Tag: Congress

Fifteen months ago, the United Nations declared 2011 and 2012 as the International Year of the Bat to promote awareness about the under-appreciated insect gobbler, pollinator and seed disperser. The bat, you see, has fallen on hard times. There’s no easy way to explain this, so we hope you’re sitting down. Or upside down. Here it goes: Statistics show more than half of bat species in the United States are either suffering steep population declines or they are already listed as endangered. A major reason why is white-nose syndrome — a mysterious disease that is wiping out bats by the millions.

Elephants dancing in skirts, bears riding tricycles and lions leaping through flaming hoops could become distant memories if a bill U.S. Rep. Jared Polis is co-sponsoring gains traction in Washington.

Congress last week allotted $4 million to study and combat the outbreak of white-nose syndrome — a mysterious and menacing disease that is killing off North American bats by the millions.

Congress didn't just agree to keep the government's lights on through the rest of the fiscal year. It is also ensuring it has the option of doing so with energy-sucking incandescent 100-watt bulbs.

As the House prepared to pass the Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act last week, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette must've imagined herself wearing a pale blue knee-length dress with a white pinafore top.

Over 30 Colorado business leaders are asking U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton to reconsider his support of the Wilderness and Roadless Area Release Act saying it poses “a serious threat” to their bottom line.

Tisha Casida is a 29-year-old southern Colorado-bred conservative. The Keystone XL Pipeline, she suggests, is safer and probably better for the environment than sending oil tankers across the Atlantic. The country's conflict over carbon dioxide, she hints, may be as much a waste of time as the war on drugs. She makes no bones that she is disappointed in her congressman, Scott Tipton, because he hasn't demonstrated leadership on a few crucial issues, like speaking out against the Patriot Act.

He isn't the fifth Beatle. But Herman Cain just may be the fifth Koch brother. The former Godfather's Pizza CEO received a rock star ovation at an Americans for Prosperity summit in Washington, D.C., on Friday night when he declared he feels a deep kinship with the Koch brothers.

DENVER-- As anticipated, President Obama this morning detailed his plan to use an executive order to ease the burden of student loan debt that presently presses down on tens of millions of Americans. Speaking in shirt sleeves and drawing on his own struggles with student debt as a young man, husband and father, Obama told the energized crowd in an event center hall on the downtown university Auraria Campus that he was determined for the foreseeable future to act wherever possible to relieve economic distress in the country without going through the gridlocked Congress.

Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler made national news this week by filing a lawsuit to stop Denver County, and by extension all Colorado counties, from mailing ballots to the state's "inactive" voters. The case drew the attention of voter-rights defender US Reps Charles Gonzalez of Texas and Robert Brady of Pennsylvania, who wrote a letter asking the justice department to investigate. The congressional letter (embedded below) is just the latest alarmed response to Gessler's lawsuit, which has featured howls from the local and national press, complaints from voter activist groups and legal push-back from Denver and Pueblo county election officials. At the eye of the storm, Gessler communications staff has been mostly hunkered down and silent on the matter, spokesperson Rich Coolidge surfacing at last today in a Texas newspaper to dismiss the congressional concerns as political gamesmanship.