Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO)

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO) appeared on the Caplis and Silverman radio show in Denver to discuss the birther flap. The hosts told Coffman that a gaffe in Washington “is when somebody tells the truth” before asking the Colorado Republican, “Were you just at that moment speaking what was in your heart and are you now feeling you need to walk it back for political reasons?” Coffman conceded that this was the case — “to some extent that’s true” — and explained that his main regret was talking about the issue because birtherism is a “horrible issue” for Republicans:

HOST: You know how they say in Washington, a gaffe is when somebody tells the truth? I know you to be such a highly intelligent guy, such a disciplined guy. Were you just at that moment speaking what was in your heart and are you now feeling you need to walk it back for political reasons?

COFFMAN: To some extent that’s true because I think that when Republicans are not talking about jobs and the economy, when we’re not on message, I think the other side is winning. But let me put it in context. The context was at that event and other events I’ve been to, Republican events, people come up to me and say, “why aren’t you taking on the president about him not being born in the United States? Why don’t I hear anything from you about that?” It gets really frustrating. Look, I just think that’s a horrible issue for Republicans. Every day we’re talking about that is just a victory for the president. What I meant to say and said very poorly when I was there was that it doesn’t matter whether he is or not, that’s just not the issue.

Listen to it:

Later, Coffman praised those who don’t believe Obama was born in the United States. “[Issues are] going to determine this election, not focusing on the birther question. God bless people that do that. I understand their passion,” he said.

Towards the end of the interview, Coffman finally returned to his new message that President Obama was born in the United States.

A majority of voters don’t support allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, yet at the same time a majority also opposes a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

According to a Fox News poll released Wednesday, 37 percent of voters believe gays and lesbians should be allowed to get married legally. While that’s unchanged from 2010, when the question was most recently asked, it’s nearly double the 20 percent who felt that way in March 2004, the first time it was asked.

There is actually nothing in the data that supports this conclusion. What the Fox News article doesn’t mention until its fourth paragraph is that it asked its question the same way the CBS/NYT poll did: forcing a choice between same-sex marriage, legal unions not called marriage, or no legal recognition. The true result of this poll is that 70 percent believe there should be legal recognition for same-sex couples, which was actually 8 points higher than what Monday’s CBS/NYT poll found.

But the problem with both polls is that they never force respondents to choose between same-sex marriage and nothing, creating an incomplete picture of where voters stand. Consider the recent polling from Colorado, which found that 62 percent support civil unions, but that 53 support full marriage equality as well. Forcing respondents to make an either/or choice about marriage and civil unions instead of allowing consideration for both separately creates a distorted view of where voters actually stand.

The Times’ Ross Douthat attempts to spin the interpretation the other way, suggesting that because so many “prefer” civil unions, their support for  marriage equality when not provided with an alternative is “reluctant.” And it’s because of that reluctance, he believes, that the results of ballot measures don’t match the polling. This, of course, is a conclusion that can only be drawn from the strange construction of the question in these polls, and it also ignores the reality that many complex factors impact these plebiscites. In North Carolina, the most current example, polling showed that voters were largely uninformed (or misinformed) about the actual impact of Amendment One, and thus did not realize they were voting to ban civil unions and domestic partnerships in addition to marriage — against their wishes. Plus, as Nathaniel Frank points out, polls on social issues are simply “notoriously bad at predicting [voter] behavior.”

Fox News wants to be able to claim it has data opposing the conclusion that a majority of Americans support the freedom to marry, despite consistent national polling over the past two years that shows otherwise. Any poll can be structured and framed to deliver a certain bias to the results, but the true momentum for marriage equality cannot be disregarded so easily.

An audio recording of the event was posted online by a supporter, who said, “I’m glad the congressman said it. Not enough have. More should.”

But now, Coffman, who has tried to paint himself as a moderate, is backtracking. “I misspoke and I apologize,” he said in a statement. “I have confidence in President Obama’s citizenship and legitimacy as President of the United States. … I don’t believe the president shares my belief in American Exceptionalism,” he explained.

A spokesperson for State Rep. Joe Miklosi (D), Coffman’s Democratic challenger, slammed Coffnamn’s “outrageous comments,” saying they “once again make clear that Mike Coffman is Colorado’s version of Rush Limbaugh. This kind of extremism is why Washington doesn’t work.” “We need leaders who will work together for solutions, not join the far right birther fringe or attack the President of the United States as un-American,” the spokesperson added.

