Reporters are having a real hard time sorting out Mitt Romney’s position on personhood. Here’s a quick and easy way for journos to think about the issue, and Romney’s evolving stance on it.

Personhood has two tracks: federal and state. At the federal level, proponents are trying to pass a law giving fertilized eggs (or zygotes) the legal rights of a “person,” under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. constitution. At the state level, the personhood campaign wants to pass amendments to state constitutions defining life as beginning at conception.

Romney on federal personhood. Romney has made it clear that he’s currently against federal personhood. This is a flip from his position in 2007, when he stated on national TV that he favored a GOP platform position supporting a “human life amendment” to the U.S. Constitution, which would ban abortion at the federal level. When Romney said this, he believed, like he does now, that life begins at conception, so Romney’s federal ban on abortion, based on his definition of “life,” would have met the requirements of Personhood USA for a national personhood law. But last year at a GOP prez forum, Romney abandoned this position because now thinks adding personhood to the U.S. Constitution could set up a “constituional crisis.”

Romney on state personhood. In October, Romney told Fox News’ Mike Huckabee that he “absolutely” would have signed an amendment to the Massachusetts constitution establishing that life begins a conception. Later, Romney’s spokespeople backed up this position by telling Politico’s Ben Smith and other reporters that Romney supports “efforts to ensure recognition that life begins at conception” and that “these matters should be left up to states to decide.”

Summary:  Romney isn’t completely clear on this issue (I’m rolling my eyes as I write that), but  it’s fair to say that Romney has flip flopped on personhood during his career. It’s also a fact that he’s currently against a federal personhood law but for state-based personhood amendments (consistent with his “life-begins-at-conception” belief and his statement to Huckabee).

One prominent journalist who’s clear on Romney’s personhood stance is Curtis Hubbard, editorial page editor of the centrist-right Denver Post. He qualifies as an expert on personhood, having directed news coverage of the personhood ballot initiative in Colorado in 2010. He recently stated on Colorado Public Television, KBDI, “Romney already came out for personhood at the state level.”

Reporters nationally will have a chance to clarify Romney’s views on personhood Saturday, as they report on Florida’s Personhood USA-sponsored presidential forum. Gingrich, Paul, and Santorum will attend.

Romney will not attend the event, replicating his pattern of skipping such forums in South Carolina and Iowa, but reporters can contrast his views with personhood promoters Gingrich, Paul, and Santorum.

Personhood USA may also hold a prez forum in Colorado, prior to its Feb. 7 caucus. Personhood USA legal analyst Gualberto Garcia Jones emailed me yesterday, in response to my query, that Colorado is a “definite candidate” for a personhood forum.

On KNUS radio this morning, Rep. Doug Lamborn told host Steve Kelley that he wasn’t the only Member of Congress to skip President Barack Obama’s SOTU speech yesterday, implying, perhaps, that he was being singled out unfairly.

“The President didn’t know or care if I was there. And actually I know of others who were not there. I happen to be one who said in advance I wasn’t going to be there.” [laughs]

I called Lamborn’s office to find out whom Lamborn was thinking of. And were the other no-shows protestors?

“There’s no roll-call vote taken,” Lamborn’s Communications Director Catherine Mortensen told me “If someone shows up or doesn’t show up, there’s no record of it.”

She didn’t know which lawmakers Lamborn had in mind, but she did tell me that she’d read press reports that Rep. Tim Scott of South Carolina had considered skipping the event.

Scott was thinking about watching the speech with his brother, but he ended up attending. His idea to be a SOTU no show was not a protest, according to local press reports.

Kelley didn’t ask Lamborn how he knew that Barack Obama didn’t care if he attended the SOTU, but he did ask Lamborn if he thinks he made a difference by not being there:

Lamborn said: “I did get a chance to tell people why I oppose the President so strongly…I feel better.”

I’ve always thought Jon Caldara was wasting his time, in terms of advancing his political agenda, by spending three hours a day, from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., doing his KOA talk radio show.

You’d think he could find a better way to advance evil for three hours every do, wouldn’t you?

Now Caldara, who’s the President of the libertarian Independence Institute, will have those three hours back, since KOA terminated his radio talk show, in favor of a faceless national feed.

I asked Caldara if he thought the radio show was the best use of his time. (He’s said it didn’t pay much.)

“Talk radio is complimentary to what I do as an activist,” he said. “There’s a synergy.”

I asked for specifics on the synergy, but he couldn’t define it, except to say, “I learn more on talk radio than most things.”

I asked Caldara how big his audience was.

“The average size was about 230-250 pounds,” he said. “There’s a lot of fat asses listening to AM radio. What was great was the coverage, because it blasted around the western United States.”

