Search the Community

FIRST ON FOX: A group of House Republicans wants to award former President Trump the Congressional Gold Medal. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., is leading a Congressional resolution to bestow the honor on Trump "in recognition of his exceptional leadership and dedication to strengthening America's diplomatic relations during his presidency," according to legislative text obtained by Fox News Digital. It is backed by six fellow House Republicans, including House GOP Deputy Whip Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, and Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Randy Weber of Texas and Mike Waltz of Florida. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-congressional-gold-medal-new-house-gop-resolution

54% of Americans Approve of Colorado Kicking Trump Off Ballot -- Including a Quarter of Republicans A new poll conducted by YouGov America found that 54% of Americans — and even 24% of Republicans — approved of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to kick former President Donald Trump off of its 2024 presidential primary ballot. The court released its opinion holding that Trump was ineligible to reprise his role as president because of the 14th Amendment’s clause barring insurrectionists from holding office on Tuesday evening, concluding that the evidence brought to it “established that President Trump engaged in insurrection” by attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. While some anti-Trump stalwarts have praised the decision, many have criticized it as an attack on democracy and act of political gamesmanship. But early polling shows that a majority of Americans support the opinion. According to the YouGov survey of 3,492 respondents, 54% of the country approve of the Court’s conclusion and 38% strongly approve of it. A combined 35%, meanwhile, either strongly or somewhat disapprove of it. Predictably, the vast majority of Democrats (84%) support Trump’s removal from the ballot. But so does a plurality of independents (48%), and even a decent proportion of Republicans (24%). https://www.mediaite.com/news/new-poll-54-of-americans-approve-of-colorado-kicking-trump-off-ballot-including-a-quarter-of-republicans/

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1GifQxudoX/?igsh=MWg5OXM1enFjYm13NQ==

Wow...man's best friend. https://www.foxnews.com/us/colorado-hiker-missing-for-months-found-dead-his-dog-still-alive-by-his-side

👊🏻🇺🇸

Six accused of forging names of dead people so Colorado candidate could make primary ballot Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on Tuesday announced his office has charged six people for allegedly submitting petitions with forged signatures in an attempt to get a 2022 Republican Congressional candidate on the ballot. The six individuals — Alex Joseph, Terris Kintchen, Patrick Rimpel, Jordahni Rimpel, Aliyah Moss and Diana Watt — were paid circulators for Grassfire, LLC, an Oregon-based professional petitioning firm, the attorney general’s office said in a news release. The firm was hired by the Carl Andersen campaign, a Republican candidate running for Colorado’s 7th Congressional District, an area anchored by Jefferson County. Brittany Pettersen, a Democrat, handily won the seat in November’s election. Prosecutors say Andersen’s campaign hired Grassfire to collect the necessary 1,500 valid signatures to get on the Republican primary ballot. The Secretary of State’s Office rejected the petition, however, due to an insufficient number of valid voter signatures on the petition. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/six-accused-of-forging-names-of-dead-people-so-colorado-candidate-could-make-primary-ballot/ar-AA1cO46s?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=39cbc4ec53774f6aaf3bc0ec1b56d889&ei=78

Dang that makes some Tesla’s pretty cheap. Under 38k for a model Y long range. You get $12500 off from MSRP. Pretty good deal for Colorado residents https://electrek.co/2023/05/29/colorado-ev-state-tax-credits/ Let’s say you want to buy a new Tesla Model Y Long Range with Dual Motor All-Wheel Drive. I’ve not added any extras when choosing the model, so the cost is $50,490 before state sales tax. This model already qualifies for the federal tax credit of $7,500, and from July 1, it also qualifies for Colorado’s state tax credit of $5,000. That drops the price down to $37,990, and some folks in Colorado may qualify for rebates from their utilities as well.

https://electrek.co/2023/04/27/colorado-may-follow-ca-in-banning-gas-lawn-equipment-in-2025/

