The Spot Blog’s Spotted Correspondent writes today that a new Sen. Michael Bennet ad is “unfairly misleading in its portrayal” of Ken Buck.

His proof? A column by the nonpartisan Post columnist Vincent Carroll!

He then points to fact checkers that found portions of a previous Bennet ad “wanting,” without mentioning that the fact checkers found numerous portions of Bennet’s previous ads to be true.

And the Spot doesn’t mention that fact checkers have been critical of Ken Buck’s ad too, as well as ads by outfits like the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which support Buck.

This is how News4 introduced its “Reality Check” of a recent attack ad by Ken Buck:

“Ken Buck promised to stay positive this election. That sure didn’t last long.”

In response to Buck’s claim that “Bennet’s votes are so bad he can’t defend them,” News4 found that Bennet in fact “does defend his votes on the health care, the stimulus, and the budget.”

“As for [Buck’s] claim he voted for higher taxes 24 times, that’s misleading at best,” News 4 reported, adding that Bennet has “never voted for a measure that would specifically raise taxes.”

With respect to Buck’s claim that “Bennet is legislating unemployment,” News4’s Reality Check stated that Bennet “did not, of course, pass a law to set the unemployment rate.”

“Bottom line,” News4 states, “Ken Buck is doing what Republicans across the country are trying to do, pin the country’s economic woes on their Democratic counterparts. As I’ve said here before, there’s plenty of blame to go around.”

9News analyzed a National Republican Senatorial Committee ad stating that:

“Bennet even raised taxes $525 billion. A jobs Killer.”

9News found this-false!

 9News explained: “Further, Bennet has not voted on a single measure that would have directly raised taxes or directly raised the tax rate. In fact, numerous economists, both conservative and liberal, have stated publicly that Americans are paying lower taxes this year than they did last year and not simply because they’re earning less as a result of the recession. (Source: Associated Press, April 14: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Tax-Day-rhetoric-aside-apf-3276228499.html?x=0)”

 9News also researched this statement in a National Republican Senatorial Committee ad:

“He [Bennet] voted to gut Medicare. ($500 billion)

9News found this-false!

9News explained: “If anything, seniors who are on basic Medicare will now have more access to preventive services and eight million will also be spared significant prescription drug costs if they fell into the so-called doughnut hole created by Medicare Part D. (Source: New York Times, June 18: http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/18/in-the-doughnut-hole-the-checks-in-the-mail/)”

The Spotted Correspondent, like everyone else who watches TV, has got to know that portions of most all political ads are found to be misleading or false by fact checkers. I wish that weren’t the case, but it is.

The Spotted Correspondent and I would undoubtedly prefer to watch ads by fact checkers not political campaigns. But that won’t be happening.

So journalists, and commentators like the Spotted Correspondent, are left to sort out the key issues, whether they are in the ads or not, and try to make sense of them for voters.

Accusing one side’s ads of being insulting, as if the other side’s aren’t…-when we all know the entire ad game is gross…-misleads voters into thinking the ads matter more than the issues at hand.

In other words, we’ll get more from comparing the candidates’ positions on the issues than comparing their ads.

The ranks of the Personhood 33, as I’ve been calling the top 33 Colorado candidates who’ve endorsed the Personhood Initiative, are diminishing.

First, as you know, Ken Buck un-endorsed the measure, though he still supports personhood “as a concept,” leaving me and others wondering what’s changed. His hard-line abortion stance still puts him in opposition to common forms of birth control and abortion even in the case of rape and incest.

Still, I’ve been wondering if the other 32 members of the Personhood 33 will follow Buck’s cue. (See list here.)

So this week, I phoned up some more of them, after determining previously that Dan Maes and Tom Tancredo were standing with the Amendment.

Colorado Senate (SD 16) candidate Tim Leonard, who…-like Buck…-believes that life begins at conception, told me he never endorsed the Personhood measure, and the Christian Family Alliance website erred in listing him as an endorser.

“I’ve taken no position on any citizens initiative or anything that’s on the ballot that doesn’t have to do with me,” he said, adding that activists were asking him about it during the primary but he never took a position.

