The jaw of anyone who’s followed the career of Rep. Mike Coffman dropped upon reading the National Journal’s characterization of Coffman yesterday as a “moderate who sometimes refers to himself as an independent.”

It’s true that Coffman refers to himself as a moderate. Most endangered politicians trying to appeal to independent voters do so.

But for a reporter to state as a fact that Coffman is a “moderate?” Where’s that come from?

Objectively, the word “moderate” does not come to mind if you look at the majority of Coffman’s record. He’s clearly way to the right on social as well as fiscal issues.

On the social side, Coffman does not hide the fact that he’s against all abortion, even in the case of rape and incest.  (Just last year, Personhood USA labeled Coffman a “statesman” for standing firm against abortion for any reason.) He voted in Congress to change the definition of rape, adding “forcible” as an clarifying adjective.

On fiscal issues, Coffman, who endorsed Gov. Rick Perry for President, has said the flat tax has “tremendous value.”

Coffman has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” and has never retracted the statement.

On immigration, Coffman has expressed an open mind about immigration reform lately. But his record stands in opposition to his recent tone. Coffman introduced a bill mandating English-only ballots, even for areas with large numbers of Spanish-speaking voters who aren’t proficient in English. Coffman has long stood with (and endorsed) Rep. Tom Tancredo, who symbolizes American extremism toward undocumented immigrants and immigration reform.

Coffman has called the expansion of Medicare under Obamacare “very radical.”

Famously, Coffman said doesn’t know if Obama “was born in the United States of America,” but Coffman did know that Obama “in his heart, he’s not an American.” Coffman apologized, but Coffman thinks too big a deal was made of the Obama comment, and it was taken out of context.

If you look at the totality of Coffman’s record, you can say he’s taken an independent view on military spending. But that’s it.

There’s no justification for journalists to label him as a “moderate.”

Jeff Crank works for Koch-Brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity and doubles as conservative-talk-radio-host poster child, holding forth on KVOR in Colorado Springs.

I offer Crank’s comments below, from Saturday’s show,to illustrate how the troubles at the IRS give echoers like Crank the perfect springboard to reach for their deepest anti-government rhetoric, while demonizing Obama at the same time in the most extreme and shadowy ways.

Crank: “This is the moment to stand up and say we need to rip the IRS out by its roots! Grab it and throw it away and eliminate it! Get RID of the IRS! Throw it out the window! Let it be—throw it on the ash heap of history! Make it be the Soviet Union! Something that we remember in the disant past! No federal agency should be feared like this – and bureaucrats should never ever have this kind of power. It’s sickening! It’s absolutely sickening to see this kind of thing.”

He added that it’s sicker that we don’t have a leader in the White House who will stand up and get rid of these Jack Booted thugs at the IRS. Then later, he got more specific about Obama:

Caller (Mrs. Youngblood): “The reason I thought why the IRS is attacking most of the religious organizations was that to silence them because he [Obama] is wanting to establish a One World Religion…which would be Muslim. These religious organizations just didn’t meet his standards. [he’s trying to] Keep them from growing. I know he’s Muslim.”

Crank: “…Some people will argue, ‘Oh, he’s not Muslim.’ Whatever, I’ll tell you this — He’s no friend of Christianity. When you’re attacking churches left and right and their tax status… there’s not one mosque that’s come forward and said, ‘You know what? The IRS is really attacking us’ Did you notice that, Mrs. Youngblood?”

Asked via Twitter if Crank really thinks Obama is “no friend of Christianity,” Crank replied: “I said there weren’t any Mosques that got an IRS root canal. Christian ministries did. True?”

Lobbyist Corky Kyle, who runs the Kyle Group, hosts an internet radio show called “In the Lobby,” which promises to give “you a backstage pass to the heated industry of lobbying and politics.”

Here’s a taste of the backstage heat you got when Kyle had Tony Gagliardi, a lobbyist for the National Federation of Independent Business, on the show May 7 (@24 min).

Kyle:  All right. We’re back.  We’re back, after the exciting first segment of our show.  How’s it feel, Denver, to be a small businessman?  Did you just want to bend over and grab the Vaseline®?  Or maybe they’re not going to use Vaseline ® this time.  I don’t think they are.

Gagliardi:  They’re not even going to take you to dinner.

Kyle:  They’re not even going to take you to dinner!  That’s right!  And, on top of that, they won’t even kiss you!

Gagliardi:  [laughing] I know.

Kyle:  What the heck is going on with this?

Watch here @ 19:30:

Kyle and Gagliardi were upset with the legislative session, generally, but in particular, they didn’t like a bill that would subject businesses with 15 or fewer employees to workforce discrimination lawsuits, even though damages and penalties would be limited.

