Join Our Live Colorado Caucus Coverage

The Colorado Independent and other Colorado blogs and news sites have teamed with the Colorado Political Institute to post live coverage from all around the state. Readers can add their voice to tonight’s coverage by tweeting updates and interacting with the caucus live feed.

Contributors can begin adding their blow-by-blow coverage to the feed beginning at 6pm Mountain Time. Updates will be aggregated into our caucus stream. Our coverage will include updates directly from party headquarters, meaning we will be the first to report statewide results.

How to contribute

Twitter: tweet news and delegate outcomes with the hash tag #caucusCO

Email: You can email updates, questions, and media to mail@coloradopoliticalinstitute.com

Online: View and interact with live coverage right here at the Colorado Independent.

You can also embed the Stream at your own sites. Grab the stream code from http://coloradopoliticalinstitute.org.

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Key races to watch include the Democratic and Republican U.S. Senate contests.

Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet faces a primary challenge from popular former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. GOP front-runner Jane Norton is battling to put distance between herself and Weld County D.A. Ken Buck and former state Sen. Tom Wiens.

GOP candidate for governor Scott McInnis has struggled for months to win solid grassroots activist support. Challenger Dan Maes will be looking to score a major boost tonight from Tea Party voters.

In the swing Fourth Congressional district, four Republicans have been jockeying for the chance to run against Democratic Rep. Betsy Markey, they are Yuma state Rep. Cory Gardner, CU Regent Tom Lucero, National Guardsman Diggs Brown, and regular guy Tea Partier Dean Madere.

Apart from the informal straw polls taken at candidate rallies over the past half year, the caucuses will be the first real test of candidate electoral strength.

In 2008, the presidential primary contests brought Republicans out in force to caucus for Mitt Romney while Democrats mobbed meeting places to weigh in on the neck-and-neck tooth-and-nail wrestling match between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama.

This year, the energetic Tea Party movement has already mobilized thousands of Coloradans on the right and left, as have intense national debates over health reform and the stimulus package and bank bailouts, for example.

In 2008, roughly 120,000 Democrats and 70,000 Republicans turned out to caucus. As the Colorado Statesman reports, though, average attendance at caucuses has been closer to 15,000 for each party.

An interesting note: In Larimer County, at least, the vast majority of Democratic caucuses will be held in public schools while the vast majority of Republican caucuses will be held in churches.

Join Our Live Colorado Caucus Coverage

The Colorado Independent and other Colorado blogs have teamed with the Colorado Political Institute to post live coverage from all around the state. Readers can add their voice to tonight’s coverage by tweeting updates from your precinct and interacting with the caucus live feed. 

Contributors can begin adding their blow-by-blow coverage to the feed beginning at 6pm Mountain Time. Updates will be aggregated into our caucus stream and will include input from politicos, elected officials, and activists. Our coverage will include updates directly from party headquarters, meaning we will be the first to report statewide results. 

Help us leverage the power of social media by tweeting from your caucus location and by including the hash tag #caucusCO. 

If you are not caucusing, our live coverage will keep you informed. 

How to contribute

Twitter: tweet news and delegate outcomes with the hash tag #caucusCO

Email: You can email updates, questions, and media to mail@coloradopoliticalinstitute.com

Online: View and interact with live coverage right here at the Colorado Independent.

You can also embed the Stream at your own sites. Grab the stream code from http://coloradopoliticalinstitute.org. 

On the Colorado Independent, the live feed will appear in the spot below this main feature.

Got a tip? Freelance story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

The trio plans to revitalize the site by offering more progressive political information and tying the site’s content more directly to political action.

“I really want to be a hub for action which not only includes things like political actions and rallies and possibly boycotts but also a resource where people can go to find out what is going on tonight,” Fong said.

The new mission would see the site house events calendars and calls to action. It might also develop fundraising tools for progressive causes and candidates.

Part of a network of blogs in all 50 states, SquareState has been running for at least five years. The site was credentialed to cover the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.

