Oil and gas drilling at Fairview and SH 119

At the January 24, 2011, city council meeting, City Manager Gordon Pedrow announced that instead of releasing draft regulations on January 31, “options” would be made available to council members, board members and the public.

January 31 came and went without “options.” On February 2, the city released a document that was not the promised “options” (whatever those might have been), but a 60+ page document titled “City of Longmont Oil and Gas Regulations Update.”

Mr. Pedrow indicates that the options, now known as “questions,” will be delayed until a Public Open House on February 6, 2011, to be held in the lobby of the City Council Chambers between 4:30 and 6:30 PM. No one will have an opportunity to see these “questions” until that time. There will be no opportunity to reflect on their meaning or potential implications for the future of Longmont.

The city has created a highly controlled environment for the release of questions. It will establish parameters and attempt to squeeze the public into a narrow band of choices that reflect the choices that the city’s attorneys and staff believe are acceptable.

It is important that members of the community maintain their own integrity on this issue and insist that the city respond to their demands and requirements.

Following the Public Open House, at 7:00 PM in Council Chambers, a joint meeting of the Board of Environmental Affairs, the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, and the Water Board (The Super Committee) will be held.

Information will be presented by city staff to the Super Committee and questions will be taken from the Super Committee. At that point, the public will have an opportunity to be heard in the same manner as at council meetings, a 3-minute Public Invited to be Heard.

Following the Public Invited to be Heard segment members of the Super Committee will be electronically polled with “multiple choice” style preferences to pre-determined questions. These questions may or may not be the same as those given to the public.

Mr. Pedrow has indicated that the responses from the public and the Super Committee will be compiled and presented to the Planning and Zoning Commission on February 15. That meeting is held in the Council Chambers at 7:00 PM and also has a Public Invited to be Heard Segment.

On February 21, the results of all three events will be presented in a Study Session to the City Council in the form of Draft Regulations. At that point the council may address an extension of the moratorium, provide additional input as to what should be included in the Regulations Ordinance, or accept the draft regulations as presented.

Barring any extension of the moratorium, the First Reading of new regulations will occur on March 13 and the Second Reading and Public Hearing will be held on March 27, 2011. If the ordinance passes, it will become law in the City of Longmont effective 10 days later and applications for permits will be accepted beginning April 18, 2011.

Technorati Tags: Colorado Oil and Gas Commission, fracking, health-safety-well being and oil-gas drilling, land use regulations, longmont, Longmont draft regulations, Longmont Super Committee, LongmontROAR.org, oil and gas drilling, oil and gas drilling moratorium, regulatory options, Sandstone ranch, union reservoir

Longmont Mayor Dennis Coombs "broadcasts" his support for marriage equality

I would like to thank Mayor Dennis Coombs for demonstrating strength, courage and compassion in standing up for marriage equality. As we continue to work for the advancement of social justice and basic human rights, it is crucial that we have strong leaders such as Mayor Coombs who are willing to take risks and publicly voice their personal opinions in defense of those who seek equal treatment under the law.

No doubt some will argue that Mayor Coombs violated the edict, “No member of Council, employee of the City, or Council appointee shall state a position or policy of the City until said position or policy has been adopted by affirmation or resolution of Council. No restraint on individual expression is hereby intended, so long as the narrator clearly indicates that the position expressed is his or her individual opinion and not the position or policy of the City.”

But I will submit that Mayor Coombs was quoted in the Times-Call article as stating that his opinion “isn’t the council’s position or the city’s position” and that Mayor Coombs emphasized that this was his personal opinion on the issue when originally contacted by phone for said opinion. Try as they might, Mayor Coombs’ few partisan detractors will continue to obstinately ignore facts in their efforts to paint him in a negative light at every opportunity.

Fortunately for Longmont, we have leaders such as Mayor Coombs who will allow us to continue to grow and progress as a community, even as his partisan rivals seek to inhibit Longmont’s evolution for their own political gains.

Technorati Tags: Dennis Coombs, Longmont Mayor, longmont politics, marriage equality

Longmont Citizens Getting Involved

Dear Longmont,

Our history includes the following:

The European settlers’ business expansion westward almost annihilated the Native Americans and the buffalo. They totally disregarded all human decency to gratify their desire for profit.

The big agriculture business showed no regard for the environment as it attempted to overproduce crops in this area and created the dust bowl, losing precious topsoil to the winds, and almost destroying our agricultural land.

Both of these historical events resulted in widespread human suffering here in Colorado.

