Colorado: Ed Perlmutter

(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.

CNN political analyst Paul Begala regaled a festive Colorado Democratic Party on Saturday night with jabs at George W. Bush and Rush Limbaugh, whom he challenged to run for president in 2012.

He cracked numerous jokes about Limbaugh, especially focusing on the conservative commentator's weight. Then, chiding Bush, he described a new swing set that President Barack Obama has installed for his daughters at the White House.

"It's so much better than the one that George W. used to play on," the former adviser to Bill Clinton said. He described Bush, who has returned to Texas, as "all hat and no cattle.

When it’s hard to convict a congressman who accepts a briefcase full of $100 bills from undercover FBI agents in a hotel lobby and then bundles them in tinfoil packets and stuffs $90,000 worth of them into his freezer, you know there’s just something plain broken about the laws governing political corruption in this country.

You know it. I know it. And Colorado Rep. Ed Perlmutter knows it.

Good news is that so do senators Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and John Cornyn, R-Texas. They reintroduced a well-designed, anti-corruption bill in January called the Public Corruption Prosecution Improvements Act, which is being heard before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday in D.

(Photo/Rep. Ed Perlmutter)

Colorado Rep. Ed Perlmutter denied any wrongdoing in securing an earmark for defense consultancy IHS, Inc., a client of disintegrating lobby firm PMA, which is under investigation by the FBI.

(Photo/Rep. Ed Perlmutter)

Perlmutter spokesperson Leslie Oliver asked The Colorado Independent to run a correction as she described the line Perlmutter draws when it comes to the business that mixes earmarks and campaign donations. “We took no campaign money from IHS,” Oliver said. “But yes, we received campaign contributions from PMA’s political action committee.”

IHS won an extra million dollars thanks to Perlmutter and the other members of the Colorado delegation who voted for the IHS earmark, including Wayne Allard, Ken Salazar and Tom Tancredo.