Mike Rosen likes to present himself as a stern parental figure on the radio, sounding rational even when he isn’t.

He builds this persona by pouncing on guests when their logic doesn’t add up. If you’ve heard Rosen, you know he can be effective (and mean) at this, often demolishing innocent callers who really don’t deserve the punishment.

So you wonder why Rosen can’t bring himself to demanding rational responses from a formerly high-paid lawyer, who’s used to verbal assaults like Rosen’s.

I’m thinking of Secretary of State Scott Gessler, who was on Rosen’s KOA show April 2.

Rosen and Gessler discussed a number of issues, but the one that caught my attention focused on the ASSET legislation under consideration in the state legislature. It would give qualifying undocumented high-school graduates a special in-state tuition rate at Colorado universities that elect to participate.

With his usual air of rational certainty, Rosen told Gessler that the ASSET bill is “transparently part of a strategy to court Latino voters.”

“Yeah,” Gessler responded. “I think one of the challenges the Democrats have is Latino voters, in my experience and sense is that, I mean, they’re fundamentally conservative folks. I mean, they’re oftentimes very socially conservative. They’re people who put their heads down and work hard and aren’t looking for government handouts. And the Democrats’ stock and trade is government handouts. So they sort of have to rile ’em up as a way to try and get their votes.”

Rile ’em up? As if the Hispanics are like children who should be winding down before bedtime?

Yes, Hispanics are upset, and rightly so.

As Gessler should know, with all his knowledge of Latino voters, it’s the GOP that’s doing the riling. There’d be no issue here if Republicans took the advice of conservative Denver Post columnist Vincent Carroll and supported the ASSET bill.

But did Rosen even gently question Gessler’s condescending and irrational comments, like he might have if a first-time caller was on the line? No.

So I called Ricardo Martinez, Co-Director 0f Padres y Jovenes Unidos, for his perspective on Gessler’s comments.

“ASSET has passed in thirteen other states,” Martinez told me. “Among them are Texas, Utah, Kansas, and Oklahoma, which are all Republican-controlled. They saw it as an economic benefit. They didn’t let ideology stand in the way of common sense.”

So, I guess Gessler would say that it’s the GOP in Texas that’s riling up Hispanic voters?

Martinez also pointed out that the ASSET bill doesn’t provide any free benefits, so Gessler’s statement about handouts is irrelevant.

“They would be paying the standard tuition,” he said, adding that no tax dollars would support the tuition of undocumented students. “This is not a hand out.”

Rosen and Gessler also discussed the Colorado Democratic Chair Rick Palacio’s suggestion that Gessler resign or be removed from office.

Rosen read Gessler a portion of an article from a March 30 Denver Post by Sara Burnett, quoting University of Colorado Professor Ken Bickers’ view that Democrats are calling on Gessler to step down to appeal to Latino voters who are critical to the re-election of President Obama.

Rosen read from The Post:

Bickers speculated Democrats may have an ulterior motive [in calling on Gessler to resign or removed from office]: creating “a storyline” to appeal to a particular group of voters. Most likely that’s Latinos, who are among those voters Democrats say will be disproportionately affected by Gessler’s efforts, and a voting bloc that will be key to President Barack Obama winning re-election this fall.

“To me it’s a sign that they think they have a weakness in the presidential election,” Bickers said.

Gessler responded:

Well, it’s good that we’ve got some good professors at the University of Colorado because every now and then they nail it. And I think that’s absolutely correct as to what’s going on.

So, not only are Democrats are riling up Hispanics, but they’re creating a story line, with Gessler as a main character, in a cynical ploy to get votes?

I wish Rosen had asked Gessler if he thinks undocumented high-school graduates, who can’t go to college because Republicans like Gessler are blocking them, see the ASSET bill that way, as an empty story line or a useless riler upper.

Or do they see it as real? As a chance to work hard and get ahead?

If Rosen had asked questions like those, maybe more Hispanics and others who believe in all-American opportunity would get riled up.

