In The Denver Post over the weekend, former State Senate President John Andrews wrote that if Colorado has election-day voter registration, as proposed in the election-modernization bill winding its way through the State Legislature, Democrats would "presto" have "tilted the electoral playing field permanently their way. Republican chances for regaining power and repealing any of this stuff will fade."
Presto? As in presto-change-o?
The "presto" part I get, because the new law would give people the opportunity to register to vote, presto, upon presenting themselves (and proper documents) at a polling center through Election Day. It would also give every voter the chance to, presto, vote with a mail-in ballot as well as the option of, presto, voting in person at vote centers.
I couldn't find any evidence that election-day voter registration would make the electoral playing field would go blue--or black with fraud.
So I was excited to hear about the evidence Andrews had to support his column.
"I have not done research on it," he told me.
I was crushed.
But that doesn't stop Andrews from saying: "Same-day registration is going to make the process of voting more emotion-driven and less reliably honest, and that favors Democrats."
"Democrats are a lot better at finding people who sign up on that basis [with same-day registration], and some may be legal voters and some might not be," Andrews said, adding that he doesn't mean to "demonize anyone" because "people have different opinions."
So, I asked Andrews, your view is based on your experience here in Colorado?
Yes, he said, along with his trust in Secretary of State Scott Gessler and former State Sen. Mark Hillman, who share Andrews' "alarm."
If you talk to Andrews repeatedly, as I have over the years, you know that he usually takes a conversation about a slice of public policy, like election-day registration, and broadens it to discussion about human motivations or political philosophy. It's fun, but sometimes it scares you.
In this case, Andrews said he doesn't think Colorado should go to "great lengths to turn everybody out to vote."
"People who demonstrate what economists call 'rational ignorance,' I don't want those people voting," he said.
"I'm a believer that voting should be more deliberative."
Democrats, he said, are more inclined to be "emotional" about a political campaign or "snowed by an ad campaign," while Republicans, he says are more "fact-based."
Thus he believes election-day registration favors Democrats, and my point that there no evidence to support his position didn't seem to bother Andrews at all.
You may recall that The Denver Post came out with a shallow editorial last week in favor of most of an election-modernization bill that's winding its way toward the desk of Gov. John Hickenlooper.
But, strangely, the newspaper argued that officials should consider waiting "years" before implementing election-day voter registration because it's so dreadfully complicated for the 21st Century human mind to assemble and operate the necessary technology.
But The Post's editorial failed to mention that Colorado's country clerks are already, in effect, registering people on Election Day with existing technology, which can be used in the 2012 and 2013 elections. And the clerks' experts say this technology can be upgraded for elections beginning in 2014.
You hate to see a newspaper siding with exclusion, when it comes to elections, based on flimsy evidence, because journalism is supposed to stand for giving everyone a voice. The newspaper should have gone the extra mile to do its homework on the election bill.
So it was a relief to see that The Post gave a Republican, Donetta Davidson (who's the Director of the CO County Clerks Association), and a Democrat, Joan Fitz-Gerald (former State Senate President), space today to argue for the bill in its entirety. They wrote:
If you're reading this, you likely voted by mail last November, and you're in good company: Seventy-two percent of Colorado voters joined you. Mail ballots are a convenient, secure and private way to cast a ballot that is increasingly popular among Colorado voters.
HB 1303 answers the demand of these voters while providing ample options for voters who prefer to vote in person. It eliminates the "inactive-failed-to-vote" status that created confusion for voters. It creates a graduated registration system that scales down the demand on the system as Election Day approaches...
As former county clerks, we both understand the pragmatic, non-political approach to maintaining the public trust in elections. Technology has caught up with the needs of voters and taxpayers. The Voter Access & Modernized Elections Act will mean more people can take advantage of their right to vote, our local governments will save money and we all win.
This publication of this piece again shows the newspaper's commitment to engaging in a full discussion of issues on its commentary page.