Now we have the big energy business preparing to harvest another huge profit, with no regard for the well being of our citizens.

We are not realizing any net benefit from the drilling activity but we are exposed to all of the risks.

We are not ignorant. We are not apathetic. We have courage and determination. We are voters. We are a majority.

We are American citizens defending our own territory.

We will not allow anyone to pollute our environment and  waste our water resources  no matter how formidable their economic resources and political influence are.

If the big fuel business wants to drill here, it will have to use a method that does not involve  hydraulic fracturing.

What is the alternative method to extract this fuel?

Until that question is answered and analyzed, we cannot issue a drilling permit.

There is no need to rush;  take all of the time you need to formulate an answer.

Technorati Tags: citizens, fracking, free speech, gas, longmont, michael coccoli, oil, politics

Here we are in another presidential election year. Billions of dollars will be spent on advertising to get people to vote for one candidate or another. However, outcomes can be affected before the election by state laws disenfranchising certain groups.

For example, an article in the latest AARP Bulletin shows that seven states have photo ID requirements; six other states ask for a photo ID but will allow people to vote with other forms of identification; seventeen other states require voters to show a non-photo ID; and twenty-one states do not require an ID.

The requirement for a government-issued photo ID is relatively new. Five of the seven states requiring the photo ID just recently enacted their law. Governors in five other states recently vetoed a photo ID requirement, while many other states are considering adding this requirement. The government-issued photo ID requirement could impact an estimated 21 million adult citizens who lack this form of ID according to the AARP article. Students, senior citizens, the poor, and minorities are groups that would be hit the hardest by this requirement.

The Sentencing Project addressed another way of reducing the election turnout in a 2008 report. The report estimated that five million people would be ineligible to vote in the 2008 presidential election. Of these, nearly four million resided “in the 35 states that still prohibit some combination of persons on probation, parole, and/or people who have completed their sentence from voting.” The report added that, due to racial disparities in the criminal justice system, one of every eight adult black males were ineligible to vote.

The closeness of the 2000 presidential election and Florida’s role in the outcome demonstrates the importance of this issue. Tens of thousands of citizens in Florida were kept from voting due to allegedly being former felons. Research showed that thousands of those disenfranchised were victims of a flawed computer data file, that is, they had the same name as a former felon.

Voters’ time constraints also play a role. For example, holding the election on a workday makes it more difficult for low-income workers to vote; and having an inadequate number of voting machines for voting stations in poor areas or near to campuses also limits the turnout.

Please encourage your senators to support the Democracy Restoration Act (S. 2017) that enfranchises former felons in federal elections.

- this article first appeared in the Colorado Daily

Every weekday morning most Americans walk into the jaws of a beast that is consuming our world. They do it willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly, helpless not to contribute to an economic engine that drives without a brake. Like cancer it has an endless appetite for growth and like cancer it masquerades as healthy behavior.

To those around it, it seems normal, as normal as earning a living. Its grasping energy fixes our attention on money as a scarce and essential commodity and ensures our participation through the mechanism of debt. We occupy Wall Street and elsewhere to illuminate a diseased condition. This beast of endless consumption is not who we are even though its life is fed by our lives and its appetite by our own.

This relentless cycle is in fact a Ponzi scheme that will destroy our world in an endgame of extinction.

We occupy to assert our inalienable right as human persons to enjoy a future for ourselves and our children and their children to an untold generation. We occupy to free ourselves from the infection the beast has spawned within us. We occupy to free future generations from indenture to the beast. We occupy in the faith that the human spirit will not rest until freedom and a peace based on justice govern human affairs, will not rest until our world is encircled by a vibrant nature.

Spring is coming; we hope at some point you will join us.

Technorati Tags: consumption, future generations, inalienable rights, Justice, Occupy Movement

It’s an impressive piece of art: the cover of this week’s New York Times Magazine. “ISRAEL VS. IRAN,” spelled out in charred black lettering, with flame and smoke still rising from “IRAN,” as if the great war were already over. Below those large lurid letters is the little subtitle: “When Will It Erupt?” — not “if,” but “when,” as if it were inevitable. Though the article itself is titled “Will Israel Attack Iran?”, author Ronen Bergman, military analyst for Israel’s largest newspaper, leaves no doubt of his answer: “Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”

Bergman does cite some compelling arguments against an Israeli strike from former heads of Mossad (Israel’s CIA). And he makes it clear that no attack can prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons if it wants them. Everyone agrees on that. The argument is only about whether an attack would delay the Iranian program by a few years or just a few months.

