Delegates at the state Republican convention will vote Saturday to decide which gubernatorial candidates will face off in the GOP primary election June 24.

But delegates will not have the option of voting for Bob Beauprez, who’s the only Republican GOP gubernatorial candidate who’s decided to skip Saturday’s convention and rely only on petitioning onto the June primary ballot.

The question is, will Beauprez be told not to attend the convention, like failed Senate candidate Jane Norton was in 2010 when she decided to forgo a vote at the assembly? Not only was her presence banned, but so were any Norton banners, signs, and literature. Presumably, Norton could have stood on the public sidewalk outside the convention hall, and indeed her signs were scattered out there in 2010, but Norton stayed away.

Then State GOP Chair Dick Wadhams was clear that no whiff of Norton would be tolerated, telling  The Denver Post’s Allison Sherry at the time:

Wadhams: “Any candidates for statewide office who forgo the caucus assembly process will not be allowed to speak,” Wadhams said. “They will not be allowed to have banners or signs or literature at the state convention. If the convention is not good enough to participate in, it’s not good enough for them to have a presence. That’s their decision.”

Media outlets have yet to determine if the same rules will be enforced, which makes for an interesting angle on equal-pay week. An email to GOP Chair Ryan Call seeking clarification was not immediately returned.

GOP candidates must receive 30 percent of the vote at the state convention to make the June 24 primary ballot. Additionally, they must garner at least 10 percent of votes to be placed on the ballot, even if they’ve collected enough signatures to make the ballot. If no candidate at the convention hits the 30-percent threshold, then the top to vote-getting candidates will make the primary ballot.

By skipping the convention, Beauprez eliminates any risk that his name would be struck from the ballot for getting less than a 10 percent of the convention vote, assuming he makes the ballot via the petition process. It appears that he will make the ballot via signatures.

Tom Tancredo has already petitioned on the primary ballot.

The winner of the GOP gubernatorial primary will take on Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper.  Leading candidates, in addition to Beauprez and Tancredo, are Secretary of State Scott Gessler and Sen. Greg Brophy.

Earlier this year, State Chair Call clarified that GOP candidates are allowed to both petition on the GOP primary ballot and go through the assembly process.

If you really want to understand the dynamic playing out right now among conservative candidates battling each other to defeat their primary-election opponents,  I might suggest you tune to conservative talk radio, even if it’s only for the next couple of months while the primary process unfolds.

You might ask, as a friend did the other day, “Does listening to talk radio make you want to crawl in there and strangle someone?”

No. Not at all.

Take for example, KLZ radio host Ken Clark’s conversation with gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez the other day.

Clark asked Beauprez how he’s going to get the support of grassroots conservatives when “you make statements like we-have-to-legislate-from-the-middle.”

“I don’t even remember saying it,” Beauprez responded, “but I’ll take you at your word, Ken'”

And then Beauprez flashed his conservative cards:

Beauprez: “I had one of the most conservative voting records in Congress. In fact, I believe I had the most conservative voting record of our entire Republican delegation, including Marilyn Musgrave and Tom Tancredo and Joel Hefley at the time. I believe the National Journal had me right at 90 percent of all members of Congress. So that puts me in reasonably elite category of proven conservatives.”

Later, Clark did some off-air research and told Beauprez that he made his we-have-to-legislate-from-the-middle comment on KNUS’ Peter Boyles Show.

But Beauprez denied being on Boyles show, telling Clark: “I suppose it showed. You couldn’t catch me off guard, because that doesn’t sound like something I would have said,” and, in any event, “I don’t think I was on Pete’s show.” [BigMedia emphasis]

A talk-radio puzzler! Did Beauprez make the heretical statement that we should govern from the middle? He didn’t say it on Boyles’ show because Beauprez was correct; he did not appear there.

But on KNUS’ Dan Caplis show March 4, with attorney Craig Silverman guest hosting, Beauprez didn’t use the exact words “legislate from the middle,” but he said as much:

Beauprez: You know, Colorado is a wonderful place where we all seem to figure out a way to get along.  But you can’t track way far to the right or to the left in Colorado and pretend to still be mainstream and be on the side of the vast majority of people. Listen here.

So Ken Clark wins! In front of a more moderate conservative host (Silverman), Beauprez did advocate for governing from the middle. In front of a Tea-Party host (Clark), Beauprez disavowed any talk of middle-ground-governance.  (Read this backwards: bob syaw-thob.)

Thumping is conservative chest on Clark’s show, Beauprez suggested that anyone concerned about his conservative credentials should read his 2009 book, Return to Values, where he outlines an “appropriate agenda for America.”