“I represent 7,500 members in this state and another 2,000 in Wyoming,” Gagliardi said on the show. “And the worst thing I hated to see come out of this session was the lack of respect for those who actually generate the infrastructure in this state, and that’s business.”

But was it ok to compare the legislation and the session to being butt f*cked with no Vaseline or anything more advanced?

I don’t think so. Do you?

“I stand by that, even though it may be a little vulgar,” said Kyle, adding: “If someone can show me where small business was helped, I’ll eat my hat and buy them dinner.”

For his part, Gagliardi told me.: “I would stand by my comment as far as lack of respect [to small businesses]. The question is, was respect shown to the small business community during this session? And the answer would be no.”

But what about the specific wording of the radio conversation?

“In that venue, playing off Corky’s comments, it’s not something I probably would have said in mainstream, but in that venue, given the context, and given what had happened the previous 120 days, I would probably stand by it,” said Gagliardi, adding that on internet radio “they really do push the envelope with more open dialogue.”

He’s right about internet radio (See shows like “Panties.”), but I can’t find any shows, featuring serious lobbyists and legislators, like “In the Lobby” does, that hit such obscene notes.

Anal sex came up the other day on Grassroots Radio Colorado, but the reference point was host Ken Clark’s story about how somebody “ rear-ended me” (as in a car accident). His co-host dropped the line: “That’s what she said.”

I don’t recall Kyle’s “In-the-Lobby” show, which has featured dozens of elected officials, including leadership from both parties, getting so deeply in the gutter before.

I asked Kyle if he was changing his show, trying to be more abrasive, so to speak.

“I think it’s starting to change on me because I just don’t like the way things are going [in the Legislature.]  Before, the whole premise of the show was, ‘if you don’t get involved in legislative process, you get what you get.’ All of a sudden things have gotten very contentious. You have to draw a line, and people want to hear different things. I want legislators on who will express some sentiments…. I don’t like the way it’s going.  Small business is getting the shaft so bad.”

Still, Kyle says that anyone who knows him will say that he’ll treat guests with the respect they deserve.

“I really do try to go down the middle,” he says. “That particular day it got a little stupid. I figure after 32 years, I get a hall pass.”

I’m late getting to this, but it’s still bugging me.

In The Denver Post’s, “Winners and Losers of the 2013 Colorado Assembly” editorial May 9, Rep. Mark Waller got credit for being “instrumental in getting a bill passed to set a standard for driving while stoned. He also managed to find a few Republican votes in favor of the budget.”

And House Speaker Mark Ferrandino was a winner for leading “his chamber through a highly contentious session with many late nights and long fights. He was heavily involved in brokering deals on the budget and other matters.”

Then how does Senate President John Morse not get similar recognition? He performed the not-so-easy task of getting a majority of Senate Dems to vote for SB1325, the DUI-D bill, that Waller was “instrumental in getting passed.”

The Post obviously liked the stoned-driving standard bill. Fair enough. So why not spotlight Morse’s work on the measure?

Connoisseurs of the immigration debate in Colorado are familiar with Helen Krieble’s “Red Card Solution,” which originally envisioned undocumented immigrants marching out of the U.S., getting a work permit from a private company, and then returning to the U.S. And all of this would be handled by the private sector. Krieble’s plan has been getting renewed attention lately by Republicans (Dick Wadhams helps promote it.), as an alternative to comprehensive immigration reform, which includes a path to citizenship. And so Krieble has been fielding a lot of questions, like this one on May 14 from KNRV’s Raaki Garcia:

GARCIA: Helen, my question is, would they need to go out of the country to participate in the Red Card. HELEN KRIEBLE: It is simply a question of whether a bill can get passed or not. The “law and order” people, who are a very strong part of this debate, say you must go outside of the borders of the country to enter legally according to our laws. And that doesn’t mean go home to the Philippines if you’re a Phillippino, but go outside. It would only take a week from anywhere in the United States with a forty-eight hour process to do this, so you’re out of the shadows in a week. But I think times have changed. And if it’s possible to pass a law by letting people get their work permits inside the country, I would love to see that happen.

Listen here to Helen Krieble 05-14-13_0001_0001 Garcia should have asked Krieble why her Red-Card-Solution website states that a great march out of the United States is still part of her thinking. What’s up?

During the last election, Denver’s local NBC affiliate (9News) hired Denver University graduate students to help reporters check the facts in election ads.

“We essentially created three temporary jobs with a set number of hours each week to study as many ads as possible,” 9News Assistant News Director Tim Ryan told me via email. “What we assumed, which turned out to be true, was that we would see an extraordinary number of political commercials in Colorado in 2012 and needed additional staff to keep up.”

