Author Archives: Jason Salzman

(Seriously? — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Sounding like former President Donald Trump equating people on both sides of the white supremacist march in Charlottesville in 2017, Vincent Bzdek, the executive editor of Republican billionaire Phil Anschutz’s media outlets in Colorado, said earlier this month that he’s “not sure” he sees a distinction among CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.

Asked by right-wing KNUS host George Brauchler April 18 if he sees a “distinction between a CNN and MSNBC and Fox,” Vincent Bdzek replied, “I’m not sure I see a distinction.”

“And I think there are, you know, activist kind of journalists on the other side of the equation, and that needs to stop as well, I think,” Bzdek explained on the radio. “And, you know, there’s a lot of like, ‘Well, it’s the truth. And we’re right. And I have moral authority.’ I don’t buy that. You know, that’s not journalists’ jobs. Journalists’ jobs are not to be activists and not to really, you know, get into the story. So I do worry about a double standard here. We’re focused on [Fox News] right now because of the [Dominion] lawsuit. But some of those other people, you know, there’s also some accountability they need as well.”

What kind of journalist isn’t sure Fox News stands alone in spreading falsehoods, lies, and conspiracy theories, and undermining journalism and democracy as we want them to be?

Bzdek is worried about a “double standard?”

Who’s the MSNBC or CNN equivalent of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, or Laura Ingraham? MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell? CNN’s Anderson Cooper or Wolf Blitzer? It’s laughable to put them in the same paragraph.

Fox News argued to a judge that Carlson was an entertainer, not a journalist, while his colleague Sean Hannity admitted the same, after CNN broke the story of his text exchange with Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in which he asked the Republican how he could help.

Name one story where the level of misinformation gets anywhere near what we regularly see on Fox News. Covid. Insurrection. Conspiracies. Much more.

MSNBC is progressive, and Bzdek expressed concern about its coverage of alleged collusion between Trump and Russia. He’s entitled to that criticism, but seriously? Is MSNBC anywhere near “the other side of the equation” to Fox News?

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(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Every second Saturday of the month at its headquarters on 17th Avenue, the Independence Institute hosts a “Barter Market,” ostensibly for freedom-loving citizens to exchange goods and avoid sales tax. Items listed as either on offer or requested at the monthly gathering include organic local food items, homemade candles and guitar lessons, but also more conspiracy-minded products like “EMF protection clothing,” chlorine dioxide (a dangerous solution billed as a cure-all, including for COVID), and accounting services to “opt out of the IRS.”

Dig into it a bit further and you’ll find that the market was organized in part by a national far-right anti-government group called People’s Rights. It was founded by Ammon Bundy, who helped lead two armed stand-offs against federal law enforcement, first at his father Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch in 2014, and then in Oregon in 2019. Bundy explains his group as a network you can call upon to “defend your rights,” i.e. show up armed and en masse, when law enforcement knocks at your door. He uses the example of his militia members responding to a call from a fellow member who has Child Protective Services and law enforcement officers at their home to remove a child.

This upcoming Saturday morning, in addition to possibly picking up a tinfoil hat, you can catch a “Sovereignty 101” presentation sponsored by a man who claims the United States is actually only Washington, D.C., insists that American citizenship is a fiction, and promotes his training with a flyer indicating that the U.S. Civil War never ended.

This is what you get from the Independence Institute, a multi-issue advocacy organization pushing anti-government initiatives on multiple fronts in Colorado. The outfit, which is the Colorado affiliate of the Koch-funded State Policy Network, presents itself as being somehow more rational, safer, and funnier than extremist conservatives. It sponsors a TV show on public television, often featuring serious and entertaining discussions. Its board of trustees includes establishment figures like former Colorado Treasurer Mark Hillman and GOP strategist Dick Wadhams, who loves to throw embarrassing public tantrums about Trump’s poison-pill effect on Republicans.

Its leader, Jon Caldara, drinks bourbon and chit-chats on panels and at conferences, but you get the sense he’d rather be crouched in the back of the room, shooting spitballs through a plastic straw. He may be the best in Colorado punditry at delivering one-line commentary that’s obnoxiously effective. And often offensive. Hence he was once even fired as a columnist from the thick-skinned Denver Post.