But that wouldn’t be good for Rosen or Gessler, would it?

When Art Carlson started his internet radio program, “Art’s Place,” he wanted to create a “soap box” to voice his “opinions from a different perspective.”

Now, two years later, former Colorado Senate President John Andrews cites Art’s Place as one reason he’s endorsed Carlson in his GOP primary race against John Lyons to face off against Democrat Nancy Todd to represent Senate District 28.

“His radio show has networked him to leading conservatives across the state,” Andrews told me, adding that he has “a lot of regard for Carlson’s grit and gumption” and that Carlson is “a well-anchored conservative.”

“He’ll never quit on promises he’s made,” said Andrews.

When I guy like Andrews is impressed with Carlson for never quitting, it means a lot. Andrews is a guy who “positively” hates lunch, he says, because it’s a distraction form his “Niagara productivity.”  (I thought he said Viagra productivity, but he confirmed that he said Niagara, as in Niagara Falls.)

Carlson, who lost in the GOP primary for a House seat in 2010, told me he’s “always been interested in politics, but I didn’t get involved until about four years ago.”

“I got tired of yelling at the TV and decided to try to do something,” he said.

He says Colorado Sen. Shawn Mitchell and Rep. Chris Holbert “rally helped me out and encouraged me and got me pointed in the right direction.”

In terms of specific issues, Carlson is a serious conservative, as you’d expect with guys like Andrews, Mitchell and Holbert behind him.

He says, for example, he signed the Colorado Union of Taxpayers tax-cut pledge over two years ago.

Carlson’s  opponent, Lyons, promised to do so during a March 20 interview on KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado:

Host Jason Worley:  Have you signed the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights Pledge?

Lyons:  Not yet.

Worley:  Are you planning to?

Lyons:  Yes.

Lyons is not yet listed as a pledge signer on the CUT website, but Carlson prefers to discuss his own plans and positions.

He tells me during our phone conversation that he’s a Little Person and he has disability called Arthrogryposis, a non-progressive muscle and bone disorder.

I asked him why he told me this. “I don’t think it matters,” he said. “But when I go out to meet people, they go hmm, but once they get to know me, that goes away.”

Also, he says, “it gives people an idea that I know something about the health care system too.”

Does that mean he supports Obamacare?

“No,” he replies.

Carlson currently works at Rocky Mountain Orthodontics, but he’s also made a living as a stand-up comedian.

“I went into it after college 20 years ago,” he says, explaining that he performed regularly in local clubs.  “I got to travel around the world and entertain our troops in Japan and South Korea. That was the high point in my stand-up career.”

His entertainment background adds a sort of dry poise to his Art’s Place interviews, where guests have included U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, Colorado Rep. Robert Ramirez, and others.

He’s not sure he can continue the radio show during his campaign.

“I’m going to see how it goes,” he said. “Campaigning takes a lot of time. Right now I’m evaluating whether I should do another month or two of Art’s Place in addition to full-time campaigning.”

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers was all over the media last week, talking about what a terrible thing it would be if the federal government forced Americans to buy health insurance.

But in an email back in 2010, Suthers told The Denver Post’s Vincent Carroll that it wasn’t the federal health insurance mandate itself that bothered him, from a legal perspective, but how the mandate was instituted.

In the email, obtained via that Colorado Opens Record Act by Colorado Ethics Watch, Suthers wrote to Carroll:

“The way to constitutionally mandate health insurance would be to incentivize the states to do it,” Suthers wrote.

There’s nothing wrong with a lawyer wanting things done in accordance with how he sees the law, but let’s be clear that Suthers’ federal incentives, if they’re devised to “mandate health insurance,” as Suthers suggests, are simply a more polite form of Obama’s Commerce-Clause mandate.

Conservative objections about alleged federal intrusion or alleged lost individual freedom would,  as a practical matter, be nearly identical if the health-insurance mandate were the result of federal incentives or federal powers under the Commerce Clause.

