Oil Shale: Mark Udall's Obstructionism vs. Bob Schaffer's Comprehensive Approach

Sunday's Grand Junction Daily Sentinel features dueling columns between U.S. Senate candidates Bob Schaffer and Mark Udall on the issue of energy production and the potential of western Colorado oil shale, in particular. A careful look at the two articles highlights a vital contrast

Mark Udall's piece is full of warnings about irresponsible oil shale development, but leaves only the vaguest of hints of what he thinks needs to be done in moving forward.

In one place, Mark Udall writes:

Put plain and simple: We still don’t really know how to develop oil shale in a way that makes economic sense and in a way that protects scarce water resources.

And if we don’t want to send the Western Slope into another economic crash, we’d better figure that out before we try to kick-start another crash program.

Classic doublespeak. It will be harder for oil shale extraction to make "economic sense" when environmental interests, to whom Mark Udall is beholden, press for additional unreasonable regulations that will make the already challenging process costlier. Udall also has advocated a one-year moratorium on oil shale recovery.

The fact that Mark Udall neglected to mention Royal Dutch Shell's Mahogany Ridge Project may speak louder than anything he actually wrote:

But a new technology has emerged that may begin to tap the
oil shale's potential. Royal Dutch Shell, in fact, has recently completed a demonstration project (The Mahogany Ridge project) in which it produced 1,400 barrels of oil from shale in the ground, without mining the shale at all.

Instead, Shell utilized a process called "in situ" mining, which heats the shale while it's still in the ground, to the point where the oil leaches from the rock.

Recognizing this reality and others,
Bob Schaffer's piece is full of faith in American ingenuity. His approach to energy policy is comprehensive:

We should offer more incentives to grow a more robust renewable energy sector. We should hold out incentives for unconventional technologies such as oil-shale, oil sands and others. We should expand other clean-energy opportunities such as nuclear and geothermal.

Bob Schaffer's strategy for oil shale is reasonable and balanced. Among other things, he recognizes that energy companies have made dramatic technological advancements in oil shale extraction that respect the environment.

As MSNBC has reported, even Democrat Governor Bill Ritter has spoken out clearly about the promised benefits of oil shale extraction: "If we go forward with oil shale, it could be the biggest commercial development in the history of the state of Colorado."

Despite using the rhetoric of responsibility, Mark Udall's energy obstructionism represents irresponsible behavior. Bob Schaffer's plan respects the environment but gives incentive to speed a process that can give a huge boost to America's energy supply and a major boon to Colorado's economy.

Mark Udall's Cynical Sponsorship of Big Labor Bill Back in the Spotlight

An astute letter writer from Grand Junction reminds readers of Boulder liberal Mark Udall's cynical sponsorship of legislation that would deprive workers of secret ballots in union workplace elections:

Virtually every Democratic candidate this year, including Mark Udall and Barack Obama, are pushing for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which is a massive handout to organized labor. EFCA would eliminate the private-ballot vote when unionizing a workplace and put in place a system where workers could be intimidated and pressured into signing petitions for unionization.

On the same day, the Denver Post reports that state government has become unionized by the votes of a small minority of workers:

About 6,900 state workers from a pool of 22,500 who were eligible participated in the election, which gave them a choice between Colorado WINS or no union representation. Of those, 5,481 supported the union.

The results were based only on the number of votes cast, but even those who did not vote will now be represented by the union — regardless of whether they pay the voluntary union dues.

Last November we speculated that Gov. Bill Ritter's executive order that set the state employee unionization process in motion may have been done in part to take political heat off Mark Udall. Has the heat been turned back on?

Mark Udall's Ranks of Undecided Superdelegates Continue to Dwindle

Grand Junction Sentinel political reporter Mike Saccone points out today that Colorado's list of undecided superdelegates has been whittled down to four: Congressman John Salazar, Sen. Ken Salazar, Gov. Bill Ritter and Congressman Mark Udall.

Superdelegate Mark Udall has 2 months, 26 days until the Democratic National Convention to state his preference. Most everyone seems to be taking it for granted that Barack Obama has all but secured the nomination. Is Udall waiting to be the last Colorado superdelegate to make up his mind?

