It’s not exactly a tidal wave. But the three Republican members of the House who have gone on record as supportive of state Senator Pat Steadman’s civil unions bill suggests Democratic House sponsor Mark Ferrandino is right to be confident that the bill will pass if it could somehow climb over likely House committee hurdles.

John Schroyer at the Colorado Springs Gazette Tuesday got a provisional “yay” from El Paso County Republican Marsha Looper.

“Rep. Marsha Looper, R-Calhan, said she supports civil unions, as long as the definition of marriage remains between a man and a woman.”

Steadman has made clear that his bill does not attempt to alter the one-man-one-woman marriage definition put in place by Amendment 43 in 2006, and he has gotten heat from gay activists as a result.

Lynn Bartels at the Denver Post nabbed a quote from Adams County Republican Rep. Kevin Priola. He gave the same caveat as Looper.

“But Rep. Kevin Priola, R-Henderson, who will be the speaker pro tem next year, said he supports civil unions “in concept, precisely because they are not gay marriage.”

And Ernest Luning at the Colorado Statesman in roughly the middle of last month reported Arapahoe County Rep. Kathleen Conti’s eloquent endorsement of the bill.

“The outpouring I’ve had so far from my town halls leads me to support it,” she said, adding that her position exhibits “a desire to be a representative of the people and for the people.”

Ferrandino has said right now he thinks he can count on 10 or 11 5 to 10 GOP votes should the bill make it to the floor of the House. That’s a long way off. Republicans Ferrandino has to win over on some level are those who sit on whatever committee to which House Speaker Frank McNulty assigns the bill. Steadman has said he thinks his bill may well start in the House Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Colorado Springs Republican Bob Gardner.

On Monday, Gardner told Schroyer he has yet to make up his mind on the bill.

“[Gardner] said he has not supported civil unions in the past but promised to give the bill a fair examination.”

Edit note: Rep. Ferrandino clarified since this story posted that he believes he can count on 5 to 10 Republican votes in the House, not 10 to 11.

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What are you doing now?

After Media Matters for America closed the Colorado office, I spent most of the summer looking for permanent employment while doing freelance projects in public relations and in media. One such project with Center for Independent Media (now the American Independent News Network to which the Colorado Independent belongs) was a detailed “mapping” of the Colorado news media landscape, to get a quick sense of the coverage gaps that had emerged or were widening in the wake of such events as the shutdown of the Rocky Mountain News and major cutbacks among other mainstream media outlets.

Since last September I’ve been working as a director with VisiTech PR, a boutique, tech public relations agency based here in Denver, covering companies involved in wireless, cable and broadband technology — almost a flashback to the sectors I covered for years as a tech journalist back in the day.

How do you view the present state of Colorado journalism?

The Center for Independent Media research project I mentioned earlier gave me a great opportunity to get a sense of the journalism landscape in Colorado at a time of wrenching change. There is a lot to be optimistic about, primarily the continued wealth of talented or up and coming journalists we have in this state and their willingness to adapt to — or even create — the new world in which they will be practicing their craft.

One example is the new Colorado Public News operation that my longtime friend and former Rocky colleague Ann Imse is developing at KBDI, creating an entirely new outlet for reporting on areas of importance to Coloradans — healthcare, environmental issues, science, to name just a few — that the mainstream commercial media by and large no longer cover in-depth and on a regular basis. KBDI’s willingness to provide a platform for Colorado Public News reinforces my impression that journalism isn’t dying, even if the old-fashioned news media businesses are; it’s evolving.

I’m also encouraged by the work of some mainstream news journalists such as Bob Moore of the Fort Collins Coloradan, who despite having had to make withering cuts in his newsroom is producing perhaps the best political reporting — on newsprint, on Twitter and in his blog — in the state.

Finally, you see people in the newsroom at one of the most battered daily newspapers in the state — the Colorado Springs Gazette — getting to the Pulitzer Prize finals and you know somebody’s still doing something right.