But Fong said SquareState contributors have felt that energy and enthusiasm at the site had dwindled recently. And in fact, the site’s editors, John Erhardt and Aaron Silverstein, had taken on additional work. Erhart is a staffer on Romanoff’s campaign.

Asked how the new site would compare to insider progressive commentary site Coloradopols, she said that SquareState would run to the left of Pols and would be more accessible to neophyte politicos.

“It will be a place that is accessible to users with all levels of political knowledge,” Fong said. “No small group of people can make it work….It has to generate community involvement to make it work.”

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Buck’s candidacy seems to be gaining steam, partly on the ground, where he appears to be the preferred candidate of grassroots conservatives, and partly in the air, where he is benefiting from a $115,000 anti-Norton ad campaign bought by the Declaration Alliance, a group which reportedly supports Buck.

At the end of January, Buck similarly benefited from an expensive ad campaign paid for by a group called Campaign for Liberty.

The National Journal reports that Norton’s ad spending already amounts to more than a third of the money her campaign had in the bank at the end of the year.

Buck’s meager fourth quarter fundraising totals– a mere $40,000– had many political observers writing him off but Buck campaign manager Walt Klein, a veteran GOP strategy man, told the Colorado Independent he wasn’t concerned.

“That’s today’s story,” he said on the day the numbers came out. “That’s one piece of the puzzle. Look what’s happened since the first of the year. Follow the candidate on the trail, watch him in front of people and you see a story of a candidate gaining momentum. Ken Buck is the underdog in this race and he’s proud of it.”

Since then, in addition to winning the backing of the semi-mysterious Campaign for Liberty and the even more mysterious Declaration Alliance, Buck pulled down the endorsement of the founder of the influential right-wing blogsite RedState, Erick Erickson.

“There are two campaigns going on,” Klein told the Colorado Independent recently. “One that flows from the FEC reports and the one happening day to day. The candidates are showing up every day and making their case to the activist voters, who are the ones paying attention at this stage of the game. There are no reporters there. There’s virtually no coverage and that’s the part of the campaign that matters.”

The caucus tonight is a test mostly for the frontrunners and Norton is spending to win.

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McInnis, a former six-term U.S. congressman born and raised in Glenwood, showed up among a bevy of statewide candidates and GOP political strategists, but he also was there for the announcement by former Glenwood Springs City Councilman David Merritt that he’ll run for the Garfield Board of County Commissioners in November.

Scott McInnis

Merritt will square off against Sunlight Mountain Resort ski area manager Tom Jankovsky in a primary, with the winner taking on entrenched Democrat Trési Houpt, who is running again after deciding last month not to seek the local state House seat after Gunnison’s Kathleen Curry switched from Democrat to independent late last year.

Houpt, appointed by Gov. Bill Ritter to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission and a strong backer of environmental and public health regulations, is often the lone dissenting vote on the three-member board of county commissioners in gas-rich GarCo.

McInnis, in fact, donated a cool 10 grand to a political nonprofit called Western Heritage that campaigned in favor of Houpt’s two Republican co-commissioners, John Martin and Mike Samson, in 2008. The head of Denver-based Antero Resources also chipped in for that cause.

Houpt has said all along she expects to have a double bull’s eye on her back because of her position on the COGCC and the GarCo board, although McInnis spokesman Sean Duffy told the Colorado Independent in January that the county commissioner race was not on the McInnis campaign radar at that point.

After Saturday’s dinner, it may have just jumped on their screen.

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For Christian conservative Minnesota U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, who is both a census hater and a gay basher, this is a clear message from either god or the devil.

Mindy Barton, legal director for the GLBT Community Center of Colorado, told the Public News Service that there’s no sex preference and gender ID boxes to check on the census, which leaves off important information.

“Our hope is that with these stickers, there would be an attempt to show the government it’s time to ask sexual orientation on the census to make sure that there is an accurate count,” she said.