As such, Caldara’s show amped up the right-wing buzz machine sometimes, and being a talk-show host might have shined up Caldara’s image a bit, making him part of the “media.” Maybe this impresses right-donors, but not sane people. They know blasting radio waves doesn’t win very often, which might be part of the reason the GOP likes to form circular firing squads, as Caldara likes to say.

I don’t mean to trash Caldara as a talk-show host. He was funny and pretty well informed without getting lost in the mud below the weeds. He connected well to his three listeners (four, if I checked in).

Too bad he didn’t have more guests on the radio, because his direct questions can be revealing.

This sounds a bit like I’m writing Caldara’s media obituary, which I’m not. Caldara still has his KBDI show, Devil’s Advocate, which should be interprested as literally “advocating for the devil,” as opposed to taking an opposing view. And Caldara has other media projects too, like Complete Colorado and the Colorado News Agency, that he controls at the Independence Institute.

I asked Caldara if  losing his slot on KOA would hurt him politically?

“I don’t think so,” he told me, “because my radio presence isn’t going to go away.” (He’ll be subbing for Rosen, Boyles, and others, and he’ll have a Sunday evening show on KHOW.  Plus he’s “entertaining offers from Playgirl” and “tweeting in his pants right now.”

Asked for the name of the KHOW show, Caldara replied, “Home Gardening Tips with Jon Caldara.”

Had enough? Maybe so if you hate Cadara’s political agenda, but these days, anytime we lose a local voice it’s bad. It’s a shame KOA dumped Caldara.

Sometimes one media outlet says one thing, another says something else, and you’re left saying, WTF.

That’s what happened last week when we heard different news about whether Rep. Robert Ramirez would back legislation this year reducing college tuition for some children of illegal immigrants. The bill is often referred to as a Colorado version of the Dream Act.

The Associated Press reported Monday that Ramirez might support the bill, as long as no tax money goes to students.  Ramirez was working with Democrats and  even writing amendments to try to pass the bill, according to the AP.

Then, on Thursday, three days later, Channel 8 in Grand Junction, delivered a different picture of Ramirez’s thinking. The “actual bill” would “give the right of a citizen to a noncitizen,” Ramirez was quoted as saying, and he opposes this.

Channel 8 mentioned nothing about Ramirez working on amendments, and the piece left you with the impression that Ramirez would definitely vote against the legislation, as he did last year.

He told Channel 8: “I have not seen the new bill, I just have heard what the changes are but they’re so minimal that I don’t think they’ll make a difference.”

So I called Ramirez to find out if he’d soured on the bill during the week, of if the media got something wrong.

He told me both AP and Channel 8 were accurate. How could that possibly be?

Ramirez says the phrase “in-state tuition” means, by definition, that government funds are included. So that’s why he told reporters only citizens should receive in-state tuition.

Ramirez favors tuition breaks for illegal-immigrant students, he told me, but he doesn’t want to call it “in-state tuition.”

“Charge them the actual expense,” he told me. “You don’t have to charge them the exorbitant out of state expense.”

But no matter how you define “in-state tuition,” illegal-immigrant students won’t get any tax money as part of their tuition reduction, under SB-15, which is this year’s version of the “Colorado Asset” bill. “Previous concepts” of this legislation did not remove all tax dollars from the tuition rate that would be offered to illegal immigrants, according a website promoting the bill. This year’s bill does this.

But Ramirez told me that his decision on whether to support Colorado Asset does not hinge solely on the issue of tax dollars. He said there are “other things,” but he didn’t specify what they are. He says he has not seen the bill yet.

Ramirez’s position on the Colorado Asset bill is under scrutiny not only because he could cast a critical vote on the State House education committee, as he did last year, but also because he’s Latino.

Ramirez says his Latino heritage is irrelevant to how he’ll vote on the legislation. He told me he’s American and doesn’t want to “re-segregate” as a Hispanic.

He drives the point home by joking that he didn’t know he was “Latino” until he “started running for office.”

“Prior to that, I was just Bobby Ramirez,” he said on Art Carlson’s online radio program last May 14.

“All of a sudden, it’s a big deal that I’m Hispanic,” he told me. “But I consider myself an American.”

Perhaps it’s this perception of himself that makes him unconcerned about some racial slurs toward Hispanics.

Asked about a story he told on the radio about being called a “wetback” when he was a child, he said:

“I don’t care if someone calls me [a wetback].  I don’t think it’s appropriate. It’s a slur. But I’m not offended by it. It doesn’t bother me. To me that shows your ignorance.”

Ramirez says he’s “very proud to be Hispanic,” as he told the AP in the article Monday.