[A] series of tax cuts, combined with the ailing economy of the Bush years and the bursting of the tech bubble led to massive structural deficits in California in recent years.
But unlike other states, where the majority party in the state legislature can actually govern the state, California was different: it took a two-thirds supermajority of both houses of the legislature to pass just a budget, much less raise taxes.
This allowed an ever-increasing extreme band of Republicans, who controlled more than a third of at least one house during this time, despite their deepening unpopularity, to hold the state hostage seemingly every year until they got even more cuts to the social safety net.
These Republicans would even use their hostage-taking power to extract corporate tax cuts for big businesses, further deepening our fiscal nightmare.
(Sound familiar, anyone? - z)
Eventually, the progressive California electorate got tired of this. Even as a tea party wave swept the nation in 2010, California's Democrats increased their legislative majorities and swept all statewide offices. We passed a ballot measure ending the supermajority requirement to pass a budget.
And in 2012, after over 30 years of anti-tax orthodoxy dating back to the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, Californians voted to tax themselves to stop the crushing damage done to our schools by decades of low-tax neglect. Even better, redistricting reform has allowed Democrats to win even more seats, finally claiming a supermajority in the legislature and rendering the Republican Party structurally irrelevant in every meaningful way.
"While Washington struggles with fiscal cliffs and partisan fights, Colorado demonstrates there is still room for compromise and moderation.".
There are 32 fresh faces in the 100-member legislature who may not remember it, but last year's session ended on an acrimonious note when the governor called a special session in hopes of forcing a vote on a civil unions bill essentially killed by Republicans in the waning hours of the 120-day General Assembly. In overtime, they killed it again.
Eight months later, Hickenlooper wants us to believe that politics in the statehouse is all unicorns and bunnies, where Democrats and Republicans walk hand-in-hand gazing at mountains and rainbows.
Republicans pulled a bunch of crap during the last legislative session to kill a bill that will make the inevitable closer to reality and that was sure to pass in the very near future:
With Democrats back in control of both chambers this year, the civil unions bill is expected to be among the first signed into law. On Wednesday, every Democratic lawmaker had signed on as a sponsor. Contrast that to one Republican - Rep. Cheri Gerou, R-Evergreen.
Democrats must be bad because they brought the bill to the floor, or something...
But Hickenlooper is the fulcrum on which bipartisanship must balance, and he must be at the halfway point, no matter that halfway between both sides has moved to halfway to Mars, for there to be bipartisanship and the guaranteed praise of Hubbard and the Post:
The governor is trying to play it somewhere close to the middle.
He may have to fend off fellow Democrats as he seeks to boost the state's reserves, confront legislation aimed at rewarding organized labor and support rules on oil and gas drilling that many in his party think are tilted in favor of the industry.
On the flip side, Republicans are likely to view with suspicion plans to expand Medicaid, stricter controls on guns and talk of tax increases for education.
"They're setting us up where the only option is to put a tax increase to the vote of the people," Waller said. "That's what's going to happen here."
It's not all Kumbaya in the Capitol.
Is there a reason it's "not all Kumbaya"? Hubbard pretends not to know.
Are Republicans and Democrats equally responsible for the inaction of government? Colorado's voters spoke clearly this November. Hubbard won't, or can't, say who has the more responsible policies and political capital to implement them.
He's too busy looking for unicorns......and bipartisanship.
As an addendum to a shrill column by Ruben Navarette arguing that the term "illegal immigrant" should not be replaced by a phrase like "undocumented worker," The Denver Post Perspective section published its own guidelines on how Post journalists should use the terms.
Unfortunately, the explanation apparantly only appeared in the print edition.
