Colorado Republican Rep. Don Wilson of Monument accidentally left a loaded Glock 9mm handgun in a restroom at the state Capitol last week.
In an apology on Twitter/X, Wilson claimed he “takes firearm safety very seriously,” which his behavior contradicts.
Wilson is the latest in a string of Colorado Republicans who have mishandled guns in and around the Capitol.
Stephen D. Daniels, new Chair of the Mesa County Board of Public Health, violated Colorado Title 25 by giving control over the health department’s budget to the elected county commissioners. No provision in the state public health law permits that.
When the Mesa County Commissioners had the Board of Health (BOH) sign their new Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA), the commissioners, County Attorney Todd Starr and all 7 members of the new BOH all either knowingly or unknowingly violated Colorado Revised Statute Title 25, Article 1, Part 5(k).
Tina Peters in a November 2, 2023 video posted on YouTube
Tina Peters filed a lawsuit (pdf) November 8 against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold to overturn the $15,400 campaign finance violation fine an administrative law judge levied against her on October 4, 2023, claiming the fine is “unfair” and that it has “irreparably injured” her.
The Court fined her for soliciting donations to run for re-election as Mesa County Clerk in 2021-2022 without having first filed the necessary paperwork with the state that requires she report the money she raised and spent on her campaign. The fine pertained to Tina’s campaign for County Clerk that she dropped out of in 2022 to run for Colorado Secretary of State instead. Tina lost the primary election for that seat to her Republican competitor by 14 percentage points, but she is telling people in interviews that she won that election.
For all her railing against the debt ceiling bill, Colorado’s 3rd District House Representative Lauren Boebert missed voting on the bill entirely on Wednesday night. The vote passed by an overwhelmingly bipartisan margin of 314-117. The Senate passed the bill this morning by a vote of 63-36. The bill had to pass before Monday to avoid a potentially catastrophic, historic federal government default on paying debts the nation has already incurred.
Boebert had vowed to vote “no” on the bill, saying “Our base didn’t volunteer, door knock and fight so hard to get us the majority for this kind of compromise deal with Joe Biden. Our voters deserve better than this. We work for them. You can count me as a NO on this deal. We can do better.”
Before Andrea Haitz was on the District 51 School Board, she was on the Juniper Ridge charter school board.
In January of 2018, while on Juniper Ridge’s board, the school was found to be educating kindergarteners in a 10×20 foot windowless tent that was heated by a wood stove and had a single rented porta-potty next it for a bathroom, alongside a bright red wood chipper.
Grand Junction’s average January daytime temperature is 31 degrees F, just below freezing.
Andrea Haitz, in 2023 is now District 51 School Board President
Juniper Ridge’s Board didn’t tell District 51 about the tent and did not submit a plan to the School District use it. Instead, Juniper Ridge portrayed its use to parents as an “extended field trip.”
After about 12 days of this, someone in the neighborhood called District 51 to report the setup.
Colorado House Rep. Lauren Boebert’s joke portraying her district as a redneck hillbilly paradise drew embarrassment to western Colorado nationally on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert in Colbert’s monologue on February 2, 2023. The Late Show is broadcast nationally.
Note taped to the front door of the Mack Post Office.
We’ve already heard about the dire labor shortage that is causing major mail back-ups at the Post Office’s Scarlet mail handling facility, and delays in delivery of residential and business mail locally.
Now we just found out the Mack Post Office was closed indefinitely on December 31, 2022, leaving people in the Mack area without any retail postal services. People needing postal services are told to go to the post offices in Loma and Fruita.
Longtime Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce President Diane Schwenke
The former longtime CEO of the Grand Junction Area Chamber of Commerce, Diane Schwenke, has announced she will be running for the at-large seat on Grand Junction City Council in 2023.
Yes, THAT Diane Schwenke.
The one who endorsed convicted felony embezzler Steve King for state Senate in 2012.
The one who endorsed Ray Scott as a replacement for convicted felon Steve King. In 2018, Scott double-billed both his legislative and campaign expense accounts for over $1,000 in Uber rides, effectively doubling his personal reimbursements. He was also sued by the ACLU for blocking constituents from his official social media accounts, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.