Not that he thinks Hispanic culture is perfect. He told Carlson in May that some in Mexico are the “nicest people in the world.” But he also said:

“But god forbid [when you are in Mexico] you talk to somebody from Puerto Rico, because they are just horrible people, and they [Mexicans] won’t have anything to do with them. So they are the most divisive group of people. We still fight each other. It’s amazing.”

“Depending on how much money you make, and what part of Mexico you are from, and your bloodline, [Mexicans] are vile to each other,” he said.

Ramirez, whose father is a Mexican immigrant, told Carlson that illegal immigrants are lazy.

“I don’t blame them for trying to come here,” he said. “What I do blame them for is when they get here, they’ve gotten here illegally and expect everything for free. They don’t want to work for it.”

Still, Ramirez understands why companies want to hire Mexicans at a lower wage, and he wants to help them employ Mexicans to work legally in the U.S. by setting up an employment office in Mexico. Responding to a caller on Carlson’s, Ramirez said:

“Or let’s just open up an employment office on the other side of the border. You know? For any of these companies that want to hire people at the lower wage, they go through this employment company who makes sure all the paperwork is processed correctly in the United States, before somebody comes in here. There’s a lot of things we can do that will make enough little changes than can fix our problems. It’s just that nobody is willing to step up and say it or do it.”

Carlson, a conservative, didn’t respond to Ramirez with the how-dare-you-propose-draining-American-jobs line that you might expect from a conservative. Maybe that’s because Ramirez told Carlson stuff like, “Our laws and lawmakers, and the people of this country, are trying to make it easy for everyone in this country but Americans.”

Still, if I were Carlson, I’d want to know how that sentiment squares with what Ramirez told the New York Times back in October:

“We can’t pretend the Latino vote doesn’t exist. It’s time we became the party of inclusion.”

Asked about this, Ramirez said, “I think some kind of compromise  [on Colorado's Asset legislation] is part of making the GOP the party of inclusion.”

Rep. Scott Tipton said in a radio interview last week that Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactors “held up reasonably well” after being struck by an earthquake and Tsunami.

So they could have been flattened, yes. But did they really hold up reasonably well?

It’s widely agreed now that the disaster caused a meltdown in three Fukushima reactors. Over ten thousand people were evacuated, and the fate of dozens of plant workers who experienced serious radiation exposure is unknown but of serious concern (at least three died, but not due to radiation exposure). Elevated levels of radiation have been found in rice, beef, milk, spinach, and tea. Leaks of radioactive material to the ocean and land still threaten fish and wildlife. The reactors remain vulnerable to earthquakes, and cleanup is estimated to take 40 years.

In his Jan. 12 KVNF interview, Tipton wasn’t asked how bad the Fukushima disaster needed to be in order for the reactors to move, in his view, from the “held-up-reasonably-well” category to the “collapsed-horribly-badly” category.

I called Tipton’s office to find out, but I didn’t get a call back.

Tipton made his comments about the world’s second-worst nuclear accident in a discussion of a proposed uranium mill for western Colorado. Tipton supports the mill.

He argued that nuclear power shouldn’t be held back due to the “big fear factor” caused by the Japanese disaster, which, he said, could be avoided if proper attention were paid to geography and safety.

“You know, as you go over into Europe, France is an example, there’s an abundance of nuclear power plants that are providing reliable energy,” Tipton told the KVNF audience. “The big fear factor, which we all understand, was after the tsunami in Japan. Those plants, for the most part, given multiple tragedies, earthquakes and Tsunami coming in, held up reasonably well. We can’t afford to have any sort of uranium leak, obviously. But we can design those plants with due consideration to where they’re going to be put, in terms of the geography that’s there, and to be able to provide reliable energy. I signed the letter in the State Legislature being supportive of the development of the [uranium] mill. When you get on the west end of Montrose County, these are good jobs. And again, we’re taking advantage of new technology, new protective measures, that are able to be put in place to be able to do it in a proper fashion to be able protect all of our varied interests. So it’s something I will be supportive of.”

“Hey everyone, this is Tim Tebow. And you’re listening to Kelley and Company on KNUS.”

You hear that on KNUS’ Kelley and Company many days, and you wonder, did Tebow mean to say, “KHOW.”

That’s Dan Caplis’ radio station, where Caplis promotes Tebow as if he were god.

Or did Tebow mean to say “KOA,” which is the radio station that almost certainly pays big bucks to have Tebow on the air Mondays.

So I called Steve Kelley, who recently returned from a three-day stint in Iowa, to find out how he scored the Tebow promotion, and it turns out Kelley landed Tebow himself to do the blurb for his show.

