CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
April 28, 2007 06:44 PM UTC
29 Comments
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is what the republic party is relying on. They have nothing left to hold onto, and we will see the worst side of many republic politicians as they fear, smear, and “lie” (common practice of calling out repulisive rhetoric of the republic party is to refer to it as lie) to the voters. It will not work and it’s sad to see the republic party relying on such tactics.
That’s why they lie so much. They are guaranteed free speech.
What’s not protected is reputation.
A lying politician like Clinton, Gore and Kerry has no credibility.
Trade associations that lie besmirch the reputations of their members, say home builders.
If individual legislators and government officials decide people are liars, they won’t talk to them, and that’s ok.
But no committee nor government agency should have the power to call people liars.
Too much political bias and back stabbing make commissions and committees as unethical as the people they pretend to deplore.
You claim that you coined the term “repulsive republican radical,” yet almost every post you make seems to be in line with that term, which you so proudly claim to despise.
As in outright falsehoods, saying something while know that it is not true? Not opinion, but lying?
Of course, Clinton is guilty of lying, no doubt about it. I will say that the Monica thing was between Bill, Monica, and Hillary. NOT the Republican dog pack.
The FUD that you spread is incredible. I should follow you again and keep pointing out how full of $%it you are, but that would be a full time job. You should consider applying at the white house.
IMHO, this was a lone-wolf lobbying effort by Mutch and the Homebuilders’ Association. It’s not something approved by the Colorado Republican Party.
This is a dirty game, you do not win on holding hand and skipping along. So it was a very one sided robo call… Meh. Come to Chicago where I moved here from, Robo calls are nothing… even the mean ones.
or arguing the merits of a position. One of the things I would play this game to accomplish is to reduce the amount of deception involved, and to educate the electorate to be less susceptible to it.
Deception is par for the course. Even robocalls that aren’t outright lies (many are) are deceptive half truths. Why do we have to put up w/ it? Because they work. I don’t think the general public is as susceptible to general advertising, why so susceptible to these biased pitches? Maybe because they play by no rules?
Legislating speech (and morality) is for those who can’t figure it out for themselves.
is to render it counterproductive. The way to render it counterproductive is to cultivate an educated electorate and to provide for them easily accessible analyses (representing the entire political spectrum) which simplify the job of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Unfortunately, the downside of democracy is that it is at least an enormous challenge, and possibly an impossible one, to motivate the currently unmotivated mass of people to invest substantial amounts of time and energy in the enterprise of being good citizens. In other words, in spite of the fact that easily accessible analyses already exist (the pundits), too few (though many) people avail themselves of those analyses, and too few people educate themselves enough to get past listening for the sound-bite they support and cheering when they hear it.
But getting it right is important enough a goal to keep on trying, and to be content to make some marginal gains.
…what a concept! Oh yeah, Jefferson thought it was necessary for democracy, too. Clever guy, there.
Push polls are political speech protected by the first amendment. But I don’t think it violates the first amendment to require that they be minimally accurate.
I have the freedom to say the most insulting things imaginable, say, to my wife, and she has the freedom to divorce me. I have the freedom to tell my boss he’s a smelly, bald, disgusting twit, and he has the freedom to fire me. A lobbyist has the freedom to be dishonest, and his employers have the freedom to fire him when there is a public outcry regarding his dishonesty. “Free speech” doesn’t mean freedom from the consequences of having said something offensive or dishonest, it just means that you have the right to say it and then accept the consequences (which, in the case of protected speech, can’t be criminal prosecution).
You said it. And now Mutch should lose his lobbying license.
because petitioning the government for redress of grievances is an explicit first amendment right. What should happen to Mutch is that his employers should fire him, since he has lost his effectiveness with the majority party and can’t lobby effectively. We do require lobbyists to register and report expenditures, etc., but we don’t license them. If he is censured, however, he’s dead meat in this business. He’ll no doubt switch over to being a political consultant, where lies and sleaze are standard procedure.
However, lobbying for money is a privilege. There’s nothing in the First Amendment that grants you a Constitutional right to lobby for money.
The legislature sets its own rules for that. You want to play for pay, you follow the rules.
I see no first amendment issue here. Mutch was free to say whatever he wanted, with no prior restraint. There’s no argument there. He is also free to lose his lobbying-for-money privileges as a result of failing to follow the published rules. The hearings now in progress are an effort to find out if he did indeed fail to follow the rules. The consequences are published; the rules have been in effect for years. It was his choice whether or not to violate those rules
You have a constitutional right to come into my house and say whatever you damned well please. Whether I throw your sorry ass out or allow it into my house the next time are entirely up to me.
So also is such a decision the prerogative of the legislature.
