Casper Stockham unsuccessfully ran a campaign to unseat U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Denver), and will likely run again in 2018. I’ve flagged a few of Casper’s more egregiously nutty posts, because if nothing else, he’s entertaining. Casper’s fake news beliefs are instructive, however, and represent a microcosm of how the GOP base consumes news. Here’s what he said on Facebook a few days ago:
I ran across this post from State Sen. Kevin Lundberg (R-Berthoud). Taking a standard position in the wake of the Hobby Lobby decision, he argues in favor of Senate Bill 283, which would let businesses discriminate on the basis of “the fundamental right of conscience.” That’s shorthand for “religious beliefs.”
I run into this a lot in the Fever Swamps: Someone posts a meme or statement urging a certain sort of behavior that they themselves do not adhere to. Today, I ran into a couple of impressive examples:
I’m gonna miss Derrick Wilburn, former Vice Chair of the Colorado GOP. He is reliably one of the nuttiest and most hyper-partisan members of the party. As a tribute to his history of Fever Swamp hysterics, I offer this case study in double standards. A few days ago, Wilburn posted this on Facebook:
Raymond Garcia, the GOP candidate who lost races in 2014 and 2016 for the District 1 seat in Colorado’s House of Representatives, is a person who will believe literally anything he reads on the internet and happily pass it on without vetting. In this case, he posts an old “news” story from 2016 claiming a Wikileaks release proves Hillary Clinton killed James Foster as if it is brand new.
I ran across a meme posted by Colorado House Minority Leader Patrick Neville (R-Castle Rock) making the argument that since more people die (per 100,000) from driving a Prius than by guns there should be a plan to end Prius deaths.
Colorado’s State Legislature is working on its yearly budget, which includes HB 1242, a bipartisan compromise that would ask voters to approve a small tax increase to provide up to 3.2 billion to address the state’s crumbling infrastructure. The hard-right wing of the Republican party in Colorado hates the deal because of their dogmatic adherence to a “no new taxes” position.
Like most everyone else, when U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) made his wild claims about surveillance of the Trump administration, I was a bit confused about the purpose. He seemed to be acknowledging that they had been caught up in the monitoring of foreign adversaries via legally obtained FISA warrants. This indicates that members of Trump’s administration were talking to the bad guys we were monitoring. It certainly didn’t support Trump’s claim that Obama had him “wiretapped.” Today, he has come out to say there is no evidence of the wiretapping Trump claimed.
Justin Ratzlaff is the Chair of the Rio Grande County GOP, and he has a Confederate flag tattoo on his arm.
Colorado State Rep. Justin Everett (R-Littleton) posted this on Facebook recently. It’s an assertion without evidence that “contrary to what you may have heard…wages go up and unemployment goes down” in so-called “Right to Work” states.
