Conservative talk-radio hosts are obviously a big part of the reason the Republican Party has a problem with women voters.

But they’re also a serious drag on the GOP’s appeal to Hispanics.

“I’m still looking for that immigrant who came to America who had a burning desire for free birth control,” said KLZ talk-radio host Jason Worley on the air Wednesday. “I haven’t found them yet. If we do find them, I will offer to put them on the air, so we can get the ditsy college girl from Illinois who can come on and go, ‘Yah, what I’d like for freedom and liberty is, ahh, free birth control, Yeah me!'”

This elicited laughter not only from co-host Ken Clark but also from Pauline Olvera, a vice chair of the Denver Republican Party.

Olvera is also on the Board of Directors for Colorado Hispanic Republicans, a new group trying to recruit Colorado Hispanics to join the GOP.

Asked by Worley “what message is catching on in those Hispanic communities,” Olvera answered:

“Well, we don’t really talk about [Republican] party issues,” she said.

One wonders why. Do Hispanics maybe dislike Republican issues? Worley didn’t ask, and Olvera flew up to a cruising altitude of 5,000 feet and waxed broad and meaningless.

“We talk about our values,” she told Worley. Our values are faith, family, freedom, individual freedom. And those are very strong values in our Hispanic community. And those values are exactly what the Republican stands for. So when we talk about those things, it clicks, right away. A lot of small business owners are in our community. They want a really good education for their children. They want choices in the education of their children.”

So why is Olvera’s organization opposing legislation that would give the top-achieving children of undocumented parents a break on college tuition in Colorado? How does that comport with giving Hispanic children choice and freedom? 

Worley didn’t ask, but you get the feeling he understood the problem his party faces with Hispanics, when it comes to real-life issues, because he did ask Olvera, “What kind of resistance, if any, do you find to the quote-unquote Republican Party?”

“Well, she answered, you know there is always going to be, for the time being, that little bit of a negative connotation to the Republican name, unfortunately.”

Full stop. You’d think Worley would have wanted to delve into this a bit. Is it because Hispanics understand that freedom is meaningless without opportunity? Opportunities provided by stuff like the college tuition bill, Obamacare, and government protections that create the kind of level playing field that give immigrants a chance?

Worley didn’t ask, so Olvera continued:

We go out there and we just start talking to people. And asking them questions about their values. And doing surveys and stuff. And we’re going to be going to Cinco de Mayo in May. And we’re going to have our booth up there. And we’ll have our nice big banner. We’re going to be bringing people along and inviting them to our meet-and-greets.

Great. The organization plans to fly a big banner a couple months from now. Nothing fired in Worley’s mind to make him as the question, “Where’s the substance?”

So on went Olvera:

“The reason we all came to this country is because of individual freedom. We left tyranny and dictatorship.  I think people are starting to wake up and see America kind of going toward the type of government immigrants are leaving and starting to resonate with our message.”

Olvera’s statement is so out there, along the lines of a GOP state Senator comparing Obama to Hitler last week, that I doubt it’s ever been put to Hispanics in any of the gazillion polls Olvera is obviously thinking of when she talks about the “values” Hispanics embrace.

Again, one wonders about the specifics here, but Worley didn’t ask for any.

Which was probably good for Olvera’s cause, because if Worley and Olvera tried to explain with a few details why America is heading toward dictatorship, probably citing stuff like Obamacare, Medicare, worker protections, etc., basically government acting on behalf of people, they’d be offering up a list of reasons Hispanics are known to dislike the GOP. Of course, I could be wrong, but with shallow interviews like this one, we’ll never know.

Rush Limbaugh’s 1950’s-era comments last week, calling a woman a “slut” for believing that her health insurance should cover birth control, came from the mouth of…Rush Limbaugh, an unelected publicity hound/entertainer of the first order.

And Limbaugh’s extremism got all kinds of coverage, locally and nationally.

Then ColoradoPols broke a story yesterday about extreme comments at home in Colorado, by elected Republican legislators at a rally on the west steps of the Capitol.

Pols posted videotape of GOP speakers, including Sen. Tim Neville comparing Nazi Germany to the Obama Administration. Other video clips consisted of, as described by Pols:

“Sen. Harvey declaring that a program of mandating contraceptive coverage is “not a slippery slope, but a cliff” to “genocide somewhere down the road.” Sen. Lambert called the policy “mind control,” and read from a right-wing column warning that the same authority could be used to force the purchase of “euthanasia pills.” Not to be outdone, Sen. Renfroe said that it could to a situation “where England was when their king decided he needed to rule the church.”

Reporters who didn’t make it to the rally should go back and cover these comments, handily posted on Pols, to air them out. That’s what journalism is about.