Either way, its federal action, which makes you wonder why Suthers gleefully told KNUS’ Steve Kelley in November:

“Federalism has been on life support for 30 years. We are going to decide if the Court is going to pull the plug or resuscitate it. That is what this case is all about.”

Really? How does that square with Suthers’ view that the feds could accomplish the health-care mandate with incentives?

Anyway, in his media tour last week, Suthers told KHOW’s Craig Silverman that “it shouldn’t be the federal government pushing this down our throats.” But again, this sounds hollow when you know that Suthers simply wants federal throat-pushing of a different manner.

Suthers also told Silverman that the expansion of Medicaid under Obmamcare, as a vehicle to cover uninsured people, is a state burden that’s “so coercive as to violate federalism.” Yet, he told Carroll that a health-care mandate could be achieved with state incentives. If he believes the incentives are constitutional, then you’d think he’d have to believe the Medicaid expansion would be constitutional as well.

In the broader picture, and this is the take-away from Suthers’ behind-the-scenes correspondence with Carroll, conservatives should not be fooled into thinking that Suthers, by joining the lawsuit to stop Obamacare, is taking a principled stand against an alleged loss of individual freedom. He’s clearly not. It’s just this legal pathway he dislikes.

For Suthers, it’s the form, not the substance.

Email exchange between Denver Post columnist Vincent Carroll and Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, March 23, 2010

Suthers: Vince, I’m curious. I understood from my conversation with Alicia Caldwell that the editorial board doesn’t think there is anything unprecedented about Congress using the Commerce Clause to sanction economic activity and force you to buy a product or service it deems beneficial. Even the Congressional Budget Office told Congress that was unprecedented. If Congress can sanction your commercial activity and force you to buy a product, where does it end? Can you enlighten me a bit?

Carroll: I am not sure what our official position will be regarding whether forcing Americans to buy health care insurance is an unprecedented action by the federal government. As you know, though, the Post’s editorials have repeatedly backed a universal mandate, so it is extremely unlikely that the page would now argue that what it has been advocating is unconstitutional. Like many people, I too worry about what a court decision upholding the legislation would say about the reach of the commerce clause. But given recent legal precedents, I suspect the court would uphold the law.

Suthers: One last point. The way to constitutionally mandate health insurance would be to incentivize the states to do it.

[Update: This post originally stated that Westword’s Michael Roberts is responsible for eight blog posts per day, written by himself and other staff, on the Latest Word blog. Due to poor reporting on my part, I got this wrong. He is actually responsible for eight posts himself, Roberts kindly tells me, adding that Westword aims for at least 12 posts per day on Latest word, eight by Roberts and four or more by others.]

As The Denver Post sinks and shrinks, there’s no getting around the fact that, even if you hate them, bloggers become more important as opinion (and information) providers.

So I thought this would be a good moment to offer up some tips on blogging from Colorado bloggers, to inspire more and better blogging

For some reason, it took me about 15 minutes to write those two lousy sentences, which is around 14 minutes more than Westword Latest Word blogger Michael Roberts would have probably required.

“I’d love to write more slowly and linger over words and phrases, but in this context you have to open up the channel, receive and send. It’s not like you have the luxury to spend 10 or 15 minutes on a sentence.”

I called Roberts at about 1:30 p.m. Friday. He’d posted 10 items during the day, but he said, “I’ll be damned if I know how.”

“At the end of the day, if I were asked to tell you every post I wrote, I would be unable to do so.”

If you follow Roberts, you know he’s in a league by himself, among Colorado bloggers, in terms of productivity. He told me that being curious is a big help in writing so much.

But I wondered about his typing speed. Without meaning to diminish the quality of his writing, I asked if he was a really fast typist.

“I am a quick typist,” he told me. “One of my stock lines is. If I ever lose this job, I’d have a decent shot at a gig as an executive secretary.”