Supreme Court ruling on Trump ballot eligibility: What it means, what the justices said and how we got here The former president said he hopes the decision issued a day before Super Tuesday will "unify" the country. Kate Murphy and Dylan Stableford Updated Mon, March 4, 2024 at 12:29 PM CST·5 min read 26.4k Donald Trump speaks at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP) Former President Donald Trump was handed a major victory on Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he cannot be excluded from Colorado's primary election ballot over his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. "BIG WIN FOR AMERICA!!!" Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media platform, shortly after the ruling was handed down. Speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump said he hoped the ruling would "unify" the country in allowing him to continue his bid for the White House. "I think it will go a long way to bringing our country together, which our country needs," he said. The former president had appealed the Colorado Supreme Court's decision to disqualify him under the 14th Amendment's Section 3, the so-called insurrection clause of the U.S. Constitution. The unanimous decision came just one day before Colorado voters head to the polls on Super Tuesday. Here’s what to know about the ruling. 🔎 What the ruling said The Supreme Court is photographed on Feb. 28. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP) "Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse," the justices wrote. It’s the first time the Supreme Court has weighed in on the insurrection clause, as the post-Civil War era provision was enacted in 1868 to prevent former Confederates from becoming a member of Congress or being elected to other offices. It’s also the biggest case related to the presidential election that the high court has weighed in on since the 2000 election in Bush v. Gore. ↘ What the liberal justices said While the court's three liberal justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred with the judgment, they disagreed with the conservative majority's rationale, saying it was unnecessary and went too far: "The majority announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment," Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson wrote. "In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement. We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily, and we therefore concur only in the judgment." 🏔️ What Colorado's secretary of state said Rioters clash with police outside the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) "I am disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision stripping states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates," Jena Griswold wrote on X. "Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking [insurrectionists] from our ballot." 🇺🇲 What the ruling means The highly anticipated ruling provides clarity as to who will appear on the ballot — not just for voters in Colorado on the eve they head to the polls on Super Tuesday, but also in Illinois and Maine, where voters had also petitioned for Trump to be disqualified from the ballot in those states, also citing the insurrection clause. “Nothing of this nature can go forward in any state, not Maine, not Illinois, not anywhere else,” Ned Foley, law professor and director of the election law program at Ohio State University, told Yahoo News. “That's one thing that's absolutely clear from today's ruling.” ➡️ How we got here The case, known as Trump v. Anderson, centers on a so-called insurrection clause of the U.S. Constitution, formally known as Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. It prohibits officials who have previously sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution from holding government office if they engage in insurrection. Section 3 does not specifically mention the word “president” in a long list of government offices. Trump maintains that Section 3 doesn’t apply to him on two levels: because he did not engage in insurrection and the provision does not specify “president.” However, Colorado voters argued that Trump did engage in insurrection on Jan. 6 and therefore should be disqualified from holding office under Section 3. Trump, however, has not been explicitly charged with “insurrection” in any of the four criminal cases in which he has been indicted. ❓Unanswered questions During the Feb. 8 oral arguments of Trump v. Anderson before the Supreme Court, many questions arose as to whether Section 3 applies to Trump, like whether he is considered an insurrectionist due to his actions on Jan. 6, or if the presidency is an “office” of the United States. “Many of the issues that had to do with Section 3 and whether it actually applies to Trump, [the court] did not answer any of them one way or the other,” Foley told Yahoo News. Foley said perhaps the biggest lingering question is what Congressional members, like Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin who voted to impeach Trump twice for insurrection, will do if Trump is elected into the White House again. Foley said congressional members like Raskin could accept the will of the voters, or if some members feel that Trump shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office, they could perhaps invoke Section 3. “It could get very ugly between November this year and January 2025 if the court hasn’t really settled Section 3,” Foley said.

retired buddy of mine rides all over out west, mostly Colorado and a bunch in West VA and the southeast mtn bikes are great collar bone breakers... he's on his third time last fall. he's still a f'ng maniac at 66 though, but his doc suggested shuffle board or billiards on the last visit

