Author Archives: Heidi Beedle

Boebert Introduces Legislation to Stop Abortions for Immigrants

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  by: Heidi Beedle December 16, 2022 at 9:13 AM MST

(“Turning down the temperature” — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) has introduced legislation to ban taxpayer-funded abortions for undocumented immigrants, according to a news release. This legislation comes after guidance from the Biden administration last month that was designed to ensure access to reproductive health care for unaccompanied minors.

According to the ACLU, “On November 10, 2022, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) announced new guidance to ensure that unaccompanied immigrant minors have access to abortion while in ORR shelters awaiting reunification with family in the United States. The policy requires ORR to prioritize placing pregnant immigrant youth in shelters in states where abortion has not been banned, but if a minor is placed in a shelter in a state with restrictive abortion laws and requests an abortion, the policy requires timely transfer to another state to access this care.”

The proposed legislation has support from Colorado’s entire Republican congressional delegation, including Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO). “The Biden administration is unlawfully using taxpayer money to transport pregnant, illegal alien children across state lines for late-term abortions,” said Boebert in a news release. “My colleagues and I have introduced bicameral legislation to end these illegal and horrific policies once and for all. Taxpayer money should never fund abortions, whether for citizens or non-citizens. Our priority at the southern border should be security and peace, not death and destruction.”

The 1976 Hyde Amendment already prevents federal funds from being used for elective abortions. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Hyde Amendment “blocks federal funds from being used to pay for abortion outside of the exceptions for rape, incest, or if the pregnancy is determined to endanger the woman’s life, resulting in dramatically limited coverage of abortion under Medicaid and other federal programs.”

According to the ACLU, many of the undocumented children qualify for those Hyde Amendment exceptions. “This new policy is an essential step in protecting the health and well-being of this marginalized population,” reads a Nov. 21 news release. “ORR is the government authority in charge of caring for unaccompanied immigrant minors who are detained after crossing the border to find their families in the U.S. and to seek a safer, better life. Unfortunately, many of these young people experience sexual assault in their countries of origin or on the perilous journey to the U.S., and some may enter ORR custody pregnant. This policy will help ensure that any minor who is pregnant is able to quickly and confidentially access abortion care, if she believes that is the right decision for herself and her future. Pregnant immigrant minors deserve to have their bodily autonomy respected, including while in government custody.”

(more…)

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Ordinance Would Allow $100,000 Penalties Against Any Abortion Clinic in Pueblo

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  by: Heidi Beedle November 30, 2022 at 10:25 AM MST

(One election away from your town? — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

The Pueblo City Council will vote on an anti-abortion ordinance during their upcoming work session on Dec. 12. Introduced by Councilor Regina Maestri, the ordinance passed its first reading during Monday’s Council meeting. The background paper, included in the meeting minutes, notes, “legal Staff does not recommend approval of this ordinance.”

Recently, Pueblo’s City Council meetings have been heavily attended by anti-abortion activists who oppose a new abortion clinic slated to open in the Bessemer neighborhood. Currently, patients seeking access to abortion care must drive an hour north to Colorado Springs.

The proposed ordinance cites federal obscenity laws passed in 1948 to empower “any person, other than the state, its political subdivisions, including the city Pueblo, and any officer or employee or agent of a state or local governmental entity in this state” to take civil action against abortion clinics that use the mail to receive any item “designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” Successful civil actions against abortion providers would lead to “statutory damages in an amount of not less than $100,000 for each violation.”

Abortion advocates question whether any kind of municipal ordinance that attempts to contravene Colorado’s Reproductive Health Equity Act, which enshrines the right to an abortion in Colorado law, is legal.

“My understanding is that it will not hold up in court,” says Karen Middleton, president of abortion advocacy group Cobalt. “I do not believe that they can try to restrict access to abortion care, whether it’s through the ordinance or zoning or whatever they’re going to do. I do not believe that they can limit this kind of access by saying you can’t have access in the city.”

The debate around the CARE [Clinics for Abortion and Reproductive Excellence] clinic has galvanized both local and out-of-state anti-abortion activists.

Leading local efforts is Forging Pueblo, a group whose mission statement mirrors those of the Seven Mountain dominionists, and includes on its board of directors Tamra Axworthy, the executive director of Pueblo’s A Caring Pregnancy Center, an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center, and Rep. Stephanie Luck (R-Penrose).

Out-of-state activists include Mark Lee Dickson, the director of Right to Life of East Texas and founder of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Initiative. Dickson, a self-described “36-year-old virgin,” touted his success in convincing municipalities across the country to restrict abortion access, including recently in Hobbs, New Mexico.

Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson addressing Pueblo City Council.