Colorado House (HD 35) candidate Edgar Antillon also told me he shouldn’t be on endorser list anymore, having un-endorsed the Initiative during the GOP primary before Buck did.

“Obviously, I don’t get attention like Ken Buck does, but my stance changed on that,” he told me, primarily because he supports abortion to save a women’s life, putting the life of the mother first.

So the Personhood 33 was down to the Personhood 30 by the time I called Colorado House (HD 34) candidate Brian Vande Krol, who told me that he also never endorsed Personhood Amendment. The Colorado Right to Life website claims he supports “Personhood”.

“Mr. Vande Krol was reported to support Personhood by a volunteer who said he spoke to him, but this is not a reliable method of knowing of someone’s stand, and he has also not responded to our survey,” Bob Kyffin, custodian of the CRTL blog, emailed me in response to my questions. “We have tried to make it clear that the only way we know for sure where someone stands is if they respond to the survey.  When we do, we make note of that.”

Kyffin added: “Your articles are helpful to us in determining who sincerely supports Personhood and who is just pretending — historically a major difficulty with Republicans.  It is our hope that most of those you communicate with will affirm support for Personhood in full knowledge that the only forms of birth control it would ban are those that cause a chemical abortion (i.e. abortifacients).”

I left a couple messages over the past week at the campaign of U.S. House candidate (CD-4) Cory Gardner, who’s endorsed Personhood, but I didn’t get a response yet.

Gardner told the Coloradoan a couple weeks ago that he supports the proposed personhood amendment, confirming his past endorsements.

Abandoning Personhood would be a major change of direction for Gardner, given that, you may recall, he bragged at a February candidate forum about circulating petitions to put the measure on the ballot this year.

“I have signed the Personhood petition. I have taken the petitions to my church and circulating them in my church. And I have a legislative record that backs up my support for life,” said Gardner.

But Gardner, like Buck, has changed his position on one issue dear to the hearts of social conservatives. The Coloradoan reported Oct. 3 that Gardner will no longer carry legislation to outlaw abortion, despite what he previously told Tea Party groups.

Given the prominence of social issues in past CD 4 elections, the Coloradoan is right to be asking Gardner about these topics, even if he resists them.  (You can hear the Gardner’s exchange with the Coloradoan here, toward the end of the clip. It’s a great example of a journalist pressing a candidate to answer a question directly.)

But especially given Buck’s statements on Amendment 62, journalists outside of Ft. Collins should be asking the personhood endorsers what they think nowadays about the measure. But they’re not. Hence this blog post, to fill in the journalistic gap.

I really am trying to stop writing about sperm, eggs, zygotes, implantation, and birth control, but these normally quiet yet essential topics keep arising in the Denver media.

The Denver Post states today that the Personhood Amendment would ban common forms of birth control, which is one reason the newspaper came out against Amendment 62.

“Yet because Amendment 62 would define human life as beginning the moment of ‘biological development,’ some common forms of birth control would be illegal because they prevent a fertilized egg from attaching.”

We know that Michael Bennet has been pointing out that Ken Buck is opposed to common forms of birth control. This is based not only on his hard-line abortion stance but also his endorsement of the Personhood Amendment.

Buck’s campaign first tried to tell journalists that Buck supported common forms of birth control AND was in support of  the Personhood Amendment.

But then Buck acknowledged that Amendment 62 would ban common forms of birth control, and he un-endorsed the measure, saying he does not want to ban common forms of birth control.

Still, as recently as last weekend, Buck has stated that he supports “Personhood as a concept.” 

But if this is true, he’d still oppose common forms of birth control, which potentially kill fertilized human eggs, as today’s Post editorial points out. And as a legislator, he’d presumably vote to ban them.

Unless Buck is…pro-choice. This would allow him to support the Personhood concept AND support common forms of birth control.

That’s what the Post editorial board should ask Buck.

Does his support for common forms of birth control mean that he’s now become pro-choice since the GOP primary? If not, what gives?