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(Heidi Ganahl’s angel investor is moving on — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

When Colorado Republican mega-donor Steve Wells turns his attention to the immigration problems along the southern border, he concludes that “everything that’s going on is extremely intentional.”

What does this mean to Wells, who’s amassed a fortune from ranching and oil-and-gas-related activities in northern Colorado?

Among other thoughts, he baselessly believes the federal government could be purposefully using undocumented immigrants to line the pockets of the Social Security program, rather than solve immigration problems.

“One of the things I want the people out there to understand is that when you all of these people that are here illegally that are working, the majority of them do not get cash,” Wells told KNUS talk radio host George Brauchler last month. “You know, we’ve always heard that story. I have never met anybody that pays their employees cash that are illegal. But here’s what happens, George. These guys can go, when they come here, they can go get a Social Security card. If they go to your business, and you run that card and it’s a bad card, they just come back within an hour with another one. So then you hire them. They go to work. Understand these people, the 10 or 11 million, whatever that number is in this country, are paying into the Social Security system that are never going to gain from it, ever. So it’s not in the Fed’s best interest to tell them no. And to go away.”

Wells, who didn’t immediately return a call for comment, is fighting back, in part, by throwing money at right-wing radio station KNUS, according to Brauchler.

Broadcasting from El Paso last month, Brauchler thanked Wells for using his political group to pay for Brauchler’s trip to El Paso, where KNUS hosts delivered on-the-ground commentary and media stunts. Wells’ Independent Expenditure (IEC) group, Deep Colorado Wells also paid for fellow KNUS host Steffan Tubbs, former Denver ICE Field Director John Fabbricatore, and others to go to El Paso, according to Brauchler.

Deep Colorado Wells was established to “support conservative candidates that believe in restoring Colorado values and defeating Democrats that have destroyed our Colorado way of life,” according to campaign finance documents.

Wells spent millions of dollars opposing Gov. Jared Polis and supporting Republican Heidi Ganahl in a failed effort to score a GOP win in Colorado last election.

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(Garbage in, garbage out – Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Bob Schaffer, LPR board chairman..

At least 18 graduates of Colorado’s most prominent conservative training program are media figures who, over the decades, have mostly dragged the Republican Party to the right, initially helping energize Tea Party Republicans to win elections but now contributing to the party’s current isolation, infighting, and increasing irrelevance.

Graduates of the training, called the Leadership Program of the Rockies (LPR), mostly populate right-wing talk radio shows and podcasts.

Two of the first LPR media yappers to have an impact in Colorado were Jason Worley and Ken Clark, who took over KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado in 2011 from founder Jim Pfaff, a hard-right social conservative, and helped shove fellow Tea Partiers toward future Sen. Cory Gardner, who in turn would bear hug the Tea Party on air.

It worked, as Gardner rode the Tea Party/Anti-Obamacare wave into the Senate.

Media Platforms Promote GOP Extremism in Blue State

But it’s been pretty much downhill from there, as LPR graduates in the media have largely pushed conservatives further and further to the right, as the state has veered more and more to the left, culminating in the disaster Republicans currently face: They hold not a single statewide governing body or have any office holder elected in a statewide election.

Bob Schaffer, the LPR’s board chair, says LPR’s goal isn’t to assist the Republican Party anyway. It looks to recruit people with an established “leadership profile” in any area of civic life, including the media, he says.

But the program is aimed partially at spawning media figures, he said. It does this by “empowering individuals to be effective leaders” in civic affairs broadly, including in “health care and academia and ministry and education and — or just, anywhere — in the Scouts, in the nonprofit world or in the media.”

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(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Jimmy Sengenberger is best known as a far-right opinion monger on talk radio station KNUS and as a right-wing contributor to Colorado Politics, which is owned by billionaire GOP donor Phil Anschutz.

On Dec. 30, at the bottom of an article published in the Denver Gazette, also owned by Anschutz via Clarity Media, he’s identified not as an opinion columnist but as “an investigative journalist, public speaker, and host of ‘The Jimmy Sengenberger Show.’” The article doesn’t appear in the opinion section of the website, despite the headline, “Nothing Extreme About Parental Rights.”