Barton said that acknowledging the presence of gay people would clearly strengthen their voice and their impact in the public sphere. The government also of course distributes hundreds of billions of dollars based on census data and gay people deserve their cut.

Bachmann believes the census is nothing less than scary government intrusion. She has said that census data was used to round up the Japanese who were placed in internment camps during World War II. In that case, maybe getting full data on the gays will make her love the census?

Barton said a recent survey demonstrated that there are self-identifying gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people living in 62 of Colorado’s 64 counties. The significant information to take away from that survey is that there are two counties in the state where people don’t feel comfortable talking about who they are.

Two choice Bachmann quotes on gays:

You have a teacher talking about his gayness. (The elementary school student) goes home then and says “Mom! What’s gayness? We had a teacher talking about this today.” The mother says “Well, that’s when a man likes other men, and they don’t like girls.” The boy’s eight. He’s thinking, “Hmm. I don’t like girls. I like boys. Maybe I’m gay.” And you think, “Oh, that’s, that’s way out there. The kid isn’t gonna think that.” Are you kidding? That happens all the time. You don’t think that this is intentional, the message that’s being given to these kids? That’s child abuse.” — Bachmann, speaking at EdWatch National Education Conference, November 6, 2004.

“And what a bizarre time we’re in, when a judge will say to little children that you can’t say the pledge of allegiance but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it.” — Bachmann appearing as guest on radio program “Prophetic Views Behind The News”, hosted by Jan Markell, KKMS 980-AM, March 6, 2004.

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No matter. “Such a move,” the Republicans’ release claims, “is an abuse of the legislative process that will eliminate borrower choice and competition, destroy tens of thousands of jobs, and add to the country’s long-term debt.”

The group includes Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Republican Conference; Rep. John Kline (Minn.), the senior Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee; and Rep. Brett Guthrie (Ky.), the top Republican on the higher education subpanel.

It’s worth noting that not all conservatives agree. In fact, President George W. Bush proposed similar reforms as part of his annual budget proposal during three years of his tenure. More recently, The Weekly Standard blasted the current system of guaranteed loans as “a textbook example of crony capitalism or (if you prefer) corporate socialism.”

The government assumes all the risk while doling out contracts to favored businesses, who then reap the profits. With student loans, the lender gets preening rights in the bargain, marketing itself as a Merchant of Dreams, a benefactor of America’s youth, a sweet-tempered Mr. Jaggers to a nation of eager Pips.

In truth, the only people who like the system of guaranteed loans are the student loan industry — now handling more than $90 billion a year — and the congressmen whose districts contain large numbers of people who work in the student loan industry.

Earlier this month, Rep. Thomas Petri (Wis.), a senior Republican on the Education and Labor Committee, also condemned the current lending framework as a boondoggle enriching private lenders at the expense of taxpayers and students.

“Private loans are much more expensive for borrowers — and much more profitable for lenders,” Petri wrote in Roll Call. “We’ve seen how this plays out — and it isn’t in the form of true choice or competition for students.”

Perhaps GOP leaders knew where Petri stood when they skipped over the 16-term Wisconsin Republican to install Kline — a more conservative four-termer — atop the GOP team on the Education and Labor panel.

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But Penry, one of the main Senate sponsors, clearly sees a bump for his district’s languishing natural gas industry if the plan becomes law. First unveiled earlier this month, the bill, which has the backing of utility heavyweight Xcel Energy, would cut nitrogen oxide emissions at Xcel coal-fired plants by up to 80 percent over the next eight years by retrofitting or shuttering several metro-area plants.

Not surprisingly, natural gas industry officials love the idea because the Xcel plants would have to be retrofitted to use mostly gas, which is produced in abundance in Colorado and burns 50-percent cleaner than coal. And the goal of the bill is to get Colorado out ahead of more stringent EPA rules that will penalize greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act.