"A drag dancer stomped on the gunman with her high heels." Hate crime charges filed in Colorado Source-https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/21/us/colorado-springs-shooting-news Title-An Army veteran says he went into ‘combat mode’ to disarm the gunman COLORADO SPRINGS — Richard M. Fierro said he was at a table in Club Q with his wife, daughter and friends on Saturday, watching a drag show, when the sudden flash of gunfire ripped across the nightclub. His instincts from four combat deployments as an Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan instantly kicked in. Fight back, he told himself. snip-"...tackling the gunman and beating him bloody with the gunman’s own gun.." snip-" Mr. Fierro, who served in the Army for 15 years, said he raced across the room, grabbed the gunman by a handle on the back of his body armor, pulled him to the floor and jumped on top of him." snip-" As the fight continued, he said, he yelled for other club patrons to help him. A man grabbed the rifle and moved it away to safety. A drag dancer stomped on the gunman with her high heels. The whole time, Mr. Fierro said, he kept pummeling the shooter’s head while the two men screamed obscenities at each other."

He just can’t help himself…😂😂

Noncitizens allowed to vote in some local elections, spurring backlash from GOP BY: ZACHARY ROTH - MARCH 20, 2023 4:55 AM The push for noncitizen voting rights has spurred a vigorous response from opponents. (Scott Olson | Getty Images) A few cities and towns around the U.S. are letting noncitizens vote in local elections, and more could follow. In response, Republicans see a chance to turn opposition to noncitizen voting into a national rallying cry. On March 14, Washington, D.C., became the latest city to approve noncitizen voting, when a bill allowing the District’s roughly 42,000 noncitizens, including those who are undocumented, to vote in municipal elections became law after a bid by congressional Republicans to overturn it fell short. A day earlier, a group of prominent conservative voting activists held a Washington, D.C., press conference to promote what they called a national campaign to “protect voting at all levels of government as the exclusive right of citizens.” Republicans also have introduced legislation in Congress that would withhold election funding to states where local governments have enfranchised noncitizens. And a separate GOP measure would amend the Constitution to ban the practice. This crusade is designed in part to push back against efforts to give noncitizens the right to vote, an idea that generally polls badly with most voters. But it could also reinforce a broader set of fears, stoked in recent years by former President Donald Trump and other party leaders, that American elections are threatened by illegal voters. The District of Columbia isn’t alone in embracing noncitizen voting. In January, the Vermont Supreme Court greenlit the practice for two Vermont cities, including the state capital, Montpelier, rejecting a Republican lawsuit. And on March 9, the state’s largest city, Burlington, voted to allow noncitizen voting, though the state legislature still needs to approve the change. Since 2016, San Francisco has let noncitizens vote in school board elections. Eleven Maryland towns also enfranchise noncitizens, the most recent in 2018. Other cities, including Boston and Los Angeles, have seen efforts to do the same in the last few years. In 2021, New York City passed a bill that would have allowed by far the largest single number of noncitizens to vote, but it was struck down by a court as unconstitutional last year, after another GOP lawsuit. Appeals are ongoing. A Democratic state lawmaker in Connecticut has introduced a bill to allow noncitizens to vote in state elections, though he has said he knows it won’t pass, and the goal is simply to spark debate. Opponents amend state constitutions This push for noncitizen voting rights has spurred a vigorous response from opponents. Since 2020, five states – Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Ohio, and, in December, Louisiana – have amended their constitutions to make clear that only citizens can vote in elections at any level. Arizona, Minnesota, and North Dakota have similar language. The clash over the District of Columbia’s bill, which was passed in October, has been among the fiercest. “Our noncitizen residents are paying taxes, enrolled in school, working here in the District of Columbia, and involved in community affairs,” said Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, the bill’s sponsor. “And without this legislation, they don’t have a voice in our elections, which is essentially one of the most fundamental things in our country.” But in a letter to District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser, several GOP members of the House of Representatives said the legislation “fundamentally violates American sovereignty,” calling it “a disgraceful episode in the District’s history.” In February, the U.S. House passed legislation, 260-162, to overturn the District’s measure, which Congress is empowered to do under the 1973 District of Columbia Home Rule Act establishing the city’s autonomy. It was the first time the House had voted to overturn a District bill since 2015. Forty-two Democrats voted with Republicans. But the U.S. Senate didn’t take up the House’s measure, and on March 14, Congress’ 30-day window to overturn a District bill expired, meaning the law went into effect. In arguing against the district bill, Republican leaders often focused on its potential to enfranchise employees of foreign governments. “Today, in D.C., somebody who is a Russian citizen working at the (Russian embassy) can vote in D.C. elections,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told reporters on March 8. “A CCP member working at the Chinese embassy can vote in D.C. elections. That shouldn’t be the case.” In some instances, opponents in Congress have misstated the effects of the bill. “Does anybody in this country think that someone working for the Chinese embassy here in Washington, D.C., should be voting in the presidential election?” asked House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., in a Feb. 8 Fox News appearance. “Absolutely not. It’s insane, what they did.” In fact, the District law applies only to local elections. Federal law bars noncitizens from voting in federal elections. Emmer’s office didn’t respond to an inquiry about the misstatement. The District debate has played out amid a broader conflict between Congress and the city. The Senate on March 8 cleared a House-passed bill that would