“I have at least one more [blog post] to do before I’m done for the day,” he said as we ended our brief conversation. He’d exceeded his daily target of eight posts, including four with an original concept and content, but, he said, “Damn it, news didn’t stop. There are a couple of things I really need to do.”

Asked for her advice on blogging, Denver Post blogger Lynn Bartels provided me with this blogger-sized list:

1. Employ nouns.

2. Add art.

3. Mix it up, between the lighthearted and the serious.

Bloggers like to refer back to their own work as early and often as possible, to cut down on typing and to get more mileage out of existing content, and that’s what Bartels did in answer to my question.

“I wrote a number of serious posts last fall about redistricting and reapportionment, including breaking news about new maps,” Bartels wrote me. “But I also had fun. Here’s one of my favorites, simply because of the picture and the cutline: [CLICK HERE].

My favorite recent blog: [CLICK HERE].

ColoradoPols‘ Co-founder Jason Bane said, via email:

The best advice I can give is to keep your writing short and simple. There’s no reason to write 5,000 words if you can make your point in 500, but that’s easier said than done. Most journalists and reporters will tell you that it is actually easier to write 5,000 words than 500, because you have to spend more time thinking about how to get quickly to the point. People don’t visit blogs because they are looking for long-form writing, and the longer you write, the less time you have to write something else.

I agree with Bane, but one trick is to get others to write for you. That’s why I’m grateful to Bane and the others for emailing me their responses to my questions. Unfortunately Westword’s Roberts won’t do email interviews, because he says he writes too much as it is. So I had to talk to him, which is better anyway, if you have the time.

Bane also wrote:

I believe it is also important to stick to a theme as much as possible. Whether you are writing about politics or about yarn, don’t stray too often from your central topic. Think about why readers are coming to your website. If someone visits your yarn blog, they aren’t going to keep coming back if you are always writing about sports, wine, and why you think Spring is the best of the four seasons.

Rossputin’s Ross Kaminsky had these tips:

Write up something just before bed, for posting the next morning. Even better, wake up a few minutes earlier and check the news to write something with maximum newsworthiness.

If you have more than one idea, write them all up, but post-date them so you can cover a couple of days at a time.

It’s widely agreed that posting content early in the day, with edgy headlines, attracts more readers. (And in Colorado, throw in the phrase “medical marijuana” as often as possible.)

Kaminsky continued:

People won’t return to sites which disappoint them with stale material more than a time or two Therefore, don’t bother blogging unless you have something new almost every day, and certainly every work day other than occasional vacations. If you can’t meet that level of supply of writing, try to participate in a group blog (such as Peoples Press Collective, for those of a free market/libertarian/conservative bent.)

Try to find an approach or style of analysis that is sufficiently different from other web sites that your writing will stand out as worth reading. Be honest about your ability to do so. Most people can’t. Like it or not, most people don’t really have enough to add to a discussion that they’re worth taking your time to read. Again, be honest about whether your writing is really different and incisive enough to be worth reading.

Quoting other people and unique sources is usually the best way to keep a blog worth reading. So even if you hated my take on things in this piece, which I wrote for posting during a vacation, at least you heard something from somebody else. With traditional journalism dying, that’s what we need most from bloggers, if they have the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worley didn’t ask, so Olvera continued:

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

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

So on went Olvera:

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

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

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

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

I just wrote Mike Littwin a thank-you e-mail for being such a reliable source of amazement and inspiration for so many years. I mean, how lucky was Denver to have a writer of his caliber for so long at a daily newspaper?

What he wrote about didn’t matter. That’s why my Republican mother-in-law, who doesn’t read my blog, kept telling me how much she loved him, even though she hates Obama so much she can barely contain herself once she gets going.

I hope Littwin somehow lands somewhere else in town, but meanwhile, without cheapening the loss of Littwin and others at the Post, you have to wonder about the op-ed page at The Denver Post now.

