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Some food for thought on conservatism, common sense and political identity
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

Some food for thought on conservatism, common sense and political identity

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Some food for thought... One pattern I see in math and physics is how fruitful it can be to test and inquire into basic assumptions we all have. A look at what it means to count things alongside a look at infinity leads one to the intriguing idea that there is more than one kind of infinity, for example. The Rocky Mountain Voice piece linked below was also intriguing to me, and for that same reason. I’ll leave it to you to read it, but some interesting (if not entirely new) themes are there. Is common sense common? Is a self-evident truth self-evident to us all? What does it mean to be conservative? Is that changing? I wrote in the past about being liberty minded though not a party adherent (see the sec...
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Colorado Tax Data Raises Questions About Calls For Higher Taxes On Wealthy
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, State

Colorado Tax Data Raises Questions About Calls For Higher Taxes On Wealthy

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Colorado’s “rich” are already paying a lot (A LOT) Tax Day, both the day when tax returns are due and the day at which you have worked enough to pay your taxes (and start working for yourself) recently passed. Around that date I saw something online giving a breakdown of Federal tax receipts vs. income group and it got me thinking about Colorado’s tax receipts vs. income. After doing some digging I have some data to share, and, as the top line here suggests, the “rich” in Colorado are already paying quite a bit. Certainly a giant percent of state revenue compared to how many filers there are. As I’ll show below, if you look at the percentage of total tax receipts vs. the percentage of taxpayers ...
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Gaines: Medicaid bloat is eating Colorado’s budget after a decade of federal expansion
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State, Top Stories

Gaines: Medicaid bloat is eating Colorado’s budget after a decade of federal expansion

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Colorado's Medicaid bloat under Obamacare In the first post of this series, I briefly went over Colorado's Medicaid financing (how much and on what). If you want or need that context, it's the first link below. In the second part of the series, I want to talk about how Medicaid got expanded by the Feds--allowing more people to get on government-funded healthcare-- and how Colorado leapt at the expansion like a shot. There were two recent (and big) expansions of Medicaid: the first was the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) which expanded Medicaid coverage to people (including those without any disability or children)making up to 138% of the Federal Poverty wage. Screenshot 1 is a summary of the changes, it comes from...
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Gaines: Watch the framing—Karlik’s slant and Polis’ quiet appointments
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Colorado Accountability Project, Approved, Commentary, State

Gaines: Watch the framing—Karlik’s slant and Polis’ quiet appointments

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project Colorado Politics' Karlik lets his bias slip (again). Colorado Politics judicial reporter Michael Karlik is back at it (see the first link below for an earlier post about his reporting). If it's not using his pen to question the motives of a conservative judge, it's tossing softballs at a liberal judge rather than challenging him. It's framing his questions in such a way as to clearly indicate what the point of the whole endeavor has been. The Colorado Politics article linked second below is a Q and A Karlik had with retired judge John Leopold** to discuss Leopold's signing an amicus brief about the arrests of Minnesota Judge Hannah Dugan. She was the one who hustled someone ICE had a warrant for out the back door whe...
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Gaines: The newest use for AI? Summarizing bills so they can be understood
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Approved, Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

Gaines: The newest use for AI? Summarizing bills so they can be understood

By Cory Gaines | Guest Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project In last year's legislative session there were 705 bills introduced, with 525 passed.  I’ve not seen anything official, but the rumors I have heard have it that there are currently 200 bills in the queue for the 75th Legislature this year, with a prediction that the total number of bills could hit 600 to 700 by May. What spurred my looking at bill numbers this year was an email forwarded from a friend.  It was a marketing email by Colorado Capitol Watch (CCW), a group that bills itself as the “the premier” bill and legislator tracking site for Colorado.  The email offered a novel service:  using AI to make summaries of legislation.   Members of CCW are entitled to use their AI tool to h...
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Gaines: Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Trump directives vs. his Red Flag Law position
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Approved, Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

Gaines: Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Trump directives vs. his Red Flag Law position

By Cory Gaines | Guest Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project I saw a recent CPR article about the conflict between Trump's directives on immigration and Colorado's sanctuary state laws. In that article, the reporter put up a statement by our own Colorado Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Phil Weiser. That statement is in the screenshot linked above. I thought it would make an interesting contrast to compare what AG Weiser said re. Trump policy vs. Colorado sanctuary law to what AG Weiser said not too long after passage of Colorado's Red Flag Law. I found a couple of CPR articles with quotes from AG Weiser. Both date to 2019, the year of passage for the first iteration of the Red Flag Law. The second link below is to an April 1, 2019 article and the third is t...
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Gaines: Legislative Democrats do their business in darkness
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Approved, Commentary, completecolorado.com

Gaines: Legislative Democrats do their business in darkness

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Complete Colorado On Dec. 30, 2024, right prior to the legally-mandated deadline, the Executive Committee of the Colorado legislature held a hearing on Senate Bill 24-157.  If you don’t know it by number, this is the bill that, among other things, allows the legislature to avoid certain provisions of the Colorado Open Meetings Law, which privileges them in ways that almost no other governmental entity in this state enjoys.  This privilege extends beyond just legislative business, too.  Majority Democrats have already made use of the law to hold two closed caucus meetings. READ THE FULL COMMENTARY AT COMPLETE COLORADO Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessaril...
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Gaines: You paid about $24.5 million in tax dollars to Denver to address the city’s homelessness
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Approved, Colorado Accountability Project, Commentary

Gaines: You paid about $24.5 million in tax dollars to Denver to address the city’s homelessness

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project A CORA request came back recently (part of digging into a reader question) that illustrates the importance of paying attention to what your legislature is doing — in particular, paying attention to those seemingly-unimportant, unsexy bills. The reader had asked how much money Denver has spent on homelessness. I'm not even going to pretend that I can find or relate a full accounting to you. Not only are there different streams of money, how you do the counting matters. I've seen headlines that put the number at $155 million spent by Denver. Okay. Personal experience, making repeated requests to Denver officials for information on the topic have gone unanswered. Let's go with that number, though I wonder whether the lack o...
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Gaines: A legislative directory to reach anyone in the 75th session
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Approved, Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

Gaines: A legislative directory to reach anyone in the 75th session

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project A reader was kind enough to make a directory of legislators in an Excel Spreadsheet. It's linked below and feel free to make a local copy (and share). Sheet 1 is senators, sheet 2 is representatives. It lists phones, emails, committee memberships, party affiliation, and district. The other quite helpful thing here is that you can copy and paste the emails. I have more than once used this spreadsheet to email every. single. legislator. It's even got some "hidden tabs" with voting machine passwords!** A great big thanks to the person — what must have been a lot of time to produce this and share it! **It doesn't. I don't have the kind of political juice to avoid any sort of legal entanglement that comes with tha...
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Gaines: You, too, can file a campaign finance complaint against someone
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Approved, Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

Gaines: You, too, can file a campaign finance complaint against someone

By Cory Gaines | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice You may not have known this before, but you have the ability to accuse someone in this state of a campaign finance law violation.  You don’t have to be a witness at a trial.  In fact, once you make the accusation, you are essentially out of the process.  You will get notifications from the secretary of state’s office about the progress of the complaint, but you don’t do anything other than swear out a complaint.   You also don’t have to have an intimate knowledge of campaign finance law.  I’m not urging you to make wild, uneducated accusations here, but you don’t need to be a lawyer or an expert.  Many of the rules around campaign finance are pretty straightforward, thus finding violations d...
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