Colorado at play

Does Timothy Egan actually mean Mountain ‘minority’ Democrats here, in Mile High Makeover:

The Architect now thinks Obama will likely win Colorado, as he said in a Wall Street Journal piece last week. The key to an Obama victory here would be college-educated white voters, according to Rove. The Dilberts in all these office parks with mountain bike tracks just outside are trending Democratic.

And something else is at work: the Census Bureau earlier this month predicted that by the year 2023 -– yes, a mere 15 years away -– more than half of all children in the United States will be minorities. Hispanics make up the bulk of that change, and as they come of age, they follow people like Salazar, who won the big suburban counties in the Denver metro area even as John Kerry lost them in 2004.

These Mountain Democrats have given national Democrats a way to win the West — and by extension the White House.

I suppose “these Mountain Democrats” refer to the Dilberts of “college-educated whites” and the “suburban minorities”.

On another Colorado note, the New Yorker wrote The Code of the West

“It shouldn’t be just a Chamber of Commerce video,” he said. “It should be political in its orientation and talk about what we in the Democratic Party have really achieved in the West. If you take a map and just look at where Democratic governors have succeeded Republicans, it’s pretty dramatic.”

It is in fact a startling change. Since 2002, Democrats have replaced Republican governors in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. It is possible to drive from the Canadian border to the Mexican border and not pass through a single state governed by a Republican. “That’s a good pictorial of how you can think about what Democrats have done out here,” Ritter said.

Political Will, on Immigration…

Why have Baca and Gutierrez decided to take this on now?
Is there a weakness in ICE, or a weak link in its armor that can be seized upon?
Mr. President, Stop Your Raids on Our Communities

What more can be done by organizing amongst Latino members of Congress to attack the inhumanity of ICE? and the racial profiling, the union-busting and dehumanization of tax-paying residents in Iowa or elsewhere?

Money on Nouriel Roubini, if I were a betting man …

Damn, that’s foresight in the Dr Doom article in the NYTimes:

announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Furthermore, I’ve heard that the Fed admitted to JP Morgan that if they didn’t buy Bear Stearns, then we’d suffer the Depression, just worse than the Grapes-of-Wrath!

If federal press releases — from the Federal Reserve, Dept of Labor, Commerce or the White House and COngress — on economic statistics and indicators do not reflect the world and reality that you and your family are living with, there’s a good reason why: its called politics influencing economics.

Since the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is not capturing the crazy inflation in prices of gas, milk, bread, coffee, clothes and credit card fees, its because there’s ‘fuzzy math’ being done by the folks who brought us the CPI. FOr more accurate economic numbers, check out Shadow Stats.