In what probably won’t be a trend, but should be, a southern Colorado radio station plans to replace an extreme right-wing talk show with a program offering a balance of progressive and conservative views.

KENN talk-show host Sean Jeremy Osborn left his show, the Painful Truth, to write a book, Osborne announced during his last show on April 6.

Osborn’s show was broadcast throughout the four-corners area, reaching Durango, Cortez, and elsewhere in Colorado.

I’ve listened to most talk-radio shows in Colorado, and I can tell you that, no matter where you sit on the ideological spectrum, Osborn’s show, with its stream of insults, inane sound effects, and dead silence, and Osborn’s son as side kick, was the worst.

I tried to avoid the Painful Truth, but I wrote about Osborn twice, once when he announced that all Iranians should be killed and another time when he called a Democratic strategist a “stupid female dog,” an “ignorant slut,” a “stupid retard” and more.

I was kind of hoping Osborn got fired, because he deserved it, but it turns out he left on his own.

“He went off to pursue book writing; he wasn’t fired,” said General Manager Bill Kruger of the KENN 1390, which broadcasts from Farmington, New Mexico.

“I’d like to have a local show that has both the Democratic as well as the Republican viewpoints, more balanced,” said Kruger when asked about his plans for the morning time slot, which is temporarily featuring Glenn Beck.  “I want a show that allows people to think and comment whether they have an issue with Democrats or Republicans.”

He said such a show would appeal to “more of the listening audience.”

Osborn had announced previously on his show that if he ever won the lottery, he’d quit. And he said during his final broadcast that he basically won the lottery because he got a big contract to write a book titled, “Brain Disconnect Disorder.”

A tea-party radio crowd is mad at Fox 31 reporter Eli Stokols for failing to report what they see as the real story behind Rep. Chris Holbert’s lone no vote against the state budget bill April 12.

Citing unnamed sources, Stokols reported Friday:

“Republicans privately groused that Holbert’s vote amounted to ‘sour grapes’ after the House GOP caucus refused to allow him to run an amendment dealing with abortion on Wednesday, when the House spent hours debating a few dozen ‘message amendments’ to the budget that aimed to make political points.”

Stokols’ story came after Holbert issued a news release stating he voted against the budget bill because it didn’t set aside any money for a so-called “rainy day fund,” to be used for unanticipated state needs.

Stokols reported Holbert’s explanation, as well the view that allegedly “swirled around the Capitol” that Holbert was essentially lying about his real reason for the “no” vote.

“If I’m Eli Stokols and I’m a crack reporter, it’s not that hard to get a hold of the people,” Grassroots Radio Colorado’s Jason Worley told listeners Monday. “It took me ten seconds to figure out everything [Stokols] says here [in Stokols' piece], which is complete supposition and rumor, is false, completely wrong.”

On the radio, Worley claimed that it wasn’t Holbert who wanted to run an amendment banning public funding of abortion in Colorado. Instead, it was Marsha Looper, who’s in a primary battle with House Majority Leader Amy Stephens.

But leading House Republicans didn’t want Looper to be able to say that she was fighting for an anti-abortion bill, because championing such a bill would help her in her primary campaign against “I-am-the-Christian-Coalition Amy Stephens” in “one of the most conservative districts in the state,” according to Worley.

So, Worley said, Republicans made it look like the anti-abortion amentment was Holbert’s, so that Looper couldn’t take credit for it.

Looper told me that, in fact, it was she who took the lead on the abortion amendment, not Holbert.

“Chris and I talked to each other about a month ago,” Looper told me. “And that was it. I was prepared to run the amendment to remind everybody that public funding for abortion is prohibited in Colorado.”

“I had conversations with individuals, and they weren’t happy with my running the bill, and [later] lo and behold, it was already in the bill,” she told me adding that she didn’t run the amendment when she found that it had been inserted in the “long bill on page 363.”  (Indeed, you can find it in a footnote in the state budget bill on page 363, as well as, and this is the funny part, in the Colorado Constitution.)

“I’m sure Mr. Stokols isn’t going to reveal his sources, but whoever his sources were, they pinned it on the wrong guy, ” Worley said on the radio.

Asked if he still stood behind his sources for this story, Stokols told me via email:

I stand by my sources.