Mark Udall says a decision is coming in June. We'll wait and see.

Off Topic, or Perhaps Not

We've been trying to figure out why Mark Udall and his environmentalist allies are so addicted to lying about important issues. Could it be because environmentalists have a thirty year plus history of lying? Could it be because environmental based lying works?

We found a very long 2001 Sacramento Bee article on environmental organizational fundraising. It lays out the lies that were being told then to raise money. It is far too long and detailed to quote at length, so we will just provide tidbits:

The letters that come with the mailers are seldom dull. Steeped in outrage, they tell of a planet in perpetual environmental shock, a world victimized by profit-hungry corporations. And they do so not with precise scientific prose but with boastful and often inaccurate sentences that scream and shout:

From New York-based Rainforest Alliance: "By this time tomorrow, nearly 100 species of wildlife will tumble into extinction."Fact: No one knows how rapidly species are going extinct. The Alliance's figure is an extreme estimate that counts tropical beetles and other insects -- including ones not yet known to science -- in its definition of wildlife.

From The Wilderness Society: "We will fight to stop reckless clear-cutting on national forests in California and the Pacific Northwest that threatens to destroy the last of America's unprotected ancient forests in as little as 20 years."Fact: National forest logging has dropped dramatically in recent years. In California, clear-cutting on national forests dipped to 1,395 acres in 1998, down 89 percent from 1990.

From Defenders of Wildlife: "Won't you please adopt a furry little pup like 'Hope'? Hope is a cuddly brown wolf ... Hope was triumphantly born in Yellowstone."Facts: "There was never any pup named Hope," says John Varley, chief of research at Yellowstone National Park. "We don't name wolves. We number them." Since wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in 1995, their numbers have increased from 14 to about 160; the program has been so successful that Yellowstone officials now favor removing the animals from the federal endangered species list.

Notice that global warming wasn't a subject that environmental fund raisers had tapped into in 2001.

It is instructive to realize that the exact same false kinds of things were said about the Roan Plateau-that it was pristine and beautiful.

The environmentalists aren't the only ones using environmental lies for fundraising. Politicians like Bill Ritter and Mark Udall are doing the same thing. Our children and grandchildren will live in a different world, but it will be a poorer world, a world built on lies.

Roan Plateau Drilling

The Denver Post is reporting that Bob Schaffer has adopted the Bill Ritter position on the Roan Plateau. That should tell all readers that we are not the recipients of inside campaign information. We don't want to be.

Politics is the art of compromise, and we don't object to this pronouncement of position. It isn't a change because Bob Schaffer hadn't announced a position to us or anyone else.

What we do object to, and will continue to write about here and elsewhere is the dishonest way this policy was sold. The environmentalists, including Bill Ritter and Mark Udall, must be held to some standard of truth by someone. If they are not, this kind of dishonest campaign will happen again and again.

We want to puke every time we read about how the Roan Plateau is a pristine natural wonderland, beautiful beyond belief, because it isn't. This newly announced Bob Schaffer position doesn't change the character of the Roan Plateau. It is still scrub land.

added: The Denver Post has rewritten its article this morning.

Absurdicus makes a plea

Our friend Absurdicus is back with a comment on the Big Blue Lie Machine Post. It is too long to repeat here and keep to our short post format, so we will pick and choose:

Apparently my entire argument is lost because of my mistake of elevation. God forbid I would assume elevation above the earth was not normalized to elevation above ground level.

Go use Google Earth now. You will find it to be addictive. Your real mistake was to respond to what we wrote without even looking at what we were writing about. Had you done that you would have had to assume nothing.

Absurdicus is now the first individual that we know of to admit that the Roan Plateau is no Garden of Eden, no pristine untouched land worthy of saving because of its uniqueness:

Despite my basic math mistake, the argument that at 1000 feet a piece of land should be drilled on just because it doesn't look "pretty" is still my argument. Please address my point, that just because it looks ugly at any distance it should be drilled and drunk up like a milkshake.

Frankly, we didn't know that was your argument.

