Although it’s certainly true that in the post-Citizens United-era more corporate money than ever sloshes into increasingly expensive political campaigns and that Big Oil donates generously in races coast to coast, Gardner nevertheless seems to be sailing into new territory.

More than a year from Election Day, Gardner has raised more money from oil and gas than did his Republican predecessor, former US Representative Marilyn Musgrave, during the entire heated 2008 campaign season. The industry contributed roughly $44,000 to Gardner this quarter and $32,000 last quarter.

Oil and gas is solidly on track to give Gardner more money this election than it did last election, and last election the industry was good to Gardner: its representatives gave him $177,000 and made oil and gas the top-contributing industry to his 2010 campaign. That’s as much as Musgrave raised from the sector for all three congressional races she ran in the district. Democrat Betsy Markey, who defeated Musgrave in 2008, got a negligible amount from oil and gas, and Republican Bob Schaffer, who represented the district before Musgrave, pulled down only roughly $23,000 total from oil and gas for all three of his House campaigns.

According to Gardner’s Federal Election Commission financial reports, he has raised nearly $900,000 total so far this year and has taken thousands from British Petroleum, Exxon, Chevron, Halliburton, Anadarko Petroleum Corp, as well as from oil and gas associations. Over the course of his career as a state and federal lawmaker, depending on how you count, Gardner has also taken directly and indirectly somewhere between $300,000 and $450,000 from Koch Industries, the oil and gas conglomeration headed by right wing lightning-rod magnates Charles and David Koch.

Committees Gardner has authorized to spend on his behalf include those run by Halliburton, Marathon Oil and Williams Companies. The last two are major gas drillers in Colorado, and Halliburton, a contract service provider for the industry, has become one of the leading companies behind the controversial extraction practice called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, where undisclosed mixtures of water, chemicals and sand are blasted into the earth to free up gas. Many believe the practice is contaminating ground water in Colorado and in other heavily drilled states such as Wyoming, Texas, Pennsylvania and New York.

A resource-rich district

In a release Tuesday, Gardner 2012 opponent Democratic state Senate President Brandon Shaffer began tapping out what is sure to be a steadily rising drumbeat narrative in the race.

“This campaign will be difficult, fighting against the special interests’ favorite incumbent, but it’s increasingly obvious that Northern Coloradans are fed up with all the hot air coming from Washington and are ready for straight talk and real Colorado solutions.”

Shaffer reported that his campaign raised $180,000 in the third quarter, with donations from more than 900 individual Coloradans, adding that the average individual contribution he received amounted to $153.78 and that 98 percent of the 900-plus individual donors to his campaign live in Colorado.

Gardner spokesperson Rachel Boxer has played down concerns about Gardner’s ties to the oil industry. After last quarter’s numbers appeared, she told the Greeley Tribune that the congressman’s ties to energy companies just make sense.

“[Energy production] is a big part of… the Fourth Congressional District. Gardner believes developing American-made energy is a good way to create jobs. It’s a good way to wean ourselves off foreign oil. And it’s a way to jump-start the economy.”

In fact, Weld County in the northeast corner of Gardner’s district has seen a drilling boom over the last few years atop the Niobrara shale formation, which spreads from Colorado into Wyoming, Kansas and Nebraska. Weld is now dotted with hundreds of new wells and will see hundreds more drilled in years to come—and that will be true no matter who CD4 constituents elect to represent them in Congress. Indeed, although Gardner attacks even longstanding clean air and water regulations as “job killers” designed by bureaucrats to “shut down the energy industry,” the gas boom in Weld has come despite stiffer environmental regulations put in place in the state by Democratic Governor Bill Ritter.

Drilling for jobs

That kind of evidence on the ground in the Fourth District, however, isn’t likely to alter Gardner’s vision.

He has aggressively adopted the House Republican line— taken up in Tuesday’s debate by GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry– that the best way to create jobs and cure the plagued economy is to increase domestic energy production, or put another way, to “drill baby drill.” In fact, the list of bills presently stuck in the Senate that House Republican leaders tout as the party’s job plan consists mostly of drilling-licensing and regulation-thinning proposals that Gardner voted for and that Democratic lawmakers and environmentalists decry as an historic attack on the environment.

Critics see the proposals less as a jobs plan and more as a thinly veiled giveback to oil and gas campaign donors.

As has been widely reported but without much effect, licensing and regulations aren’t the problem they’re being made out to be: oil and gas companies right now are sitting on thousands of drilling leases all over the country, and regulations, including the new rules in Colorado, have not prevented the same companies from conducting major new operations.