It’s obvious to me that the statements by elected GOP  officials deserved more attention from the local media than Limbaugh’s comments, weird as they were.  They’re elected officials. Maybe they’re publicity hounds too, but still.

Candidates like Joe Coors who make extreme comments in secondary media outlets, like talk radio, also deserve media scrutiny when they go off. There’s not much public-interest value in reporting that KNUS talk-show host Steve Kelly thinks Obamacare is leading to a government takeover of the individual, but when Joe Coors, who’s running against Rep. Ed Perlmutter, says it, it’s news.

Here’s what Coors said on KNUS’ Kelley and Company yesterday:

Kelley: How big an issue is [Obamacare] in this race?

Coors: It’s huge…. Governments that have controlled health care in their countries basically own the individual. And we cannot let Obamacare legislation dictate our lives in any matter shape or form, and I’m very much opposed to it and would certainly vote to repeal it or defund it or whatever I could do when I get back there. [BigMedia emphasis]

Kelley: You make a great point. Yeah. Think about that. If someone could make a decision on your health and decisions on your health, they have total control over you.

Coors: Yes, sir.

Listen here to Joe Coors on KNUS 3-13-2012 say Obamacare leads to total control of the individual.

A reporter might ask a veteran getting VA coverage if he or she feels the government owns him.  Or a Brit, or to a lesser degree a Canadian or someone on Medicare, for that matter. And what does government control over healthcare have to do with mild-mannered Obamacare anyway?

With depleted staff, reporters at legacy news outlets can’t be everywhere and do everything like they could before, or at least try to. They should throw out any hesitancy to use material from places like Pols or talk radio, if the material is verifiable and newsworthy.

For example, I was just listening to a podcast of Grassroots Radio Colorado from Monday, in which  Sen. Neville describes how he prepared his comments about Nazi’s and the Obama Administration for the rally.

He said:

I was doing some research last night, and I was putting my notes together [for his speech at the rally] and of course you pull things apart. You don’t like this. You don’t like that. And you know I was looking at the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany and the parallels I was seeing were pretty scary.

What’s scary to me is how many of us, including smart reporters, are ignoring this stuff.

Westword’s Kylie Horner askedAndrew Cole, Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s Communications Advisor, about Gessler’s repeated references to unproven instances of election fraud in Colorado.

I’m sending over a big high-five to Westword for asking the question, which major media are ignoring, but Cole slipped out of it, as you see below, leaving the door open for Westword or some other enterprising media entity to follow up.  Gessler’s office won’t answer my questions on this matter.

Here’s what Cole told Westword:

“We don’t have proof of a lot of fraud,” Cole says. “Critics on the left say he’s talking about massive fraud. When we point to incidences of fraud, they say that’s too limited. He’s never talked about massive fraud; he’s only talked about instances in the fraud which we know are there.”

The Secretary of State’s office pointed to a 2010 election case in which six voters were found to have voted twice — once in Colorado and once Kansas. “We think that those sorts of instances of fraud point to vulnerabilities in the system,” Cole says.

I wish I could send you one of  Jon Stewart’s dumbfounded faces through this blog.

I mean, where’s the fraud?

The six people accused of voting twice have yet to be convicted. All we have here is possible fraud. Not actual factual fraud, yet.

Also, Gessler said on the radio Monday that “some” noncitizens voted. This of course raises the shadowy specter of Colorado elections being influenced by foreigners. Are the people who allegedly voted twice noncitizens?

So someone should ask Cole, or preferably Gessler himself, where’s the actual fraud he’s been talking about?

Before he entered office, and discovered the salary to be too low, Gessler was a high-paid lawyer who knows better than to play fast and loose with the f word.

Every time Secretary of State Scott Gessler alleges outright voter fraud in Colorado, I think to myself, this has to be the last time he says this, unless he produces evidence to back it up.

And then he says it again, like he did on KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado Monday:

We’re continuing to do the analysis on the issue of noncitizens not voting here, or I’m sorry, noncitizens being on the voting rolls here in Colorado, and some of them voting. We did a study last year, and we’re going to do some more analysis and come up with more evidence to show people that there, in fact, are problems here in Colorado with that and, again, hopefully we can get folks, particularly Senate Democrats… [BigMedia emphasis]

Just because Gessler has alleged actual, real, not-theoretical, election fraud before, without showing proof of it, doesn’t mean it’s any less serious an accusation when he says it again.

Sorry to repeat the obvious, but this is from the mouth of Colorado’s Secretary of State!! And sorry to use two exclamation marks.

It’s our voting system, and he’s in charge of it. And we like to think of ourselves as tough when it comes to corruption, especially in the all-American area of voting.