The same Diane Schwenke who endorsed Laura Bradford for Colorado House of Representatives in 2012. Bradford was pulled over by Denver police for driving under the influence of alcohol during her first and only term in the House. She quit after that term.
The same Diane Schwenke who endorsed Rose Pugliese for County Commissioner. Pugliese worked to kill the Riverfront Trail System by gutting all funding for it, circulated a petition to force D-51 teachers to stop teaching kids about climate change, and also stumped for the disastrous Tina Peters to be elected County Clerk.
Bobbie Daniel’s May, 2016 self-published book, is 273 pages and is now out of print.
In May of 2016, Republican Mesa County Commissioner candidate Bobbie Daniel self-published a book, “Solutions from a Nobody: Using Founding Principles to Solve Modern Problems.” She wrote the book to present “clear and important ideas to fix what ails America.” She spent ten years as a hairdresser listening to her customers and put a lot of time into thinking about the problems they talked about. Daniel wrote this book to provide solutions to their problems.
First of all, kudos to Daniel for bothering to think about societal problems at all, let alone try to come up with solutions. Most people never bother, so that’s worth something.
Everybody is talking about how, while reading a passage from the Bible, Colorado House Rep. Lauren Boebert mixed up “wanton” and “wonton,” jokingly admitting that she didn’t understand what “wanton killing” was.
Remember that point in the Club 20 debate between Boebert and her opponent Adam Frisch, where Frisch asked Boebert why she didn’t attend the Club 20 Steak Fry, an event to honor the candidates participating in the debates?
Boebert answered Frisch by curtly saying, “Dinners aren’t my thing.”
What she didn’t want people to know was that she wasn’t at the steak fry that night because she was across the state in Woodland Park, preaching at the Truth and Liberty Coalition’s “From Vision to Victory” conference at Charis Bible College, hosted by faith healer Andrew Wommack.
In this exchange during her speaking engagement at the Jefferson County Republican Men’s Club on February 21, a woman in the audience asks election conspiracy-theorist Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters how to get “voters with inappropriate names off the voter list”:
Woman to Tina: “Is there anything we can do at this point, at this election, I mean to get these voters with inappropriate names off the voter list?”
Tina: “Yes, there’s some issues on HAVA [the Help America Vote Act] (pdf). They stand behind HAVA a lot. That is the national voting act where they are bringing in all these drop boxes and making elections “more accessible” to everybody. [Tina gestures using air quotes when she says “more accessible”]. Well, they’re really not. They’re making them more accessible to the ones that shouldn’t be voting.”
Tina Peters is running to replace Jenna Griswold as Colorado Secretary of State.
————————————————————————–Local realtor and right wing extremist Cindy Ficklin posted on her Facebook page Sunday, 12/26/21, that she was withdrawing from the race for the House District 55 seat. She filed to run on 10/18/21. Her candidacy lasted only about two months.
Ficklin
Far right wing extremist Cindy Ficklin announced on Sunday, 12/26, that she has withdrawn her candidacy for the Colorado House District 55 seat.
Ficklin made the announcement in one of her usual extended, emoji-laden posts sprinkled with misspellings. She expressed shock that she had been called anti-semitic during her campaign, especially by her Republican Jewish friends, and admitted she had been ignorant about long-time anti-semitic tropes like saying Jews controlled all the banks the world. She expressed disappointment that people called her “gun-toting” when she only owns only “a couple baby Glocks.”
Ficklin lamented that the media had referred to her as a “conspiracy theorist,” saying
“I call it being the f*cking resistance, assholes.”
Newly-elected D-51 School Board member Andrea Haitz promised transparency, but is violating open meetings laws and attempting to enact policy without public comment. At about 4:43 into the meeting video, after a suggestion that the Board could get more information about potential law firms to hire, Haitz says “There’s a certain point where you can get too much information.”
It took no time at all for the newly sworn-in District 51 School Board members to violate Colorado’s Open Meetings Law (pdf), violate their campaign promises of transparency, and indicate their willingness to spend excessive taxpayer funds for no clear reason, and they did it all in one breathtaking move they sprang on everyone a full four hours into their first board meeting December 14.