“What we’re seeing [is that] over 60 cities throughout the United States have passed ordinances that address abortion access within their communities,” said Dickson during Monday’s council meeting. “The largest is Lubbock, Texas, population 264,000. The smallest is Impact, Texas, population 20. This is something that we’re seeing happening, not just in Texas, not just in Nebraska, Louisiana, Iowa, Ohio. We’re seeing it in New Mexico, and there is interest here in Pueblo, Colorado, because an abortionist in Bellevue, Nebraska, wants to move here and open up shop. Now, part of that is my fault. We started a petition to outlaw abortion in Bellevue, Nebraska, and within days of starting that petition, [Dr. LeRoy] Carhart started a GoFundMe page about moving to Pueblo, Colorado. The ordinance that has been given to you guys is an ordinance that has been drafted by the same attorney that has helped me in over 60 cities.”

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New Aurora PD Chief: History of Misconduct and InfoWars Visits

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  by: Heidi Beedle November 17, 2022 at 2:12 PM MST

(Speechless in Aurora. CLICK HERE for more background — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Aurora’s new interim police chief with Alex Jones.

Aurora’s newly appointed interim police chief, Art Acevedo, in addition to recently being fired by the city of Miami, has a history of misconduct and was a frequent guest on InfoWars, founded by conspiracist Alex Jones, who was ordered by a Connecticut court last month to pay hundreds of millions to Sandy Hook families for falsely saying the 2012 school massacre was a hoax.

Acevedo began his career in law enforcement as part of the California Highway Patrol (CHP). In 2004 the Los Angeles Times reported that Acevedo “has been investigated recently for allegedly showing nude photographs of a fellow CHP officer to other high-ranking officers while on duty. Assistant Chief Art Acevedo is the subject of a $5-million civil claim involving the woman with whom he allegedly had an affair in 1995.”

According to the Times, claims filed with three state agencies alleged that Acevedo kept sexually explicit Polaroid photographs of the woman in the glove box of his state-issued car and showed them to other supervisors after the affair ended. Two CHP captains allegedly said Acevedo showed them the pictures, including one in which the woman is performing a sexual act on him. Acevedo denied showing the photos to other officers to the Sacramento Bee.

In 2007, Acevedo was hired as chief of the Austin Police Department. In 2016, the Austin American Statesman reported that Acevedo was “reprimanded, stripped of five days’ pay and warned his job is in jeopardy after his boss said he didn’t follow orders to stop discussing the controversial police shooting of an unarmed teen in February. At the center of the penalty against the chief, City Manager Marc Ott said Acevedo had been insubordinate.”

While serving as the Austin PD chief, Acevedo was a regular guest on Alex Jones’ InfoWars program. In October, Jones was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to families of victims of the Sandy Hook School shooting, for falsely claiming they were actors who staged the shooting as part of a government plot to seize Americans’ guns. Jones was recently ordered to pay an additional $473 million in punitive damages.

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‘2,000 Mules’ Beats a Dead Horse

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  by: Heidi Beedle May 5, 2022 at 9:12 AM MDT

(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

It was a packed house at the Cinemark Tinseltown theater in Colorado Springs for Monday’s premiere of conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s new film, 2,000 Mules. D’Souza’s film is the latest attempt by conservatives at questioning the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, which has been the subject of numerous forensic audits — that failed to show evidence of fraud — in states like Arizona and Michigan.

D’Souza assembled a panel of conservative thought leaders from Salem Media Group that included racial slur enthusiast Dennis Prager, virulent transphobe Charlie Kirk, protester-punching Eric Metaxas, who is a co-defendant in the defamation lawsuit brought by former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer, and Larry Elder to review his evidence.

D’Souza works with Catherine Engelbrecht of the group True the Vote, and Greg Phillips, a data expert who collected anonymous cell phone data to identify repeat visitors to ballot drop-off boxes in battleground states, a practice called “geo fencing.”

“So there are two independent lines of evidence obtained by the election intelligence organization that’s called True the Vote,” said D’Souza told KNUS radio host George Brauchler, during a May 2 on-air discussion of the film. “They got a giant amount of cell phone geo tracking data. This is the data that shows the movement of cell phones. And they bought the data from October 1, 2020, through the election. Now they sort of this data, they ran a kind of a search algorithm looking for these mules. Now, what’s a mule? A mule is a paid political operative, typically hired by a left-wing organization to dump fraudulent and illegal ballots into mail-in drop boxes, typically in the middle of the night. … Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote coined the term and when I say ‘coined’ it as she lifted it from, you know, drug trafficking and sex trafficking in human trafficking where the mule is kind of the go-between. So she basically just applied the term to this area to ballot trafficking in which we have people doing exactly the same thing. They’re serving as mules.”

D’Souza, who was pardoned by Donald Trump in 2018 for a 2014 campaign finance violation, claims that a shadowy network of nonprofits used paid ballot “mules” to distribute enough false ballots in battleground states to swing the results of the 2020 election.

This is simply the latest conspiracy theory to be trotted out for conservative audiences that can’t get enough relitigation of 2020.

(more…)

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