Nevertheless, his article stacks the deck in favor of supposedly persuasive reasons for Israel to act. It’s almost a hymn of praise to what one Jewish Israeli scholar has called Iranophobia, an irrational fear promoted by the Jewish state because “Israel needs an existential threat.” Why? To sustain the myth that shapes its national identity: the myth of Israel’s insecurity.

That myth comes out clearly in Bergman’s conclusion: Israel will attack Iran because of a “peculiar Israeli mixture of fear — rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to survive — and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.”

Fear of what? Defend against whom? It doesn’t really matter. Israeli political life has always been built on the premise that Israel’s very existence is threatened by some new Hitler bent on destroying the Jewish people. How can Israel prove that Jews can defend themselves if there’s no anti-semitic “evildoer” to fight against?

So here is Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, talking to Bergman about Iran’s “desire to destroy Israel.” Proof? Who needs it? It’s taken for granted.

In fact, in accurate translations of anti-Israel diatribes from Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there’s no mention of destroying or even harming Jews, nor any threat of war. There’s only a clear call for a one-state solution: replacing a distinctly Jewish state, which privileges its Jewish citizens and imposes military occupation on Palestinians, with a single political entity from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Guess who else called for exactly the same resolution to the conflict: the most renowned Jewish thinker of the 20th century, Martin Buber. Plenty of Israeli Jews keep Buber’s vision alive today, offering cogent (though debatable) arguments that a one-state solution would be in the best interests of Jews as well as Palestinians.

Yet Ronen Bergman and the editors of the New York Times Magazine see no need for their readers to encounter these facts.

Nor do they see any need to mention the most important fact of all, the one most flagrantly missing from Bergman’s long article: No matter what Iran’s leaders might desire, it’s beyond belief that they would ever launch a single nuke against Israel. They know full well that it would be national suicide. Israel has at least 100 nukes, and 200 or more by many estimates, all ready to be used in a counterattack.

Which makes it hard not to laugh when Bergman reports Ehud Barak’s other arguments for attacking Iran. Even if Iran doesn’t intend to kill all the Jews, “the moment Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the region will feel compelled to do the same.” That’s the foolish “stop a Middle East nuclear arms race” argument we hear so often coming out of Washington, too — as if Israel had not already started the Middle East nuclear arms race decades ago.

And how can a supposedly serious journalist like Bergman solemnly repeat the latest popular argument of the Iranophobes: A nuclear-armed Iran (in Barak’s words) “offers an entirely different kind of protection to its proxies,” Hezbollah and Hamas. That “would definitely restrict our range of operations” in any war against those so-called “proxies.”

As if Iran would even consider committing national suicide to serve the interests of any Lebanese or Palestinian factions.

Yet the myth of “poor little Israel, surrounded by fanatic enemies bent on destroying it” is so pervasive here in the U.S., most readers might easily take this Iranophobic article at face value, forgetting the absurd premises underlying all arguments that Israel “must” attack Iran.

What American readers think is key here. Most Israelis do believe that (as Bergman puts it) Israel needs “the support of other nations to survive.” It’s a crucial piece of their myth of insecurity. And the only nation that really supports them any more is the U.S. So Israel won’t attack Iran without a green light from Washington.

Bergman glibly asserts that there’s some “unspoken understanding that America should agree, at least tacitly, to Israeli military actions.” For years, though, a torrent of reports from Washington have all agreed that both the White House and the Pentagon, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, would refuse to support an Israeli attack on Iran. The consequences for the U.S. are too drastic to even consider it. Why should that change now?

Bergman’s article ignores the obvious answer, the most crucial missing piece in his picture: Barack Obama wants to get re-elected nine months from now. Despite what the headlines tell us, he doesn’t really have to worry about pleasing hawkish Jewish opinion. Most American Jews want him to work harder for peaceful settlements in the Middle East.

What Obama does have to worry about is Republicans using words like these (which Bergman tucks into his article as if he were paid by the GOP): “The Obama administration has abandoned any aggressive strategy that would ensure the prevention of a nuclear Iran and is merely playing a game of words to appease them.” Only a dyed-in-the-wool Iranophobe would believe the charge that Obama is an “appeaser,” but we are already hearing it from his would-be opponents.

Obama also has to worry about fantasies like the one Bergman offers (apparently in all seriousness) of Iranian operatives smuggling nukes into Texas. Republicans will happily spread that story, too.