As investigative journalists ourselves, we couldn’t help but notice some differences between our approach to reporting versus his.

When reporter Heidi Beedle asserted in her Dec. 1 article that groups like Colorado Parent Advocacy Network (CPAN) and FAIR [Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism] have an anti-LGBTQ activist agenda, she provided evidence in the form of direct quotes from group leaders and citations of other news reporting.

Beedle’s reporting — and characterization of these groups as “conservative” — is backed up by facts and quotes.

Sengenberger states without evidence that “none of these groups are extremist.”

He writes that the Colorado Times Recorder “attempted to paint CPAN as a right-wing extremist group working to undermine public education and harm the LGBTQ community. The site grouped CPAN with the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, Advocates for D20 Kids, and the longstanding Independence Institute. None of these organizations are extremist.”

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(Would Jesus steal elections? — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Colorado Christian University (CCU) is “honestly, the safest campus in Colorado because we’re deeply committed to Jesus,” said Jeff Hunt, a CCU leader on his podcast last month. “There’s not a lot of craziness going on.”

Hunt didn’t respond to an email seeking data to back up the claim, which he made on his Frontier Freedom Hour at 11 minutes here.

Hunt, who directs the CCU’s right-wing Centennial Institute, also didn’t supply an answer to the question of why his Christian university would be safer than other Christian universities, like Regis, a Jesuit Catholic institution in northwest Denver, a few miles from the Lakewood home of Hunt’s CCU.

Regis’ mission, as stated on its website, is partly to “embody God’s love in the world,” and it’s “rooted in an Ignatian spirituality of Christian discipleship,” which makes it sound like Regis is as committed to Jesus as CCU.

“As Catholic, part of a global community of faith called to celebrate and embody God’s love in the world, Regis educates diverse students for lives of service and meaning, equips them with knowledge and skills to be discerning persons in solidarity with others, especially all who are poor or whose dignity has been violated, and empowers them to care for the Earth, our common home,” states the Regis website.

CCU’s website contains similar statements, claiming the university “emphasizes development of Christian character and spirituality with the intent of sending graduates with personal Christian commitment and an informed sense of Christian morality into today’s communities and workplaces to provide leadership. CCU emphasizes the development of compassion, social concern, and a sense of biblical justice in the lives of its students.”

Another query that Hunt ignored was whether his own promotion of his religious commitment as somehow better than the religious feeling or ethics of others because it makes his community safer undermines the values of “compassion” and “social concern” that he claims to hold, particularly when there appears to be no data to back up his claim.

At least one member of CCU’s academic team is currently under investigation for several serious crimes. In August a judge ordered Centennial Institute Policy Fellow Jenna Ellis to testify as part of a Georgia grand jury investigation into crimes including, “solicitation of election fraud, conspiracy and making false statements to state and local government bodies.”

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(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Colorado Politics, a digital and print news outlet with a conservative editorial page, has stopped republishing articles from Center Square, a conservative news service that claims to be competing with the Associated Press and other newswires.

The last Center Square article appeared on Colorado Politics’ website on Sept. 21, 2021, the day before the Colorado Times Recorder published an article spotlighting 33 of Center Square’s conservative-leaning news stories on Colorado Politics’ website. The article, which I wrote, cited evidence that some of Center Square’s funders, staffers, and content lean to the Republican right — despite Center Square’s claim that it doesn’t favor conservatives.

Center Square’s parent company, the nonprofit Franklin News Foundation, doesn’t identify its sources of funding for itself or for Center Square, claiming Center Square delivers “objective, balanced” news stories with a “taxpayer sensibility.”

Colorado Politics advising editor Vince Bzdek didn’t respond to requests for comment last year, when my original article was published.

Unanswered questions at the time, when Center Square articles were appearing in Colorado Politics, were whether Colorado Politics would publish news content from Colorado Newsline, which names its funders, including major progressive donors, and produces journalism that’s credentialed by the Colorado Capitol press corps, or from the Colorado Times Recorder, which has undisclosed progressive donors and writes from an openly progressive perspective. Both news sites offer their content for free, as Center Square does.

