Nation Topics - Colorado | The Nation

Discusses the role of morality in U.S. state law and Supreme Court decisions. Report that the Colorado Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of a convicted murderer because jurors had consulted a Bible during their deliberations rather than state law; Design of the court system to moderate human behavior in the face of moral ambiguity; Discussion of the movement among health professionals to exercise the right of refusal, a practice that is often informed by religious conservatism; Opinion that professionals must act under the guidelines of the profession they have chosen; Problems with replacing professional ethics with religious belief.

Offers a look at the role of antidepressant drugs in homicides perpetrated by teenagers. Case of Jeff Weise, a teenager who killed ten others at the Red Lake Indian reservation in Minnesota, and who was on the drug Prozac; Presence of the antidepressant Luvox at the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado; Use of Prozac by Joseph Wesbecker who killed nine in Kentucky; Lawsuit against pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, manufacturer of Prozac, in the Wesbecker incident; Criticism of the clinical testing of Prozac; Connection between psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies; Research into the likely link between Prozac and violent acts.

The article focuses on the Democratic Party in the United States, following its defeat in the 2004 elections. Well-informed voices predicted early in the campaign that this presidential election was going to be decided by Hispanic voters. But John Kerry and the Democratic Party did not take this seriously enough--and they lost. The election was decided by Latino voters in Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico. If 64,000 Hispanic voters had chosen Kerry instead of Bush in those three states, Kerry would have had nineteen additional electoral votes, for a total of 271, which would have won him the White House. Those 64,000 Hispanic votes--which represent less than 1 percent of the total Hispanic vote--could have been gained with relative ease through more interviews in Spanish, more Hispanic television and radio advertisements and by linking the Kerry campaign in Colorado with that of Hispanic Senator-elect Ken Salazar.

Focuses on the results of the 2004 United States elections in the Congressional House and Senate. Advantage given to Republicans in the House of Representatives; Victory given to Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who increased his power after redistricting Texas; Election of Georgia Democrat Cynthia McKinney; Possibility that the House will try to pass President George W. Bush's Central America Free Trade Agreement; Report that the Democratic Party picked up Senate seats in Colorado and Illinois, with Ken Salazar and Barack Obama respectively.

This article discusses the demographic mix in Arizona, which is an important swing state in the 2004 presidential election. Arizonians of both parties, but especially Democrats, know that for the first time they can remember, their state has become a key player in a presidential election. Maybe the decisive player. Not a single presidential candidate campaigned in Flagstaff in 2000, but both the Kerry and Bush campaigns have been divebombing in and out of this state of 5.6 million for the past few months. Indeed, for all the talk about Rust Belt battleground states like Ohio, the collective electoral clout of New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Arizona could easily overshadow any larger heartland state. Nevada, a red state last time around, is now an even match, as is New Mexico, where Al Gore won by 366 votes in 2000. Democrats are also confident they can compete in Colorado, where Bush beat Gore by eight points. But it's in Arizona, the second-fastest-growing state (after Nevada), brimming with Latinos and Independents--it now has ten electoral votes--where the bloodiest fight is likely to take place. Democrats, who lost the state by six points in 2000, have been pouring in resources--dwarfing the meager commitment made in 2000. Political spots saturate the airwaves--in both English and Spanish (Latinos are a fourth of the population). The AFL-CIO has deemed Arizona crucial enough to be one of the states to which it will send election monitors to guarantee minority voting rights. Left-of-center nonprofits and 527s--from the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, to New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's Moving America Forward, to the labor- and church-supported New American Freedom Summer--have also set up shop. Volunteers man phone banks every night. In Arizona, as elsewhere, the Kerry campaign charges up dead center, focusing on themes of "security"--national security and economic security--and de-emphasizing the more thorny issues of war and peace.

Democrats in the United States are running even or ahead in four of five races for 2004 open Senate seats in the South, and they are also even or ahead in contests for Republican-held seats in Illinois, Oklahoma, Colorado and Alaska. Suddenly, in a year when continued Republican Party control of both houses of Congress seemed assured, and the presidential election was supposed to be the only competition that mattered, there is a real race for control of the legislative chamber that can make or break a President's agenda. New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine says Democrats need to get these Senate races on their radar. If Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry makes it to the Oval Office his attempts to address the disastrous failure to fund No Child Left Behind education programs would certainly be affected by whether the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee was chaired by New Hampshire Republican Judd Gregg, the chief Senate defender of Bush's mandate-rich but cash-starved education agenda, or Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy, one of the few senators who is not afraid to talk about fully funding federal mandates. Suggestions that Democrats might actually come out of the 2004 election season with a President and control of the Senate provoked laughter when Jersey Senator Jon Corzine took over the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in late 2002, after the Democrats had lost control of the Senate in one of the worst midterm election setbacks ever for an opposition party.