Rep. Holbert made the conscious choice to send out his own press release and statement the day after the vote. Obviously, he felt the need to explain his vote for some reason. I wrote the story because he sent the press release, which ran counter to the other things I’d been hearing.

I don’t blame Stokols for using anonymous sources. He’d almost certainly never have gotten anone to comment on the record, and given the importance of abortion issues in politics these days, airing the views is clearly in the public interest.

So Worley shouldn’t be directing his anger at Stokols, who just reported what he was told.

Worley should focus on finding out who spread the Holbert story and give reporters specific names.

That’s what Worley did Monday, saying on the radio: “And, you know, Reps like B.J. Nikkel who spread these rumors should know better.”

I called Nikkel yesterday for comment, but have not heard back yet.

Unlike Worley, Holbert won’t say who he thinks talked to Stokols.

All he’d tell KVOR talk-radio host Jimmy Lakey Sunday was, “Somebody planted that story.”

Last year, someone came to Holbert with a bill to defund Planned Parenthood, and he was going to run it, but it was too late, Holbert told Lakey.  This year, Holbert continued, he decided to look into it, but the language was too complicated. And when he heard that Rep. Marsha Looper was working on a similar bill, he figured he didn’t have to run it.

LAKEY: …But this sour grapes, and so do you know who the sour grapes are up there [at the Capitol]?

CHRIS HOLBERT:  I…

LAKEY: You want to name names here?

CHRIS HOLBERT:  No…

LAKEY: No, I know you don’t.  You’re a nice guy.  I’ll name na…!  No, I don’t know who they are either… Well, we’ll come back, I want to wrap it up with Representative Chris Holbert.  He stood firm and he voted ‘no’ on budget that spends every penny, every year, where it continues to kick some problems down the way.  But Chris Holbert says he wasn’t pouting.  So there you have it.  We’ll continue to talk about this, wrap it up with Chris Holbert, and uh, I’ll be glad to, in just a moment, tell you how you can contact Chris Holbert, or maybe help him out.  He’s the lone vote!  Voting against some crazy stuff up there, and you ought to support a guy like that.  So stick around!  More to come!  I’m Jimmy Lakey.

If you think tea-party radio shows are done with this strange story by now, a week after Stokols reported it, you’d be wrong.  Worley was still talking about it Wednesday on KLZ. And he’s still angry at Stokols.

My advice for Worley is, don’t get mad at Eli Stokols. You should be thanking him for reporting what was said to him. You just need to find people with the guts to name names, and present other evidence of below-the-belt politics, if it’s true, on the record.

If you look at Denver media, you find way more partisan support for Republicans than Democrats.

I’m not talking about “conservative” media figures versus “progressive” ones. I’m talking about media types who urge people to vote Republican.

Here is my list of Denver media figures who are partisan Republicans:

Freeland Denver  Post columnists John Andrews and Mike Rosen (also on KOA); Michael Brown, KOA; Ross Kaminsky, KOA; Jon Caldara, KHOW; Dan Caplis, KHOW; Steve Kelley, KNUS; Jimmy Sengenberger, KNUS.

As for partisan Democrats in the Denver media, I can’t think of any. Can you?

AM 760′s David Sirota, who no longer appears regularly in The Post, is a leftist, but he trashes Democrats repeatedly, even saying last year he didn’t “give a shit” about who’s elected president this year. KHOW’s Craig Silverman, who will argue with GOP-talking-head Caplis on KHOW, wanted to attend GOP caucus meetings because of his love for Mitt Romney.

In my tally of partisan Republican media figures, I’m not even counting Denver Post columnist Vincent Carroll, who predictably sides with Republicans.

Carroll doesn’t say, outright, to vote Republican or that he favors Republicans, though he routinely attacks Democrats and their initiatives.

Similarly, left-leaning Post freelance columnists Ed Quillen and Susan Barnes-Gelt don’t tell us to vote Democratic or to support Dems. Same with Littwin, when he was at The Post.

In contrast, Post freelance columnists John Andrews and Mike Rosen don’t hide their partisan support for Republicans.

Andrews’ column can look like it’s a memo to the GOP faithful, as it did in the Post in October:

“I have no foresight about how the race will go, other than to implore my fellow Republicans against overconfidence in the face of President Obama’s potent incumbency and billion-dollar war chest.”

Rosen, is unabashed partisan Republican, whose partisan support for the Republican party is boring. In a February Post column endorsing Romney, Rosen described himself “as a philosophical, principled, right-leaning, Reagan Republican.”

