Tag: Brandon Shaffer

Depending on how things go in Colorado's primaries June 26 and in the general election in November, this will either be the year that congressional challengers were able to buy their way into office or the year in which challengers spent millions of their own money only to say in the end that they gave it their best and lost anyway.

As concerns mount over oil and gas rigs inching closer to several Colorado schools, legislators are looking toward 2013 to sort out whether local controls should take a backseat to state regulations.

It didn't take long for the High Park Fire to become politicized.

A unanimous federal appeals court ruling issued in Boston today found the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional in that it discriminates against same-sex couples. The ruling is a victory for the Obama administration and supporters of both gay rights and states' rights and a blow for the national anti-gay marriage movement and for Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, who filed a controversial and critics say confused amicus brief in the case last year in support of the embattled federal law.

Saturday at 9:30 am, a group of Colorado women and family members will gather at Civic Center Park’s Greek Amphitheater for a rally to protect women’s access to health care, and for the right of each woman to make her own health care decisions.

CBS News aired undercover video Friday that captured Colorado Republican U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner and other Tea Party freshman members of Congress hobnobbing with high-rolling donors at a Key Largo yacht club, downing cocktails at a $10,000-a-head happy hour and venturing to sea on a chartered fishing boat named the "Good Life."

Colorado Congressman Cory Gardner, like many Republicans this week, took aim at President Obama over gas prices. He dismissed the president's proposal to tap national oil and gas reserves as an election-year political fix and called instead for more oil and gas drilling on federal lands. But Gardner's proposal drew a swift fact-check rebuttal from his Fourth District Democratic opponent, Senate President Brandon Shaffer, who said it was Gardner who was playing politics.

Democratic state Senate President Brandon Shaffer, who is running fpr Congress against freshman Republican Rep. Cory Gardner in Colorado's Fourth District, reported today that he pulled down $112,000 from more than 600 donors in the final quarter of 2011. The report comes as news circulates that Shaffer is testing the waters in the state's Sixth Congressional District.

If Gov. John Hickenlooper has anything to say about it--and he will--most of a potential increase in state tax collections this year and in 2012 will go to restore some of the money cut from K-12 budgets in the past few years.

Colorado Fourth-District Republican US Rep Cory Gardner is filling his campaign coffers for 2012 as he did in 2010 by leaning heavily on oil-and-gas industry donors. He raked in $370,000 in the quarter that just ended. That's the most of any candidate for federal office from Colorado and topped his take in previous quarters by roughly $100,000. One of every ten dollars Gardner brought in last quarter came from oil and gas, and this quarter the percentage is higher, coming in at roughly 12 percent. That notable campaign finance record paired with the high-profile pro-drilling and environmental-regulation-rollback positions he has taken mark out the freshman congressman as an aspiring top-level advocate for oil and gas on the Hill.