There are limits on first amendment rights. According to the footnotes to the Col Revised Statutes, there is no consitutional privilege to publish defamation and fraudulent statements. However, there is a press group, apparently coordinated by Mutual Insurance of Bermuda that is trying to promote the idea that anyone can publish anything about anyone even if they know it is not true or have failed to check the truthfulness of the report. They claim it is true if they write that someone else said it. Under that reasoning, it could be published that Mrs. X said that Mr. Y has sex with animals. If a divorce lawyer advises his client to claim that her extranged husband beat her up in order to get an advantage in a custody or alimony dispute, she can just call in a fraudulent report to the police and the newspaper can publish it as the police blotter. These days they keep those reports up forever on the Intenet so even if the couple gets divorced and the man moves out of state and gets remarried, the relatives of his new wife, his children, employer etc. can see the reports accusing him of a crime, even if he is found not guilty or the charges are dismissed.
So if defamation laws are ignored under the banner of “first amendment rights”, then regulations on lobbying can be ignored.
Now I see: THIS is the source of Suthers’s TABOR “memo” denouncing the governor’s legislative proposal.
I think this practice is bullshit, regardless of whether it’s common.
We were suspicious last fall with his refusal to follow up on a complaint, now we know.
You don’t suppose Wad Dickham’s called his office, do you?
Nah…….
Keep stretching the truth Wad. Most voters are onto you and the Pubs that distort truth. You’ll pick up a few illiterates, but in the end, we will win.
Let the courts decide, not the AG.
Having read the transcripts and heard the testimony, Mutch went over the line, IMO. The bill had not been introduced at the time of the calls and naming the bill the “trial lawyer home tax” was wrong. The calls were targeting a vunerable elderly population, also wrong.
Although those under the dome do use political arguements and hyperbole as means of persuading, legislators and lobbyists understand the game and recognize the tatic.
It doesn’t matter what happens to Mutch. This publicity and exposure can not help him. Legislators need to trust those that give them information and this story continues the stereotype that lobbyists would sell their mothers to get what they want.
I’m asking because I don’t know. From reading the transcript and since no bill had been introduced, I’m guessing everything said in the transcript was possibly true.
Calling it a tax and blaming it on the trial lawyers is indeed done all the time. Usually there is a qualifier such as “so called” but advocacy groups do it on any legislation that might hurt their group.
Targeting seniors is a natural because seniors are a group who will call their legislators. They tend to watch carefully legislation that might hurt them. They don’t necessarily learn about the issue in the short term before making a call if the call seems urgent.
Targeting seniors is sleazy. Blaming the trial lawyers is disingenuous, at best. Threatening that people might lose their homes is deplorable.
At the very least, Mutch should have a big red A branded on his forehead. And, legislators will avoid him like the plague.
Telling lies often enough makes them the truth?
Seems like exactly what we hear on our phones every election cycle. Maybe this is making news because we don’t have an election coming up?
is when lobbying specific legislation your word is everything.
During elections, this sleaze is par for course. Push polls, misleading sound bites, disingenuous advertising… Lobbyists who use these techniques at the Capitol don’t last long.
The reason this is news is because Mutch walked too far into the gray area with his “political arguments” and got caught misrepresenting the true facts of the bill.
communicating about a bill that had not been introduced yet.
The ‘lie’ was the name of the bill, the intent of the bill and the lack of ethics in opposing the bill. I’m not sure Rep. Borodkin isn’t more upset about Mutch not telling her they were opposing than she was about constituents calling.
Mutch was disingenuous and sleazy, but there are unwritten rules and he broke some.
Couple of thoughts:
Why did the Colorado Association of Homebuilders cede their lobbying efforts to Colorado Concern? 1338 was/is a bad bill but a lot of the arguments against it got lost in the ham-handed efforts of a lousy effort to fight it.
And given that credible arguments could have been made against 1338, why weren’t rationale comments used versus the false and erroneous statements made in the robo-calls? (Okay, I admit it, that was a really naive question on my part.)
If CAHB really wants to push an agenda that advocates, among other things, affordable housing, than it has to seriously re-look it’s lobbying efforts with a hostile legislature.
If Colorado Homebuilders are positioned as saying that they want their members to be able to avoid responsibility for substandard construction, then their financial bias is obvious and it looks bad. So it is better for them to get another group to present the message as if they were an unbiased group.
It doesn’t help low and moderate income people if they buy or rent construction and then cracks develop in the foundation or it turns out that the roofs won’t hold up to the storms that are increasing with global warming.
Building substandard construction is a waste of everyone’s money. The building codes are clear and easy to follow. It’s just more profitable to cut corners.