overturn the District’s rewrite of its criminal code, which had been a product of a years-long review and would have reduced penalties for some crimes, among other steps. President Joe Biden has said he’ll sign Congress’ overturn bill, angering District leaders and many Democrats. “Our disenfranchisement is on full display right now,” said Nadeau. “So we’re expanding voting rights here while our autonomy is under attack. It’s a pretty spectacular juxtaposition.” A long history of noncitizen voting It might seem like a new idea, but noncitizen voting has been around as long as the Republic, though state laws governing it have swung back and forth several times. Both before and after the Revolution, all property-owning white men could vote, and many noncitizens did so. The practice was then phased out in many places, but it saw a resurgence in the middle of the 19th century, when at least 16 states passed measures to allow noncitizen voting, often to incentivize workers to move to less populous, Western states. Then, beginning in the 1870s and lasting into the first decades of the 20th century, states gradually began repealing these laws. This retreat from noncitizen voting came amid a wider push in the Northeast to restrict voting by recently arrived Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, regardless of citizenship status, who were seen as less educated and responsible than the white Protestants who until then had predominated. During the same period, Southern whites were passing Jim Crow laws to crack down on voting by recently enfranchised Black citizens. Nebraska was the last state to repeal its noncitizen voting law in 1926. In this century, the issue has resurfaced in some communities where the number of noncitizens has grown quickly. In New York City, it took on a new level of urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic because so many frontline workers were noncitizens, said Nora Moran, the policy and advocacy director for United Neighborhood Houses, which advocated for the bill there. “Largely, the people who were working in our hospitals, delivering our food, keeping people safe, had no ability to vote on the policies that lawmakers were making that directly impacted their health and safety,” said Moran. “So COVID underscored the importance of the bill for us.” This resurgence has given Republicans the chance to expand the issue onto the playing field of national politics. On March 2, Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., who founded and chairs the House Election Integrity Caucus, introduced a resolution calling for a constitutional amendment barring noncitizens from voting in elections at any level. Three days earlier, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, sent a letter to Speaker Kevin McCarthy urging Congress to pass five conservative voting measures, including a constitutional amendment banning noncitizen voting. Since 2021, Raffensperger has been pushing for a similar amendment to Georgia’s constitution. And an oversight plan approved in late February by the Republican-led U.S. Committee on House Administration included a pledge to “investigate how states and localities that allow noncitizens to vote ensure that federal funds are not used to facilitate noncitizen voting.” That built on sweeping elections legislation introduced in July by Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Ill., that contained a provision penalizing states where local governments allow noncitizens to vote, by cutting their share of federal election funding by 30 percent. Davis’ measure also would require that these states keep separate voter rolls for state and federal elections, and would bar them from using federal funds to maintain state rolls containing noncitizens. The March 13 press conference promoting a national campaign against noncitizen voting was organized by Americans for Citizen Voting, which was founded by the Missouri Republican strategist Christopher Arps, and helps states amend their constitutions to ban noncitizen voting. Arps was joined by three leaders of the broader conservative push for stricter voting rules: Hogan Gidley, a former Trump campaign spokesman who runs the elections arm of the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank; Christian Adams, whose organization, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, has often sought to raise the alarm about illegal voting by noncitizens; and Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia, who chairs the Election Transparency Initiative, which supports tighter voting policies and opposes reforms to expand access. As that lineup suggests, these efforts appear designed in part to fold the practice of legal noncitizen voting in local elections into the existing Republican campaign to raise concerns about rare cases of illegal voting in state and federal elections, including by noncitizens. On Jan. 31, Emmer and other congressional Republicans sent a letter to Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon asking him to “to investigate claims that DACA recipients and other non-citizens are voting in Minnesota’s elections.” At times, opponents of noncitizen voting have sought to conflate the two issues. “When illegal aliens and felons vote, when identity thieves cast votes of registered voters, or cast them on behalf of people long deceased, the votes of legitimate voters are diluted or diminished,” Arps wrote in a 2019 op-ed launching Americans for Citizen Voting. Moran, of United Neighborhood Houses, said her group has encountered this kind of conflation as it has advocated for the New York City bill. But, she added, noncitizens in fact tend to be especially anxious to follow the law. “The people who are following voting rules most closely are often noncitizens,” Moran said. “Because they don’t want to do anything that could jeopardize their ability to pursue citizenship or other kinds of status down the line.” Still, Moran added, since the New York City bill passed, her organization has heard from local advocates across the country looking for guidance on how to craft their own bills. The calls have come not only from big cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, she said, but also from a group of small towns in Maine that are resettling refugees. “So for us, it’s been very heartening,” Moran said, “that, at a time when there’s a lot of backlash against voting rights, when there’s a lot of rhetoric around migration and who is coming to this country, that there are groups who are interested in making sure that new people coming to our country can participate in civic life and make their communities better.”

