Colorado
updated
8:19 p.m.
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Citing economic impacts to his rural Third District, Rep. John Salazar was one of forty-four House Democrats to vote against the American Clean Energy Security Act (ACES), which would have taken a first step toward limiting carbon emissions. A story in the Post-Independent quotes an email the paper received from Salazar's press secretary Eric Wortman: "The CBO [Congressional Budget...
Colorado Pols - 3:22 p.m.
We've been checking our regular news sources and Google Alerts like we do every morning, but today we were especially looking for coverage of yesterday's "Tea Party" protest events--a number of which were scheduled to take place in Colorado . As we mentioned a couple of days ago a "Tea Party" in Grand Junction was of particular interest , with Senate candidate Ken Buck speaking and all-but-ann...
Colorado Pols - 8:29 a.m. - 6 clicks 
Ross Kaminsky never fails. I read everything he writes on the Denver Post website and it is always the most batshit crazy wingnut jibberish that I regularly read. Today he goes above and beyond even his usual crazy, Do you work for AIG or GM? For Citigroup or the Department of Education? If so, then I wish you happy Dependence Day. Same if you work at a company which uses lobbyists to stee...
Steam Powered Opinions - 3:30 a.m. - 5 clicks
Good morning, and please read carefully. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging. Denver made it through the month of June without a single day in the 90s; on Wednesday, July 1, the high was 92?. And Wednesday evening cooler air blasted in, bringing overnight rain showers and a high of only 79? on Thursday - and lovely sleeping weather. Warmth returned yesterday - just in time f...
SquareState - Sat 12:05 p.m. - 8 clicks
I heard the terrible story of the accidental toddler drowning in Vail last weekend on the news but until just now I hadn't realized that the victim was the 2 1/2 year old son of the Denver Metro Chamber's Sara Cassidy. My condolences to Sara and her family at this tragic time. Face The State has the details on the memorial fund for anyone interested. ...
Steam Powered Opinions - Fri 2:22 p.m.
Ex-Rep. Marilyn Musgrave this week formalized an announcement made last month, filing a campaign committee termination report that showed she donated her remaining campaign funds to a program created by her new employer. More details are in my Coloradoan blog, http://tr.im/qMxR The termination report filed Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission showed that Musgrave donated $50,32...
Colorado Pols - Fri 2:21 p.m. - 3 clicks
Colorado Independent reports: The spring's tea party chants are being updated to oppose the state's new car fees. The expression is important for the emotion and general impressionistic anti-government feelings it conveys. It doesn't have to make any sense. "Governor Ritter hates my car!" "We won't pay taxes or fees!" "Down with the nanny state!" "Especially if the state doesn't employ someo...
Colorado Pols - Fri 2:21 p.m.
As you may have noticed, your hosts were a little busy yesterday morning doing all of the non-bloggy things we do, and didn't have a chance to get some posts going until the early afternoon. Fortunately, our observant readers are always on duty. Recounting some familiar-sounding fun from yesterday's open thread related to gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis' new website , the Colorado ...
Colorado Pols - Fri 8:18 a.m.
The progressive group Americans United for Change announced today that it plans a five-figure TV ad campaign next week, praising Rep. Betsy Markey for her vote on cap and trade. The ads will air on Fort Collins and Denver cable systems, according to spokesman Jeremy Funk. (Denver cable? Really?) The announcement came a day after the National Republican Congressional Committee announced it was be...
Colorado Pols - Fri 6:06 a.m. - 4 clicks
As the Aspen Times reports: The energy-climate bill passed last week in the House will face an even tougher battle in the Senate, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet predicted Wednesday during a stop at the Aspen campus of Colorado Mountain College. The Colorado Democrat, in town to attend the Aspen Ideas Festival, met with CMC administrators and other local representatives for a briefing on the colle...
Colorado Pols - Thu 2:13 p.m.
From the Colorado Independent : Three Republican Congressmen last week launched a new caucus aimed at defending the nation against international treaties they see as threats to American rights and national interests. The so-called sovereignty movement has gained surprising momentum on the Hill recently and Lamborn's new House caucus goes further in establishing its presence. The Washington I...
Colorado Pols - Thu 2:13 p.m.
...and meeting of the Colorado Chocolate Fountain Caucus . We like having guests at Casa de Frankenoid and, although the combination of wet weather and bindweed eradication have delayed getting Our Old House prepared for guests this year, the time has come at last that we can throw open the gates and host a gathering. Our little soir?es are a chance for Denver-area (or visiting out-of-town) ko...
SquareState - Thu 12:28 p.m. - 8 clicks
. Drop in inmates gives sheriff breathing room in jail http://www.gazette.com/article... A year ago, the El Paso County Sheriff was pleading to raise taxes to expand his jail. He was worried about overcrowding. Today his inmate population is 20% lower than a year ago. People can just not afford a life of crime anymore, that's how bad this economy is. . ...