Around June, Kelley told me, Tebow was promoting his autobiography, Through My Eyes.

“Obviously he wants to get on some of the Christian stations speaking to his audience,” Kelley says. “I just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”

“Salem is a Christian-owned group of stations, and so there’s already a built-in network on the Christian side,” Kelley told me. “And KNUS is on the secular side of Salem Communications.”

Tebow was scheduled to speak on Denver’s KRKS, owned by Salem, which bills itself as offering “life-changing Christian radio broadcasts.” (Salem is known as a right-wing broadcaster.)

“But there were no live shows on KRKS  at the time Tebow was able to call,” Kelley told me. “I was hanging out, and so it was like, hey, it’s Tebow on the line, do you want to do an interview with him. I thought sure, I’ll talk to the kid. He wasn’t nearly as popular as he is know, at least as a Bronco.

“I said, hey Tim, would you mind doing a quick liner for me, because it’s a new show and it would be a great favor, and I’d appreciate it. And sure, he did it. He was gracious in doing it. I don’t know if he got himself in trouble. Or if someone would say, You can’t use Tebow. He’s ours!”

“KOA has a franchise on the Broncos,” Kelley pointed out. “But they don’t have the franchise on Tim Tebow necessarily.”

That’s the kind of thinking Tebow would love.

You have to hope the person most proud of Kelley is Dan Caplis.

If you’ve ever tried to “fact check” a political ad, you know it’s a lot harder than it looks. What do the ads’ sparse words mean? What do the candidate’s vague positions include? At what point is an ad untrue, or three quarters of the way to the right on the pants-on-fire meter?

But to you journalists out there who are trying to fact check ads having anything to do with Mitt Romney and abortion, get ready for your head to explode.

Take for example Newt Gingrich’s ad attacking Romney for allegedly expanding access to abortion.

Respected journalists Lori Robertson and Robert Farley at Factcheck.org concluded that it was “highly misleading” for Gingrich’s ad to state that Romney “expanded access to abortion pills.”

The “abortion pills” in question are what most people would call “contraception.”  Known as “Plan B” or morning-after pills, they are high-dose birth-control pills that can prevent a fertilized egg (or zygote) from thriving in the uterus. In 2005, Romney allowed expanded access to Plan B in Massachusetts.

Factcheck.org reported that because “abortion” was not actually involved, but instead “contraception” pills, then Romney cannot be credibly accused of expanding access to abortion.

I personally would agree with Factcheck.org, and its conclusion is in keeping with current law, but Romney himself would not agree.

Romney, like Gingrich, has stated that life begins at conception, and Romney told Mike Huckabee just this year that he’d “absolutely” favor a personhood amendment in Massachusetts’ constitution defining life as beginning at conception.

So Romney himself would define Plan B as an “abortifacient,” which is the word that anti-abortion activists use to describe “contraception” and other things that cause “abortions.” And he’s written as much.

Therefore, using Romney’s own definition of abortion, he expanded access to abortion by giving the green light to morning-after pills. And to be consistent, Romney would have to call them “abortion pills.”

To be fair to Gingrich, Factcheck.org should have stated this as they panned the Gingrich ad. Gingrich and Romney should define “abortion” and “contraception” the same way, because they both believe life begins at conception.

But Factcheck.org did offer some key context:

To be sure, some abortion opponents have pushed for a so-called “personhood” law declaring that life begins at the moment a human egg is fertilized, which could make the “morning-after” pill illegal, and arguably an “abortion” pill. But an effort to pass such a law by ballot initiative was recently rejected by more than 55 percent of voters in Mississippi. And of course, it wasn’t the law in Massachusetts.

Our view is that the language in the ad misleads voters into thinking Romney expanded access to RU-486, which – there’s no debate about it – induces abortion.

Nationally, journalists have had a hard time sorting out Romney’s position on personhood, with some reporters incorrectly stating that Romney has no position on the issue.

But here in Colorado, possibly because he’s had plenty of time to ponder the issue during past election cycles with personhood amendments, Denver Post Editorial Page Editor Curtis Hubbard has correctly concluded that Romney has come out for personhood. (Romney has flipped his position of federal personhood, but he’s stated that he’s for it at the state level.)

Just this week, Hubbard re-stated his view on Jon Caldara’s Devil’s Advocate television show on Colorado Public Television, KBDI:

“Romney already came out for personhood at the state level,” Hubbard told Caldara. “So if Romney is the nominee, he’s going to be asked that same question [about personhood]. It’s going to be difficult.”

Difficult for Romney would be seeing the doctor in the Bennet TV ad saying Romney wants to outlaw birth control, which, by Romney’s and Gingrich’s definition of “abortion,” and given their support of “personhood,” would be deemed by fact checkers as absolutely true.

On KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado yesterday, Sen. Kent Lambert ratcheted up the GOP opposition to Colorado Senate President Brandon Shaffer’s bill mandating that legislators take a pay and benefit cut if they require a special session to pass a budget bill.

Lambert’s attacks, apparently reflecting conversations he’s had with lawyers about Shaffer’s bill, go beyond what he was telling the AP yesterday.

Here’s what he said on the radio.

“There might be some legal problems with doing this in that this may get crosswise with the Colorado Constitution in a couple ways. Article V of the Colorado Constitution establishes what the Legislature has to do. And it provides some rules. One thing is, you can’t bind your caucus into a position like this until a vote is taken. And another one is, you can’t unduly influence legislators to vote in a certain way before the vote is taken. So this is a nonstarter. You have to mark it up as sort of a humorous distraction from the business at hand.”

I thought Republicans love moms and dads who makes sure the kids know they’ll get spanked if they get out of line. The Republicans like to say that the Dems are the ones who accept excuses for not passing a budget and serve hot chocolate to the bad children anyway.

The GOP opposition to Shaffer’s pass-the-budget-or-get-a-pay-cut bill seems to reverse the GOP’s own talking point, and therefore should fall into the radar screen of the news media.

If three is a trend in politics, then we’ve got a trend going of GOP politicos pointing to communist China as the modern success story of capitalism that America should emulate.

First came Rep. Mike Coffman who wrote in May that China has “enjoyed sustained economic growth based on the free market principles that we have long abandoned in favor of the redistributionist policies of a welfare state.”

Then in November, Michele Bachmann said, essentially, that China is growing like crazy because it lacks America’s Great Society programs, which she’d dump.

And now yesterday, according to a tweet by AFP reporter Olivier Knox, Mitt Romney held up China as a place where people are getting rich on the free enterprise and capitalism, while, by implication, Americans are watching on the sidelines getting poor.

OKnox Olivier Knox

Romney says China is getting rich on “free enterprise and capitalism — not exactly how we practice it.” Hmm. “Not exactly”? #fitn

One wonders if he China guided Romney’s  thinking when he was at Bain Capital.

In any case, in the old days, three examples of something made it newsworthy. Today, due to the depleted press corps, it takes nine examples to make news. But in this case, given the stakes involved, let’s go back to the rule of three.

The emerging GOP view of China as the (at least partial) model capitalist state is news.  Reporters should find out what exactly the aforementioned GOP leaders like about Chinese “capitalism” and what they don’t. And how do they propose make American capitalism look more like what they have in China.

If you’re in charge of a Tea Party radio show, and the Republican establishment likes to say you don’t understand the way the world works, then you want to go heavy on the fact checking to make sure you’re actual factual, especially in the introduction to your show, which you play over and over and over.

And, of course, you want to be extra actual factual so you don’t annoy the progressive media critics who listen to your show and hear your introduction over and over and over.

Colorado’s flagship Tea Party radio show, KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado (5 – 7 p.m. weekdays, 560 AM), has an intro that includes a quote from failed NV Senate candidate Rep. Sharron Angle, saying:

“We have a fearful society right now. What they’re afraid of is that what we are going to be passing down to our children is not liberty and freedom, but debt and deficits.”

(Listen to the entire intro here. I don’t think you want to miss the voice of failed-canditate-past Ken Buck, who’s also featured in the Grassroots intro. What Buck says is mostly correct, but do you really want a loser’s voice in your intro?)

Angle sounds sincere and all, but she’s ill-informed, because, by definition, you don’t pass government “deficits” down to your children.

You pass a debt down. The deficit resets every year. It’s a measure of current red ink in the budget cycle. True, it could be wiped out, as the good guys on Grassroots Radio Colorado like to say all the time, in any single year. But it’s our problem, not our children’s.

The debt, on the other hand, is our children’s problem, or at least it might be a problem.

This may sound like a quibble, but, like I said, a Tea Party radio show should lead off with its best thinking, and this isn’t it. Not to mention the fact that Angle and Buck aren’t the best poster children for the Tea Party brilliance.

Plus, the serious questions of “debt” and “deficit” frequently get muddled in Tea Party circles. The two words are sometimes used incorrectly with respect to the federal government, and you’ll hear, for example, that the Colorado state budget is in the red. Of course, it isn’t.

A while back, I wrote Grassroots Radio hosts Ken Clark and Jason Worley and asked if they’d dump Angle’s statement about passing deficits down to our children from their intro because it casts an air of misinformation across their show, but I never I heard back.