No one, not Bill Ritter, not John Salazar, not Ken Salazar, not the Sierra Club, not Trout Unlimited, not the Wilderness Society, not the Denver Post, not the Rocky Mountain News, and especially not Mark Udall nor any other individual or organization involved with pushing the environmental agenda has had the intellectual honesty to make that argument.

Instead, they use words and photographs intended to fool the public into believing that the land is something it is not. We never would have thought to look at the land using Google Earth but for the obviously deceptive video ad that we wrote about in Looking More Closely at The Udall Commercial - Part 3. We've driven through that part of Colorado many times and it is a lot of things, but it is not wet.

Absurdicus, we don't know how to respond to your argument. It is one that needs to be had in an honest way by the politicians who represent us, unencumbered by the false propaganda that is pumped out daily.

Instead, we have the politicians like Mark Udall and Bill Ritter as well as the newspaper editorial boards who should be demanding and engaging in an honest discussion unwilling to do so out of fear that they would lose in that environment. There can't be another reason.

The politicians spend their time pushing the false propaganda and taking big campaign donations from the organizations which generate it. The organizations collect big donations for supposedly "protecting the environment" when they are often doing no such thing.

There will never be a response to your argument from us or anyone else because none on your side, probably including you, will allow it to be held under conditions we could respect.

Environmentalist Extremism on Steroids.

Our Governor, Bill Ritter, and our would be Senator, Mark Udall, simply haven't learned to use the Draconian language of "Climate Change." Word is filtering out of Canada that Ontero has appointed a "Climate Change Czar," and, alternately, a "Climate Change Secretariat."

Isn't that the language of the old Soviet Union? And, these commissars are serious:

It's a strategy that has worked elsewhere. British Columbia, which has a Climate Action Secretariat, came out with a green provincial budget two weeks ago that included North America's first full-fledged carbon tax.

One wonders what would happen to the Colorado economy if Bill Ritter or Mark Udall suggested that all coal fired power plants in the state be closed by 2014:

As head of the climate change secretariat, MacLeod's top priorities will be making sure Ontario's coal-fired power plants close by 2014, which is already well after the original Liberal promise to close them by 2007; protect large-scale areas for caribou habitat in the Boreal Forest; and build more rapid transit, the source said.

These are key planks in the Liberal plan to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change by 6 per cent below 1990 levels by 2014, 15 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050.

Make no mistake. This is exactly where Bill Ritter wants to take the state and Mark Udall wants to take the country.

Another Inconsistent Mark Udall Comment

Now that 2008 is two months old, Mark Udall is running from the anti-fossil fuels energy record that he has fought so hard to make since he entered public life.

The Stirling Journal-Advocate reports that Mark Udall said:

“For me, all paths lead to and from energy,” he said Thursday.

He said that while the U.S. needs to explore and develop alternative energy sources, we cannot completely walk away from fossil fuels.

It was just last year that Mark Udall fought as though his political life depended on it against drilling on the Roan Plateau. He would very likely still hold that position if Bill Ritter hadn't seen the pot of tax gold at the end of that rainbow. When Bill Ritter folded on the issue, Mark Udall couldn't do an about face quickly enough.

We would guess that this statement means that Mark Udall now supports development of ANWR oil, or does it? Mark Udall now is willing to promote oil shale development in Western Colorado, right?

In all of Mark Udall's long career, this is the only statement that we know of that even remotely supports US oil and gas oil development and use. Yes, he is willing to allow offshore drilling, but only off the Cuban coast.

Not long ago, Mark Udall dropped a similar comment about nuclear power which he has never before supported. He didn't follow up on it with legislation or a strong advocacy of nuclear power, he just uttered the word so that he could claim both sides of this issue.

We suspect that that is what he is doing here.

We are putting both of these comments under the tag "Udall as a Liar."

Global Warming Treaties and Mark Udall

One of the side effects of politicians like Mark Udall, John Salazar, Ken Salazar, and Bill Ritter supporting organizations like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society in trying to blame everything on global warming is that others are listening.

Negotiations on a new treaty to fight global warming will fail if rich nations are not treated as "culprits" and developing countries as "victims," China's top climate envoy said.

