It's not enough for the radical right running Colorado to legislate your marriage, mandate your kids' allegiances, and move public school dollars to Christian institutions ... they now intend to legislate whom colleges and universities can hire.

Really. News4 just reported that our Repugnicans are drafting legislation requiring Colorado's colleges and universities to hire right-wing academics (I'll link to it when they get it onto their web site). It's going to be spun as the Academic Bill of Rights. As in, Hi, my name is Bill Owens, you have the right to agree with how I tell you to live (uh, Bill, um .... oh, never mind).

That's right, an ideological screen for faculty. "And have you Ms. Jones ever considered, or known anyone who has considered, using a contraceptive?" Zzzzzt, buh bye. (Repeat after me, it is not 1958....it is not 1958 ... )

What's worse, this is just another example of our elected officials acting as mindless puppets of the national rightwing machinery. Turns out the 'Academic Bill of Rights' campaign is just another Beltway-imposed mandate on our drone Republican leadership (Rove to Gov Bill: You Vill Have an Academic Bill uv Rights if you Vant to be Our Leader!) . Neo-McCarthyite David Horowitz (Time magazine calls him "A Real, Live Bigot")' "Center for the Study of Popular Culture", funded by notorious radical right billionaire Richard Scaife, is behind this particular bit of elitist divisiveness..

This, of course, after the GOPers waste more of our time and tax money opposing their own right wing Supreme Court on Affirmative Action.

Well, all that will surely maintain Colorado's top ranking among higher educational institutions in this here country!

Oh wait, that's party-school rankings. Well now, we oughta be able to trust a Bill "Bush Lite" Owens' Faculty to maintain those.

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Update: Peggy Lowe at The Rocky Mountain News is onto it... Turns out that the Independence Institute sicced one of their young Righties onto UC Boulder, in an entirely manufactured incident, after a Horowitz love-in with the Republican leadership this summer;

Corry (of the Independence Institute), who earned her undergraduate degree at CU in 2001, also was among those meeting with David Horowitz at his June gathering of legislators in the Brown Palace. ... Corry said she also is committed to bringing conservative speakers onto CU's campus.

Pattern? Rove gins up redistricting through a compliant Colorado Republican legislature. Horowitz gins up a right wing takeover of higher ed through a complaint Colorado Republican leadership. Bill Owens attacks Affirmative Action, and spends more time flirting with Grover Norquist in D.C. than finding new jobs for Colorado. (Don't get me started on Tancredo). All locally enabled by the Independence Institute. Just whose interest do these wingnut Republicans represent? This is Colorado's vaunted tradition of independent-minded leadership??

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Up- Update. Lowe at RMN just published the full Republican take-over plan here.

The GOP leadership in Colorado is expected during the 2004 legislative session to dovetail this issue with the larger one of affirmative action. Owens has said he would sign a bill that would bar Colorado colleges from using race as a factor in admissions.

It's worse than I thought -- don't hire your quota of Christian Conservative idealogues? Lose your funding:

"They had the discussion ... on how to put teeth into it, to make them accountable to the legislature and the governor, how to create it in such a way that it was enforceable and that the schools had to do it, so it wasn't just a nice warm-fuzzy statement," said Christopher Sanders, who helped Horowitz's office make arrangements for the meeting.

"The discussion involved their funding on an annual basis, when their budget is renewed."

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Up Up Up Date: Media Transparency has hook, line and stinker on David Horowitz and his nest of inter-related right-wing entities:

Here's how he advertised one of his recent books:

"The ad, titled 'Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea - And Racist Too,' proclaimed that slavery was self-inflicted by blacks and that efforts for reparations should be stopped."

The Nation , in a very long 2000 piece, said of his obsession about supposed leftist professors in academia:

But what about the UCLA survey of 35,000 professors cited by Robert Hughes in his book Culture of Complaint, which revealed that only 4.9 percent called themselves "far left," while 17.8 percent put down "conservative." ,

and said of Horowitz' race-baiting book "Hating Whitey",

In Hating Whitey, however, Horowitz whips up a frenzy about a multitude of black rapists. ...

...More troubling is the way Horowitz wields statistics. "In 1994," he writes, "there were twenty thousand rapes of white women by black men, but only one hundred rapes of black women by white men"--a statistic he lifted from Dinesh D'Souza's book The End of Racism. D'Souza's assertion, however, is based on a gross misreading of Justice Department figures.

Now THAT'S the guy Colorado wants telling the Republicans whom to hire for our colleges and universities!