The other side of the coin is the rather disappointing way in which some of the major old and new media have failed to seize the day at a time of great opportunity. For example, the Denver Post has remade its political “blog” presence into The Spot and lists about 10 full-time political/government reporting staff, but neither the bloggers nor the newspaper break much significant political or public policy news and rarely engage with the blog’s audience. Instead we get Lynn Bartels “blogging” about Dick Wadhams’ wedding, thus giving the Post the distinction of having no full-time science writer but three full-time gossip columnists.

It’s also amazing that local broadcasters such as KUSA/9news are touting the huge expansion of their news airtime, but typically are filling most of those extra hours with content that even generously can’t be described as news. KUSA has one of the top political/public policy journalists in this market in Adam Schrager but I’ve yet to see the station fully leverage this asset with all that added ”news” airtime.

I believe the weaknesses in Colorado journalism have created a competitive void, one that ominously is filling up with what can only be described as “astroturf” new media outlets. The right-wing think tank Independence Institute alone accounts in one way or another for three of them — Colorado News Agency, Complete Colorado and Face the State. None of these three profess to adhere to a standard journalism code of ethics and their “work” sometimes gets aggregated by other “news” organizations such as State Bill Colorado that do not routinely identify the political and financial ties the three have with conservative donors. A State Bill reader who sees a Colorado News Agency article has no idea it’s being produced by a right-wing organization which actively is promoting and campaigning for its own political agenda.

With luck the tide will again turn and legitimate journalism organizations eventually will crowd out the pretenders much as healthy grass eventually will crowd out dandelions.

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The banner montage uses as its anchor a photo that appears large on the opening page of the Romanoff website. Two other shots are pasted in and one of the photos is a snap of Denver School Board candidate Andrea Mosby.

Mosby is African American and Bartels suggested she was deliberately placed next to Romanoff particularly to make the candidate appear ethnically diverse in his appeal. Mosby said that in fact she was at the event and didn’t mind be pasted into the banner shot. She’s a Romanoff supporter. That was Wednesday.

In a Thursday Denver Post offline edition column, Susan Greene took Bartel’s implication and ran with it and got some of the facts muddled in the process.

The most obvious manipulation is the insertion of a woman who appears prominently in the center of the picture just between the words “Andrew Romanoff United States Senate” and the image of the candidate. She is African-American. Another man whose likeness was digitally added, prominently, to the picture appears to be Latino. Several more supporters inserted in the scene are smiling admiringly toward the candidate.

The effect is to make Romanoff’s crowd of boosters look bigger, more adoring and more racially diverse than in the original snapshot taken in Denver’s Washington Park in September.

It’s not clear which “Latino man” man Greene believes was photoshopped into the banner but a cursory look at the original photo makes clear the two main Latinos at the center part of the photo were not photoshopped.

It was in responding to Greene that Romanoff’s latest spokesperson Roy Teicher (he is number four) went off the rails.

“Those minority folks were absolutely at the rally,” he adds. “We were just simply moving around random people for aesthetic reasons. It’s absolutely an accepted technique. Every campaign does it.”

Today’s letter from the coalition of Latino groups (pdf) takes issue with that response.

“‘These minority folks’ write to you today shocked, disturbed and outraged. Please allow this letter to serve as notice that we are NOT random people to be moved around for aesthetic reasons. We are NOT political pawns to be used when convenient nor do we accept being manipulated and repositioned when it serves one’s political motives. The ‘photoshopping in’ of minorities is not acceptable and falls far short of the integrity we expect of candidates running for the US Senate.”

The Romanoff Campaign today announced that they would be keeping the banner and responded in a statement yesterday that called Greene’s reporting a “despicable charge”

A columnist accused our campaign of manipulating a photo in order to diversify the crowd at our kick-off rally last fall… A designer collected photos taken at the rally and pasted them together in a collage at the top of our website. Every individual pictured was at the event – a fact the columnist neglected to note. Neither the columnist nor the newspaper pointed out that our opponent had done precisely the same thing in his own brochure.

The Romanoff campaign also released endorsement from Unidos Con Romanoff a group of more than 150 Latino leaders in the state. Leaders include Former State Rep. Polly Bacca, Rep. Ed Casso and State Democratic Party Vice Chair Margaret Atencio.

