Westword’s uber blogger Michael Roberts reported Sept. 19 that Tom Tancredo, a former Republican Congressman from Colorado, had placed ads in Metro State University’s student newspaper seeking plaintiffs for a lawsuit seeking damages resulting from the University’s decision to offer undocumented students a reduced tuition rate, below the out-of-state fee but higher than the rate for Colorado citizens.

Tancredo tells me that some students who are paying out-of-state tuition have replied to the ad, but they’re scared to sign up with Tancredo and sue, like good Americans do.

You might think, it’s Tancredo they’re scared of. But no, according to Tancredo, the students are worried they’ll feel the heat from Metro professors.

Tancredo said: “Problem is, the ones we’ve talked to, they are afraid of the ramifications in the school, whether teachers would treat them unfairly. We’ve got several saying it’s unfair. But they say, I’m scared, what if they do something to me?”

Tancredo plans to continue running his ad through the end of this month, hoping he can find plaintiffs.

His ad reads: “Paying Out of State Tuition? Annoyed you are being ripped off by Metro’s policy allowing a lower rate for noncitizens?”

I asked Tancredo if he tells his potential plaintiffs that Metro teachers will not bite back against them.

“I don’t want to be overly optimistic and say that would never happen,” he said. “It certainly could. I don’t want to lead them astray. They have to make a decision about whether they want to brave that particular outcome.”

Tancredo’s lawsuit, especially because it’s being pushed by one of Colorado’s top Republicans, could be seen by some as a Republican attack on Hispanics who, along with women, are seen as decisive voters in Colorado.

So I asked Tancredo if he’s he waiting until after the election to drop the suit.

“Believe me, I would drop it tomorrow if I had that one plaintiff,” Tancredo replied.

Tancredo fired a question back at me.

“Have you asked the question to Metro?” he asked. “Did they do this to influence the election? I think it’s a distinct possibility.”

Metro didn’t return a call seeking comment, but the University has said in the past that its policy was based on business considerations.

The undocumented students involved say it gives them hope. The Denver Post quoted one such student in August. He told The Post he entered the U.S. in 1999 illegally with his parents.

“It’s really tough; you get frustrated because all we want is the chance to get out of the shadows, to become someone,” said Oscar, 20, a freshman. “We’ve talked about going back, but Mexico is a place we don’t know, and we feel like, ‘We grew up here, we belong here.’ “

In a Sept. 21 article in the Denver Business Journal, Amy Attwood, who’s running against Brittany Pettersen for State House, was paraphrased as saying that the state government’s move in 2010 to repeal tax credits forced businesses to lay off workers.

The Journal reported:

Attwood, CFO of Clemons Construction of Littleton, emphasizes that as an officer of her family’s general-contracting company, she’s seen the negative effects state policy can have on business. The “Dirty Dozen” tax-credit cuts of 2010 stopped investment, stalled private construction and forced downsizing — and company owners are worried more rumored tax-credit cuts that could come in 2013 will freeze investment again, motivating her to prevent such moves, she said.

Asked about this, Attwood told me, “I didn’t say that.”

“The forced downsizing, I never talked about that,” she said, adding that “it was just a misquote.”

“I live business every day,” she continued. “Having a stable business climate and not having more burdens placed on us by government will help us to produce more jobs and to get our economy going.”

Business Journal reporter Ed Sealover said:

“What she told me is that her business is at five employees now, down from a high of 12 employees. I didn’t specifically ask her when that high of 12 employees was. And so maybe that’s the miscommunication. They downsized at some point. I can tell you that.”

Attwood maintains that “the dirty dozen has hurt business across the state.”

What’s her evidence to support that?

“Just talking to thousands of business owners,” she told me. “They’re going into next year not knowing what to expect, and if they elect candidates like myself whose priority is jobs and the economy, they will know what to expect. And who are the jobs producers? Private business.”

