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As the Colorado Independent’s John Tomasic reported Friday evening:

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers’ office this week made what’s sure to be a controversial decision to officially support Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s effort to establish a legal defense fund. The fund would host contributions from private donors willing to cover costs tied to a Denver District Attorney criminal investigation into reimbursements Gessler charged to his office for alleged unofficial expenses…

“In the Attorney General’s view,” Grove wrote, “the propriety of a legal defense fund is governed by conflict of interest principles… The Attorney General submits that an arrangement that: (1) places appropriate limits on the public official’s solicitation of contributions, and (2) either ensures transparency or establishes a blind trust would be consistent with [constitutional] concerns…”

Suthers and Gessler are both high-profile Republican figures in the state, and the letter, which Attorney General Spokesperson Carolyn Tyler told the Independent was approved by Suthers, is sure to fuel complaints about backscratching among top state Republican officials. It will also likely renew questions about the power of the state’s understaffed Ethics Commission, which is tasked with investigating official misconduct but hobbled by a tiny budget and no staff attorneys to turn to for advice on legal questions. Indeed, the Grove letter underlines the way the story of Gessler’s alleged misuse of a relative small amount of public money seems to grow into a larger story about government ethical standards and oversight each month as new chapters pile onto the narrative.

Basically, Attorney General John Suthers’ office argues that Secretary of State Scott Gessler would not violate Amendment 41, the Colorado law barring “private gain” by state employees that could in turn influence an official action, by setting up a legal defense fund. The AG’s office says that if appropriate safeguards restricting Gessler’s ability to solicit contributions are defined, and the arrangement “either ensures transparency or establishes a blind trust,” it would be permissible under Amendment 41. Read the very brief memo here.

The thing is, whether or not that opinion is correct, the role of the Attorney General’s office as both counsel for state employees and the Independent Ethics Commission investigating Gessler is turning into a conflict all by itself. Tomasic of the Independent continues:

Ethics Commission Director Jane Feldman believes the Commission’s consideration of the matter has been complicated by the Attorney General’s official position in support of the fund. She told the Independent that Grove’s letter raises conflict-of-interest concerns because the Attorney General is tasked by the state constitution with providing counsel to the Ethics Commission in its deliberations.

“It’s disappointing that the AG’s office weighed in on this without discussing it with us,” Feldman said. “Now we effectively lose the services of the attorney general’s office in considering the legality of the fund. If we need advice, we’ll have to hire outside counsel.”

…Ethics Watch Director Luis Toro told the Independent he thought the attorney general’s office had crossed a line in taking a position in favor of the Gessler defense fund and that the move bolsters an argument his organization has been making for years that the state’s Ethics Commission should have its own counsel on staff, independent from any of the government agencies or offices it might have to investigate.

“The AG’s office said it wouldn’t be involved in Gessler’s criminal defense, yet here it’s involved, isn’t it?” Toro said. “In fact the AG went out of its way, tripping over itself, to get involved. Whose hat is the AG wearing? Is it counsel for the Ethics Commission or for Scott Gessler? Now they’ve handicapped the Commission by leaving the members without its usual counsel.”

Given the obvious partisan political relationship between Republican Attorney General Suthers and Secretary of State Gessler, this situation reveals the folly of using the AG’s office as counsel for the ethics commission at all–since the AG’s role as counsel for state employees arguably makes the conflict the IEC is complaining about in this case inevitable.

Says Colorado Ethics Watch, this problem would be best solved by properly funding the IEC, which would allow it to retain its own legal counsel. For that to happen, of course, lawmakers in Colorado would need to start treating the IEC, and for that matter Amendment 41 as a whole, as something more than a bastard stepchild they would really prefer just go away.

As it stands now, our GOP Attorney General has demonstrated a clever way to subvert it.

UPDATE: Whatever a lopsided majority may say in polls, they apparently don’t live in Rep. Cory Gardner’s district. From the conservative website Newsmax.com:

Over-regulation and too much spending is plaguing the economy, Gardner said in an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV.

“I’m frustrated, [and] my constituents are frustrated, because they see Washington doing the same exact thing,” he said. “This was the most predictable crisis anybody could ever imagine. So, months ago we knew this was going to happen. It got closer, closer, closer and here we are now days away instead of months away and we’re talking about kicking the can down the road, and the American public, the constituents I represent, they’re tired of it. They want to see tax rates that are lower, not higher…” [Pols emphasis]

It’s a very safe seat, after all.

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Politico reports on the latest development in ongoing negotiations to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff” at the end of this year. It should be noted that Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner made a new offer Friday, which includes a big at-least rhetorical concession:

“The President and the Speaker are meeting at the White House to continue their discussions about the fiscal cliff and balanced deficit reduction,” according to an identical statement issued by aides to Boehner and Obama [Monday].

Boehner jump-started the talks with a proposal Friday to boost marginal tax rates on income over $1 million, in what was a significant departure from his party’s no-new-taxes plank.

Democrats described the movement on rates as “progress,” but cautioned that a deal is not imminent because of the high income threshold and proposed cuts to Medicare, including raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67. Obama wants tax rates to rise on family income above $250,000 a year, and he has not publicly embraced cuts to Medicare beneficiaries in the latest round of talks.

As we and most media coverage has noted throughout these negotiations, public opinion polls show overwhelming support for allowing the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts to expire on income greater than $250,000 per household. At the same time, polling is tepid at best on any move to cut Medicare, Social Security, or other so-called “entitlements” valued by the middle class.

So what we have is Boehner agreeing, belatedly and only partly, to one piece of the public’s desired solution, using that as leverage to demand things the public doesn’t want.

