The discussion touches on stories reported by the Michigan Messenger on a new Brennan Center for Justice report on the new rash of voter laws and on the fact that Michigan appears to be violating federal laws that seek to expand voter registration there.

Note: At the end of the discussion, Tomasic refers to the Denver District judge who ruled against Gessler on the matter of inactive voter ballots as “she.” He meant “he,” as in Judge Brian Whitney.

“Apologies, Judge Whitney! I had Denver County Clerk Debra Johnson’s face playing across my mind,” says Tomasic.

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Here’s a sentence you don’t see much these days: A new newspaper will hit the streets Thursday.

Erin Chavez, former Associate Publisher of the Vail Mountaineer, which closed in June along with the Denver Daily News, will launch a weekly called “Sneak Peak Vail.”

Chavez said she saw a hole in the advertising market after the Mountaineer closed, and she developed a business model to meet the demand and make a new newspaper sustainable.

“We’re partnering with core businesses that had supported the Vail Mountaineer,” she says. “We offered them a preferred advertising rate that provides a base for us and stable and inexpensive advertising source for them for years to come.”

After the Mountaineer shut down, Chavez said that local businesses told her that if they had an affordable and guaranteed advertising rate, they’d sign a longer term contract.

She’s got 27 contracts as of Monday, which, she says, is enough to cover the main cost of printing the newspaper. She figures she can offer the reduced rate to a limited number of advertisers before her business will lose money.

The advertisers will have no input on the paper’s editorial content, which will be “more lifestyle-oriented, not based on news in the Vail valley, but more of what is going on and applying it to second home owners and locals,” she said.

Chavez has hired seven staffers and seems excited to give the business model a shot. “I’ve been lucky to have the resources up here to try this,” she said.

She said of the Mountaineer, “The model wasn’t unsuccessful. On paper it makes sense. But when the economy is hurting, and people aren’t paying, cash flow is a big problem.”

She’s hoping her new model, with ongoing support from advertisers, will fix that problem.

“We’re satisfied that [the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel] did a very thorough investigation of the matter,” Colorado Ethics Watch Director Luis Toro told the Colorado Independent. “They took their time to look closely at the material and deposed two witnesses. We’re glad that they put a period on this story. The public gains in transparency for its having done the investigation.”

Retiring from Congress in 2005, McInnis agreed to write a series of articles on water in the west and to promote them for the Hasan Foundation for $300,000. McInnis leaned on water expert Rolly Fischer to do research for the articles.

When the Denver Post reported that large sections of the articles McInnis turned in were plagiarized, McInnis responded that it was Fischer who had lifted sections from a paper written decades earlier by Justice Gregory Hobbs. McInnis said he was unaware of the uncredited borrowing until the Post reported it.

But the plagiarism was a fact and McInnis’s name was attached to the articles for which he was paid a relatively vast sum of money. The Post went after McInnis in a series of pieces and the media had a field day with the story. The public soured on the McInnis candidacy as a result. McInnis lost a humiliating primary election to untested amateur politician Dan Maes.

From Law Week Colorado:

“Mr. Fischer alone chose to import large sections of text previously written by the Honorable Justice Gregory Hobbs into one of the articles drafted for Mr. McInnis, without credit citation,” states the results of the investigation.

Fischer apparently argued that the use was not plagiarism because he believes the article is part of the “public domain,” according to the investigation, compiled from interviews with Fischer.

Fischer had never disclosed to McInnis that he had taken Hobbs’ work, according to the report.

While the Hasan Foundation had originally stated in a news release that McInnis had never disclosed to them the use of Fischer as a research assistant, the investigation found that in fact McInnis had disclosed that information to the foundation.

“For all these reasons, there is no clear and convincing evidence Mr. McInnis knowingly engaged in dishonest conduct by either: (1) plagiarizing Justice Hobbs’ work, or (2) reporting to the Foundation that the articles were his original work,” states the report.

The story was first reported and broken by the Denver Post, which then led a large editorial campaign against McInnis, calling for the former Congressman to back out of the primary given the allegations.

But Regulation Counsel John S. Gleason says the Denver Post reported erroneous facts.

“While both Mr. Fischer and [Hasan Family Foundation Chairwoman Seeme] Hasan provided contradictory accounts to the press at the time this issue was raised by the Denver Post, a more thorough review of their archived materials demonstrates that both had forgotten several specific communications with Mr. McInnis that had occurred several years before,” states Gleason.