Coffman is facing a tough reelection battle in a newly redrawn district that is more competitive than before.

He’s the latest Republican to join a new wave of birtherism.

Colorado Rep. Don Coram (R)

When Colorado Rep. Don Coram (R) cast the deciding vote killing civil unions Monday night in committee, he oddly referenced that he has a gay son — perhaps trying to sugarcoat how anti-gay his decision was. Now, that son, Dee Coram, has spoken out about his father’s failure of leadership, noting that Rep. Coram previously supported letting the full House vote on the bill — where it would have passed:

DEE CORAM: He did say at that time if it goes to the floor, I will vote no. But at that time his stance was that the committee should send it and let the House vote on it. He was given an opportunity here to actually be a leader, and I guess he didn’t take that leadership role. And it’s disappointing to see that on something like this, he said it should have gone to the House floor for a vote. Essentially he prevented that from happening.

Listen to Coram’s comments and his father’s response:

Rep. Coram claimed that he thought it was “appropriate” to discuss his gay son, but he voted against the bill because his constituents don’t support it — though 62 percent of Coloradans do. Apparently, Coram even supports civil unions, but felt the word “spouse” appeared too many times in the bill’s language. As the Gill Foundation’s Leah Pryor-Lease noted on Twitter in the wake of Coram’s vote, “Wonder if Rep. Coram’s district will be coming to his house for Christmas instead of his gay son.”

Colorado House Speaker Frank McNulty (R)

A huge majority of Colorado voters support a bill to allow same-sex civil unions. With at least six Colorado House Republicans and the House Democratic caucus reportedly all backing the legislation — it enjoys clear majority support. Three House committees have endorsed the measure. The Senate has already passed it multiple times and Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) has promised to sign it.

But one man stands in the way of the bill’s passage: Romney-endorser and ALEC member Speaker Frank McNulty (R). After employing filibuster tactics last week to run out the clock on the bill without letting it have a floor vote, McNulty lamented reaching “an impasse” that required him sacrificing dozens of other bills. Incredibly, he blamed Senate Democrats for not getting the bill to the House early enough in the process — though that delay had come at the behest of a House Republican supporter. Gov. Hickenlooper called McNulty’s bluff last week, ordering a special session to give full consideration to civil unions and several other bills killed by McNulty’s parliamentary games.

McNulty announced he wanted the special session — which began today — to last just three days. Even though the bill has already cleared three committees, McNulty declared this afternoon that he would send civil unions to yet a fourth committee — the House State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee, which has no jurisdiction over the matter. McNulty chose this committee as the apparent burial ground for the bill; none of the members of the Republican majority on the committee are supporters.

Even worse, he released a statement blasting Gov. Hickenlooper’s decision to allow the House the time McNulty had earlier lamented it needed to consider civil unions and other bills.

Make no mistake about it. Gov. Hickenlooper has called this Legislature into an expensive special session for the sole purpose of dividing Coloradans. Instead of using his authority and his bully pulpit to unify Coloradans behind a pro-growth agenda of economic recovery and job creation, he is using his authority to tear Colorado apart. Again. That’s where his priority is.

What had been a regular legislative session defined by remarkable bipartisan progress turned bitter and cold when Democrats brought the work of the state House of Representatives to a grinding halt by demanding that a bill creating same sex marriage [sic] in Colorado be prioritized and forced to the front of the line. It is unfortunate it happened, but it did.

Gov. Hickenlooper’s special session will not result in one more job being created, or making gasoline any cheaper.

Unlike President Obama, Gov. Hickenlooper and their campaign operatives, Colorado families aren’t preoccupied with promoting a divisive social agenda – because they have more pressing concerns.

After obstructing civil unions and other legislature, McNulty shows considerable gall, blaming others for his obstruction, and considerable ignorance, suggesting voters do not care about expanding civil rights for all Coloradans.

The House State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee meets later today — seemingly to kill the civil unions bill. The voters of Colorado meet in November and observers expect they will likely respond by killing his one-seat GOP House majority and ending his reign as Speaker.