Yet Gessler’s repeated accusations of election fraud (I now count three times he’s said it) have flown largely under the major media’s radar, not mentioned once, for example, in The Denver Post news pages, though columnist Fred Brown brought up the topic.

Again, I’m not talking about Gessler’s many warnings and innuendos about fraud. I’m talking actual fraud here.

If journalists won’t publicly hold Gessler accountable for his comments on this topic, which is so central to why journalism is supposed to exist then, I’m sorry, they should find new jobs.

I’m not saying reporters have given Gessler a free pass. They haven’t, and he doesn’t think so either. On the radio Monday, Gessler said:

The mainstream media beats me up all the time. They don’t like what I’m doing.

I don’t see reporters not liking Gessler as such. They’re mostly just reporting what he’s doing, but on the fraud issue, the election-fraud-is-happening-now-in-Colorado-now angle to this story, there’s been too much silence, except from Gessler.

I love politicians who have guts to talk about their “messaging” in public. Everyone knows it chews up huge amounts of behind-the-scenes time (and money), but the insider debate about messages doesn’t spill out much.

When it does, reporters should be all over it, not to play “gotcha,” but to help real people (none of whom read this blog) understand how different communications “frames” illuminate competing worldviews about government and values.

For example, on KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado Feb. 17, the hosts and Colorado Rep. Robert Ramirez got into an honest discussion about how the GOP should talk about poor people and budget cuts.

Ramirez started off by saying, “The Democrats have a benefit. Everything they say makes somebody feel good about something in their life. When we say, ‘we got to quit spending so much, we can’t take any more money to pay for those poor kids,’ it doesn’t sound as good.”

He has a point. This makes the GOP sound like they aren’t very concerned about the poor.

Ramirez went on: “We have to say something more like, we need to spend the money responsibly to be able to help people the most, and not just waste dollars in places they aren’t helping anyone.”

So the frame here is that government is the bad guy. It’s wasting money in useless dark places, some of which may sound like they’re helping kids, but they’re really not.

Ramirez continued:  

But when somebody says, you’re trying to kill children, you have to say, that’s an interesting comment. Honestly, we have to spend the money the best way to help the most people. So it doesn’t matter what they say, we have to, one, stay on message, and we have to keep the message in a positive arena, not negative against the other side. And that’s the key, positive towards our message versus negative against them. Negative doesn’t work.

Here, Ramirez presents a progressive counter “frame” that the GOP is “trying to kill children” by cutting government, whose programs (like generous children’s health insurance) save lives and should not be axed if you care about giving impoverished kids in the world’s richest nation the basic opportunity to succeed in life.  (Okay, that’s a dramatic rendition of this frame, but I’m just making a point.)

Actually, I don’t know any progressives who think Ramirez or other conservatives want to kill our children. But progressives point to studies showing that if conservatives succeed at, for example, charging more for state-run health insurance, more kids could certainly get sick, and, yes, possibly die. (Colorado Sen. Greg Brophy, among others, acknowledges the risk to kids.)

So you see how the two frames of “good government” versus “bad government” play out in Ramirez’s statements on the radio.

Underlying these competing frames about government is, of course, the debate about taxes.

And so it was fitting that, at the end of his Grassroots Radio Colorado interview, Ramirez turned the topic to taxes.

Ramirez, who’s indicated his opposition to the extension of unemployment benefits and who’s supported Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan in the past, argued that everyone should pay the same percentage of their income in taxes:

 “You know what,” Ramirez said on the air, “it doesn’t matter if it’s 1o percent, 50 percent, 30 percent, 60, the moral part is, everyone should pay the same percent. If you are making $100 per week, you should pay 10 percent. If you are making a million dollars a week, you should pay 10 percent.

I don’t know how this translates in the real world into anything but a massive tax cut, and as such, major slashes in government spending for the poor.

If he stayed on message, and didn’t talk about taking money away from poor children, Ramirez would probably say he’s cutting waste, creating a responsible, smaller government, and helping people most through tax cuts.

And a progressive might say Ramirez is undermining what we all want, to work together through government to give poor children and families basic opportunity and a fair shot at success, and we can raise taxes a little bit to do it, on people who can afford it.

Reporters should look for chances, like Ramirez’s radio appearance, to illustrate these competing worldviews underlying political “messaging.”

Partial Transcript of Feb. 17 Interview with Rep. Robert Ramirez on Grassroots Radio Colorado on KLZ 560 AM, weekdays, 5 – 7 p.m.

Ramirez: Romney, much like many Republicans, allows someone else to dictate what his message will be, kind of like a senatorial candidate we had last year….