McInnis supporters are now calling for an ethics examination into the reporting of the Denver Post.

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David O. Williams

Ritter, now the director of the Center for the New Energy Economy at Colorado State University, assesses the current administration’s track record on energy issues and steps that still need to be taken on the state and federal levels to further the objectives of his “New Energy Economy,” which he advocated for relentlessly over the past four years.

Eves talks about continuing to diversify the state’s energy mix and defends his company’s recent handling of the Solar Rewards program. He also discusses the push for more natural gas-powered electricity in the form of Ritter’s Clean Air, Clean Jobs Act, which was bitterly opposed by the state’s coal industry.

Karen Sheldon, an environmental attorney and the head of WRA – a 22-year-old non-profit environmental law and policy organization with offices in seven western states – praises Minnesota-based Xcel for its more progressive stance on renewable energy sources. But she also argues that much more needs to be done to ensure the front-end extraction of energy resources doesn’t needlessly impact Colorado’s air and water quality.

The program, hosted by veteran television journalist Cynthia Hessin, airs statewide tonight at 7:30 p.m. MDT on Rocky Mountain PBS (Channel 6 in Denver and on the Front Range; Channel 8 in Pueblo and Colorado Springs; and Channel 18 in Grand Junction and much of western Colorado).

It’s then re-broadcast on Sunday morning at 5:30 and again early Monday morning at 12:30. After the first broadcast it is also streamed and archived online at www.RMPBS.org. Click VIDEO at the top of the home page.

Colorado-Springs Republican Doug Lamborn has led the charge for two years to ban federal funding for National Public Radio programming. His bill has gained traction among Republican House leaders just as a conservative dirty-tricks media campaign waged against the public broadcaster has made news. Majority Leader Eric Cantor, looking to strike while the iron is hot, fast-tracked the bill, lining up a vote for today. The bill cuts no money from the federal budget.

“Taxpayers should not be on the hook for something that is widely available in the private market,” Lamborn said in a statement. “I wish only the best for NPR. Like many Americans, I enjoy much of their programming.”

Last year, Lamborn was less guarded about his motivations in writing the bill. He seized on the controversy over NPR’s firing of Juan Williams to rally conservatives who believe public broadcasting is liberal and biased. Lamborn appeared on the FOX network several times to make his case.

“You may have heard about the recent firing of NPR News Analyst Juan Williams and the $1.8 million donation by liberal activist George Soros to hire 100 NPR reporters,” Lamborn wrote to supporters at the time. “These two actions make it clear that public broadcasting is a friend and protector of liberal issues and political correctness, at the expense of free speech and balanced news reporting.”

Last week, top NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller resigned after conservative politics dirty trickster James O’Keefe released a hidden-camera video of Schiller making disparaging remarks about the Republican Party and the Tea Party. Like past O’Keefe product, the video was dubiously edited for effect. FOX News host Glenn Beck and others compared the video against raw footage and found it fundamentally altered and misleading.

The irony in the fact that conservative lawmakers like Lamborn are leaning on discredited overtly political media work produced by O’Keefe to bolster their claims that NPR is biased has thinned their case at all but the most conservative news outlets and in the right blogosphere. O’Keefe has been warned repeatedly by judges that his wiretapping activities have been illegal. He plead guilty to breaking into Democratic Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office last year to produce one of his hit-videos. His videos on ACORN, which conservative lawmakers seized upon to defund the low-income housing and voter registration organization, have been discredited. Judges ruled in cases across the states that ACORN did nothing illegal.

NPR fans and most Democrats in Congress support NPR tax-payer funding, calling the organization a valuable resource in the increasingly polarized and corporate media news environment.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Lamborn’s legislation “prohibits NPR and its local affiliates from using federal dollars to produce programming or purchase content from other member stations. Affiliate stations could only use taxpayer money for administrative costs, under the bill.” None of that cuts into federal spending.

NPR received $430 million in federal funding this year. Its stations receive roughly 10 percent of funding from tax dollars. Donations fund the rest of the NPR budget and those are hard to come by in large rural parts of the country.

