October 04, 2016 10:31 AM UTC
Get More Smarter on Tuesday (October 4)
8 Comments- by: Colorado Pols
Donald Trump has left Colorado (maybe); you may return to your normal activities. It’s time to Get More Smarter with Colorado Pols. If you think we missed something important, please include the link in the comments below (here’s a good example). If you are more of a visual learner, check out The Get More Smarter Show.
TOP OF MIND TODAY…
► Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump was in Colorado for a pair of campaign stops on Monday. Trump visited Pueblo and Loveland, where he set out to spin the news that he doesn’t really pay income taxes as some sort of call to action, or something. From the Denver Post:
Donald Trump confronted questions Monday about whether he paid income taxes by blaming loopholes in the system and bragging about his business acumen.
“The unfairness of the tax laws is unbelievable,” Trump told a packed ballroom at the Pueblo Convention Center in the first of his two campaign stops in Colorado. “It’s something I’ve been talking about for a long time, despite frankly being a big beneficiary of the laws.
“But I’m working for you now. I’m not working for Trump.”
Trump’s remarks were his first about a New York Times report about his 1995 tax return that showed a deduction for $916 million for losses that may have allowed him to avoid paying federal income taxes for up to 18 years.
Instead of denying the report, he made his pledge to overhaul the tax code the central theme of his 50-minute speech and touted his tax “skills” as the reason he managed to survive the economic downturn in the mid-1990s.
Yes, Trump has mad brilliant tax skills. Also, it appears that free speech doesn’t really apply in Loveland.
And on another note, a new poll shows Hillary Clinton with an 11-point lead over Trump in Colorado.
► The candidates for Vice President square off in their only primetime debate of the cycle tonight at Longwood University in Virginia. Politico previews the showdown.
Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Kaine will return to Colorado on Monday to introduce a GOTV concert headlined by Dave Matthews.
► National Republicans continue to express concern about Rep. Mike Coffman’s seat in CD-6. The Congressional Leadership Fund is dropping $1.3 million in the final two weeks of the 2016 election in a bid to help Coffman stave off defeat from Democratic challenger Morgan Carroll. Coffman and friends have been having trouble coming up with an attack on Carroll that is not completely debunked by local media outlets, so every dollar counts. As Sandra Fish reports for Colorado Public Radio, there is no shortage of campaign cash in two key Colorado races:
Colorado TV viewers can expect to see more than 83,000 ads consuming nearly 29 days of airtime in October at a cost of $30 million.
Of that, more than $12.8 million is being spent on two congressional races. In the 6th Congressional District in Aurora and suburban Denver, former Democratic state Senate President Morgan Carroll is trying to unseat GOP Rep. Mike Coffman. In the 3rd CD in southern and western Colorado, Republican Rep. Scott Tipton faces former state Sen. Gail Schwartz.
The first debate of the CD-6 race, hosted by Univision, takes place today but won’t air publicly until Saturday. We’re keeping a list of the most notable debates this month as Elected Day draws ever closer.
Get even more smarter after the jump…
IN CASE YOU ARE STANDING NEAR A WATER COOLER…
► Former state Senate President John Andrews, somehow still a prominent voice in Republican political circles, is out with his own voter guide for 2016. Andrews kicks things off by explaining his opposition to Amendment T, which is…ugh:
No on Amendment T: No Exception to Involuntary Servitude Provision
This is a symbolic gesture to repudiate any hint of slavery in our state constitution, emotionally appealing but meaningless under the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Is Amendment T purely a symbolic gesture? What difference does it make? Why would you need a reason to oppose anything that repudiates slavery?
► The Daily Beast takes a look at Republican Mike Pence’s record on gun violence in Indiana, and finds that Indianapolis now has a higher murder rate than Chicago:
Pence himself should be asked about it during Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate with Tim Kaine. A pre-debate fact check shows the murder rate in Indianapolis reached 16.9 per 100,000 in 2015 with 144 murders, the most in that city’s history. Chicago’s rate came in slightly lower, 16.7 per 100,000, with 468 homicides in a city with more than three times the population.
In both cities, around 80 percent of the homicides involved firearms. Chicago police note that some 20 percent of the guns recovered in crime scenes there were purchased in Indiana, where access has gone from easy to even easier.
Pence’s most notable actions as governor with regard to firearms include arranging for the National Rifle Association to train the Indiana National Guard in carrying concealed weapons. Pence also signed laws that legalized sawed-off shotguns, permitted people to keep guns in vehicles in school parking lots, and retroactively barred a 1999 suit by the city of Gary against gun manufacturers.