“I spent three days living in the dirt on the Mexican-Arizona border, and there are more than people crossing the border who want to cut your lawn. They want to cut your throats,” filmmaker Dennis Lynch told radio hosts Devon Lentz and Tom Lucero on Greeley’s KFKA radio Sept. 10, adding that “the border is wide open.”

“Another 9-11 can happen at any time,” Lynch said, on the eve of the 11th anniversary of the tragedy. “They can be in any city in three days.”

(Someone like Timothy McVeigh could get there faster, but let’s not think about that right now.)

My question is, why would Lucero and Lentz, both former executives with the Larimer County Republican Party, sit there and let an angry filmmaker trash millions of hard-working people?

What about the taxes they pay? What about the work they do?

If there’s one thing we all know about illegal immigration, it’s that simplistic swipes like Lynch’s don’t contribute to solving the problem. They make it worse and breed sadness and hostility.

But Lucero and Lentz didn’t see it that way, at least on the radio September 10.

“That was phenomenal,” Lucero gushed at Lynch, minutes after Lynch told Lucero that he and Lentz will have to change the language of their radio show when tens of millions of illegal immigrants flood across the border in the coming years as the economy improves.

“You’re going to have to learn how to do your radio show in Spanish, and that’s not me being a racist,” said Lynch, whose fear-mongering underground film is titled “They come to America.”

Lynch’s solution is to vote for (hold your breath) Mitt Romney!

Why? Partly, Lynch said on the radio, because Obama has authorized giving work permits to illegal-immigrant children, who are excelling in school and who were brought to this country through no fault of their own.

And Obama supports the Dream-Act idea of giving a path to citizenship to these children, if they excel in school.

Why is it so horrible to give these children a break? Why is it so bad to support comprehensive immigration reform, like Obama does, increasing border security, while offering illegal immigrants in our country an arduous path to citizenship?

If you were listening to the radio show, you have no idea what’s wrong with these policies because they weren’t debated. Lucero and Lentz took the low road and offered not a flash hope for a person with a questioning mind.

All they did was trash undocumented immigrants, and that approach doesn’t help us deal with the problem of illegal immigration.

Lentz told her radio audience that Lynch’s video made her think about illegal immigration, and now she was “mad.”

“I went to Wal-Mart the other day,” she told listeners. “Nearly everything I saw in the package department at Wal-Mart is in Spanish too, right under English.”

And Devon, were you worried, as you left the store, that the Hispanic man cutting the lawn was going to try to cut your throat?

by Michael Lund

Brandon Rittiman’s six-and-a-half minute interview with Paul Ryan on 9news’ Your Show last week raised more questions than it answered.  Not that Rittiman didn’t try his hardest.   But reporters who encounter Ryan further on down the campaign trail should press him for more details.

With help from viewers’ submissions, Rittiman posed timely, topical, and well-constructed questions to Ryan.  But the GOP vice-presidential nominee’s responses were scripted and predictable (on Obama’s record), broad (on taxes), simplistic (on limited government), evasive and misleading (on women’s health issues) and even humble (backpedaling on his previously reported extraordinary marathon time).

Ryan began by debunking President Clinton’s assertion during his speech at the Democratic National Convention that in a single term, no president could fix the mess that President Obama inherited.  Ryan called that argument an excuse, and then recited oft-repeated numbers on unemployment and growing poverty.

He finished his statement with,

 “We want growth, we want prosperity, and we have a very specific plan to get jobs created, to get higher take-home pay, to get people back on a path to prosperity – out of poverty.”

Wanting growth, jobs and prosperity doesn’t distinguish Ryan from anyone else in America, including every Democrat.  Thankfully, Rittiman deftly followed up with the obvious question – he asked for specifics on the Romney/Ryan plan on taxes and spending.

Ryan barely complied.  He advocated across-the-board tax cuts of 20%, (paid for by “getting rid of loopholes”) and then proposed a transparent, democratic process (no “backroom deals like they did with Obamacare”) to determine which loopholes to close and who should benefit from write-offs.