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Sen. Al Franken headed to Austin, Texas, on Monday to speak about net neutrality at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, one of the largest film, music and interactive gatherings. In his speech, Franken said that net neutrality is important for many of the artists who showcase their talents at SXSW and that maintaining the current structure of the internet will help keep it “weird” — a reference to the festival host city’s informal slogan.

Franken called the internet “the ultimate self-distribution channel; the best part is that no one has to sell out unless they want to.”

The Minnesota Democrat warned that if the structure of the internet were to change, independent artists would have a hard time getting heard.

“I came here today to warn you that the party may almost be over,” he said. “They are coming after the internet hoping to destroy the very thing that makes it such an important tool for indie artists and entrepreneurs: its freedom and openness.”

He explained what the term means. “Net neutrality means that content… moves over the internet freely and moves at the same speed no matter what it is or who owns it,” he said. “For instance, an email from President Obama and an email from your tea party uncle come in at the same speed.”

He added that opponents of net neutrality often say that proponents want to change the internet.

“We have net neutrality right now and we don’t want to lose it. It’s not about changing the internet at all,” he said.

He said the problem exists when corporations decide to allow certain content to be transmitted at one speed and other content at other speeds.

“Big corporations are not inherently evil, but they have a legal obligation to make as much money as they can,” he said. “Paid prioritization would make these corporations gatekeepers to decide which content goes in the high speed lane and which gets stuck in traffic depending on who paid.”

He added that lobbyists are derailing efforts to prevent paid prioritization. “Every policymaker in Washington is hearing much more from the anti-net neutrality side than the side without lobbyists,” he said. “But everyone has more to fear from these big corporations than from us. It would benefit no one but them.”

“Let’s not sell out,” he concluded. “Let’s not let the government sell us out. Let’s fight for net neutrality. Let’s keep Austin weird. Let’s keep the internet weird. Let’s keep the internet free.”

Minneapolis native Leif Utne of The UpTake spoke with Sen. Franken before the speech. “To me this is the First Amendment issue of our time,” he said. “The right seems to want to say that this is taking over the internet, but it’s not; it’s about keeping the internet the way it is.”

He provided an example, “You get The UpTake as fast as Fox News — and that’s the way it should be.”

Bill Smith, the teenage medical marijuana patient whose quest for an education The Colorado Independent has chronicled over the past month, made the TV news again last night in Colorado Springs.

Click on photo for video.

The television story breaks no new ground for regular readers of this site, but we spoke to the boy Wednesday evening, and he reiterated that he just wants to get an education and have the same access to his medicine that other students have to theirs.

Smith (not his real name) has a rare disorder that causes seizures, which if untreated can go on for days at a time. He controls the seizures by sucking on THC lozenges, which state says cannot be possessed or consumed on the grounds of a school.

Because of that law and the school district’s enforcement of it, Smith has to walk home from school when an attack begins and take his medicine before he can go back to school.

“What if one of their (legislators) family members was going through this? Everything would change then,” he said. “It is so frustrating.”

He says he understands that lawmakers think people abuse medical marijuana, but notes that people also abuse valium and other prescription drugs which are legal on school property.

Smith also worries about legislation that may ban edible marijuana products in Colorado, or may ban edible marijuana products if they are manufactured out of state.

He’s concerned that he and other patients wouldn’t be able to get their medication if that happened.

He says concerns that edible products or THC-infused soda pops could be attractive to children are misguided.

“Are they going to ban cherry-flavored Tylenol? Kids die from that when they think it is candy and drink too much. Nobody is going to die from a marijuana lozenge or drink. I don’t want to smoke it and neither do lots of other patients. If the best way for someone to take it is in a drink, why outlaw that?” he asks.

One of the reasons he likes the lozenges is that they come in really low dosages and he can spit them out when his seizure starts to go away, further limiting his consumption of the drug.

“If they outlaw lozenges, I don’t know what I will do. I may not be able to go to school at all because I would have to take a pill or something with a higher dosage and it would affect me more than a lozenge.”

He says if Legislators don’t want him in school, they should tell him that. “They should tell me to my face that I can’t have the medicine that helps me, because they disagree with it.

“I will keep pushing until everything changes. I’m not going to back off,” he said. “I just want to be a normal person. I don’t want to be discriminated against because of my disease. All they (legislators) think about is the people who abuse. They don’t think about the actual patients who need the medicine,” he said.

BOULDER – Popular unrest has engulfed the Arab world, and as the despots fall, the question on nearly everyone’s mind: where is this going?

