Burn the Party Down

Steve House, Colorado Republican Chairman: 

"Go Ahead and Burn the Party Down"

This in a little temper tantrum after being called to task for cutting Colorado voters out of the candidate selection process.

Well sir, you ought to look around you... people, Republican people in Colorado are pissed and it is not the people of Colorado lighting the fire.  It is folks like yourself, folks that think they know better than everybody else, folks who are throwing the 2016 election away. Frankly at this point I wouldn't vote for a Republican if they were the only thing running.

As the saying goes... and the horse you rode in on! 

Well, It's Official

I was perusing an article on MSN earlier on the most Republican and Democratic counties in each state and it's official:  I live in the Most Republican County in the State of Colorado.

Romney won 65.1% of the 2012 votes cast in Teller County. The county’s poverty rate was lower than the national rate from 2009 through 2013. Additionally, the county was predominantly white, with 94.3% of its 23,276 residents identifying solely as white. Unlike most predominantly Republican counties, Teller County residents were relatively well educated. About 31.6% of county residents had at least a bachelor’s degree over the five years through 2013, compared with 28.8% of all adults nationally.

Not that I'm looking down on y'all or anything

Photo: Wikipedian Kbh3rd

How did you fare?

Water water everywhere?

Colorado Water Conservation Board

Colorado vows that downstream states and countries in accordance with interstate compacts and treaties will get every drop of water they are legally entitled to... and "not a drop more".

Western water law is an odd beast and by those treaties and compacts, court rulings, etc.  one third of the Colorado River water belongs to Colorado.  Western water law operates on the first use-senior claim premise, which means that a junior claim upstream can not pull water if it impacts "beneficial use" of a senior claim downstream.  Now I'm no lawyer but I believe that beneficial use is defined as "up to the point of waste".  Out here in the west water is and has always been a big deal.  Believe it or not, here in Colorado while you may direct the water from your downspouts towards your landscaping, it is illegal to collect and store the water unless you are permitted and own the surface water rights.

Colorado's new plan is to create storage for trillions of gallons of Colorado water that currently slips between our proverbial fingers on its way to the Gulf of Baja which it now seldom reaches.  Fortunately for me my water rights predate more than half the population of the state.  Fortunately for California... it's started to rain, so we're not at the point where bottled water as a vanity becomes the greatest invention since... bottled water as a necessity. 

An interesting question we need to ask is that if we have an interstate natural gas distribution grid.

 And an interstate electrical distribution grid.

Why haven't we considered an interstate water distribution grid?  It seems that we seldom have a national scarcity of water, we simply suffer from drought in some locations while others suffer inundation.  Now I'm a small government libertarian, but it is these types of national infrastructure projects that the federal government should be focused on, project for the general welfare of the nation.

Problems that are currently handled regionally, or by compacts by small numbers of states, for example the Colorado River Compact consists of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California, have a national influence.  To illustrate, water rights can be bought and sold like any commodity, agricultural holders sell those rights to enable municipal development taking farm and ranch land out of circulation, decreasing the supply and increasing the price of food.  The problem is that it is a dead end street, once water rights are allocated to a municipality, there is not a municipality that can turn around and sell them again, and all this is done without a coherent national policy.  As watershed water is diverted to municipalities farmers resort to aquifer water for irrigation, as the aquifers deplete, there is no alternative source for replenishment.

What do you think?

Flamethrowers, Street Skiing and Tree Fishing

Colorado is one of the healthiest states in the nation.  We love the outdoors.

Sanders, my long-haired former-hippie neighbor turned libertarian, is one of those people who could look 50, or 25, depending on how you turned your head and what frame of mind you were in when you were looking at him. He acts like he’s 15 and sometimes wears funny hats or severe-looking heavy framed tortoise shell eyeglasses, which produces in me an odd combination of fear and amusement.

“Dude, you gotta get one of these!” he shouted as he cranked up the flamethrower he was wielding.

