No Colorado newspapers reported on U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard's effort to abolish the federal minimum wage through an amendment to the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007, even though some did publish articles about another Allard amendment to the same bill.

Yesterday seemed like a perfect opportunity to get out the vote in Denver.  The weather was an unusually warm 74 degrees, and as a Colorado Democratic Party poll watcher I knew we had a team of well trained observers backed up by lawyers who would be ready to deal with any effort by the Republicans to subvert the vote -- and who in fact were able to put together quickly a case to present in court when the vote centers proved unable to handle the turnout.  The Republicans didn't even bother to send a watcher to my vote center, the St. Charles Recreation Center.  As it turned out, the Republicans didn't suppress the vote in Denver -- we did it to ourselves.  The picture at right doesn't even show the hundred plus voters waiting inside at that hour; I don't know how many people gave up and went home before the last voter was processed around 8:45 p.m.  And it wasn't even the Sequoia touch screen voting machines that were the problem.

UNITE-HERE announced today that it has succeeded in its efforts to organize employees of the Convention Center Hyatt hotel downtown, and that today Hyatt management officially recognized the union.

The conventional wisdom is that Republican immigrant bashing is so obviously racially charged that the Latino vote will simply fall into the lap of the Democrats without much effort.  A recent Pew Charitable Trust poll of 2000 Latinos nationwide, reported in the Associated Press, the Denver Post and elsewhere, shows something different and frightening:  The Democrats' weak response to the Republicans is actually reducing Latinos' connection to the party.

To me, Crashing the Gate promoted two distinct and really unconnected arguments:  First, that the Democratic Party is controlled by an old guard that seems content to run the same losing campaigns without any accountability to donors or party members.  Second, that "single interest groups" such as the environmental, pro-choice and labor movements are hurting the party by putting their specific agenda ahead of the party as a whole.  The first argument is dead on, the second, not so much.