The whole world must take action to confront climate change, but developed countries have a "historical responsibility" to do much more because their unrestrained emissions in the past century are responsible for global warming, said Ambassador Yu Qingtai.

Remember the Kyoto treaty? It required the industrialized nations to lower emissions but not India or China. While Mark Udall and Bill Ritter insist that Colorado should spend its treasure to get rid of coal fired electric plants, China is bringing 544 new coal fired electric plants on line.

Unless China finds a way to clean up its coal plants and the thousands of factories that burn coal, pollution will soar both at home and abroad. The increase in global-warming gases from China's coal use will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years, surpassing by five times the reduction in such emissions that the Kyoto Protocol seeks...

Already, China uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.

Meanwhile, the Mark Udall's and the Bill Ritter's remain silent while the Chinese ambassador plays the victim card:

Yu disputed that view, calling China "a victim" of climate change and stressing that its economy only started to grow in the last 25 years.

Mark Udall wants to be a Senator in a body where any new treaty would be ratified. Would he silently allow the US economy to be destroyed by this kind of thinking and propaganda? His history and his political contributors scream YES!

Political Commentary Through a Fun House Mirror

Newspapers match their readership or they won't survive. It is no surprise that The Gazette is somewhat conservative in its outlook given that it must sell papers in a conservative county.

Likewise the Boulder Daily Camera must be quite liberal or it will not survive. It comes as no surprise that its analysis of the Senate race tilts leftward.

They managed to find CSU political science professor John Straayer for some quotes that were very sloppy if someone wants an accurate analysis of the political climate in Colorado:

About Schaffer, he said:

"He's continually dogged by the image that began to be created when he was in the state Senate, and that's that he's close to the more right fringe of the party, particularly on social issues like abortion and gay marriage," Straayer said.

We have been carefully monitoring the campaign for six months. The msm and even the liberal blog political coverage never seems to mention any of these issues, nor does the Udall campaign. The big complaint from Udall supporters is that Schaffer hasn't given them any issue to latch on to, something Straayer leaves out. This makes us curious as to what campaign Straayer is watching.

Likewise, John Straayer dismisses the fact that Mark Udall's liberal allies and the msm routinely describe him as liberal, reliably left wing, and even extremist. Look at the first comment at the bottom of the Daily Camera article for another example of how far out of touch Straayer is:

Mark! Mark! Mark! Go Mark [ Udall ]! Boulder's Best deserves the upgrade from Congressman to Senator. The rest of Colorado will see that being a "Boulder Liberal" can be good for all. Mark is a "Coloradan's Coloradan."

Last summer, the political buzz was that Colorado would be an easy pick up for Udall and the Democrats. As poll after poll shows the race to be a dead heat, most knowledgeable observers are rating Colorado as a toss-up. Once again, John Straayer is in his own little world:

Straayer said Udall should be considered the favorite to win the race.

The Daily Camera appears to have reported Straayer's over all analysis of the Colorado political scene without giving him a direct quote:

Straayer and other political observers say there's ample reason to think Colorado, traditionally a strong Republican state, will be much more rewarding territory for the Democratic candidate this year. Recent history has been good to donkeys, starting with Salazar's victory in 2004, followed by Democrats winning control of both chambers of the state Legislature for the first time in four decades. In 2006, Denver prosecutor Bill Ritter -- a pro-life Democrat -- won the race for the governor's office.

What John Straayer leaves out is the excessively abusive gerrymandering that allowed Republican candidates to aggregate the most statewide votes in legislative contests but elect only 40% of the legislature.

He also ignores the Republican infighting that handed Ken Salazar and Bill Ritter their elections, infighting that seems to have subsided.

Straayer might also have mentioned that the Denver Post appears to have soured some what on the Democrats in general and Bill Ritter in particular, which will negatively impact the ability of leftist candidates to pretend to be centrists.

If John Straayer wants to have some credibility, he would do well to read, consider, and answer our September essay "why the left wing prognosticators are wrong." The left wing prognosticators have turned out to be wrong, realized that they are wrong, and modified their positions, all except for Straayer.

All in all, John Straayer comes across in this piece as a prognosticator operating in a fun house whose mirrors distort reality to the point that his comments cannot be trusted by either side.

