The government should get out of the media business. Legislative fellows follow up. Your Colorado legislature: hard at work chipping away at your Second Amendment rights.
The government should get out of the media business.
I recently saw an article about the Town of Bennett dropping their ad purchases and public notice buys due to problems the town trustees had with their local paper's coverage of the sexual assault of a local child.
It brought to mind the fuss over Custer County Commissioners doing the same to the Wet Mountain Tribune paper over coverage of the what the county commissioners were doing.
Getting the press and the government in business together is inherently fraught with problems, for both parties.
I think it's time, in the internet age, to perhaps separate the two. No more ad buys, no more public notice buys, and no more threats of First Amendment lawsuits over pulling money for same if the government disagrees with the newspaper.
More in my recent op ed below.
https://completecolorado.com/2025/06/08/government-journalism-public-notice-relationship-turns-toxic/
Related:
Ari Armstrong's contemporaneous (with mine above) piece on why the government oughtn't to be funding public media.
Hear hear!
More in his op ed below.
https://completecolorado.com/2025/06/10/government-funding-of-news-media-inherently-corruptive/
Legislative fellows follow up
I posted last week about the legislative fellows law, where select nonprofits will be able to place fellows within the legislative staff office to work on research, policy analysis, etc. (see the first link below for that newsletter).
This bill, what it proposed struck me as having the potential to cause problems and/or be abused, and I'd written in to the legislative staff to see what types of safeguards there were.
I did get a response and wanted to share that.
I got an email back from Ms. Castle of legislative staff. Her response below is a quote from my email (the links she sent are left intact):
My senior leadership team and I are in the process of developing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Institute for Science and Policy (ISP) at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science to implement this fellowship. The MOU needs to be approved by the Legislative Council, so I will be asking President Coleman to add the MOU to the committee's agenda when they meet to review the Blue Book on September 4. Should the MOU be approved, we will post it on our website. LCS will provide additional information about the fellowship when we present the MOU to the Legislative Council, which will also be maintained on our website. If the Legislative Council does not approve the MOU, LCS will not host the fellowship.
This fellowship grew out of a separate science fellowship for STEM students designed by former Senators Chris Hansen and Bob Rankin; Senator Rankin was later replaced by Senator Cleave Simpson. ISP received funding to work on the development of this fellowship from a grant they received from the National Conference of State Legislatures Foundation a few years ago. At that time, they began meeting with me and my deputies to talk about whether LCS would host the fellowship and have worked in good faith with us since. You can direct people to this website for information from the ISP about the fellowship: https://institute.dmns.org/about/colorado-science-and-technology-policy-fellowship.
A total of four fellows will be placed within our fiscal notes, policy and research, and information technology teams beginning in October. They will be integrated into our teams and will do the same work as our staff. Any work they produce will go through the same review process as work for any other member of staff. They are expected to meet our employment standards, including standards for nonpartisanship. I have the authority to terminate a fellow's relationship with LCS should those standards be violated. The folks at the ISP and I have discussed and agreed that all of the fellows' work products will include their name and specify that they are an ISP Fellow (this was Representative Luck's idea).
The fellows will be compensated and managed administratively by the staff at the ISP. LCS will provide office space and access to our systems, on-the-job training, and supervision. ISP and LCS are working together to develop a training program for the fellows.
I responded with a follow up asking what people could do if they had concerns over the work produced by a fellow. She said that people should contact her if they had concerns.
The link to the legislative staff directory is linked second below.
https://open.substack.com/pub/coloradoaccountabilityproject/p/nah-theres-no-way-legislative-fellows?r=15ij6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
https://leg.colorado.gov/agencies/legislative-council-staff/staff-directory
Your Colorado legislature: hard at work chipping away at your Second Amendment rights.
Per the Sun article linked at bottom Colorado now has 12 more gun regulations on the books. 12.
You feel 12 times more safe? You feel any safer than the year before?
I often wonder what it would look like (since they, perhaps intentionally, hide the ball and won't say it out loud) if I could crack open the heads of Colorado Democrats and see what "gun control nirvana" looks like. Are there any guns left? Who gets them?
A valid question because there is no (zero) evidence that what we're doing is working to prevent violence. Rather, it seems mainly to pile more oppressive and unnecessary regulation on the law-abiding who want to simply live their lives in peace and exercise all their rights, not just the ones Colorado Democrats deem necessary or "okay".
If you haven't yet, start donating to gun rights organizations. Politically this is effectively the only way you will be able to fight for your rights in this state in the current political climate.
https://coloradosun.com/2025/06/12/new-colorado-gun-laws-2025/
Related:
I occasionally get emails from the editor of the Sangre De Cristo Sentinel, and he sent me the below.
They do a centerfold in their paper and this one is on guns and gun laws. Obviously tongue in cheek and made me chuckle. Thought I'd share. Enjoy.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gepm3cjmEtaS4XWKyJAFgpl9FZRNH9Vf/view?usp=sharing