Citing the need to create jobs, however, Gardner last spring voted for more than a hundred bills (pdf) that would block or lift regulations on air and water pollutants including mercury for the benefit of cement-making, mining and drilling companies.

“This is fear-based politics,” Colorado Conservation Voters Executive Director Pete Maysmith told the Independent. “A small number of GOP politicians and their Tea Party supporters are holding captive politicians of all stripes. It’s become Republican Party orthodoxy to attack regulations but that is just ideology in that much of it is not based in reality.

“Providing basic protections for the environment is a bedrock principle for Coloradans. This is such a great place to work and play. We have a long history of hunting and fishing. It’s who we are. There’s an ethic that we have to protect this beautiful state. We may disagree on how to do that but to run roughshod over regulations is just not sensible.”

Fort Collins-based Clean Water Action Director Gary Wockner said Gardner already has established himself as perhaps the most anti-environmental member of Congress in the state’s history. He told the Independent his group has knocked on tens of thousands of doors in the district to draw attention to Gardner’s positions, pointing in particular to Gardner’s repeat votes in favor of diluting the forty-year-old Clean Water Act.

“There is no outcry [in the Fourth District] to attack the Clean Water Act,” Wockner said. “Nobody is talking about the Clean Water Act up here. It’s a well-established law that forces polluters to clean up after themselves. No business or organization or any other entity I know of here sees the Clean Water Act as causing trouble. This is coming from Gardner alone.”

Offshore Colorado

Gardner’s oil and gas advocacy, however, already extends well beyond the district and has led him into deeply controversial territory.

Most notably, Gardner last June introduced the Jobs and Energy Permitting Act of 2011, which seeks to open up greater sections of the U.S. coast to oil drilling, and particularly sections of the Arctic Ocean off of Alaska.

Shell Oil has been working for a decade to win permits to conduct major operations in the pristine Arctic Chukchi and Beaufort seas. Shell spokesperson Kelly op de Weegh told the Independent that it was Shell’s case that reportedly spurred Gardner, a representative from a landlocked district, to act. She said members of the GOP-controlled House Energy and Commerce Committee including Gardner “were particularly interested” in Shell’s efforts to secure permits.

“Key committee members, including Congressman Gardner, determined that legislation was appropriate to settle some of the more troubling issues and to ensure that future permit applications are processed in a more expeditious manner.”

In an email, Op de Weegh denied that Shell wrote the bill for Gardner.

“As the legislation was developed, Shell and other industry supporters provided input as requested by Mr. Gardner and others.”

A main reason for the delay in permitting, according to testimony provided to the Energy and Commerce Committee by Anchorage-based EarthJustice attorney Erik Grafe (pdf), is that pertinent research on the largely unstudied region and its unique qualities has yet to be completed. He points out that the significance of that research has been underlined in the year since the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. He referred to the National Commission report published on offshore drilling in January 2011 that strongly recommended more specific scientific study of natural environments and emergency response preparedness in any region being considered for new drilling, particularly the remote, freezing, stormy, dark Beaufort and Chukchi seas.

Grafe added that another main reason for delays in permitting was Shell’s repeat attempts to sidestep air-pollution rules by not submitting full data or by seeking to win classifications that would sidestep longstanding air pollution standards for the aging exhaust- and particulate-spewing fleet of icebreakers and drilling support ships it plans to move into the region.

Grafe told the committee that the regulatory streamlining proposed by Gardner’s bill would create the same kind of loopholes that led to the Deepwater spill.

Little of Grafe’s testimony– about the region, about Shell, about the nature of the lives of the native people who live there– has been heard in the Fourth District.

“One thing I can attest to is that a majority of Coloradans support increased energy production,” Gardner said in explaining why a Colorado Congressman was introducing the bill. He said the bill would create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

He also lamented that regulatory processes were more challenging in the United States than they were in Saudi Arabia.

“Production off the coast of Alaska could provide a million barrels of oil a day – comparable to what we currently import from Saudi Arabia. Unlike Saudi Arabia, this domestic production is blocked by a convoluted permitting system in place that is difficult if not impossible to navigate.”

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For more stories in our series “Campaign Cash: Outing the Corporations,” click here. This report was produced as part of a collaborative investigative effort to expose the influence of corporate money on the political process by members of The Media Consortium, in partnership with the We the People campaign. To read more, visit CampaignCash.org or follow #CampaignCash on Twitter.

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Anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List this week launched a video campaign against President Obama based on the administration’s move to shore up family planning services in New Hampshire. Social conservatives on the state’s executive council earlier stripped $1.8 million in federal funding from Planned Parenthood affiliates there. New Hampshire officials informed the Obama administration that, in failing to provide key women’s health services, the state was violating federal law.