I was going to ask The Post to put it online, and I'm thinking its omission was just an oversight, but before I did, I thought I'd put it out there for people to see:
Newspaper usage
The Denver Post: The Post uses the term "illegal immigrants" in referring to citizens of foreign countries who are in this country with no passport, visa or other document to show that they are entitled to visit, work or live in the United States. We do not use "illegal aliens" or "illegals" except in direct quotes or in rare cases when the official government term "illegal aliens" is unavoidable. We will not use the nouns "alien" and "illegal" in headlines. The term "undocumented immigrants" or "undocumented workers" is an acceptable synonym but is more vague.
The Associated Press: The AP also prefers the term "illegal immigrant." Unless quoting someone, the news service does not use the terms "illegal alien," "an illegal," "illegals" or the term "undocumented."
My question for The Post is, what constitutes sufficient proof that an individual doesn't have a "passport, visa or other document to show that they are entitled to visit, work or live in the United States."
If someone admits not having proper documentation? If immigration officials or police make this determination? If someone can't produce documentation immediately? What's the evidentiary standard?
It's one thing to label the group of people who are presumably in the United States illegally as "illegal immigrants," but it's another to presume any single individual is an "illegal immigrant."
Last year, Post City Editor Dana Coffield told me that The Post only refers to someone's immigration status "when it becomes part of and material to the public record"--unlike talk-radio host Peter Boyles who dehumanizes himself and all of us by implying or asserting that someone with a Spanish surname is an "illegal."
Anyway, I'll ask The Post my question about its style guide next week, and I'll include a few of the best questions from my readers, if you have any. Shoot them my way, if you do to tips@bigmedia.org.
I'm late getting to this, but I've been hearing conservatives trying to make themselves feel better about their election collapse by saying they successfully cut the gender gap in Colorado.
I'm thinking they might have scanned every word in The Denver Post, searching for something good, and found this sentence in a Nov. 6 article:
Although many polls nationally predicted a significant gender gap, Colorado exit polls showed women and men split equally.
Dear Media: The Colorado exit polls are simply not accurate. Trust them at your own risk. Thank you. #copolitics
I asked Hughes to amplify, and he sent me these thoughts in an email.
First, we know the exits originally said that Colorado was tied at 48% for each candidate - when final results are tallied, Obama will carry Colorado by over 5%, so that's a significant miss. Second, the exits show that Obama's Colorado margin was bigger among men (+5%) than women (+3%) which runs contrary to every single public and private poll conducted over the past two years. In reality, Obama almost certainly carried women with a double digit margin. Third, the exits list "NA" for voters aged 18-29, even though they make up 20% of the electorate, a larger portion than voters 65+. Given those sample sizes, how is it they are unable to show results for voters aged 18-29?
Fourth, there are also exit poll results published by Latino Decisions that show Obama received 87% of the Latino vote, while the networks survey shows 75%. I'd say 75% seems about right, but that's a pretty big discrepancy.
If people want a look at what the electorate likely was, I'd suggest looking at the poll by Keating Research conducted just prior to the election that showed Obama +4%. His numbers are more reliable to me than anything I have seen out of the exit polls in this, or previous, cycles (again, ask President Kerry about exit poll reliability).
So if you happen to be one of those Republicans who was feeling good because of those 18 encouraging words in the Denver Post, about women liking you more than before, I'm sorry I had to be the one, with the help of Hughes, to set the record straight.
In addition to his full-time gig at 850KOA, Mike Rosen has the rare privilege of being published regularly in the Denver Post. He's a titan among Denver's media, "liberal" or otherwise.
The Denver presidential debate was a crucial turning point in this year's election. There have been many signs of desperation in the Obama campaign since then, both big and small.
The belligerent attitude of Joe Biden and Barack Obama in the subsequent debates is a prime example. That may have stirred the animal spirits of Obama stalwarts, but it's been a turn-off for moderate swing voters, especially women.
As they say, politics ain't beanbag. Nor is debating for the highest office in the land. The fact that Obama was very docile in the first debate is a mistake everyone admitted. Did it stir our "animial spirits"? Fight or flight? I say yes.
We've been fighting modern Republican ignorance and obstinance for 4 solid 30-plus years.