This week at CU, four experts on the Arab world gathered to offer insights and background skipped over by the mainstream media on the current and historical context in Egypt and the Middle East.

The panelists included Haytham Bahoora, assistant professor of Arabic studies, Nabil Echchaibi, assistant professor of journalism and media studies, Najeeb Jan, instructor of geography, and John M. Willis, assistant professor of history.

After spending extensive time living and studying the Muslim world, all four professors possess a thorough knowledge of the culture, history and political structures of the Middle East.

At the panel, Willis started the conversation by offering a short history of parallel revolutions that have occurred in Egypt in the past century. He spoke of the popular revolution in 1919 that spurred what he describes as “a preemptive independence” from Britain. However, the revolution did not produce the desired results, and so again in 1952 the government was overthrown, which led to a period of economic reform and modernization under Gamal Abdel Nasser.

According to Willis, neither revolution ultimately fulfilled the idealistic goals they set out to accomplish, as Nasser’s rule ultimately led to Mubarak, where Egypt was “subjugated to a brutal regime of neoliberal capitalism.”

“What we find historically when we look at the two major revolutions in Egyptian history is that there’s always the possibility of revolutions being co-opted or turned against their original intents,” said Willis. “So we must proceed with caution.”

Bahoora, who has lived and studied extensively in Cairo, contrasted the current push for democracy in Egypt with the as yet largely unsuccessful American-forced democratization of Iraq.

“As an Iraqi, I can say I am jealous of Egyptians in that they did not have to be bombed into democracy,” said Bahoora.

Middle Eastern media expert and journalism professor Echchaibi, who is from Morocco, said the media may be focusing too much on Twitter and Facebook’s role in the uprising, while not recognizing the enormous role that Al Jazeera and activist blogs played in laying down the foundation for the revolts in Tunisia and then in Egypt.

“Make no mistake, Al Jazeera wanted this to take place,” said Echchaibi.

Jan concurred with the fellow panelists that the events in Egypt so far can be called “a happy moment,” but he refrained from calling the uprisings a revolution as of yet. As did the other panelists, he criticized U.S. foreign policy double standards that allowed Mubarak to remain in power.

“How can we claim we are the leaders of world democracy when we consistently support authoritarian leaders across the world in the name of stability?” said Jan. “What happened in Egypt did not happen because of the U.S., but rather in spite of the U.S.”

For better and for worse, in our partisan politics and media culture, controversial stories draw attention to the writer and to the outlet where it was published as well as to the subject of the story. In the weeks before an election, that kind of scrutiny intensifies. The Colorado Independent and I welcome that scrutiny. We don’t welcome uninformed speculation and smears.

Some fairly well-known journalists have told their version of how the story came to be written. That they did so without talking to anyone at the Colorado Independent, including me, is no shock. That they failed as journalists to make a phone call or send an email before writing stories about what they call suspect journalism is laughable and sad.

I’ve read at the Denver Post, for example, that progressive activist group ProgressNow and the Colorado Independent are “sister organizations.” I’ve read that when ProgressNow “shopped” this story to the mainstream media and found no takers, they spoon fed it to me. I’ve read that I was part of a coordinated effort to bring down Ken Buck.

Really?

That speculation is based on the assumption that ProgressNow and the Colorado Independent share financial backers. (Both organizations are non-profits.) That may or may not be true, but this is the most relevant fact concerning funding: I don’t know who funds ProgressNow and I only have a vague idea who funds the Colorado Independent. Frankly, I don’t want to know. The last thing I want to think about when writing a story is whether it will please a funder– or piss one off.

I do know–only because claims made by others about this story have forced me to find out–that we are not funded by the Colorado Democracy Alliance and we have no legal, financial or operating connection with ProgressNow.

If columnists and bloggers at the Denver Post and the National Review, for example, had called me, this is what I would have told them because this is the fact of how the 2005 Weld County rape story found its way to the Colorado Independent.

Late the night of Tuesday, September 21, I was surfing the Internet looking for story ideas. At popular politics blogsite Colorado Pols, I found mention of an event at which rape and incest victims were going to talk about their experiences and why they thought a complete ban on abortion, even in the case of rape or incest, is a bad idea.

