CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
June 25, 2012 11:52 PM UTC
28 Comments
This is so obviously a joke it’s ridiculous that you would even post it. Slow news day?
I guess no jokes in public now, trackers are everywhere. Thanks for making public events even more boring, Dems.
for example, when you’re elected to statewide office, you’re expected to show some maturity and good judgement.
He was sure right about the uptightness anyhow. Are the only funny jokes the ones transmitted to Vladimir, liberals?
When you try and wing it like that you make less sense than usual, which I suppose is some sort of accomplishment in itself. Congratulations.
I know you’ve got a better sense of humor than this, I read it all the time. Why don’t you just admit your sense of humor is politically biased?
says, take your pick:
“Are you here for the party? That was last night”
“Bring my car around pops”
“Have you seen our plan for ‘keeping our hands off your Social Security’. That was funny.
OMG they were rolling in the aisles !
is heefuckingsterical, doncha know?
and watching our country devolve towards 3rd world electoral standards. If that dosen’t make you chuckle you’re just ” uptight “.
but in that case, you shit all over yourself with outrage.
He was trying to make a point that the private sector has received many more benefits than the public sector but Oh Lordy how you tried to make it into some spittle flying outrage that the President was out of touch with the economics of our times.
You are such a butt sucking turd when it comes to defending the remarks of your favorite politicians and attacking the remarks of your least favorite politicians.
Colorado (and almost every other state) has partisan elected officials run its elections at both the state and the local level (except for Denver’s Clerk and Recorder who is nominally a non-partisan elected official).
The United States one of the only, if not the only, functioning democracies in the world to do so, and that says a lot of the degree to which there is bipartisan agreement on all but the finest points of election administration which speaks well of our democratic culture, even though it doesn’t say much for the wisdom of the late 19th century, early 20th century progressives who came up with such a bizzare system (in the similar tradition of the Founding Fathers’ decision to vest resolution of election disputes in elected officials in Congress who it became immediately clear, resolved disputes in a blatantly partisan manner until not earlier than sometime after the Civil War and Reconstruction were concluded).
There is absolutely no harm in one of those partisan elected officials acknowledging that fact in jest when, as Gessler did, when he then immediately and expressly disavowing any claim that the joke is serious in case anyone was unsure that it was a joke.
The fact that officials acknowledge that they have biases publicly does not mean that the system must be corrupt. I’d worry more about someone who ran for partisan public office who tried to deny that they had a partisan bias once elected, or who genuinely couldn’t care less how elections came out. Is sub silente partisanship in election administration a la Bush v. Gore really any better?
I don’t like the way our system decides who should administer elections via partisan elected officials, I argued vigorously before the election in a diary at this site that Gessler was not the right man for the job, and I disagree with plenty of Gessler’s actions since he was elected. But, this particular joke is utterly inoffensive, and ethical performance of one’s public duties does not require humorless performance of one’s public duties.
Civility and the ability to take a joke have their place in the public square as well.
Also, fortunately, the Colorado Secretary of State is a pretty weak state election official and most of the arguably objectional decisions he makes are subject to judicial review (and Colorado does a much better job of choosing good judges than it does of choosing good election administration officials). In particular, the Secretrary of State (1) has almost no say in redistricting, (2) has extremely little say in actually counting ballots, a process run by local clerks whose partisan alignment tends to match the local political majority, (3) has no say in how state elected official ethics cases are administered, (4) can’t initiate criminal prosecutions for election law violations unilaterally (and the potential of anyone to do that was narrowed further when criminal libel laws were repealed this legislative session), (5) is subject to extremely detailed statutory direction on most issues, (6) is subject to effective review of new regulations from both the judicial and legislative branches (as well as the AG’s office, which has assigned his predecessor to handle the SOS’s office’s legal work), and (7) is subject to effective judicial and legislative branch supervision of his involvement in the initiative and referrendum process.
One of the very few discretionary and effectively unreviewable powers that he has at his disposal, are his executive decisions to be more lenient than the law permits in enforcing campaign finance violations and to choose which campaign finance violations to to target given his office’s very modest staff resource (decisions to overprosecute these violations, in contrast, are subject to judicial review and frequently result in reversals of SOS decisions).
He has a bit more say over how voter registration is handled now than the SOS used to in light of centralized IT systems; but the SOS’s office’s IT people have a better track record of competence than most government offices in the state, honed managing uncontroversial corporation and Uniform Commercial Code and Notary record databases. No Colorado SOS in living memory has ever been fraudulent in adding up county clerk generated vote tallies to get a statewide result.
It isn’t even clear if the Colorado SOS has the authority to impose uniform state rules on the mailing of mail in ballots to inactive voters, the subject of a past lawsuit that wasn’t resolved on the merits (Gessler lost) and a new one that might be resolved on the merits with the Denver County Clerk and Recorder.
The position does involve sensitive decisions that in close cases can swing an election. Somebody has to do that. I personally would prefer that it wasn’t him. But, one can get carried away in thinking that it makes a huge difference, when the system works better than one might reasonably expect given its design.
I don’t agree as I think the election chief should be beyond reproach. But you make a reasonable argument.
are no joke.
They’re a threat to democracy.
but this joke is still going to look petty if someone tries to make a big deal about it. Seriously, this is the kind of thing that is only upsetting if you already disagree with Gessler.
Talk to people about his lying about voter fraud to try to take away the right to vote, his partisan attempts to disenfranchise anyone who sat out the 2010 election… anything but this.
It can’t be tolerated. Get Rick Palacio on this unacceptable joke right now! RESIGN!!
(HAHAHAHAHA)
that was pretty brainless. But I’ve had a hard day at work and I’m ready for a fight–give it your best shot. Unless, of course, you’re already off the clock for the Mittens team and might not get paid.
About Rick Palacio’s last call for Gessler to resign. It didn’t go so well…
then you blew the joke.
But looks like Mittens upped your paid hours, good on you.
I learned the hard way when I started my career that there are times and places to be friendly and off-the-cuff and funny. And there are times when you must say words that have no ambiguity, no chance to be interpreted, because people watch you. You can never walk into a meeting and tell everyone that your process is FUBAR’d, that your foreman hasn’t been sober since ‘Nam, or that you are providing an illegal unfair advantage to one company over another. That would be unprofessional. Being professional is kind of an important job qualification for someone is Gessler’s position.
…Or even if he were the scrupulously ethical Secretary of State known for his nonpartisan decision-making in office, who had never, ever, EVER been seriously accused of voter suppression.
As-is, this is as if Sandusky held a press conference and told the old joke about a pedophile and a little boy walking in to the dark woods together.
And Congratulation PC on being reelected to FPE.
I also liked “Being an Adult” by RG….this guy does not have wriggle room in making partisan comments. This is a natioanlly coordinated anti-union and voter suppression effort by a hand full of rich cats.
It’s unAmerican and disgusting.
said into what he thought was a dead microphone “the bombing of the Soviet Union will begin in five minutes”.
That was a real knee slapper.
And the thought of millions of dead civilians as ‘collateral damage.’ Especially when I have my finger on the proverbial button, senility notwithstanding. What was Dr. Strangelove said …. “Yeeee—Hawwwww!” I believe?
He spoke for nearly an hour. Is this all you have?
http://politicalticker.blogs.c…
Pay no attention to the schemers behind the curtain.