Colorado: Josh Penry

Wow, you think? As the Grand Junction Sentinel reports:
A Front Range political watchdog group says it will investigate a phone message left by former Republican Congressman Scott McInnis with a supporter.

McInnis' message suggests he's working with a 527, the term borrowed from the IRS code for an independent political organization...

McInnis mentioned no organization by name in the phone message and told The Daily Sentinel that he knew of no such organizations operating in connection with the 2010 election in which Gov. Bill Ritter, a Democrat, is up for election.

The CompleteColorado.com transcription begins with, "Wanna visit with you on this two-thousand-and-ten governor's race.

The Colorado Senate moved forward tonight with a plan to tap $500 million from a workers' compensation fund to balance the state budget, a move Republicans compared to a Venezuelan-style takeover of a private company.

Even some Democrats had concerns about whether the plan to take a portion of Pinnacol Assurance's assets would work or was fair to businesses. The quasi-governmental agency offers guaranteed workers' compensation insurance, and Republicans have argued that because the insurer's assets were funded by businesses paying insurance premiums, the state should keep its hands off the money.

They also said that because Pinnacol was likely to challenge the move in a lawsuit, the money would be tied up in court so long it would be unavailable to balance next year's budget.

Republicans in the state Senate made an unsuccessful, last-ditch attempt Tuesday to change proposed new rules for oil and gas drilling before conceding that the fight in the legislature is basically over.

The operatic end to the epic legislative battle came on the day the Senate gave initial approval to the rules, which are backed by Gov. Bill Ritter and are intended to protect the environment and public health from drilling's side effects. Critics say they go too far.

Republicans had hoped to woo some moderate Democrats to make changes to the rules Tuesday. They offered an amendment that would have increased certain protections for drinking water and raised fines for some violations in exchange for stripping out a number of regulations that Republicans oppose, such as rules they say don't give property owners sufficient authority to overrule wildlife protections on their land.

A Democratic-backed law that kept property taxes from decreasing survived its final legal challenge Monday as the Colorado Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that the 2007 measure violated the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights in the state constitution.

In a 6-1 ruling, the court reversed a May 2008 district court ruling that said the law, which kept local mill-levy rates from going down and is expected to raise more than $100 million annually, violated TABOR's requirement that voters approve any additional tax increases.

Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter, who was a defendant in the suit, said the ruling would avert even deeper cuts in the state budget to education programs like full-day kindergarten and school counseling.