February 09, 2016 10:05 AM UTC

Get More Smarter on Tuesday (Feb. 9)

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• by: Colorado Pols

Good luck trying to get a sandwich on your lunch hour in Denver today; the Super Bowl Champion Denver Broncos will be parading through town around noon. 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…

► The New Hampshire Primaries are today, and if polling results are to be believed, we aren’t in for much of a surprise at the top of the ballots. Bernie Sanders is expected to easily defeat Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side, while Donald Trump appears to have things locked up in the Republican Primary. The real drama of the evening will be the race for second place in the GOP field, as Politico explains:

But New Hampshire isn’t called the “graveyard of pollsters” for nothing. The margins by which both Sanders and Trump might win — and the order of the next four Republican candidates, all of whom run close in the polls — could still tighten or widen considerably. And there could easily be eleventh-hour swings that the polls, the last of which concluded early Monday, didn’t pick up.

The margins matter: A blowout win for Sanders could give him momentum heading into next week’s Nevada caucuses, while a closer finish might be seen as a disappointment for the Vermont senator, who still trails Clinton nationally and in most other states…

…Among Republicans, not only do the other competitors want to close strong and challenge Trump — the order in which they finish could mean the difference between quitting and hanging on, even if they are only separated by small margins.

The final CNN/WMUR tracking poll, concluded Monday morning, shows Sanders with a 26-point lead over Clinton. On the GOP side, Trump is at 31%, followed by Marco Rubio at 17% (followed by Marco Rubio at 17%), Sen. Ted Cruz at 14%, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich in double-digits at 10%.

► Marco Rubio continues to face heavy scrutiny over his disastrous debate performance on Saturday. After being widely panned over the weekend for his robotic rhetoric, Rubio was again stuck on instant replay during a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Monday. You can watch the short video clip below for the complete Marco Roboto experience. From the New York Times:

Speaking to a crowd in Nashua, he was lamenting the decline in American family values.

Then he lamented the decline in American values again.

This is what he said verbatim, as his wife and four children looked on:

“We are taking our message to families that are struggling to raise their children in the 21st century because, as you saw, Jeanette and I are raising our four children in the 21st century, and we know how hard it’s become to instill our values in our kids instead of the values they try to ram down our throats.

“In the 21st century, it’s becoming harder than ever to instill in your children the values they teach in our homes and in our church instead of the values that they try to ram down our throats in the movies, in music, in popular culture.”

Mr. Rubio appeared to notice his own echo: As he repeated the word “throats,” he caught himself, but proceeded to the end of his sentence nonetheless.

Get even more smarter after the jump…

► Since we’re on the topic of idiotic legislative reasoning, we should mention that Sen. Kevin Lundberg is pushing a bill that would make it easier to kill people in Colorado. Under Colorado law, a jury must be unanimous in its decision to approve a death penalty sentence. Lundberg thinks the law should be changed so that a judge would only need the consent of 9 out of 12 jurors. The Denver Post quotes a Colorado public defender with a pretty straightforward explanation of Lundberg’s lunacy:

“We require the prosecution to prove beyond a reasonable doubt all criminal charges to a unanimous jury,” said Colorado public defender Doug Wilson. “So (under the proposed bill) someone charged with shoplifting would get a unanimous jury, and yet when we decide we want to execute one of our citizens, we would leave it to a jury of less than 12.”

Meanwhile, a former Texas prosecutor will be disbarred for presenting tainted testimony that sent an innocent man to death row.

► Apparently it is still legal in Colorado to “tamper with a corpse.” The legislature is looking to make a change.