https://www.climbing.com/news/rockslide-destroys-classic-boulders-rocky-mountain-national-park/

Republican secretary of state threatens to kick Biden off the ballot as Trump payback JANE C. TIMM AND AMANDA TERKEL AND ADAM EDELMAN January 5, 2024 at 7:36 PM Jeff Roberson A top Republican official in Missouri is threatening to remove President Joe Biden from appearing on the ballot as retaliation for the determination in two other states that Donald Trump doesn't qualify because he "engaged in insurrection." "What has happened in Colorado & Maine is disgraceful & undermines our republic," Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft wrote on the social media site X on Friday. "While I expect the Supreme Court to overturn this, if not, Secretaries of State will step in & ensure the new legal standard for @realDonaldTrump applies equally to @JoeBiden!" Ashcroft's post came shortly after the Supreme Court agreed to review a decision by Colorado's high court that found Trump could be barred from the state's primary ballot because of his actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Colorado's Supreme Court based its ruling on the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which bars those who "engaged in insurrection" from running for various federal offices. Ashcroft said in an interview that he tweeted his warning to "remind people of how severe this is." "I’m 99% certain the Supreme Court will stop it, but if they don’t, chaos is ahead and we’ve got to avoid it," he told NBC News. Ashcroft said he plans to file an amicus brief — in support of neither party — warning the Supreme Court of what he believes will happen if Colorado’s disqualification is allowed to stand. "If Democrat states are saying we're not going to let these Republicans run, you bet you're going to see the same thing happening from Republican states. And it's not good," Ashcroft said. "If you're playing a basketball game and the other team doesn't have to dribble the ball, eventually you're going to say, 'Why am I worried about dribbling the ball?'" Asked how he would disqualify Biden from the ballot for insurrection, Ashcroft said that he's "let an invasion unstopped into our country from the border." Vice President Kamala Harris, he added, "supported people that were rebelling against the U.S. government during the riots in 2020," referring to racial justice protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder. "If this is the standard, does that suddenly mean she's not allowed to run? None of us can say, because there is no standard," he said. The Biden campaign did not immediately return a request for comment. Michon Lindstrom, a spokesperson for Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, said in an email that "our Office is pleased that the U.S. Supreme Court has taken up Donald Trump’s appeal from the Colorado Supreme Court and will ensure clarity and consistency for all Secretaries of State on this question." Texas' Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also suggested last month that his state would consider removing Biden as well, "for allowing 8 million people to cross the border since he’s been president, disrupting our state far more than anything anyone else has done in recent history." Trump remains on the ballot in Colorado and Maine — which both hold their primaries on Super Tuesday (March 5) — while the cases go through the legal system. The Maine case is slightly different than the one in Colorado. There, the Democratic secretary of state made the determination that Trump was ineligible for the ballot. Ashcroft said he broadly didn't believe secretaries should be involved in deciding who is on the ballot. "I don't want to go there," he said. "I'm scared for what it means for our election."