Host: Republicans don’t know how to message. They’re messaging sucks. In your mind, what can we do to change that?

Ramirez: You know, it’s not just message. The Democrats have a benefit. Everything they say makes somebody feel good about something in their life.

Host: Yeah. I suppose that’s true.

Ramirez: When we say, we got to quit spending so much, we can’t take any more money to pay for those poor kids, it doesn’t sound as good. So we have our message–

Host: Like Rollie Heath’s message–

Ramirez: Yeah. We have to say something more like, we need to spend the money responsibly to be able to help people the most, and not just waste dollars in places they aren’t helping anyone. But when somebody says, you’re trying to kill children, you have to say, that’s an interestingt comment. Honestly, we have to spend the money the best way to help the most people. So it doesn’t matter what they say, we have to, one, stay on message, and we have to keep the message in a positive arena, not negative against the other side. And that’s the key, positive towards our message versus negative against them. Negative doesn’t work.

Host: …Morally, how much should someone pay in taxes?…If you are a successful contributing member of the economic class, a business owner, something like that, you’re at 30, 40, 50 percent. At what point is it immoral?

Ramirez: You know what, it doesn’t matter if it’s 1o percent, 50 percent, 30 percent, 60, the moral part is, everyone should pay the same percent. If you are making $100 per week, you should pay 10 percent. If you are making a million dollars a week, you should pay 10 percent.

Host: I agree. I could not agree more, actually.

Ramirez: I don’t know an actual percentage, but you understand what I’m saying. It should be a percentage based on everyone. That encourages people to make more money and create more jobs.

Conservative talk radio is all aflutter about a trial underway in Georgia to determine whether President Obama is eligible to appear on the election ballot there.

A Georgia law requires all candidates to prove they’re eligible for office, and this means presidential candidates must prove they’re U.S. citizens.

Such laws, now on the books in a handful of states, are the cutting edge tactic of the dregs of the birther movement, which will not accept that Obama is a U.S. citizen.

The case has a local connection in the name of John Sampson, a former immigration officer who retired in 2008 and also a candidate for Colorado Senate District 25, facing Sen. Mary Hodge.

Sampson told his story to an adoring audience on KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado on Friday.

Sampson said on the radio that he was retained by a leader of the birther movement, Orly Taitz, whom he met in Lake Charles Illinois in November 2009, to investigate President Obama’s Social Security number, and he determined that Obama’s Social Security number was issued to a Connecticut resident in March of 1977.

Sampson tried hard but can’t find evidence that Obama was a citizen of Connecticut, ever.

“Why is [Obama] utilizing a Social Security number that was issued to somebody who was apparently living in Connecticut at the time it was issued?” Sampson asked on KLZ Friday.

Sampson flew to Georgia to present his evidence at the administrative court hearing, compelled, he says, by a subpoena to do so. He testified in court that there is “credible evidence to warrant further investigation” into Obama’s Social Security number and birth certificate. He also testified that he’d investigate Obama’s passport history.

Sampson was in court when another person who was subpoenaed failed to appear. That would be Obama, whose lawyers contend the President is under no legal obligation to testify. 

As a souvenir for his trip to Georgia, Sampson got his photo in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a step up from the publicity he’s used to getting in the birther underground. He makes an appearance in Jerome Corsi’s Where’s the Birth Certificate, for example, he said on the radio. (See a video of Sampson testifying in Georgia here.)

Asked on Grassroots Radio Colorado why the birth certificate released last year by Obama did not put the matter to rest, Sampson responded by saying another expert at the hearing said the birth certificate was fake.

Sampson also said his own research raised “concerns” about the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate, as well as Obama’s Social Security number.

“I’m not prepared to tell you whether he was born in the United States, not born in the United States,” Sampson stated on KLZ. “I’m not what you would consider a birther, per se. This is an issue of constitutionality. This is an issue of whether or not the provisions of the Constitution requiring a natural-born citizen to be President of the United States have been violated or not.”

Hmmmm. I wondered what he meant when he said, “I’m not a birther, per se.” But the radio hosts weren’t thinking along the same lines, and KHOW’s Peter Boyles, who’s sharp as a knife on this issue, and proud of it, wasn’t there to clarify things.

In any case, Sampson explained on the radio that the Georgia hearing continued without Obama. The administrative law judge is scheduled to rule Feb. 5 on whether the sitting President meets Georgia’s citizenship requirements, and at that point, the Georgia Secretary of State will determine if he’s eligible to appear on the ballot–again.

Asked by a caller, who turned out to be yet another conservative talk show host, Jimmy Sengenberger, whether the birth-certificate issue was worth raising, with unemployment and other issues plaguing the country, Sampson pointed out he was hired to investigate the Social Security number and subpoenaed.

