More Deception From Mark Udall

On Sunday, the Denver Post published an article on the relative liberal standings of Mark Udall vis a vis other prominent members of his party. El Presendente did an analysis and we made separate observations.

The article was based on the prolific work of academic Kieth T. Poole. Dr Poole has created a mechanism for rating Congress, congressional leaders, and even presidents against their contemporaries, past and present.

While it appears that Dr. Poole cannot manipulate his statistics, the same cannot be said for active members of Congress. Congressmen need only change their voting pattern to move around on the tables

Sometimes politicians who are running for higher office feel the need to deceive the public as to where they are on the political spectrum. They do this by moderating their positions, their votes and their rhetoric in the hope that no one will look at their past record.

A good example in this election would be Mark Udall's dropping his co-sponsorship of Dennis Kucinich's Deprartment of Peace bill after he decided to run for the Senate.

Ace political analyist David Sirota opined in the Denver Post that no one one in Colorado would know who Dennis Kucinich was or care about this. We lampooned Sirota's argument with our "Nobody Knows About the Loon in the Attic" observations.

While Mark Udall has not moderated his rhetoric, he has tried to make his voting record appear more moderate.

Dr. Poole's statistics show Mark Udall ranked as the 182 d most liberal member of the 110th Congress. Colorado is a conservative leaning state. Ranking 182 of 435 puts him left of center in a left leaning Congress He is near the 40th percentile of liberalism in this Congress.

By voting this way in 2007, he could hope that some, including the Denver Post, would argue that Mark Udall is voting as a moderate in the 110th Congress. The Denver Post has a history of claiming that very liberal politicians are "moderate," and thus helping them over the finish line.

Is Mark Udall really this close to the center of a liberal congress? A very easy way to do a reality check on Mark Udall's voting record is to go back in time. According to Dr. Poole's statistics, Mark Udall's voting records driven standards for the previous congresses are:

109th 68th most liberal
108th 82d most liberal
107th 25th most liberal
106th Not Provided

These statistics make a compelling case that Mark Udall has again attempted to deceive the public. It is a habit, so much so that we have a "Udall as a liar" tag on this blog.

Up On One Foot And Spinning

After this author called for Bob Schaffer to withdraw from the race, we wanted to see if Ben had taken our writing priveledges away.

Foolish individual that he is, he hasn't done so yet.

One of David Sirota's colleagues once described him as trying to gain attention by standing on one foot and spinning. We went one better.

Since it works for David, we are going to give it a try with the following:

Hey Denver Post: Are you going to write about Mark Udall's admission on Thrusday that he was a pot smoker?

Hey Rocky Mountain News: Since when is it not news that sitting US Congressman Mark Udall had his automobile confiscated by the cops as a 20 something for ... carrying a lot of marijanua in the back seat (or whatever)

Hey Gazette: Were you aware that there is a US Senate race in Colorado this year and Mark Udall, the guy whose staff tried to send Caroline Bninski to jail for a year, got kid glove treatment when he was caught with pot?

Hey Boulder Camera we know that you like your pot but why the Silence on your favorite son Mark Udall's admission that he lost his car and got a year's suspension in 1972.

I don't see how David Sirota does this. I'm dizzy already. Follow this link for the whole story. Maybe Google will pick it up now.

Loon In The Attic Drops Out

David Sirota's Loon in the Attic announced today that he is dropping out of the Presidential Sweepstakes. It seems that his day job is in jeopardy.

See you in Denver this summer, Dennis Kucinich.

Perhaps you and Mark Udall can stand together for a group hug and a photo op. If not, we do own Photoshop. How about a nice composite of the two of you walking down the street in front of the Peace Academy marching band? Were you a pot smoker, too? The photo in the Denver Post article could be easily modified to add a reefer. Carrying a banner really only requires one hand.

We have so many good ideas and so little time.

Shooting Fish in a Barrel

One of the Democrat strategies promoted by David Sirota is called land politics. It has been cynically used but not bought into by Colorado Democrats including Bill Ritter and Mark Udall.

Sirota wants an alliance between environmentalists, Democrats, and hunters / fishermen against Republicans. He wants Democrats to play down their traditional gun control stance and play up "hunting rights."

Bill Ritter so confused his position among voters that this author was told by registered Republicans living ten miles apart that they were voting for Ritter, one because he was for gun control, and one because he would protect hunters rights better than Bob Beauprez!

The Rocky Mountain News reported during the campaign:

Ritter says he would make recreational shooting improvements a priority if he is elected governor. He wants Colorado to take the lead in establishing more shooting ranges, beginning with a pilot program he proposes for the Arapaho-Roosevelt forests.

The words were good, but Ritter turned out to be a gun control governor.

Now Mark Udall is playing the land politics card with hunting in Rocky Mountain National Park. Well, not really hunting. It is killing elk with silenced guns and low velocity rounds.

Udall said he was glad park service managers said they might use sportsmen, but he was concerned the Park Service might give a higher priority to shooters from other federal or state agencies.

