August 17, 2016 12:28 PM UTC

Get More Smarter on Wednesday (August 17)

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• by: Colorado Pols

Happy Flag Day…in Bolivia. 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 nominee Donald Trump has made some major changes at the top of his campaign as the candidate pledges to increase his level of Trumpiness in the final months of the election cycle. As Chris Cillizza writes for “The Fix”:

“I am who I am,” Trump said. “I’ve gotten here in a landslide and we’ll see what happens.”

What that quote — and the subsequent staff moves — should tell you is that Trump believes he made a mistake in bowing to establishment pressure and bringing in a veteran hand like Manafort to oversee things. Trump sees his current problems in the race as deriving not from being too much of himself but from not being enough of himself.

What moving out Manafort and elevating Conway and Bannon should tell you is that Trump has decided that he is going to run the last three months — or so — of the campaign on his own terms. Win or lose, he is going to go out being himself.

If you come across a Republican weeping quietly in the fetal position today, try to give them an encouraging pat on the back or something.

And if you see Sen. Cory Gardner, it’s probably best that you just not use the “T” word. Gardner quietly announced his support for Trump on Friday, but the lede was so buried that the original story didn’t get widespread attention until Tuesday.

► New polling results from Quinnipiac University show that Hillary Clinton maintains a  double-digit lead over Donald Trump in Colorado. Quinnipiac has Clinton up 49-39 in Colorado; 47-44 in Iowa; and 50-38 in Virginia. Quinnipiac’s numbers in Colorado are in the same ballpark as the Real Clear Politics polling average of Clinton +11.

Get even more smarter after the jump…

IN CASE YOU ARE STANDING NEAR A WATER COOLER…

► The Aurora School Board continues to do everything in its power — which isn’t much, sadly — to try to compel con-artist Eric Nelson to resign his seat. As the Aurora Sentinel reports:

Former APS Superintendent John Barry, who moved on from the district three years ago, reiterated Tuesday what the majority of the school board and several community members have already made clear this summer: Nelson should cease his work on the school board because of his fictitious resume and falsified military record…

…Later in the board meeting, Board directors voted 5-2 to officially censure Nelson for the remainder of his time on the board. Nelson was elected to a four-year term in 2013. Yamrick and Nelson cast the dissenting votes on the censure.

Brandon Eyre, legal counsel for APS, said at a previous APS board meeting that the censure is largely symbolic. The board previously stripped Nelson of his duties as the board’s secretary and prohibited him from identifying himself as a member of the school board at public functions, among other sanctions.

Serving on the Aurora School Board is an unpaid position, and Nelson has zero political future in Colorado (or anywhere else), so it’s hard to see why he still insists on being little more than a nuisance at this point. Nelson has even been prohibited from publicly identifying himself as a school board member.

► A group of Progressive political organizations has come out in opposition to Amendment 69; critics say the single-payer health care proposal is well-intentioned but flawed in its wording.

► Larimer County Republicans are concerned that President Obama is forcing children to “Pray in Muslim.”

► Why, Larry Mizel?

► Colorado voters will get to vote on a ballot measure about other ballot measures. As the Denver Post reports:

A state constitutional amendment to make it harder to amend the Colorado constitution will appear on the November ballot, the Colorado Secretary of State’s office announced Tuesday.

Backers of the “Raise the Bar” campaign submitted nearly 184,000 signatures on Aug. 5. A 5 percent random sample of the signatures projected the number of valid signatures to be greater than 110 percent of the total number of signatures required for placement on the ballot, the secretary of state said.

The initiative will be called Amendment 71 on the ballot.

“Coloradans are tired of seeing their constitution pummeled with the latest fad ideas and bloated with permanent, unworkable schemes,” campaign co-chair and Summit County Commissioner Dan Gibbs said. “The voices throughout Colorado agree, it’s time to raise the bar and make it more difficult to amend our constitution.”

The point of Amendment 71 is not to restrict citizen initiatives in general; rather, the idea is to make it more difficult to make Constitutional changes through ballot measures.

► There’s plenty of out-of-state money flowing into Colorado over a ballot measure that would raise the minimum wage to $12-per-hour.

► The month of July set a new record for travelers passing through the Eisenhower Tunnel in Summit County.

OTHER LINKS YOU SHOULD CLICK

► Jefferson County Republicans are opening a new field office for the Trump/Pence Presidential campaign this weekend. Make sure you get a tetanus shot before you enter this particular building.

► Donald Trump is striking out in his bid to appeal to Mormon voters.

ICYMI

► Swimmer Missy Franklin is back in Colorado after a disappointing finish in the Rio Olympics.

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