Littwin and Vince Carroll balanced each other out on the page, as former Post Editorial Page Editor Dan Haley told me last year when I pointed out, with careful bean counting, that The Post op-ed page was more balanced with Harsanyi gone.

Haley told me at the time:

Locally, as of next week, we will have two main op-ed columnists (Carroll/Littwin) who will write 12 columns a month from the right and left. That’s balance.

I emailed The Post’s Editorial Page Editor Curtis Hubbard this morning, and after expressing my sadness about the layoffs and telling him I didn’t want to cheapen Littwin by looking ahead while Littwin’s chair on the editorial board is still warm, I asked Hubbard how he’ll balance the commentary page now that Littwin’s columns, blogs, and tweets are gone?

He replied:

We’ve still got a lot to sort through here, but providing a wide variety of voices and viewpoints remains a priority or the op-ed page.

Secretary of State Scott Gessler recently made an appearance Colorado’s flagship Tea-Party radio show, KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado.

I was jealous because Gessler’s office won’t talk to me, and it’s possible that even my audience of three people is bigger than KLZ’s.

But it made me feel a little bit better when I found out that Gessler’s also boycotting the Colorado Independent and AM760’s David Sirota show, as I’ll explain below.

Still, it raises the question of whether it matters all that much that a conservative elected official, not just Gessler but any of them, boycotts progressive media outlets. Or whether a progressive office holder should feel obligated to talk to conservative media types.

If I were Gessler, I’d look at the actual work of the journalist or media person who’s requesting the interview. If their work shows them to be unfair, inaccurate, and generally unconcerned about civil discourse, then an elected official can justify not talking to them.

For my part, I can’t help but be nicer to people if they let me interview them. I normally try to be fair, but I’m even more careful if I actually talk to someone. I like to think most writers are this way.

I asked progressive columnist and talk-show host David Sirota for his thoughts on this broad topic. According to John Turk, producer of the David Sirota Show on AM 760, Gessler spokesman Rich Coolidge told him last week, just after Gessler appeared on Grassroots Radio Colorado, that Gessler had “no interest” in coming on Sirota’s show to talk about possible voter fraud.

Sirota emailed me:

My view is that the best elected officials are those who make themselves available to the widest possible audience of their constituents. In Colorado, though, that’s the exception (Ed Perlmutter is one for instance), not the norm. Here, most politicians see themselves – and carry themselves – as if they are part of an elite country club. They typically only make themselves available to their friends in the media who they know won’t ask them a single substantive or hard-hitting question – those who will simply propagandize for their agenda and kiss their ass in a very public way. I’m not surprised by that. I’m a journalist, and genuine journalism is a threat to those in power who are either ashamed of their behavior or who shouldn’t have to answer to anyone. Most of the politicians in the state know that regardless of party, I don’t pull punches and will ask them tough questions, and so many of them avoid my show. I see that as a badge of honor.

The Colorado Independent’s John Tomasic has also gotten the cold shoulder from Gessler. Tomasic offered these thoughts in an email:

The question of officeholder responsiveness matters mostly in its relationship to accountability.

It seems obvious that when people elected to office are willing to go on public record regularly on topics big and small and to field unscripted questions, it’s always a good sign for the city or state or country they’re serving. As any fair-minded person in a position of authority knows, explaining your actions means making the case for them. If you can do that well, you gain legitimacy for those actions and support for them and cooperation to bring off your grand plans.

The energy it takes to explain yourself, even in fraught political or business environments, is worth it

Our secretary of state is a longtime controversial figure. It’s my opinion that he revels in it. He’s a courtroom attorney. I like that about him, the fact that he’s a fighter, if for no other reason than he’s fun to write about. Unfortunately, in office, it seems clear he is increasingly adopting what has become a familiar approach to the media on the right, which is to malign the media and retreat into a silo of friendly outlets while delivering an occasional stock quote to the paper of record. That just seems like a short-haul strategy to me.

Gessler is not a  representative from some very conservative district.