Sampson also said: “I am a very firm believer in the Constitution. In June of 1981, I raised my right hand for the first time of many and swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And to paraphrase what Lt. Col. Allen West has said, that oath did not come with a statute of limitations or with an expiration date. And that’s the only reason I’m involved in this. I have not and do not have sufficient evidence that would warrant me to make a statement as to whether or not he is eligible or not eligible.”

This satisfied Sengenberger and the Grassroots Radio guys, who told Sampson he was 100 percent behind him.

But would you be satisfied? I thought a birther was someone who doesn’t believe Obama is a citizen. That’s what Sampson is saying when he testifies that he doesn’t know if the President is a citizen. Same thing. A birther.

I mean, the entire birther movement is about not being satisfied with the citizenship documentation provided by Obama. Where’s the birth certificate?

That’s exactly what our own John Sampson is saying.

And when the birth certificate is produced, you have to guess, though we don’t know for sure, that Sampson, like his fellow birthers, will find some other reason not to know for sure if Obama is one of us.

Even if you’re a die-hard Tea-Party radio host, you’d think you’d try to clarify things when an ideologically-sympatico political candidate tells you on the air that he abandoned his business because of the Colorado Department of Labor’s efforts to enforce employment rules.

That’s what Colorado State House candidate Brian Vande Krol told KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado Jan. 20:  

In fact, I’ve heard you guys talk about unemployment insurance before, and it just so happens that as of the first of the year, my swimming coaching business basically is no more. I still call it a business, but because the Colorado Department of Labor is pursuing what they call misclassified employees, the place where I coach said hey, we can’t have you here as an independent contractor. You can no longer be a businessman here. You have got to be an employee.  So I’ve basically lost a business.

Obviously, there’s no proof here that Vande Krol did anything wrong, but how could you not wonder what happened, especially because this guy is running for the state legislature (HD 35). (He narrowly lost to Rep. John Soper in 2010.)

So I did the Grassroots Radio hosts’ job for them and called Vande Krol, and he answered my questions via email. (See his answers in their entirety below.)

Vande Krol believes he did nothing wrong.

For both of my businesses where I’ve run up against this problem, I absolutely meet the definition of independent contractor. I meet all nine of the requirements specified in Colorado Statutes for one business, and the preponderance (as also specified in statute) for the other business.

But, he wrote me, a Colorado Department of Labor audit of the business Vande Krol worked for apparently thought differently:

Despite that, one of the businesses I contract with was threatened with large taxes and penalties by an auditor who chose to interpret the statutes as she sees fit, presumably justifying her salary. She then negotiated the amount down to the point of being a nuisance, told the business they could take it to court, but precedence was on her side. The business paid the tax rather than hire a lawyer and risk further scrutiny by government agencies that are clearly overstepping their bounds. If this were done in the private sector, it would be called extortion.

The Colorado Department of Labor performs the types of audits to which Vande Krol refers to enforce state laws protecting workers.

Basically, if an employer classifies a worker as an “independent contractor” then the employer is not required to provide the worker the same protections as the employer would if it classified the worker as an “employee.” 

These protections include unemployment insurance, for workers who get laid off, and workers’ compensation, covering injuries sustained on the job. Employers also contribute half of an “employee’s” Social Security tax.

If an “independent contractor” were not required to meet specific criteria, then employers would be free to pay all their workers as independent contractors, stripping them of worker protections that are now mandatory.

Vande Krol believes he met the definition of an “independent contractor,” but on the radio, his anger seemed to go beyond his specific case.

So I asked him if he believed the government should allow businesses to decide for themselves whether to classify workers as “employees” or “independent contractors” and therefore let businesses decide whether to pay for their workers’ Social Security taxes, workers comp, and unemployment insurance.

He answered that employers should be able to classify their employees as they see fit, and employees should likewise be able to classify themselves as they want to:

If a person is freely willing to give up the protections offered by an employer/employee relationship, he or she should be allowed to do so. If an employer is freely willing to give up the control offered by the employer/employee relationship, it should be allowed to do so. Of course, either relationship is based on the idea of a mutually beneficial exchange of service for compensation. Government interference in private contracting cannot eliminate the right of people to decide for themselves – it can only impede the ability to legally do so, and hamper meaningful job creation in the process.

Clearly, voluntary participation in workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, and Social Security would mean major changes for these programs, and for society as we know it.

But Vande Krol writes, “If social security is a good deal for the individual, why is it not managed by individuals according to their individual needs?”

Below is Vande Krol’s entire written response to my questions:

Why didn’t you meet the definition of an independent contractor, under government regulations?

