September 02, 2016 12:48 PM UTC

Get More Smarter on Friday (September 2)

• 4 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

If you plan on spending any of Labor Day weekend in Denver, you might want to consider alternate forms of transportation (especially on Friday). 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…

► Advisors to Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton are expecting a landslide victory for their candidate in November. The Washington Post examines some new strategies emerging from various Republican Senate candidates that suggests a blowout may be coming:

Senate Republicans have privately polled for months to figure out the best way to survive if Donald Trump continued to be a drag on their down-ballot candidates. They’ve closely studied the lessons of 1996, when the GOP gained Senate seats even as Bob Dole lost the presidency. They’ve weighed the risks of turning off portions of their base against the rewards of winning over voters who are repulsed by their nominee.

Ahead of Labor Day, which marks the start of the fall campaign, Republicans across the country are beginning to put the plan into effect.

“My opponent, Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, is a good person,” John McCain says in a glossy new campaign video. “But, if Hillary Clinton is elected president, Arizona will need a senator who will act as a check, not a rubber stamp, to the White House.”…

…The video, which makes no mention of Trump, is the clearest signal yet that some Senate Republicans in tough races will more visibly break with the nominee in the coming weeks. It posted online just one day after McCain won a competitive primary and within hours of the presidential nominee delivering his hardline immigration speech in Phoenix. McCain skipped that event, opting to stay at his ranch 115 miles to the north in Sedona.

Republicans are also still trying to figure out how to respond to Trump’s strangely-aggressive immigration reform policies.

► Congressman Mike Coffman (R-Aurora) seems to be strategically paralyzed at the moment as his re-election campaign tries to figure out how to approach reporter questions and debate queries.

Get even more smarter after the jump…

IN CASE YOU ARE STANDING NEAR A WATER COOLER…

► If there is a minor controversy about the election “blue book,” then it must be September of an election year.

► Victims of the Aurora Theater Shooting have been ordered to pay substantial court costs and attorney fees as part of what appears to be an effort by Cinemark to discourage lawsuits.

► The Washington Post takes a closer look at how North Carolina ended up getting the smackdown from the Supreme Court over efforts to disenfranchise minority voters:

Critics dubbed it the “monster” law — a sprawling measure that stitched together various voting restrictions being tested in other states. As civil rights groups have sued to block the North Carolina law and others like it around the country, several thousand pages of documents have been produced under court order, revealing the details of how Republicans crafted these measures.

A review of these documents shows that North Carolina GOP leaders launched a meticulous and coordinated effort to deter black voters, who overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. The law, created and passed entirely by white legislators, evoked the state’s ugly history of blocking African Americans from voting — practices that had taken a civil rights movement and extensive federal intervention to stop.

Last month, a three-judge federal appeals panel struck down the North Carolina law, calling it “the most restrictive voting law North Carolina has seen since the era of Jim Crow.” Drawing from the emails and other evidence, the 83-page ruling charged that Republican lawmakers had targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

► Republican Senate candidate Darryl Glenn continues his bizarre quest to spend the majority of his time campaigning in front of small crowds of Republican voters. Glenn is spending Labor Day weekend stumping in Eastern Colorado.

► Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke to a group at the University of Denver on Thursday…but declined to talk about anything anybody might actually care about.

► The FBI released more documents related to Hillary Clinton’s email scandal during her time as Secretary of State.

► Ft. Collins Democrat Pat Stryker is spending big bucks on efforts to help elect Democrats in Colorado and around the country.

► As the Colorado Independent reports, Colorado ranks third among states dealing with negative health impacts from oil and gas operations:

Despite having the toughest oil and gas regulations in the country, Colorado ranks third for adverse health impacts from oil- and gas-related pollution, a new report has found. Denver ranks fifth for metro areas nationwide. [Pols emphasis] 

The Clean Air Task Force and the environmental organization Earthworks collaborated on the project, which used data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s national emissions inventory to isolate the health impacts of smog-forming pollution from the oil and gas industry across the U.S.

“We had been getting questions about the public health impacts of pollution from the oil and gas industry,” said lead author Lesley Fleischman, who works as a research analyst for the Clean Air Task Force. “We designed this study to be able to isolate the public health impact of the smog-forming pollution from the industry.”

The results found that Colorado kids under the age of 18 have 32,477 asthma attacks each year attributable to ozone smog from oil and gas production. In Denver alone, that number is 20,466 attacks. Only Texas and Oklahoma have a higher number of statewide incidents. Denver is outranked by Houston, Dallas, New York and Washington, D.C.

But…but…the oil and gas industry is responsible for 400 billion jobs in Colorado!!!

OTHER LINKS YOU SHOULD CLICK

► Republican John Honeycutt takes his place in a weird tradition of Greeley candidates demanding more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry. 

► Denver voters will get to decide on a question about public marijuana use after all, as Jon Murray writes for the Denver Post:

Days after rejecting a competing measure for the November ballot, the Denver Elections Division on Thursday approved a proposed initiative that would allow social use of marijuana in some businesses.

City voters will decide whether regular businesses, such as bars or cafes or even yoga studios, should be able to create indoor or outdoor consumption areas for bring-your-own marijuana products, under certain conditions. The most significant condition would require that an application for an annual or temporary permit receive backing from a neighborhood group, such as a city-registered neighborhood organization or business improvement district.

ICYMI

► The Presidential campaign of Donald Trump has one — yes, one — field office open in Florida, which is perhaps the most important state in the country this Presidential cycle.

Don’t forget to check out the Get More Smarter Show. You can also Get More Smarter by liking Colorado Pols on Facebook!