In the wake of a Republican U.S. Senate candidate’s denunciation of a racist Facebook meme shared on the personal Facebook page of GOP County Chair Linda Sorenson, Delta County Republicans are saying a hacker is responsible for the post , contradicting Sorenson, who has taken responsibility for it last week.

The Grand Junction Sentinel’s Duffy Hayes reports:

“This whole thing is a hoax. Someone got into the Facebook somehow,” said Vic Ullrey, vice chairman of the committee. “It was hacked and somebody got into it, definitely.”

When asked why Sorenson was the specific target of the alleged hacking — possibly a federal crime, if true — Ullrey said, “I have no idea,” later adding, “Just to damage the Republican Party, no doubt. … Just to make us look bad,”

Sue Whittlesey, DCRCC treasurer, said, “That whole thing is bogus. Somebody hacked Linda Sorenson’s Facebook page, and posted that out there.”

“We believe it has something to do with (conservative-media watchdog) Media Matters. They’ve been harassing her the last few weeks,” Whittlesey said.

Trouble is, Sorenson told me directly, as I blogged last week, that she posted the meme as a joke and that she didn’t care if people found it offensive.

One person who found it offensive was GOP U.S. Senate candidate Jack Graham, who tweeted,”Republicans have legitimate differences with the president but this is absolutely unacceptable.”

As for Sorenson, here’s what she had to say when I callled to confirm that the post, which compared Obama to a chimpanzee, was hers:

I described the chimp post to Sorenson and asked if it was meant to be a joke.

She said, “Sure it is, Jesus.”

I said,”Yeah. Can you understand how people would be offended by it? Or do you care if people are offended by it?”

She replied, “I really don’t care if people are offended by it.

I said, “Right.”

She continued, “Un-friend me. Stop looking at me on Facebook.”

Then she hung up on me.

Listen here, as recorded on Wednesday, May 25, 2016.

Sorenson didn’t return a call from Duffy, who sought “to explain the discrepancy” between Sorenson’s conversation with me and the claims by her Delta County Republican colleagues who said her personal site was hacked.

Delta County Republican Chair Linda Sorenson shared an image on her Facebook page last week depicting Ronald Reagan nursing a chimpanzee. The photo is sandwiched by the phrase, “I’ll be damned… Reagan used to babysit Obama.”

Sorenson told me in a very brief phone interview today that it was a joke.

“I really don’t care if people are offended by it,” she told me of the post, which was sent to me by a source. “Un-friend me. Stop looking at me on Facebook.”

A similar photo was among a group of images exchanged via email among Ferguson, Missouri police and a city official, according to a 2015 report in the Washington Post, which obtained the emails as part of a public records request. The three officals involved were fired. The Post reported at the time:

City officials in Ferguson, Mo., on Thursday evening released the full, unredacted content of racially charged and religiously insensitive e-mails sent by the city’s former court clerk as well as two former supervisors in the police department.

The e-mails, released to The Washington Post in response to a public-records request, were sent and received by Mary Ann Twitty, who was Ferguson’s court clerk, as well as former Ferguson police captain Rick Henke and former police sergeant William Mudd. All three were removed from their jobs after the Department of Justice discovered the e-mails, which prompted an internal investigation by city officials. The unredacted versions show for the first time which employee sent which e-mails.

State Sen. Laura Woods wrote on Facebook Sunday that Colorado should ignore President Obama’s mandate that public schools allow students to use the bathroom corresponding the gender they identify with.

But ignoring the federal rule, as advocated by Woods, would apparently run counter to Colorado law, which, since 2008, has allowed transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity. There has been no assualts resulting from the Colorado policy.

Woods wrote on Facebook May 21:

Woods: So, the U.S. Department of Education is now dictating school bathroom policies? This is absurd. Their new policy will completely undermine local control. Plain and simple, this is none of their business and totally beyond Congressional intent in the enactment of Title IX. Therefore, it is a policy Colorado should ignore.

In making its decision earlier this month, the Obama Administration determined that forcing a transgender child to use the bathroom corresponding to the sex on his or her birth certificate would amount to sex descrimination.

Obama’s guidelines ensure that “transgender students enjoy a supportive and nondiscriminatory school environment,” according to the administration.

Woods, who represents the Westminster area and who doesn’t return my calls, is being challenged by Democrat Rachel Zenzinger. The outcome of the race will likely determine which party controls state government.

