MIKE ROSEN AT THE MOVIES TODAY AT 2 And since I watched nothing this week maybe we'll talk about other stuff this week.
KAYLEE WINEGAR IS RUNNING FOR DOUGCO SCHOOL BOARD And she's on at 1 to tell you why she's running and why you should vote for her. Find out more about the slate of candidates she aligned with by clicking here.
GET THE SHOT OR GET OUT HAPPENS IN DENVER TODAY And the city says only 2% of employees have not complied. Today is the day when letters of discipline go out telling the remaining few they have to get the shot or else. A group of Denver law enforcement officers sued the city but the case was dismissed because of a procedural issue. I fully expect that challenge to continue through the proper channels and eventually end up in court. I want to talk about the notion that somehow because a smallpox vaccine mandate withstood a court challenge in 1905 that means this is the same and the government has the right to force you to get a vaccine. It is NOT. Smallpox had a fatality rate of 30%! Some varieties had a fatality rate of almost 100%. There is simply no comparison at all. Once again, I wish everyone would get vaccinated for their own protection, but coercion by the government should not be the way to do it. And if it's so critical, why not tie any sort of government assistance to vaccination? I'll go further, and say if we're going to coerce people to put something in their body they don't want, how about forced long term birth control for poor people? They are going to have children they can't afford, some of them may be drug or alcohol addicts, so why not force them to be temporarily sterilized? It's an extreme example, but why is it that different? We have to push back on this because if we don't, the next thing might not be so innocuous.
MORE MONEY FOR EDUCATION, LESS MONEY FOR TEACHERS The next time someone tells you our educational system is starved for cash, send them this report. In it the way education dollars are spent is laid out and you can see that over the last ten years funding for education has ticked up, save the pandemic year, and the amount allotted for teacher salaries has gone DOWN. There was some uptick in benefit spending, but not enough to explain why administration grew while teacher salaries did NOT. From the report:
Funding for K-12 education is at an all-time high, even as education continues to be crowded out of the state budget by spending on other areas such as health care and PERA.
Apart from the pandemic year (FY 2020), funding has been steadily increasing since 2013 when the state’s economy began rebounding from the Great Recession.
Colorado allocated nearly $8 billion in total program funding (state and local funding from the School Finance Act) for FY 2022, resulting in an average of $8,991 per pupil for a population of 888,538 students. Total program per pupil funding ranges from $8,428 to $19,762 across school districts.
At the same time, the share of General Fund dollars allocated to education has declined from 42.3 percent to 34.4 percent over the past 15 fiscal years. That eight percentage point drop equates to just under $1 billion in FY 2022.
By 2022, the contributions to PERA from the school division just to pay down the unfunded liability will be more than $900 million. That $900 million in funds could be available for other spending priorities if it were not committed to pay down the growing unfunded liability. For perspective, this would amount to $16,117 per teacher.
Doesn't seem like we're starved for cash at the state level now does it? I'm going to get the author of this report on the show.
THIS AS DENVER PUBLIC SCHOOLS DECIDES NOT TO CLOSE SCHOOLS IT SHOULD Enrollment in DPS is WAY down since 2015 and there are multiple neighborhood schools that have enrollment of less than 300 kids, especially elementary schools. There was a plan to consolidate schools and shutter those without enough students to make staying open financially feasible. I realize closing a school is VERY upsetting to the families who send children there, but the district has to make lots of hard choices in order to spend their money wisely, right? Not so much, the new superintendent has put the plans on hold for now.
THE AURORA POLICE OFFICERS DO NOT HAVE CONFIDENCE IN CHIEF VANESSA WILSON At least that is the result of the No Confidence vote held by one of the unions at Aurora PD. And she got CREAMED. Not even close. I've been told the vote was 442 to 16. Union members are being told to expect retaliation and "punching down" from the superiors as this vote is really just symbolic because the City Council has to do something to remove her and the Aurora City Council SUCKS when it comes to cops. We'll see what happens next, but remember you read it here first. I can't link to my source on this one, but trust me, I'm right.
MAYOR MIKE COFFMAN VS THE AURORA CITY COUNCIL IS OVER And this one has to do with Campaign Finance regulations that Aurora put in place recently that would have limited WHO could donate to a campaign. The Mayor sued and now the council has amended the language to take out the offending parts. If only they had listened to the Mayor first...
TAXPAYERS ARE ABOUT TO GET ROYALLY SCREWED BY COLORADO PUBLIC WORKERS With a huge new collective bargaining agreement that puts automatic raises every year into law. It's going to be a nightmare, dramatically increase our significant PERA issues and the Democrats made this happen. Right now, the unions are celebrating while the taxpayers will get the bill. Read more here.
JOE BIDEN HAS OPENED OUR SOUTHERN BORDER TO ANYONE WHO WANTS TO COME IN And it's official now as the Department of Homeland Security has issued guidance that says we simply can't be bothered to arrest and deport EVERY person who walks over the southern border. From the New York Post:
“The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen … should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them,” reads the seven-page memo from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. “We will use our discretion and focus our enforcement resources in a more targeted way. Justice and our country’s well-being require it.”
Most shockingly, the memo suggests there can be “mitigating factors” that argue against deporting an illegal immigrant who has committed a crime, including “advanced or tender age”; “lengthy presence in the United States”; “military or other public service of the noncitizen or their immediate family”; and “the impact of removal on family in the United States”.
Got that? Now Border Patrol agents I guess are expected to be judge and jury when it comes to deciding who meets the nebulous standard. Here's a cray cray idea, send the National Guard to enforce the border until some sort of plan can be hatched to figure out what to do here. We are at over 1.7 MILLION contacts by border patrol agents by August of this year. That is a larger number of people than many cities. We've been invaded and no one is doing anything. I fully expect some sort of attack to occur by someone who waltzed across the southern border at some point, which I'm sure will be blamed on our own alleged xenophobia.
MORE BLACK PEOPLE WERE MURDERED THAN WHITE PEOPLE LAST YEAR And considering that they make up a much smaller percentage of the population this should be EXTREMELY alarming. So who is killing 10,000 mostly male black people? Statistically it's other black people, which is why this is not a huge story. The percentage of blacks killed by black people is consistently over 90%, which means that of those 10,000 deaths 9,000 or more were committed by OTHER black people. Which is why this is not a story. Read a column about it here.
HOW DIFFERENT PEOPLE HOLD A BABY This is legit.
BIDEN GOT ELECTED BECAUSE OF FEELINGS AND NOW WE ARE SEEING WHY THAT'S BAD And don't take my word for it, read the column from NBC News by Jim Antle. It's not kind but worth the read to understand how fully America screwed itself over mean tweets.
OH BRITNEY, I HAD SUCH HIGH HOPES Britney Spears celebrated the end of her conservatorship by posting a bunch of nudes on Instagram. Sigh.
THE MOST HATED HEADLINES FROM THE BABLYON BEE!
WHY DOES RAND PAUL KNOW MORE ABOUT THE SCIENCE OF COVID THAN THE PEOPLE MAKING POLICY?