Karen E Crummy provided an assist to a left wing (excuse us - progressive) attack on Bob Schaffer this week.
She began an article with these words:
A campaign watchdog group has launched a $100,000 television and radio ad campaign urging Republican Bob Schaffer to apologize for a controversial trip he took to the Mariana Islands and to donate a portion of his campaign funds to charities there.
Think about this for a second. There isn't a true watchdog group, campaign or otherwise, that has $100,000 to spend on a two week advertising campaign in one small market. If a group is going to spend that kind of money, it is an advocacy group and only pretends to be a watchdog group.
At the end of the article, she provides the following:
[ Campaign ] Money Watch, whose stated mission is to hold candidates accountable for favors politicians give to their financial supporters, says it is nonpartisan. Many of its biggest donors, however, are longtime Democratic contributors.
This organization targets only Republican candidates. Karen Crummy shouldn't be misrepresenting the facts. No honest journalist would ever call this outfit, as she does, a watchdog group.
Then there was the Dan Haley anti-term limits editorial. Normally, this author is a fan of Dan Haley, but he seems to have gone off the deep end on term limits.
He rails and rails about the failure of term limits at the national level but never once admits that it failed because of a misguided Supreme Court ruling. If he were a better student of history, he would know that the Constitutional Convention considered term limits as part of the Virginia Plan and rejected it because it was below the level of detail they wanted to include.
This failure to include term limits or reject them in the Constitution automatically throws the matter to the states under the 10th Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Now comes the modern US Supreme Court which rules that the matter must be settled by a constitutional amendment. Justice Breyer has called the 10th amendment a dead letter and he treats it as such. An honest Supreme Court and an honest editorial writer would have acknowledged that Colorado did have the right under the 10th Amendment to limit the terms of its senators and representatives.
It would be more useful for Dan Haley to have spent some time and ink justifying his love of the current crop of term limited legislators. He speaks in generalities but names not a single one that he would like to see stay.
His editorial didn't stir the public. Two readers commented, and one wasn't thrilled with the editorial.
It did stir John Andrews who unlike Haley justified what he had to say:
I’m just saying Dan is going to have to show me some evidence that term-limited states are necessarily worse governed, because on the evidence so far it appears they may be somewhat better governed.
Maybe it’s matter of what we think government should do. Many of us believe it should stay off our backs and out of our pockets. By that measure, the Haley concern that too little is being done to “bridge partisan tensions” and that “statehouses with term limits are growing… less powerful” is no concern at all.
The Denver Post is the most powerful newspaper in the state. Quantity of readership doesn't necessarily equate to quality of product.
Comments