Ironically, when you go to The Denver Post’s website and look for a way to pay for the content, instead of lapping it up for free, you have to get out your microscope and look in the upper right hand corner (and the way bottom of the page) to find the word “subscribe.”

I’ll make it easy by providing the subscription link here.

The Post should enlarge its “subscribe” button so its squinting aged readers don’t have another excuse, as if they need one, not to subscribe to the newspaper, which  is downsizing its newsroom once again.

Obviously The Post, like other outfits that try to practice serious journalism, is hurting. You might think it’s their own fault. You might think they’re doomed. You might think they don’t add as much to civic debate as they used to. And you might be right, but please think about subscribing anyway, especially if you use the content, to try to help keep the state’s best journalistic organ alive.

It may already be in the death spiral, but there’s still hope that if the newspaper industry can make it through the recession and, at the same time, get better at making money online, it can maintain the expertise and staff needed to inform us idiots out here.

The people who say that The Denver Post is useless at this point can’t be reading the newspaper.

If everyone in Colorado actaully read The Post, we’d have the most informed and educated state in history. I know the newspaper sucks compared to what it was, but think about how bad it could be, and how much worse the state would be without it.

The newspaper still covers the grind of politics and civic life, entertainment, business, even sports, unlike anything we’ve got and will probably ever have.

So do us all a favor and subscribe.

If you’ve been following my blog, you know I’ve been trying to get Jimmy Lakey, who’s a Colorado Springs talk-radio host, to explain why he laughed like a mad man when a caller compared Michelle Obama to a character in the Planet of the Apes. (Listen here to the audio.)

On his show Sunday, September 25, Lakey offered up a response of sorts.

He was laughing about something, and he cut off his laughter abruptly and said:

“Oh, I’m sorry I’m laughing. Laughing makes many people nervous on this radio show.”

I’d been looking forward to hearing what Lakey had to say, but I never expected to agree with him, especially when he was mocking all the people who were legitimately upset by his behavior.

But he’s right. He laughs and I’m nervous.  That’s not my usual reaction to laughter, but in this case, it’s true.

Now I’m hoping he explains himself some more.

September 25, Jimmy Lakey show on KVOR-740 AM, owned by Cumulus Media, Inc.

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who’s a creator and promoter of the Tea Party, was on the Mike Rosen Show yesterday, and he and Rosen spent a couple minutes discussing the Wall Street Greed protest.

Armey’s rambling about the demonstration shows why the simple message of Wall Street Greed is so effective.

The conservatives try to say, Wall Street is not greedy because…. and they immediately start to sound really out of touch.

Here’s Dick Armey, who’s not a stupid guy:

Armey: …Goofballs that are walking around now protesting what they call, Wall Street greed is just ridiculous. I don’t know how you even respond to people like that.

Rosen: You’re talking about the, Occupy Wall Street, demonstration here.

Armey: Right, right. These folks first of all, the first thing the left does, progressives, there’s a documented history of this is a design by them, is distort the language. Basically what they argue is that people who have gone out and worked hard and earned their living and want to keep the money they earned through their legal, honest effort, these people are greedy…. To me, greed was wanting something from someone else that you hadn’t earned. That’s what I always thought greed was. But to these folks, greed is wanting to keep what you worked very hard to earn. I mean, I don’t get it. I don’t get their line of thinking. You know, I think they’ve got a distorted sense of truth. I don’t know, it’s very frustrating to me because it’s hard to know how anybody can be that misguided and that arrogant.

Rosen might have been alone, even among his audience, in not wanting to ask: Ok, about that Wall Street Greed that is self evident in America?

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler has been denying that partisanship played any role in his decision to file a lawsuit to stop Denver from mailing election ballots to inactive voters, who last voted in the 2008 general election.

Gessler’s latest public denial of partisan-taint came on KHOW’s Caplis and Silverman Show last week, in response to a direct question from Silverman at 33 minutes in the podcast Sept. 28 show, 5 p.m. hour:

Silverman: Isn’t this just partisan on your part? Isn’t it because you’re thinking this will favor the Democrats?

Gessler: Absolutely not. Denver can’t do what it wants to do. It can do what it wants to do in a municipal election.

But in October, as he was running for office, Gessler said on a radio show that the large number of Democratic voters on the inactive voter lists concerned him, specifically because more Democrats than Republicans were on the inactive voter lists.

In fact, it concerned him so much that he implied that election officials in Democratic counties, which would include Denver, were managing their inactive voter lists in such a way as to favor the Democratic Party.

Gessler framed the issue in partisan terms, saying at the time that in counties with large numbers of Democrats, election officials are slow to clean up their lists of inactive voters.

“You have some heavily democratic counties that are less focused on cleaning up their databases than other counties,” Gessler told KOA’s Mike Rosen, Oct. 6, 2010, at 10:15 seconds in the podcast:

Rosen: I’ve got a report in front of me from the Secretary of State’s office, and it’s an official report. You can see  it online. And it has total registered voters by party affiliation and status. Among Republicans, we have 869,000 active voters and 199,000 inactive voters. Among Democrats, 825,000 active voters and 242,000 inactive voters….