We have some first-class TV reporters in Denver, but even they would admit that local TV stations are known to take what’s in The Denver Post and regurgitate it.

That’s not what Fox 31 did last night.

The station took information from a front-page Post article Tuesday and told us something The Post didn’t report.

The Post’s article, impressively researched, focused on Colorado state legislative candidates (15 Republicans and 7 Democrats), who have criminal records. It listed the candidates and their criminal records in a handy box, along with a response from every candidate. The easy-to-read format provided lots of factual information for voters in a limited space.

Fox 31 advanced the story a bit last night by reporting that one legislator, Republican Clint Webster, running for House 24 in Wheat Ridge, threatened to shoot a gun at his ex-wife. This tidbit had not been included in The Post, which reported that Webster was simply arrested “in 1991 after an incident involving his ex-wife and the Jefferson County sheriff’s office.”

But Websters behavior was actually worse than both Fox 31 and The Post reported.

In 1991 Webster shot two bullets at his ex-wife and someone else, and he eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree assault and felony menacing (which The Post had reported).

Interviewed by Fox 31 last night, Webster claimed he only threatened to fire a gun at his ex-wife. But the police record shows that this is not true.

Asked why the information about Webster shooting at his ex-wife was left out of story, Post Political Editor Curtis Hubbard wrote that it was an “oversight.”

“Reporting in the original story relied upon interviews with the candidate and the Jefferson County District Attorney’s office,” Hubbard emailed me. “Lynn [Bartels]  missed the mention in a typed portion of the police report and couldn’t make out a portion of the report that was hand-written.

We’ll be running a clarification in tomorrow’s paper that notes the Webster threatened to kill his ex-wife and fired two shots from a Colt semi automatic pistol at her and another person as they drove away from his house.” [This is already on the Post website.]

Fox 31 should also set the record straight.

As I mentioned, Tuesday’s Post article details not just Webster’s felonies, but the criminal records of 22 legislative candidates (15 Republicans and 7 Democrats).

All the violent crimes were committed by Republicans.

Despite this, the Post article’s introduction spotlights Democrat Dennis Apuan’s 2002 conviction for nonviolent trespassing, which occurred during a nuclear weapons demonstration. It is discussed near the beginning of the article, after information about Brighton Republican Tom Janich’s record of five arrests, from 1983 to 1989, one of which involved resisting arrest violently.

Asked if she thought her discussion of Apuan and Janich created a false equivalence between Democrats and Republicans in the article, Post reporter Lynn Bartels wrote:

How people look at these crimes depends on their own value judgments, I believe,” she wrote, adding that she included Apuan because his opponents “have been using his arrest record in their attempt to unseat him.”

“I think someone who has lost a child to a drunken driver might argue that a DUI is more serious than a 20-year-old resisting arrest.”

Bartels clearly has a point that the dates of some of the criminal records and how they are being used in the campaigns make comparisons more complex.

For this reason, you could make an argument that The Post should have just run the criminal records and the responses, without spotlighting any one of them in an introductory narrative.

But because it chose not to simply list the information, it’s probably most fair to rank criminal records by their severity according to known judicial standards. So, even though I could see how fair-minded people could think otherwise, I think the criminal behavior of candidates like Wheat Ridge Republican Clint Webster (1992 felony, felony menacing convictions), Aurora Republican Gary Marshall (1992 misdemeanor child abuse charge), and Pueblo Republican Steven Rodriguez (1996 misdemeanor assault) deserve The Post’s spotlight more than Apuan’s trespass. Wheat Ridge Republican Edgar Antillon (perjury conviction in 2004, failure to appear in court 18 times) was included toward the end of The Post’s narrative.

Moreover, journalists add value to reporting when they analyze patterns in the raw data.  One of the more disturbing trends picked up in The Post’s table of criminal records was a recurrence of domestic or spousal abuse.  Webster’s case of threatening to kill his ex-wife, and going so far as to discharge a weapon twice at her, merits attention for the egregious nature of the offense, but also for the fact that he was one of three candidates listed with a history of domestic abuse, along with Republican Bob Lane of Denver and Republican Steve Rodriguez in Pueblo.  (ColoradoPols named other candidates with a history of abuse, including House Assistant Minority Leader David Balmer.)