Let me clear up what appears to be a misunderstanding. This is about a government agency using broad regulatory and auditing powers to remove freedom of choice from the individuals of Colorado, adding unnecessary burdens to small businesses, and resulting in less real employment. For both of my businesses where I’ve run up against this problem, I absolutely meet the definition of independent contractor. I meet all nine of the requirements specified in Colorado Statutes for one business, and the preponderance (as also specified in statute) for the other business. Despite that, one of the businesses I contract with was threatened with large taxes and penalties by an auditor who chose to interpret the statutes as she sees fit, presumably justifying her salary. She then negotiated the amount down to the point of being a nuisance, told the business they could take it to court, but precedence was on her side. The business paid the tax rather than hire a lawyer and risk further scrutiny by government agencies that are clearly overstepping their bounds. If this were done in the private sector, it would be called extortion.

The other business I contract with decided to change me from a contractor to an employee simply to avoid the risk of audits and penalties.

Colorado statutes are already more restrictive than federal statutes regarding independent contractor status. However, Colorado statute does allow that a contract between businesses is sufficient to evidence independent contractor status. This provision that allows an individual to freely choose is ignored by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. According to the CDLE, 14% of workers in Colorado are “misclassified” as independent contractors. The CDLE is threatening to go after that 14%, which is a direct threat to their livelihoods and those that use their services. That’s one in seven workers. That’s not a recipe for expanding real employment in Colorado.

 Now to your question.  I do meet the definition of independent contractor. That did not prevent the CDLE from extorting money from one of my “employers”. Nor did it prevent the other from changing my status. In the second instance, employees are often more expensive than independent contractors because of government burden, so my employer reduced my compensation. I dropped my liability insurance since I’m now covered by their policy. The cost to provide that insurance is more than the revenue I typically generate outside of my contract with the employer, so I will also quit working outside of my relationship with that employer.

Do you think the government should require businesses to provide “employees” with worker’s compensation and unemployment insurance, as currently required? As you know, the government does not require businesses to do this for “independent contractors.”

My concern is that government is removing the right of people and businesses to freely associate on terms they choose. Worker’s compensation policies makes good sense for employees because they may not be covered for on the job injuries by other insurance plans. It’s good business sense as well – businesses limit their liability to an injured employee by providing worker’s compensation insurance. Independent contractors, however, freely give up access to worker’s compensation insurance and unemployment insurance. That independent contractor should be allowed the freedom to make that choice based on what’s best for them.

Do you think the government should be required to pay half the Social Security tax of their employees?

(I assume the intent of your question is “should government require businesses to pay half the social security tax of their employees”. That’s the question I’ll answer).

Businesses are the ones that write the checks, but they don’t pay the taxes. Social Security taxes are a business cost. Businesses pass costs on to their customers, employees, owners, shareholders or investors.

A more interesting question is about the recent “tax holiday” for social security taxes. Did the federal government point out that future benefits will be reduced by the tax holiday? Did they suggest or allow that individuals could invest more in their own social security retirements by not taking advantage of the tax holiday, and paying more than is required? If social security is a good deal for the individual, why is it not managed by individuals according to their individual needs?

Do you think the government should allow businesses to decide for themselves whether to classify workers as “employees” or “independent contractors” and therefore decide for themselves whether to pay for their workers’ Social Security taxes, workers comp, and unemployment insurance?

I believe that people are far better able to make decisions for themselves than the government. If a person is freely willing to give up the protections offered by an employer/employee relationship, he or she should be allowed to do so. If an employer is freely willing to give up the control offered by the employer/employee relationship, it should be allowed to do so. Of course, either relationship is based on the idea of a mutually beneficial exchange of service for compensation. Government interference in private contracting cannot eliminate the right of people to decide for themselves – it can only impede the ability to legally do so, and hamper meaningful job creation in the process.

These questions flow from your apparent view, expressed on the radio, that the government had no business telling your employer that you could not work there as an independent contractor.

Again, it was the employer who made the decision to change my status. They did so based on the threat of the CDLE to pursue one out of seven Colorado workers and their “employers”. I met the most important criteria – I provided my own tools, training, liability insurance, marketing, medical insurance, etc. However, I could not protect my employer from the danger of an overly aggressive audit by a government agency that was $500 million dollars in debt to the federal government in February of 2010.

The federal government pressured the CDLE to pay back loans for the Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund. The state legislature responded by raising rates on businesses who can ill afford it. These rate increases fall disproportionately on the businesses who have fewer unemployment claims. The CDLE is pursuing small businesses with their power of audit to coerce legitimate businesses to pay unemployment taxes that they do not owe. As a result, resources that could be used to expand hiring and boost the Colorado economy are being diverted to the federal government, and one in seven Colorado workers is directly threatened by CDLE.