There’s a massive difference in gas prices from state to state. I pay under $3/gal in Colorado.

https://www.newsweek.com/colorado-invites-disney-move-amid-desantis-attacks-1699450

The Electoral College question looming over 2024 Mark Murray Sun, April 7, 2024 at 8:00 AM CDT·6 min read There are two scenarios that could explain where the 2024 election stands right now. In one, President Joe Biden is locked in something close to a 50-50 contest with former President Donald Trump. In the other, Biden is trailing by more — maybe much more — than the national polls suggest. The answer depends largely on whether Trump and Republicans have maintained the advantage in the Electoral College that they held in the last two presidential elections. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2 percentage points — but Trump’s performance among certain demographics and in certain states meant he defeated her in the Electoral College, 306 to 232. (Because of “faithless” electors, the final history-book margin later changed to 304 to 227.) In 2020, Biden bested Trump in the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points, getting him the same number of Electoral College votes Trump won four years earlier — 306. And if that trend carries over to 2024, Biden might have to win the popular vote by 5 points or more to get the 270-plus Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency. But a two-election trend is no guarantee of future results. And there’s another school of thought about 2024 that the GOP’s Electoral College edge may not be as pronounced, as Trump has made gains with Black and Latino voters, including in states like California and New York that won’t come close to deciding the presidential election. Even slightly better margins for Trump in those big, blue states could bring the national vote and the tipping-point state vote into closer alignment. The question, however, is how sizable that decrease might be — if there is any. It’s an important piece of information to help gauge what the national polls really mean right now, but it’s also shrouded in mystery. “With Trump’s improvements among Hispanic and Black voters, the pro-GOP bias may decline by 1 to 2 points — but it won’t be erased,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. “In other words, I think Trump could lose the popular vote by 2 points in November and still have an excellent chance of carrying Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada — which is why I view Trump as a pretty obvious favorite at the moment,” Wasserman added. The case for the GOP maintaining its Electoral College edge When political analysts discuss Electoral College bias, they’re referring to the difference between the margins in the popular vote and in the “tipping point” state — that is, the decisive state that carried the victorious candidate across the 270-electoral vote threshold needed to win the presidency. Over much of the last 70 years, the tipping point states have closely tracked to the popular vote. In 2012, for example, Barack Obama won the popular vote by almost 4 percentage points, and he carried his tipping point state, Colorado, by more than 5 points. But that changed in the Trump era, when the Electoral College bias grew to the highest level since 1948 — in the Republican Party’s direction. Part of the explanation was Trump’s particularly strong performance among white working-class voters in the Midwest and Rust Belt battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Another explanation was Democrats’ overperformance in states like California and New York, which aren’t key to deciding presidential contests in our current political landscape. “Biden won by roughly 7 million votes [in 2020],” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, the GOP half of the bipartisan team that conducts the NBC News poll. “He won California by 5 million votes; he won New York by 2 million votes.” “This means in 48 other states and D.C., the vote was essentially tied,” McInturff added. Also, Democratic improvement in Texas — going from 41% of the vote in 2012 to 46% in 2020 — further underscores how, in the Trump era, three of the most populous states have swung in the Democrats’ direction relative to the nation. And with Biden and Trump set to be on the presidential ballot again in 2024, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to see both overperformances — Trump’s with white working-class voters, Biden’s with voters in places like California and New York — repeat themselves. The case for the GOP losing its Electoral College edge A year ago, however, political number crunchers Nate Cohn of The New York Times and J. Miles Coleman and Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics surmised that 2024 could be different from 2016 and 2020. With national polls showing Trump faring better with Black and Latino voters, and with Democrats performing better in the 2022 midterms in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania than in California and New York (relative to past results), they argued that the pro-GOP Electoral College bias could be shrinking. “If in fact Trump is improving with young and diverse voters — a debatable proposition, I think, but this is what the polls show now — it may simply give him better margins in states he’s already likely to win or lose, like California, Florida and New York,” Kondik told NBC News. “So I do think it’s possible that the pro-GOP bias in the Electoral College could be smaller in 2024 than 2020,” he added. Indeed, recent high-quality California polls show Biden ahead of Trump in the state by about 20 points in a head-to-head matchup, down from Biden’s nearly 30-point winning margin in California in 2020. As Cohn put it in his New York Times article last year: “At the very least, tied national polls today don’t mean Mr. Trump leads in the states likeliest to decide the presidency.” Where the battleground polling stands right now Currently, Biden and Trump are locked in a competitive contest nationally, according to head-to-head polls, but Trump has held a small, yet consistent, advantage in several of the top battleground states, although those results are usually within the margin of error. And polling averages do hint at a pro-Trump Electoral College bias in some battlegrounds, but not others. Now, a big caveat: Using polling averages to measure exactly where a presidential contest currently stands can be problematic, because of the polls’ different methodologies, their different margins of error and their different reputations. But they can be useful to take a broad view at how the national polls might be different from battleground surveys. According to the RealClearPolitics average, Biden and Trump are essentially tied in the national polls. They’re also essentially tied in the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, suggesting little to no pro-GOP bias in those states — a shift from the final results in the last few elections, when those states tilted several points to the right of the national vote. But Trump is ahead in other battleground states, including in Michigan, which some analysts believe could be the tipping point state in 2024. This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