In a Facebook post last month, Elbert County (Colorado) Commissioner Robert Rowland wrote that he would end up “in jail” if he saw a transgender person enter a bathroom that was also being used by his granddaughter.

Rowland was commenting on an article, posted April 14 on Facebook, which quoted former Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz as saying, “Men should not be going to the bathroom with little girls.”

In the comment section, Rowland wrote,  “If I catch one of the sick bastards following my granddaughter into the bathroom, I will be in jail.”

Rowland, whose Elbert County district is southeast of Denver, said Tuesday his Facebook comment was not a threat of violence.

“I’m a Christian man,” Rowland said. “I’m not a violent man. I would certainly do one of two things. I would retrieve my granddaughter quickly or ask the person to refrain until she’s finished.”

With respect to going to jail, Rowland said, “Maybe somebody would get angry if I tried to delay them going in, while my granddaughter had a chance to get out. But that’s about it.”

“I’m an ex-cop,” Rowland, a Republican, said. “I’ve put enough people in jail. I don’t want to be on the other side.”

“It is an emotional issue for everybody,” he said.

Asked for a response to Rowland’s comment, One Colorado Political Director Laura Reinsch pointed out that there’s no record of any criminal problems with transgender people using bathrooms in Colorado.

“Transgender Coloradans are not ‘sick,'” said Reinsch via email. “They only want to live their lives like every other Coloradan does, and that includes being able to use the bathroom without harassment. Since 2008, Colorado law has allowed transgender people to use the bathroom that reflects their gender identity, and there hasn’t been one instance of a transgender person assaulting anyone in a bathroom in our state. The language used by Commissioner Rowland is offensive and misrepresents the experiences of transgender people.

“Transgender Coloradans are our friends, neighbors, and family members, and they deserve to be treated fairly and with respect.”

Even in North Carolina, where state legislators passed a law requiring people to use the bathroom corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate, there is no record of assaults by transgender people in bathrooms.

This accusation has been called the anti-LGBT “bathroom-predator myth,” and on Monday the federal Justice Department sued North Carolina, arguing that its law is discriminatory.

Robert Rowland

If all you knew about Jennifer Kerns is her job title of executive editor of the Colorado Statesman, you may have been surprised if you attended last Thursday’s meeting of the North Jeffco Tea Party, where she provided an evening lecture titled, “Brokered Brand: How the GOP continues to compromise its brand and lose elections… and what you can do about it.”

A couple days before her Jeffco speech, Kerns’ Tea-Party conservatism was blaring from KNUS 710-AM, where she subbed for arch conservative Dan Caplis:

Kerns: We can’t forget that we have a big senate race coming up here in 2016, the race against Sen. Michael Bennet, one of the more liberal members of the U.S. Senate, very similar to Mark Udall, except, in my view, there’s one big problem with Senator Bennet, and that is, whereas Mark Udall was concerned about one thing and one thing primarily, your uterus–That was his nickname at least on the campaign trail, given to him by The Denver Post.–Sen. Michael Bennet has many, many interests that he wants to control in your life. And to talk about that a little bit is the executive director of Advancing Colorado, Jonathan Lockwood. … I want to go through some of the attacks you’ve made on Sen. Michael Bennet and rightfully so, given his track record. Let’s start with his support of President Obama’s nuclear deal that gives Iran basically unfettered access to nuclear material… Great work you’re doing, Jonathan Lockwood….

This doesn’t sound like a journalist who, a couple weeks later, would be writing a front-page Statesman article about the Bennet race. But, yes, Kerns authored the April 13 piece, headlined “Bennet will have a fight, but how much of one is TBD.”

The headline was fair enough, but the article hit a low note by repeating an inaccurate conservative attack against Bennet:

“[Bennet’s] initial support of transferring prisoners from Guantanamo Bay detention camps was an unpopular sell to many Colorado voters,” Kerns reported.

Bennet never supported transferring GITMO prisoners here, and Kerns was immediately challenged on Twitter by “MissingPundit,” who pointed out that Politifact found it untrue that Bennet supported bringing Gitmo detainees to Colorado.

In response, Kerns called Politifact a “lefty site,” again repeating a conservative talking point that ignores the fact that Politifact won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. Kerns tweeted that Politifact is “lefty” in the same way America Rising is “righty.” In reality, America Rising was established to expose the “truth about Democrats”, while the mission of Politifact is fact checking.