All of this could be laughed off as absurdity if the American conversation about Israel were based on reality. Israel, the Middle East’s only nuclear power now and for the foreseeable future, is perfectly safe from Iranian attack. Indeed, Israel is safe from any attack, as the strength of its (largely U.S.-funded) military and the history of its war success proves.

But as long as the myth of Israel’s insecurity pervades American political life, an incumbent desperate to get re-elected just might feel forced to let the Israelis attack Iran. The only thing that would stand in the way is a better informed American electorate. Apparently that’s not what the New York Times Magazine sees as its mission.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea. Read more of his writing on his blog. Contact him at chernus@colorado.edu

Technorati Tags: American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea, Ehud Barak, Hamas, Hezbollah, Huffington Post, Ira Chernus, Iran, Iranophobia, Israel, Israel vs Iran, Israeli attack on Iran, Israeli insecurity, Jewist state, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Martin Buber, New York Times Magazine., nuclear Middle East, Ronen Bergman, U.S.-Israeli relations

The 18-inch Tinsley Classical Cassegrain

On Wednesday 25 January 2012 at 7:00pm the Little Thompson Observatory (LTO) in Berthoud welcomed its 50,000th visitor since opening its doors in June 1999.

The LTO is a non-profit all-volunteer observatory that is open to the general public any night of the year by appointment and on every third Friday of each month for a Public Star Night. For more information, please go to the website www.starkids.org.

The group attending the celebration was Scout Troop 787 under the leadership of Jared Meier from Loveland, with about 15 scouts and 3 or 4 parents/leaders.

The LTO awarded the scout troop a plaque commemorating this event.

Editor’s note: I volunteered to rebuild the Little Thompson Observatory website in 2008. The more I worked with the group of volunteers that had built and now run the observatory the more impressed I became. I had just gotten the site fully operational and handed off when my wife Marilyn was diagnosed with cancer. The team picked up the slack and ran the site with no assist whatsoever for several months until I was able to return to duty as volunteer webmaster.

I’m deeply honored to be part of the team that operates this observatory. If you ever want to see your tax dollars at work and rugged individualists doing good work with their own time and money, come visit the LTO. The telescopes are provided by the Telescopes in Education program and the control software is donated by Software Bisque. Everything else is community donations and volunteer manpower. This facility is a real gem. —MDW

Technorati Tags: astronomy, berthoud, little thompson observatory, LTO, starkids.org

Residents on the northern shore of the reservoir by County Road 28 insisted that they did not receive notification.  Believe them.  While they may have, in fact, received some sort of communication from the city, it was clearly inadequate to define the scope of the issue.

This isn’t the first time that the city has inadequately notified neighborhoods.  And unless the policy is changed, it will not be the last.

The issue of drilling for oil and gas at Union Reservoir was on staff’s table as early as June of 2011.  Ex-mayor Baum recently said in a radio broadcast that “drilling was nothing new,” that “it had been in the works for a year and a half.”

Really!  But the public was not made aware of this until October.  And the plan was to ram the issue through for a hearing by the Planning and Zoning Commission on November 18^th.  The P&Z was intended to be the final word on the matter.

Had citizens not been alert, those living outside the immediate Union Reservoir area would not have been present at the “neighborhood meeting” to learn that drilling was intended to be imminent.  Most of the residents in the area did not grasp the city’s intentions and had to be separately notified of the threat.

While the Union Reservoir Master Plan was modified and vetted, it is essential to note that this vetting was without any knowledge whatsoever by the public that the area was going to be invaded by the oil and gas industry.

Union Reservoir is unique.  Drilling has no business anywhere near it.  And it should be stopped by any and all measures available.

Council needs to direct staff to revise the notification process so that full implications are apparent.  The notifications need to go beyond small neighborhood geographical areas when the impact is broad and/or citywide.  And the council should table the $750,000 expense of the trail until there is a full understanding of the impact of drilling at Union Reservoir.

The last recommendation I make with reluctance as I am strongly supportive of such a trail.  However, the impact on wildlife, whether from the trail or from drilling, needs careful assessment before, not after, the financial cost is incurred.

Technorati Tags: Bryan Baum, Kaye Fissinger, longmont, longmont politics, public notification, union reservoir, Union Reservoir trail

Jonathan Singer takes the oath of office in the Colorado House of Representatives

Surrounded by his parents and Senate President Brandon Shaffer, Singer took the Oath of Office from Justice Nancy Rice of the Colorado Supreme Court. He then addressed the legislative assembly which he will be joining, expressing the responsibilities which legislators have in working to solve the major social and economic issues of the State of Colorado.

