Over 100 businesses on the Western Slope wrote Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper today, asking that he stop devoting state resources to study Aaron Million’s embattled Flaming Gorge pipeline proposal.
In the last two years, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler has made voter fraud prevention a top priority. His efforts have included working to stop county clerks from sending absentee ballots to inactive voters, lobbying for a controversial voter ID law and leading an unprecedented effort to determine whether non-citizens are voting in the state.
The bill was never really debated in the Senate where it was introduced, then it was tacked on to a House bill amid the blizzard of activity that marked the last days of the Colorado legislative session. Government watchdog and elections groups on the right and left are now asking Gov. John Hickenlooper to veto it, arguing the bill would deny citizens the right to inspect voter ballots and “gut” the state’s Open Records Act.
DENVER– Outmaneuvered over the last six days in a legislative chess game centered on a gay-rights civil unions bill here, the Colorado Speaker of the House on Tuesday, the second-to-last day of the session, effectively turned over the board. Frank McNulty, a Republican from Highlands Ranch, walked out of the House at roughly 9 p.m. and stayed away for more than two hours, letting a recess run all the while and killing the civil unions bill and nearly 40 other bills in the process.
Conservative Rep. B.J. Nikkel, R-Loveland, voted to advance a state civil unions bill that would recognize same-sex partnerships last week in large part because she had come to believe the legislature, not the ballot box, was the best place to weigh civil rights questions.
Josh Jones was acquitted last week of felony charges stemming from his role as a medical marijuana caregiver. As a result, the Jefferson County sheriff’s office returned marijuana confiscated from Jones during the raid at his house that took place more than a year ago.
BOULDER– U.S. Senator Michael Bennet told students, staff and faculty members at the University of Colorado campus here Tuesday that he was proud to champion the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and happy that the Senate voted in favor of its reauthorization by a broad bipartisan majority.
“I believe that people who are either transsexuals or transvestites — I don’t know what the proper term is — traditionally are more liberal-minded thinking people, tend to associate more with the defendants because, obviously, they have been either ridiculed before or are feeling in a position of being in a microscope all the time and are outcasts which lends themselves to associating more with the defendant.”
In Colorado, organizing, infrastructure and fundraising within the Democratic Party and progressive organizations are the stuff of legend. The story of how liberal mega-millionaires and single-minded cooperation on the left turned this formerly solid red state to purple and blue have been told and retold for years. The story of coordination among conservatives groups, however, and the way millions of dollars each election cycle slosh to candidates and causes on the right has received relatively scant attention.
A Boulder District Court judge last night rejected attorney Rob Corry’s bid to prevent the University of Colorado Boulder from shutting down campus today. The judge ruled the university administration is free to bar non-students from entering the grounds as part of an effort to force annual April 20 anti-drug war and pro-legalization marijuana advocates to assemble elsewhere.
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