That’s not a recipe for job creation.

Below is a partial transcript of Brian Vande Krol’s statement on KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado, Jan. 20.

Brian Vande Krol: I’ve had a sky diving coaching business, a swimming coaching business. My first business was actually Paradise Rock Gym. That was probably the most capital intensive and labor intensive business.  It actually set the standard for other climbing gyms across the country. I’ve got a floor installation business currently, quite a few businesses. I’ve always found things that I’ve really enjoyed doing and pursued those activities. In fact, I’ve heard you guys talk about unemployment insurance before, and it just so happens that as of the first of the year, my swimming coaching business basically is no more. I still call it a business, but because the Colorado Department of Labor is pursuing what they call misclassified employees, the place where I coach said hey, we can’t have you here as an independent contractor. You can no longer be a businessman here. You have got to be an employee.  So I’ve basically lost a business. But now I count as a new hire in Colorado’s jobs statistics and so my experience of one person may not swing things one way or the other, but basically that’s probably the way it will work out. I’m a new hire in Colorado. That will show up somewhere, I assume, in their statistics. And I’m no longer a business owner for that particular business. …

KLZ host Jason Worley: What is your main platform?

My main platform is economic freedom. The founders told us all men are created equal, and that means no man was born to rule over another man. And out of that it unleashed two powers that changed the world forever: liberty and responsibility. And government’s responsibility is to secure the blessings of liberty. They’ve clearly gone way beyond that. They are hampering economic freedom, and that’s hampering job growth. It’s hampering economic development in Colorado. We have to change that. Like I said, it’s about economic freedom.

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.

Read (or listen here) how 560-AM KLZ’s Ken Clark said good bye to his listeners, including me, last night:

You know ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a great show. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s been very, very interesting. But I cannot stress enough that we need to get involved. We all need to get involved…. We need to become evangelical about this. We are in the fight of our lives. The Democrats, the liberals, the progressives, they lie. They are lying to you. It’s going to get a lot worse. You have got to study the issues. You have got to get involved. There are a ton places to go do that…They cannot win in a battle of ideas, because we always have the right ideas. On a national level, they cannot beat us in a battle of ideas. So they are going to lie. They are going to spend over a billion dollars in the next year, lying to you, making you believe that they are the good guys. They are not. Pure unadulterated evil. They are progressives. They are socialists. They have got to be defeated at all costs. This is Ken Clark, as always, good night, Colorado.

I sent the following email to Clark this morning. I’ll post any reply I get in its entirety.

Dear Ken:

You’ve make a big deal out of Rep. Amy Stephens calling you Tea Party people “anarchists.” I don’t blame you on that. It’s rude.

But now look what you’re doing, basically one upping her, calling people like me lying evil doers. I’m not evil, Ken. Ask my kids (on good days). Ask my friends. Ask people who’ve worked with me, conservatives even. Ask my Republican mother-in-law.

Maybe I’ve done an evil thing or two, but I’m a lot like you insofar as I try to figure out what’s right, and then do stuff, make things happen.

And you know what; I actually admire you for your activism. I’m not lying. I wish more people got involved, even if they join the Tea Party. Apathy is killing your side and mine.

And you can’t blame apathetic people for being apathetic if they stumble on your show and hear you  say you “always have the right ideas.” Are you kidding? I admire your passion, truly. I felt that way too when I was a kid. But please, do you really believe that? I don’t think you do.

You Tea Party people are losing ground because the word leaks out, from Congress down to your show, that you think you’re always right and you think those who disagree with you represent “unadulterated evil.”

How about we have a cup of coffee? I promise I won’t poison you. I’ll buy it, as a tiny sign of my non-evilness. Let me know if you’re up for it.

Jason

We all know the process of hammering out new state legislative districts is difficult for everyone involved: the governor, legislators, judges, and regular people, as well as the journalists reporting on it.

So even conservative talk-show hosts, like Jason Worley and Ken Clark on KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado, should at least make a pass at presenting the issue with some measure of decency and fairness.

I know, it’s talk radio, but still.

This should start with Worley and Clark mentioning, however briefly when they discuss this issue, the fact that Democrats and Republicans agree that competitive districts are good for Colorado, because competition makes politicians on both sides of the aisle more responsive to their constituents, so they’ll do the things they want them to do, like create jobs, boost education, and listen to each other at least as well as my 14-year-old listens to my 11-year-old.