“I think if qualified sportsmen or sportswomen are willing to volunteer, they should be first in line,” Udall said.

If the Park Service did use volunteer cullers, it would not be like hunting. They could not take the meat or other trophies, and the work would be done under strict, controlled conditions.

It would be shooting fish in a barrel. These folks might call themselves hunters, but there would be no sport in the process, and no sportsmen involved. We're not sure Mark Udall knows the difference, but this is as close to land politics as he has come.

Catching Up With Democrat Lies - There are so many

We were busily working on another project this weekend and now find that we have fifty Google alerts to go through for our various blogs. This is a partial catch-up post.

One of the accidental themes of this blog is now the willingness of liberals to lie for their "cause," and be nasty or sometimes stupid about it. While David Sirota's current lie is about the political mess Bill Ritter has created for himself and doesn't mention Mark Udall at all, it illustrates the depths that liberals sink to when they are in power to stay in power. John Andrews takes Sirota to task for his latest lie, but is too polite to actually call Sirota a liar:

This weekend, in one of his most overheated blog posts yet -- which is saying something for a commentator who operates close to Fahrenheit 451 at all times -- Sirota hit a new high in slicing and dicing the plain facts.

Gentleman Bob Beauprez obviously took great pleasure in observing that John Murtha has decided that the "surge" is working after all. While he won't call Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Harry Reid political liars intent on damaging our country for political gain, we will.

From Harry Reid’s “this war is lost” and Pelosi’s “The escalation (Surge) has failed to produce the intended results” to Clinton’s September rebuke of Gen. Petraeus (”The reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief”), the Democrats have invested their future in failure by America’s finest.

We would be remiss not to note that this weekend Bill Ritter got accused of being either a liar or terminally stupid (our words, not the Denver Post's).

Either Gov. Bill Ritter knowingly deceived Coloradans and sold them a bill of goods with his executive order on labor unions, or he doesn't understand the law.

While we were gone, another obvious Mark Udall lie (hopefully it was a lie) surfaced regarding his sponsoring a peace department bill at the urging of high school students. It reminded us of Jimmy Carter's famous claim (hopefully it was a lie) during the 1980 Carter-Reagan debate as related by Wikipedia:

[ Ronald ] Reagan would have none of it, and it came as no surprise, then, when the candidates repeatedly clashed over the nuclear weapons issue in their debate. But it was Carter's reference to his consultation with 12 year old daughter Amy concerning nuclear weapons policy that became the focus of post-debate analysis and late-night television jokes.

Mark Udall to Co-Sponsor This Too?

Mark Udall, as we have pointed out before, co-sponsored a bill to create a US Department of Peace written by the loon in the attic whose name David Sirota claims no one in Colorado knows.

It turns out that a couple of folks want to put the recommendation to establish a US Department of Peace in the Colorado Constitution.

Make no mistake. We would think for a second or two about signing the petition to get this on the ballot. It wouldn't pass, and even if it did, it would be meaningless. Think of the spotlight it will turn on Udall. It can only help to illuminate Mark Udall's unfitness for office. Maybe the loon in the attic will get some Colorado name recognition, too, just in time for the National Democrats to show up.

The reason we would only think for a second or two is that if this makes the ballot, it will give the folks who want to destroy the initiative process more ammunition.

Not to put a bug in anyone's ear, but the Green Party could attend a Mark Udall Town Hall meeting and publicly ask him to sign this. We would be more than happy to report on the outcome.

Nobody Knows About the Loon in the Attic

Today, David Sirota made the "nobody knows about the loon in the attic" argument when writing about a Mike Saccone blog entry.

Notice, his first reaction is the guilt-by-association move, pointing out that the bill Udall is pushing is supported by - gasp! - Dennis Kucinich. He seems to imply that this is some sort of political taboo - even though most people in Colorado have absolutely no idea who Dennis Kucinich is. And, of course, by Saccone's logic, any bill that Udall and Kucinich both voted for is some proof that Udall's politics are exactly Kucinich's politics. What a silly assertion.

It isn't just that they vote for the same bills. They co-sponsor each other's flaky bills. Take the bill that Kucinich wrote to establish a cabinet level Department of Peace, complete with a Peace Academy. Yes, it is wonderful idealism, but we can't afford idealists in Congress during a time when people are willing to fly airplanes into tall buildings or nuclear reactors. We had a lot of fun making fun of the concept.

Like this latest Mark Udall resolution, that bill didn't have all that many co-sponsors, but one of them was the Congressman from Colorado's second district. Even if a lot of Coloradoans don't know the identity of the loon in the attic, it isn't likely that it will remain a state secret in an environment where both candidates have millions of dollars to work with.

Sirota's next argument shows his contempt for those of us who have lived in Colorado more than the six months he has been here. Recall that he is writing about a Grand Junction blog and says about one of the most prominent politicians in that area, and one of the three or four most prominent Republicans in the state senate:

But what I find even more short-sighted is Saccone's obsessive focus on how Udall's resolution supposedly allows people like Josh Penry - again, a person who most Coloradoans have never heard of - to call Udall a "Boulder liberal.