He wrote:

“I see trillions of dollars’ worth of difference between Republican supply-siders who want to balance the budget within our tax capacity, and left-wing Keynesians, like Paul Krugman, who boast trillion-dollar deficits are an economic stimulus, and want to double up. There are stark differences when it comes to energy, labor unions, social policy, education and, most important, limited government. Democrats are inherent statists.”

I asked Wesword’s Latest Word blogger Michael Roberts, who writes about media issues frequently, if he could think of a local media figure who’s a partisan Democrat.

“You certainly have a few not-entirely conservative voices,” he told me, citing AM 760′s David Sirota. But he describes Sirota as “not a guy who says you must go out and vote for the Democrats.”

“If there’s an example out there, the equivalent of a Jon Caldara or something, I can’t think of it right now.”

Neither could right-leaning media-type Kelly Maher.

Reached by phone, the always-quotable John Andrews told me his Denver Post column was established when Andrews went to then Post Publisher Dean Singleton in 2004 and told him that The Post’s commentary page lacked partisan Republicans.

Andrews said:

“I went to Dean Singleton and said, I see Gail Schoettler has  a column in the newspaper. Wouldn’t it be fair if I had a similar platform? But I haven’t seen anything from Schoettler in a long time.”

So now the opposite is true, I told Andrews. Partisan Democrats are needed at the Post for basic fairness.

“If your thesis is that there is an asymmetry, I would say there probably is,” Andrews said. “It’s partly a result of Democrats having decided that they are not going to be as out there saying their party is good. That partly accounts for the fact that you get a lot of liberal voices, but they are not saying, I’m a Democrat and proud of it.”

Andrews says this is a strategy by Democrats, like former legislator Ken Gordon, to get more Democrats elected, by pretending political parties are a bad thing and “it’s all about good government.” But political parties enhance civil society, Andrews said.

In any case, whatever the reason, there’s obviously a partisan commentator gap out there in the Denver media. You’d like to think the radio station executives in town would look to the greater good and create at least one itsy bitsy slot for a partisan local Dem, but this won’t happen.

The Post is another matter. Its commentary page shouldn’t favor partisan Republican over partisan Democratic columnists. More on The Post in a future blog post.

I’m going to name three political figures, and you tell me how they became embroiled in mini-media frenzies over digitally altered images or websites.

Marc Holtzman

Scott McInnis

Andrew Romanoff

Here are the answers: GOP gubernatorial candidate Marc Holtzman’s photo was altered in 2006 to make him look taller than Reagan. GOP gubernatorial candidate McInnis’ 2009 website portrayed the Canadian Rockies as our own. And Romanoff doctored a photo on his 2010 Senate campaign website to make a crowd look more diverse.

If you got any of the right answers, and you should have, it’s because of all the media attention they got in Denver.

And deservedly so. Maybe they aren’t the biggest deal in the world, in the mix of all the ways political candidates are polished and handled, but digital alterations are tangible acts that can get real people, none of whom read this blog, thinking about politics and the real issues involved.

Same with expensive hair and mustache cuts by candidates.

Such an opportunity presents itself today, in an article broken by the Colorado Independent, a progressive news site

It reported yesterday that the Colorado Observer, a conservative website, posted a story Saturday with the following quote from Rep. Scott Tipton’s campaign Manager, Michael Fortney:

“With gas prices doubled, the national debt doubled, and unemployment has barely moved, we feel good.”

Then, after the Washington Post spotlighted the Fortney quote, it was changed on the Observer website to:

“Voters in the 3rd District are rejecting Obama’s policies that have led to gas prices doubling, the national debt doubled, and unemployment has barely moved. We feel good about our chances.”

Fortney told The Post that the Observer originally quoted him out of context. He told The Denver Post:

“I was not out talking to him about policies,” Fortney said this morning. “I was talking to him about electoral prospects, how the campaign was going to go in 2012 … Scott is voting for a budget that will rein in the deficit, rein in high gas prices.”

Fortney told The Post that the phase “about our chances” had been left out of the Observer article, and as you can see, it was  added to the Observer’s corrected quotation, along with other changes.

So what’s up with the Observer? What exactly did Fortney say? How did the changes to the quote come to pass?