Romanoff’s campaign said that the attacks were a diversion from the issues that really matter, highlighting the need for jobs in Colorado and America.

The Latino coalition behind the letter Friday called for the Romanoff campaign to remove the banner from its website, acknowledge the problem and apologize for comments referring to “those minority folks…simply moving around random people for aesthetic reasons.”

The letter was signed by: Theresa M. Trujillo, Joseph A. Salazar, Nita Gonzales, Bob Montoya, Angela Giron, Marcos Garibay, Michelle Garcia, Deb Montoya, Florence Trujillo, Tammy Torres, Saul E. Trujillo, Steve Nawrocki, Daniel Garcia, Charity Trujillo Mannie Rodriguez, Geraldine Gonzales, Luis Espinoza-Organista, Theresa Solano, Tatsue Maekawa, Josette Jaramillo, Dusti Gurule, Julie Gonzales, Ricardo Martinez, Adrienne Benavidez,Veronica Barela.

Many of the those on the list appear on a letter of significant leaders endorsing Michael Bennet, including Dusti Gurule, Theresa Trujillo, and Joseph Salazar.

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Although Penry jumped into the campaign strongly this summer, winning “rising star” status from popular Washington Post blogger Chris Cillizza, he has recently struggled.

Even though he posted large fundraising figures for the first quarter, for example, he was overtaken by primary rival former U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis. Penry raised $400,000 and tweeted about it proudly only to be deflated when McInnis later announced he had pulled down $545,000, establishing himself as the clear frontrunner, enjoying the edge in experience, name recognition and cash.

Penry worked for McInnis as a Congressional staffer and never fully succeeded shaking the impression that McInnis had his number. McInnis fueled the impression by appearing unflappable in the face of Penry jabs. McInnis refused to debate Penry or even to appear in straw poll events with him.

Josh Penry

Penry also seemed to be losing momentum on his message. Although he opened the campaign with a clear platform based on admitting to Republican fiscal failures, he soon seemed to be casting about, attacking Gov. Ritter with arguments designed for dramatic effect but increasingly untethered to facts. It was as though the budget crisis that is forcing Ritter every day to announce cost-slashing measures was undoing Penry’s planned program-cutting platform.

Penry’s complaints about Ritter’s prisoner-furlough program as carelessly reckless, for example, was the opposite of the reality. As the Colorado Independent reported, the program was meticulously thought out, a product of long planning based on research that showed incarceration and recidivism as a major financial drag on the state and that looked at which prisoners would be best to parole months early. In other words, it might have been exactly the kind of “hard choice” cost-cutting measure Penry described as essential to good government. His attacks seemed opportunistic and recalled the ugly national campaign that featured infamously furloughed Massachusetts prisoner Willie Horton in commercials run by George H. Bush in his campaign against Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Penry’s recent attacks on the Governor’s Energy Office were similarly reaching. He called the office a “silo of patronage” and said it should be eliminated. But asked to say which patronage positions he was referring to, he came up with merely two names, and neither person owed their position to patronage. One of the employees, in fact, merely used workspace in the Energy Office and was not paid out of the Office budget. Indeed, the Office budget had been slashed to the bone by Ritter and is now running almost entirely on federal funds.

In addition, Penry seems to have made a poor decision in his selection of campaign manager Mike Britt. The choice seemed antithetical to his “new GOP politics” message. Britt cut his teeth working for Karl Rove, perhaps the most visible GOP strategist of the divisive cultural politics of the past decade. Britt was under investigation as a political staffer in George Bush’s White House and last week news surrounding Britt’s suspect tinkering with Republican National Committee email lists overshadowed Penry’s campaign.

Wins by moderate Republicans in two governor’s races last week may also be weighing on the decision for Penry to move aside for McInnis. Moderate Republicans Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell beat their Democratic rivals in New Jersey and Virginia. McInnis is perceived as more moderately conservative than is Penry.

Cillizza is now reporting that in fact last week’s governor’s races influenced the decision.