He is a state officeholder. The topics he deals with every day as secretary of state are enormously important for all the citizens of Colorado. He oversees voting, campaign finance rules– really basic stuff that is of equal interest to citizens all across the political spectrum. For that reason alone, he is a person of interest for everyone reporting about politics in this state: newspaper people, broadcast people, bloggers, etc, and he has a crack staff of communication experts at his disposal. Use them, I say! Let’s hear more every day from spokespeople Rich and Andrew at the secretary of state’s office. Turn those guys loose! “Free Rich!” “Free Andrew!”

Granted, the media is a player in the political process and dealing with the media as an elected official can certainly be like navigating a mine field. It’s only my opinion but, as someone who has watched this politics-media tug of war with keen interest for years and who has watched big political stories unfold from the inside, as an editor and reporter, I can say that the subjects of those stories would have nearly always fared better by talking to the reporters writing the stories.

I’m reporting on the war over voting laws that has taken the nation by storm in the past two years. Gessler has put himself on the frontlines of that war, proposing major changes to our state election rules. So I’ll keep asking questions. Maybe some day soon, I’ll get a response.

Meantime, I’m developing a cordial and, I must say, fruitful relationship with the secretary’s office conducted via the Colorado Open Records Act. It could be worse.

I’m ready to join the “Free Rich” campaign, and I’m thinking about offering myself up for the dunk tank at the first “Free Rich” fundraiser.

But as Tomasic illustrates, part of the trick of journalism is to find ways to get information when you can’t get it mouth-to-mouth. Who else knows? What documents are available? Getting blacklisted for interviews, even in an apparently partisan manner from the Secretary of State, is how it  goes.

And obviously both parties do this. Gov. John Hickenlooper won’t go on KHOW’s Caplis and Silverman show, the hosts allege on air. Though he’s on KOA’s Mike Rosen’s Show monthly.

Rep. Scott Tipton isn’t talking to the tea-party-leaning radio program, the Cari and Rob Show. But Tipton’s Democratic challenger Sal Pace will go on the show.

KHOW’s Peter Boyles likes to say no elected official will go on his show anymore, though I heard Rep. Chris Holbert and Sen. Ted Harvey on Boyles’ show Feb. 15 to discuss their gun bills.

Mitt Romney skipped over all the major Denver media last month, eliciting an admirable Howard-Beale-like outcry from Fox 31 political reporter Eli Stokols.

It’s always been this way, you’d say. But the changes in the media make the situation worse for real people (who stopped reading this blog post before the first paragraph, even though I put “rabid” in the title to lure them in).

With the major media in decline, and more small outlets lining up along ideological lines, many people are less likely to hear from elected officials they disagree with.

Progressives, for example, who consume news from progressive news outlets, won’t be hearing from Scott Gessler directly any time soon, it appears.

That’s not good, and you have to think it will get worse, because, politically, Gessler can write off the left, talk to his conservative base, and try to reach moderates through other means, which may or may not include The Denver Post in the long run.

Under this scenario, how does the partisan divide do anything but get wider?

To be fair, and this is my attempt at ending on a hopeful note, I should tell you that even after Gessler’s office rejected my own interview requests, Gessler was willing to speak with me when I approached him after a speech  he gave at Colorado Christian University. I told him I was a liberal blogger, and he still spoke with me.

In the semi-public setting, maybe he felt a responsibility, as an elected official, not to turn away from me?

But,  like Westword, I didn’t ask him the right follow-up question. Who knows if I’ll get another chance?

I blogged March 14 about how bizarre it was that, apparently, no news outlets had picked up on ColoradoPols video of Colorado Republicans (Tim Neville) comparing Hitler to Obama, (Ted Harvey) saying a mandate for health insurance coverage of contraception leads to “genocide,” (Ken Lambert) saying such a policy is “mind control,” and (Scott Renfroe) saying the policy could lead to a government takeover of the church.