But overall I like the way the way The Post reported this complicated information, and the hard work shows.

The Post made a wise decision to include DUIs, because, as Bartels pointed out to, voters may care more about DUIs than a felony conviction, and voters have a right to know about them.

And I like the way Bartels asks readers directly to email her related information, if she missed anything. That’s really smart and even-handed.

Looks like CBS Anchor Bob Schieffer did about two minutes worth of homework prior to his interview with Ken Buck Sunday on Face the Nation.

Had he or his producers prepped for maybe five or ten minutes, he could have called out Ken Buck on some seriously misleading statements on his show.

Schieffer: You also said at one point that you would support a proposed law out there in Colorado that would have banned some forms of birth control, some birth control pills. Do you still hold to that?

Buck: I have never said that. No. I have said that there is a state amendment on personhood. I am in favor of personhood as a concept. I am not taking a position on any of the state amendments. And I have said over and over, and it’s been reporter over and over again, that I am not in favor of banning any common forms of birth control in Colorado or in the United States.

Schieffer: Alright. So we’ve cleared that one up.

Hardly.

Buck is clearly on record as supporting the Personhood Amendment. He’s un-endorsed the Initiative now, but he was for it previously. (And in the middle there, he was against it.)

As for banning common forms of birth control, Buck’s spokesman Owen Loftus told 9News in an email three weeks ago that Buck opposes some forms of the pill, IUDs, and other homone-based methods. These are common forms of birth control.

Buck’s position opposing birth control was consistent with his view that life begins at conception, with the creation of the fertilized egg or zygote.

His no-birth-control position was also consistent with his position opposing abortion, even for a 14-year-old girl raped by her teenage brother. Buck wouldn’t allow her to take a morning-after pill, either.

But Buck’s new position in favor of birth control methods that kill zygotes (like IUDs or the Pill) is inconsistent and makes him look awfully hard-hearted toward the raped 14-year-old girl.

Buck is now saying he’d allow a zygote to be killed by an IUD, but he won’t let a teenage girl choose the morning-after pill or to abort a zygote if the poor girl gets pregnant after she is raped.

Schieffer could have produced some informative and dramatic TV if he’d asked Buck what gives.

Why would he force a raped girl to have a child but allow comfortable women, who could use barrier-method birth control, to use IUD’s and the pill, which murder fertilized eggs too?

After Scheiffer failed to clear up Buck’s issues with Personhood, Schieffer then asked Buck if he was in favor of turning veterans hospitals over to the private sector.

Buck said Schieffer was getting “the Democrat speaking points here.”

Schieffer said, no, “these come from newspaper clippings, but I want to hear your side of it. That’s why I asked.”

It’s great Schieffer is reading newspaper clippings, but he wasn’t reading them very closely. If he had, he’d have pressed Buck harder.

The BigMedia question of the week is, are any of the 33 candidates who endorsed the Personhood Initiative, other than Ken Buck, clued into the fact that the measure would ban stuff like the Pill and IUDs?

You recall last week Buck withdrew his endorsement of Personhood, Amendment 62, saying he didn’t “understand” that the measure would ban common forms of birth control (even though his campaign understood that the measure would ban IUDs and at least some forms of the Pill.)

Over the weekend, to fill in the journalistic gap, I asked a few of the other best-known Personhood endorsers (the Personhood 33) if they knew the Initiative would ban common forms of birth control, and if Buck’s decision changes anything for them.

Nate Strauch, spokesman for Personhood endorser Dan Maes, said of his boss, “He has not changed his opinion on the matter.”

Fellow gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo, also a Personhood endorser told me “nothing has changed there,” regarding his endorsement of Amendment 62.

Asked if this means he supports banning common forms of birth control like the Pill and IUDs, Tancredo said, “I must admit, on the rest of this stuff, I have to look into it.” (I’ll check back with him later and report back.)

