Local Lefties Post Progressively, Tout Taxes

Something calling itself the Rocky Mountain Progressive Network launched a blog yesterday, supposedly to counter the "right-wing dominated media in Colorado." Translate this latest line from the Left, that the media is all right-wing, into college football terms. You're a coach at a Division III school who's athletic director has scheduled Ohio State. Your lines are outweighed by 100 pounds a man on both sides of the ball. Your quarterback hasn't started shaving yet. But you make like Knute Rockne and try to fire up your team by telling that the only reason you're 40-point underdogs is that the world's against you and the local reporter graduated from OSU.

The fact is, the papers out here are pretty balanced. On the whole, the Post is more leftish than the Rocky, especially on the editorial pages. Especially on foreign policy since Holger Jensen went and got himself fired by making things up (see point #3 below). But while the Rocky tends to endorse more Republicans, it's hardly right-wing. Its business writing is much better, the Post's political coverage is a more extensive. The notion that either one of these papers is ready to go out and burn questions marks to scare Unitarians is pure invention.

In any case, read the blog a couple of times, and it'll be clear that the "Progressive" part refers, as it usually does, to increasingly progressive taxes rates, progressively higher taxes for us all, to fund a progressively more intrusive and expensive government. You'll see that Xcel is the next Enron (as though California didn't mismanage its own way into darkness 2 years ago). I particularly like the quote from long-time Coloradoan, er, Californian Leon Panetta suggesting that the next governor should brush aside those pesky "electoral mandates," to increase spending. Raising taxes is a great way to attract jobs, almost as good as announcing that you're going to raise taxes as soon as the economy permits. Teachers should be telling their first-grade students to write environmentalist letters to their congressmen. (When I was in school, they just said write; now they like to make sure you're writing the right things.)

And that's all on the first day.

One of the publishers is J.B. Holston, with whom I worked about 5 years ago at a company called Netsage, since merged with Finali. the Microsoft Word Paperclip People. It was a great job, and J.B. was a leader, not merely a manager. I know he can write better than the blog shows, but not if the raw material he's working with is so thin. Right now, J.B. sounds like a guy who's trying a little too hard. Maybe it comes from being on the team with the underfed linemen.