Potential pitfalls include the volatility of gas prices compared to coal, and the ongoing environmental concerns about the impacts of natural gas drilling on air and water quality, especially on the state’s Western Slope.

Penry, joined in the House by gas-patch Rep. Ellen Roberts, R-Durango, supports Ritter’s bill for fairly transparent reasons. Switching from coal to gas in Colorado means lower emissions and more drilling jobs on the Western Slope.

But Penry hasn’t always been so transparent in his relentless support for oil and gas industry interests. While simultaneously blasting any Obama administration initiatives aimed at addressing environmental concerns on public lands, Penry also has been behind groups like the Western Skies Coalition, a nonprofit set up to green wash Republican candidates and attack any new enviro regs as anti-gas, anti-jobs.

Ritter, lawmakers and other experts were slated to testify on the merits of the bill before the House Transportation and Energy Committee later this morning.

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“You know, in my humble opinion, the world heats up, the world cools down, the world heats up, the world cools down. I don’t know if the dinosaurs were driving cars… It just seems to me we can’t hobble our economy with cap and trade and other nonsense like that,” he said.

Regular guy Tea Party candidate Dean Madere then stepped in to finish the thought and round it out with a comic jab at Gore.

“Dinosaurs drove the Tyrannosaurus Rexurgeon (?), I think… and if Al Gore would keep his mouth shot, there’d be a hell of a lot less hot air in this world.”

Howls erupted from the crowd packed into the high school auditorium. Uninterested students streamed out of the wing of the building across the way that houses the classrooms.

——
YouTube by Taran Volckhausen.

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The national argument on health reform follows along the exact same lines.

Pro-life state Sen. Kevin Lundberg

Among the myriad criticisms that opponents of the Democrats’ health reform bills have leveled at the legislation, perhaps none resonates as strongly as the emotionally charged claims about how the proposals approach abortion coverage. For almost 35 years, federal law has prohibited the federal funding of abortions, and the critics of this year’s reform proposals contend that the Senate bill would loosen that decades-old restriction.

Never mind, for a moment, that the Senate bill would force women to write separate premium checks each month — one for abortion coverage and one for all other health care services — and that insurers would be required to segregate those funds to ensure that no federal subsidies dribbled into the abortion pot. One longtime health care reporter yesterday pointed out another reason that the critics have missed the mark by citing abortion as the reason to oppose health reform: Expanded coverage reduces abortion rates.

“Increasing health-care coverage is one of the most powerful tools for reducing the number of abortions — a fact proved by years of experience in other industrialized nations,” T.R. Reid, veteran reporter for The Washington Post and author of The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care, wrote in the Post Sunday.

“All the other advanced, free-market democracies provide health-care coverage for everybody. And all of them have lower rates of abortion than does the United States. This is not a coincidence.”

Reid cites figures compiled by the United Nations to make his point. In places where the government has steped in to guarantee coverage for everyone, abortion rates are much lower than those in the United States.

Canada, for example, has 15.2 abortions per 1,000 women; Denmark, 14.3; Germany, 7.8; Japan, 12.3; Britain, 17.0; and the United States, 20.8.

“When it comes to abortion rates in the developed world,” Reid notes dryly, “we’re No. 1.”

To understand why, look no further than the explanation provided to Reid by the late Cardinal Basil Hume, a senior official of England’s Catholic Church during Reid’s tenure in London some time back.

“If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it’s needed,” Hume explained, “she’s more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn’t it obvious?”

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who previously represented Illinois in the House for 14 years, also recently blasted the anti-abortion crowd for citing the hot-button issue as a reason to oppose health reform. Writing in the Chicago Tribune Sunday, LaHood said he feels “compelled to remind my former colleagues that contrary to what many people have been saying, the bill explicitly prevents federal dollars from being used to fund abortion.”

It ensures not only that those seeking abortion coverage will be required to pay for it with their own money, but also that their personal money will never be commingled with federal funds. As a former congressman with a 100 percent pro-life voting record, I’m comfortable supporting this bill.

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