In the 49-second video, an animated Obama appears drinking and smirking at a bar party:

He was the most popular guy at the party. Big smiles and tall tales. But the longer he stayed, the less he’s liked. First, the small businessmen left him. Then, union workers, college kids, and soccer moms. But through it all, one friend has stuck with Barack Obama: the abortion providers. And his dedication knows no bounds. For them, he promised to shut down the entire federal government. Threatened to slash Medicaid for the poor in Indiana. Even offered to pay for abortion clinics in New Hampshire…with our federal tax dollars. Barack Obama and Planned Parenthood. They won’t stop…until America turns off the music.

Responding to requests from New Hampshire officials, the federal government recently committed to paying Planned Parenthood of Northern New England to provide the mandated family-planning services New Hampshire lost after the executive council vote.

According to the Associated Press, state health officials asked the feds to step in after they failed to find contractors to provide all the non-abortion family-planning services offered by the state’s six defunded Planned Parenthood clinics. Reuters reported that it was the state’s Department of Health and Human Services commissioner who alerted the Obama administration that the state was violating federal rules that required family-planning services be provided statewide. Roughly 4,000 New Hampshire women had their health care services “disrupted” after the executive council initially canceled Planned Parenthood’s contract in June.

Former Colorado Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, an arch social conservative Republican who lost to Democrat Betsy Markey the year Obama was elected to office, joined SBA List as a spokesperson after her defeat. Musgrave often appears in states where the organization is waging political battles. President Marjorie Dannenfelser has called the federal actions in New Hampshire “government by fiat.” SBA List has raised funds on the message that encouraging states to restrict uninsured women’s access to family-planning and reproductive-health services will reduce abortions.

The group has shaped family planning policy debate among the 2012 GOP presidential candidates. Several of the candidates have signed the group’s controversial anti-abortion-rights pledge.

As of June, the Susan B Anthony List Inc. Candidate Fund had banked roughly $13,000.

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Freshman Republican Congressman Cory Gardner weathered a drawn out if ultimately not-close Tea Party caucus battle last year and rode the Republican wave to victory over Democrat Betsy Markey.* Less than a year later, he’s again navigating the increasingly rocky electoral waters of Colorado’s sprawling Fourth District.

Bipartisan participants in a town hall two weeks ago assailed him over free-trade job loss and GOP-proposed cuts to Medicare. And last week Fort Collins-based Clean Water Action launched a campaign arguing that Gardner’s brief voting record in Washington establishes him as perhaps the most anti-environmental member of Congress in the state’s history and therefore deeply out of step with the district he represents.

“This is a conservative district but not an anti-environment district,” Clean Water Action Director Gary Wockner told the Colorado Independent. Wockner says his group has knocked on 25,000 doors in the district since January to draw attention to Gardner’s “aggressively anti-environment” positions, he said, pointing in particular to Gardner’s repeat votes in favor of diluting the forty-year-old Clean Water Act.

“There is no outcry to attack the Clean Water Act,” Wockner said. “Nobody is talking about the Clean Water Act up here. It’s a well-established law that forces polluters to clean up after themselves. No business or organization or any other entity I know of here sees the Clean Water Act as causing trouble. This is coming from Gardner alone.”

Gardner’s office didn’t respond to attempts to contact him for comment.

‘Strong environmental safeguards’

The release sent out by Clean Water Action builds on a report brought out by Henry Waxman and Ed Markey, Democratic leaders of the congressional Energy and Commerce Committee, which details efforts by this year’s GOP-led Congress to dismantle longstanding efforts to curb pollution, protect public lands and address climate change.

Waxman and Markey looked at 110 votes taken since January in the House, including votes to “block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating mercury and other hazardous air pollutants emitted from cement plants; to relax emission requirements for offshore oil and gas activities; to stop the EPA from establishing new water quality standards or enforcing existing ones; and to prevent the EPA from protecting streams from the effects of mountaintop-removal mining.” 

Legislation targeting the Clean Water Act and supported by Gardner, sometimes on voice votes, include, for example, H.R. 1, the 2011 Continuing Appropriations Bill, which would block the EPA from revoking Clean Water Act permits for bad actors; H.R. 872, the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act, which would prevent the agency from requiring Clean Water Act permits for companies that spray pesticides into navigable waters; H.R. 2018, the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act, which would block the EPA from establishing new Clean Water Act standards; and H.R. 2018, the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act, which would limit government authority to establish water quality standards for chemical and other pollutants.

To be fair, Gardner voted with his Republican colleagues in the Colorado delegation on most all of these bills and the defense he makes of his record matches with arguments made by Republicans across the country– mainly that environmental regulations have become too burdensome on business.