► Supporters of Donald Trump were excited over the weekend about a new “bombshell” data drop from WikiLeaks that apparently is not really happening. From the Washington Post:
Over the course of two hours Tuesday — with the world’s media and bleary-eyed Trump die-hards across the United States tuning in — Assange and other WikiLeaks officials railed against “neo-McCarthyist hysteria,” blasted the mainstream press, appealed for donations and plugged their books (“40 percent off!”).
But what they didn’t do was provide any new information about Clinton — or about anything else, really.
The much-vaunted news conference, as it turned out, was little more than an extended infomercial for WikiLeaks on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of its founding.
Hook, line, sinker. Where have we seen this before?
► Public lands issues could very well doom the re-election hopes of Congressman Scott Tipton (R-Cortez).
► At this rate, Senator Michael Bennet (D-Denver) will defeat Republican Darryl Glenn in November by the same margin as the last four Colorado senate races combined.
In an unrelated story in the Ft. Collins Coloradoan, we see more explanation for Glenn’s complete inability to run a competitive race in 2016.
► Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson made his first campaign visit to Colorado on Monday.
► Apparently there are two different candidates who will not beat Congressman Jared Polis (D-Boulderish) in November.
► Colorado school districts are joining in the fight to get rid of TABOR, as the Denver Post reports:
Colorado school boards who claim Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights has decimated student funding have joined a five-year legal fight to have the law dismantled.
Five Colorado school boards have been added as new plaintiffs in the original federal lawsuit filed against the anti-tax measure, also known as TABOR. The suit was filed in 2011 and led by state Sen. Andy Kerr and House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst.
In June 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court returned the case to the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver for further review. But in June 2016, the Court of Appeals determined the legislative plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. The case was then sent back to U.S. District Court.
Lawyers for the original plaintiffs hope to keep the suit alive with the addition of the school districts, saying the districts have legal standing to sue because they have been directly injured by TABOR.
Whatever its original intentions, it has long been clear that TABOR is terrible for Colorado.
► “Stoned driving” may be on the increase in Colorado. Or maybe not. What were we talking about again?
OTHER LINKS YOU SHOULD CLICK
► Somebody leaked information about Donald Trump’s tax returns. But who?
► If you’ve ever dreamed of running for Vice President, the Washington Post has some important information for you to consider. Nevertheless, we’d rather run for VP than accept a bucket of warm piss.
ICYMI
► State Senator Kevin Lundberg is a big fan of Donald Trump. Of course he is.
Don’t forget to check out The Get More Smarter Show. You can also Get More Smarter by liking Colorado Pols on Facebook!
More Jesus-like behavior from the lovely, non-racist, Christian, Jesus-loving party:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/finally-someone-who-thinks-like-me/2016/10/01/c9b6f334-7f68-11e6-9070-5c4905bf40dc_story.html
Trump leads LA Times tracking poll: http://graphics.latimes.com/usc-presidential-poll-dashboard/
He always leads in that one. It's been a total outlier for ages. It's the only one he leads in since the last debate. Look at the other major polls. Look at all the poll averaging site’s averages. To those of us who follow the polls regularly the fact that Trump is, as usual, ahead only in the LA Times poll nationally is very, very old news. Color us not freaked at all by your big scoop, little modster.
Good news, everybody! We don't have to watch the debate because time traveling Republicans have kindly already watched it for us and returned with the reviews!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mike-pence-rnc-winner-kaine_us_57f43b67e4b04c71d6f0c7bd?section=&
Optimistic much? We were paying bills so haven't watched it yet. I was kinda hoping for a live blog to save us the brain damage. Oh, well. Let's see how they did.
I didn't watch either but watched some after chatter and highlights. The consensus seemed to be that Pence won but not for Trump.
Pence came across smoother and Kaine was the constantly interrupting aggressor. But Pence also avoided defending many of Trump's positions, took some quite distinct from Trump positions and kept saying that Trump never said things Kaine pretty much quoted directly from Trump (Kaine did this a lot) and that all those things will gone over in tomorrow's discussion of the debates. There will be lots of … Pence claims Trump never said this. Here's the video.
There was some speculation that Pence doesn't think Trump is going to win and was more interested in presenting himself as a future candidate than in fighting for Trump.
Oh and apparently there was so much cross talk and interrupting, even of and by the moderator so with all three talking over each other, there were whole sections nobody could understand a word of anyway.
So it looks like we didn't miss much of any great importance or that was particularly enlightening. VP debates rarely move the needle in any case.
We weren't able to do a live blog last night. Given how boring the debate became, by most media accounts, we're glad we didn't.
From what the talking heads were saying afterwards about the three way cross talk you would have needed some kind of technical assistance to unscramble most of it anyway. Guess it was mainly … "how do you defend Trump saying fill-in-the-blank" followed by "nu-uh. He never said that".