As the battle over same-sex marriage played out in Massachusetts in 2003, the Republican Party reacted cautiously--afraid to alienate its social conservative base but afraid, too, of a backlash against a full-fledged culture war. The "family values" movement had no such qualms. Focus on the Family, with its vast Christian media empire based in Colorado Springs, launched a media campaign and its president, James Dobson, took a leave from his paid post to free himself from not-for-profit constraints and fight gay marriage "on the political level." After several months of furious organizing, Dobson complained, only thirty senators have endorsed the proposed constitutional amendment. That is why, a week after Massachusetts began issuing same-sex marriage licenses, Focus on the Family, along with the Family Research Council and the National Association of Evangelicals, organized a live church service, dubbed "The Battle for Marriage," simulcast to 500 Christian congregations, to prepare their troops for a major fight. Some speakers tried to offer up Capitol Hill-ready talking points--about the effects of same-sex marriage on childrearing, public school curriculums and divorce and cohabitation rates--and hawked literature, such as Focus on the Family's "Marriage Under Fire," with its eleven focus-group-tested arguments against same-sex marriage. In their more candid moments, Christian right leaders acknowledge that gay activism is not the only force undermining traditional ideas about marriage. Studies have shown that born-again Christians experience a higher divorce rate than both mainline Protestants and secular couples. However deeply felt the battle against gay marriage is, it has its political usefulness, too. Races for governor, Congress and Senate in Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Maryland and Minnesota had been decided in part on the question of gay marriage and gay civil rights--and that in each case, "pro-family" candidates were victorious.

The author argues that, to win the U.S. presidency in 2004, the Democrats should target Latino voters, rather than trying to win over the South. The new path to the White House runs through the Latino Southwest, not the former Confederacy, especially for a Northern nominee. We say this although we fully agree with the recent argument made by our friends Jesse Jackson Jr. and Frank Watkins that a strategy based on economic issues is critical for uniting African-American and white voters--and, we would add, Latino voters-over the long term. Bush pollster Matthew Dowd's revealing insight that if the Bush 2004 percentage remains the same with every ethnic group he won in 2000, then the Democrats could win by 3 million votes rather than half a million. Most of this increase would come from Latinos. Where do these Latinos live? They live in four key states in the desert Southwest with huge and growing Latino populations -- New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado. Latino voters in these four states could be united and inspired by an economic agenda that includes decent wages, retirement security, reining in corporate corruption, rebuilding public schools, labor rights and healthcare. Then there is the secret weapon--non-Cuban Latinos in Florida. Mobilizing the fast-rising Southwestern Latino population around the same progressive economic issues that can also unite poor whites and African-Americans is the ticket to ride in 2004.

This article looks at the Republican efforts to grab power through redistricting. Traditionally, state legislatures and courts spend the year after the national Census redrawing Congressional maps to fit the new demographic realities. Recently, however, having gained control over more state legislatures than it's had since 1952 (twenty-one to the Democrats' sixteen, plus twenty-nine governorships), the GOP has not only redrawn the state electoral maps after the Census, it has broken with the decennial tradition and rammed through redistricting plans in mid-decade, most notably in Texas but also in Colorado, where the State Supreme Court recently tossed out the Republican legislature's new plan. Amid the brouhaha over redistricting in Texas earlier this year, Representative Martin Frost's office requested that Library of Congress researchers investigate when the last mid-decade redistricting occurred. To recap the Texas saga in brief: State Republicans, goaded by Tom DeLay and supported by DeLay-sponsored political action committees (Americans for a Republican Majority and Texans for a Republican Majority), as well as the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, successfully broke the Democratic resistance to mid-decade redistricting. While the attorneys and the political players argued that the redistricting was solely concerned with divvying up the Texas Congressional delegation to more accurately reflect party loyalties in the Lone Star State, opponents believe that they were attempting to nullify the impact of a large number of conservative voters who split their votes between Republicans in presidential and local elections and Democrats in Congressional races.

On February 26, 2003 the small town of Moscow, Idaho, saw more commotion than it had since a truck camper exploded in a vacant lot the previous September. While the town was still sleeping, two military planes landed at a nearby airport, and at least 100 armed federal agents raided a University of Idaho student apartment--all to arrest a single Saudi graduate student, Sami al-Hussayyen. Word of the raid spread quickly among foreign students across the country, as did news in December that six Middle Easterners studying in Colorado were jailed when they complied with the Immigration and Naturalization Service's special registration program, required of men from twenty-five predominantly Muslim countries. Thanks to Hani Hanjour, the September 11, 2001 hijacker who entered the United States on a student visa, South Asian and Middle Eastern students joined the government's suspect list soon after the attacks. Since then, says the American Civil Liberties Union's Lucas Guttentag, attorneys have observed 'a persistent pattern of discriminatory investigations and enforcement against Muslims and South Asians, especially foreign students from Middle Eastern countries.' Some of the tactics used with students are constitutionally questionable. Muslim foreign students say the pressure of continual scrutiny has led them to curtail travel plans and political activities.