Fair Warning to Trout Unlimited

We find it sad that politicians like Mark Udall and Bill Ritter seek allies in the hunting and fishing community and then allow the environmentalist extremists and the gun control nuts to knife them in the back.

Bill Ritter promised shooting ranges across the state during the election, but the legislature can't seem to find the money for any. Instead, it spends its time and energy crafting gun control bills that Ritter is only too happy to sign.

Now, Trout Unlimited might want to start looking over its shoulder. Coloradoriverconservancy is reporting that the environmentalists are trying to rid the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon of Trout:

On June 2nd 2006, The Center for Biological Diversity and the environmental group Living Rivers gave formal notice of intent to sue the Arizona Game and Fish Department for violating the endangered species act if they stock Trout at Lees Ferry.

So what does all this mean to the sportsmen of Arizona? We must understand that the debacle that is occurring at Lees Ferry and in the Grand Canyon is the beginning of a movement to remove non-native sport fish from not just the Colorado River, but sport fish removal and eradication might just be coming to a river or lake near you.

Whose back is Mark Udall watching? His own. As long as the environmentalist extremists are willing to send him money by the bucketfull, he is willing to ignore what his allies have in mind for trout fishermen.

Doing Yourself a GIANT Favor

If you want to inform yourself as to the sleazy and frightening way that Bill Ritter's Climate Plan came into being, invest 30 minutes of your time to watch tonight's Independent Thinking rerun at 5:30 on KBDI.

Paul Chesser is Jon Caldera's guest.

It is scary when an agenda driven non-profit can come into Colorado and hijack the process to the point that our climate plan is a close cookie cutter version of the plans produced in 20 other states by this same non-profit. How does it serve the public when they produce a list of mandates that they want imposed without any requirement for cost-benefit analysis or any proof that their draconian mandates impact the climate in any way?

Is Bill Ritter so corrupted by the environmentalist extremists and so inept a manager that he sees no need for a cost benefit analysis on any of these proposals?

No matter your position on the political spectrum, this could be the most important 30 minutes you spend in 2oo8.

We stole this from Ritterwatch, a blog well worth visiting.

A Campaign Quote Raises Questions

Mark Udall was quoted in the Cherry Creek News:

Speaking about the coming campaign and the issues to define it, Udall said “the outlines are clear- Iraq, the economy, immigration.” Udall said that undocumented immigrants must “travel the path to citizenship— pay a fine (for being in the U.S. illegally), speak English, have committed no crimes.” “We must address... the health care system where families are one illness away from bankruptcy.”

Udall, a westerner, said that Colorado issues would play a key role in the Senate race: water, transportation and creating more transit options. He also emphasized that Colorado’s position for renewable energy and the jobs it could create was strong, given our resources and the presence of the National Renewable Energy lab in Golden.

Someday we must remember to ask if Mark Udall considers it acceptable for (as he says) an undocumented immigrant to gain his citizenship if he went through Bill Ritter's agricultural trespass plea bargain mill.

Note that Mark Udall is not all that interested in talking about his part in the bark beetle crisis, his refusal to allow either clear cutting of fire breaks to reduce the size of a probable forest fire or the harvesting of dying trees by lumber companies.

We wonder if Mark Udall will be willing to talk about his part in his staff's railroading of Caroline Bninski into a one year jail term.

Is Mark Udall proud to be associated with Daily Kos to the point that they were setting up his own personal blog on that site?

So many questions and so few answers. Oh, and our favorite, the Department of Peace?

Politicians, Put Your Finger In The Wind

This Denver Post article on Bill Ritter's plan to raise another $500 million in taxes, excuse us, fees now has 227 comments, and they are not favorable. If someone has organized this, it isn't obvious. We sure haven't. In fact, we aren't even part of the 227.

Let's put the number 227 in context. Most articles in the Post are lucky to draw a handful of comments. Even their editorials usually top out at a dozen or less.

This number of comments is bad news for tax and spend Democrats like Mark Udall and Bill Ritter. If they haven't put their finger up in this anti-tax gale, they are fools.

Added: There are so many comments and hits that the Denver Post has a message up that their data base is overloaded.