It’s also not surprising that, given the partisan divide on energy that characterizes U.S. politics today, that in a recession marked by anemic job growth, Gardner champions the oil and gas sector as key to rebooting the economy. Most notably, he introduced the Jobs and Energy Permitting Act, which aims to open up water off the Alaska coastline to drilling.

“One thing I can attest to is that a majority of Coloradans support increased energy production,” Gardner said as a way to explain why a congressman from Colorado would spearhead the move to open up land in Alaska. “Yes, we expect and deserve strong environmental safeguards, but we don’t want those safeguards to be exploited into an excuse to shut down the energy industry.”

Rhetoric and reality

Gardner’s critics suggest he is at best misguided in these efforts. No one is looking to “shut down the energy industry,” they say, for instance. Oil and gas companies have leased land nationwide that they have yet to make productive and they hold thousands of unused drilling permits for sites all across the mountain west, for example. In that light, the push to open up vulnerable new territory seems premature.

Critics similarly point to lessons offered up in Gardner’s own district, where stiffer state regulations on oil and gas production put in place by Democratic Governor Bill Ritter three years ago and attacked repeatedly by Republicans as “job killers” have not discouraged major new oil and gas drilling. On the contrary, Larimer and Weld County, for example, have hosted a drilling boom atop the Niobrara formation that has dotted the northern reaches of the district with dozens of new oil and gas wells and will see a great deal more drilled in years to come.

Critics also say that, although Gardner boasts an “all of the above” approach to energy production, he seems intent not to seize upon the great long-term economic opportunity presented by Colorado’s burgeoning clean-energy sector, which the laws he has voted for would set back considerably.

In the release accompanying the Waxman report, Massachusetts Congressman Markey likens House Republicans like Gardner to new-energy assassins.

“President Theodore Roosevelt said ‘A vote is like a rifle,’ and House Republicans have one pointed right at the heart of America’s clean energy future.” (See the list of related legislation here, pdf.)

Campaign finances

Clean Water Action’s Wockner believes Gardner draws encouragement in his anti-environmental stances from his financial backers. Oil and gas companies gave nearly $180,000 to Gardner’s campaign in 2010, and a Greeley Tribune investigation found that donations from oil and gas and mining interests amount at this point to more than 10 percent of Gardner’s 2012 election funds.

“Mainstream citizens of the Fourth District are seeing the economy, the public’s health, and the environment endangered by Rep. Gardner’s votes, while the oil and gas industry – which is having record multi-billion dollar profits quarter after quarter – is getting richer and richer,” Wockner wrote in last week’s release.

The opposition

Dispatches from Washington like the Waxman report and campaigns in the Fourth District like that undertaken by Clean Water Action will feed the efforts of Gardner’s 2012 election opponent, Longmont resident and state Senate President Brandon Shaffer.

“Gardner has sided with anti-environmental radicals time and time again,” Shaffer told the Colorado Independent. “We’re all in favor of streamlining red tape, but people understand there has to be balance.”

Shaffer believes Gardner’s record in Congress demonstrates that he doesn’t weigh the upside and downside of individual bills but that he reacts instead according to ideological positions. He says Gardner is against regulation in an indiscriminate way simply because he has made up his mind that government regulation as a generalized concept is bad.

“Coloradans know that natural gas, for example, is key to the economy,” Shaffer said to make his point, “but there is also a strong desire here to maintain clean drinking water and clean rivers. Clean water is a top priority in this state. I’d say it’s the biggest environmental concern.”

Given that mining and drilling compete with major outdoor tourism in Colorado and that Centennial State culture has long been tied to appreciation for the majestic mountain landscape, Shaffer said lawmakers here are intensely aware of the push and pull between developing natural resources and protecting the environment. He said many of the regulations in place have been hammered out at the capitol in Denver and that effective Colorado legislators learn how to look for balance.

“In writing regulations, we have to work in a business-friendly way,” he said. “It’s the difference in working off of talking points and believing in what you say.”

[ Top image via Flickr user ColoradoFarmBureau ]

*Edit Note: In the end, Gardner’s would-be challengers for the GOP nomination in 2010 faded quickly for lack of money and experience. Throughout the spring and summer, though, Gardner appeared on stage and stumps alongside Tom Lucero, Diggs Brown and Dean Madere, all of the candidates testing Tea Party movement strength. Hat tip to R.M.

