UPDATE: Coffman told The Denver Post late yesterday that, because he’s running for federal office, he would not endorse personhood or any state ballot measure this year. He also said he’s against all abortions, except when necessary to save the life of the mother, so presumbably that would include opposition to abortion even in the case of rape and incest. Also, by Coffman’s definition of abortion, he’d oppose some common forms of birth control. Coffman did not say why he supported personhood while he was running for federal office in 2008 and 2010.
————–
If you dig deep on the Colorado Right to Life website, you find a letter from Mike Coffman to Dan Caplis, host of KHOW’s now-defunct Caplis & Silverman show. Part of the letter reads:

Dan, I would deeply appreciate it if, during your show, you could state that I wanted to make sure that my position was clear, unequivocally, that I oppose abortion in all cases of rape and incest. I believe that all life is equally sacred irregardless of how it came into being.

I’ve listened to a lot of talk radio, and you don’t hear about guests asking for clarifications very often. Amplification they’ll ask for, but clarification, not so much.

So you have to wonder if this letter from Coffman is real. And did Caplis actually clarify Coffman’s position on air?

Coffman’s letter to Caplis has no date, but Colorado Right to Life’s website states that Coffman made his original rape-and-incest comments on the Caplis & Silverman show during the week of Oct. 14, 2009.

The Caplis-&-Silverman show’s archives don’t go back that far, unfortunately, but one person popped into my mind who ought to remember the incident: Dan Caplis!

“I had forgotten all about that until I saw your note,” Caplis wrote in response to my email about Coffman. “That’s a long time ago, but I do have a vague recollection of that happening, and of reporting Mike’s clarification on air. Mike has always been such a champion of the pro-life cause that I think the issue was quickly resolved.”

Caplis’ confirmation of Coffman’s abortion stance will be useful as the debate about the personhood amendment heats up.

Colorado’s proposed personhood amendment would outlaw all abortions, including those performed after rape or incest.

Personhood supporters make no attempt to hide this. Their belief, reflected in Coffman’s letter above, is that a zygote (fertilized egg) conceived after a rape should not be punished (aborted) for the crime (rape) committed by the father.

Coffman endorsed Colorado’s personhood amendments in both 2008 and again 2010, according to the Colorado Right to Life blog.

But Coffman has yet to tell personhood organizers, who submitted signatures Tues. to place their measure on the ballot, if he’ll back their amendment this year.

You’d think, given Coffman’s unwavering opposition to all abortion and his deep ties to the anti-abortion movement, that he’d endorse personhood again.

If he backpedals, like Ken Buck before him, and Joe Coors yesterday, reporters would obviously want to know why.

But they’ll also want to know what components of the personhood amendment Coffman still stands by, like his view, duly clarified by Dan Caplis on his former radio show, that abortion should banned even for a women who’s been raped by her father.

Obviously, the key news from today’s personhood press conference was that personhood supporters turned in 112,121 signatures to Colorado’s Secretary of State, hoping to get their measure on the November ballot.

But the political ramifications of the personhood amendment should continue to be a key part of the coverage. The amendment, which would ban all abortions and some common forms of birth control, is clearly of interest to women, in particular, and women are a key voters in Colorado elections.

Personhood supporters have yet to hear from Rep. Mike Coffman and Rep. Cory Gardner about whether they will endorse their amendment this year, as they did in 2010, Personhood USA legal analyst Gualberto Garcia Jones told reporters today.

Garcia Jones said they’d welcome their support again, as they would any candidate, Democrat or Republican.

“To me, they’d be shooting themseves in the foot, if they backtracked,” said Colorado Right to Life Vice President Leslie Hanks. “It would be their loss.”

Coffman was listed as a personhood supporter in 2010. Coffman also supported Personhood in 2008, and, on one occasion, Coffman wrote Dan Caplis, of KHOW’s defunct Caplis and Silverman Show, a letter, specifically clarifying that Coffman, like all personhood supporters, does not support abortion, even in the case of rape and incest.

Likewise, Cory Gardner is praised on the Colorado Right to Life website for his support of personhood in 2010, and earlier this year, Kristi Brown, who initiated the personhood movement in Colorado, said that Rep. Cory Gardner was “one of our main supporters” in 2008.

“Kids are taught that life is cheap,” Hanks told me, referring to legalized abortion. “So we shouldn’t be shocked when we have massacres happening.”