“… and who should get the write-offs?  Should we be giving write-offs to specific businesses?  Should Washington – which Republicans and Democrats have both done, pick winners and losers?  Or should high income individuals be able to shelter their money from taxation?  We don’t think so.  By closing these tax shelters, by plugging loopholes that go to specific industries and businesses, that go to higher income people who shelter their money from taxation, you can lower tax rates for everybody.”

Hold the phone.

Was Ryan talking about rich people with tax shelters?  What was that he said about Swiss bank accounts, Bermuda shadow corporations, and $30 million of Bain Capital funds in the Cayman Islands?

As Newt Gingrich has pointed out, and Vanity Fair has investigated, and American voters like me have observed, the Romney/Ryan plan might cause some consternation for people like Romney.

And what about that call for a transparent process?  If it’s going to be transparent, we may need to know about which presidential candidates have which assets tucked away in which off-shore accounts.   Hmmm.  Releasing tax returns could help in that regard.  Just sayin’…

Rittiman persisted in asking for details, and Ryan reiterated, with no satisfaction to my inquiring mind.

“We’re actually saying, “Don’t lose tax revenue, but don’t have a massive tax increase and restructure the tax code so that it is fairer, simpler, and more internationally competitive to create jobs.”

Does that mean that Ryan and Romney might be down with “a moderate tax increase”?

Rittiman didn’t ask, but the “numbers guy” Ryan did offer that he would not support “higher tax rates on successful small businesses which is where most of our jobs come from.”

But, if we close loopholes, couldn’t some businesses and Republicans spin that as a tax hike?  After all, many take issue with the idea of repealing the Bush tax cuts, saying that restoring previous tax rates would actually amount to a tax hike.

And another question:  does a “fairer, simpler, and internationally competitive” system include sheltering assets in strawman corporations in sunny Caribbean locales?

Ryan insists in the Your Show interview that there is Democratic support for the Romney/Ryan plan.

“The Simpson-Bowles Commission proposed a similar process of lowering tax rates and plugging loopholes even more that what the Romney/Ryan plan does.”

One might wonder, how did House Budget Committee member Ryan vote on the Simpson-Bowles recommendation?  I’ll save future interviewers some trouble here.

He voted against it.

The opinion articles in a newspaper like The Denver Post aren’t an anything-goes zone when it comes to facts.

Professional editors over there do their best to keep the facts real, even if the opinions are bogus. So you’re more likely to read factual information in a Post op-ed than in a random blog like this one (though I do my best).

So this means, if an error slips through the editors, they’ll correct it (as  I will).

That’s what happened last week as it became clear that GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan did not climb 40 Colorado peaks, as written by conservative columnist John Andrews Aug. 26.

Andrews wrote in an opinion article boldly titled “Paul Ryan, Mountain Man:”

“[Andrews] has climbed 40 of the state’s 54 peaks over 14,000 feet.”

Turns out, as The Post wrote in a “clarification” Friday, Ryan climbed 28 peaks, but he climbed these 28 mountains a total of 38 times, if you believe what he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

I don’t get why The Post calls it a “clarification” when Andrews writes, completely inaccurately, that Ryan climbed 40 Colorado peaks.

It was an error on Aug. 11 (2 peaks off the mark, because he failed to write “nearly 40”), and now now it’s clear the error is worse (14 peaks off).

Here’s the item The Post ran on the matter Friday:

• CLARIFICATION: An Aug. 11 Denver Post story and an Aug. 26 column by John Andrews relied on comments from state Republican Party chairman Ryan Call that U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan has climbed nearly 40 of the state’s peaks over 14,000 feet. In a 2009 interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Ryan addressed the number of individual fourteeners he had summited directly. “I think I’ve climbed like 28 (peaks), and I’ve done it 38 times,” he said of his Colorado fourteener experiences.

The Denver Post’s new weekly columnist Rick Tosches is a great writer, no doubt, as anyone who’s followed him over the years knows. And he’ll be a great left-leaning addition to The Post’s right-leaning commentary section.