Jonathan Singer Colorado House Representative for HD 11. Photo by Charles Hanson.

While serving as legislator, Singer will also continue his campaign to be elected this November for the HD11 term beginning in 2013.

Technorati Tags: Colorado House District 11, House Economics and Business Development committee, Jonathan Singer, Jonathan Singer sworn in

Give up?

If you said the Republican party, congratulations, you get 1 point.

But if you said the Nazi party, you get 10 points. They were after all, the ones who crafted this platform. All the Republicans did, was co-opt it and wrap it in Old Glory.

Fascism. Sinclair Lewis was dead right.

Technorati Tags: fissinger, GOP, lindner, longmont, nazi, platform, politics, wray

Methane is released in huge quantities

For all those climate change deniers who have convinced themselves that greenhouse gases are not man-made, here’s a great big wake-up call.

As if CO2 (carbon dioxide) isn’t bad enough, we’re headlong into making the matter 100 times worse.  It’s called methane.  It’s trapped under ice at the poles.  And it’s being released in huge quantities from shale gas drilling.

A January 2009 report by Dr. Al Armendariz, formerly of Southern Methodist University and now the director of EPA’s regional office in Dallas, estimated that the air pollution from shale gas drilling in the Dallas/Fort Worth area likely exceeds the emissions from all the cars and trucks in that area.

From May 31 to June 3, 2011, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation directed David Sawyer of Sawyer Infrared Inspection Services to examine 15 natural gas drilling and compressor sites in Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia that are visible from public roads.  Sawyer’s equipment detected methane and perhaps other hydrocarbon gases escaping from 11 of these 15 sites. The four sites with no emissions were not operating.  CBF used a standard video camera to simultaneously record the same sites that Sawyer was taping with the “GasFindIR” camera.

Dr. Robert  Howarth of Cornell University said CBF’s videotape shows significant emissions of methane and perhaps other hydrocarbon gases, and demonstrates why a comprehensive federal examination of pollution from shale gas drilling is needed.

Visit the link and see for yourself.  The emissions look like colored smoke.  Yet the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission keeps telling Colorado citizens that WE have no rights, only the mineral owners do.

Technorati Tags: Chesapeake Bay Foundation, citizens' rights, climate change, CO2, COGCC, Colrado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, global warming, greenhouse gases, Kaye Fissinger, methane, methane infrared, mineral rights, Robert Howarth, Sawyer Infrared Inspection Services

It comes from the top of the “party” and its advisors and it comes from the bottom of this unholy pit.  One also has to wonder who originated the ugliness.  Or did it begin at both ends?

I don’t know if there will ever be a definitive answer, but something that was forwarded to me this evening makes the conclusion moot.  There is a poison, a cancer, an evil in our land.  And I don’t know how it’s excised.

Yesterday, the campaign manager of a Democratic congressional candidate in Arkansas came home to find his children’s pet cat murdered and placed on their doorstep.  His head was bashed in, an eye hanging from its socket, and the word LIBERAL written in magic marker on the cat’s body.  If any of you doubt the veracity of this report, the evidence is here.

The candidate, Ken Aden, released a statement saying, “To kill a child’s pet is just unconscionable. As a former combat soldier, I’ve seen the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. Whoever did this is definitely part of the worst of humanity.”

Even that statement is clearly understated.

Technorati Tags: Arkansas congressional candidate, cat of Democrat murdered, Ken Aden

Citizens getting involved and speaking out - only tyrants discourage it.

Recently there was a Letter to the Editor in the Times Call talking about limiting City Council’s Public Invited to Be Heard which is provided for at city council meetings on Tuesday nights.  Public Invited To Be Heard allows every Longmont citizen up to 3 minutes to talk to their locally elected representatives to tell them what they think about an issue.

As a former city council member for 5 years, there was no doubt that there were times that I wished folks would “hurry up” or “summarize their thoughts.  However, I always reminded myself about what America stands for. Here, in this country, we are allowed free speech and we are given the right to talk to our elected council members. While this might be inconvenient for elected officials, I feel strongly that citizens need to speak out and let their representatives know what is on the minds of the people they work for.  Remember, the voters are the ultimate decision makers.  City council members work for us.  How can they govern if they do not know how citizens feel about an issue?

We all have a right to speak out.   When someone decides they want to run for public office, this is the job that they agreed to perform.  Ducking out on this public duty is not the kind of person we want representing us. Elected officials need to listen.

