When I was 13 years old, I had the opportunity to go camping in Colorado. We were based in Colorado Springs while we prepared for our excursions to Pike's Peak and The Key Hole/Crux Pitch at Long's Peak (overlooking Bolder). It was a beautiful town. The food was great, the parks were well tended, and crime did not seem to be a problem. What a difference 25 years of conservative politics have made.
I read BiggotBasher's must-read GD post yesterday that linked to a Denver Post article that outlines the issues facing Colorado Springs (
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7635659">Here), and I would like to add some commentary that I found in my Google Reader account that truly puts the issues facing Colorado Springs into political gruel for our consumption and eventual targeted projectile regurgitation (being that this is a political site, and this does make me want to vomit).
We often wonder what a conservative paradise would really look like on the liberal blogs, and it looks like Colorado Springs---home to many defense contractors and to Focus on Family---has become a shining star in the much-desired collapse of basic government services that Grover Norquist and other anti-government fanatics have always wanted. Unfortunately, it seems less paradise to have much-slashed government, and more stinky, ugly, boring, and scary.
-snip-
Community business leaders have jumped into the budget debate, some questioning city spending on what they see as “Ferrari"-level benefits for employees and high salaries in middle management. Broadmoor luxury resort chief executive Steve Bartolin wrote an open letter asking why the city spends $89,000 per employee, when his enterprise has a similar number of workers and spends only $24,000 on each.
We all hope you can see the irony---Bartolini is part of the problem. By paying his employees so little they can barely afford food and rent, he’s basically choking off a revenue stream into the city, because they aren’t paying that much taxes. If his people could afford to do things like buy property, they’d pay property tax that the city could use to pay its lighting bill. But here’s Bartolini, who is a huge part of the problem, complaining because some people out there aren’t starving to death, and starving the government while they’re at it. Why is he complaining? Presumably, a government that’s falling apart is what he wants. Except that people like him are extremely narrow-minded and selfish, and I’ll bet you a lot of money he’s pissed, because infrastructure falling apart means that he’s losing tourist dollars to cities that aren’t teetering on the brink, or at least where the grass is green. But he can’t think about the money coming in, because he’s so intently focused on maximizing human suffering in the hated working classes. He’s only interested in looking at ways to impoverish workers.
Read more at "
http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/no_cops_no_parks_halted_economic_activity_conservative_paradise/">No cops, no parks, halted economic activity: conservative paradise".
The lesson here, one which we need to learn how to point out efficiently, is how conservative anti-tax and anti-government policies, in arguably the epicenter of it's ideological base, has turned a small town paradise into shit-hole in full flush.
Liberal = We The People = Self-Governance
Conservative = Me And Mine = Un-Governable
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