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“The justice of man is rot,” which is why the Tea Party has swerved clear of traditional left-wing Hollywood and made its own contribution to the pop-culture U.S. history canon. Courage, New Hampshire, is a one-hour drama made by Tea Partiers for Tea Partiers that shines out with Christian faith and American exceptionalism and the unfettered right to bear muskets! After debuting Sunday in Monrovia, California, it heads straight to DVD.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the makers of the film, James Patrick Riley and Jonathan Wilson, are pitching Courage as a TV pilot to conservative online outlets such as Glenn Beck’s GBTV and Kelsey Grammer’s Right Network.

The genesis of the project reads like satire: Riley and Wilson reportedly met through the Pasadena Tea Party chapter. Wilson founded the group and recruited Riley to perform as Patrick Henry at group events. Apparently, fired with Tea Party patriotism, the two men decided to take the experience to the screen.

Riley said he’s looking to mix the “narrative tension of The Sopranos and the redemptive, heroic American exceptionalism of Frank Capra.”

Wilson said that although many of the actors are Tea Partiers, some are not, so he pledged there would be no politics on the set.

That pledge conjures the Tea Party 2010 congressional campaign season in Colorado’s hotly contested CD4, where Tea Partiers kept inviting Democratic incumbent Betsy Markey to Tea Party candidate forums. “We’re not Republican or Democrat,” they made sure to say at the opening to each event, but Markey politely and wisely declined to show.

Hollywood Reporter on the Tea Party movie:

“I was surprised to learn how many Tea Partiers there are in Hollywood,” Riley said. “Most won’t talk about it, though.”

Riley and Wilson will likely pluck the writers and directors of future Courage episodes from those ranks of Hollywood Tea Partiers, though Riley adds: “We’ll hire anyone who can get the job done. We have cast members who are raging leftists.”

The first episode of Courage is subtitled “The Travail of Sarah Pine” and stars Alexandra Oliver as a colonial woman who accuses a British soldier of the crime of “bastardy.”

And he figures Hollywood is probably against him, given its antagonism to Tea Partiers. He even debated the topic with Mitchell Hurwitz when the creator of Arrested Development visited his farm once.

“The Tea Party came up and he was a little dismissive and I told him I was a part of it,” Riley said. “He thought it was all about guarding our pocket books at all costs.”

Riley said he didn’t even bother pitching the show to traditional TV outlets.

“They wouldn’t get it, or trust us. We know we’re new, and we’d like to prove ourselves on our own, without focus groups or leftist-orthodoxies telling us which stories to tell,” Riley said.

“Most TV sitcoms and dramas tend to depict conservatives and traditionalists and people of faith as halfwits. That tactic lost its edge about four decades ago and we think it’s time to turn the tables,” he said.

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The American Patriot Foundation, which has served as Lakin’s press office over the last seven months, sent out a release today that includes talking points to use in communication with lawmakers and that frames Lakin’s refusal to deploy as the kind of principled stance demanded of members of the military at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi officers after the Second World War.

Since Nuremberg, servicemembers are trained to question illegal orders, yet for more than a year, no one in the Pentagon could answer LTC Lakin’s simple question– is there proof that [the President] is legally, Constitutionally eligible to be in charge of the U.S. Armed Forces? LTC Lakin would have been part of Barack Obama’s surge forces to Afghanistan– but now he faces up to four years of hard labor at Fort Leavenworth prison– if convicted at court-martial on December 14th.

Lakin, an Army doctor, made a splash in April when he said he would refuse all military orders until he sees convincing evidence, including the alleged missing “long form” birth certificate, documenting that Obama was born in Hawaii. Lakin is the highest ranking member of the active-duty military to subscribe to the so-called birther conspiracy, which holds that the birth records of the president are illegitimate or have been falsified.

Shortly after he declared his intentions to the press, Lakin was met at the Pentagon clinic where he he works by officers who read him his rights and revoked his access to the building. Military investigators also reportedly seized his computer.

Monday’s Patriot Foundation press release encouraged supporters to also call newly elected members of Congress. The release included contact information for new Colorado GOP Reps. Cory Gardner and Scott Tipton. Gardner drew heat last year for supporting birther sentiment on the stump in his campaign against Democratic incumbent Betsy Markey. Gardner later told the Denver Post that he didn’t endorse the birther conspiracy.

Margaret Hemenway, a spokesperson at the American Patriot Foundation, has appeared on Colorado talk radio to plead Lakin’s case. She told Denver radio host Peter Boyles in April that Lakin was merely searching for the truth and that he looked forward to the coming “showdown” with the military, which Boyles called a “reckoning” for the president.

Others see the Lakin story as an American tragedy, where a military medal winner has thrown away a distinguished career, hypnotized by the anti-Obama theories that have cropped up and been repeated endlessly on the right since Obama took office, including that the president is a closet Muslim and that he was born in Kenya.