Bzdek, who served as an editor at the Washington Post and The Denver Post, did not respond to an email last week seeking an explanation for why Center Square’s content was dumped. Colorado Politics Publisher Jared Wright also did not return an email.

Bzdek’s silence on the disappearance of Center Square articles is particularly noteworthy given that Colorado Politics’ conservative editorial stance and its ownership by a GOP mega-donor.

Also, Bzdek has accused Denver media outlets (The Denver Post, The Colorado Sun, Westword, Colorado Public Radio) of having a liberal slant — so you’d think he might welcome the chance to talk about why his outlet scrubbed conservative content from its news site, if his concerns about Center Square’s bias are the reason Center Square articles were dropped from Colorado Politics. (In any case, Bzdek never produced data to back up his claims of partisanship by Denver news organizations.) It’s more likely Bzdek had no role in the decision to stop using Center Square content, but who knows?

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(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

After Trump was blamed for the Republicans’ midterm wipeout in Colorado, multiple leading Republicans gushed on public platforms about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who championed Florida’s notorious ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law, which is seen by advocates as a clear attack on LGBTQ rights.

Speaking on conservative radio the morning after this month’s election, state Sen. Paul Lundeen (R-Monument), who’s the new Republican leader of the state Senate, said the Republican brand is in “disarray,” and DeSantis represents “the emerging Republican brand.”

The ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law, which was condemned by multiple Florida businesses, including Disney, bans discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in public K-3 classrooms. Before it was passed, LGBTQ advocates warned that it was vague enough to potentially apply to all public schools — which turned out to be the case. When the Florida law was rolled out in late June, multiple schools in the state reportedly warned some teachers to remove photos of their same-sex spouses from their desk and flag course material which referenced LGBTQ identities. The bill has since become a template for similar anti-LGBTQ legislation in other states.

On the radio, Lundeen dodged a question about Trump being responsible for Republican woes, and instead praised DeSantis for his overwhelming election victory.

“Ron DeSantis spoke to and promoted and was very specific about the issues that Republicans care about,” Lundeen told KHOW’s Ross Kaminsky Nov. 9. “They care about affordability of life. They care about freedom from government intrusion into their life. They care about being safer in their neighborhoods and their communities. And they care, quite frankly, about having greater authority over their child’s education. So that’s the brand that Ron DeSantis ran on and won four years ago on — and won in a much bigger fashion last night. And I think that is the emerging Republican brand. Going back to the question of brand, I would like to think that we’re going because that’s what we campaigned on, and it didn’t stick.”

Likewise, Republican pundit Dick Wadhams wrote in Colorado Politics Nov. 13 that if DeSantis runs in 2024, “Colorado might be in play.”

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(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Colorado Republicans are saying they want to improve themselves, and a good way to move forward would be for the state’s top-money Republican, Phil Anschutz, to stifle the Colorado Springs Gazette’s impetuous and extremist editorial board, led by editor Wayne Laugesen.

The Gazette board, and especially Laugesen, are a far-right drag on Republicans who need the opposite.

It’s senseless for Anschutz to underwrite the production of rabid anti-abortion, flame-throwing opinions that play an oversized role in defining the Gazette and its affiliated platforms (Colorado Politics, Denver Gazette), which exist, at least in part, to promote conservativism to blue Colorado.

Thanks to the board and Laugesen, the brand of the Gazette is more along the lines of MAGA Trumpism than anything Colorado wants. While a good chunk of the editorial positions aligns with establishment Republicans, the ones that break through and define the platforms are Trumpist.

For those who follow Laugesen, it was no surprise that he turned up at the Jan. 6 insurrection and immediately commented that the culprits were “probably Antifa.”

Before Laugesen attended the Capitol riot (accompanying his wife and there to observe, he claims), the Colorado Springs Gazette had already — quickly and irresponsibly — raised the possibility of election fraud. A Nov. 12, 2020, editorial cited “allegations in multiple lawsuits” — which were all dismissed.

Laugesen, who never disclosed that his wife worked for Trump, sits on the Gazette editorial board along with Ryan McKibben, Chairman, Christian Anschutz, Vice Chairman, Chris Reen, Publisher, and Pula Davis, Newsroom Operations Director. So he’s not ultimately responsible for the self-defeating extremism that pours from the page.

