Colorado: New Mexico

The only things missing from the ozone-busting tag team of Gov. Bill Ritter and Attorney General John Suthers are Mexican wrestling masks to completely shield their partisan identities.

The state’s chief executive and chief lawyer have teamed up to fight the belching coal-fired Four Corners Power Plant and the planned Desert Rock plant located just over the state’s southwestern border with New Mexico.

According to a press release from the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment, the dynamic duo is taking two tacks — push the Environmental Protection Agency to require stronger emission controls on the Four Corners Power Plant on Navajo Nation lands near Farmington, N.

(Photo/gravitywave, Flickr)

A state Senate panel late Wednesday evening approved a bill to require law enforcement officials to collect DNA samples from anyone arrested for a felony in Colorado, over strong objections from one lawmaker who said “Katie’s Law” — named after a New Mexico college student whose brutal rape and murder was solved using DNA evidence — does “permanent damage” to constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

(Photo/gravitywave, Flickr)

“There are great costs and consequences in not passing this law,” Jayann Sepich, the mother of the law’s namesake, told the Senate Judiciary Committee after displaying slides of her slain daughter, Katie Sepich.

Sepich has been traveling the country urging states to pass similar laws since New Mexico adopted it in 2006.

Colorado freshman Sen. and Deputy Whip Mark Udall is a pivotal figure in the intended Obama revolution, according to a profile fronting today’s Congressional Quarterly. Udall’s tall-order task is to help Obama succeed where Ronald Reagan failed by getting the record-breaking number of majority party newcomers in the senate to support the president’s agenda without alienating the moderate voters who elected them.

The list of newcomers Udall is tasked with wrangling includes two fellow Democrats — the other senator from Colorado, Michael Bennet, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s replacement; and Udall’s first cousin, Tom, from New Mexico.

Although Mark Begich of Alaska is the only freshman Democrat from a state that voted for Republican John McCain in November, five of the new Democratic senators were elected in states carried by George W.

A House committee Wednesday killed a proposal to give tax credits to Coloradans building new homes but approved a measure giving incentives to out-of-state filmmakers.

Rep. Larry Liston, R-Colorado Springs, told the House Finance Committee his bill was needed to jump-start home construction in Colorado. The bill would have given a tax credit to people who buy homes to be built in 2010.

The bill called for a credit worth 3 percent of the purchase price of the home, up to a maximum of $10,000.

Liston said the number of housing-construction starts in Colorado had fallen from a high of 40,000 in 2005 to fewer than 8,500 last year.