Cory Gardner is a red flag for Colorado's political and income middle

Cory Gardner is a red flag for Colorado’s political and income middle. 

Cory Gardner, opposing Democratic Senator Mark Udall in Colorado, is ranked as the 10th most conservative member of Congress.  Colorado is hardly the 10th most conservative state in the union.  Gardner sounds and looks moderate, but his legislative positions were, are, and would align closely to his Tea Party House colleagues.  This election is also about electing a senator for the next six years who will represent your views and will be voting to determine Supreme Court vacancy  replacements.

Gardner’s and Udall’s visions of freedom are very different.  Udall promotes freedom for individuals from an intrusive government, a maverick leader in the Senate against overreaching NSA surveillance.  He is a strong advocate for the ability for women and men to choose their reproduction schedules and whom they marry.  Freedom for Udall also means freedom from worry about affording health care and college for their kids.

 Gardner’s vision of freedom is to gut environmental laws and favor tax policies for business while supporting greater government interference in choices individuals can make.  His position on reproductive rights and marriage equality are the most extreme of any, even criminalizing abortions and doctors, opposes birth control practices that interfere with his belief that life begins at conception.

The U.S. unemployment rate is now back to pre-crash levels and in Colorado it is below the national average. The deficit has been cut in half and the national economy is growing at 3%.  Colorado has the highest economic growth in the nation which is not only due to an improving national economy, but to a booming energy sector.  Science denier Gardner is not even sure humans cause global warming. Mark Udall prizes a balanced approach to natural resource development and Colorado’s growth is evidence that approach can work.

Gardner, unlike Udall, has voted in Congress to make it even more difficult for the middle income earners to recover from the Great Recession. He has voted to cut Pell grants and opposed decreasing interest rates on student loans or refinancing student loans to lower rates.   Most Colorado families depend upon women working, but Gardner has voted against raising the minimum wage or furthering equal pay for women in the workforce.

One of the most underrated boosts to middle income earners is the ACA (Obamacare), which both the GOP and Gardner still want to repeal.  Gardner offers no alternative, no fixes no workable way to pay for covering preexisting conditions. He has no viable plans to make health insurance affordable for 30 million Americans, mostly middle income, who once again would have to choose between losing their home or health care treatment because they could not qualify for or afford insurance. 

 No traditional Medicare coverage was lost due to the ACA (contrary to a very misleading Gardner ad), and the ACA added 14 years to the life of Medicare.  Gardner supports changing the efficiently administered Medicare program to provide a voucher system and block grants to states that upends a system that now guarantees coverage that keeps up with costs and gives stability to co-pays.

A version of this appeared in the www.skyhidailynews.com October 30 2014

The GOP and the gender gap

The GOP must be looking at poll numbers. They are still losing the women’s vote, especially in Colorado. The gender gap is wide as Democrat Sen. Udall begins the campaign with a 9% lead among women over the GOP opponent Congressman Cory Gardner.  July and August NBC/Wall Street Journal polls show a significant gender gap nationally. The Colorado gap may widen as more women learn Gardner’s positions on their issues.

So now Republicans are attempting to blunt the Democrats' accusations that they are waging a war on women by trying to divert attention to job creation and the economy.  It may not be a war on women, but the GOP consistently gives women’s economic and personal interests second place to other priorities. What Republicans do not understand is that women’s take-home pay and their ability to participate in the economy are being made more difficult by their policies of consistently putting women’s interests below employers' rights and bottom lines or when core religious conservative supporters raise objections.

For example, women getting insurance from employers should not have to pay more for health insurance premiums than men.   Increasing the minimum wage helps women who mostly hold the minimum-wage jobs.  There is no one more important right that enables women to work than being able to control when, if, and how often they have children.  That is the ultimate economic issue in middle-class families where the women’s paycheck is vital.

While some GOP members have supported raising the minimum wage, the party as a whole, including Gardner, has blocked congressional action.  Republicans' adamant opposition to Obamacare would restore the right of insurers to charge women more for premiums, and Gardner has voted to repeal Obamacare fifty times.

The GOP has consistently supported limiting women’s ability to control their reproduction schedules. Birth control is even under assault from the GOP-lauded Hobby Lobby decision that permitted certain corporations to opt out of covering birth control for religious reasons.

Pro-life is the basic litmus test for the GOP to back any candidates.  There are those who permit exceptions to banning abortions and others more extreme who want to criminalize abortions or the doctors who perform them.  The GOP still nominates candidates who take the most extreme positions, including Gardner.

