Want to piss off Latinos? Here's one way to do it:
http://blogs.denverpost.com/...
A pair of radio interviews Colorado gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez gave over the Fourth of July weekend drew reaction Monday from a Washington immigration reform group quoting Colorado Latino leaders.
Beauprez, the Republican nominee, complimented Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on the radio and said he would show similar leadership on immigration at the state level in Colorado, if he’s elected.
“Governors on behalf of their states are going to have to be very vocal, very strong, and push back on D.C.,” Beauprez told 850 KOA host Doug Kellet.
Beauprez said that governors have to push back against federal immigration efforts.
“If they won’t do it, governors ought to be allowed to do it, as Jan Brewer tried to do in Arizona,” he said.
Arizona passed a law in 2010 that gave police the authority to detain anyone who wasn’t carrying documentation to prove his or her citizenship. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law two years later.
Beauprez said that if the federal government sent buses carrying immigrants from overwhelmed Texas detention facilities to Pueblo, he’s heard from people who said “they’re going to be in the streets to block them.”
America’s Voice in a statement Monday compared Beauprez to Tom Tancredo, the former congressman, presidential and two-time Colorado gubernatorial candidate who is a nationally known firebrand on immigration issues. The organization also released statements from several Colorado Latino leaders condemning Beauprez. - Denver Post, 7/14/14
Latinos aren't the only ones pissed off at Beauprez. His former GOP opponent, Tom Tancredo, is bashing him and the GOP establishment for why he lost:
http://www.coloradostatesman.com/...
On June 24 the GOP establishment won a narrow victory — less than 14,000 votes (or 3 percent) separated first and second place. They won by pursuing a scorched-earth policy against the liberty movement’s leading challenger to the status quo — Tom Tancredo. I think it important to share the main outlines of this story so the liberty movement can learn from this experience.
I have run 10 ten elections in my life and was successful in eight of the 10. Needless to say, it’s a lot more fun to win. However, I believe totally in the need to enter into the public arena, regardless of the difficulty or the outcome. Also, when one gets in this game and recognizes that there are only two possible outcomes, either victory or defeat, one must be ready emotionally to accept either.
And indeed, on June 24, I was certainly disappointed in my loss in the Colorado Republican primary for governor but not devastated by it. The aspect that needs exposure, even at the risk of sounding like sour grapes on my part, was the role in my defeat played by the Republican Party establishment.
Unlike Mississippi, in Colorado, the establishment could not openly or easily mobilize Democratic voters to cross over and vote for my opponent. But they could and did use lies and ugly distortions and the desperate tactic of “independent expenditure committees” to finance the nastiest media attacks.
The chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, Ryan Call, sent out two blast emails that essentially begged Republicans to vote for the party establishment’s preferred candidate. I’ve never seen anything like that before. The party chairman also suggested to his Executive Committee that if Tancredo ended up the nominee of the party, funds would not be forthcoming for the race. The state party scheduled a “unity tour” for the week after the election, but when it looked as though I was going to win, it was canceled — only to be hurriedly rescheduled when I narrowly lost.
And perhaps the most bizarre twist of all, a massive buy of attack ads was purchased through a Massachusetts campaign group called Red Curve. It turned out the group was a Mitt Romney creation run by his former staffers. A blast email was then sent out by Romney for President Inc. with the same attack theme. More to the point, there is evidence that the motivation for this package of attack ads originated with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and others at the Republican Governors Association, although the RGA likely did not put any of its own money into the project. Christie and his RGA friends simply used the Romney-created group as the vehicle for funding the Colorado attack ads against me.
When the fiction of me being a one-issue candidate failed to gain traction, the party establishment resorted to inventing things out of whole cloth. They created a new and dishonest issue by claiming I wanted to legalize hard, addictive drugs like heroin and cocaine on top of the legal marijuana that Colorado voters had approved by a 55-45 margin in the 2012 election. This was a complete distortion of a speech I made five years ago saying the “war on drugs” was a failure. I still believe that, but I never advocated legalizing hard drugs in the same fashion as marijuana.
It was impossible to counter the barrage of lies when my campaign was outspent 8-to-1 on radio-TV advertisements, most of that coming from the “independent” groups, not candidate committees.
In effect, the establishment GOP reversed its position on Tom Tancredo 180 degrees in order to defeat me. They started by saying that while I was popular among the Republican base, I could not win over moderate and independent voters because of my “extreme” stand on illegal immigration. But in the closing weeks of the campaign, they abandoned that argument in favor of the opposite theme, using an issue where I was clearly more in tune with the majority of Colorado voters than my primary opponents. Instead of being “too extreme,” I was now too mainstream. - The Colorado Statesman, 7/11/14
Yeah, ok. Tancredo can cry all he wants, the GOP still ended up with a bat shit candidate like Beauprez. And immigration is going to play a big role in this race:
http://kdvr.com/...
Gov. John Hickenlooper isn’t ruling out seeing some of the more than 57,000 Central American immigrants who have crossed the Mexican border relocated to Colorado, although he has a number of concerns that would need to be addressed starting with the costs to the state.
While the administration has not yet made any official request, the Associated Press reported Monday that Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell met Sunday with Hickenlooper and a number of other governors who were in Nashville over the weekend for meetings of the National Governors Association, which Hickenlooper just took over the chairmanship of, as the administration looked to gauge support from the states for a possible relocation.
“Our citizens already feel burdened by all kinds of challenges. They don’t want to see another burden come into their state,” Hickenlooper said. “However we deal with the humanitarian aspects of this, we’ve got to do it in the most cost-effective way possible.” - KDVR, 7/14/14
If you want to donate and get involved with Hickenlooper's campaign, you can do so here:
http://www.hickenlooperforcolorado.com/