Actor Robert Redford has always loved the landscapes of the West, and his classic roles as the outlaw Sundance Kid and mountain man Jeremiah Johnson are now part of Western lore. As executive producer and narrator of a new documentary, Watershed, Redford takes a close look at the greatest Western icon of all: the Colorado River, which flows almost 1,500 miles from its source in the Rocky Mountains to its delta at the Gulf of California. The river’s water, notoriously dammed and diverted in order to meet the region’s growing thirst, now rarely reaches the sea.

Watershed profiles several people who are trying to change the region’s relationship with the river, including a Los Angeles bicycle activist, a Navajo Nation councilwoman, a Colorado fly-fishing guide, and a restoration ecologist in Mexico. In short interludes, a crew of animators illustrates the fiendishly complex politics of the river, the mechanics of hydraulic fracturing, and other issues facing the Colorado Basin. The documentary, written and directed by Mark Decena, was co-produced by Redford’s son James, who also produced the HBO documentary Mann v. Ford and directed the new film The D Word: Understanding Dyslexia. (James is 50, but as you’ll see, his 76-year-old dad still calls him a “good kid.”)

The new film screens at the Sausalito Film Festival on May 13 and is available through the Whole Foods-sponsored Do Something Reel online film festival this month. Robert Redford spoke about it with OnEarth contributor and longtime Western journalist Michelle Nijhuis. (Disclosure: Barry Nelson, a senior water policy analyst at NRDC, which publishes OnEarth, was an advisor on the film, and Redford is an NRDC trustee.)

Do you recall your first encounter with the Colorado River?

Well, I’ve had a lot of experiences on both the Colorado and the Green rivers — fishing for golden trout in the high mountains, filming Jeremiah Johnson, floating the Green River, and having a boat on Lake Powell for 30-odd years.

I grew up in Los Angeles, and after the Second World War, people flooded in there like it was gold-rush time. Suddenly, the place turned into concrete and smog and pollution. That made a huge impact on me.

I retreated into the Sierras and then into the deserts, the Mojave and so on. When that retreat began, I became aware of the value of the natural environment. So all those experiences — working in Yosemite, floating the rivers, raising my kids on the rivers — gave me a pretty good perspective on water in the West. I became acutely aware of the demand for water exceeding its supply.

What made you think that now is the time for a movie about the Colorado?

I realized that not enough people were paying attention to the issue. Water is a big subject — like air, you know. People take it for granted. For years, people thought water was just an endless resource to be used by anybody in any way. When I became aware that the Colorado River was no longer reaching its destination in the Gulf of California, that really hit me. I went down into that area and saw the cracked earth. I saw what was happening to what used to be marshland — that it was just drying up.

Then I became aware that cultures were suffering — that Native American cultures and Mexican cultures on the south end of the river were suffering. That hit me, too. And I looked at where the water was going — to dubious growth in Las Vegas. Las Vegas doesn’t have much water, and yet it’s growing in leaps and bounds.

The Colorado is an iconic symbol of America, of America at its best in terms of natural resources. Yet we’re destroying those natural resources. Not enough people know about that.

You’ve made many films with a political bent, but you’ve said that you’ve had to give up the idea that your films will make a difference. What do you hope to accomplish with Watershed?

I’ve given up the idea that I can really change anything, and I just do the best I can. It’s either that or do nothing, and we know that nothing doesn’t work.

Some of the films I’ve made in the past that I thought might make an impact, I don’t think did. I don’t think The Candidate [a satire of campaign politics] changed anything. I think politics are worse than they ever were. And Quiz Show [based on a 1950s Hollywood quiz-show scandal] was about the corruption in the entertainment business. Well, that’s as bad as it ever was.

In other words, you don’t want to deceive yourself. You just do what you can do the best you can, and you just keep doing it because that’s all you can do.

What do you hope that viewers will remember the most from Watershed?

I hope they’ll remember the people. The mayor of Rifle, Colorado — I just love that guy. He’s so simple and plain and gentle. Then you have that crazy kid in Los Angeles, that guy with the bike. He’s so wild and crazy and smart and committed. You look at a guy like that and you say, “Boy, there’s a kid that could have gone the other way, but look at what he’s doing.” He’s converting all his energy into doing something — because he loves the city, and wants to play a role in it.