https://www.deseret.com/coronavirus/2021/11/3/22761167/colorado-new-covid-19-cases-hospitals

I paid $2.78 in Colorado this afternoon

otb... where? https://www.freedomsledder.com/index.php?/search/&q=colorado &type=forums_topic&quick=1&nodes=4&search_and_or=or&sortby=relevancy that 'Colorado' found him to be an insurrectionist?

primaries for Colorado and Maine are Tuesday... is this supposed to be some sort of gotcha surprise? oh, wait... forget who the OP is I don't think anyone other than a couple people here thought 'Colorado' would win this one

Sweden became the newest member of NATO earlier this month, joining 31 nations in the security alliance, including the United States. Well, make that 49 of the 50 United States. Because in a quirk of geography and history, Hawaii is not technically covered by the NATO pact. If a foreign power attacked Hawaii – say the US Navy’s base at Pearl Harbor or the headquarters of the Indo-Pacific Command northwest of Honolulu – the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would not be obligated to rise to the Aloha State’s defense. “People tend to assume Hawaii is part of the US and therefore it’s covered by NATO,” he says. But, he concedes, the tip-off is in the alliance’s name – North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Hawaii is, of course, in the Pacific, and unlike California, Colorado or Alaska, the 50th state is not part of the continental US that reaches the North Atlantic Ocean on its eastern shores. “The argument for not including Hawaii is simply that it’s not part of North America,” Santoro says. The exception is spelled out in the Washington Treaty, the document that established NATO in 1949, a decade before Hawaii became a state. While Article 5 of the treaty provides for collective self-defense in the event of a military attack on any member state, Article 6 limits the geographic scope of that.