Colorado Pols - Thu 12:00 p.m.
While Rice is in Iraq with Army Reserve, Carroll Holds In Absentia Meeting 7/11 For a few months while he is in Iraq as a Colonel with the Army Reserve, State Representative Joe Rice (D-Arapahoe County) won’t be able to......
Colorado House Democrats - Thu 12:00 p.m.
Defending a military coup based on arguments that it somehow was about "the rule of law" prevailing is proving to be a fairly credulous argument. The Honduran Congress has just removed five constitutional articles dealing with basic civil and human rights . ...
Steam Powered Opinions - Thu 9:44 a.m. - 8 clicks
New unemployment data came out showing the job market continues to worsen. My Facebook friends reflect this. Four times this week, friends of mine have announced their availability in the job market via their Facebook statuses. Colorado has lost almost 100,000 jobs in the past year according to the Colorado Dept. of Labor and Employment. Only a fraction of the stimulus money has been spent...
Colorado Pols - Thu 9:44 a.m. - 6 clicks
The overall crime rate fell 8% in Colorado in 2008 from 2007 , and more in Denver. "Colorado's overall crime rate dropped last year for the third time since 2005[.]" Colorado did better than the nation as a whole which also had falling crime rates. Crime rates are less cyclical than most people believe them to be. Car theft was down 22%, which makes sense. The Denver Post interviewed a law enf...
Wash Park Prophet - Thu 8:18 a.m.
Mike Maday visited the CO congressional delegation with the Change that Works Colorado group to discuss why he thinks we need health care reform now. Watch the video above to see what kind of reception he received, and sign up here to show your support for a public option. ...
SquareState - Wed 9:21 p.m. - 2 clicks
Speaker of the House Terrance Carroll has appointed three community leaders to the Long Term Fiscal Stability Commission, an interim committee. Saying that "They bring a deep understanding of the issues from a variety of perspectives" to the Commission, Speaker......
Colorado House Democrats - Wed 6:07 p.m. - 8 clicks
DENVER – It took years of work by Representative John Soper (D-Adams County) to build a coalition with fire and health officials, with citizens whose lives have been affected by carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning, and with Rep. Lois Court and......
Colorado House Democrats - Wed 6:07 p.m. - 9 clicks
We're pleased to introduce a new member of the Colorado Pols community, McInnis4Governor . Nice to meet you. Given all the recent hullabaloo over 'sock puppets,' we'd say our readers will find the authenticity of your approach refreshing. McInnis4Governor's first act after signing up was to helpfully post an important release from gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis' campaign: "McInnis tod...
Colorado Pols - Wed 4:22 p.m. - 5 clicks
Republicans think Rep. Betsy Markey's vote Friday on the cap and trade bill will cost her votes next year. Politico, in a breathless and at times inaccurate piece Tuesday, even described it as a "career-ending vote." The article included the National Republican Congressional Committee's plans for attacking Markey and other potentially vulnerable Dems with TV and radio spots. The NRCC's offensive ...
Colorado Pols - Wed 2:02 p.m. - 5 clicks
It's July 1st, and you know what that means. New laws take effect making it legal to collect rainwater, implementing the hard-fought FASTER bill that raises vehicle registration fees to pay for roads, and Governor Bill Ritter's bill that will raise hospital fees to pump more money into Medicaid, thereby scoring more federal matching funds. But most interesting to me is the Designated Benefi...
Colorado Pols - Wed 8:23 a.m. - 2 clicks
As the Grand Junction Sentinel reports, Senate candidate Ken Buck and all-but-announced gubernatorial candidate Josh Penry are throwing a party. A tea party, actually. A Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat will speak on Independence Day to a Grand Junction tea party. Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck will speak at the 7 p.m. event. Buck is the second potential Senate c...
Colorado Pols - Wed 7:05 a.m. - 6 clicks
[disclaimer: I work on projects for the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative but am not a staffer] While the idea of health cooperatives might be a tempting solution for liberals to grab onto, co-ops actually would endanger the current the health care reform effort by posing as a politically palatable--but ultimately meaningless--alternative to a public health insurance option. As Paul Krugman, ...
Colorado Pols - Wed 5:53 a.m. - 2 clicks
There is lots of good data on the number of executions carried out under color of law in every country in the world for almost every year, with a handful of cases like China, where the data is merely estimated. There is far less easily available good data on the average time elapsed historically and in different countries between the offense, the conviction and the execution. Yet, this data shoul...
Wash Park Prophet - Tue 10:58 p.m.
A Monday decision by the Colorado Supreme Court, decided by a 4-2 margin , over whether a sanction for discovery violations and related misconduct by lawyers in civil litigation was too harsh (the majority ruled that it was), nicely illustrates what civil litigation looks like when the pre-trial process gets ugly, despite (or perhaps because of the fact) that the underlying case was a fairly low ...
