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Unbeknownst to us, apparently you can buy a “subscription” to Colorado Pols for your Amazon Kindle: Product Description Colorado’s most-read political blog, featuring news, opinion and inside information from both sides of the political aisle. Kindle blogs are fully downloaded onto your Kindle so you can read them even when you’re not wirelessly connected. And […]

Republican Rep. Cory Gardner is only entering his second full term in Congress, but he’s already confusing himself with some other Cory Gardner.

This week Gardner and some guy named Tim Griffin (apparently a Congressman from Arkansas) sent a letter to President Obama demanding answers in Monday’s State of the Union speech. Here’s how the press release begins:

Congressmen Cory Gardner (CO-04) and Tim Griffin (AR-02) issued the following statements after sending a letter to President Obama requesting that he be forthcoming in this State of the Union (SOTU) regarding our national debt, Medicare and Social Security:

“This President has claimed to be one of the most transparent in history, yet his healthcare overhaul was passed behind closed doors and ended up cutting $500 billion from Medicare,” Gardner said. “The American people deserve better than that. The State of the Union is President Obama’s chance to come clean and lay out an honest plan for protecting Medicare and Social Security, which is something he failed to do during his first term.”[Pols emphasis]

That’s funny! You know why it’s funny? It’s funny because Gardner was a big supporter of  the infamous “Ryan Plan” that would have gutted Medicare to the bone and slashed nearly $800 billion from Medicaid as well. It’s funny because he’s demanding that President Obama protect what Gardner himself is trying to unravel. It’s funny because “Medicare and Social Security,” has been under assault…from House Republicans like Gardner.

Or maybe that was some other Cory Gardner storming the gates of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in 2011.

We’d call this the height of hypocrisy, but this is so ridiculously absurd that even the word “hypocrisy” would want to distance itself from Gardner.

You go, Cory! Demand that our President protect America from Cory Gardner. Both of them. Either of them. Whatever.

The Hill–there’s a chance that we’ll be referring back to this story for a long, long time:

Even as Republican officials maintain the GOP majority is safe, several lawmakers and longtime activists warn of far-reaching political ramifications if voters perceive Republicans as botching consequential talks on the debt ceiling, sequestration and a possible government shutdown.

“Majorities are elected to do things, and if they become dysfunctional, the American people will change what the majority is,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a House deputy majority whip and a former National Republican Congressional Committee chairman, told The Hill. [Pols emphasis]

Concerns on the right stem from a public perception that House Republicans were to blame – because of poor leadership strategy and rank-and-file dissent – for bringing the country to the edge of the fiscal cliff late last month.

As this fine reporting by The Hill’s Alexandra Jaffe makes clear, the House GOP majority is torn by two competing and mutually exclusive assumptions. On one side, you have an ideologically rigid conservative wing of the majority, still feeling emboldened after large gains made in 2010 and in redistricting in many states, who are absolutely determined to carry out their ideologically-driven agenda–regardless of public opinion, or short-term consequences for the U.S. economy.

On the other side, you have at least some practically-minded Republicans who realize coming out of 2012 that they have already overplayed their hand.

Conventional wisdom, backed by hard numbers, suggests that Republicans have enjoyed enough success with congressional redistricting in recent decades–though not in Colorado–to create an extremely durable GOP House majority. The simplest evidence for this is the 2012 national popular vote, which re-elected Barack Obama by nearly five million votes, while also re-electing 2010’s “Tea Party” GOP House majority more or less intact.

Democrats need to net 17 districts to take back the House in 2014, widely considered a significant hurdle to overcome.

But the party has identified “30 districts where the [GOP] incumbent [won by] less than 10 percent and an additional 18 districts that we think can perform better” in a non-presidential election year, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) said recently.

And it’s in those districts – where Republicans don’t have a deep base of voters to rely on – that a repeat disaster like the fiscal-cliff fight could matter. [Pols emphasis]

We haven’t seen the list of 2014 Democratic pickup opportunities mentioned above, but we fully expect it to include both Colorado’s Third and Sixth Districts. Although Republican incumbents held these seats in 2012, every election cycle under the current maps will remain hotly competitive in both. If Democrats picked up one or both of those seats in 2014, and that level of success was replicated across the country in other swing district races…

Seriously, folks, what must happen before conventional wisdom is forced to reassess?

We weren’t the only observers who thought that the National Rifle Association jumped the shark when CEO Wayne LaPierre laid out his absurd plan to place armed guards in every school. If you thought the NRA couldn’t get more absurd, well, check out their new ad via CNN

The National Rifle Association released a new television commercial Tuesday night charging President Barack Obama of hypocrisy for being “skeptical” about placing armed guards at schools, while his own two daughters are protected by the U.S. Secret Service.

“Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” a narrator says in the 30 second ad. “Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools, when his kids are protected by armed guards at their school.”