He claims this board is hands-on, developing and approving editorial opinions together. Laugesen told the Colorado Springs Independent, “I have a hand in all editorials as do my five colleagues on the board.”

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(Here’s your sign — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Colorado State Board of Education candidate Peggy Propst is the latest Republican to sound the alarm over Colorado students she claims are dressing as “furries” and want “litter boxes in the bathroom.”

“We have furries in our classrooms, kids that come to school and believe that they want to be treated as a dog or a cat and have litter boxes in the bathroom,” Propst, A Republican, told Winn Tuscon, a right-wing radio show in Arizona Oct. 28. “And this is a real thing.”

Propst cited, “in particular,” parents from one unnamed school in Jefferson County who are demanding a litter box for their daughter.

The Jefferson County School District has denied that students are identifying as furries during the school day. And the allegations are seen by advocates as veiled attacks on LGBTQ students, particularly transgender students.

Nonetheless, the alleged presence of furries and alleged demands for litter boxes in Colorado schools proves to Propst that “parents have got to put their foot down” and demand tax dollars in the form of so-called “vouchers” to remove their students from the public schools — a move that opponents argue would undermine public schools.

Some classrooms in Jefferson County schools have had cat litter since 2017, in case students are locked in a classroom during a shooting. Jefferson County is the district that includes Columbine High School, where a massacre occurred in 1999.

Colorado gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl has been widely criticized for her steadfast — but unsubstantiated — belief, first reported by the Colorado Times Recorder, that Colorado “kids identifying as cats. It sounds absolutely ridiculous, but it’s happening all over Colorado and schools are tolerating it.”

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(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

In a KOA radio interview Tuesday, Colorado congressional candidate Barb Kirkmeyer at first tried to dodge a question about whether she’d sign a bill banning abortion nationally, including in Colorado.

Then, after being pressed, she said, “Quite frankly, I’m going just to tell you. I support saving as many lives as possible. That’s where I’m at.”

For Kirkmeyer, the phrase “saving as many lives as possible” means banning abortion if possible. As she told fellow state senators this year in explaining why she voted against a bill that protected the right to an abortion in Colorado law, “A baby in his mother’s arms should be just as valued as when that baby was in his mother’s uterus.”

Yet, during last week’s debate with her Democratic opponent on 9News, when asked if she’s interested in a national abortion ban, Kirkmeyer replied, “at this point, no.”

She went on to say during the debate, “And I’m going to support whatever saves lives. It’s not an all-or-nothing thing to me. If there’s a way to save some lives, I’m going to work to save some lives.”

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(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

“I’ve always had this test as an elected official that, you know, if you can’t go home and look yourself in the mirror, you probably shouldn’t be doing it, right?” said Colorado congressional candidate Barbara Kirkmeyer earlier this year. “If your children would be embarrassed by what you’ve done, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. I’ve tried to live by that test.”

It’s a fair question, then, to ask why Kirkmeyer, as a Weld County commissioner, continued to reimburse herself for miles driven back and forth to work after Republican state lawmaker John Cooke called it “downright arrogant,” and a fellow Republican on the Weld County Commission, Sean Conway, stated flatly at the time, “I just don’t think it’s appropriate.”

The Greeley Tribune concurred the following year, writing that it wasn’t illegal, but, “We don’t think she should do it.”

Kirkmeyer took advantage of the reimbursements on a grand scale, collecting enough money to buy two new cars — on top of her annual salary as commissioner, which ranged from about $80,000 to $105,000 during her tenure in office beginning in 2009.

Her defense?

“I’ve worn cars out, worn tires out,” Kirkmeyer told the Greeley Tribune in 2017.

Over the course of her 11 years on the commission, from 2009 to 2020, Kirkmeyer banked over $73,000 in tax money for trips to and from work, according to a Colorado Times Recorder analysis of her reimbursement records — the first complete compilation of her expense reports submitted during her tenure as county commissioner from 2009 to 2020. (Expense reports from her first period on the board, from 1993 to 2000, were not reviewed for this article.)

The total mileage for her trips to work and back was about 130,000 miles.