We were standing on his deck imbibing 471 Small Batch Double IPA's from Breckenridge Brewery, and when the blast hit his Weber kettle grill, I had to admit it did an admirable job catching the coals on fire. I also noted the singed branches overhanging the deck, and I made a mental note of the blackened portion of his guttering and soffits. He caught my casting glances and chuckled in spite of himself.

Of course I ignored his advice. I’ve got a gas grill anyway. The guy just ain’t all there. He’s got a medical marijuana prescription due to an injury he sustained when he hit a parked car while skiing. How did that happen? It wasn’t up at Monarch, where if you got really, really wild coming down Gunbarrel it could be technically feasible; it happened (appropriately) on Race Street here in town. His girlfriend (or ‘old lady’ as he refers to her), got him a nice pair or Rossignols for Christmas and he just couldn’t wait to try them out so he strapped on and headed down the street, in boxers, a ski jacket and WW II pilot aviators goggles an uncle had given him.  

I can’t really knock him for it. I’ve done some dumb stuff myself. Every spring I test out my fishing rods by casting down the street with a one ounce weight attached. Almost put out a mail truck’s windshield once, and I accidentally tore a birdhouse out of a neighbor’s tree with my Eagle Claw open-face. I use the extra heavies to get the bale to completely unwind, but it can have negative and far reaching consequences.

My friends and I did some street skiing back when I lived in Denver. We were supposed to take a day trip up to Keystone, but ironically, a blizzard hit and all the snow closed I-70. I don’t remember anyone wracking themselves up like Sanders did, but I do remember us falling down laughing when Dave did a nice kick turn off of Jamaica Street onto Colfax and passed a snow plow that was diligently chugging along. Jim from next door came out with one of those huge bottles of Jack Daniels. After some generous chugging, one of us, can’t remember who, slid into a neighbor’s house, causing her to poke her head out the front door and threaten to call the police. That’s when we decided to go back inside.

If we weren't suppose to eat animals, how come they're made of meat?

Anyway, I started out wanting to post on grilling, and I guess I got sidetracked. If you enjoy grilling, smoking or BBQing, The Ugly Brothers have some pretty good tips on their web site. Their Grillosophy Page is a treasure trove of outdoor cooking wisdom. Whether you’re new to the grill or an old hand, you’ll find some worthwhile stuff there.

I’m grilling beer butt chicken and smoking ribs for New Years, how about you?

Don't Californicate Colorado

We’re getting dumber, at least here in Colorado...

It's not enough that unwashed liberalism has spilled out of the hippie asylum known as Boulder, we are also suffering a plague of liberals swarming the state as they flee their collapsing progressive experiments.  Even worse, these blue state refugees now want to invite even more, including liberal foreigners.

The city of Denver is looking to bid on the 2022 Winter Olympics, and I am firmly against it. I don’t want mobs of outsiders screwing up my skiing and clogging up my roads and I don’t want my state stuck with the inevitable debt and the deadbeats who decide to stay on after the party's over.

Here’s an excerpt from a Denver Post article describing why Colorado used to be such a great state before the California liberals moved in…

In 1972, Lamm led an effort to block Denver from hosting the 1976 Winter Games — the only time an Olympics city has done that. Nearly 60 percent of Colorado voters agreed to reject the Games, which had been awarded to the city 2 1/2 years earlier. Voters had feared taxpayers would be stuck paying for skyrocketing costs and wary of the environmental damages caused by hordes of spectators. (Denver Post)

We used to be a good mix of libertarian liberals and conservatives with a live and let live attitude. Not anymore.  We’re now getting stupider, and this is being powered by the mass influx of east coast and west coast liberals into the liberal loon town of Denver.  You can see evidence of this in on-line forums.  Enlightened progressives sing Obama's praises and remark what an east coast feel Denver has, and they are right.  It is now easily the least "Colorado" part of the state.

Reminds me of that old saying:  Half of the people in Colorado live in Denver, and the rest of us are glad they do! 

For my rant that heaps scorn on LA transplants who don't know how to drive on snow, read A Liberal Mess