In any case, to the Statesman’s credit, the falsehood about Bennet was later removed from the digital version of the article, but, unfortunately, there was no indication that a correction was made.

Asked to discuss this error and her conservative activism, Kerns, who’s also a favorite of KNUS’ Peter Boyles, referred me to Statesman publisher Jared Wright.

First, Wright said, he’s obviously aware of Kerns’ conservative background, and he points to her bio, often printed in the newspaper and online, as proof that the newspaper is being transparent about her:

Jennifer Kerns is an executive editor at The Colorado Statesman. She is an accomplished conservative political writer and contributor to several national publications including The Blaze, The Washington Times, and The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal. She also served as the communications director and spokeswoman for the 2013 Colorado recall elections to defend Coloradans’ Second Amendment rights. [and California’s Proposition 8, BigMedia addition]

Calling the recall elections an effort “to defend Coloradans’ Second Amendment rights” is biased itself, but Wright said, “All of her stuff [online and print] goes through another editor and the fact-checking process. And there have been a number of times when we said, ‘You need to go get comments from the other side. You need to make sure the other side has its say.”

Wright said it’s “no excuse,” but his small newspaper has been hit with an overlapping staff crisis and vacations recently. A written correction should have been made on Kerns’ Bennet article, in line with the newspaper’s policy, and he promised to look into it.

The short staffing, he said, was partly the reason Kerns was writing the Bennet article in the first place, said Wright. The executive editor job is “more of an executive officer or an assistant to the editorial department,” he said. But Kerns will “pinch hit” as a reporter, as she did when writing the “Hot Sheet” feature when Wright, who usually writes the informative daily political briefing, was away recently.

Wright believes that advocates can make good journalists at a political newspaper like the Statesman, due to their insider contacts and deep political knowledge.

But, I told Wright, Kerns looks like a conservative operative at work at the Statesman, which, two sources say, is under the majority control of conservative power-broker Larry Mizel.

Wright said expects Kerns’ outside political work to end soon, though she’ll still have her opinions, and some of it was on tap before she started.

“I’m fully aware that Jennifer has her bent, probably more than anyone else on our staff,” said Wright, who’s a former GOP state lawmaker, now a registered independent.

“I want to have people who are opinionated,” said Wright, emphasizing his newspaper will be as transparent as possible. “It’s important to have journalists but also to have people who have been very active in politics, and of course the only place you are going to find those people is on one side of the aisle or the other. So as long as we have a balance of those people on the team, I think we’ll be in good shape.”

Who’s the balance for Kerns, who started last month?

“You know, we’ve also got [Statesman Capitol Bureau Chief] John Tomasic,” Wright said. “John will tell you he’s very opinionated on the progressive side and has worked for progressive publications [like the Colorado Independent].”

Kerns has a track record as an operative; Tomasic is a journalist, I told Wright.

He agreed that the two staffers are not comparable “in the way they are currently operating.” He said he might add a writer with a progressive background to his staff. [If you know someone, please see if they want to apply.]

With respect to Tomasic, he said, “There are times when we have to say, ‘John, you have to go talk to the other side. John, sometimes correctly, doesn’t trust the other side, and doesn’t have those contacts. It’s just all of us, working as a team, and keeping each other on track.”

The question is, given what we’ve seen so far, can the team control Kerns?

Clarification: An early version of this post implied that the Statesman is begging for progressive job applicants. This is not what I meant.  Also, the incorrect statement that Tomasic wrote for progressive causes was removed.

On Facebook this week, Republican State Sen. Laura Woods signaled that she will vote for Donald Trump, if he is the GOP nominee.

Woods “liked” a Facebook post by The Conservative Update, which stated:

‘Like’ if you would vote for Donald Trump if he were the 2016 GOP nominee.

Woods’ name appears among over 500,000 others.

Woods has made no secret of her leanings toward Trump. She told KNUS 710-AM radio in January that Trump is one of her two favorite prez candidates (listen here at 25 min 50 sec), but she’s backing Ted Cruz.

Woods is the only elected official in Colorado who actively likes Trump, though three others have said they’ll support the reality-TV star if he wins the GOP nomination.

Woods has yet to explain why she likes Trump, but both Woods and Trump have taken extreme anti-choice and anti-immigrant positions.

Woods told KNUS that she  “narrowed the field” after October’s Republican debate in Boulder.