Gardner was also not only a proponent, but a longtime leader of the state personhood amendment that would consider life begins at conception, a backdoor way to make all abortions criminal, and passage would make certain kinds of birth control illegal.

Recently, though, Gardner quietly tried to walk back his support of the personhood amendment.  His conversion is suspect, given the timing.  With the personhood amendment on the state ballot in November, it will be hard for him to duck his history.  In Congress, his name is still on a federal personhood amendment bill, and he recently voted for a bill that would make it criminal for abortions to be performed after the 20th week with few exceptions.

For more, visit www.mufticforumblog.blogspot.com

A version of this appeared in the www.skyhidailynews.com August 28 and 29 2014

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/poll-democrats-hang-slight-leads-key-senate-races-n155531

http://www.quinnipiac.edu/news-and-events/quinnipiac-university-poll/colorado/release-detail?ReleaseID=2060

America's Fed Up: Obama Approval Rating Hits All-Time Low, Poll Shows - NBC News

http://www.factcheck.org/2014/08/a-fight-over-birth-control-in-colorado/?utm_source=FactCheck.org&utm_campaign=14f7ddb656-FactCheck_Newsletter_8_15_20148_16_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3294bba774-14f7ddb656-47897245

Considering the alternatives to feckless and toothless in foreign and domestic and Colorado senate race politics

John McCain’s bluster and attacks at President Obama for not being hawkish enough and call him “feckless”  has me yelling back at the TV when he appears…”ok; what would you have done?”   Send troops into Syria just to show we are not wimps? Bring Georgia into NATO when 20% of it is already occupied by Russian troops? Surround Russia with nuclear missiles we never intend to use?  Start a natural  gas war that would only hurt western Europe that relies on Russian oil and gas?  (It wouldn’t do much to us but raise our  fossil fuel prices through the roof since world markets determine such prices).  Threaten NATO military intervention  in the Ukraine when even he has taken that off the table?  Give me a break.

 At least McCain deserves credit for coming up with some alternatives, but the alternatives he presents are those that we have no intention of following through….they are just toothless wonders, worse than even Obama’s drawing red line in Syria which had no realistic bite to them, especially as our allies there were hijacked by Al Qaeda affiliates. McCain’s alternatives are so full of potential backlashes, to swallow them without  chewing on them  is enough to make rational people choke.

This follows the pattern of other blustering critics of the Obama administration.  Whatever he is for, they are against even though they have no alternatives.  It is nearly always “repeal” but don’t replace. When some more moderates who agree there are indeed problems that need to be addressed  do present alternatives, their proposals  are so full of measures most cannot swallow or  they believe they will not work.

At the suggestion of a leader of the Tea Party Express, a  reader of my columns, I visited the Winston Group’s site which he claimed proved some points he was making…that the Tea Party still had the oomph and public support to be a power because it was a power in 2010.  In examining the reasons the conservative Winston Group, a beltway lobbying and political consulting outfit, tried to explain away Gov. Romney’s loss to Obama in 2012, they concluded it was because the public did not buy the alternatives he put forth, even though most Americans were in tune with conservative objectives on budget, deficit, jobs and the economy. 

The GOP may again be committing the same mistake in 2014.  Sen Mark Udall in Colorado may be low enough  in the polls to appear  beatable now, or in danger of losing in the 2014 midterms, but the GOP is falling into the  2012 trap.  Voters may not be happy campers with the Democrats, but they also are rational and they do consider alternatives when they learn about them.   Nihilism is not a plan. Elections are not won on just anger.  The question voters ask is “as compared to what or whom”.

 Damning Obamacare may be the only  GOP handle that unites their party and which, therefore they are putting forth their only  strategy in the midterms, but either presenting an empty sack full of hot air or one that does not address the problems polls show voters understand  begins to appear as a cure that is worse than the disease.

The only “replace” even getting honorable mention is the one put forth by three Republican Senators, which would either cost as much as Obamacare  and tax those already insured  by their employers to pay for it. At the recent retreat of the GOP congressional caucus, they could not even agree if they should advocate a replacement, much less what a replacement would be. Therefore, in unison, they are stuck in “repeal”mode.   

It will become even more evident in the Colorado Senate race when voters outside GOP’s gerrymandered  conservative bastions of north  east Colorado and Colorado Springs look at the GOP’s candidates who are right of the right, supporting the personhood amendments (a sure fire turnoff of women voters) and still stuck calling Hispanic’s desire for eventual citizenship “amnesty”, or failing to support dream acts (another turnoff of potential Hispanic votes).  Outside the very conservative Congressional districts, Colorado is a different, more liberal, demographically different state where the decisions will be based on “as compared with whom or what”.