But he’s not the kind of raw partisan on the GOP side of the equation, like Mike Rosen and John Andrews, not to mention the not-so-raw partisan Vincent Carroll, who you see in The Post regularly (Carroll three times a week, Rosen weekly, Andrews every third week).

I mean, Rosen’s last column was titled, “Paul Ryan is no radical.” And Andrews’ last piece was, “Paul Ryan, Mountain Man.”

Not much subtlety there.

Tosches is too sophisticated to deliver crude Democratic talking points, like Rosen’s on the right. He’ll write about more interesting stuff, and only some of it will be political, you have to guess.

So that means The Post’s partisan gap on its commentary page may look like it’s going to remain open. (I’ve discussed this previously.)

But in announcing the addition of Tosches Sunday, Post Editorial Page Editor Curtis Hubbard wrote that The Post will also run columns from Democratic consultant Laura Chapin and others in the coming weeks, to offer more “voices on the left.”

Hubbard wrote:

I’ve heard from many of you in recent months that we need more voices from the left on these pages given the loss of Ed Quillen, Mike Littwin and others.

To that end, you’ll be seeing columns in coming weeks from two new writers: Laura Chapin, a Democratic consultant and former speechwriter for Gov. Bill Ritter; and Teresa Keegan, whose name may be familiar to you from her time as one of our Colorado Voices columnists.

Chapin is the kind of partisan writer who The Post needs to counter Andrews and Rosen. The title of her last Post column was, “Is there a GOP Obsession with LadyParts.”

Hubbard keeps a tally of the ideological bent of the content of the editorial page. Let’s hope he takes a close look at it, and factors in raw partisanship, as he decides how many columns he needs to add by folks like Chapin.

One of Colorado’s best up-and-coming reporters is leaving The Denver Post to cover politics in Illinois for the Associated Press, according to an AP report today:

Sara Burnett, an award-winning political reporter who has covered presidential campaigns and congressional elections in the battleground state of Colorado, has been hired to cover Illinois politics for The Associated Press.

The appointment was announced Monday by Central Regional Editor David Scott and Illinois News Editor Hugh Dellios. She will join a team of reporters, including Springfield, Ill., Correspondent Christopher Wills, in the coverage of state government and politics in Illinois.

Burnett, who worked at the Rocky when it closed, was a smart and hard-working reporter who earned the respect of fellow journalists.

She’ll be missed by everyone, across the political spectrum, who cares about quality journalism in Colorado.

If you’ve ever listened to “Mad Jen’s” internet radio podcast, you know she doesn’t interview many political candidates or politicians. Among other things, she’s too mad.

“I put my faith in ‘We the People,’ not so much in elected officials,” she emailed me recently when I asked why. “My favorite elected officials are long dead and were mostly from Virginia.”

So it was a bit of a surprise recently to find Colorado Senate District 28 candidate John Lyons on Mad Jen’s show.

Given Mad Jen’s archive of anger toward most political candidates, it was kind of funny that Lyons, right off the bat, had no answer to Mad Jen’s first question, about whether there is “ever a time” when “abortion should be allowed.” Lyons offered pieces of his thoughts to Mad Jen, but he never put them together to form an opinion.

In cases of rape and incest, he told Mad Jen, “I struggle with this issue.”

“I would hope a woman would choose to bring the child to term,” he said, “but I don’t know.”

In the end, he had no answer.

“And so, I wrestle with this, in what instances does abortion, you know, make sense?” Lyons told Mad Jenn. “You understand what I’m saying? And I struggle with that, and I haven’t quite got it.”

Mad Jen definitely understood what Lyons was saying, but she elected not to try to help him do any soul-searching on her radio show.

“It’s not my place to help you along with that,” she said, as if she were scolding a neighborhood kid who lost his baseball mitt, as my own son did yesterday.

