Joe Biden

WATERTOWN, N.Y. – Rallying support for Democratic congressional candidate Bill Owens before Tuesday’s special election in NY-23, Vice President Joe Biden today told a mostly full room at the North Side Improvement League to “teach a lesson” to right-wing activists. Ideological activists, said Biden, forced Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava out of the race because they couldn’t brook “dissent with their neoconservative views.”

We’re tweeting Vice President Joe Biden’s remarks on the Middle Class Task Force in Denver today:

From the governor’s office, here are the remarks as prepared for delivery by Gov. Bill Ritter, who introduced Vice President Joe Biden before President Barack Obama took the stage Tuesday afternoon at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science:

Roman Catholic Cardinal James Francis Stafford, who was Denver’s archbishop until being tapped for a Vatican position in 1996, warned a university audience President-elect Barack Obama’s “anti-life agenda” on abortion is “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic,” in an address reported Thursday by the Catholic News Agency. Stafford told students at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., that the next few years will be “among the most divisive in our nation’s history” because Americans were distracted by the prospect of electing an African-American president from Obama’s “deadly vision of human life.”

Latino voters turned out in record numbers in Colorado this year, more than doubling their turnout since 2004, according to recent polling data.

More than 330,000 Latinos voted in the state last week, compared with 165,000 in 2004, based on exit polling from media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Voto Latino, a national nonprofit organization that organized Latino voting drives in the state.

Throughout the evening, The Colorado Independent will be tracking election returns across the state for hotly contested races from the the presidency on down.

Join us as we reminisce on this long campaign season beginning with the Colorado Republican Party’s state convention to Election Day preparations in Denver.

A few days ago Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin went off script about her $150,000 shopping spree, much to the chagrin of John McCain’s staffers. Now, according to Roger Simon of the Politico, “John McCain’s campaign is looking for a scapegoat. It is looking for someone to blame if McCain loses on Tuesday. And it has decided on Sarah Palin.”

The acrimony on the presidential campaign trail has reached new lows in distortions, misinformation and irresponsible racially and religiously coded attacks by pundits, campaign staffers, surrogates and the candidates themselves.

When Sarah Palin quoted Ronald Reagan in the vice presidential debate, I was moved. At the culmination of her cocky evening at the podium opposite Joe Biden, her final statement quoting Reagan was a moment of seriousness-of-purpose that took me by surprise: “It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. We have to fight for it and protect it and then hand it to them, so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.”