'Bout time BO joined us.
The luster and the novelty have worn off. Beneath a cool veneer, Obama is a brutish politician tutored in the Chicago School, not Mr. Nice Guy.
A recent "unofficial" Obama campaign ad directed at young women displays desperation of a more squalid nature. The ad features Lena Dunham, who ... likens the act of voting for Obama with that of a young-woman voter having sex.
Here's the vid that got Rosen's ummmmm, dander up.
Pretty tame, actually. It gets to relevant political issues immediately, and the last thing I thought of was sex. But Mike is still threatened, bless his little heart, and projects his and his party's low regard for young women onto us:
[T]he style of it betrays a low regard for the intelligence of the young women it's targeting. Apparently, Obama partisans will stoop to any depths to pander for votes.
Mike ignores all that "depression" stuff. No 1%-ers ever needed help from the stinking government in his world.
In his four years as president, Barack Obama has been a bad chief executive, lacking in managerial experience or ability and ineffective in getting along with others - like Republicans in Congress - to forge public policy compromises.
Not even close to reality. Mike, please see assasination of terrorist Osama bin Laden, how Obama has been praised for response to Hurricane Sandy, and the conveniently ignored plot by national Republican leaders to obstruct Obama from the day of his inaugural. How do you compromise with liars who have dedicated themselves to your failure?
A couple weeks ago, syndicated columnist Al Lewis wrote a devastating piece about Joe Coors, which The Denver Post didn't run.
That was a surprise, because The Post posts most all of Lewis' columns online--and usually one runs in the business section of Sunday's print edition.
Amped up by the election, I was thinking that the plain-spoken destruction of Coors by Lewis might have led to its absence from The Post's slice of cyberspace.
Lewis' column raised questions about how Coors can get away with touting his business expertise on the campaign trail when Coors "gave millions in 2002 to a con artist who promised him a 75% weekly rate of return."
But what added value to this old story was Coors' refusal to talk to Lewis, a former Post columnist who now writes for Dow Jones:
I would have let him tell the story in his own words, instead of the words in a trail of federal court documents, old news reports, and his adversaries. But his communications director, Michelle Yi, responded to my request in an email, saying that Coors was too busy with his campaign to give me an interview. "We can and will try to arrange something most definitely after the election," she wrote. [Bigmedia emphasis]
Yi's response goes down in my annals of public relations strategies as "nice try." Coors wants to campaign on his record as a great businessman, but like a Las Vegas gambling addict, he only wants to talk about the deals he won.
If I were The Post, that's the kind of writing I'd beg to have on my website, and in my newspaper. But it wasn't there. Why?
"I'm happy to answer your question," Post Business Editor Kristi Arellano emailed me yesterday. "But I'm afraid the answer won't be nearly as interesting as you would like. We get Al Lewis' column via email and it is manually dropped into our system and launched online by the editorial assistant in the business section. That individual was on vacation, and the column got overlooked. It was not an intentional decision. Rather, it was an unfortunate oversight caused by short-staffing."
I told Arellano that, yes, if Lewis' column had been spiked due to threatening calls from Coors, and intervention from Post Editor Greg Moore, it would have made a better blog post for me. (In fact, such questions about outside intervention were raised in 2010 when a Lewis column, telling the story of how John Elway called Lewis a "scumbag," was not printed in The Post. Like Coors, Elway had also lost millions of dollars in a ponzi scheme. Here's Westword blogger Michael Roberts' 2010 account of this.)
In any case, I asked Arellano if she'd run the column, and she said she'd "circle back" and post it online, adding that the column "fell through the cracks--and that should not have happened." I'll update this blog post when the column appears online.
UPDATE: The Post's Kurtis Lee has posted a Spot blog post, headlined, "Liberal group posts video revealing failed attempts to reach Congressman Coffman," addressing whether Coffman has, in fact, been answering questions, as Coffman promised.