“It’s just my place to get your views,” she told Lyons. “But I do encourage you to sit down with some of your supporters and talk this through. Because I think if you sit down and have a good, long conversation with some of them, the issue would become a lot more clear to you and it would be easier for you to stand out and talk pretty solidly about it.”

In an email, I asked Mad Jen, who said she interviewed Lyons at the suggestion of a friend who works for him, if she’d followed up with Lyons, to find out if he’d chatted with pro-life supporters as she suggested.

“I have not checked back with him,” she emailed me. “I would be interested to find out if he’s continued to search for and refine his personal stance on abortion.”

“It’s nearly impossible to tell who real conservatives are until they make it into office and start working,” she wrote. “The [Lyons] interview was for the sake of my audience, and I will leave it for them to decide whether or not he’s a true conservative.”

Mad Jen’s email was signed “WarHawk,” and I asked her if this was her real name. Would she tell me her real name for my article?

“I’m just a regular person,” she answered. “Mother, Wife, daughter, sister who wishes to leave our great nation to my children in better shape than it was when I received it.”

Why does she go by Mad Jen?

“My brand is ‘MADASHECC,” she wrote. “Therefore, I’m ‘Mad Jen.’ But MADASHECC started because I was mad as heck at what’s happening in our nation, and I felt I had to do something about it, so…I started MADASHECC. (Moms’ and Dads’ Associated Society Helping to Educate Conservative Constitutionalists)”

“I don’t necessarily operate as a news source. My goal is education and brining something educational to the discussion,” she wrote. “Often times, what I talk about on the show, I was interested in learning about myself, so I researched the topic and published my findings into a show. I never claim to be the authority on the various subjects that I speak about, though I make great attempts to learn as much as I can, and have everything I talk about be as factual as I can determine it to be.”

Mad Jen promotes her views on her podcast, which airs live on the internet on Saturdays, and social media. Her website contains an extensive archive of her internet podcasts.

On any given day you could hate Dan Caplis and Craig Silverman, if you’re on the political left, in the center, or to the right of center.

Their KHOW radio show was mostly a debate between a die-hard social/fiscal conservative and a right-leaning social moderate, and the illusion of a real left-right debate could kill you.

But still, the show, which ends today, offered more real political debate than you’ll find anywhere else on Denver radio, and it was a great part of the Denver media scene.

I’m really sorry to see it go.

Politics-wise, Caplis and Silverman hit their stride during the 2010 election cycle, when there’s little doubt that the program had a major impact on the election.

Among Colorado media outlets, only The Denver Post had a greater political impact that year. Click here for more details.

When he wasn’t kissing ass, Silverman asked some of the toughest and most logical questions of any media figure in Denver. For example, check out his questioning of GOP candidate Ken Buck in Aug., 2010:

Craig: You’re saying even in the cases of rape or incest, you’re not for abortion?

Buck: That’s correct. You know, Craig, if you believe that life begins at conception, which I do, then with the exception of rape and incest, you’re taking a life as a result of the crime of the father. And even though I recognize that the terrible misery that that life was conceived under, it is still taking a life in my view, and that’s wrong.

Craig: Right. And I believe life begins at conception. I think that’s a matter of science. To me the question is, when does somebody become a human being and entitled to the same rights and protections that any human being in America deserves, or frankly around the world. To me, that’s the debate. How did you come to your position? Is it informed by your religion?

Buck: It’s my upbringing. It’s my faith. It’s my life experiences, the three things that have brought me to that position.

Craig: And have you always been there, or is this something that you’ve evolved to.

Buck: No, I think it’s something I’ve evolved to. It’s something that I realized in my mid-twenties. I certainly as a teenager hadn’t thought through the positions. As I got out of school and was observing things and growing in my faith I came to that position.

Craig: And would it transfer into the legal world. You’re going to be a legislator if you’re voted into the United States Senate. Would you create a law that would prohibit abortion in the cases of rape or incest?

Buck: I would favor that position in law, yes.