Sources close to Penry suggested that he was heavily influenced by the victories for Republicans in New Jersey and Virginia last week — wins due, at least in part, to the lack of competitive primaries on the Republican side.

Penry was worried that a bruising August primary would potentially compromise the eventual nominee’s chances of beating Ritter. Combine that with his youth (he is 33) and his role as state Senate Minority Leader and Penry decided that dropping out of the race was the best option for him and the party.

Ritter spokesman Evan Dreyer said the governor had no comment on the news of Penry’s decision, which he noted is yet to be confirmed.

In advance of the announcement, observers are speculating as to why Penry appears to be leaking the news in waves to Cillizza in Washington D.C. rather than to his home town paper, the Grand Junction Sentinel, or the Colorado paper of record, the Denver Post.

The Denver Post recently ran stories critical of Penry attacks on Ritter. Tim Hoover last month wrote a piece that scewered Penry‘s claims that Ritter had been expanding government. Lynn Bartels wrote the piece that punctured Penry’s “silo of patronage” claim regarding the Enery Office.

Michael Huttner, founder and head of liberal activist group ProgressNow, speculates in a press release that McInnis has had a hand in pushing Penry out through lobbyists in D.C., which he believes explains why the story is originating there.

“If this is true, it’s the old D.C. lobbyist guard stepping out of the shadows to clear the field for Scott ‘McLobbyist’ McInnis. McInnis’ ties to lobbyists, oil and gas interests, and corrupt cronies like Tom DeLay can’t help but make one wonder what’s really going on when his primary opponents start dropping out of the race.

[...]

And it should come as no surprise that this story broke first in Washington D.C. instead of Colorado, since that’s where ‘McLobbyist’s’ best friends are. We call on McInnis to disclose which of his lobbyist friends helped push Penry out.”

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Tom Tancredo is not in office. He is not running for office, at least not yet. So why are we reading his musings in the newspaper today?

The Post offers no further reporting on why Tancredo is weighing in. There is no ferreting out of his motives. There is little background reported on Tancredo or how he came to his own decisions to run for office and how any of that might be relevant to Norton’s announcement and candidacy. He offers some background about the tensions pulling between grassroots Colorado Republicans and Washington that any number of GOP analysts could have explored, even for example back east writers at The Hill reporting from the land within the Beltway. Tancredo, though, is sure to let slip rumor, using the Post to position himself as some kind of Don of GOP politics, taking calls from candidates and holding forth from his compound in Jefferson County.

Tancredo is a controversial figure who likes to appear in the media. He’s perfect fodder for the op-ed page or Sunday talk shows. What are his unadorned musings doing in the news section?

The news here? That Tancredo is chagrined.

Former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton will announce her candidacy for the U.S. Senate Tuesday, much to the chagrin of retired Congressman Tom Tancredo.

[H]e charged that Norton in recent weeks got talked into running by Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Norton family friend and political ally.

“Does John McCain have a right to do that? Sure. Do I have a right to bitch about it? You bet,” Tancredo said tonight.

“Jane Norton is a nice lady who I like. End of story. But I fear she is not ready for prime time.”

And now Tancredo got himself some inches on our page too! Argh.

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AWAY WENT THE WATER: The good news is that citizens made a stand. The bad news is that today they lost. Chaffee County commissioners, who ran on pledges they would guard the county’s precious water, voted to allow giant Nestle corporation to drain 200 acre feet of fresh spring water annually from the area around Buena Vista in the upper Arkansas River Basin. That’s the equivalent of the amount of water used by 700 homes.

Citizens and county consultants agree that environmental tests Nestle ran were inadequate. They argue the siphoning could devastate area wetlands. This afternoon, after months of anticipation and deliberation and citizen concern, the commissioners voted unanimously 3-0 in favor of Nestle. The company will now have license to harvest 65 million gallons of water from an aquifer at the mouth of Brown’s Canyon. It will pipe the precious cargo four miles to Johnson Village and truck it from there to Denver, from whence it will be sold in supermarkets, corner stores and yoga studios as Arrowhead bottled water. Kah-ching. Nestle just made a trillion dollars. What did Chaffee County or you get out of the deal?