Wash Park Prophet - Tue 10:49 p.m. - 2 clicks
DENVER -- Speaker of the House Terrance Carroll announced that the Colorado House of Representatives – including the Majority Democrats, the Minority Republicans, and the administrative divisions – will return approximately $900,000 from its operating budget to the State’s General......
Colorado House Democrats - Tue 10:48 p.m.
Colorado Pols has won a well deserved mention in Denver's 5280 magazine , who's "Top of the Town" lists are somewhat more serious and less ironic of those of free Denver tab, Westword which has "Best of Denver" lists instead. Both are highly sought after and treasured for years afterward by local merchants. Copyright Andrew Oh-Willeke (2009) ...
Wash Park Prophet - Tue 9:50 p.m.
Confirming what was widely anticipated, from the AP wire: Another Colorado state senator is leaving for a job with the Obama administration. Democratic Sen. Jim Isgar of Hesperus was announced Tuesday as the U.S. Department of Agriculture's state director of rural development. The La Plata County rancher says he will give up his Senate seat early for the post. Isgar is chairman of the Senate...
Colorado Pols - Tue 3:22 p.m.
Two articles from the ProgressNow Daily News Digest caught my eye this morning. The first is about additional clean energy development in Colorado. The other puts violent speech from a Con politician on display. I'll start with the clean energy story : potential development in the San Luis Valley that is being looked at by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as part of an effort to build solar ...
SquareState - Tue 3:04 p.m. - 2 clicks
After some tough press last week regarding a couple of small but politically inconvenient expenditures, the Colorado Senate leadership announced today that it is returning over $627,000 in unneeded funds to the state. Says Senate President Brandon Shaffer , "The cuts start here. We must be first in line to demonstrate fiscal restraint." Full release follows: had the timing been a little differ...
Colorado Pols - Tue 1:39 p.m.
Mother Nature Network America's eco-mayors ... Mayor John Hickenlooper's Greenprint Denver plan, launched in 2006, was designed to position Denver as one of the most sustainable cities in the country. Three years later, it's on the right track. During that time, 70,000 trees have been planted in the Mile High City. Meanwhile, low-flow toilets were installed in City Hall, and the city's ent...
SquareState - Tue 9:41 a.m. - 4 clicks
Reporting from Indianapolis and Denver: The last time Indiana missed its deadline for passing a budget and had to shut down the government was during the Civil War. Indiana is one of five states -- along with Arizona, California, Mississippi and Pennsylvania -- bracing for possible shutdowns this week as time runs out for lawmakers to close billion-dollar gaps in their fiscal 2010 budgets. Of ...
SquareState - Tue 7:48 a.m. - 3 clicks
Louisiana in 2100 (predicted) About 10% of the land in Louisiana, including essentially all of New Orleans, will be underwater by 2100 , due to subsiding delta silts and rising sea levels. The engineering effort necessary to make a big dent in this trend is mammoth. Much of New Orleans is already below or just barely above sea level, the state has lost a large share of its wetlands to t...
Wash Park Prophet - Mon 7:01 p.m. - 2 clicks
The nation's foremost election law blogger opines at Slate that the U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to declare the McCain-Feingold bill limitations on corporate and labor union spending in federal elections unconstitutional on its face, a decision that could also impact Colorado's campaign finance laws. The U.S. Supreme Court had been scheduled to release a narrow statutory opinion concerning...
Wash Park Prophet - Mon 3:36 p.m.
I was in Ludlow yesterday for the dedication ceremony. It's a beautiful marker and the story boards around the monument are very well done. I've become a bit of a Ludlow buff in the last year or so and have actually done a small group presentation on the topic. Labor history in Colorado is endlessly fascinating to me and luckily there's no shortage of good books on the topic. I had wanted to atte...
Steam Powered Opinions - Mon 2:49 p.m. - 5 clicks
Fourteen years ago today, I was formally admitted to the practice of law, in New York State. A little later, I would move to Colorado and practice law there. New York State has several hundred more years of history (New York has had a continuous governmental regime longer than the United States, for example), and has spent much of that history at a reasonably high population. This shows in their l...
Wash Park Prophet - Mon 12:45 p.m.
An email from Rep. Markey displays the courage and thoughtful reasoning that so many of us want from our employees in Washington, D.C. As expected, Cons like Dick Wadhams are trying to use Markey's vote for H.R. 2454 (the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009) against her in the lead-up to the 2010 election. Rep. Markey responds with the necessary conviction that a Democrat in a re...
SquareState - Mon 9:43 a.m. - 5 clicks
Children of the Waters by Carleen Brice One World/Ballantine, 304 pages, $14 Denver novelist Carleen Brice's second novel is a quick-paced family drama that turns on a secret adoption, told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of two sisters who are unknown to each other, living in the same city but in very different worlds. Trish Taylor is a blond, overweight veterinary technician who...