As has been reported previously, it’s not just the Democrats who recognize that competitive districts are desirable, but it’s also former GOP Chairs Dick Wadhams and Bo Callaway. Also, in December, then GOP Senate Minority Leader Mike Kopp told the Colorado Statesman, “Citizens want a fair and open process with competitive districts.” The Fort Collins Coloradoan reported that Rep. Amy Stephens wants competitive districts, as does Sen. Steve Ward, R-Littleton, who told the Associated Press (April 24, 2008),“It’s the lack of competitive districts that have led to the polarization of politics.”

And both Republicans and Democrats can find aspects of the new legislative maps, currently under review by the Colorado Supreme Court, that increase competitiveness. So key elements of both parties would agree that this is a good thing, though, obviously, many leading Republicans believe that the latest set of maps give Democrats an unfair advantage overall.

But, as The Denver Post reported Sunday, not all Democrats are happy with the new districts either, and hearing their fellow Democrats say that the maps were drawn to meet the Supreme Court’s requirements to keep more counties whole doesn’t seem to satisfy them either.

But Worley and Clark failed to tilt their rhetoric anywhere near fairness and decency during a broadcast Tuesday.

Regardless of where they stand on this issue, Worley and Clark do no one any good when they nod, like Soviet generals, as Rep. Robert Ramirez, with no evidence, accuses reapportionment committee chairman Mario Carrera Tuesday of approving maps that would allegedly hurt Ramirez’s chances of re-election because of their old dispute over whether to allow undocumented children of illegal immigrants to qualify for in-state college tuition.

Retribution and spite, that’s what was motivating Carrera on the maps, Ramirez told told Grassroots Radio Colorado.

I mean, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum, you have to hope that a baseline level of evidence and facts are required before talk show hosts engage in a conversation like this one, which occurred on Grassroots Radio Colorado Nov. 29:

RAMIREZ: You know, its funny because the one vote this year that you guys actually praised me on, and we have seen different eye to eye on a couple things, was the ASSET vote. The in-state tuition for undocumented…. or illegals.  And he [Carrera] actually came to visit me the morning before that vote, brought me a letter and basically said please vote for this. It’s really important and I really want it. And I think we need to do this. It’s good for the Hispanic people. Blah blah blah blah. And really I went into that vote open-minded, thinking okay let’s see if there is something constitutionally we can do here. And they never found that. It was never there. Well then I hear…I overheard a Democrat [sic] commissioner talking to another commissioner hearing that while they were working on the maps, Carrera was discussing with people that he was upset with my vote on ASSET. And then I heard from a couple commissioners that he directly told them that he was mad about my vote on ASSET. So when I got my first map drawn, the primarily adopted, I am like wow ok so this is true, it’s working. But the new map with Carrera, and they dumped a 70 percent Democrat [sic] voting margin group in and took out my highest Republican voting margin. It was very obvious that he was playing the partisan game.

CLARK: So not to put words in your mouth. I’ll let you finish this Rep. Ramirez, but in your opinion you believe that pretty much everything he has been doing has been from a I’m mad at you for this, I’m mad at you for that, how dare you question me on this, and moving towards vindictiveness. And he is using the maps to get back at people he’s mad at.

RAMIREZ: Well, if you look, Ken Summers originally the only people that were really badly damaged that he could do anything with on the original maps were Republicans who had voted against the ASSET bill. And now it’s just, how dare you go against my word, so I’m really going to mess with you. I think it is. I think his pride has got in the way. And it’s unfortunate because I truly thought that he was a man of integrity. And he is proving that not so.

WORLEY: So now we can use M for Vendetta. M for Vendetta, we’ll have a new movie title going. Mario for Vendetta.

RAMIREZ: The main thing I wanted to say was, I wanted to thank Mario Nicolais. I wanted to thank the people who were actually trying to do their job. The Republicans that are on there. And it’s not a just a partisan thing. I’ve watched them, I’ve listened to them. And when you go to one of these meetings and you see the eye rolling of Atencio, Web, Matt…oh gosh…Matt Jones and Carroll. I mean literally, whenever a Republican or a conservative or a non-Democrat would say anything at these meetings they just [sign noise], roll their eyes, and really disrespect them. You never saw that from the people on the Republican side. They would get back at them.

WORLEY: I have heard Ms. Atencio is kind of nasty.

RAMIREZ: Oh absolutely. Without saying. I want to say that I appreciate the commissioners that are in there really trying to really be honest and hold true to the Constitution. Because the original map they gave me wasn’t a better map. It was a little worse than when I ran last year. But it was an honest map. And it followed the rules like you guys were saying earlier. We follow the rules. We go out there and try to do what’s right and then every time the Democrats…and we know they are going to do it, sweep in the last minute with lies.