BACKSEAT BUDGETMAKER: You think you can do better at balancing the budget than the beleaguered representatives we all like to mock as spendthrift bureaucrats? Of course you do. But it ain’t easy to balance this state’s budget. In fact, it’s a challenge, kinda like Grand Theft Auto. That’s right, try your hand online. Balancing the Colorado budget is now an online kind of computer game. Ask your kids or nieces and nephews for a hand.

BIRTHER INVASION: look around you. Did you know that in Colorado 2/3rds of Republican voters are not sure whether Obama was born in the United States? Just 58 percent of voters overall in the state will say for sure that they think Obama was born in the country. Then again, 3 percent of the state’s adult population also believes that Hawaii is a foreign land. They surround us.

PLANETS COLLIDE: If you haven’t seen it yet, Massachusetts U.S. Rep. Barney Frank has had enough, demonstrating for all the world via YouTube that sometimes, even in contemporary American politics, enough is enough.

ACCESS JOURNALISM: It’s great. You get to speak face to face with lawmakers and their staffers. They answer your calls. You get to be all close and cozy. You just develop crushes on them. It’s fun. You come to write things like this.

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1. Rep. Doug Lamborn — two years ago a freshman trying to find the Capitol bathroom — is now the dean of Colorado’s Republican delegation in Washington.

2. Dick Wadhams’ threat to shove a bunch of 30-second ads up Democrat Mark Udall’s ass over a missed vote might just have marked the Macaca moment of his failed effort to get his old pal Bob Schaffer elected to the United States Senate. Such trashy talk underscores what went so utterly wrong for Republicans in Colorado on Tuesday.

When the other party is promising all things are possible, that there is hope in a dreadful economy, and there is hope for millions of Americans without decent health care and hope for a solution to the quagmire in Iraq, Wadhams was issuing crude threats.

Specifically, Wadhams’ quote in early August, reported by Rocky Mountain News reporter Lynn Bartels, came after Udall missed a vote in Washington over whether to recess Congress before energy-related legislation had been passed. “[We’re] going to shove a bunch of 30-second ads up his ass on this issue over the course of the campaign,” Wadhams practically crowed.

His candidate, Schaffer, didn’t help himself much during the campaign, including shrilly attacking Udall on national television, and later petulantly complained about not being able to bring notes to a 30-minute live TV debate.

In a pre-debate exchange that was being live-streamed, including by the Colorado Independent, Schaffer argued that he wanted to have his notes, despite a prior no-notes or -props agreement.

“You know, this is a campaign for the United States Senate, it’s not a talent contest,” Schaffer argued.

Udall coolly settled the spat — his own defining moment of the campaign. “This is a test of your wits; it’s a test of what you have in your head,” he said. “If Bob needs to have a few notes with him, fine. But I’m here with an empty pad and let’s go. Let’s debate.”

In June 2007, Wadhams promised a great comeback for the Republicans in 2008. During a speech to the Montana GOP, Wadhams predicted, “We will win here in Montana, we will win in Colorado with the only Senate seat in the nation and we will win the presidency of the United States with a principled campaign.”

Wadhams had returned to Colorado after running former Virginia Sen. George Allen’s disastrous effort for reelection two years ago. He returned to run the state GOP and quickly signed on to a dual role to run his old pal Schaffer’s campaign.

Then, despite his promise of “principle,” he went back to his old crude rules -– including efforts to marginalize reporters, only talking to news outlets he deemed “legitimate” (specifically The Rocky Mountain News and a few others). He weirdly tried to shapeshift Schaffer, an uber-conservative, school voucher-obsessed oil and gas executive, into a cosmic alternative-energy butterfly.

In his dual role as GOP chairman, Wadhams instructed other Republican candidates to play by his rules — to their detriment.

On Tuesday night President-elect Barack Obama obliterated Wadhams’ trash talk with eloquence and a promise to be president to all — including Wadhams. It’s a tall order. But the results of the elections are a clear signal that Wadhams’ tactics no longer work, not even in his home state of Colorado — and not even for the man formerly known as Karl Rove 2.0.