I can hear skeptics, two of which read this blog, saying that the fact that the Observer changed the quote, and not the Tipton campaign, lessens the news value of this story.

But we’re talking about the Observer, a right-leaning entity, here. If The Denver Post had changed or altered a quote, the political significance would not be the same (and a correction would have been written). As it is, there could be more to this story than meets the eye.

The Observer remains mum about the incident. The Colorado Independent reports that it did not return e-mails, and its website provides no enlightenment.

I was able to reach Observer Valerie Richardson, who told me:

“I’ve got to tell you, I was completely out of the loop on that,” she said I hear. “It wasn’t my story. I probably know as much as you do, if not less. Max would be the one to ask.”

She was referring to Mac Zimmerman, who’s listed as the copyright agent for the site. He did not respond to my email seeking comment. He’s in Malaysia, Richardson told me, but she had been in touch with him via email an hour before I tried. I wanted to confirm that he is the former chief of staff for Josh Penry and worked for Tom Tancredo, but I haven’t heard back from him.

More local reporters at the legacy news outlets should cover this story, and try to get an answer from the Observer on what happened and why. What’s the relationship between the Observer and Tipton?

This is the kind of political story that sheds light on how political campaigns operate nowadays.

UPDATE: Luddick responds below saying he obtained his incorrect figure from a Denver Post story that originally contained the figure he used but was subsequently corrected by The Post.

————

In a Summit Daily column last week, Morgan Liddick argues that the Democrats are cheaters.

Liddick sounds like a grade-school kid in a fight during recess.

“They are going to cheat,” he whines, echoing Secretary of State Scott Gessler who’s said Democrats want to “game the system,” by passing legislation requiring county clerks to send mail ballots to registered voters who otherwise would not receive them because they didn’t vote in the last election.

The whining is bad enough, but then he gets his facts wrong in the column when presenting his “evidence” of Democratic cheating.

He writes that Dems want “push forward their plan to mail more than 400,000 ballots to inactive voters.”

The actual number is 135,000.

I’m okay with someone getting their numbers mixed up. I’ve done it. But the funny part is that Liddick goes on to say Democrats can’t do math! Whoops, it seems he can’t do it himself.

Later in the column, in a discussion of Medicare, Liddick levels another school-yard taunt: “Which is worse, the inability to do simple sums, or the inability to tell the truth?”

Liddick needs to answer his own question.

And he says it’s President Obama who hurls “vicious, inaccurate” attacks. Trouble is, he could again be describing himself.

Honestly, I forgive Liddick for the error, but I hope he’s more careful next  time.

In response to an email this morning, Liddick wrote, “My figures were taken from The Denver Post, repeated on several occasions.  I suggest you contact them regarding any such error.”

I wrote Luddick back, thanked him for responding, and pointed out that The Post used the 135,000 figure.

He responded:

No thanks necessary.  But I fear you will not like the discovery;  it’s a curious excursion into what George Orwell referred to as the “memory hole.”

At  [this Post web page] one may see the story, originally published on April 5, 2010, which gave the figure of 439,560.

The electronic version has subsequently been corrected without comment, to give the lower figure as shown by the quote at the end of the article, given below:

(begin quote)

This article has been corrected in this online archive. The bill would require counties to send mail ballots to about 135,000 inactive voters who would not receive them under current law, instead of 439,560.

(end quote)

As a comment, it matters little to the thrust of the argument if the figure is 439,560 or 135,000 or 439.  “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson was elected to the US House by 87 votes in 1948 – the slightest margin ever in Texas history, and well within the number of dead and other nonvoters  who “voted” in the district that time around.

Soliciting the votes of those whom one cannot prove are even alive introduces considerable latitude for error, unintentional or otherwise.  Both are troubling, the latter more so.  And it is instructive that one side of the table strives continually to enlarge this area of possibility.

Should I write another blog about Secretary of State Scott Gessler? Probably not, but then I say to myself, if my three readers don’t know the kind of stuff smart talk-radio hosts like KHOW’s Craig Silverman let Gessler get away with saying, without raising a peep of protest, then there’s no hope that lesser radio hosts will do the right thing and ask Gessler follow-up questions that would illuminate the innuendo and misinformation in his statements.

You still  might say, who cares? Gessler and the radio hosts are hopeless. Let the hot air go float out of the room undisturbed.

