Bennet engages religious leaders in health-care debate

Candidate McInnis moves mountains — from Canadian Rockies to Colorado

What is it with Colorado politicians and their mountains? No, Mount McKinley isn’t Pikes Peak, and the Canadian Rockies are nowhere to be found in the Centennial State.

Hours after launching his campaign Web site to much fanfare, official Republican gubernatorial hopeful Scott McInnis yanked from the site a prominent graphic featuring a vista of Lake Louise, a resort nestled in the Canadian Rockies. The Canadian terrain appeared behind the question, “What do you want for the future of Colorado?”

Judge grants CSU motion; chancellor search tape to remain unreleased

Unbowed by a ruling two weeks ago in which a Larimer County judge found that Colorado State University violated Open Meetings laws, the CSU board and its lawyers fought an order demanding the release of audio tapes of the executive session where the board selected its own vice chairman, Joe Blake, as sole finalist for the new chancellor position.

Judge Stephen Schapanski today granted CSU a stay of his order. The battle over the release of the tapes is part of a larger ongoing suit brought last month by The Colorado Independent, The Fort Collins Coloradoan and The Pueblo Chieftan alleging the university violated state transparency laws.

Senators hold personal stake in bailed-out banks

The senators who voted last fall to approve the federal bailout of Wall Street hold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stock in the very banks that Washington has rescued in the nine months since.

Of the 74 upper-chamber lawmakers who supported the $700 billion financial rescue in October, at least 15 own direct shares in institutions receiving federal funds under the Troubled Assets Relief Program, according to financial disclosure forms filed by members of Congress last month.

Rep. Lamborn launches new Sovereignty Caucus to oppose ceding rights to foreign institutions

WASHINGTON — 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.

Rio Blanco and Garfield counties:
A tale of two nuclear gas blasts

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, four nuclear devices were exploded underground on Colorado’s Western Slope in an effort to free up commercially marketable amounts of natural gas from dense sandstone formations.

Battle brewing between Obama and civil liberties groups on detentions

It was a blind quote hitting the civil-libertarian solar plexus. Bad enough that, as ProPublica’s Dafna Linzner and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn reported late on Friday afternoon, the Obama administration was readying an executive order that would establish a system of preventive detention in terrorism cases. President Obama himself had indicated in a May speech at the National Archives that he wanted to seek legislation toward the same idea.

But now an administration official had told reporters that those same opponents of preventive detention had given the president cover to pursue it: “Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order.”

Isgar creates Senate vacancy with appointment to USDA rural post

Term-limited state Sen. Jim Isgar won appointment as the U.S. Department of Agriculture state director of rural development, Mile High Politics first reported Tuesday morning. The Hesperus Democrat, whose Senate District 6 covers eight counties in the southwest corner of Colorado, plans to step down in about three weeks, he told Jeremy Pelzer, creating the need for a vacancy committee to fill the final year of his term.