New West Boulder - Mon 9:43 a.m. - 3 clicks
The Colorado Springs Gestapo Department released an Internal Affairs investigation results Friday, and once again, the PIGS came up “innocent”. Surprise Surprise Surprise. Seems the only property rights (or any other rights) they enforce or give a shit about are those of people who have a couple million in the bank and own real estate. [...]...
Not My Tribe - Mon 3:32 a.m.
Two of the common Opuntia cactus in the woods--the claret cup in bloom and another mini-prickly pear living on a boulder in what must be just wind-blown dirt. Thanks to the wet weather in May, however, they look pretty happy. But as the experts say, don't mulch your cactus. ...
NatureBlog - Mon 3:32 a.m. - 2 clicks
What is odd is that I saw this in the online New York Times , but not in the Denver Post or Pueblo Chieftain . National Public Radio's version is here . Now two new laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater legally. The laws are the latest crack in the rainwater edifice, as other states, driven by population growth, drought, or declining groundwater in their aquifers, h...
NatureBlog - Mon 3:32 a.m. - 4 clicks
Christo and Jeanne-Claude are Great Artistes, and zey have une grande vision artistique called " Over the River ." Those Coloradans who worry about the disruption of commerce, of emergency services, of their pitiful small town lives, et cetera -- they are like the squeakings of the mice. Ils sont très amusants. Now politicians are lining up behind their "Over the River" project . All...
NatureBlog - Mon 3:32 a.m.
Good morning, and you never know what you might find in the garden. Welcome to Saturday Morning Garden Blogging. Here in Denver, if it's not one thing, it's another. We did leave behind the abnormal cloud-covered, cool temperatures of early June... and moved straight into an early arrival of our typical summer monsoon pattern. We've had thunderstorms every afternoon, with som...
SquareState - Mon 2:31 a.m. - 4 clicks
Six months on the campaign trail have sharpened Senator Michael Bennet's speaking skills. Although raised inside the Washington Beltway, it took him a while to project the thoughtful grasp of policy displayed at today's Arapahoe Young Democrat's picnic. With a relaxed earnestness, he navigated a probing set of questions on health care from a gathering that made it clear that he had not yet prov...
SquareState - Mon 2:31 a.m. - 4 clicks
The Stonewall Riots (over the shutdown of a gay bar in New York City), forty years ago this Sunday, marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement, and the Colorado Democratic Party's gay, lesbian and transsexual interest section (like that of many Democratic Party entities with the same purpose) bears its name, the "Stonewall Democrats." Growing up in small town Ohio in the 1970s and 1...
Wash Park Prophet - Jun 26 - 4 clicks
The American Clean Energy and Security Act passed today in a narrow 219-212 vote , with 8 Republicans voting for it and 44 Democrats voting against. Colorado split down party lines with the exception of Congressman John Salazar who opposed the legislation. ...
SquareState - Jun 26 - 4 clicks
Denver, Colorado entered June a little below the average for annual rainfall to date. We are now already more than two inches ahead of the year to date average (about a third more than normal) and are far above average for June. It is raining again today, so the last few days of June promise to provide even more moisture. If I recall correctly, snow packs also got to slightly more than their annua...
Wash Park Prophet - Jun 26 - 6 clicks
It appears that the governor is completely ruling out increases in revenue as he looks for a solution to our state's fiscal woes. It's a political calculation I'm sure; going into an election year he doesn't want to close tax loopholes and do away with tax credits. I suppose that's an understandable position but I can't say that I agree with it. Colorado loses around $2 billion in revenue via ta...
Steam Powered Opinions - Jun 26 - 2 clicks
• A list of nature books for young readers from the John Burroughs Association. • Famous Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki suffers a public meltdown over British Columbia politics. • The Colorado Division of Wildlife reports births of some second-generation lynx kittens : "The discovery of kittens this year is extremely promising," said Tanya Shenk, DOW lynx field researcher. "The l...
NatureBlog - Jun 25 - 3 clicks
It is raining right now, hurray, but rain cannot be counted on here in the Southwest. For certain flower and vegetable beds, soaker hoses or permanent drip-irrigation systems are not an option and my house, but "ollas" (Spanish for jug) work, even in our heavy clay foothills soil. Supposedly this is an old Pueblo Indian technique—bury an unglazed clay pot with just the neck showing and then...
NatureBlog - Jun 25 - 2 clicks
Your state legislature in Colorado is only in session from January to May. The US Congress however is in session now. Even though we are not federal, we do occasionally get updates about what is going on in Congress by virtue of us being in the state legislature. I would like to share some of [...]...
Morgan Carroll's Senate Blog - Jun 24 - 3 clicks