“Contact me, and I’ll get you a copy!” Beauprez said.

See what I mean about conservative talk radio? On top of all the dramatic conflict and intellectual stimulation and puzzles, you even get free books by guys like Bob Beauprez. Don’t miss it. Grassroots Radio Colorado starts at 5 p.m. on KLZ 560 AM.

In a blog post Friday, I tipped my hat to a Greeley talk-radio show for being the first media outlet to report that Cory Gardner’s new position on abortion, in the wake of his un-endorsement of the personhood amendment, aligns with dogmatic religious views against abortion, even in the case of rape and incest.

But KFKA hosts Tom Lucero and Devon Lentz let me down by not questioning Gardner when he told them he holds the same position on abortion as “many pro-lifers in Colorado, including Congressman Bob Schaffer.”

But Bob Schaffer never endorsed the personhood initiative at all, much less collected signatures for it. Personhood leaders would never have called Schaffer one of their “main supporters.”

In Congress, Schaffer never co-sponsored federal personhood legislation, which would have banned all abortion, even for rape and incest, like Gardner did less than a year ago.

You can bet Schaffer never sent a constituent a letter saying, “Throughout my life, I’ve been committed to protecting human life, beginning at conception.” Gardner wrote this just last month.

So, actually, Gardner’s abortion position is significantly to the right of Schaffer’s, which obviously carries serious political baggage for Gardner, as Lucero and Lentz should have pointed out.

On abortion policy and politics, Gardner is much more like Ken Buck. Afrwe being an enthusiastic supporter of the personhood amendment, Buck un-endorsed the measure in much the same way Gardner did,  saying he still supported it “as a concept” but he hadn’t fully understand it. Gardner, you recall, said the personhood initiative was motivated by “good intentions.”

Buck’s flip did nothing to stop him from, arguably, losing the election due to his position on women’s issues. Schaffer would neither have been as vulnerable as Buck was nor as vulnerable as Gardner remains.

These are the issues that should be raised, if Gardner continues to downplay his personhood flip flop by comparing himself to Schaffer.

I just went to Safeway after reading Eating Dangerously, by Denver journalists Michael Booth and Jennifer Brown.

I have to admit, the produce aisle was scary. The cantaloupes brought flashbacks from the book’s detailed recounting of the deaths of 33 people who ate Colorado cantaloupe in 2011. The shiny apples didn’t look clean. The bagged greens, which I love, bothered me. But I found a deceptively clean-looking bag and tossed in in my cart.

I moved on, just trying to implement some of the book’s ideas to protect myself.

Over in the fruit area, I decided to put my apples, oranges, limes, and bananas in one of my reusable bags, instead of just dropping them loose in my shopping cart, like I used to do to avoid putting them in wasteful plastic bags.

As Eating Dangerously explains, you don’t want your apples rolling around a shopping cart that’s been slimed with raw chicken and who knows what. It suggests wrapping them in plastic bags. I was glad I read the book for this advice alone.

I skipped the fresh raspberries. I’d been buying them lately for my daughter’s smoothie, even though I know they’re imported from somewhere really really far away with virtually no inspection. But the book helped me recommit to not buying raspberries in April. (I buy plenty of other foods from faraway places, but the raspberries got cut.)

I used to feel good about the organic/local section, but I was deflated because the book points out that organic food can carry deadly bacteria just like conventional food. Still, there are benefits to organic/local food, and I loaded some stuff in my buggy.

I didn’t want to buy meat at all, especially salmonella-laced chicken, but it’s so easy to toss a chicken in the oven. I reminded myself that I’d cook the shit out of the it, and I’d be safe.

I put the bagged bird under the rest of my food, on the platform under my buggy, to separate it from the produce, which will be eaten raw. Good advice from the book, which is subtitled, “Why the Government Can’t Keep Your Food Safe…and How You Can.”

I strolled around a while longer, and at one point, I saw my buggy with the chicken dangling by the wheels of the cart. I realized, shit, the book recommended selecting stuff like chicken LAST, at the end of my shopping experience, not at the beginning, to limit its time out of the fridge.

I ran to my buggy, loaded up on a few more things, and headed to the check-out line.

Everything was going well until the checker dumped my apples, limes, oranges, and other fruit on the conveyer belt after he’d taken them out of my cloth bag and weighed them. If you read the book, you know the conveyer belt at the checkout-line in a grocery store has major potential to contaminate your food, especially stuff you’re not going to cook.

I was doing the bagging, and I lunged for the apples as they hit the moving belt, limiting the exposure to the contaminated area to just seconds.

I didn’t have the guts to tell the checker that he was exposing me, possibly, to deadly contamination by tossing my lemons on his moving black rubber pad.