Next day I tracked down one of the event organizers, Ellen Dumm, executive director of the progressive activist group Campaign for a Strong Colorado. She told me I had missed the event by a day. In that conversation or a subsequent one in which I asked for more information about the featured speakers at the event, Dumm told me she knew a woman who had been raped in Greeley a few years back and that the local DA, Ken Buck, had refused to prosecute. She said Buck had dismissed the charges as mere “buyer’s remorse” and I thought the case well worth looking into.

I know there can be many reasons a case isn’t prosecuted, but I told her I would love to talk to the woman. Dumm explained that the woman had felt somewhat burned by the coverage produced by the Greeley Tribune and other Northern Colorado media at the time of the assault. She wasn’t sure if the woman would speak with me. She said she would ask.

Days later, Dumm called and gave me the rape victim’s first name and phone number.

I ended up calling the woman early last week. She was congenial and engaging. She was nervous about telling her story, but she thought it was important.

I knew ProgressNow co-sponsored the original event I had missed because its name was on the press release. I don’t know why I called Dumm instead of ProgressNow Director Kjersten Forseth. Probably, I called both and Dumm is the one who called back first. I really have no idea.

I mention that now because during the course of my conversations with the victim, she mentioned that she had taped a private meeting she had with Ken Buck and she told me ProgressNow had the tape and that I was welcome to listen to it.

When I read that ProgressNow fed me this story, I shake my head.

This story isn’t about the Colorado Independent or about ProgessNow or both. I believed as I was reporting it and I believe now that the story I reported matters. For reporters still working this story, ask whether you think the way Buck handled this rape case matters. Whether you think he handled it well or handled it poorly, it’s the answer to that question that’s most worth writing about.

I don’t agonize over who gives me a tip. The background and motivation of the tipster is simply a matter of context in the story I write. Either the rape case matters or it doesn’t. The Colorado Independent strives to be transparent in its reporting, so ProgressNow is part of the story, but it’s not the story.

I called the sources on the story. They never called me. I called Campaign for a Strong Colorado because they had something I wanted: rape victims who would talk to me about what a ban on abortion would mean to them and other rape victims.

When I called ProgressNow, it was because the victim in the Weld County case told me ProgressNow had the tape of her meeting with Buck. What reporter wouldn’t follow that lead? I don’t think I even asked her why ProgressNow had the tape. I simply made a note to call ProgressNow.

The victim didn’t tell me about the tape right away, though. It was two or three conversations in that she gave me that nugget. By that time, I had already driven from Denver to Greeley to look at the 2005 police report. I had already interviewed the Greeley chief of police. I had already called the Weld County DA’s office several times and emailed staffers there as well. A public information officer called me back and told me she had told Buck I was working on this story and had given him my contact information. He never called me. I also phoned and emailed the campaign several times and never got a response.

In fact, I didn’t find out about the tape until late last week, at which point the story was mostly written.

I had never met anyone at ProgressNow or at the Campaign for a Strong Colorado prior to writing this story. I had never talked to anyone at those organizations prior to writing this story. I was not on their email lists. If I had been, I probably would have made it to the event I missed that started me working the story.

Nobody fed me anything. I called Dumm and said I was interested in rape victims’ experiences. It’s probable Dumm and Forseth’s familiarity with the Colorado Independent made them receptive to me. It is possible they Googled me or otherwise determined I might be sympathetic to the victim. I have no idea. I do know that if I had not thought the rape victim’s story was compelling, I would not have written about it.

I also know that I asked a lot of people in my life about the story before I published it. I asked, “Is it fair to go back five years to write this story? Is it fair to draw conclusions from one case?” I agonized over that question. At the end of the day, I thought Buck’s decision not to prosecute may have been reasonable—though I am not saying I think it was reasonable. I also thought, however, that he displayed a remarkably demeaning attitude toward this woman. I hate to call her a victim. To me, she’s a survivor, a fighter. She’s someone who was put in a position no woman wants to be put in, whether it was rape or not.

You can ask her if she was raped, or you can ask Ken Buck, but only one of those two people returned my calls.

When I read that I’m in bed with ProgressNow and that staffers there fed me the rape story, I wonder who is being fed a story now–or sold one–and why reporters buy it. I wonder if they have an agenda.

To the “longtime journalists” regurgitating that I wrote a “coordinated” story “hand and hand” with ProgressNow, if you’re going to write in the future about my reporting, call me first, because that’s what journalists do.

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