in case you missed it | Chick-Fil-A vs. Cheney and The Muppets

CHICK-FIL-A VS. CHENEY AND THE MUPPETS

By now everyone knows that Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy is not a supporter of gay marriage. But what hasn’t been reported is the fact that Cathy’s antigay remarks may well spell the end of the GOP as we know it.

The statements by the founder of Chick-fil-A have created a bizarre alliance of once disparate, politically powerful forces, which could well become the face of a new political party to rival the Republicans, namely Dick Cheney and the Muppets.

At virtually the same time that Mr. Cathy was disparaging gay marriage, Dick Cheney was celebrating the same thing. Cheney’s daughter Mary finally tied the knot with her long-time partner Heather Poe, which, according to a press release by Dick and Lynn Cheney, made Mary’s parents very happy. This clearly puts the Cheneys on the same team as the Muppets, who have been quite outspoken in their outrage over Cathy’s statements.

But the real demise of the GOP will likely come as a result of preacher-turned- Republican-presidential-candidate-turned-Fox-TV-personality Mike Huckabee, who has called for a Chick-fil-A eating marathon to show support for Cathy’s anti-gay stance.

Considering that a meal consisting of a Chick-fil-A deluxe chicken sandwich, large order of waffle potato fries and a big Coke contains 1,270 calories, 48 grams of fat and 1,850 mg of sodium, it’s quite likely that the majority of Fox viewers who follow Huckabee’s advice may actually become too large to leave their homes to vote, or so physically ill that they are forced, due to economic considerations, to become supporters of Obamacare.

Either scenario will assure another four years of Obama while shrinking the numbers, if not the girth, of the Republican Party to insignificant levels. It could happen. This sandwich stuff is serious.

CITY EXPLAINS REMOVAL OF DISCLOSURE FORMS

We took a swipe at the city of Boulder last week for removing city council candidates’ 2011 financial disclosure statements from the city’s website at a time when some of those forms are under scrutiny for being incomplete.

City Clerk Alisa Lewis says the city’s election page is wiped clean and archived annually in a database to prepare for posting new forms related to the next election. The archived 2011 reports aren’t available online yet because the city department that handles that is currently short-staffed and being manned by temps, Lewis says.

But she acknowledges that even the archived 2010 election reports on the website currently aren’t accessible without a password, and that she hopes those and older reports will become publicly available online once the city switches to its new website and fills its vacancies in the central records department.

She says all forms are available upon request, which is all fine and good, but it’s a lot easier for the public to see council members’ possible conflicts of interest by going online than trying to figure out how to file an open records request.

So maybe there is a logical explanation for the sudden lack of transparency, and it may just be a case of bad timing.

But it still looks bad. Again, it’s about the appearance of impropriety.

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