Water Storage Issue

Yesterday, we ran across more name calling by a left wing blog. Since we don't do any linking to blogs that engage in name calling, we won't be linking to them.

They opined that Bob Schaffer could be attacked because he had supported a referendum that would have spent $2 billion for water storage projects. Since that blog is part of the big blue lie machine, they claimed that it was $4 billion, but what is a little exaggeration among friends?

Today, we discover that Bill Ritter is talking about water storage to the corn farmers.

"Really, we can help ourselves a great deal with conservation, with re-use, with shared use between municipalities and agricultural land," said Ritter after his speech. "And then we have to decide at what level we embark upon greater water storage."

That is going to make it very difficult to play the water storage card against Bob Schaffer.

Will Voters Remember At The Polls?

In ten months the voters will be going to the polls. It will be interesting to see if they can connect the dots between what Mark Udall and Bill Ritter have been doing and how it impacts their daily quality of life.

Take food prices. They are going up sharply. The Boulder Camera reports on food price inflation without identifying Mark Udall, Bill Ritter, or the Sierra Club as in any way responsible:

In the western United States, the costs were even higher. With a recorded 6.4 percent gain in December 2007 and a 4.7 percent increase for the full year, the region, which includes Colorado, boasted the largest increases among the four U.S. Census areas for those periods...

One of the major underlying factors is the rising cost of fuel. The energy needed to produce, transfer and store food items is coming at a bigger price tag, he says.

"At the same time, some of the raw product costs -- particularly for the costs of manufacturing, wholesale ingredient prices -- were up substantially," he says. "The retail end of it kind of held the line as much as they could."

And then there's the demand for ethanol.

"You've got these government mandates that we're supposed to be producing so much corn," said Jeff Thredgold, a regional economist for Vectra Bank Colorado. "What it has done is push corn prices dramatically higher, which has an impact."

The higher prices of corn, a key ingredient in feed and a variety of foods, have carried forward to products such as tortillas, cornbread, beef and poultry.

Democrats count on the votes of people who live on a fixed income. That voting block is eventually going to get wise to the fact that Mark Udall and Bill Ritter are paying their extreme environmentalist agenda on the backs of the poor through higher food and fuel prices, higher property taxes, and higher utility bills. Will they remember at the polls?

Cleaning Up The Forests

Mark Udall is opposed to cleaning up the forests. It would require building forest roads. Heaven forbid!

Today, the Rocky Mountain News made a proposal to remove dead timber that will never be allowed to happen, and it admits as much:

But these productive solutions are possible on a large scale only if federal and state lawmakers act quickly to provide the economic assistance and regulatory relief needed to develop viable commercial applications of significant scope.

As unpopular as it may be with some groups, [ and politicians like Mark Udall, John Salazar, Bill Ritter, and Ken Salazar ] relaxing certain zoning and environmental restrictions is as critical as finding funds for new machinery or other start-up costs. Removing barriers to quick production is essential because of the natural timetable at work in Colorado's forests.

The Rocky didn't go far enough. Forest access roads must be built and maintained. Clear cuts must be established as fire breaks. Environmentalist terrorists like Mark Udall and his Sierra Club must be put on notice that their foot dragging won't be tolerated. Does anyone have the courage to do that? Not likely, unless it is the voters.

The Yellow Rose of Texas

Californian in Texas, subtitled "the ramblings of a liberal Californian" opines:

[ Mark ] Udall is further left than governor [ Bill ] Ritter and senator [ Ken ] Salazar, but he does have a small advantage because of the state's Democratic trend in recent elections.

Since the conventional wisdom is that both Ritter and Salazar are liberal, with Bill Ritter seen as moving farther and farther to the left daily, Californian in Texas obviously believes that Mark Udall should be classified on our scoreboard as "reliably left wing."

The Mark Udall is not a moderate scoreboard:
extremist 2
reliably left wing 9
liberal 28
moderate 0
conservative (chuckle)

We started this scoreboard when we noticed that liberal blogs and the msm were routinely calling Mark Udall a "liberal," "reliably left wing," and even "extremist." We do not count comments from conservative blogs and we didn't count a comment on a liberal show by a conservative politician. Those who would like to check our methodology can follow the bread crumbs backwards.

