February 25, 2009 06:18 PM UTC

If Kathy Hall said it....Face-the-State thinks it's good to go

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• by: ClubTwitty

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

It must be true.  

Or apparently that is enough ‘fact’ for Face-the-State to launch into a speculative article “Could Curry be the next Buescher.”

The tale turns on this ominous quote by oil and gas mouthpiece and known dissembler Kathy Hall:

According to Kathy Hall, western slope director for the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, Colorado has already seen a loss of about $3 billion in drilling activity since the new regulations passed last year. The economy of Curry’s western slope district relies heavily on the energy industry.

“The drop in drilling translates into a loss of millions of dollars of severance tax revenues,” said Hall. “[Curry] is going to have to answer to her voters why she worked so hard to destroy an industry that supplies money to local municipalities, schools and fire districts.”

Kathy Hall has a head full of rocks.  As is well-documented, drilling activity has been plummeting all across the globe–in Colorado, in Texas, off-shore, and even in Siberia.  New regulations were not passed last year; they won final approval by the COGCC and now have to go before the legislature–before they take effect a couple of months hence.

If Kathy Hall is an idiot…what does that say about ‘Face the State’?

Besides relying on a fundamentally faulty premise without any context (and thus falsely implying that new rules not yet put into effect not last year in Colorado have caused the oil and gas industry to crash here while it is doing just fine, drilling up a storm, everywhere else), Face-the-State ignores the most obvious factors that led to Beuscher’s defeat.

Mesa County is a Republican stronghold.  

In Gunnison  County, the BOCC is made up of three Democrats–in Mesa County it is three Republicans.  

In Gunnison County, voters in 2008 supported Obama for president at 63% while in Mesa County voters supported McCain by 64%.  John Salazar and Mark Udall won Garfield Gunnison [typo-CT]  County; Wayne ‘Who?’ Wolf and Bob Schaffer won Mesa County.  

Curry’s district does include some of Garfield and Pitkin  counties, but its Glenwood,  Carbondale and Aspen.

It’s disappointing when anyone prints disproven talking points from disreputable sources.  To use them to craft a spurious piece of thinly veiled threats is scurrilous.  

Certainly political analysis from a blog that calls itself ‘Colorado’s Front Page’ and the ‘Go To’ political news resource, might actually include politics and news in its analysis before constructing a story around a weave of verbal fantasy.  Or not, apparently, if you are Face-the-State.