According to various versions of The Rocky’s report, Bruce has been either “ordered” or “instructed” to stay away from an unnamed woman working at the state Capitol who lodged a harassment complaint against him. (The harassment complaint was later identified as “sexual” in nature).

The story, by reporter Lynn Bartels, originally noted that Bruce “was handed a letter by House Speaker Andrew Romanoff. Bruce’s face turned red when he read the letter, and then met briefly with Romanoff in his office.”

The red-faced reference has since been inexplicably removed from the newspaper’s Web site. In addition, there is no indication of what Bruce might have, or have not, done. No corroborating witnesses. No comment from Bruce, or from the legislative leadership. No word of criminal charges. Just that “other lawmakers confirmed that a complaint had been filed and that Bruce had been told to have no contact with the woman.” (Those lawmakers were not identified.)

The story is salacious enough — after all, everyone else is talking about it, and the great pile-on of the boorish Bruce is all the rage these days.

But it wasn’t even three months ago when Bartels’ boss, Rocky Publisher and Editor John Temple indignantly weighed in on how his publication would never, ever stoop to such lowbrow tactics. Specifically, he was referring to another lawmaker, former Rep. Michael Garcia — in a scenario that virtually mirrors the goods, if you will, that they’ve so far got against Bruce.

In Garcia’s case: Anonymous charges of sexual harassment. No criminal charges. No corroborating witnesses, no confirmation or comment from leadership.

The Rocky did not initially run the Garcia piece — which was also being pursued by Bartels. Ultimately Garcia, an Aurora Democrat accused of exposing himself to a female lobbyist, resigned (and the Rocky finally did report the news).

Temple subsequently weighed in, in a Feb. 2 column offering up what he called a “Cautionary tale for the Web era” and explaining why they simply would not stoop to gutter reporting tactics, er, “lower standards” — in other words why they got scooped by The Denver Post and the blog FacetheState.

This is from Temple’s Feb. 2 column, explaining the paper’s decision not to publish in the case of Garcia:

“I knew the woman had told her story to the speaker of the House,” Temple wrote. “She had done the right thing, gone to a person in authority who could do something about her concerns.

“But she hadn’t filed a criminal complaint. There were no witnesses. Other women were said to have had similar experiences. But we couldn’t find them. And a prosecutor hadn’t evaluated the case and determined that there was cause to file charges, so no independent party had concluded there were grounds to believe she was a sex assault victim. (The Rocky doesn’t report the names of sex assault victims in criminal cases.)

“The story was a case of ‘he said, she said,’ I told Lynn. Without witnesses or other women or a prosecutor or confirmation from the House speaker, we would do nothing with the story except continue to investigate it — unless the woman was willing to put her name to the allegations.

“Our policy on anonymous sources is clear:

“The Rocky Mountain News discourages the use of anonymous sources. Their use threatens the credibility of the newspaper because the reader has no way to judge whether the source is reliable and/or whether the source is using the newspaper for his or her own end.

“When considering whether to grant an exception to our rejection of anonymity, journalists should ask whether the information from the source is crucial to the story, whether it is informational or accusatory and whether it is fact or opinion.

“The News does not use anonymous sources for opinion or accusatory material, or for incidental elements.

“It was clear that we were dealing with accusatory material and couldn’t publish it.

One can only conclude, after reading The Rocky story about Bruce this week, that the newspaper’s policy on anonymously sourced stories has changed radically. We’ll look forward to Temple’s upcoming explanation of the change in the guidelines.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen what will come of the latest complaint against the embattled Rep. Bruce — a legendary bachelor who — yes it’s true — has long been known to routinely lob inappropriate and offensive comments at women and men, government officials, staffers and even his own supporters.

Among other things, he’s called fellow politicians “corrupt socialists,” threatened to drop his pants in city council meetings and printed up business cards identifying his occupation as “terrorist.”

Cara DeGette is the editor of Colorado Confidential and a longtime Colorado-based journalist. E-mail her at cdegette@aol.com