Cory Gardner, running for CD 4, is another high-profile GOP candidate who’s thrown his backing behind Personhood. His campaign didn’t return my call over the weekend, but the Ft. Collins Coloradoan reported Sunday that Gardner supports Amendment 62.

Asked by the Coloradoan if he opposes abortion even in the case of rape and incest or if the mother’s life is in danger, Gardner replied: “I’m pro-life, and I believe abortion is wrong.”

I’ll try to find out if Gardner, unlike Buck, understands that Amendment 62 would ban common forms of birth control.

I’ll be calling other members of the Personhood 33 as well.

Denver Post editorial page editor Dan Haley got a fact wrong in his column today.

He wrote in reference to Colorado’s U.S. Senate race:

“No one in 2010 is talking about social issues except Bennet.”

Most likely, Ken Buck is the GOP nominee precisely because he talked so much and so passionately about social issues during the Republican primary, scoring much more love from the social-conservative wing of the Republican Party than his opponent Jane Norton. Arguably the support from social conservatives tipped the close primary in his directions.

So it would have been true for Haley to write that Buck doesn’t like to talk to him and mainstream journalists and average-regular-angry voters about social issues now. And Buck is trying not to talk about social issues to anyone now that the primary is behind him.

But Buck undoubtedly blabbed and blabbed about social issues to select audiences who heard his words clearly, and these folks were part of his Tea-Party victory formula.

I’m really sorry to offer this exchange again from Jim Pfaff’s social-conservative radio show (560 KLZ), but it’s emblematic of how Buck dangled his social-conservative lines to select audiences who wanted to hear them.

Pfaff: “These social issues, like marriage, these are critical issues. It has been one of the great weaknesses of the Republican Party not to deal with these critical issues.”

Buck: “I agree with you that I think it has been a weakness of the Republican Party in the United States Senate, and I think it’s time that we look at the people we are sending back to Washington DC and making sure those people are sticking by the values they espouse on the campaign trail.”

This kind of talk paid dividends for Buck.

As the Colorado Right to Life blog put it after the 2010 primary:

“The biggest victory for Personhood today was Ken Buck, for U.S. Senate.”

So, you’re right Mr. Haley, Ken Buck must not have said anything about social issues in 2010 to get that kind of response from Colorado Right to Life, which we all know cares only about jobs and the economy.

In a KBDI Channel 12 debate Sept. 17, News4 reporter Terry Jessup asked Gualberto Garcia Jones of  Personhood Colorado about GOP support for the Personhood initiative, Amendment 62.

“I mean there’s no one out there with the possible exception of Ken Buck that has talked about this much,” Jessup asked Gualberto. “Why is that?”

Jessup is right that candidates aren’t talking about Personhood much, but plenty of them have endorsed the measure.

As Jones pointed out in response to Jessup:

“One of the changes that we saw from this amendment from the last amendment in 2008 is that we have had at least had tacit endorsement from every major GOP candidate out there. Every candidate that calling himself pro-life is saying personhood is the way to go. And to me that’s a great in roads. Ken Buck is willing to stand up for a child conceived in rape. That takes guts, and I really appreciate that.”

“Tacit” support is hard to pin down, but here’s a list below of candidates (32 Republicans and Tancredo) on record as endorsing the measure, according to surveys by the Christian Family Alliance of Colorado and/or Colorado Right to Life.

Now that the Personhood issue is making headlines, Jessup and other reporters should ask the significant candidates who have endorsed Personhood whether they will take a cue from Buck and alter their position on the measure.

Buck, you recall, backtracked because he said he didn’t understand that the initiative would ban common forms of birth control, like the Pill and IUDs. First Buck said he supported Amendment 62, then his campaign said he opposed it, and most recently he said he’s neutral on it.

