The Woodland Park-based effort to fundamentally alter public education in America is being funded by the zombie fortunes of long-dead conservative industrialists, according to a review of hundreds of tax documents associated with the members of Civics Alliance, the coalition which produced the American Birthright social studies program.
Twenty miles northwest of Colorado Springs, nestled amongst the conifers behind the first upslopes of the Front Range, the vanguard of a shadowy, well-funded national movement has taken over a school district. Now, the district is being used as a base of operations from which to open a new front in the right wing’s decades-old war on public education.
It was 8:52 on a Saturday night when the bill died. The legislative session was barreling towards a close, constrained by the 120-day limit enshrined in the state’s constitution, and there was more business to get through.
The problem of corruption in America is bigger than we acknowledge, and it’s getting worse — that’s according to our new columnist (and former journalist) Logan Davis, who will be taking a look at corruption’s spread, its consequences, and what we can do to stop it in a new biweekly column.
David Buckley, a Republican candidate for the state legislature, used campaign funds to pay himself thousands of dollars in improper mileage reimbursements – this according to his own documentation, a campaign finance complaint filed with the Secretary of State, and a subsequent analysis by the Colorado Times Recorder.
Republican state Senate candidate Tim Walsh broke the law by not disclosing a $3 million mountain home, but he won’t face any fine or penalty for his omission, according to a recent ruling from the Colorado’s Secretary of State’s office. Though it’s rare for a single campaign finance complaint to upset several years of established legal interpretation, that’s exactly what happened when the Deputy Secretary of State handed down a decision in the Walsh case overturning four years of incorrect legal precedent established during former Secretary of State Wayne Williams’ tenure in office – after applying it to Walsh one last time.
In the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican candidates across the country have attempted to distance themselves from their past embrace of hardline anti-abortion positions, seemingly due to fear of backlash at the ballot box in November. In southwestern Colorado, though, a candidate for the state legislature is not following their lead.
Tim Walsh, the Republican nominee in one of the year’s closest-watched state Senate races, omitted from his personal financial disclosure a financial trust, a corporation, and a mountain home worth more than $3 million, according to a complaint filed with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office last week.
