Colorado: Congress

U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman on Monday unveiled a proposal to give tax breaks to people who buy water-saving toilets, sprinkler systems and other items for their houses.

Coffman said he hopes the proposed credit, which was formally introduced earlier this month and has bipartisan support in Congress, will spur a greater culture of conservation in Colorado. He noted the state faces an estimated 630,000-acre-foot water-supply shortfall by 2030. One acre-foot could serve the needs of about eight people for a year.

"This legislation will help conserve one of our most precious resources," said Coffman, an Aurora Republican. "Conservation has got to be our first line of defense in our ability to meet our future water demand.

WASHINGTON — As Rep. Jared Polis toured Iraq this week, he had something more than security conditions or troop withdrawals on his mind: the case of a man allegedly sentenced to death in a criminal court for membership in a gay-rights group.

An openly gay member of Congress, Polis has been investigating the treatment of gays in Iraq for several months, and last week he spoke through a translator by phone to a transgender Iraqi man who said he had been arrested, beaten and raped by Ministry of Interior security forces.

Human-rights groups tracking the issue also passed Polis a letter, allegedly written from jail by a man who said he was beaten into confessing he was a member of the gay-rights group Iraqi-LGBT.

Environmentalists won’t allow President Obama to sit on the bench of sports escapism for even a minute without reminding him of his obligations to reject the Bush administration’s eight-year full-court press on America’s national forests.

In an ad campaign launched today to coincide with the first day of the NCAA’s Final Four basketball tournament – a tourney Obama playfully picked the winner of on ESPN Wednesday – the Pew Environment Group called on the president to uphold the hotly debated Roadless Area Conservation Rule.

“Jayhawks and cardinals play here. So do wildcats and wolverines. The road to the national championship? No, our national forests,” the television version intones.

(Illustration/fitzscience.com)

After a decade of delays and budget shortfalls, Colorado will finally get the brand-new, stand-alone VA hospital veterans organizations have wanted, U.S. Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki announced Wednesday morning. Construction will begin this spring on a 200-bed medical center set to open in the summer of 2013 on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, Shinseki said.

The new facility will have a 30-bed, state-of-the art spinal injury center, Shinseki said, meaning nearly 1,000 veterans with spinal-cord injuries in the Rocky Mountain region won’t have to travel to the West Coast for treatment.

“Now we can fulfill the promises that we made to our veterans,” said U.