Tag: Marilyn Musgrave

Larimer County Republican insiders nibbled away at conventional wisdom regarding Colorado Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry's prospects in the coming gubernatorial primary.

Conservative Republican and CD 4 hopeful Tom Lucero hosted a campaign breakfast Tuesday in Loveland at a strip-mall cafe and ended up talking to eight likable, earnest people there about the need to affect major cultural change if they were ever going to restore a sense of personal responsibility in the United States and succeed in abolishing income taxes and the Internal Revenue Service. "We have to replicate Obama's Chicago-style politics, Saul Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals,' if we're going to beat the [Democrats]," he told the small group of almost-all retirees. They nodded in agreement but said nothing. Lucero faces a tough slog between now and Election Day 2010, and he knows it.

The 2010 state Republican convention will likely be held at the Budweiser Events Center in Loveland, the Loveland Reporter-Herald reports. That's inside the 4th Congressional District, which will be a top GOP target next year as the party tries to retake the seat from freshman U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey, a Fort Collins Democrat who ousted three-term Republican Marilyn Musgrave last year.

The national antiabortion group, Susan B. Anthony List, is the recipient of a cool 50 grand courtesy of defeated U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave's campaign fund. The Fort Morgan conservative, who now works for the List's Votes Have Consequences outreach effort, will fund the "Young Leaders" training program, an initiative of the group's separate tax-exempt charitable education foundation. That organizational do-si-do may allow Musgrave to effectively skirt a federal campaign finance rule that prohibits candidates from donating unused war chests to their employers.

Not to be outdone by Joe-the-Plumber's recent rant about not letting "queers" near his children, former U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave has penned a fiery letter promoting her new gig at "Votes Have Consequences."

"We will spread the truth about their destructive agendas, drag down their approval ratings, force them to publicly defend socialism, authoritarian gun-grabbing, gay marriage, infanticide and everything else they vote for in Washington, and ultimately, on November 2, 2010, we will take their jobs away from them."

Former Rep. Marilyn Musgrave will lead a new antiabortion initiative dubbed "Votes Have Consequences" that will target members of Congress in the 2010 election cycle who support abortion rights. In a case of supreme irony, Musgrave intends to rip a page from the hardball playbook used by the Defenders of Wildlife. The environmental group was credited with helping to defeat the three-term Republican congresswoman with intense local organizing and a $1.6 million barrage of TV attack ads — a strategy that was roundly criticized by Republicans.

Republicans looking to challenge freshman Rep. Betsy Markey got a double dose of bad news Monday. The CD 4 congresswoman was named to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Frontline Program to hyper-boost her re-election bid on the same day the Dem got a rare head nod from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the pro-business group joined at the hip to the GOP.

Gentlemen, go to the back of the class, says the Sargent Shriver National Center for Poverty Law. Rep. Doug Lamborn and recently retired Rep. Tom Tancredo earned failing grades on the center's new poverty scorecard ranking the 110th Congress on its votes on bills legislating fair pay, housing, college financial aid, unemployment and other measures designed to lift working class folk out of poverty.

State GOP chairman Dick Wadhams sits down and opens up on a wide range of political topics in an illuminating interview with The Colorado Statesman editor Jody Hope Strogoff and reporter Jason Kosena, who was The Colorado Independent's chief political reporter through the 2008 election. Unlike his ubiquitous -- sometimes vulgar -- sound bites issued during the heat of the campaign, Wadhams sounds positively relaxed and introspective as he discusses the future of the Republican Party in Colorado, prospects for retaking the legislature and statewide seats, and even whether Marilyn Musgrave should have called to concede to Betsy Markey after losing her 4th District seat in Congress (short answer: yes).

As if that last campaign season wasn't long enough, it looks like the next one is already well underway. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) launched a fusillade on Monday against 25 House Democrats who voted in favor of the $819 billion stimulus bill last week. Freshman Rep. Betsy Markey, the first Democrat to represent the 4th District in more than three decades, was the lone lawmaker to merit the NRCC's attention in Colorado.