Oh, I forgot to note that all of those Republicans are elected members of the Colorado Senate, making them impossible to ignore from a public-interest, journalistic point of view–kind of like Tom Tancredo running for President.

I uploaded my piece prior to the publication date of the Colorado Statesman, which reported the GOP comments March 16, as well as additional remarks by Sen. Greg Brophy, who seems to be a quote machine for thoughts harkening back to the 1950’s.

Last week Brophy tweeted:

Ms. Fluke, I don’t want to buy your booze, pay for your spring break or your birth control. Call your Dad for that.”

Then the Statesman reported:

Brophy told The Colorado Statesman that before he sent his Twitter update, he knew the comment would likely spark animosity and criticism, but he said he felt it was necessary to send a strong message since he only had 140 characters to do so, as is the limit with the Twitter technology

“When you’re limited by 140 characters, either you make a point, or you don’t make a point… The discussion is over whether it’s appropriate to hand out birth control to 18-year-old coeds on campus… I don’t think it sells the college experience to mom and dad looking to send their kid to that school,” said Brophy.

Brophy doesn’t mention Hitler, as you can see, which might explain why he didn’t get “Schmuck of the Week” honors from Westword’s Patricia Calhoun, though you might think he deserves it.

Sen. Tim Neville got the Schmuck award for his deep Hitler comment.

Westword posted Pols’ video of Neville on its website, making it the only news outlet to do so. I’m tempted to call the Denver news media a bunch of Schmucks (with the exception of Westword and the Statesman), but I won’t.

This got lost on my to-do list, but even if it’s late, and not exactly a new topic, I’m gonna write a quick blog post about Rep. Scott Tipton’s statement, paraphrased in the Pueblo Chieftain last month, that Obamacare’s “target of shrinking future Medicare costs by $500 billion over a decade would ultimately mean the government denying senior citizens needed medical services.”

Numerous fact checkers have shown this to be false.

For example, Pulitzer-Prize winning Politifact reported June 15, 2011:

Also, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, tagged Obamacare by critics, doesn’t eliminate benefits.

Indeed, portions of the law improve benefits and coverage, according to Tricia Neuman, director of the Medicare Policy Project at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit health care research organization. Medicare will cover more preventive health care services, such as wellness visits, and recipients won’t face the “doughnut hole” gap in prescription coverage imposed under an existing Medicare program.

Other provisions reduce the growth in Medicare spending by helping the program operate more efficiently and fund other coverage expansions to the uninsured. Other provisions are designed to improve the delivery of care and quality of care, Neuman has said.

In another article, Politifact found the statement, “The new health care law ‘will cut $500 billion from Medicare. That will hurt the quality of our care,’ ” to be deep in its “Mostly false” category, which is as deeply false as its ratings go.

Fact checkers at the Washington Post also found that the $500 billion is saved in Medicare efficiences which are “wrung from health-care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries.”

In last month’s article, that I quoted above, The Chieftain did not report that Tipton’s statement about Medicare cuts under Obamacare was false.

But in the past, to its credit, it has put the number in context, showing different ways journalists deal with the misleading use of the $500-billion figure.

Oct. 29, 2010, the Chieftain reported:

“…[Tipton]  repeated his charge that Salazar and Democrats want to cut $500 billion from Medicare — a cut that Tipton said would hurt seniors. That part of the legislation calls for reducing the growth in Medicare expenses by $500 billion over 10 years by eliminating fraud and waste.

Oct. 7, 2010, the Chieftain reported:

Tipton has shot back, accusing Salazar of supporting a $500 billion cut in Medicare — a reference to the Democratic health care legislation that requires the future growth in Medicare expenses to be reduced by $500 billion over 10 years. A reduction in future growth is not a cut in the current Medicare program.

This kind of reporting  is more fair than letting Tipton’s allegations hang unchallenged. But journalists should also include the fact that benefits under Medicare will not be affected.