She said collecting signatures is intended to counter this and is a “labor of love.”

“Coloradans trust and respect women,” said Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains Director Vicki Cowart in a news release. “‘Personhood’ measures do not respect women and their families. Today, Planned Parenthood gears up for a third campaign. We’re hopeful that the third verse will be the same as the first and second.”

Personhood USA spokesman Keith Mason talks to reporters at a news conference Monday

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.

UPDATE (8-6-2012): After reading my blog post, McBurney sent me the following clarifications:

The only comment I remember differently is this: I operate under no delusion that Personhood will pass “this election cycle in Colorado”. Because I believe it will pass, somewhere, sometime, but I’m a realist, and gaining 21 points in Colorado, in one cycle is highly unlikely.

And another thing I may not have mentioned. The battle for Personhood is about provoking a confrontation. And whether you heathens want to settle this or not, we are going to settle it, and it will be settled in favor of the innocents you have actively advocated murdering. And you will be put to shame.

———-

“The one thing the homosexuals have on us is they will stand up loudly and proclaim what they want,” Doug McBurney told me. “Christians are really timid. They don’t stand up for their beliefs.”

Timid isn’t what you think of when you listen to McBurney’s Weekly World internet podcast or hear his stories, which deserve a wider audience, about collecting signatures to put the personhood amendment, outlawing all abortions and some common forms of birth control, on the November election ballot in Colorado.

To get signatures, McBurney says he’s been “stopping by” churches, sometimes by invitation and sometimes “commando-style,” over the objections of church leaders. Once, he says, he was “literally grabbed” by a Catholic priest.

McBurney says he’d gladly get arrested repeatedly at churches, but family and work commitments make this impossible.

Recently, some members of a church, whose name McBurney will not divulge, told McBurney to ask their pastor to allow McBurney’s personhood-signature gatherers to visit their church and collect signatures. This is McBurney’s story of how he succeeded in getting signatures there.

I could not confirm whether McBurney’s story is true, and in normal circumstances I wouldn’t re-tell it without confirming it. However, whether it’s true or not, or partially true, it’s what McBurney is alleging, and it’s being passed around in personhood circles, as inspiration for their cause. So, as such, and because the harm done if it’s false is minimal, I think it’s worth telling. So here you go,

McBurney says he asked the pastor for permission to solicit signatures on church grounds, but he never heard back.

So he bought a ticket to a “comedy-night” concert at the church, and at the event, he started collecting signatures for the personhood amendment in the lobby.

At which point, he was escorted out of the church by security officers, as were fellow signature gatherers who were in the parking lot, where, McBurney says, they created more of a ruckus.

This kind of altercation doesn’t bother McBurney. In fact, that’s why he’s collecting personhood signatures.

“This is a ministry to increase social tension, and most of all, we want to create social tension in the church, because it has failed us,” he told me.

McBurney doesn’t have “delusional” hopes that the personhood measure will pass, if it makes it on the ballot, he said.

It’s more about what happened at the church after he was escorted out by security.

A few days later, the pastor called McBurney and said he was on his side and believed in his personhood cause, but McBurney’s behavior at the church was unacceptable.

McBurney pleaded with the pastor to rise above the fracas and invite his group back, to collect signatures.

The pastor agreed, and set up a table for McBurney “in the corner” of the church lobby, where, McBurney says, “people could only see us out of the corner of their eyes.”

“So I don’t stand by the table off to the side,” says McBurney. “I took my two-foot-by-two-foot sign, [which read, ‘Protect Innocent Life. Sign the Pro-Life Petition’,] and stood in the middle of lobby.”

“What this pastor saw was that most everyone in his congregation, maybe 150 people, came and signed our petition,” said McBurney.

“This pastor was timid,” McBurney continues. “But I could see in his eyes that he was becoming emboldened. He realized he could say he was pro-life in front of his congregation.”

“The pastor didn’t want chaos in the lobby,” he told me. “He feared that there would be arguments. But the people who supported personhood were happy and joyful about it, and the others just averted their eyes and shuffled out quietly. They were ashamed.”

So McBurney says that, next time, the pastor put them in the center of the lobby, announced that they were out there, and, at the last service, made an “impassioned statement” about them.

“We were flooded,” McBurney told me, and the pastor assigned a staff member to help them collect signatures.

They have a lot of collecting to do to get the approximately 86,000 signatures required by Aug. 6, and McBurney doesn’t know if they can do it.