Control of Colorado state government likely rests on the outcome of the race between Woods and her Democratic challenger, Rachel Zenzinger. Republicans hold the senate chamber by a one-vote margin, and Woods won the seat over Zenzinger in 2014, which was a GOP wave year, by a slim 650 vote margin. To be sure, a few other state senate races may be close, but none has the potential to fall as easily toward Democrats as this one. And with it would end divided government in Colorado.

Trump won in South Carolina because GOP primary voters were angry at establishment Republicans for “submitting to the leftist, racist political correctness and removing the confederate flag without discussion,” according to Anil Mathai, the chair of the Adams County Republican Party.

Mathai: “People are totally missing what happened tonight in South Carolina,” wrote Mathai in an analysis on Facebook. “It doesn’t make sense at all but, wait, it does. It wasn’t about Trump. The Republicans of South Carolina rejected Nikki Haley, Sen. Tim Scott, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and Congressman Trey Gowdy. Why? Because they all endorsed the establishment candidate Rubio, but what’s worse? A few months ago they sold the people of South Carolina out by immediately submitting  to the leftist, racist political correctness and removing the confederate flag without discussion. They cursed out the conservative base in South Carolina by listening to the leftists and tonight the base returned the favor. This wasn’t about Trump. It was about establishment Republican control of once popular but now loser politicians in South Carolina. Tonight, Haley, Scott, Graham, and Gowdy (with Rubio) are urinating in their pants as their time in office is coming to a close really soon! You turn on your constitution loving, Republican platform supporting base, and you will pay a price. Trump and Cruz rode the wave.”

Gov. Nikki Haley signed a law in July, 2015, removing the confederate flag from the SC state capitol, after a massacre at nine black churches in Charleston. The flag’s presence had obviously long been a source of conflict there and nationally prior to last year.

Mathai did not return a call for comment on the Feb. 20 post on the Colorado Tea Party page. He also discussed on conservative talk radio in less stark language.

But by referring to arguments for the removal of the confederate flag as “leftist, racist political correctness,” it appears that Mathai himself sides with those in South Carolina who opposed the removal of the confederate flag.

The Colorado Republican Party has apparently not taken a position one way or the other on the confederate flag, but county chairs like Mathai, elected by fellow Republicans, are free to take positions on issues as long as they don’t endorse candidates in a primary. In his radio interview and Facebook post, Mathai did not endorse a presidential candidate.

Last year, liberals accused Adams County Republican Vice Chair John Sampson of posting racist comments on Facebook, but Sampson said he judges people based on their character, not skin color or anything else.

Key swing state races will take place in Adams country in November.

Choice issues will continue to impregnate political discourse as we head toward November for the simple reason that women, a huge swing voting bloc in Colorado, care about candidates’ positions on abortion. Of course they do. That’s common sense.

Yet, you still hear anti-choice conservatives saying how insulted they are by progressives who talk about choice, because somehow they think it means progressives don’t think women care about the economy, the environment, etc. Women obviously care about those things too. But also, choice–which is often less muddled, in terms of where candidates stand, and therefore defines a candidate more than other issues.

And choice issues could prove decisive in the senate district that will likely determine if Democrats control Colorado’s government after November. That would be the seat held by anti-choice state Sen. Laura Woods (R-Westminster).

You can read more details in RH Reality Check, but, briefly, Woods isn’t following the mold of Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner. He completely denied his co-sponsorship of a personhood abortion-ban bill in an effort to win over state-wide voters, who pretty much mirror the voters in Woods’ swing district, evenly divided among Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliateds.

Woods is sticking to her conservative principles, as she puts it. After openly embracing Dudley Brown’s vision of America, including personhood, 1) during her 2014 primary, 2) during her 2014 general election campaign, and 3) during her first year in office, Woods is 4) again sponsoring a personhood bill this election year–along with a bill requiring women to be offered an ultrasound prior to having an abortion (and also to wait 24 hours).

Last week, Woods’ Democratic opponent, Rachel Zenzinger, wrote on Facebook that after last year’s Planned Parenthood massacre, Woods was, in Zenzinger’s words, “advocating for this kind of [clinic] violence.” Woods responded on Twitter by condemning the clinic attack and all violence, but, as someone pointed out on Twitter, it took Woods 83 days to do this. And to this day, she’s never explained the timing or meaning of her Facebook post, which was supportive terrorism to fight injustice. No one would argue that war or revolution are sometimes justified, but in the wake of the clinic shooting, Woods’ post made it appear like she supported the shooter–especially because she didn’t comment on the attack.

