January 20, 2016 10:09 AM UTC

Get More Smarter on Wednesday (Jan. 20)

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• by: Colorado Pols

Today is the last day until January 21st. Think about that. It’s time to Get More Smarter with Colorado Pols. If you think we missed something important, please include the link in the comments below (here’s a good example).

TOP OF MIND TODAY…

► El Paso County Commissioner Peggy Littleton has officially joined the ever-growing field of Republican candidates for U.S. Senate. By our count, Littleton is the 10th candidate to announce a campaign for the GOP nomination; in January alone, a Republican has announced for U.S. Senate on average once every five days.

► State Sen. Morgan Carroll said on Tuesday that she will not resign her seat in the State Senate in order to focus full-time on her Congressional campaign in CD-6. From the Denver Post:

“This is the job the voters elected me to do,” Carroll said Tuesday. “And I think it’s my duty to finish it.”

Carroll gave up her role as State Minority Leader when she first announced her Congressional campaign last summer, but had never indicated that she might step aside from the State Senate altogether. Carroll is term-limited in 2016 regardless.

Get even more smarter after the jump…

IN CASE YOU ARE STANDING NEAR A WATER COOLER…

► Aurora Sentinel editor Dave Perry makes bold headlines with his editorial calling for real action on gun safety:

Here’s the deal, Colorado. We can come at the problem of gun violence and mass shootings two ways: We can make it demonstrably more difficult to gun up in this country, or we can look seriously for mentally ill people who might go off, and stop them. In another place and time, we would do both, but not here. Not now.

I guarantee you gun lords at the National Rifle Association, locally at the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners group, will have none of it. They’re already yanking the political choke collars of their puppets in Congress and at the Colorado Capitol, and their critics are running scared.

Here in Colorado, milquetoast gun laws spawn from Aurora’s massacre — requiring universal background checks and a reduction of the size of ammo magazines — brought gun lords down on three Democratic state lawmakers in 2013. Petrified state legislators here and in Congress aren’t about to offer any meaningful reforms, such as limiting sales of military-style weapons, mass purchases of ammunition, trigger locks or outright bans on assault rifles. The gun lords have thrown the gauntlet. They won’t even allow the Centers for Disease Control to study the plague of violence that kills about 90 people in this country every day, tens of thousands a year.

► So much for the ‘B-word.’ As the Colorado Springs Gazette reports, pre-session sentiments of bipartisanship from Senate Republicans have been quickly abandoned in favor of a mass deportation of legislation to “kill committees.” We mentioned something similar in a post at the end of last week.

► Are you a supporter of Donald Trump for President? As Politico reports, you may be surprised about what you have in common with other Trump backers:

I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authoritarianism.

That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow…

…Authoritarianism is not a new, untested concept in the American electorate. Since the rise of Nazi Germany, it has been one of the most widely studied ideas in social science. While its causes are still debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. [Pols emphasis] From pledging to “make America great again” by building a wall on the border to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations.

► The race for an open legislative seat in HD-3 (South Denver) is expected to be among the more competitive Primaries of 2016. Democrat Jeff Bridges announced on Tuesday that he ended 2015 with a bang: Bridges has more than $40k in the bank, and new endorsements from former Gov. Bill Ritter and former Secretary of State Bernie Buescher.

Meanwhile, Bridges’ Democratic opponent, Meg Froelich, is touting the endorsement of EMILYs List.

► Six Republicans in the State Senate are pushing for legislation that would make it easier to kill people in Colorado. As 9News reports, Senate Bill 64 is based on the premise that the bar is just too darn high for imposing the death penalty in Colorado:

Sponsors told 9NEWS the effort is a direct response to the Aurora theater shooting trial, which resulted in a sentence of life because not all of the jurors voted for death, as well as a similar outcome in a Denver case involving multiple murders at Fero’s bar in Denver.

“I believe there is an appropriateness for the death penalty for the worst of crimes,  but it has to be set up in such a way that it can occur,” said  Sen. Kevin Lundberg (R-Berthoud.) “The unanimous opinion has become too high a bar. So, I believe three-quarters of the jury should be sufficient.”

In August, Aurora Theater shooter James Holmes did not receive the death penalty for his crimes when the jury couldn’t come to a unanimous agreement on Holmes’ punishment. You can certainly make an argument that Holmes deserved the death penalty, but our legal system worked exactly how it was intended; a jury of his peers deliberated and reported back to the judge with their decision.

► If you are a supporter of Trump, you also have something in common with Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who used most of the words in her rhetorical repertoire in a strange, rambling endorsement of Donald Trump for President. Whatever your opinion of the value of a Palin endorsement, it did give Trump another daily media victory as the calendar rapidly closes on the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses.

► It’s deja vu all over again for some issues in the state legislature. As Marshall Zelinger reports for ABC 7 News, several bills that failed miserably in 2015 are back again anyway.

OTHER LINKS YOU SHOULD CLICK

► It’s official: We broke another record in 2015, though not a good one. Last year saw the hottest global temperatures ever recorded, easily breaking the previous record…set in 2014.

► Recent polls are showing a surge from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in his bid to capture the Democratic Presidential nomination. Is the surge real?

ICYMI

► Federal law enforcement officials have received their share of criticism for a relatively hands-off approach to the #YallQaeda terrorists holding an Oregon visitor’s center hostage. As Think Progress notes, this has provided the armed militia plenty of space to fight amongst themselves instead.

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