LIST OF COLORADO CANDIDATES WHO’VE ENDORSED THE PERSONHOOOD AMENDMENT, ALL GOP EXCEPT TOM TANCREDO

• Ken Buck (U.S. SENATE — now says he’s neutral)
• Dan Maes (Governor)
• Tom Tancredo (Governor)
• Cory Gardner (Congress)
• Sue Sharkey (CU Regent)

Colorado SENATE Candidates

• Greg Brophy (SD 1)
• Kevin Grantham (SD 2)
• Vera Ortegon (SD 3)
• Wayne Wolf (SD 5)
• Steve King (SD 7)
• Kent Lambert (SD 9)
• Scott Renfroe (SD 13)
• Kevin Lundberg (SD 15)
• Timothy Leonard (SD 16)
• Mike Kopp (SD 22)
• Tedd Harvey (SD 30)

Colorado HOUSE candidates

• Mark Barker (HD 17)
• Libby Szabo (HD 27)
• Jim Kerr (HD 28)
• Kaarl Hoopes (HD 32)
• Brian Vande Krol (HD 34)
• Edgar Antillon (HD 35)
• Kathleen Conti (HD 38)
• Frank McNulty (HD 43)
• Chirs Holbert (HD 44)
• Steve Rodriguez (HD 46)
• Glenn Vaad (HD 48)
• BJ Nikkel (HD 49)
• Ray Scott (HD 54)
• Randy Baumgardner (HD 57)
• Mark Rogers (HD 58)
• John Becker (HD 63)
• Jerry Sonnenberg (HD 65)

If you’ve ever looked at submissions of testimony for a PUC hearing, you know they can fall on the obscure side of things.

And if you’re a reporter covering a hearing, you want to spotlight issues that are understandable and relevant.

Jobs fall into the understandable and relevant category, given that the Great Recession just ended but you’d never know it.

So when The Denver Post’s Steve Raabe was reviewing testimony for a short  Sept. 18 story on the PUC’s hearing about Xcel Energy’s plan to convert coal-burning plants to natural gas, it’s natural that the Colorado Mining Association’s submission on jobs caught his eye.

“There are a wide range of intervenors before the PUC in this case, and much of the testimony they filed deals with relatively narrow subjects,” he emailed me in response to a question about his story. “The issue of jobs, however, is one that I think warrants attention.”

So he included these two sentences to his piece:

Adopting the plan could produce Colorado job losses of 30,000 to 120,000, [the Colorado Mining Association’s Roger] Bezdek said, from coal mining and a ripple effect on other industries. The testimony did not specify how it arrived at that total.

I’m really glad Raabe included sentence number two above, given that he wrote sentence number one.  But the question is, should he have written sentence number one at all, given the information in sentence number two?

In other words, since we don’t know if Bezdek’s jobs figures had any basis in reality, should Raabe have simply picked something else to report in his story, even though jobs are a hot-button issue these days?

I think Raabe should have passed on Bezdek’s employment numbers, until their origin was more clear. And, especially since jobs are such a senstive issue, Raabe should have at least reported job figures from the folks who support Excel’s conversion plan.

According to a study paid for by Xcel Energy and conducted by the LEEDS School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Xcel’s “preferred” conversion plan would generate an average of 1,250 jobs from 2010 to 2026. The process used for determining this employment figure is cited.

Raabe explained his thinking on the story to me:

“From a timing standpoint, this was a difficult story to cover,” Raabe emailed me. “As you may know, the PUC often sets a Friday 5 p.m. deadline for filings in various dockets. And given the nature of procrastination, most of the filings came in late Friday. There literally were thousands of pages of testimony filed, and I didn’t have the time to examine it all. But I looked at all of the filings that I thought would be potentially relevant, and I did not see any testimony — other than Bezdek’s — that addressed the issue of jobs. I was not aware of a source that I could have reached on short notice Friday evening that could have commented on, or refuted, Bezdek’s testimony on jobs.” 

Raabe’s point about deadline pressure is clearly valid. It took me hours to track down and clarify the job figures I got–and I knew people to turn to.

Raabe also pointed out that PUC hearings on the testimony filed Friday are scheduled for October and November. The LEEDS study was submitted as testimony to the PUC.

So there will be plenty of opportunities to report in more detail on jobs impact of Xcel’s plan–and to confirm that Bezdek’s figures can be substantiated somehow. Bezdek did not return my email asking about this.

Reporters are having a hard time figuring out Ken Buck.