Gessler: If they have not voted in the last general election they become inactive. And I think what you are seeing there, especially because of the heavy skew towards the large number Democrat inactive voters. I think that indicates variances in the counties and how focused they are. You have some heavily democratic counties that are less focused on cleaning up their databases than other counties. What you always look for to find out if there is a problem with the database is statistical anomalies. When there is something that pops out that seems a little unusual. Here there is something unusual there. You have two times, twice as many inactive Democrat voters as you do Republican voters. That is something that needs investigation. I am not saying there is massive fraud or anything there but that is very unusual to have those statistical anomalies.

I contacted Gessler’s office for a clarification. When he said, “less focused,” did he mean that clerks were deliberately putting less of a priority on cleaning up the inactive voter lists in order to promote Democrats?

Does he believe there’s a little bit of fraud going on here, even if there’s not the “massive” variety? Did his concern about the inactive voter lists play a role in his decision to file the lawsuit against Denver?

I’ll update this post when I get an answer.

UPDATE: Talking Points Memo picks up on the post below, adding, among other things, the quote from Lakey that it’s cruel to criticize Michelle Obama’s clothes, but “”It’s cruel for her to talk about my hamburgers that I want to eat all the time.”

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Colorado Springs talk-radio host Jimmy Lakey was sitting at a cigar club at some point, he didn’t say when, and he heard someone refer to Michelle Obama as “Chewbacca.”

He’d never used the word himself, he told his radio audience Aug. 14, but “at the cigar club, someone used the phrase Chewbacca, and everyone knew or assumed who this person was talking about.”

“I’ve tested it,” Lakey said on 740 KVOR, laughing. “I’ve done group testing, and I’ve said, if I say Chewbacca, what do you think? And, I’m telling you. I’m in so much trouble right now.”

In trouble, he said, with his wife, whom he told about the Chewbacca talk at the cigar club.

“She lectured me, and told me that was wrong, and that was crossing the line, and how rude that was,” Lakey said into his microphone for the world to hear.

But then one day Lakey showed his wife some photos from Facebook of Michelle Obama dressed in different outfits.

His wife, the “nice one,” he said,  told him she looked like a halfback.

“If you’re the First Lady, you shouldn’t wear things that make you look like a halfback,” she said to him.

Lakey replied to his wife: “What’s the difference between you saying she looks like a halfback and someone else saying the name Chewbacca? I don’t get the difference. I just don’t get the difference.” [Editor’s note: A halfback is a football player. Chewbacca is an ape-like character in Star Wars films.]

After he started telling this story on the radio, Lakey said he got a Facebook message from a listener. The caller claimed to be the guy from the cigar club, Lakey said, the person Lakey first heard using the name Chewbacca. The guy who started this whole thing.

It turns out, this guy’s wife gets mad at him, too, for referring to Michelle Obama as Chewbacca.

“I had a guy just post on my Facebook fan page,” Lakey told anyone who hadn’t turned off the radio yet. Then he read the Facebook post:

Hey Jimmy, I smoke cigars, and I referred to Michele Obama as Chewbacca since 2009 (laughs). I wonder if I’m the guy you heard call her that. …My wife has told me not to call her that in front of my kids. But my boys, got bless them, have picked up on it and they have marched forward with it…. I wanted to identify myself and state that I cannot stand the Obamas. I took my boys out of school to attend the Tea Party rallies, and they were magnificent.

Along the way, Lakey had told his audience that he thought calling Michelle Obama Chewbacca was “crass and a little bit much.”

But that didn’t stop him from saying everything he said, plus Lakey offered up this:

Chewbacca! I didn’t say it! (laughs) No! I will not take the heat on this. I did not call her Chewbacca.  No. I get in trouble. My wife, when I told her this, she yelled at me. I thought it was kind of funny.

After I listened to a recording of Lakey’s story last week, I sent him an email with this question:

You said on the radio Aug. 14 you thought it was “kind of funny” for Michele Obama to be called Chewbacca. You also said the comment was “crass and a little bit much,” but you went on to repeat the phrase and laugh repeatedly. Do you really think that using “Chewbacca” to describe Michele Obama is kind of funny?

I didn’t hear back from him.

Neither did he tell me a couple weeks ago why he laughed hysterically and grotesquely when a caller compared Michele Obama to a character in the Planet of the Apes.

And, as I explain here, Lakey deleted questions about his on-air behavior that I posted on his Facebook fan page, where he describes himself as “humanitarian & entrepreneur, and a former candidate for U.S. Congress in Colorado’s CD7 and…a frequent guest host for radio talk shows across the USA.”

I don’t take his brush-off personally, because he didn’t respond to the Colorado Springs Gazette either.

So that’s where the story ends for now.

If you want to ask him what the @?!!!** he’s thinking and why, here’s his email address: jimmy.lakey@cumulus.com. Lakey’s station, KVOR, was just recently bought by Cumulus Media, Inc, one of the biggest radio conglomerates in the U.S.

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Below are the segments of the show during which Lakey tells his Chewbacca story.

If you thought the written version above was scary or offensive, you’ll find the radio-show clips below even worse, because his laughter adds a creepy dimension that could not convey.

Lakey: “Chewbacca! I didn’t say it,” Part 1:

Lakey “Chewbacca! I didn’t say it,” Part 2 (later in the show):