November 27, 2006 08:38 PM UTC

Hey, Where's Our Money?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Apparently Colorado Pols is funded by Tim Gill, Pat Stryker and Jared Polis.

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Okay, so where’s the check?

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Seriously, where’s our money?

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Okay, if we don’t have any money, then how has this dastardly plot been uncovered? By the super sleuths at the oft-wrong Republican blog ToTheRight. They’re all excited over there about what they think is a big scoop:

The evidence is quite clear. ColoradoPols.com, Colorado Media Matters, and ColoradoConfidential.org are funded primarily by Tim Gill, Jared Polis, and Pat Stryker. Any weak claims of impartiality or nonpartisanship from any of these sites should not be believed.

Good try, Nancy Drew, but Colorado Pols isn’t funded by anyone. Our only revenue comes from paid advertising. That’s it. We’ve never had financial backing at any point, nor is it required to do what we do; it really doesn’t cost much money to keep a blog running every month.

We’d normally ignore ToTheRight, because they’re usually wrong about whatever they post and we don’t want to get both of their readers too excited. They’ve also always had a weird obsession with Colorado Pols – they even have a special section dedicated to us, which is kind of creepy.

You may remember ToTheRight as the same blog that had the big scoop about Jane Norton being named Bob Beauprez’s running mate (wait, that didn’t happen?). ToTheRight is also the same blog that “broke the story” of a press conference in which Beauprez’s campaign was going to produce the widow of a man who was allegedly killed in a traffic accident involving Bill Ritter decades ago in Africa. That press conference, of course, didn’t happen either.

But since ToTheRight quoted an erroneous National Review story, we felt inclined to defend ourselves.

Despite the insistence of the authors of ColoradoPols.com that the site is non-partisan, during the last election it became increasingly clear that the site was nothing more than a vehicle to release opposition research on Republican candidates into the mainstream.

The reality of the matter is that ColoradoPols was a stealth project launched with the intention of manipulating media coverage in Colorado to favor Democrats. John J. Miller explained the forces at work behind the scenes in the article “The Color Purple” in the latest issue of National Review:

“The mini-Soroses of Colorado [Gill, Stryker, & Polis] aren’t merely dabbling in elections – they’re building a permanent infrastructure. `We are finally realizing that how we win is by creating an envrionment of fear and respect,’ boasted Gill adviser Ted Trimpa – described by one politico as `the Karl Rove of Colorado’ – to the Bay Area Reporter, a gay newspaper in San Francisco earlier this year.”

“They’ve established several websites, including Coloradopols.com, that have started to shape political coverage in the state.”

Investigation has revealed a tangled web of paid, liberal bloggers in the state of Colorado who have taken advantage of loopholes in campaign finance laws to obscure the flow of money. Under the guise of “nonpartisan groups,” Tim Gill has been able to subsidize and fund a number of liberal bloggers including ColoradoPols.com.

We don’t know what kind of “investigation” was undertaken here, but it was about as accurate as a Jake Plummer pass. We haven’t seen the National Review article, because you can’t get it online unless you are a subscriber, but nobody at the Review EVER contacted us for comment.

The Review apparently just printed what someone else said, as though it must have been true because they said it. What if that person had said that Colorado Pols was funded by Vladimir Putin and was a secret attempt to introduce communism in Colorado? Would they have printed that, too?

A little publicized fact is that both of the known authors of ColoradoPols.com, Jason Bane and Leslie Robinson (formerly of the Howard Dean for President campaign), receive “stipends” for blogging in the amount of $1,500 per month along with free access to research tools such as LexisNexis. This payment is provided through a group called The Center for Independent Media, ostensibly a “nonpartisan” group that just happens to do nothing but employ full-time liberal bloggers. The Center for Independent Media also employs the entire gaggle of liberal bloggers at ColoradoConfidential.org.

Jason Bane does write for Colorado Pols and Colorado Confidential, but Leslie Robinson has never written for Colorado Pols (unless it has been in a diary, which anyone can do). This connection is irrelevant anyway, because Colorado Pols has been in existence since December 2004 and Colorado Confidential only started up this summer. We’ve been here for a long time – long before most other active blogs today.

Furthermore, Colorado Media Matters is the primary advertiser on ColoradoPols.com and is subsidizing the site in that manner in addition to directly paying the authors via The Center for Independent Media.

Wait…what? We thought it was Gill-Stryker-Polis who were subsidizing Colorado Pols? This is getting confusing.

The truth is that Colorado Media Matters is a paid advertiser on Colorado Pols, and has been for several months. Colorado Pols is the largest political blog in Colorado, hands down, which is why Colorado Media Matters advertises with us.

For those still in doubt; keep in mind that Leslie Robinson, a former blogger for the Dean campaign and author for ColoradoPols, should be familiar with the tactic of covertly paying bloggers. After all, that tactic was invented by the Dean campaign and we suspect that Tim Gill is simply picking up where Dean left off.

Again, Robinson has never been an “author for ColoradoPols.” Neither has Howard Dean. Or Bill Clinton. Or Walter Mondale.

The evidence is quite clear. ColoradoPols.com, Colorado Media Matters, and ColoradoConfidential.org are funded primarily by Tim Gill, Jared Polis, and Pat Stryker. Any weak claims of impartiality or nonpartisanship from any of these sites should not be believed.

Just because you create a neat little flow chart doesn’t mean you have “evidence” (although, in a perfect world, flow charts would be the definitive logic), and there’s no evidence here.

To repeat, Colorado Pols is NOT funded by anyone other than paid advertisers (and never has been), and there is no evidence to the contrary.

Colorado Pols has been the target of intense scrutiny for years, whether it was Gov. Bill Owens telling state employees not to read the site or the Rocky Mountain News going to great lengths to track down the people behind the site.

Despite all of that, Colorado Pols has continued to grow and flourish as the most widely read and discussed political Web site in Colorado, and a place where people from both sides of the aisle can come to discuss politics.

Colorado Pols had more than 60,000 unique visitors in October alone – and we continue to grow every month – which makes us larger than most weekly and monthly newspapers in the state. Like anything else in life, when you’re on top, everybody tries to knock you down.