Thursday, June 29, 2006

Save Rocky Mountain National Park from Marilyn Musgrave


Everyone's wondering why Marilyn Musgrave won't support Rocky Mountain National Park. Let's introduce you to one of Marilyn's best friends in the corrupt Congress, Richard Pombo. He's all for giving away America's conservation heritage to condo developers and miners. It's like a religious mission for these yahoos!

And since Marilyn is Colorado's gift to the committee that oversees the park, we've got trouble!

The Loveland newspaper's editorial page wonders too. In fact, they pretty much call Marilyn a hypocrite:

Designate park as wilderness

The gateway towns of Estes Park and Grand Lake are in favor of it.

So is Larimer County. Boulder County is on board. So are officials in Grand County.

Everywhere you look, the powers that be can find no reason not to officially designate most of Rocky Mountain National Park a protected wilderness area.

In fact, 90 percent of the 265,828-acre park, most of it rugged backcountry, is already managed as if it were wilderness. It’s essentially been that way since 1964, when the Wilderness Act was signed into law. The park has also been on the books as an official candidate for designation since President Nixon made that recommendation in 1974.

So, why isn’t the current legislation that would make the park an official wilderness sailing through Congress like an eagle on the wing?

To realistically make it through their respective committee hearings and gain bipartisan support, the legislation — S. 1510 in the Senate and H.R. 3193 in the House — needs consensus backing from Colorado’s congressional delegation.

It doesn’t quite have it, yet.

Our own 4th CD Rep. Marilyn Musgrave says she wants an economic analysis of the Rocky proposal before she’ll throw her support behind it.

It’s odd that she didn’t ask for the same sort of study before signing on as a co-sponsor — along with 2nd CD Rep. Mark Udall and 7th CD Rep. Bob Beauprez — of similar legislation to create the 20,000-acre Browns Canyon Wilderness Area in the Pike and San Isabel national forests.

That legislation was sponsored by fellow Colorado Republicans Sen. Wayne Allard and Rep. Joel Hefley.

The Rocky legislation is sponsored by Sen. Ken Salazar and Udall, both Democrats.

So Musgrave wants an economic analysis? Here it is: Roughly 3 million visitors — and their wallets — make their way to Rocky each year to take in the grandeur of snow-capped peaks and to catch a glimpse of elk and other wildlife.

Quite simply, wilderness is what all these people come to bask in.

Their visitorship is the economic engine driving places like Estes Park and Grand Lake, and its leaders know how valuable the park is. Estes Park’s mayor recently called Rocky the town’s “golden goose.”

There is no salient reason not to have Rocky on the books as a protected wilderness area, officially a place where, as the Wilderness Act says, “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” A place of “primeval character and influence” and with “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.”

Sounds like a place that should remain untrammeled by partisan politics.

Also sounds like a place we’d like to visit.

Handy Facts

These are some handy facts for us:

Facts are handy things to have when writing, and Tom Bender could have used a few more when he wrote his June 13 Soapbox. Here are some examples:

Someone in the Bush administration leaked the identity of a CIA operative to the press, compromising her mission and threatening national security. This would fit Bender's definition of "corruption bordering on treason and the internal sabotage of America." President Bush has not told us who this person is.

Nearly all of the "across-the-board tax relief" went to the rich.

Bush did not exactly put more money in taxpayer's pockets. He gave them a cash advance on the giant credit card called the national debt. Taxpayers and their children will have to pay the money back, with interest.

Bush inherited a $230 billion surplus, which he promptly spent, and then borrowed more. To date, he has put us $910 billion deeper in debt.

The unemployment rate in 2000 was 4 percent. Today, it is 4.6 percent. In 2000, the number of unemployed was 5,692,000. Today it is 7,591,000.

It was not the "appeasement of evil" that allowed the 9/11 terrorists to attack. None of them came from the Axis of Evil; most came from countries we consider to be our allies.

Marilyn Musgrave, the "champion for American troops and veterans," got a rating of zero from the Disabled American Veterans for 2004 and 2005. She opposed expanding access to TRICARE health insurance for reservists and voted against giving bonuses to National Guard troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tom Glatzel,
Fort Collins

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Heckuva job, Hector

Marilyn Musgrave: Clueless on small business.

This was in Business Week:

"I think very highly of chairman Manzullo, and he recommends our new guy, Steven Preston. He's from Illinois, and he has a good background in finance. From what I've heard, Mr. Preston specifically is going to focus on disaster assistance. After the scrutiny that Mr. Barreto got, Steven Preston will be very conscientious in that area. I'm not saying Barreto wasn't. I'm just saying that you get a lot of scrutiny when people are in desperate straits. I think Mr. Barreto has served us well, and I look forward to this administrator. "
Marilyn Musgrave sits on the House Small Business Committee. It supposedly oversees things, like say, the Small Business Administration. That's where George Bush sticks fundraising cronies, where they proceed to screw up when it's crunch time.

So when Marilyn Musgrave sends dispatches from Planet Marilyn about what a great job everyone's doing on disaster assistance at SBA, it's time to take a closer look. Because the Small Business Administration, not to mention George Bush & Co., has blown it so big on Katrina assistance.

Hector Barreto, who "has served us so well," was called "The SBA's version of Mike Brown" because he just so unqualified to get the job in the first place. It's no accident it was called "The Slow Business Administration":
The committee chairwoman, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), began the session by pointing out that the Small Business Administration had, at that time, processed only 10 percent of 28,540 applications for disaster loans from small businesses in the Gulf Coast area and had approved only 3 percent of them. Mr. Barreto responded with a long and self-pitying description of how difficult things remain in the Gulf, how emergencies are not really his responsibility and how much his agency's performance had improved lately.

At one point, Barreto forgot to tell Congress it needed money and had to shut down. Duh.

And on Barreto's watch, the abuse of 9/11 loans was so outrageous, even Congress had to step in and do something. The Associated Press issued the ass-kicking that probably got Barreto out of there:
The government's $5 billion effort to help small businesses recover from the Sept. 11 attacks was so loosely managed that it gave low-interest loans to companies that didn't need terrorism relief — or even know they were getting it, The Associated Press has found.

And while some at New York's Ground Zero couldn't get assistance they desperately sought, companies far removed from the devastation — a South Dakota country radio station, a Virgin Islands perfume shop, a Utah dog boutique and more than 100 Dunkin' Donuts and Subway sandwich shops — had no problem winning the government-guaranteed loans.
For Marilyn Musgrave, this is call "success."