I’d be inclined to think the same way if I didn’t hear the things Colorado’s top-dog election official says. But once I hear Gessler, I can’t convince myself that doing nothing is the proper response.

It started on KHOW’s Caplis and Silverman on Monday when Craig Silverman, hosting alone with Dan Caplis away, asked Gessler, “You always hear rumors about voter fraud, election fraud.  What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened in Colorado that you’re aware of?”

Good question, right? It’s a polite way of asking, “Mr. Secretary of State, you’ve spread baseless claims of voter fraud, including right here on this radio show when you said there’s a ‘pretty high incidene of fraud’ here in Denver, but can you cite a specific example of fraud in Colorado, ever?”

“Well,” replied Gessler to Silverman’s question, not mine (his office won’t talk to me). “There’s, historically, you know, going back like forty, fifty years ago, there were very clear instances of just outright stealing elections. In fact, I think it was down in southern Colorado some of the mining camps, the company towns there that they had, the companies would control the polling places and steal elections. And those were overturned. In Colorado, the last prosecutions I’m aware of, we’ve had some people vote in two states. And then when ACORN was operating, there were several people who were prosecuted, and convicted I believe, of voter registration fraud here in Colorado, as well. So, we’ve seen it happen historically in the past, you know, several decades ago, and we’ve seen it happen very recently too.”

I wish Silverman had asked Gessler about the “some people” who were allegedly prosecuted for voting in two states. When? How many? Where? I did some research and cannot find a recent case like this.

I wish Silverman had pointed out that “voter registration fraud” is a completely different animal than voter fraud. Because no one actually voted. So his reference to ACORN, apparently referring to a 2005 case when employees were convicted of submitting false voter registration forms, is misleading.

And I wish Silverman had jumped all over Gessler’s conclusion that “we’ve seen [election fraud] happen very recently, too.” Very recently? Gessler didn’t provide any facts to support this.

Asked about his interview with Gessler, Silverman told me he was too pressed for time to deal with the complicated topic of voter fraud.

“I did not have time to flesh that out,” he told me, adding the topic would  lead to a “ten-minute rabbit hole.” “A follow up would have led to an insider-baseball discussion about those cases.”

I don’t think asking for basic details about the cases, where and when they occurred, is insider baseball. Neither is a discussion about the distinction between “election fraud” and “voter registration fraud.”

“If you get into the minutia of legal cases it’s is a turn off [for listeners.],” said Silverman. “While I care about the issue, it’s not one of my areas of expertise.”

“I will say this,” Silverman said. “Gessler is good for talk radio. He’s in the eye of the storm.”

So here’s question that might lead Silverman, me, and Gessler out of the rabbit hole and into the sunlight.

(Sorry in advance if it sounds too lofty.)

Gessler may be good for talk radio, and for bloggers for that matter, but what about our basic trust in government, which rests to some degree on faith in elections? How seriously should we take it, or should we ignore it, when our Secretary of State is running around on the radio and elsewhere making accusations of very recent election fraud (we’re talking outright fraud, even by noncitizens), that are unproven or have been categorically disproven?

Planned Parenthood activists shouldn’t have a problem with GOP donor Foster Friess’ joke about how the cost of birth control could be dramatically reduced if only women would put aspirin between their legs.

That’s what KFKA talk-show host Devon Lentz, who’s an executive board member of the Larimer County Republican Party, told listeners Monday.

Can you guess why?

Because putting aspirin between your legs, if you’re a woman, is a form of “abstinence, which is still a form of birth control,” Lentz told her Colorado AM listeners.

So why were the Planned Parenthood activists, protesting the appearance of Friess as the keynote speaker at a Larimer County Republican fundraiser Friday, so upset, Lentz wondered?

“Their shirts said something about how everybody should be allowed to have birth control, be allowed access to birth control,” Lentz said on the radio. “Foster’s joke about how in his time women held an aspirin between their knees I’m pretty sure still goes to abstinence, which is still a form of birth control. And he was being funny. It was funny. These guys can’t laugh. These women were outraged he could make such a statement. They didn’t even know what they were standing out there doing.”

Lentz told listeners she “sent somebody out there to go talk to [the protesters],” and they didn’t really know “what [Friess'] statement was, let alone what it meant.”

Given that the protesters had symbolic aspirin between their legs, you have to wonder what basis the undercover GOP scout had for thinking the protesters were clueless about their own protest.

