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Political blog stirs ire of GOP brass

Lynn Bartels, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 1, 2005 at midnight

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The director of the Colorado Republican Party on Wednesday urged members to stop posting to one of the state's most read political blogs, ColoradoPols.com.

GOP director Hans Gullickson accused Democrats of running the blog, saying information posted about Republicans is either "spectacularly wrong or consistently biased."

In addition, he accused those behind the blog of keeping track of the names of people who thought they were anonymously posting to the site. He feared how that information might be used.

"We expect that the anonymous Democrat activists that run this site intend to use the information they are collecting to hurt Republicans and Republican campaigns," Gullickson wrote in a memo distributed to party members.

ColoradoPols.com responded Wednesday evening with a post on the front page of its Web site:

"Here's where we make this simple: this site's content is produced by several authors on both sides of the political spectrum. We take pride in the fact that our information is, more often than not, accurate and timely. We do not have a 'secret agenda' to bring down anybody's candidate or party. We call things how we see them, and if it weren't the case, we would not have the strong bipartisan following we presently enjoy."

ColoradoPols.com was launched this year and instantly became a must-read for politicos. The authors refuse to identify themselves, using the pseudonyms of three dead governors. They say they are a bipartisan group.

Last summer, the Rocky Mountain News outed one of the three. "Alva Adams" turned out to be Jason Bane, a Jefferson County Democrat who was the spokesman for Mitch Morrissey's successful Denver district attorney campaign in 2004. Bane, who also is a freelance journalist, did not return calls Wednesday.

In recent months, much of the traffic on the blog has involved GOP gubernatorial candidates Bob Beauprez and Marc Holtzman, who are engaged in a nasty battle to win the primary next August.

The candidates and their campaigns alternately have been vilified or praised by those posting on ColoradoPols.com.

Some posters have speculated that Holtzman is behind the blog - a charge that contradicts the theory that big-time Democrats are running the site.

Beauprez's campaign coordinator, John Marshall, said he used to regularly check the blog but now doesn't bother because "so much of it is so inaccurate."

Marshall said ColoradoPols recently reported that he had been tossed from the campaign and it named the person Beauprez supposedly had hired to replace him. Both items were wrong, Marshall said.