Analysis of the City Charter shows that Skorman’s home-made campaign contribution forms violate municipal election law

By Seth Richardson

The brouhaha over whether candidates for Mayor of Colorado Springs are required to provide the employer and occupation of donors on their campaign finance reports appears to be a cynical dirty-politics attempt to gain political advantage by exploiting an ambiguity in the law by mayoral candidate Richard Skorman that may come back to bite him in the behind.

The fault for the ambigity Skorman and Colorado Ethics Watch are trying to exploit must be laid at the feet of City Clerk Catherine Young, who once again has proven that she’s incompetent to hold her office.

But as for any legal or criminal culpability on the part of candidates for Mayor in Colorado Springs who used the mandated official form provided by Young, which do not provide space for the information Colorado Ethics Watch and the Skorman campaign insist is mandatory, it’s a dead issue.

The reasons are pretty simple, beginning with Colorado’s state constitutional Home Rule provisions, which clearly state that where there is a conflict between state law and home rule city ordinances, the home rule ordinances trump the state law, unless the General Assembly has specifically “occupied the field” by regulating the specific issue.

Despite what Colorado Ethics Watch maintains, the Colorado Fair Campaign Practices Act’s provisions regarding the listing of the occupation and employer of donors do not automatically apply to local political races in home rule cities like Colorado Springs, or so says Deputy City Attorney Wynetta Massey. She wrote in a May 13, 2011 e-mail, “…where inconsistencies occur between the FCPA and the City Code, the City Code will prevail… Since the campaign finance reports do not specifically state that employer and occupation must be reported, it is optional for reporting purposes.”

She’s absolutely correct in her legal analysis, and while CEW executive director Luis Toro is quoted in the Gazette as saying, “Wow, I disagree with that,” and said that “other cities in Colorado regularly require disclosure of donors’ employers and occupations,” that is not a requirement for all home rule cities, who can make their own rules as they see fit. Section 5.2.201 of the City Charter says, “In the case of any inconsistency, this chapter, “Elections”, of the City Code provisions shall prevail.”

Toro goes on to falsely claim, “If you accept that argument, then the clerk could change the election requirements at whim.” This is legal nonsense. The rules for local elections in home rule jurisdictions are set by the Colorado Springs City Council which delegated supervision of elections to the City Clerk. Section 1.2.506 of the City Charter says, “The Clerk shall conduct all City elections and do or cause to be done all things required by the City Charter and related ordinances… The Clerk is the designated election official for purposes of Colorado statutes.”

This doesn’t make the City Clerk an independent ruling body, but it does vest substantial administrative authority in the City Clerk to determine what information is required by the city in the election process. If CEW or Skorman have a dispute, it’s with the City Clerk, not the other candidates, who merely followed her directions to the letter.

And there’s another law that absolves everyone except Skorman from legal liability for following the directives of the City Clerk in this instance. Colorado Revised Statutes 18-1-504 says that a person cannot be held criminally liable for obeying “an official written interpretation of the statute or law relating to the offense, made or issued by a public servant, agency, or body legally charged or empowered with the responsibility of administering, enforcing, or interpreting a statute, ordinance, regulation, order, or law.”

Catherine Young is exactly the sort of public servant anticipated by this law, and candidates in the mayoral race were told explicitly by her that they were to use the city-provided form and no other form. Section 5.2.202 (A) of the City Charter states, “All reports required by the Fair Campaign Practices Act shall be filed with the City Clerk upon forms supplied by the City Clerk.”

And guess who knowingly and deliberately did not file the required reports on the mandatory form supplied by the city? Candidate Richard Skorman.

Skorman cannot claim that he was obeying the dictates of a city official tasked with conducting the election as the other candidates can. Instead he knowingly refused to abide by her instructions, and what’s more, he never openly questioned her interpretation of the campaign laws or asked for a clarification of the conflict between the city election code and the CFCPA prior to filing illegal self-created forms that explicitly violate the city’s election code.

Clearly he knew of the ambiguity between the state law and the city code, and tried to exploit the ambiguity to his political advantage, seemingly with the full cooperation of both Colorado Ethics Watch. But there’s some potential bad news on the horizon for Skorman, if someone wishes to press the issue.

Section 5.2.204 (A) of the City Charter goes on to say, “Any person who knowingly violates any provision of section 5.2.202 of this part… shall be guilty of a violation of the ordinances of the City, punishable as a misdemeanor, and shall upon conviction be punished by a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars ($500.00) for each offense. Any candidate shall, in addition, forfeit the right to assume the nomination or to take the oath for the office to which the candidate may have been elected…” (emphasis added)

By knowingly filing illegal home-made campaign finance reporting forms, Skorman has violated municipal law and may be prosecuted for a misdemeanor and, most importantly, has forfeited the right to take the office of Mayor, even if he wins the election.