Eating Dangerously recommends bathing certain foods in a bleach bath, but this is not practical for me. I’ll wash my food, especially the fruits that hit the conveyer belt today, more carefully than I would have before reading the book, and maybe my daughter won’t die, as a result. It could happen, as the book proves with reasoned and credible analysis, carefully cited.

And the sad part is, if someone were to die because their apples got contaminated at the check-out line, it’s likely his or her death would have been completely preventable, if our government could afford to implement simple common-sense regulations that, surely, most everyone would want, given the life-and-death stakes.

Booth, who just left The Denver Post, and Brown, who’s still there, make an irrefutable case that the gaping holes in our food-protection system, carefully documented in their book, reflect a gross failure of government. And, bottom-line, we could be eating more safely if more tax money were available for the food fight. Instead, budget cuts make us eat more dangerously every day.

You can argue about whether improving food safety should be the highest priority of our broke government, given the magnitude of death and destruction in our world at home and abroad. But one in six Americans will get sick from something they ate this year. Three thousand will die.

Correction: a previous version of this post inaccurately stated that contaminated cantaloupe were grown in Rocky Ford, Colorado. In fact, they were grown 90 miles from Rocky Ford.

When Rep. Cory Gardner dumped his longstanding support of the Personhood amendment two weeks ago, reporters failed to tell us about Gardner’s new position on abortion.

It turns out, Gardner now holds the same abortion stance as Archbishop Charles Chaput, who left Denver for a Vatican post in Philadelphia in 2011.

That’s what Gardner told KFKA (Greeley) talk-show hosts Tom Lucero and Devon Lentz March 27. They get the intrepid-talk-show-host prize for being the first to ask Gardner the logical follow up to his March 21 bombshell about ditching personhood:

LUCERO:  So, Cory, has your position on life changed, or just your position on – with regards to the Personhood initiative?

GARDNER:  Yeah.  I mean, if you look at my record, it still is a pro-life record.  And many pro-lifers in Colorado, including Congressman Bob Schaffer, the Archbishop Chaput of the Catholic Diocese, hold the same position.

LENTZ:  So, it’s really, it’s more along the lines, if I’m understanding correctly, on what contraception is available for women, not – not abortion — for being abortion– it’s just more having the choice of birth control itself.

GARDNER:  Well, that’s one of the consequences that we looked at in terms of contraception, but this issue [personhood] is, I think, a settled issue in Colorado and something that pro-lifers – you know, like I respect peoples’ difference of opinion on this, and I think there are a lot of differences of opinions on this, but I happen to agree that, with the things that I have learned, that I did something that was the right position to take.

So what does this tell us about Gardner’s newly minted abortion views?

The Vatican, along with Catholic Bishops, like Chaput, support the personhood concept, with life beginning at conception. They oppose all abortion, even for rape and incest.

But, as Gardner said, Chaput did not back the personhood amendment. I couldn’t find Chaput’s specific explanation for his opposition to the personhood initiative.

A decade ago, Chaput himself wrote, in describing church teachings, that Roe v. Wade is a “poorly reasoned mistake” and “abortion is wrong in all cases, even rape and incest.” (News Release, “CFJ: Many See the Anti-Religious Implications of Dem Questions on Pryor,” July 3, 2003″).

Vatican watchers will undoubtedly recall that Chaput directed Catholics to vote according to their faith, and he called abortion a “foundational issue” that’s not open to debate.

On his “AM Colorado” show last week, Lucero also asked Gardner for “a little more insight” into his decision to abandon personhood:

LUCERO: You got a little bit of heat this last week in an interview you had with The Denver Post. Give our listeners a little more insight into what you were trying to tell them over at The Denver Post. 

GARDNER:  Well, you know, if you look at my position as a pro-life member of Congress, if you look what we did four years ago during the 2009, 2010 run up to the election [inaudible] the number of initiatives on the ballot, I had stated then that I supported an initiative known as the Personhood initiative.  But since that time, I have done a lot of work, done a lot of studying, and learned that that is actually something that many pro-lifers agree, could ban contraception and is a step back for the pro-life effort.  And I believe the voters of Colorado have spoken –that they said ‘no’ to this on multiple occasions, and we ought to be working together on common goals that we can achieve, instead of fighting over a separate issue.

Interestingly, in August, before Gardner flipped on personhood, former CO Republican Chair Dick Wadhams cited Chaput as a model for a GOP candidate–as someone who is both “pro-life” but anti-personhood amendment. Wadhams said at the time that a pro-life candidate who embraces the personhood amendment can’t win in a statewide election.