“We don’t have enough signatures now, and we only have about ten days left,” McBurney said.

But Gualberto Garcia-Jones, legal analyst for Personhood USA, is more optimistic.

“I do think we’ll make it,” he emailed me.

If you listened to progressive talk-radio host David Sirota and conservative Michael Brown on the radio, before they were paired up on KHOW’s new afternoon talk show, you know that Brown was explicitly pro-Romney.

But you might not know whether Sirota would vote for Obama at all.

So you wonder, how will this play out on their new show, called the Rundown.

Will Brown be telling listeners to vote for Romney, while Sirota says both candidates are, as Ralph Nader liked to say, tweedle dee and tweedle dum?

If so, who wants to listen that one-sided conversation?  It sounds too much like some bizarre permutation of the conservative love fest you’d hear on the Caplis and Silverman Show, which used to occupy Sirota and Brown’s afternoon slot on 630-AM KHOW (3 – 7 p.m.)

Asked about this via email, Brown, whom President George Bush thought was doing a “heck’ve a job” during the Katrina disaster, wrote:

Brown: “I do plan to vote for Romney and will actively support him. I probably am more enthusiastic about Romney than Sirota is about BHO. But, having said that, we’re not really discussing that issue much on air. My guess is left-leaning listeners might be upset at both of us — me for supporting Romney and David for criticizing BHO.”

Exactlty. Left-leaning listeners like me might get upset and turn off the radio, like I did when Caplis and Silverman piled on Obama. I mean, among other things, it’s boring, even if you don’t love Obama. It’s bad radio.

I asked Sirota how he’d counter Brownie when he starts telling us to vote Romney, or that Romney will do a heck’ve a job as President:

Sirota: “When this show was formulated, one thing that was central was that our show was not going to be agenda radio. It’s not going to be Crossfire. I really take that to heart. It’s not foremost on my mind to convince people to vote for one candidate or another. I’m not enthused about Obama or Romney.”

But, still, I said to Sirota, what if Brownie is sitting next to you telling people to vote for Romney?

“I would ask people to think about how much of a difference there is between Obama and Romney,” Sirota told me. “There are some differences but they are not epic.”

Sirota said that when the issue of Obamacare come up on a recent show, Brownie trashed the legislation but Sirota defended aspects of it, saying he did not like the way it was structured but that “uninsured people will at least be a little better off.”

“I was not a big proponent of Obamacare, but I took general side of the progressive push for universal health care, and he disagreed.”

“One of the things we are trying to do,” Sirota continued, “is to remove the issues from the candidates themselves, and talk about the bigger issues.”

“The only way to reach a broad audience of listeners is to get to the bigger, more universal issues. That’s one of the reasons the presidential race won’t be a big part of our show.”

“The people aren’t interested in the minutia,” Sirota said.

It’s true that issues inspire and motivate people more than the horse race, and usually more than candidates.

But if Brownie is holding forth about how we should vote Obama out, I’m hoping Sirota will tell us who he’s going to vote for and why, even if he thinks the difference is small. It will make for a better radio show.

UDATE 8-8-12 Independent candidate Tisha Casida released the following statement last night on the decision by Adams State University’s Veterans Group not to include her in tonight’s debate featuring candidates for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District:

I am surprised by the actions of the Adams State University Veterans Club to invite Sal Pace (D) and Scott Tipton (R) to the debate at Adams State University (ASU) and ignore my candidacy for Colorado’s third congressional district as an independent.

I represent a group of people who are dissatisfied with what both political parties are doing about these important issues; and being a woman who has had a husband in war is an entirely different perspective than what either Pace or Tipton will ever be able to speak to.

——————-

UPDATE: Cory Diss, the President of the Adams State Veterans Group, which is the organization sponsoring the Pace-Tiption debate, explains why Casida was excluded:

I would like to start off by telling you a little bit about our group.  We are a group of student veterans who formed a recognized ASU student club, the  Adams State Veterans Group about a year ago.  Since becoming a club we have been working with our representatives, the community, and the college to help veterans with some of the major issues that veterans face in our rural community.  As a new club our membership, resources, and public awareness of our group are very limited, however, we continue to bring results to help better serve all veterans.  This debate was organize completely by our group and the committee that headed up this venture was Matthew Martinez and myself.  The idea to do a debate came about through the work that the group has been doing with our representatives.  With the upcoming election we decided to try an organize a series of debates with our congressional candidates, and local state reps candidates to help veterans, students, and our community become more educated about the issues that our nation is facing.  It was the decision of our group to only include the two major party candidates for our debates.  We made this decision for several different reasons.  The first and foremost reason was the difficulties our group would have accommodating every candidate that decided to run with our limited resources.  Moreover, we had to consider the amount of time we had in the debate to get a fair amount of questions and answers in, with more than the two candidates it would cut down the amount of questions being ask significantly.  We also had to take into account ASU’s policy for inviting political figures in, this policy requires we invite both major parties of those running for offices.  By limiting our venue to only the two main party candidates we address all of these issues.  Lastly, it would be unfair to invite a candidate who is currently not on the ballot and would open the door for other write in candidates to ask the same question.  At  the end of the day this will be the first congressional debate that has taken place in the San Luis Valley and it will be held by a our group which is a non-partisan group.  We have a very hardworking dedicated group of veterans and students involved with the Adams State Veterans Group and we hope that this debate will be beneficial for our club and the community and would hate to see it get tarnished by a decision that was made to try and make this a fair and worthy event.

Independent congressional candidate Tisha Casida has yet to be invited to a debate at Adams State University featuring Democrat Sal Pace and Republican Scott Tipton.

The debate, which will be the first in the race for the 3rd congressional district, will take place Aug. 8, according to a tweet today by Durango Herald reporter Joe Hanel, which did not indicate if Casida was included. Hence this blog post.

The event is being organized by the Adams State University Veterans Club, a student group, according to a University spokesperson.

An email to the club was not immediately returned.

“We haven’t heard anything about that,” said Casida when asked if she was invited to the event. “We’ll have our volunteers and supporters call them and see if we can be a part of it.”

Casida has so far not been invited to participate in the two debates that incumbent Scott Tiption has agreed to attend with Pace: one in Grand Junction, sponsored by Club 20, and another in Pueblo, sponsored by the Pueblo Chieftain.

Tipton told The Denver Post that he will participate in other debates, time permitting.

Pace and Casida have both agreed to debates at Fort Lewis College Oct. 11 and in Aspen in the fall (no date has been set), according to Casida.

“The latest we heard is that Tipton has not confirmed his presence at either of those,” Casida told me.

Casida turned in signatures to qualify for the ballot a couple weeks ago, and she said she’s confident she’ll meet the ballot qualifications by the Aug. 13 deadline.

“We’re pounding the pavement and meeting with groups,” Casida told me, adding that 2004 Libertarian Presidential candidate Michael Badnarik will be coming to Colorado to help her campaign during the final 100 days.

But nothing she does will convince “some people in the Republican Party” that she’s a legitimate candidate.

“No matter what you do, [Republican State Chair Ryan Call] is going to continue to dismiss us,” she said. “But the majority of people we reach, we win over, because we are honest and transparent. We have a lot of hungry people who want what we offer.”

“We’d love to be included in the debate,” said Casida. “But if they decide not to, it’s a free country.”

You may recall that Steve Kelley, host of KNUS radio’s morning drive-time show, got really pissed at Rep. Mike Coffman, after Coffman refused to appear on Kelley’s show and explain why, among other things, he felt the need to (sort of) apologize for saying Obama isn’t an American in his heart.

Coffman ignored Kelley’s interview requests, and eventually Kelley said he didn’t want Coffman on his show anymore, unless he answered questions about his birther moment and explained why he ducked Kelley. I explained all this in a previous blog post.

But Coffman was on Kelley’s show Friday, talking about the Aurora shootings.

I figured that, in light of the horror at the theater, Kelley had made a one-time exception to his promise not to let Coffman off the hook on his birther comments, and this turned out to be correct.

“I suspended it,” Kelley told me, regarding his Coffman ban.

“Bill, my sports guy, was angry with me. How could I back down? But 58 people had been wounded and 12 were dead. What am I going to do?

“When we’re talking politics again, there will be no conditions set. Period. No questions will be off limits. Not that any conditions were set this time. I could have ambushed him, but I didn’t think it would have been appropriate.”

Kelley obviously did the right thing here.

But I’m hoping Kelley, and any other media types who interview Coffman, insist on getting his personal cell phone number, so they can find him if he refuses to talk about topics that fall someday into Coffman’s  “I-stand-by-my-statement-that-I-misspoke-and-I-apologize” category.