Ryan says the additional help allowed 9News to produce 44 ad-check stories during the 2012 election cycle–and it gave the student researchers some real-life job experience.

“Our researchers produced very detailed examinations of each spot, then our permanent reporting staff (Brandon Rittiman, Chris Vanderveen, Matt Flener, Todd Walker) turned that detailed research into television stories,” wrote Ryan.

9News calls its ad-check stories  “Truth Tests,” and they won a Cronkite/Jackson prize and other national praise.

“The reason this was successful is all about volume.  At any point in time, there might be commercials from the Obama campaign, the Romney campaign, interest groups in support or opposition to both candidates, as well as a number of competitive congressional campaigns that also included spots produced by candidate campaigns as well as interest groups.  In other words, there was a tremendous stream of ad content that needed attention, and the only way to do that effectively is hire additional staff.”

Local TV stations should hire more real-life-professional journalists, but short of that, it’s a no brainer to employ graduate students for fact checking, especially in swing states where political ads bring in millions of dollars.

But Ryan doesn’t know of other stations that have done it. “We certainly think it could be a model for other organizations, but newsrooms would have to balance the cost vs. the number of spots requiring study.”

I checked around and it appears that no other station in Colorado–or the country–has tried a similar arrangement.

“I’m not aware of those relationships, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there were some,” said Mark Jurkowitz, Associate Director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “Student journalists are contributing in more robust ways to news. In Boston, investigative journalist students have written for local media. Graduate students are 0ld enough to perform the task, under the assumption they’re properly trained to the point that you are confident they are looking at things the same way.”

Deborah Potter, who’s the Executive Director of NewsLab and writes frequently about the local TV news industry, doesn’t know of any other stations that have hired graduate students to “fact check” political ads.

“I’ve often wondered why more stations don’t partner with colleges and universities in their area on projects that involve research,” Potter emailed me. “As long as student work is supervised by professionals, I don’t see much downside in this kind of arrangement.”

“They were closely supervised and they trained in terms of reliable sources,” Ryan told me. “Their jobs didn’t require source building, or other pieces of journalism that are more difficult. It was database work. And at the end, the experienced political journalist had to decide what to call the ad. Was it true? Exaggerated?”

And if an error slipped through, Ryan said, 9News would hear about it. “As you know, the campaigns watch everything and would take issue with anything they thought was wrong. And we’d respond.”

Ryan expects to hire graduate students again for the 2014 election, but nothing is finalized. Until then, staff reporters will probably check political ads as they air.

I suggested that TV stations that are too stingy (sh0ck) even to hire grad students might partner with a professor and find a graduate seminar class to take on an ad-check project for free. No money!

Ryan said this could be a “definite possibility,” but cautioned that  “management could be a bit more challenging.”

“But if you had the right class, it could work, especially for stations that don’t have the resources,” Ryan told me, adding that his station “partnered” with Denver University to find graduate students this year, working with a DU staff person as a point of contact.

9News’ emphasis on fact-checking political ads began in 1998 as a series called “Spotcheck,” done in conjunction with Denver Post reporter Mark Obmascik, according to Ryan.

“In the 2002 cycle, we continued to work with the Post but called the project ‘Adwatch,’” Ryan wrote. “Adam Schrager began producing them as Truth Tests for the 2004 cycle, which we repeated in 06, 08 and 10 (as well as occasional off-year efforts like Denver mayoral campaigns).

The concept of checking political ads on local TV was apparently pioneered in Denver by Channel 7′s John Ferrugia, in a project called “Truth Meter” ,in the 1990s.

The Grand Junction Sentinel’s Charles Ashby deserves credit for correcting one of his local lawmakers who claimed a bill mandating a higher renewable energy standard would devastate his constituents when, in fact, it wouldn’t affect them at all.

On Channel 6′s Colorado State of Mind Friday, Ashby told the story of how SB 252, which would increase the renewable energy standard on large Rural Electric Associations, was cited by Rep. Jared Wright (R-Fruita) as evidence of a war on rural Colorado, even though one of Grand Junction’s REAs supported the increased standard, and the other local REA gets power from Xcel Energy, which isn’t affected by the legislation, which awaits Gov. Hick’s signature.

Ashby: “We already have a 20 percent standard for utilities like Excel. In ’08, I think it was, they imposed a 10 percent standard on the REAs. Then [this session] they wanted to up it to 25 percent, and they ended up doing 20 percent. And that became the ‘war on rural Colorado.’ It’s going to raise rates. It was almost funny because one of my local lawmakers, for example, from Grand Junction, got up there, and he said, this is going to put people out of their houses. Businesses are gong to close. And what’s funny, in Grand Junction, for example, the major REA gets its power from Xcel, so therefore not affected by this bill. The other REA in his district actually passed a resolution in support of raising the standards. So it was more politics than it was policy.” [BigMedia emphasis]

Ashby originally called out Wright in an April 26 Sentinel story.

