Grants like GOCO are essential

Re: “Great Outdoors Colorado grant preserves Cañon City-area ranch and wildlife refuge” by Lance Benzel. I appreciate that you are sharing information about wilderness and public land – I believe it is very important to acknowledge these victories. Grants like the one provided by GOCO are essential to the Colorado environment; we need to continue to work toward preserving wildlife and their beautiful habitat.

Recently, congressman Jared Polis introduced the Continental Divide Wilderness and Recreation Act. This would protect roughly 58,500 acres of land in Summit County and Eagle County. The act could secure and sustain wildlife (and its surroundings) for many generations, as well as bolster recreation activities. It applies the ideology of the grant on a large scale, offering an extraordinary opportunity to protect Coloradan climate.

With an interest in creating a beautiful and diverse world for future generations, I encourage Coloradans to support the act.

For more information on this act, visit continentaldivide.org/proposal.

Jensen Miller

Broomfield

Anonymous political speech

A recent Denver Post front page article about “dark money” was an opinion piece that had no place in the news section given its blatant liberal slant that pejoratively describes anonymous political donations as “dark money” that somehow but inexplicably “could set back democracy.”

The United States is not a “democracy”; it is a constitutional republic that utilizes limited democratic processes, all of which are subject to constitutional limitations, including prohibitions on infringement of any citizen’s right to freedom of anonymous political speech through the imposition of laws that require the public disclosure of their names as contributors to organizations that engage in political advocacy on their behalf.

These organizations are nothing more or less than a group manifestation of the right of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. Whereas the individual alone has no effective voice during political campaigns, a large group of individuals acting together can have an effective voice in the political arena.

Groups as diverse as Common Cause and the NRA prove that there is political power in banding together with others of like mind and hiring professionals to present the group’s political message to voters and to legislators. To require such groups to reveal individual donors infringes on those donors’ right to engage in anonymous political speech.

The purported risk of quid-pro-quo vote buying used as an excuse to pass such laws has not been demonstrated and the Supreme Court as much as said so in the watershed 2003 McConnell v. Federal Election Commission decision.

The right of every person to speak freely and anonymously must be preserved in order to prevent liberals from engaging in their customary practice of character assassination against people who disagree with them politically and who have a right to express that difference of opinion without fear of personal or political retribution.

That is why we have secret balloting, and anonymous political speech must be equally vigorously protected.

Seth Richardson

Monument

As wrong as wrong could be

We should fully expect in some short few days or weeks a major act of Muslim terrorism in the USA, and precisely because of Barack Hussein Obama’s saying at the National Counterterrorism Center that there is “no credible threat of terror to the United States.” He who is always unlucky had better do nothing. He who is always wrong on Islamist terrorism should say nothing.

It is hard to think the habitually guilty innocent of crime. It is hard to think the habitually wrong as occasionally right. Obama has been as habitually wrong on everything dealing with our national defense in the homeland, with Muslim terrorism, as anyone in the history of failures in protecting their nation’s interests has been or ever may be. He keeps company with Neville Chamberlain in that regard.

But, I pray that for the first time Obama is right and his declaration is that remarkable first instance of his ever being right in this regard. The problem is that every time Obama professes some accomplishment of his as defeating terrorism, something follows shortly that proves he was as wrong as wrong could be. He just needs someone like Hillary Clinton, when she was secretary of state, to lie for him as she did for Benghazi.

For now, we must wait for the time left in his term to run its course, and we may hope we have a new commander in chief who will not sacrifice lives for their selfish desires to be president of the United States.

Don Littleton

Colorado Springs