Here’s another way Chieftain reporter Peter Roper, who wrote all the articles I cite in this blog post, dealt with the $500-billion figure. This actually might be the best approach journalistically, because it focuses on what Republicans themselves have said. But it requires more space than a simple fact check.

On June 28, 2011, the Chieftain pointed out that Republicans first ridiculed the $500 billion figure as being imaginary, and then they switched course and declared that it was a real cut that would hurt seniors.

In an article about a Democratic ad targeting Tipton, the Chieftain reported:

[Tipton] reached back to the 2010 election debate over health care, noting that the Obama administration was touting cutting future Medicare costs by $500 billion over a decade.

At the time, Republicans scoffed that such savings were imaginary in the Democratic legislation intended to broaden health care coverage.

“The Democrats ended Medicare as we know it when they cut $500 billion from it,” Tipton said in a statement sent to reporters Monday.

Aug. 26, 2011, the Chieftain similarly reported:

Two years ago, Republicans ridiculed President Barack Obama’s health care legislation for claiming it would lower the deficit by reducing future Medicare expenses by $500 billion over time. Now they’ve embraced that number as a Democratic cut in the popular health insurance program for seniors… “(Democrats) took $500 billion from Medicare,” Tipton replied…

You want reporters to correct any factual errors in quotations that appear in their work. This is not always practical, unfortunately, for reporters these days.

But when reporting statements that are obviously politically charged, and are easily found to be false or lacking in context, reporters should set the record straight. Tipton’s allegation about Medicare falls into this category.

The $500-billion figure will almost certainly come up again, and when it does, given the sensitivity of the issues involved, it’s only fair for reporters to present a factual statement about the issue, and/or to ask Tipton to provide proof for his allegations about Medicare.

There’s a personal quality to talk radio that lends itself to emotion.

Take for example this segment on KVOR’s Jeff Crank Show March 10 about the Senate District 10 primary between Republicans Owen Hill and Rep. Larry Liston.

You can snooze through a lot of talk radio, but not this type of discussion. Crank gets upset, and so do his callers, and you can feel the anger.

When El Paso Country Republicans get mad at each other, Ref C often makes an appearance, as it does here with Crank saying that Hill is falsely acusing Liston of having voted for Ref C. Liston, who was a guest on the show, says he voted against it in the state legislature.

Crank said on air that he was ready to host an on-air debate between Liston and Hill.

 But when Crank gave Hill four possible dates for an on air-debate, Hill rejected all of them, Crank told his listeners.  Hill would only debate after the county assembly, he said.

Then this from Crank:

“Last I checked, this is not the Owen Hill show,” said Crank on air. ” This is the Jeff Crank Show, and I decide when you come on and when you don’t come on.  And you don’t call me and demand that, ‘Well, I’ll come on your show but only after this.’  That means you’re forfeiting your right to come on the show.  You come on when I ask.  I decide the topics, not you.

“And what kind of an elected official would that be, by the way, if he’s telling you, ‘Oh, I’m going to call in on this day but not this day.  I’m going to decide when I do this, as opposed to something else.  I’m sorry, that’s just not the way it works here on this show.   When I decide that we’re going to have a debate, that’s when we’re going to have it.  And you either show up, or you don’t show up. Okay?  So, let’s be real clear about that.”

“Second… I gotta tell you, I think there’s an honesty problem here.  Because I have been repeatedly told, and people in our community who I respect, people like Steve Schuck, and many others have asked whether a certain person named John Hoteling was working for Owen Hill, and he tells them, ‘no’.  Because he has a checkered past, you see. He was Doug Lamborn’s campaign manager, ran the slime against me; he and his brother Mark Hoteling, ran the slime against me.  So he doesn’t want everyone to know.”

On the radio, Crank said that Sen. Ted Harvey supports Hill and that Harvey wrote on Facebook that Hoteling is Hill’s camaign guru.

“I was around when Ref C was going,” Crank said on air. “And I was falsely accused of supporting Ref C. So I know what’s it’s like.”