-----
A recent post in the Spot Blog had a headline that grabbed your attention, if you've been following Rep. Mike Coffman's up-and-down relationship with reporters, a talk show host, and other people who've wanted to ask him questions during this election season. The headline read:
"Have a question for Coffman? Reach out, he'll respond with a 'very specific' answer"
A very specific answer? Great!
The article explained:
"Everybody who has a question can come on to my website, at any point and time, and they can get a very specific answer back," Coffman said.
An answer from the Congressman directly?
"Absolutely," Coffman said.
A spokesman told The Post that Coffman would take questions by phone and mail and email as well.
Coffman hadn't been answering my queries, so I got excited after reading this and decided to post some questions that reporters and I could ask Coffman, while Coffman was in the mood for answering questions not hiding (e.g., holding private "town hall meetings" behind the closed doors of large corporations.)
I still got no response from Coffman.
It's quite a promise Coffman made to personally answer all questions with specificity, when you think about it, especially the answering-questions-personally part, and I was glad Denver Post reporter Kurtis Lee wrote about it.
But now it's been three weeks, and we don't know if Coffman has kept his promise. There are signs, including this video, that he didn't, but we don't know for sure, because neither Lee nor any other reporter in town has informed us on how Coffman's heat-of-the-election-openness-pledge has been working out.
The Post obviously has no obligation to follow up on every blog post, but in this case, given Coffman's unusual promise, casting him in quite the flattering light, I think The Post owes readers another story assessing whether Coffman's kept his promise, especially because it was made five weeks before the election and there's about two weeks left.
Denver Post reporters like to think of themselves as evidence-based folk. That's what sets professional journalists apart from the rest of us, right?
So if you're a clever headline writer at The Denver Post, why would you put the following headline atop a story comparing a new Post Poll showing Romney with 48 percent of likely voters versus Obama's 47 percent with the Post's previous poll, five weeks ago, showing 47 percent for Obama and 46 for Romney? (Both polls had a four percent margin of error.)
"Romney Sways Voters!" [I added the exclamation point because it might as well have been there.]
Despite what this headline in the Sunday print edition said, the poll, released partially by The Post Friday with more details Sunday, showed a dead heat, with the difference well within the survey's margin of error.
The fact that Romney gained two statistically insignificant percentage points since the previous Post poll is obviously meaningless.
Former Post columnist Mike Littwin got it right in two tweets today:'
D-Post fail: WaPo correctly calls its poll (Obama +3) "dead heat." DP calls its poll (Romney +1) "shift in Romney's fortunes." #copolitics
More on D-Post fail. Gallup: Romney +5. WaPo: Obama +3. Any poll fallible. Yet DP tells readers its 2-point swing significant.
First lady Michelle Obama repeats message in Castle Rock, wraps 2-day visit
Now the Pulitzer prize-winning part:
Castle Rock was the last leg of a two-day visit to Colorado for the First Lady who spoke at Fountain Middle School and Fort Lewis College in Durango on Wednesday. The first lady recycled remarks here she made in Fountain Wednesday.
Ryan really blew that one open. I never imagined politicians repeat the same speech - almost word for word - wherever they go! How lazy is that?!? And doesn't she know about YouTube? She could make the speech and text the link to these people and no one would have to go out of their way.
Next you're going to tell me Springsteen plays "Born to Run" at almost every concert, not just the one I'm at? And Gabriel "Fluffy" Iglesias tells the same jokes at comedy clubs around the country, ZOMG?!?!??!!!?111?
The good thing is she recycled that speech, because we all know, except for Republicans, that recycling is good.
I really must thank Ryan and the Post for pointing this out. I'm going to read each article extra-carefully from now on; you never now what you'll learn while reading the Denver Post - like the fact that politicians repeat stump speeches in town after town.