There have been a handful of soldiers in the last year who have refused to deploy for the same reason cited by Lakin. Their cases suggest Lakin’s attorneys have their work cut out for them.

In September, for example, U.S. District Court Judge Clay Land tossed a similar claim placed by Capt. Connie Rhodes, another military doctor who was represented by infamous birther lawyer Orly Taitz.

“In a remarkable shifting of the traditional legal burden of proof, the plaintiff in this case unashamedly alleges that defendant has the burden to prove his ‘natural born’ status,” Land wrote at the time. “Any middle school civics student would readily recognize the irony of abandoning fundamental principles upon which our country was founded in order to purportedly ‘protect and preserve’ those very principles.”

Land said that Americans and their political parties had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the presidential campaign in 2008 when great teams of opposition researchers combed through Obama’s records and found nothing to substantiate these claims. Land was disgusted by the thinness of the case brought by Taitz and said he would sanction her if she were to ever again bring a similarly frivolous complaint to his court.

[Image: Terry Lakin on YouTube ]

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“The new reforms contributed from zero to a maximum of five percent of increases. It’s not the primary cause for increasing rates,” she wrote in a release Tuesday.

Morrison sent out the release (pdf) late last week, explaining that the Commission had received lots of questions about the effect Health Care Reform has had on premiums. The release hit the politics blogosphere Tuesday morning.

Every insurance company operating in Colorado has to turn in a request for permission to raise premiums, and most of the those requests come in near the end of the year. As part of that process, insurance companies have to spell out exactly why they need to raise premiums.

“What we found isn’t surprising: health insurance premiums continue to rise but what may be eye-opening for some people,” Morrison said in the release, is that the cause is not reform.

Jo Donlin, director of external affairs at the Division of Insurance, told The Colorado Independent that the Division has specifically required insurance companies submitting requests for higher rates to spell out how much each provision of the Health Care Act has been responsible for higher costs.

For instance, she said the requirement that insurers allow families to keep children on their family plans until the age of 26 has caused costs to rise by no more than 3 percent, depending on the company and the type of plan.

She said that as of today only 23 companies have submitted their requests for rate increases, but she said those include some of the largest insurers in Colorado. “This includes some of the companies that affect the market the most,” she said in explaining that the Division is fairly confident that the numbers they are seeing so far will stand up.

She sent us a document that details the effect on premiums of six provisions of the Health Reform Act, each of which became effective on Sept. 23.

The other provisions and their effects on costs are:

Elimination of pre-existing conditions for enrollees under the age of 19 has affected premiums at a rate between 0.0 percent and 3.0 percent.

Removal of annual benefit limits: 0.0 percent to 1.2 percent.

Removal of lifetime benefit limits: 0.0 percent to 1.8 percent.

Rescission prohibition: no effect.

Coverage of all preventative services without cost sharing: 0.0 percent to 3.0 percent.

On renewals, the cumulative effect of all mandated reforms this year is 0.0 percent to 4.0 percent.

On new policies, the effect has been to increase premiums by 0.0 percent to 7.8 percent.

Health insurance premiums are going up in Colorado and around the nation. Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA), of which the Division of Insurance is a part, issued this document (pdf) last week detailing all of the factors that go into rate increases, including new federal regulations.

In 2009, Colorado ranked 26th in the amount paid by the average family for health insurance. The annual premium for a family getting coverage through an employer was $13,360 in 2009, compared to $9,522 in 2004.

Linda Gorman, executive director of the Health Care Policy Center at the Independence Institute, says the studies she has seen forecast that HMO and PPO customers will each see premium increases of about 11 percent next year. Even if only half of that is attributable to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, it is too much, she says.

The free-market Independence Institute was the primary sponsor of Amendment 63, which would have prevented the Federal government from mandating health care in Colorado. It fell 53 percent to 47 percent, indicating that a majority of Colorado voters either favor Obama Care, or at least want to let it run its course.

Gorman said she didn’t think Morrison had the facts to back up the assertion that Health Care Reform has had only a small effect on premiums. “She is just repeating talking points,” Gorman said.

She said the Act will cost corporations an enormous amount of money.

“Health Care Reform has already been successful in Colorado,” said Denise de Percin, executive director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative.

“People are still learning about it. There is a real lack of information for people and there is also a lot of misinformation being spread by people who opposed reform,” she said.

“Even if this adds less than 5 percent to someone’s insurance bill, that can still be significant in this economy, but at least people actually get something for this 5 percent,” she said.

One family that stands to benefit enormously from the Reform is Nathan and Sonji Wilkes, of Arapahoe County. Their son was born with severe hemophilia. Nathan Wilkes said his son’s condition is manageable, but only with the right medications, which cost about $40,000 a month. At some points in his son’s life, complications have arisen which have jacked that cost to more than double.