I think some journalists see fact checking as boring, but I agree with Ashby that it’s fun to point out the misinformation, even if, at least theoretically, it’s part of the blocking-and-tackling grind of journalism.

On KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado yesterday, co-host Ken Clark told a story about how he was waiting in line for car wash and got rear-ended.

He jumps out to confront the asshole who hit him. He’s  swearing and cursing and cussing and…. He can’t see who hit him because of tinted windows.

He assumes the fight stance. He’s going to kick some ass. Door opens.

It’s a 17-year old young woman…. Crying and freaked out.

Ken talked to the girl’s dad on the phone and it all worked out – even though Ken never met the guy, and even though he was so pissed off he was willing to initiate a violent altercation.

Everything worked out FINE!

Ken’s moral of the story:  Government is bad.  Obamacare would have told Ken where he HAD to take his car for repair… and the work would have sucked.  Ken would have been forced into a bureaucracy, and would not have been able to settle this issue on his own.

Nice huh? Only on Grassroots Radio Colorado!

In a Spot Blog post Sunday, The Denver Post cited a story from Colorado Springs TV station KOAA reporting that organizers of the campaign to recall Senate President John Morse hired Kennedy Enterprises to gather signatures to put the recall question on the ballot.

But the Post’s print version of its Morse-recall story, unlike it’s Spot Blog post, did not include a reference to Kennedy Enterprises, and it didn’t delve at all into the mysterious question of who’s funding the Morse recall campaign, even though Post reporter Kurtis Lee quoted one of the anti-Morse campaign’s major donors (without informing readers of her donation).

So The Post missed an opportunity to follow up on the query posed by KOAA-TV’s Jacqui Henrich in her May 6 story, “The bigger question at hand: who hired Kennedy Enterprises despite their questionable background?”

In his piece for the print edition of the newspaper, Kurtis Lee quoted Laura Carno, who was identified as a “Republican political strategist who runs a political action committee in Colorado Springs and is in staunch support of the recall.”

Lee didn’t point out that one of Carno’s organizations, I Am Created Equal (IACE), donated over $14,ooo in in-kind support to the recall effort. Lee should have informed readers about her donation, what it’s being used for, and her views other aspects of the anti-Morse campaign, once considered rag-tag but now infused with real money.

You’d have to hope The Post would get better answers from Carno than I did when I emailed her last week. Carno did confirm that her 501(c)4 organization donated 14k, but she skirted these questions:

Will you tell me what the IACE’s 14K (in-kind) donation to El Paso Freedom Defense Committee was used for or what it was earmarked for?

Do you know who’s paying for the people to collect signatures to recall Sen. Morse, if it’s true that there are people being paid to do this?

Do you think it’s fair to call the Morse recall effort “grassroots” even though the paid petition drive appears to be led by someone named Tracy Taylor, who’s not from Colorado?

Carno sent me a video link as well as this written response:

“We are raising money for our Morse education campaign the way I Am Created Equal always has — we are asking folks who believe in free markets, free enterprise, and limited government to help. To date, every penny we have raised for this comes from Colorado, just as you would expect from a grassroots group like our own. Rest assured, not one penny has come from Mayor Bloomberg. That much I can promise you.”

Last month I reported that Larry Pratt, Director of Gun Owners of America, praised Weld Country Sheriff John Cooke for his opposition to gun safety legislation.

On KFKA’s Scooter McGee show, Pratt said some 400 sheriffs in the U.S. are promising not to enforce gun-safety laws, like Colorado’s new statute expanding background checks.

Pratt also said some sheriffs have vowed to arrest federal agents whom sheriffs believe are violating the U.S. Constitution.

Pratt said on the radio that some “sheriffs are saying, ‘Not only will I not cooperate, but if the Feds are doing something unconstitutional in my county, particularly a gun grab, I’ll put them in jail.’”

It wasn’t clear whether Cooke was among the sheriffs who are ready to arrest the feds, so I called to find out.

“The state gun laws are unenforceable, and I won’t enforce them,” he said. “I’d rather go after drug dealers, burglars, and rapists.”

But Cook said he wouldn’t actually arrest federal agents in Weld County, even if he thinks they’re enforcing unconstitutional laws, like federal gun safety statutes.

“I’m not going to arrest a federal agent,” he said. “No, I’m not going to go that far.”