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The education of John Hickenlooper

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 13:03:00 +0000

After 70 people were wounded and 12 killed during a shooting spree inside an Aurora movie theater, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper went on CNN to make one thing clear to his constituents: What happened on that July day was a tragedy, but tighter gun control laws would not have prevented it.

“This person -- if there were no assault weapons available, and no this or no that -- this guy’s going to find something, right?” he said. “If it was not one weapon, it would have been another.”

Eight months later, Hickenlooper has changed his tune.

As the New York Times reports:

Mr. Hickenlooper is poised to sign some of the toughest new gun control laws in the nation, capping a journey that has transformed a popular, data-driven Western Democrat who takes his son shooting into an unlikely frontman for bringing new gun laws into the center of the United States.

After Aurora (after Oak Creek, after Newtown) Hickenlooper started "asking questions about guns and death," the Times notes. "Did ammunition limits make sense? Did background checks really keep guns away from potential killers?"

Drinking the fracking Kool-aid

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:00:00 +0000

There are few politicians - Republican or Democratic - who more singularly embody the notion of "drill, baby drill!" than Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper. This week, in a Washington PR stunt, he yet again proved how devoted he is to deceiving the public on behalf of the oil and gas industry at a high-profile Senate hearing.

Before we get to the stunt, remember that Hickenlooper started his career as a petroleum geologist and his gubernatorial campaign was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry. Remember, too, that Hickenlooper has publicly denied that global climate change is even happening; appointed one of his fossil fuel industry donors to a key regulatory position; overseen both an explosion in oil/gas spills and a decrease in state fines against oil/gas companies for those spills; and is offering to help oil/gas firms overturn local drilling regulations. He has, of course, also repeatedly claimed that hydraulic fracturing (aka "fracking") is completely safe and poses "literally no risk" to human health.

Progressives win big in Colorado

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 17:03:00 +0000

On a watershed day with much to celebrate, no state exemplifies American politics' lightning-fast progressive earthquake more than Colorado. And here's the part of that story the media won't tell you about: The presidential election results from this formerly deep red state comprise only a minor part of the tectonic shift.

Sure, President Obama did effectively use his massive campaign war chest to eke out a much-needed victory here, but that not-so-surprising result is not the big news in a region whose demographics and population growth make it a vision of America's political future. Instead, the big square-state story is that a once-dominant Republican Party is utterly marginalized, an autocratic, top-down Democratic Party establishment is at the mercy of its activist base, and the state's corporate elite are no longer able to fully dictate political destiny.