Readers of this blog know that no Republican need call Udall a Boulder liberal. The msm and left wing blogs are doing it for them. Let them quote the scoreboard we keep. That's why we keep it.

Then Sirota says something astounding:

Any objective look at Rocky Mountain politics over the last few years has shown that these charges - whether they are "Boulder liberal!" or "Missoula liberal!" - are failing miserably. They just aren't sticking any more. That's not to say that Democrats shouldn't be wary of the brand, but the concept that these attacks are powerful vote-shifters is absurd.

If Bill Ritter and Ken Salizar had run as the liberals they have turned out to be, it is unlikely that they would have won. They ran wearing "moderate" burkhas and only dropped them after they were elected. One of the reasons we are keeping our scoreboard is to keep everyone honest.

Dennis Kucinich isn't the only loon in the attic, it would seem.

More Wisdom From The West

Mike Saccone of the Grand Junction Sentinel is having a war of words with the lefties. He comments:

So why is criticizing conservative talking head Rush Limbaugh a bad tactic ahead of the 2008 election? … In a nutshell: it does nothing to burnish Udall’s moderate credentials. Indeed, allying oneself with Congressman Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, on a resolution that will have no binding effect is, well, kind of a nonstarter. Sure it’s a principled stance, but it’s nothing more than that.

More importantly, it lets politicos, from Schaffer to state Sen. Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, stand back and lob the “Boulder liberal” label * at Udall...

Nonetheless, it’s a political stance and an electoral risk [Mark ] Udall did not have to take.

This is the second Saccone essay on the subject. He got beat up by the local liberals and David Sirota on the first one. We like short essays, so we will take on Sirota (the commentator, who according to a gang of four colleague, grabs attention by standing on one foot and spinning. Picture him in a pink tutu with fuzzy yellow bedroom slippers.) in another post.

*Note that we normally kill links embedded in quotes, but the Saccone link was so full of wisdom that we left it in. (Yes, we are laughing as this is being written.)

We Like Word Pictures

It is almost an addiction. We like painting them and we admire others who use them. Thus when a blogger described David Sirota as someone who drew attention to himself by standing on one foot and spinning, it made us laugh.

We might have added a wide pink tutu and pink slippers to a picture of David spinning as he beat the top of his chest while screaming out a loud Tarzan like "ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh."

Well, David is up on one foot again. He has no personal ethics or he would be writing about Mark Udall who sold his vote to labor on a bill he admits he didn't like. Instead, he is slamming Bob Schaffer for "hypocrisy," and trying to restart something that was effectively put to bed last week by the Rocky Mountain News.

Living The Grand Life had a quotable quote today that fits Sirota almost as well as his tutu:

Do some liberals accuse conservatives of hypocrisy because libs have no core values and can therefore never violate them?

Tonight's Trip Around the Blogosphere

1. The Rocky's editorial yesterday seems to have shut down the left wing's self-generated frenzy claiming that Schaffer sold his vote.

2. The name calling continues, with three blogs adding to our count today. If the left wing blogs want to sully their reputation with childish name calling, we will help them. The score will go up next weekend.

3. David Sirota keeps rewriting the same post with the same links to his own stuff. One gets the impression that he really doesn't know Colorado all that well. That isn't surprising given that he just moved here. We've stopped following his links out of boredom. He seems to have lost his Gang of Four platform as the Post appears to have shut it down effective August 18th.

4. Sirota was part of the left wing echo chamber shoving the Schaffer stuff along. We wonder if he will devote any attention to the Mark Udall scandal involving $75,000 in union contributions. Will we see strident calls that Udall return the money? Probably not, because ethics and consistency are not strong points among left wing bloggers.

When Looking For Dirt...

The left wing echo chamber has bounced a story about a single Bob Schaffer campaign contribution for weeks now. It started at ProgressNowAction, affectionately known as PlagiarismNow to this author because last spring it appeared to have lifted, word for word, three paragraphs from a Wikipedia article and only slightly modified a fourth without attribution for the body of one of its hit pieces.

It moved to the Denver Post for two printed articles. A far left wing Denver Post blogger, David Siorta, has worked it over as has about every left wing Colorado blogger we know of. It isn't news, it is a manufactured "controversy," and thus hasn't made it into responsible outlets like the Rocky Mountain News or the Gazette. We don't know of any of the smaller papers around the state that have repeated it, which doesn't speak well of the Denver Post's judgement.

Today, the Denver Post left winger is up for some well deserved criticism by a fellow Denver Post writer David Harsanyi for defending John Edward's hedge fund machinations while going after Bob Schaffer. He observes that Sirota isn't consistent:

Now, let’s remember, only days earlier, the same progressive was hyping a concocted “scandal” over Republican Bob Schaffer, for which he admitted he had not a shred of proof and not a single reputable person said had any merit.

That’s quite a display of consistency. I guess activists have their own set of rules.

Actually, only Democrat activists have their own set of rules. They use a microscope for Republican dirt and blinders for Democrat filth. We try to be consistent here.