Conservative talk-radio hosts aren’t warming to the idea of tightening gun-control laws in the wake of Friday’s Aurora shooting.

Some are saying that Cinemark’s reported gun-free-zone policy, banning movie goers from carrying concealed weapons, could be responsible for the deaths of some of those killed at the theater.

For example, Sunday night on KOA, Bill Cunningham, talking to a national audience from his home radio station in Ohio, offered the view that the “movie theaters should reconsider having signs up telling permit holders not to carry on their premises. If there were five or six permit holders in there firing back at James Holmes, maybe lives could have been saved….”

Bill Cunningham (speaking to a caller who identified himself as someone who carries a concealed gun): Guys like you should be considered an extension of law enforcement. Cops can’t be everywhere. So there’s guys like you to help cops do their job… There are hundreds and hundreds of crimes thwarted each year by permit holders. And I would think, if there were permit holders permitted in that theater early Friday morning, there’s a chance that all the victims of James Holmes would not have been killed. And none of us should consider the cries of liberal democrats to do something more with restrictive gun laws as necessary… AMC movie theaters should reconsider having signs up telling permit holders not to carry on their premises. If there were five or six permit holders in there firing back at James Holmes, maybe lives could have been saved…

The other thing is, [the shooter] had no vest below his navel. He could have been gut shot. He could have had a leg shot off. He could have had an arm shot off, in which case he would have stopped.

On KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado Friday, fewer than 24 hours after the shooting, host Ken Clark said that he’d “bet money” that the Aurora shooting would lead to a campaign by Obama for the United Nations Small Arms Treaty.

Clark: “I will bet money that the [Obama] Administration uses this to justify the UN Small Arms Treaty, because that is gun control, and that’s coming after each and every one of us.  And as Dick Morris was so – the way he pointed it out on Grassroots Radio Colorado, if Obama signs that or Hillary Clinton as his surrogate, it will become the law of the land.”

On the radio, the news media also comes up as an advocate for gun control, post shooting. Monday morning, former Larimer County Republican Chair and KFKA morning talk-show host Tom Lucero, told his listeners that the media is “interjecting themselves into the stories and advocating gun control,” and it’s “fun to watch” the hysteria coming from the media.

Tom Lucero: I don’t know how much of this you caught, whether it’s on radio or TV or in print. The media is interjecting themselves into the stories and advocating for gun control. The predictable politicians, Diane Feinstein was on Fox this weekend calling for an extension of the assault weapons ban, because it had sunset. And so here we are right in the middle of another gun-control debate. It’s fun to watch. You can pull out the playbook and predictably turn from page to page and see the hysteria that’s going to come from media and politicians.

To their credit, local conservative talkers on some shows have, to some degree, held back in talking too much, with too much anger, about gun control and the political aspects of the shooting. This undoubtedly won’t continue as the story’s focus shifts, which is good thing, because the conservative views on gun control should be aired out.

In a blog post yesterday, I offered some fresh examples of how, when Scott Gessler is on right-wing radio, he often sounds just like the right-wing radio host, bashing Democrats.

That’s not good, if you’re the Secretary of State, because you’re supposed to be above the partisan fray, at least somewhat, so that people trust our election system.

In my example yesterday, from Gessler’s recent appearance on KOA’s Mike Rosen Show, Gessler said it’s “the left’s common tactic just to scream voter intimidation whenever anything comes up they don’t like.”

Gessler: “I mean if you look back, back in 2004, you know, the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign actually published a Colorado election-day manual, and in that, they specifically said, if no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a preemptive strike. And they go through a whole list of things where the Democrats are supposed to launch a preemptive strike, accusing Republicans of intimidation, rounding up minority people. And that’s their word. It says, quote minority leadership denouncing tactics that discourage people from voting. So it’s really sort of a cynical way for the Democrats to try and rile up, and I should say the left as well, to rile up their base by making these accusations whether or not there are any facts to support it.”

I should have taken the time to see if Gessler had his facts right about the Kerry-Edwards campaign manual, but I’m grateful that Tom,  a commentator on ColoradoPols, looked it up for me.

Here’s an excerpt from it, as provided by the Democratic National Comittee, and it shows that, far from proving Gessler’s point that the left screams “voter intimidation whenever anything comes up they don’t like,” Democrats were simply preparing intelligently for possible voter intimidation:

II. HOW TO ORGANIZE TO PREVENT AND COMBAT VOTER INTIMIDATION The best way to combat minority voter intimidation tactics is to prevent them from occurring in the first place and prepare in advance to deal with them should they take place on election day.