You may have heard that Secretary of State Scott Gessler said last week, in a speech to fellow conservatives, that the "left" doesn't care about voter fraud. But he also said, during the question and answer portion of his presentation, that he likes to "tease" that The Denver Post is the embodiment of the "liberal mainstream media."
Gessler: I always teasingly say that if I wanted to call central casting for a movie to get the mainstream media, the liberal mainstream media, they would send me The Denver Post editorial board.
That's Gessler's idea of teasing? I've heard him say this before, and it didn't sound like he was teasing then, but even if he is teasing, you wonder if arch conservative columnist Vincenet Carroll, who sits on the editorial board with radical lefty Post founder Dean Singleton, is amused.
It was great to see The Denver Post dedicate solid space Saturday in its increasingly flimsy print edition to a conference at the University of Colorado addressing, in part, media coverage of Muslims, including stories about the recent international protests against the U.S. and an anti-Islamic film.
I remember seeing video of those protests and thinking that they looked awfully small but hearing much more emphasis on the anger than the size.
The Post's Electa Daper quoted Megan Reif, a political science professor at CU Denver, pointing to evidenced that this was, in fact, the case:
In most places, other than in Pakistan, violent protests were carried out by "a minuscule percentage of the population," Reif said, mostly by chronically unemployed, desperate young men. Yet coverage of these few have affected the presidential political campaign and more.
"We're actually negotiating our diplomatic relations now through the media," Reif said. And presidential candidate Mitt Romney, responding immediately to media reports, criticized Obama administration foreign policy.
"It alienates (Muslims) when the media fails to differentiate between the few on the street and the average Muslim," Reif said.
The Denver Post is looking for undecided Coloradans for a unique part of its coverage of the presidential debate Wednesday.
The Post's Jeremy P. Meyer will be hosting a panel of several voters in the newsroom at 101 W. Colfax Ave. The panelists will watch the debate live and use interactive technology to chart their interest in the debate in real time.
A graphical overlay of the debate livestream on The Post's homepage will allow Denver Post Online users to see how the debate is playing to undecided residents of the hardest-to-read swing state in the nation.
It's only hard-to-read if you don't realize many independents are to the right of Tom Tancredo and Ken Buck and Doug Bruce and Wayne Allard and ... and ... and...
It's only hard-to-read if you don't realize many of these voters don't have the skills nor time (not always their fault, many time the fault of the media) to critically examine candidates and their proposals.
It's only hard-to-read if you haven't seen this Bill Maher' Real Time bit - Bill's take on independent voters starts at 2:10:
But wait, his effective tax rate is a low 13.9 percent. Lower than mine and probably yours. And the lie they told while waiting until late September to file was very crafty:
His campaign earlier estimated that Romney would pay about $3.2 million in taxes for the year, an estimate well above the $1.9 million actually paid.
Thanks, Denver Post, for helping skew the facts about Mitt Romney's wealth and how millionaires and billionaires pay less to Uncle Sam than most of us leeches and losers who comprise the 47% that Republicans hate.
Denver writer and radio-show host David Sirota claimed in a tweet Friday that Denver Post Editorial Page Editor Curtis Hubbard blocked Sirota from the Denver Post Twitter:
Following my @harpers piece, @DenverPost editor @CurtisHubbard blocked me on Twitter. Dear lord, that's friggin' hilarious.
He followed that tweet up with this one:
David Sirota@davidsirota
Can't say I blame @curtishubbard - he knows Dean "Citizen Kane" Singleton signs his paycheck and is watching...
You wouldn't expect Hubbard to block Sirota over one article, even if it comes down hard on The Post. Hubbard gets hit constantly.
So I asked Hubbard if it was true, he wrote:
"No, it's not true.
I tried to unfollow him several months back. For some reason his tweets kept coming through, so I blocked him. My guess, and I'm not going to waste any time researching it, was that it was in the spring or early summer. It's nothing personal."
The Denver Post's new weekly columnist Rick Tosches is a great writer, no doubt, as anyone who's followed him over the years knows. And he'll be a great left-leaning addition to The Post's right-leaning commentary section.