Political junkies agree that the odds are against Woods winning the Jeffco seat during a presidential election year, in a district she won by only about 650 votes in the 2014 GOP wave year. And, you’d also have to think that the women who didn’t vote in 2014, but turn out this year, will likely to pay attention to Woods’ positions on abortion and birth control.

“If you’ve looked at my voting record at all, what you will know is, I’m an independent thinker,” Woods told The Post Jan. 10. “…I bucked my leadership, I bucked the party, I bucked the caucus … if it didn’t line up with my principles or my district.”

But repeated polls, and common sense, say the swing voters in her district disagree with her on choice.

Last month, Rep. Mike Coffman wrote on Facebook that Obama is the “real recruiting tool” for terrorists, not GITMO.

Coffman: “President Obama wants to close GTMO because he thinks it’s a recruiting tool for terrorists – the real recruiting tool is a President who seems more concerned about protecting the rights of terrorists rather than defeating them and protecting the American people.”[emphasis added]

Yet it flew under the radar of Denver media, and Coffman never apologized for the recruiting tool comment.

But it seems, judging from a KOA interview today, that Coffman himself apparently believes that the comment was wrong.

On KOA this morning, Coffman said:

Coffman: This president refuses to acknowledge that we are a nation at war not of our own choosing and refuses even to identify those who have declared war on us. … He says Guantanamo Bay is a recruiting tool for terrorists. What is a recruiting tool for terrorists is having a commander in chief that projects weakness. [emphasis added]

It’s one thing to say Obama’s policies are a recruiting too. It’s another to write that the President himself is a recruiting tool for terrorists.

Does Coffman really believe that the “real recruiting tool” is the President of the United States?

Two sort-of prominent Colorado Republicans are apparently refusing to delete offensive comments on their Facebook pages.

Here are the comments, written by commenters on the Facebook pages of Sate Rep. State Rep. Stephen Humphrey (R-Severence) and Denver congressional candidate Casper Stockham.

In response to an article, posted by Humphrey on his Facebook page, in which Democratic House Speaker Dickey Lee Hullinghorst (D-Boulder) criticizes anti-choice “ideologues,” one commenter, Daniel Lanotte, wrote, “Just think where we would be now if Speaker Hullinghorst’s mother had chosen the Speaker’s solution.”

A comment on Stockham’s Facebook page, written in response to an article with the headline,”Breaking: Grand Jury Indicts pro-life investigator behind baby parts video; clears Planned Parenthood,” “Who the hell is this judge that determined this? I’m so angry at Planned Parenthood right now. I wish someone would just blow up their facilities.”

Stockham tells me he doesn’t have time to delete “stupid” stuff from his Facebook page, though he did have time to write comments in the same thread where the blow-up-Planned-Parenthood wish appears.

Humphrey, who introduced a bill last month in the legislature banning all abortion in Colorado, even for rape and incest, hasn’t deleted the Hullinghorst insult, since I told him about it in a voice mail Thursday. (But the commenter himself, David Lanotte, says he was intending only to express his opposition to abortion, not insult Hullinghorst. Lanotte said, “I was not saying that I wish she were aborted.”)

For an RH Reality Check post on the topic today, I asked an expert whether politicians and candidates are responsible for such comments on their Facebook pages. An this has relevance for reporters covering these types of issues.

“When you look at the sheer volume of what people put on Facebook, it’s unrealistic to expect staff or candidates to keep up with it,” said Boise State Associate Professor  Justin Vaughn, author of Controlling the Message: New Media in American Political Campaigns. “They might be getting thousands of comments. Unless we know there’s active support, we should be cautious about inferring that inaction means tacit support.”

But Vaughn said the expectation could be different if a politician knows about the comment or actively promotes it, by retweeting a tweet on Twitter or ‘liking’ a post on Facebook.”

“If the campaign is made aware of an offensive comment and refuses to take action, that’s another story,” said Vaughn.

Vaughn said there could be a political expectation that a candidate will use “certain moments to communicate with the electorate about the limits of political discourse.”

He pointed to a 2008 presidential debate when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) corrected a questioner’s assertion that then Sen. Barack Obama was a  Sen. Barack Obama was a untrustworthy Arab.