1. If there are any signs of present or expected intimidation activity, in advance of election day, launch a press program that might include the following elements:

[The document continues with a list of suggestions, which you can read if you’re interested.]

On ColoradoPols, Tom offered this comment:

The manual in question was excerpted by Drudge in 2004. The DNC released a more complete excerpt indicating that the “pre-emptive strike” was to get information out to let potentially disenfranchised voters know what to look out for, especially in states with a history of voter intimidation and disenfranchisement.

It’s not surprising that Colorado had such a thing in the field since Donetta Davidson was letting fly with a stream of sketchy shit, including a big voter purge, inconsistent application of voting rules across counties and the wonky implementation of new voting machines. Even the Guardian newspaper covered our little doings. http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl…

Actually, a pre-emptive strike to counter voter disenfranchisement sounds like something that would be useful this year in a number of states.

I couldn’t find a current copy of the DNC document, but here’s a 2004 wayback machine link http://web.archive.org/web/200…

Bottom line: it’s bad enough for a Secretary of State to throw out partisan salvos, as if he were Mike Rosen. But when his partisan attacks are also completely misleading or outright wrong, it’s even worse. And Rosen should let his listeners know about it.

As Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s term drags on, you’d think even the stomachs of conservatives like KOA’s Mike Rosen would turn when Gessler re-launches the partisan attacks he’s been on about since day one in office.

Maybe you wouldn’t expect Rosen to be sick of it, but everyone else, yes?

It’s almost laughable to suggest again that Gessler should take his office seriously and start sounding like our state’s top election official, instead of like a Republican attack dog, because no one expects Gessler to change his ways at this point.

But still, his partisan rhetoric is, to use an over-used word in political commentary, unacceptable, and even the likes of Rosen should call him on it.

For example, on Rosen’s show last week, Rosen read Gessler a Denver Post quote from Joanne Kron Schwartz, the Director of the progressive group ProgressNow, saying that Gessler’s attempt to find noncitizens on the voter rolls could intimidate some eligible voters, particularly Latinos, and result in their not voting.

A Secretary of State in his right mind, who wants people to have faith in elections, would answer Schwartz’s reasonable objection with a fact-based response, sticking to his lines about how the voting rolls must be scrutinized.

But Gessler’s immediate response sounds like something Rush Limbaugh might blast out.

“Unfortunately this is part of the left’s common tactic,” Gessler told Rosen, “just to scream voter intimidation whenever anything comes up they don’t like.”

Let me just say, I’m part of the left and I don’t scream voter intimidation “whenever anything comes up” that I don’t like. I never scream it at my 15-year-old son, for example, when he leaves a pig-pen-like trail of debris around the house.

Maybe Gessler means to say that the left is too concerned about voter intimidation.

But why would you expect a person with Gessler’s job title to stick to a measured response?

Gessler’s un-statesmanship continued, with Rosen’s approval:

Gessler: “I mean if you look back, back in 2004, you know, the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign actually published a Colorado election-day manual, and in that, they specifically said, if no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a preemptive strike. And they go through a whole list of things where the Democrats are supposed to launch a preemptive strike, accusing Republicans of intimidation, rounding up minority people. And that’s their word. It says, quote minority leadership denouncing tactics that discourage people from voting. So it’s really sort of a cynical way for the Democrats to try and rile up, and I should say the left as well, to rile up their base by making these accusations whether or not there are any facts to support it.”

Even if you accept Gessler’s facts about the Kerry-Edwards campaign, and why should you, do you really want your secretary of state to dismiss a historically legitimate concern about voter intimidation by accusing Democrats of cynically riling up their base?

It’s this sort of brazen partisanship that, at the end of the day, is Gessler’s core downfall as Secretary of State, epitomized in Gessler’s quote to the Greeley Tribune about his job: “You’re here to do something, to further the conservative viewpoint.”

We can disagree with his loose-with-the-facts style, and priorities, but his sullying of the office is what kills me most—and should even kill a civic-minded guy like Rosen.

“You have to sort of wonder at the motivations,” Gessler said later in the interview, speculating about the evil leftists that seem to haunt him. “I think a lot of times, what they are trying to do is play the race card, play the disenfranchisement card, and use it as a political talking point to rile up their base.”

Thanks, Rush Gessler.