That’s a lot of driving, to be sure, but Kirkmeyer’s critics said 1) she could have lived closer to the office 2) driving to work was part of her job, and, 3) it wasn’t fair for county commissioners to collect money for driving to and from work while other county employees, like sheriff’s deputies, could not.

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(So you don’t have to — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Rep.-elect Lauren Boebert (R-ifle).

You get a sense of what’s coming in U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-CO) new book, My American Life, when the jacket cover brags about her voting to “oppose the presidential electoral certification.” And a blurb from Trump promising that after “reading her story, you will love her as much as I do.”

That’s a big clue that you shouldn’t read this book.

And sure enough, there’s nothing in it for you, trust me, including the forward by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who writes that America “needs more representatives like Lauren.”

More representatives like Lauren?

No one in their right mind would arrive at that conclusion after reading this memoir.

Boebert uses her own life story — massaged with misrepresentations — to glorify some of the worst aspects of American culture, business, and politics.

Her job at McDonald’s is presented as her proof that all you need to do is work hard to succeed in America — even if you drop out of high school like she did. And later when she was working at an energy company, she didn’t need six weeks of parental leave. She was happily back at work after four weeks. “I’m sure Pete Buttigieg will be disappointed,” she writes.

The intense pain of her teen marriage, widely documented, is downplayed instead of used as a warning. “Love at First Sight” is the title of the chapter telling the story of meeting her boorish (and troubled) future husband when she was behind the counter at McDonald’s and he came in for a burger. “What are we doing later?” were Jayson Boebert’s first words to Lauren, who was 17 years old.

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(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

Republican pundit Dick Wadhams says that newly minted Democratic lawmaker Kevin Priola’s decision to leave the Colorado Republican Party because of the party’s support of election deniers has “no credibility” because, in Colorado’s last election, the election deniers “got routed.”

State Rep. Colin Larson went further last week, calling Priola’s decision “political BS” because “[a]nyone in our party carrying the insurrectionist banner was roundly defeated” in the June primary election.

In a letter explaining his move, state Senator Priola, formerly a Republican, wrote that he didn’t want to be “part of a political party” that “continues to peddle claims that the 2020 election was stolen.”

“I was very struck in his letter about citing the election denier issue as one reason he’s leaving the party. Look what happened in Colorado,” Wadhams told KHOW’s Dan Caplis Aug. 23. “The election deniers, the conspiracy theories got routed. I mean, Ron Hanks, Tina Peters, Greg Lopez. And then I guess there were a bunch of local and state legislative primaries where the election deniers got beat. Colorado is a beacon in defeating election deniers and conspiracies. I don’t understand that. That had no credibility with me at all.”

No credibility? Political BS?

Is it credible for Priola to want to run from the Colorado Republican Party in the race to save democracy? Needless to say, if you’ve been following Colorado politics, the facts support Priola here. But in case you’ve been focused elsewhere over the past several years, I’ll explain.

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(Promoted by Colorado Pols)

During a wide-ranging interview with conservative pundit Jon Caldara, Colorado congressional candidate Barb Kirkmeyer said she’d reduce federal spending, in part, by transforming Medicaid into a block grant system, a move that could lead to cuts for low-income Coloradans who rely on the federal-state health care program, say experts.

“I think the other thing we could look at again the Medicaid situation. You know, I’ve been talking with folks about maybe we put that into a block grant, same as what we did with temporary aid for needy families, the Welfare reform stuff, and even with our child welfare, and looking at our child care programs as well,” Kirkmeyer told Caldara. “Looking at block grants. And then having states say, ‘This is what’s best to serve our constituents.’ You know, ‘Here’s the block of money.’ That’s exactly what happened back in late ’90s. Here’s the block of money that comes to the state. States, you still have to match. You don’t get to drop your match just because we are block-granting it to you. But we are going to give you more flexibility to meet the needs of the residents of your state.

“And I think that’s what we need to do with Medicaid.”

In her conversation with Caldara, Kirkmeyer first brought up her Medicaid proposal in response to Caldara’s question (at 18 min 12 sec) about what “on the federal level we should spend less on.”

“I think we need to look at the entitlement programs and get a handle on them,” replied Kirkmeyer. “… I think we need to look at the whole Medicaid situation.”