Maybe these people can set an example. I hope viewers will realize the value of the river through the stories of the people who live with it.

You’ve lived in the region for decades. Did you learn anything new about the Colorado River while you were making the film?

The one thing that’s always been very impressive to me is its history, how it got that way. I went to college for a year, to the University of Colorado at Boulder, and then I was kicked out. One of the reasons I was asked to leave was that I was having too much fun — I spent too much time in the mountains, and I didn’t spend enough time studying. But two courses really got my attention, and they were geomorphology and anthropology.

I got so taken with geology, just fascinated with how the earth got to be the way it is. When I would drive from Boulder back to Los Angeles, I was thrilled by the idea that wherever I looked, I could understand how it got that way, whether it was a mountain or a river or a valley. I think that’s probably where it all started for me, driving through that country and looking at what I had learned.

Then when I studied anthropology, I learned how people connected with the land in ancient times, and how we evolved to the point where people and geology came together and produced what we have today. I wanted to tell that story.

I wanted to ask about you and your son James. You worked together on Watershed — how did that come about?

We’ve worked together on a couple of other things, and on his own, Jamie has moved in the same direction that I’ve been moving in over the years — I think largely because of the way he was raised and the things he saw.

What was your partnership like?

It was great. He’s got a great sense of humor, so we can kid each other. I’ll tell him, “This is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.” And he’ll say, “Next to yours, you mean.” So we have a lot of fun. He’s a great kid, and I’m very proud of him.

Michelle Nijhuis is a contributing writer for Smithsonian, a contributing editor at High Country News, and a 2011 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow. She lives in rural Colorado.

This piece was originally published at OnEarth and was reprinted with permission.

Colorado House Speaker Frank McNulty (R) deserves particular credit for killing civil unions and 30 other bills.

Civil unions are dead for this year in Colorado and Republican obstruction is to blame after an unprecedented night of antics on the House floor. The civil unions bill passed out of its final committee yesterday evening and needed to reach a floor vote by midnight. Republicans instead chose to intentionally run out the clock with hour-long debates on noncontroversial legislation about historic license plates and trans-fats in school lunchrooms, with Rep. David Balmer (R) filibustering, “Not a one of you has the courage to vote against chocolate!”

Rep. B.J. Nikkel (R), one of several Republicans who supported civil unions in committee, offered to help Democrats regain control to force a vote. The presiding officer declared a recess as an attempted coup ensued. In this exclusive behind-the-scenes clip from OutFront Colorado, it’s obvious that House Speaker Frank McNulty (R) is seen holding the civil unions bill hostage, refusing to guarantee that he would bring it up to a vote. In fact, he dishonestly rejected the notion that any sort of stalling tactic was underway. Meanwhile, Rep. Mark Waller (R) attempted to play damage control on the floor, evoking uproarious laughter from the press when he claimed, “The Democrats in the State House right now are playing procedural games to have one bill heard over every other bill.”

Ultimately, the House never came out of recess. Not only did the civil unions bill die, but so did 30 other pieces of legislation, including $20 million worth of water projects statewide and a controversial bill that would set a standard for driving while stoned. Upon news the bills were dying, people in the gallery started booing and chanting, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” Watch how McNulty tried to blame the failure on an “impasse,” disingenuously suggesting “it is unfortunate that there will be items that do not receive consideration by the House tonight”:

But of course, McNulty is fully responsible for that impasse. He tried to pass the buck by blaming Senate Democrats for delaying introduction of the bill, but left out one important detail. Sen. Pat Steadman (D), the bill’s sponsor, explained that he brought the bill up late specifically because the speaker pro tem, Rep. Kevin Priola (R), was considering sponsoring the bill but wanted to wait until after the GOP state convention in mid-April. Priola supports the bill, but never bothered to sign on as the House sponsor, despite the delay at his request.

The Denver Post has called on Gov. John Hickenlooper to call a special session of the legislature so that civil unions can pass. Unfortunately, even in a special session, McNulty could reshuffle committee membership to prevent the bill from advancing to the floor.

There is no way to spin the absurd obstruction that took place last night. Despite ample support for civil unions from Republicans, it was the Republican House leadership that sacrificed 30 other bills to prevent same-sex couples from obtaining legal rights. It’s an historically sad day for Colorado politics.