Technorati Tags: 3 minute limit, city council, Karen Benker, longmont, Longmont City Council, Longmont free speech, longmont politics, pitbh, politics, public invited to be heard

Councilwoman Finley : limit public's time to thirty minutes

Council Member Finley moved, seconded by Santos, to direct staff to change the Council agenda to have a 30 minute time limit at the first Public Invited to Be Heard.

Council discussed this topic at length.

Council Member Bagley moved, seconded by Coombs, to table the motion until an unspecified time. Vote was taken the motion to table and it carried: 4-3 (Finley, Levison, and Santos dissenting).

— City Council Proceedings, January 10, 2012 (PDF)

Let me jog your memory about the last time this happened:

“Having to listen is ridiculous” —Bryan Baum 2010

Mayor Baum “brought it up for discussion” that he wants to limit the entire Pubic Invited to be Heard (PITBH) to only 30 minutes after which each council member would have three minutes “to dispel public untruths”.  If he doesn’t get agreement for this arrangement, he plans to move PITBH to the END of the evening.  He claims that the “business of the city and council is more important” than listening to the public’s concerns, their love for their community and their passion for government in the interest of ALL of the citizens of Longmont.  He thinks “it is ridiculous to have to listen for an hour and a half.”

Look at their expressions. Do they look like they care about what citizens think? The ex-mayor is already crowing about his connections benefitting his business. Isn’t that exactly what they accuse their opponents of doing?

Could this concept now be quietly buried under a nice little memorial and never brought up again? Unless of course the perpetrators are ready for an equal and opposite reaction.

Cory Gardner, getting asked the tough questsions

On a roll.  Or so he thought.  His script was down tight.  Celebrate the free market even though it’s far from free.  The deck is stacked for the 1% and I’ll bet he damned well knows that.  The house always wins.   But, hey, as long as you’ve got gullible people who can’t find their rear end with both hands, it works.

Lots of old fogies, as my parents used to describe them.  Not because they were old, but because they lacked that which the “conservatives” think they have – common sense.

How many lifetimes will it take for some of these people to grasp the fact that they are never going to be part of the 1%.  The 1% doesn’t want them.  In fact, they’d be more than happy to see the number be half a percent or smaller.

With the help of wordsmiths like Frank Luntz and a year of practice, one of the 1%’s water carriers has got that political “pivoting” maneuver down pretty well.  But someone’s always going to show up with that question, the one not expected, the one that wasn’t included in the script.  And then the guy would rather run for the door – but that would be way too humiliating.  So what to do, blabber a little and quickly, and then look the other way, call on someone else, and be very glad that the scheduled hour is almost over.

Here’s the question:

There is a 501c4 that is rabidly anti-environment and places property rights ahead of all other rights.  This organization inserted itself into Longmont’s municipal elections in 2009 and again in 2011.  It began in Montana and the Montana Political Practices Commission described the campaign practices as raising “the specter of corruption.”  There was testimony that the organization even accepts money from outside the United States.  Recently the Montana Supreme Court  in its ruling against Western Tradition Partnership, now known as American Tradition Partnership, said, “We take note that Western Tradition appears to be engaged in a multi-front attack on both contribution restrictions and the transparency that accompanies campaign disclosure requirements.”  Mr. Gardner, you have accepted campaign assistance from this corrupt organization.  Will you renounce American Tradition Partnership, its policies and its political practices?  Yes or No

Here’s the answer:

I don’t know.  I can’t give you a yes or no because I don’t know the organization’s contribution.  I don’t know if they did, when they did it, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.  So there’s lots of different opinions in this room and you may have a different opinion on the group than someone else in the room.

Now that might have worked, but there was a little problem with evidence that was raised high for all in the room to see.

“Cory Gardner has pledged 100% support for Western Tradition Partnership’s agenda…”

“With jobs fleeing Colorado and your prosperity in danger, you need to know where the candidates for Congress stand.”

And Mr. Know Nothing from a Do Nothing Congress controlled by a Know Nothing Party verifies it:

“I don’t know…I don’t know the organization’s contribution…

I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Hey, but who and what ya gonna believe?  Your lyin’ eyes.  The evidence?  Or Colorado Congressional District #4 Representative Cory “I don’t know what you’re talking about” Gardner?

Sorry, Cory.  The headlights gotcha.

Technorati Tags: American Tradition Partnership, Colorado CD4, Cory Gardner, Cory Gardner town hall, Kaye Fissinger, Western Tradition Partnership