The antics of crazy Republican Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and her loony-tune election conspiracy scandal earned a 9 minute-long segment on MSNBC’s nationally-broadcast cable TV program The Rachel Maddow Show yesterday, November 17, 2021.
The Rachel Maddow Show is the most-watched cable news show in the country.
Maddow discusses Peters’ relationship with Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow Guy,” House Rep. Lauren Boebert’s former campaign manager, the FBI raid of her and others’ homes on 11/16, and more.
Maddow said the story of the Mesa County Clerk, which began as a very small and awkward story, has “metastasized and become very serious” and even “riveting” in how it has unfolded.
Cindy Ficklin is already blowing off deadlines for filing campaign finance information and incurring hundreds in fines.
Republican conspiracy theorist Cindy Ficklin has already been delinquent in filing her first campaign finance disclosure, incurring a $200 fine.
Ficklin announced October 18 that she was running for Colorado House District 55 in retribution against the “leftist progressive liberals” at the school district who dared not appoint her to the open School Board seat left by Paul Pitton’s retirement.
Colorado law gives candidates 10 days after filing notice they are running for office to submit a Personal Financial Disclosure to the state.
Cindy Ficklin in now-deleted video where she announced she was running for House District 55 to get back at the School District for spurning her
On October 27, the day before it was due, the state sent Ficklin a courtesy reminder about the deadline to file the disclosure.
But the October 28 deadline to file it came and went without Ficklin filing anything.
An event held by embattled right wing Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters at the old county courthouse that was billed as a “press conference” turned out to be more of a rally of her supporters Monday, as the event was poorly attended by local media outlets. Two newspapers were represented, and no television stations were there.
Peters’ talk seemed to focus on impugning the Mesa County Commissioners for entering into another contract with Dominion Voting Systems to provide secure voting equipment to the County and keeping it maintained until 2029. Peters also waved what she said was a stack of emails from the county commissioners that she had obtained that she believes show the commissioners doing something detrimental to county citizens. Peters insisted she had exposed massive voter fraud in Mesa County, but still has not provided conclusive proof.
Trump supporter, election conspiracy theorist and Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters is under criminal investigation by three agencies for allegedly compromising voting equipment.
At least one ethics complaint submitted to the State of Colorado about Mesa County’s crazy Clerk Tina Peters is starting to bear fruit.
Luis Lipchak, the Secretary of State’s Campaign Finance Enforcement Manager, determined that a complaint by Mesa County resident Scott Bielfuss (pdf) alleging that Peters violated campaign finance laws has merit and their office has decided to pursue it.
Bielfuss alleged that Peters “flew up to Mr Pillows cybers-symposium on a private plane provided to her and is staying as a guest of the Pillow foundation in clear violation of accepting gift laws. Complainant [Bielfuss] alleges that by engaging in the aforementioned activities, Respondent [Peters] failed to report contributions or expenditures associated with said activities and accepted gifts over allowed amounts.”
Wayne Williams, via Wikipedia, photo By Jeffrey Beall – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72780852
Item #7 on the agenda at the Mesa County Commissioners’ meeting tomorrow (Monday, August 30) at 9:00a.m., is signing a contract, (pdf) drafted by former Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams himself, that will officially make Williams Mesa County’s Designated Election Official (“DEO”) for the November 2021 coordinated election for the County. The contract says Williams will get a salary of $180/hour, discounted from his normal rate of $400/hour, and Mesa County will pay any non-lawyer assistants Williams taps from his law firm for help at the rate of $50/hour. The County will also pay Williams’ travel expenses to and from his home in Colorado Springs.
There is no stated maximum expense Mesa County will incur from retaining Williams for this position. Rather, the contract states the expense can be unlimited:
“Any estimate of fees and costs that we may have discussed is only an estimate, and is not an agreement to a fixed or maximum fee. Accordingly, we have made no commitment concerning the maximum fees and costs that will be necessary to resolve or complete this matter.”