Now I’m a man, but I have to think it’s really hard for an adult woman to be clutching fake aspirin between her legs and not understand the point.

Especially after Foster Friess got all that attention for saying contraception need not be so expensive because, in his day, “The gals put [Bayer Aspirin] between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.” Friess, who’s now supporting Mitt Romney, later apologized.

So I called up Lentz, who organized the Friess event, and co-host Tom Lucero, who was the Master of Ceremonies, to find out why they didn’t dispense with the stealth reconnaissance of the Planned Parenthood folks, and simply have them on their show to find out what they know about birth control, and GOP proposals to ban some forms of it, and what they don’t.

Lucero, who’s a former chair of the Larimer Country GOP, told me he was “not the guy who went out and interview [the protesters].”

“I took Devon’s comments to mean they didn’t know who Foster Friess was,” Lucero told me. “We would probably need to get further clarification.”

Asked if he’d have the activists on his show to discuss the issue, Lucero said: “Absolutely, if they’re interested in coming on the show and talking about it, we’re willing to take anyone as guests.” He offered to schedule a specific time in advance.

I’d love to hear Lentz tell the women from Planned Parenthood to lighten up, because, as she said on the air, if the activists take Friess’ aspirin joke seriously, he’s just promoting abstinence as a “form birth control.”

Lentz is right, of course.

And in Freiss’ day, that’s all the “gals” had access to, a fact that would lead to a useful discussion on the radio about why the Planned Parenthood protest was important and why Lentz is the one who doesn’t get it, given that Republican leaders, like the one Friess gave big money to, would ban common forms of birth control, even if abstinence isn’t on the chopping block.

Even if you weren’t paying attention, you probably remember back in 2010 when GOP gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes spoke up against then Mayor John Hickenlooper’s bicycle programs, which, along with other policies,  was “converting Denver into a United Nations community.”

“These aren’t just warm, fuzzy ideas from the mayor,” Maes was quoted as saying in The Denver Post, which broke the story.  “These are very specific strategies that are dictated to us by this United Nations program that mayors have signed on to.”

“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” Maes said.

This prompted the progressive blog ColoradoPols to comment:

“Oh, Dan Maes! We don’t know where you came from, and we’re still amazed at how you got here, but we can’t deny that you are one amusing fellow. Even if you don’t mean to be.”

We know that one of the places Dan Maes came from was the Colorado tea party and its allies on conservative talk radio.

Now, however, the tea-party radio show “Grassroots Radio Colorado” has a specific policy to refer to Maes as the “Mr. Irrelevent” or the one “who shall not be named.”

Still, it’s clear that the themes of Maes’ once energetic campaign still live in tea party circles, incuding the U.N. paranoia stuff.

The other day, Rich Bratten with right-leaning Principles of Liberty Colorado gave listeners of KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado a legislative update, specifically addressing Senate Bill 130, which would create the Office for Child and Youth Development in the Department of Human Services in Colorado.

The bill, which would simply consolidate various government functions, is the culmination of several years of work, going back to Gov. Kofi Bill Ritter’s administration.

A Colorado Springs church called this bill a “United Nations conspiracy,” which Bratten wouldn’t do.

“I don’t think this was a U.N. conspiracy…,” he said on the radio March 30.

But the funny part is, he went on, without objection from the radio-show hosts, to say that the Office of Child and Youth Development would lead to a  socialist takeover of America, possibly leadin’ to a U.N. power grab.

“However,” Bratten said, “[the Office of Child and Youth Development] is very consistent with the Convention on the Rights of the Child of the UN, if you’ve done any research on that.  You’re listeners might be more familiar with the UN Small Arms Treaty….

HOST:  Yeah, they’re very familiar with that one ….

BRATTEN:  Right, which would put constraints upon if we  .…   You know, of course, Clinton adpopted the UN… that treaty, but it hasn’t been ratified by the senate.  Obama says he would like to get it ratified by the senate.  If we were bound to that treaty, we would  basically be giving up our second amendment rights.  And you guys are very familiar with Agenda 21?

HOST:  Very! We spent half the day on it yesterday.

BRATTEN:  This Convention on the Rights of the Child is kind of a similar animal.  And so, is it a UN conspiracy?  No, of course not!  However, is it that inex-OR-orable slide that we’ve been seeing our federal government make towards European Socialist Democracy type of government?  And, you know, the answer is yes — honestly, it is.  So, I’m thrilled to see Speaker Mc Nulty assign this quickly to that committee, and I hope that it gets a quick hearing.