Boehner needs robust changes to the hugely popular seniors health program to sell any kind of tax-rate increase to his conservative-dominated Republican Conference. [Pols emphasis]

The public’s failure to embrace cuts to popular institutions like Medicare and Social Security isn’t due to a lack of trying. The Fix The Debt campaign, Alan Simpson dancing “Gangnam Style,” and the millions spent trying to make Hugh Jidette a household name have all dismally failed to turn Americans into voters willing to accept Ryan Plan-style austerity. They know better.

This means Boehner and the Republicans are in a desperate political conundrum. The real constituency supporting sweeping entitlement cuts is exposed as embarrassingly small and ideologically motivated. Boehner must hold out for cuts to popular programs that the public doesn’t want–cuts only supported by a small minority for uningratiating reasons.

No doubt this latest smallish concession from Boehner seems rudely shocking and offensive to Grover Norquist, and other “starve the beast” ideological opponents of anything that doesn’t “shrink the size of government.” The lesson in this, however, may not be Boehner’s concession, but how far the Republican Party has drifted from the mainstream of public opinion.

American author Horace Greeley said back in 1865, “Go West, young man”, advising those in crowded eastern cities to head westward for new frontiers and employment opportunities.  In their recent report, “West Is Best: Protected Lands Promote Jobs and Higher Incomes,” that’s exactly what Headwaters Economics, an independent nonpartisan research firm, found to be true for today’s job seekers.

The full report can be found at http://headwaterseconomics.org… but it’s the colorful and compact infographic summarizing the report that remarkably says it all on one page for job-seekers, businesses and policy makers.

Top-line, the infographic reveals that the West’s popular national parks, monuments, wilderness areas and other public lands offer its growing high-tech and services industries a competitive advantage, which is a major reason why the western economy has outperformed the rest of the U.S. economy in key measures of growth — employment, population, and personal income — during the last four decades.

Communities near protected lands, not only benefit from increased tourism, but also attract businesses that want the quality of life offered by outstanding river, mountain and forest recreational opportunities.   As a result, employment in the West has grown by 152 percent since 1970, nearly double that of employment growth nationally.  Even more astonishing, towns near national parks and wilderness areas have enjoyed a 350 percent job growth in the same period.

The infographic is also posted on the Headwaters Economics website:

http://headwaterseconomics.org…

Since the election, it’s been widely reported that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intends to retire in the next few weeks. Speculation about her possible replacement is currently focused on Susan Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11th of this year, Rice initially stated on television that the attacks were due to protest over an anti-Muslim YouTube video, though it has been determined to have been a well-coordinated terrorist attack.

Republicans sought before the election to blow the Benghazi affair up into as large a scandal as possible for perfectly understandable political reasons. Now that the election is over, that motive still exists but with a longer view–and congressional Republicans are still pushing the issue. And to a point, they should. Democrats too are interested in fully accounting for what happened.

Unfortunately, as the Washington Post reported last week, Republicans are taking a reasonable point of inquiry way too far, and making a joke of their oversight responsibility:

97 House Republicans co-signed a letter this week warning President Obama that Rice’s public comments after the attack on the mission in Benghazi “caused irreparable damage to her credibility both at home and around the world.”

The members also told Obama that making Rice “the face of U.S. foreign policy” in the coming years as his next secretary of state “would greatly undermine your desire to improve U.S. relations with the world and continue to build trust with the American people.”

“Ambassador Rice is widely viewed as having either willfully or incompetently misled the American public in the Benghazi matter,” the lawmakers wrote. “Her actions plausibly give U.S. allies (and rivals) abroad reason to question U.S. commitment and credibility when needed.”

Signers of this letter include Colorado Reps. Cory Gardner and Doug Lamborn.

In an editorial today, USA TODAY outlines the stupidity, not to mention the almost comical hypocrisy, of Republicans going after Rice over her early comments about the Benghazi attack:

Working from talking points put together by intelligence officials and later edited by others, Rice peddled the story that the attack sprang from a spontaneous protest, spurred by an anti-Muslim video produced by an American.

That account turned out to be wrong, but it’s hardly a reason to block Rice’s potential nomination. After all, if misleading comments based on flawed intelligence were disqualifying, Colin Powell would have been forced to resign as George W. Bush’s secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice never would have succeeded Powell. Powell’s powerful speech before the United Nations in 2003, proclaiming proof of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, helped push the United States into a misguided war. Condoleezza Rice also touted the story line about Iraq’s supposed nuclear program, warning on CNN that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” No such weapons were found.

Susan Rice’s comments about events in Benghazi are at best a sideshow. Instead of obsessing about what she said on TV after the tragedy, lawmakers ought to be more concerned about finding out what went wrong and preventing a repeat. Why weren’t security warnings heeded and requests for more protection granted? As U.N. ambassador, Rice most likely had zero involvement with those decisions.

To summarize:

1. Even if they’re right, they’re going after the wrong person, and

2. How quickly they forget.

There’s another dimension to this story that we do want to address, though. Following the GOP’s letter and media tour against Susan Rice, who is African-American, some Democrats angrily reacted to singling her out for criticism. Rep. James Clyburn accused Republicans who signed the letter noted above of employing “racial code words,” in part by describing Susan Rice, a Rhodes scholar with a resumГ© to match anyone’s, as “incompetent.”

Without a doubt, the resumГ©s of politicians such as our own Cory Gardner and Doug Lamborn seem quite humble compared to Rice. And after the election we just had, where women and minority voters played a key role in GOP defeats around the nation, making your first big post-election splash by attacking a black woman really seems like a stupid thing to do–doesn’t it?

Bottom line: we’re not going to allege that Gardner and Lamborn had racist or sexist ulterior motives in signing on to this letter. But just as they have the right to throw around specious charges ripe for political backfire, you all have the right to think whatever you want about their motives. And the stereotype reinforced by this episode…is not about Susan Rice.