But he's not the kind of raw partisan on the GOP side of the equation, like Mike Rosen and John Andrews, not to mention the not-so-raw partisan Vincent Carroll, who you see in The Post regularly (Carroll three times a week, Rosen weekly, Andrews every third week).
I mean, Rosen's last column was titled, "Paul Ryan is no radical." And Andrews' last piece was, "Paul Ryan, Mountain Man."
I'm pretty damned cynical these days, thanks to the actions of so many of our "Democratic" "leaders", especially Obama, Mark Udall, and Michael Bennet, but even I don't think most independents, and even many Repubicans, will fall for the extreme amount of B.S. being passed off by partisan Mitt supporters in his defense.
Here's the Obama campaign's latest ad that urges Mitt to answer some very simple questions:
And here are some of the many outstanding questions that have been raised about how the Republican candidate for President has manipulated tax laws in a way that very few Coloradans can:
The history of Romney's Swiss bank account, which he failed to properly disclose on his personal financial disclosure reports and was revealed only by the single full year of tax returns Romney has disclosed so far.
How and when the Bermuda corporation Romney has owned for nearly 15 years - but had transferred to a blind trust in his wife's name the day before he was sworn in as Governor - ended up back in his full ownership of outside of the trust, as reported on his 2010 tax return.
The details he recently promised ABC News (a promise on which he then reneged) about whether he ever paid a lower income-tax rate than the 13.9 percent he paid in 2010, far lower than what many Americans pay.
Details of Romney's personal interests in at least 12 Bain Capital holdings in the Cayman Islands, worth as much as $30 million.
How Mitt Romney's IRA grew to become worth as much as $100 million despite an annual contribution limit of $30,000.
To what extent was Romney personally involved in the tax trickery that Italian taxpayers are still paying a price for.
To what extent Romney gained financially by turning a blind eye to the largest tax avoidance scheme in history when he led Marriott's audit committee.
Maybe Colorado Republicans were correct when they voted for Rick Santorum to be their nominee. He was alsmost as dumb as Mitt, but doesn't have nearly the taxing questions that Romney has about his qualifications to be president.
"He didn't pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain," Reid told the Huffington Post in first floating the charge.
He then took to the Senate floor to repeat the claim.
Reid is practiced at political hardball - not journalism - and by going public with his information (disinformation? misinformation?) forced the media to go along.
Oh that poor little Media couldn't control themselves.
Mitt Romney and Dick Cheney are the only two politicians in generations who think half of one year's return is enough to show voters. If the public, and the media by extension, has further questions about Mitt Romney's wealth, how he got it, and if he has played by the rules then there's one person who can end all doubt now about all of it. And that's Mitt Romney.
Rove coordinated an illegal prosecution of Alabama Governor Don Siegelman in order tosolidify Republican dominance in that state (after George HW Bush banished him from Texas.)
What can we conclude from this editorial and the issue of the unreleased Romney tax returns?
- Mitt Romney can prove how much in taxes he paid, whether he fulfilled his church's tithing requirement, and whether Rafalca ate Platinum-dusted Horse Chow or just plain old Gold-dusted in about 2 minutes....by releasing his tax returns! Oh, and he's have the added benefit of proving The Post correct and Harry Reid a liar, which would be a very rare occurrence indeed.
- Harry Reid can pass along any information he wants to the public and to his fellow Senators and he's one of the last people in DC I'd consider to be liar. I'd bet Rence Preibus and Karl Rove and Mitt Romney all lie more times before breakfast than Reid has lied his entire life.
- To turn over the Post editorial pages to a right-wing welfare case like Vince Carroll is to have your editorials filled with faulty logic, false equivalencies, horrible policy suggestions, and attempts to make Karl Rove look like anything but a lying traitor.
Irony is not dead. One of its proponents at The Denver Post is alive and well and writing editorials.