Craig: -Let’s say, god forbid, that a 13-year-old boy impregnates his 14-year-old sister and does it by forced rape. You’re saying that the 14-year-old and anybody involved in the abortion should be prosecuted, if they choose to terminate the pregnancy, either through surgical abortion or a morning after pill?

Buck: I think it is wrong, Craig. I think it is morally wrong. And you are taking a very small group of cases and making a point about abortion. We have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of abortions in this country every year. And the example that you give is a very poignant one but an extremely rare occurrence.

Craig: Incest happens. I’m sure your office prosecutes it. And we know rape and sexual assault happen all the time, and your office prosecutes it. So it’s not completely rare. I agree that most abortions have nothing to do with that. I don’t know if I’d go with rare.

You knew if there was a big political story breaking, you’d likely find a major figure talking about it on Caplis and Silverman in the afternoon. Unfortunately, some Dems stopped going on the show, which was a mistake on their part, but to their credit, GOP leaders almost never rejected invitations. Click here to see some of Caplis and Silverman’s interviews that caught my attention over the years.

I’m goning to miss the Caplis and Silverman show a lot, and Denver is definitely worse off for its departure from the airwaves.

Just when you thought birthers were running away from their inner birtherness, a new birther jumps out of the closet on the op-ed pages of The Denver Post today.

That would be the ever-rational Mike Rosen, of the Mike Rosen Show on KOA.

Rosen wrote a column today, titled “Mike Coffman was right about Obama in the first place,” defending Coffman’s statement, first aired on 9News May 16, that he doesn’t know if Obama is a U.S. citizen or if our president is an American “in his heart.”

The funny part is that, even as Rosen defends Coffman for saying these things, Rosen is still birtherphobic when it comes to accepting that both he and Coffman are birthers.

Rosen wrote: “To set the record straight, in his remarks at the Elbert County Fairgrounds on May 12, Coffman did not challenge the legitimacy of Obama’s natural-born citizenship. This was not, as 9News falsely captioned it on-screen in its slanted report, ‘Coffman’s Birther Moment.'”

(Incidentally, 9News acknowledged its story was stimulated by a tip from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.) In fact, Coffman separated himself from ‘birther’ activists who express certainty that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. On that matter, Coffman said, ‘I don’t know.’ Neither do I. I’m not certain Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud, but I’m suspicious.”

Mike, you don’t know Obama is a citizen, and you still think his birth certificate might be a fraud. If you hold these beliefs, you can’t say, categorically, that the President is a citizen. That means you’re a birther.

And the Oxford American Dictionary agrees with me, defining a birther as:

“a conspiracy theorist who challenges President Obama’s US birth certificate.”

At risk of repeating myself, but I can’t resist: By definition, if you don’t know for sure that Obama’s birth certificate is valid, and you don’t know whether he was born in our country, then you’re “a conspiracy theorist who challenges President Obama’s US birth certificate.”

Thus, I hate to tell you, Mike, you’re a big old birther just like Coffman was during his “birther moment,” as correctly labeled by 9News.

It was “Coffman’s birther moment,” because Coffman told 9News that he misspoke. If you believe Coffman’s apology, it was Coffman’s moment of birtherness.

9News didn’t label its video “Birther Coffman,” or something like that, which would have unfairly attributed permanence to Coffman’s birther statement. 9News was accurate.

It’s true, to be fair, that if you research this topic, you’ll find different definitions of the word “birther.” Some claim the word means an absolute belief that Obama is not a natural-born citizen. But legitimate sources, like the one above, support my view and 9News’ use of the word.

But you can be sure of one thing. You’ll find plenty of birthers who will argue about how they define themselves. And they’ll cite seventeen million pieces of evidence to support one definition of “birther,” corroborated by nine million pieces of missing evidence.

Other birthers will find ancient newspaper clips and numbers to support their position on “birther.”

And the birthers will argue about what it means to be a “birther.”

But there’s one thing they will agree on. Like Rosen and Coffman (for a moment), they’re at least not yet sure that Obama is a natural-born citizen. They’re birthers.