His statements on key issues are at odds with each other, and this has left some reporters, like local TV fact checkers, disagreeing about what some of his real beliefs are.

I have sympathy for these reporters. How do you sort out a guy who says we should “immediately flip the switch” on the Department of Education one day, and then calls for slowly phasing out the Department the next.

How does a reporter reconcile Buck’s view that government shouldn’t be in the retirement or health arenas at all with his view that we have an obligation to make Social Security and Medicare work for our seniors?

To give the public a better handle on how Buck thinks about these issues, reporters should take a few minutes to learn what he thinks about the U.S. Constitution and the intent of the founders.

Speaking to a Tea Party group in December Buck made it clear that we need to honor what he sees as the intent of the founders, which was to keep the federal government small.

“We have for 70 or 80 years put ourselves in a bind where we have grown government in a way that’s inconsistent with the way the founding fathers saw the government,” Buck said. “And I’m not ready to say unconstitutional because the Supreme Court, according to our constitutional structure, is the decision-maker on whether something is constitutional or not. It has said it is constitutional. It’s certainly not consistent with what I think the founding fathers intended. But I’m not sure it’s unconstitutional at this point. But that’s semantics.”

“And so,” Buck continued, “I think we need to recognize what the federal government shouldn’t be doing, and we need to develop a plan to move those programs into the state and the private sector. But again, it isn’t going to happen overnight.”

This view of the federal government gone awry, going back to the New Deal, explains how Buck can be so hostile toward, for example, Social Security, Medicare, and the Department of Education…-and yet not want to flip the switch on all of them (though he has said this about the Education Department, perhaps because his primary opponent was ready to shutter it immediately.)

Buck’s recipe for how he would scale back the New Deal initiatives and other federal programs may help resolve the dispute among reporters about whether Buck really thinks Social Security is constitutional or not, much less “horrible” policy.  It may well be that Buck was literally speaking his mind when he said, “I don’t know whether it’s constitutional or not,” if he reduces the distinction to mere semantics, while Social Security itself is “fundamentally against what I believe” since it would be one of those government programs that have put us “in a bind” in the last 80 years.

People need help understanding how Buck would get us to the world where major federal programs, like Social Security and Medicare, are privatized and the states have more control.

What’s Buck’s plan to create a government consistent with Buck’s view of the intent of the founders? What are the details? How many years until he could see Social Security and Medicare being fully privatized and out of the control of the federal government? How long until the Education Department is cut back and returned to the states, and which programs would be cut outright in the long term and which put in state control?

These and other questions spring forth from BigMedia’s question of the week for reporters:

What’s Ken Buck’s plan for moving major federal programs to the state and private sectors?

Partial transcript of Ken Buck discussing the U.S. Constitution and the size of government December 6,2009, at a Tea Pary gathering.

We have for 70 or 80 years put ourselves in a bind where we have grown government in a way that’s inconsistent with the way the founding fathers saw the government. And I’m not ready to say unconstitutional because the Supreme Court, according to our constitutional structure, is the decision-maker on whether something is constitutional or not. It has said it is constitutional. It certainly not consistent with what I think the founding fathers intended. But I’m not sure it’s unconstitutional at this point. But that’s semantics. I think your point is government has grown beyond where it should be, in ways that in shouldn’t be, and I agree with you. And I think the key is to find ways over time to reduce programs and privatize programs and return programs to the states.

But what about that kid with student loans who couldn’t go to college otherwise. Are we really going to say for 70 years we’ve had student loans, and that is an unconstitutional program, and now you can’t go to college? Or are we going to find a way to move from where we are now, which is wrong, to a system that recognizes human behavior and human needs and let the states take over these programs in a thoughtful way. And so I think we need to recognize what the federal government shouldn’t be doing and we need to develop a plan to move those programs into the state and the private sector. But again, it isn’t going to happen overnight. We didn’t get into this problem overnight and we aren’t going to solve this problem over night. And people who say we are going to solve it overnight are either ignorant or lying to you. And it’s very frustrating to have those people out there with simplistic answers to these very complex problems.