Converting Medicaid to a block-grant program is a longstanding goal of conservatives and has been denounced by Medicaid proponents as a stealth way to cut the program.

“Block grants are just code for cuts,” said Adam Fox of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative (CCHI), when asked by the Colorado Times Recorder about Kirkmeyer’s proposal. “We saw what would have happened if efforts to repeal the ACA would have been successful, because they would have block granted Medicaid and forced devastating cuts to eligibility and the services available. Block grants are just a way to eviscerate the benefits Coloradans need.”

The primary reason block grants would likely result in cuts for state Medicaid spending is that the Medicaid program, as currently designed, guarantees coverage to all eligible individuals. The program’s funds are not limited and can respond to “fluctuating need; eligibility criteria can be tightened (consistent with federal standards), but coverage cannot be rationed among eligible people on a first-come, first-serve basis,” as explained in a Kaiser Family Foundation report. Block grants, “typically limit the number of people served through priority lists, waiting periods, and by simply closing down enrollment. Individuals generally have no federal right to the services financed through the block grant,” states the report.

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(In the name of all that’s good and decent — Promoted by Colorado Pols)

In his race for the state Senate, Tom Sullivan, who first ran for the state legislature after his son was killed in the Aurora Theater massacre and has made gun safety a top priority ever since, faces a Republican opponent, Tom Kim, who received an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and appears to oppose the basic gun safety measures Sullivan has pushed into Colorado law.

On his campaign website, Kim makes no mention of his stance on guns or his “A” rating from the NRA, but in a May Facebook ad, Kim touts himself as a “gun owner and member of the Centennial Gun Club” and questions whether a fellow Republican supports the Second Amendment.

Kim and Sullivan are competing to represent Senate District 27, which is located in and around Centennial, southeast of Denver.

Kim’s top NRA rating, which was apparently awarded during his Republican primary campaign against JulieMarie Macklin, was based on Kim’s answers to an NRA questionnaire. That’s why his rating is “Aq” on the “Voting Card” below, with the “q” referring to the questionnaire, which was obtained by the Colorado Times Recorder.

Kim’s specific answers to the NRA’s questions were not found, but to obtain an “Aq” rating, based on the NRA’s questions, it’s fair to conclude that Kim answered many if not all of the questions to the approval of the NRA. “Aq” is the highest rating a candidate can receive without having a voting record.

One of the NRA’s questions, for example, asked if Kim would support “mandating the locked storage of firearms in one’s own home?”

Sullivan, who’s currently a state representative, was a co-sponsor of a bill, which became law last year, that required “firearms be responsibly and securely stored when they are not in use to prevent access by unsupervised juveniles and other unauthorized users.”

In another question, the NRA wanted to know if Kim would support any “new restrictions on the purchase and possession of ammunition beyond current law?”

Kim did not return a call to discuss the gun-storage law and to obtain his positions on other gun measures. Sullivan also didn’t return a call for comment.

For his part, Sullivan states on his website that, going forward at the Capitol, he wants to focus, among other things, “on firearm suicide prevention as well as public awareness around responsible firearm ownership.” He says he respects Second Amendment rights.

Kim’s top rating from the NRA means he will likely “not just try to stop the passage of [gun safety] laws but seek to repeal laws that have already been passed,” according to Tom Mauser, whose son died in the Columbine school shooting and is a spokesman for Colorado Ceasefire, a group formed to stop gun violence.

Mauser expects the NRA, which sent out a fundraising appeal three days after the Aurora Theater shooting, to campaign against Sullivan, whom Mauser sees as a “strong advocate” for gun safety and a stark contrast to Kim.

“The NRA has nothing to offer on the gun violence issue,” said Mauser. “They have nothing, other than they want to reverse what’s been passed, and they want to have more people carrying concealed [weapons]. They want to have more people carrying [weapons openly in public]. They want to have teachers armed. To the NRA, the solution is more arms, and I don’t think that’s where most Coloradans are.”

Prior to the pandemic, Kim’s gun club was known for its annual “Machine Gun Santa” event, in which members were invited to bring their children to pose for a picture with St. Nick and an arsenal of fully automatic weapons.

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