He essentially had to quit a good job because his family’s medical bills were driving up premiums and deductibles for everyone at the company. He started his own consulting company and now pays about $20,000 a year in premiums. Even at that rate, though, his son’s benefits are capped and once those caps are reached, Wilkes said his family would be in a very difficult place.

With health care legislation, there are no longer any caps. Also, companies can no longer exclude someone under 19 from a plan because of pre-existing conditions.

Certainly Health Care Reform has been both political and controversial, and is no doubt part of what cost Democratic Representatives Betsy Markey and John Salazar their jobs.

With the election over, the issue continues to draw attention. In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Senator Michael Bennet said Health Care Reform needs more work and that he expects the Senate to get back to work fine-tuning the program soon.

“The burden of the reforms lies on the shoulders of the reformers,” he said regarding Congress’s responsibility to get reform right.

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“We understand that thousands of Coloradans’ votes still have not been counted a day after the election. In Congressional District 3, Pueblo County votes are still being tabulated. We will work together with the Secretary of State’s office to ensure Colorado voters will be heard and that every vote is counted before victory is declared in CD3.”

President Barack Obama, in a post-mortem press conference this afternoon on Tuesday’s brutal midterm election that saw Democrats lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives and barely hold onto the Senate, praised so-called Blue Dog Democrats in largely Republican districts who took courageous votes for the administration agenda despite the possibility of being thrown out of office.

As of last night, it looked as if that’s exactly what happened to Salazar in CD3 and Betsy Markey in largely rural CD4. Markey, whom Obama just last week praised by name on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” for taking tough votes, definitely lost to Republican Cory Gardner Tuesday. Salazar, the brother of U.S. Interior Secretary and former Colorado senator Ken Salazar, appears headed for the same fate.

But while Markey voted for Obama’s climate change legislation, including cap and trade, Salazar – from an agrarian and energy rich district — did not. At his press conference today, Obama declared cap and trade all but dead. Asked if the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should administratively regulate greenhouse gas emissions, Obama said the agency is under a court order compelling it to deal with the emissions in some way.

Saying the feds can’t ignore the science on climate change, he went on to explain that cap and trade was “just one way of skinning the cat,” suggesting the incoming Republican Congress will have to work hard with Democrats to look at other ways reduce heat-trapping emissions.

“I am humbled and honored by the decision Colorado’s voters have made, and I accept the challenge you have entrusted to me to lead our state as Governor,” Hickenlooper said in a release. “This is not the end of our journey. This is the beginning. And it starts with bringing people together.”

The television station also called the 7th Congressional District race for incumbent Democrat Ed Perlmutter 52 percent to 44 percent over Republican challenger Ryan Frazier.

9News at about 8:30 p.m. also had, as expected, incumbent Democrats Diana DeGette and Jared Polis (CD1 and CD2) holding onto their seats, but blue dog Democrat Betsy Markey lost her CD4 seat to Republican state Rep. Cory Gardner 52 to 43 percent.

Nevertheless, Colorado Democratic Party Chair Pat Waak was upbeat about the Dem wins in a national wave of GOP victory.

“Going into this election, the number one target of the Republicans was the governor and 9News has called the race for John Hickenlooper,” Waak said, also cheering wins by DeGette, Polis and Perlmutter. “Let’s celebrate tonight; these are great Democratic victories for the state of Colorado.”

Also as expected, Republican incumbent Mike Coffman handily defeated Democrat John Flerlage by a 69 to 29 percent margin in CD6, and Republican Doug Lamborn easily defeated Democrat Kevin Bradley in CD5 by a 70 to 25 percent margin.

With Republican Scott Tipton leading John Salazar in the CD3 by a 51 to 45 percent margin, that means Colorado’s congressional district could shift to a majority of Republicans, mirroring national results. NBC News a little before 9 p.m. was predicting Republicans would take back control of the U.S. House.

Here’s Hickenlooper’s full release:

Colorado voters on Tuesday elected John Hickenlooper, a brewpub pioneer turned Mayor of Denver, as the 42nd Governor of Colorado.

“I am humbled and honored by the decision Colorado’s voters have made, and I accept the challenge you have entrusted to me to lead our state as Governor,” Hickenlooper said. “This is not the end of our journey. This is the beginning. And it starts with bringing people together.”

Gov.-elect Hickenlooper set himself apart in the 2010 election by maintaining his promise to run a completely positive campaign. His pledge to renounce attack ads brought national attention to Colorado and distinguished Hickenlooper as the kind of leader the state needs to solve problems and turn its economy around.

