Colorado Springs looks to cash in on ads on city property

Colorado Springs has announced a plan to sell advertising on city property to try to cash in on $5 million a year. Imagine: Mountain Dew, doing the Dew to the early morning foliage at Garden of the Gods. Qwest, adding adventure to your Sunday morning bike trek through North Cheyenne Canyon. It’s not the first time that the marketing brains have tried something like this out in Colorado’s second largest city. Back in the mid-1990s the city’s largest school district became the first in the nation to sell ads, including in schools and on the side of buses, to raise cash.

New claim of Colorado atrocity: The Bible has been criminalized

An outfit calling itself The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission (CADC) has put out a Top 10 list of what it considers “the most outrageous Christian bashing in America in the year 2008.” Coming in at No. 4 is a claim that “Colorado Law Criminalizes the Bible.” What?

The assertion is actually a reference to last year’s Senate Bill 200, which expands the definition of discrimination to include sexual orientation. At the time, you’ll remember that Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family went bonkers over the bill, claiming that transgendered people would be able to go into bathrooms and molest children. But criminalizing the Bible? How on earth did Focus miss that angle?

When Colorado was Klan country

This week’s legislative kick-off, with African-American men leading both the Colorado Senate and House of Representatives, is historic indeed, and many have highlighted the import of the moment. After all, it was less than a century ago that the Ku Klux Klan dominated much of Colorado politics, even claiming then-Gov. Clarence Morley a member. But it would be wrong, as has been suggested in some news reports, to claim that the only targets of the Klan of the early-to-mid 1920s in Colorado were people of color. Rather, as historians have detailed, the primary motivation of the Klan in Colorado was to promote “100 percent Americanism” — and that meant also targeting Jews and Roman Catholic immigrants.

Ritter and U.S. Senate pick Bennet to make tracks across Colorado

Beginning today, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter and his U.S. senator-select, Michael Bennet, begin what is likely to be their first round of trips across Colorado to introduce voters outside of Denver to the guy most of them have never heard of — and hey, it’s a pretty good opportunity for Ritter to follow his Thursday State of the State address with a reminder that he’ll be running for re-election next year.

Bill Thiebaut joins the jockeying for Colorado U.S. attorney

Pueblo District Attorney Bill Thiebaut, a former longtime Colorado legislator, is the latest to say in effect, “Pick Me!” to be Colorado’s next U.S. attorney. On Thursday the Pueblo Chieftain reported that Thiebaut, a former majority leader in the state Senate, is interested in being nominated to replace Republican Troy Eid, who announced this week he plans to resign on Jan. 19 and run for attorney general in 2010.

Troy Eid to resign, run for Colorado attorney general

If all goes the way that the Denver Post laid out in very matter-of-fact terms today, Attorney General John Suthers is either planning to seek the nomination for governor or U.S. senator from Colorado in 2010. Meanwhile Colorado Supreme Court Justice Allison Eid will step down from the bench if her husband, Troy Eid, is elected Colorado’s next attorney general.

For Colorado lawmakers: ‘People who live in glass houses shouldn’t bowl’

There once was a man named Chuck Henning — a staple in the Colorado Legislature. He was a historian, an author, a TV reporter and, for a year in 1992, a Republican representative from Englewood. He was also a bon vivant, a collector of political quotes that captured the essence — and sometimes the absurdity — of democracy in action.

And so, on the opening day of the regular session of Colorado’s 67th General Assembly, here’s a toast to the memory of Henning — with the hopes that our lawmakers will live up to his so-very-quotable standards. Or, as Dan Quayle might say, “It’s a question of whether we’re going forward into the future, or past to the back.”

Quick, Shepherd out as possible U.S. attorneys

Adams County District Attorney Don Quick, reportedly at the top of the list to become Colorado’s next U.S. Attorney, has apparently taken himself out of the running, as has Denver attorney Willie Shepherd, who is active in Democratic Party politics as well as numerous civic and philanthropic boards.

Tancredo rides into the sunset speaking Spanish; Allard is, well, Allard

As Colorado’s newest members of Congress are being sworn in and readying their offices, the messages for two of the Centennial State’s outgoing federal lawmakers have been less than flattering. Indeed, a Denver Post profile about former Rep. Tom Tancredo and retired Sen. Wayne Allard has hardly turned out to be swan songs for the lawmakers, at least to the many who’ve left comments of response.

2009 Legislature: Social calendar filling up, pomp and circumstance to come

With two days before kickoff, the Webmasters in charge of announcing the upcoming pomp and circumstance on Colorado’s official legislative session will hopefully soon update the page of events so we’re not still stuck back in 2008. But in the meantime, the deadline schedule for this year’s 120-day schedule for bill filing and such is ready to review. And, the legislative social calendar is filling up — though not so briskly as in the past.