Who knew how much of a threat the U.N. is? I’ve been depressed that it was in decline, but I guess I was wrong.

In any case, no one thought Maes was a lone ranger in Colorado’s battle against the United Nations, but his view, or permutations of it, is alive and well on talk radio, even if the name Maes has been banished.

“There may or may not be a joke tonight about birth control,” said Tom Lucero, the master of ceremonies at tonight’s Larimer County GOP fundraiser featuring keynote speaker Foster Friess, who was embroiled in a national controversy after he joked that contraception need not be so expensive because, back in the old days, “The gals put [Bayer Aspirin] between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”

Lucero made the comment on KFKA radio’s AM Colorado (at the 36:45 in hour 2), which he hosts weekday mornings.

“I thought it was funny, frankly,” said Lucero, “when he made the joke about birth control in his day and age, and birth control back then was Aspirin. We are going to have a good time tonight.”

Organizers told me last month they had no plans to disinvite keynote speaker Foster Friess, who apologized for the Aspirin joke.

Here’s what I reported on my blog last month:

Asked if the flap around Friess had given him second thoughts about inviting Friess to their fundraiser, Larimer County GOP  Chair Michael Fassi said,  “We’re going to move ahead with Foster Friess.”

Former CU Regent Tom Lucero, who’s the master of ceremonies for the event, told me that Friess’ joke didn’t give him second thoughts about his own involvement in the dinner.

“I think that Foster handled it appropriately,” said Lucero, who’s served as Chair of the Larimer County GOP. “He was  trying for a joke, and it fell flat. It wasn’t the appropriate forum for that particular joke, and we moved on.”

On the radio this morning, Lucero said, “My friend Foster Friess graciously accepted the invitation to come to Colorado.”

Lucero called Friess “an amazing man” who started with nothing and eventually sold his business for $400 million.

I have to say, it must be tough to interview Scott Gessler.

He says so many half-baked, half-proven, innuendo-laden things that, as an interviewer, you’d have to constantly be interjecting with: Where do your numbers come from? Do you have proof? On what documents do you base these claims? Do you think your behavior befits your office?

Just yesterday I bashed Mike Rosen for failing to interrogate Gessler when he said Democrats like to “rile” up Hispanics to get their votes.

But I have to give Rosen a bit of a break here. I took a second look at the Gessler interview and found yet more outrageous claims that I had missed previously, demonstrating that even with the luxury of sitting at a computer and being able to re-wind a podcast, it’s easy to miss stuff Gessler says that should be challenged.

My first time through the Rosen interview I managed to miss Gessler’s statement that he thinks, categorically, that Democrats are trying to “game the system” by backing a bill in the state legislature allowing clerks can to send ballots to registered voters who did not vote in the previous election.

Gessler said: “So, it seems to me that they were really invested in making this change, trying to game the system. And it was maybe more than just a policy dispute for them.”

In retrospect, Rosen should have asked Gessler for evidence that Democrats are essentially against fair elections, trying to rig the system in their favor. This is a serious allegation, even coming from Gessler.

As it was, the only proof Gessler offered in his interview was that Democratic State Chair Rick Palacio was, Gessler said, “uncorked” and “red-faced.”

Gessler: You know what I found really interesting?  When we were sort of in this battle at the legislature, I mean, I viewed it very much as a policy disagreement.  And, you know, you can have different views on the policy.  I think that the position they were trying to advocate was completely wrong.  But when you look at how uncorked [Palacio} became, and was just all sort of red faced and angry, it makes me wonder if there was something in there that the Democrats were using to try and game the system.  And remember, this is the same framework that we’ve had for seventeen years, now, in Colorado. And then to sort of trot out these stale claims of disenfranchisement, as if there are thousands of people in Colorado now being disenfranchised, which is simply not the case. So, it seems to me that they were really invested in making this change, trying to game the system. And it was maybe more than just a policy dispute for them.

So here’s my advice for anyone whom Gessler grants interviews to. Schedule two interview sessions, no just one. Tell the Secretary of State that your second interview slot will be for the follow-up questions that inevitably slip by in the rush of unsubstantiated allegations and outright misinformation that comes out of him.