“The problems we face are too big for partisan politics,” Hickenlooper said. “We’re facing a budget shortfall that threatens to hurt our schools and reduce opportunities for our kids to go to college. So tonight, the political campaign is over, and the business of putting Colorado back to work begins.”

Hickenlooper will be joined in office by Lt. Gov.-elect Joe Garcia, who is currently the president of Colorado State University-Pueblo. Garcia is a respected educator who has served as the president of Pikes Peak Community College and Co-Chair of the state’s P-20 Education Reform Council.

“I am so fortunate to have a talented problem-solver like Joe Garcia as my lieutenant governor,” Hickenlooper said. “Joe is just the kind of leader we need to build a 21st-century education system for the state of Colorado.”

Hickenlooper and Garcia will be inaugurated on Jan. 11.

“Gov. Bill Ritter leaves a legacy for which we should all be grateful,” Hickenlooper said. “His work to improve outcomes for kids, through access to health care and better education will have a lasting effect on our state. His ability to define Colorado as the center of the New Energy Economy will help create thousands of jobs, not just now but also for generations to come.”

Hickenlooper challenged Coloradans to work together regardless of political party to make Colorado.

“Starting tonight, we set aside our differences and work together to rebuild hope in our state and get our economy back on track,” Hickenlooper said. “That’s what our friends and neighbors want. That’s what Colorado needs.”

Kirsten Cangilla contributed to this report.

Stewart questioned the president’s agenda, wondered if Obama’s policies had in some ways been too timid and expressed dismay at Democrats choosing to run almost anti-Obama campaigns. Obama countered that his administration first had to stop the second coming of the Great Depression and then try to pass reforms. In other words, the administration weathered the economic storm of the last two years is not done enacting real change.

Here’s Obama on Markey and other Democrats who took tough votes:

“They won in the big surge that we had in 2008. They knew it was going to be a tough battle that these are generally pretty conservative districts and yet still went ahead and did what they thought was right, and my hope in this election is that people who vote on the basis of what they think is right and have integrity and aren’t just thinking about the next election but are thinking about the next generation, that they are rewarded.

Now that’s tough in this political process because you’ve got millions of dollars of independent money pouring into those races. They are being hammered by negative ads every single day and the question then becomes do the millions of voices that came out in 2008, who said folks were interested in fixing our health care system, wanted a serious energy policy, wanted the kinds of changes in our student loan program that have allowed millions of more kids to have access to college — that’s what we ran run on, that’s what we’ve delivered — and my hope is that those people are rewarded for taking those tough votes, and if they are, then I think Democrats will do fine on Election Day.”

You’ve got all kinds of noise. You’ve also got all kinds of dissatisfaction and malaise, at least that’s what The New York Times has found in Larimer County.

In a full-page article on the front of today’s National section, The Times talks to many locals who say they are unhappy with the economy and with the direction the country is going — and don’t see much hope for change from next week’s election.

Many decry the tone of the advertising, especially the ads funded by outside groups, which tend to be negative.

Here, a well-known Northern Colorado journalist offers his take:

Bob Moore, 50, the executive editor of the local newspaper, The Coloradoan, said he thought that politics in Larimer County had been “nationalized” by those outside interests and by the fact that people are paying less attention to hometown news coverage. As at most newspapers, circulation at The Coloradoan has fallen and the staff has been cut.

“The personality that should be in a local race gets obliterated and you just have the Democrat and the Republican — you don’t have Betsy Markey and Cory Gardner [the 4th Congressional District candidates],” Mr. Moore said.

Another prominent local Republican says that this year he will vote mostly Democratic.

A former mayor of Fort Collins, Ed Stoner, a Republican, said he would vote mostly for Democrats — including Betsy Markey for the local Congressional seat — but abstain from the United States Senate race between Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, and his challenger, Ken Buck, a Republican.

Then, of all people, The Times talks to an unaffiliated voter who leans Republican but thinks the health care bill didn’t go far enough.

Or consider James Cherry — no handy label for him either. He is a structural engineer and an unaffiliated voter who leans, he said, toward the Republicans on gun rights and abortion.

But he is also heavily involved in philanthropy, and the federal health care overhaul passed by the Democrats touches on his passions about caring for others. He enthusiastically supported the change and has no patience for Republicans or Tea Party enthusiasts who want repeal. Indeed, he is unhappy with both parties that the law does not include a single-payer government option that liberal Democrats had favored. His wife, Julia, is on the same page.

“I’ve always volunteered for those underserved who don’t have a voice,” she said.

The Times has done a whole series of articles this election season, focusing on the voters and issues of Northern Colorado, an area many see as key to winning statewide elections.