Oops. Looks like his attempt to get everyone else in hot water backfired on him, perhaps fatally for his candidacy for Mayor. That’s what you get when you play dirty politics and do it poorly.

© 2011 Altnews

The killing of Osama bin Laden won’t end terrorism, but it sure brought out the bleeding-heart nitwit knee-jerk liberals.

By Seth Richardson

Wayne Laugesen in his editorial on the killing of Osama bin Laden, stole my Wizard of Oz metaphor before I got this article written, but I’m going to use it anyway.

Unfortunately for everyone, Osama didn’t melt into a cloud of green smoke after being shot by SEAL Team Six (first rule of SEAL Team Six…you never talk about Seal Team Six…). One shot, one kill. Good work gentlemen.

U.S. forces took custody of Osama’s body to collect forensic evidence for positive identification, then buried the body at sea, after, according to reports, giving the body some minimal degree of respect towards Islam by washing it, wrapping it in a white sheet, and speaking some words (we don’t know now just what words) in Arabic before the body was dumped into the Arabian Sea.

This was a brilliant move on the part of the military because it denies jihadists both a body and a shrine to terrorism.

Wayne’s editorial ignited a firestorm of criticism from panty-waist liberal apologists, quislings and Chamberlainesque appeasers to radical Islamic terrorists when he suggested that Osama’s body was undeserving of Islamic ritual and ought to be cremated and flushed down the White House john.

Liberal nitwits of every stripe flooded out of the woodwork and, as Wayne put it, gave him a “shellacking,” going so far as to call for him to be fired for his insensitivity to Islam and his “barbaric” attitude. They thought we should be “above” suggesting desecration of Osama’s body, and that his “insensitive” editorial would foment a backlash from radical jihadists for his disrespect.

Who cares what radical jihadists think? Not me, and not Wayne, and not any right-thinking American, or right-thinking Muslim.We must never, ever cater to the ire or desires of terrorists, because that is the whole purpose of their terrorism. We must stand strong and speak as it pleases us to speak, and if they attack us for it, so be it, we will kill them in due course too, just as we did Osama, no matter how long it takes.

Once that bullet penetrated his skull, Osama ceased to exist and what was left was merely offal to be disposed of in a sanitary manner in the interests of public health.

So, put me down as a supporter of Wayne Laugesen and what he actually wrote, because far from being insensitive to Islam, he was strongly supporting true Islam and true Muslims.

Here’s why: Osama bin Laden was not a Muslim. He was a disaffected megalomaniacal, narcissistic, murderous, serial mass-murderer whose entire organization was built around his personal antipathy towards the United States.

He misused Islam as a stalking-horse for his personal vendetta because that was the only way he could attract followers willing to die for him, a coward who would not do his own dirty work, but rather recruited mental defectives, women and children to be his suicide bombers. He talked the talk, but was too cowardly to walk the walk.

Why was he so angry at the United States? Because we stationed troops in Saudi Arabia, at the invitation of the Saudi government. That’s it. There is no other complaint he had other than his ire at Saudi Arabia’s Kings for allowing the United States to garrison his “holy land.”

He first tried to attack the Saudi royals and government, but they cut off his money and revoked his passport, and he became a fugitive, so he organized Al Quaida as a way to strike at America to vent his spleen. It had absolutely nothing whatever to do with Islam.

If you ask American Muslims, they decry jihad and terrorism as being illegitimate and a perversion of true Islam. The same is true of most peaceable Muslims. Radicals have a different opinion of course, but we should not care what they think.

Therefore, Osama is at best an apostate Muslim, and properly he’s no Muslim at all, but merely a pretender, an Infidel, and an abuser of true Islam who, by Islamic standards, richly deserved to die.

And Wayne was perfectly correct, if somewhat provocative, in stating that we should not grant his body Islamic rites because to do so is to grant him membership in the religion that he twisted to his own ends and abused.

To do so is an insult to true Muslims, and although we did provide some perfunctory Muslim rites, no one should care how outraged radical jihadists become. If they initiate revenge attacks, we will track them down and kill them too. That’s how we deal with such animals.

As for Osama’s final resting place, it’s perfectly appropriate that he’s fish-food, and that jihadists are denied their martyr’s bones and a shrine to terrorism. Besides, flushing his ashes down the john next to the Oval Office would just make the White House into a jihadist shrine, so it’s just as well that didn’t happen.

And thank SEAL Team Six for their proficiency with firearms, which saved the United States probably a billion dollars in expenses that would have been required to incarcerate, try and execute Osama. Such should be the on-the-field-of-battle fate of all members of Al Quaida. No prisoners. After all, they don’t recognize the Geneva Convention, so neither should we.

Let us all now pause to thank SEAL Team Six and all the support units that made this public sanitation measure possible through their outstanding skill and courage. Thanks guys, you’re the very best we have, and I’m forever grateful that you’re out there in the bush looking after us. If I can ever do anything to help you, anything at all, just let me know.

© 2011 Altnews™