A Liberal Fan Club In A Close Race

The out of state folks at The Seminal are obviously fans of this blog. Well, perhaps not fans, but we are clearly a resource.

Their reporting is a heck of a lot more accurate than it was just a few days ago. They quote the Independent Thinking video at length. That is what comes from being careful to provide links.

After an abysmal first essay, which Ben panned, they put out a well balanced second essay that describes the contest as being where we think it is:

That, coupled with the recent blue streak in Colorado politics (all branches of the state's government will have a Democratic majority if a Democrat wins in '08) has made it one of Time Magazine's Top Ten Senate Races to Watch.

The outgoing Senator Allard won his 2002 reelection with only 51% of the vote, and in the 2004 Senate elections Coloradoans sent Democrat Ken Salazar to Washington, also with 51% of the vote. Though it has a conservative track record, Colorado is clearly a state that now swings both ways.

We wouldn't want our new friends to put too much stock in the legislature being in the hands of Democrats as it has been cleverly gerrymandered by agents of the State Supreme Court. Republican legislative candidates in aggregate routinely get more votes than Democrat candidates. The district this writer lives in goes 80-20 Republican while just a few miles south, the Democrat wins by a nose. That is what gerrymandering will do, and it leads to overconfidence and misleading assumptions by folks who don't live in Colorado.

We also wouldn't want them to put a lot of stock in either the win by Ken Salazar or Bill Ritter. Both ran as "moderates" and faced a divided Colorado Republican party. Bill Ritter has turned out to be so far to the left that the Denver Post, which supported him in 2006, regularly eats his lunch. That won't help Mark Udall, whose liberal blogging and msm friends (including you) regularly call him a liberal to the point that we keep a scoreboard. (We'll update the scoreboard later tonight or tomorrow as we have time.)

There is a more than even chance that having the Democrat convention in Denver will be unhelpful to Mark Udall.

This isn't the gimmie that many on the left thought it might be just six months ago. It will be a close race. We commend The Seminal for observing that Bob Schaffer:

is a formidable opponent, as demonstrated by his recent appearance on the television program Independent Thinking. There he expressed views that are bound to resonate with Colorado's conservative voters.

Strike out the word "conservative" and just leave it at "resonate with Colorado's voters."

They are correct when they say:

It's going to be a fun one out west.

So much of the liberal blogosphere in Colorado is untruthful and unethical that we are quite happy to see a well written and balanced essay from a liberal source. No Democrat blog in Colorado would have written what you wrote. They get paid (literally) to be nasty. Welcome to the arena of civil discourse.

Surprised Mark Udall Wasn't There

Officials, including Bill Ritter, cut a ribbon on a solar energy facility on Fort Carson. The Gazette forgets in writing this puff piece that whether the federal government pays for its power directly or with federal tax rebates, it still pays the full bill for its power. Playing games with the accounting doesn't make it cheaper. If it did, we taxpayers should demand that all of the Department of Defense power needs be paid for with tax rebates.

The scope of the project is mind boggeling.

“This project is the largest solar project on an Army base,” said Erik Rothenberg, spokesman for 3 Phases Energy Services, part of the private public collaboration. “It is the sixth-largest solar project in the United States, the 70th largest in the world.”

Supposedly, the project cost $13 million dollars, but we question the figures. Our bet is that it does not include a hefty sum in tax credits. The story mentions tax credits but doesn't mention how much those credits were. Currently the Federal tax credit is 30%, or more than $6 million for this project. We don't know if the state also provided a tax credit.

If one assumes a very conservative interest rate on a $20 million investment of 5%, just the interest costs of this energy is $1 million a year. That $1 million assumes that the project never has to be paid off. If this lights 500 houses, the real cost of the electricity is $2000 a year per house. Just the electricity, and assuming no need for capital repayment or rainy day fund for repairs.

It looks like very expensive power to us. Mark Udall, who wasn't there, might argue that it was good public policy to build this solar collector, but he and others need to be honest about the costs involved. Pretending that a $20 million project cost $13 million to construct isn't fair to the taxpayer.