MichaelBennetofficialphotoHow highly do Sen. Michael Bennet and (soon to be former) Sen. Mark Udall think of southwest Colorado?  So much so that it seems the only time the Senators open their mouths to speak about it, they are only concerned about what local channels SW Coloradans get.

PeakNation™, you may remember way back during Super Bowl Sunday, Udall tried to score some cheap political points by writing an op-ed for The Durango Herald saying that it was a shame that Coloradans in the southwest couldn’t be sure of watching Broncos’ games.  But, as we found out when we looked into the facts, exactly one game of the last 220 Broncos’ games (including all 12 this year) was not shown in Durango (and, as we wrote at the time, the Broncos were finishing out a rather forgettable 7-9 season at the time).

Senator Mumbles shows at least a little more political astuteness by not invoking the false controversy of Broncos games, but, like Udall, he can’t seem to think of southwest Colorado beyond being a local TV desert.  As Peter Marcus at The Durango Herald reports:

U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and Mark Udall, Colorado Democrats, have been pushing aggressively for a legislative fix. Recently, they celebrated the Senate passage of a measure that would help Four Corners residents access Colorado TV news, weather, sports and emergency information.

Yet, as Marcus writes earlier in the article, this is really just all window dressing from the Colorado Democratic Senators:

Television broadcasters worry that federal legislation aimed at providing Denver television to Southwest Colorado would do little without a commitment from satellite providers.

In fact, the broadcasters say no legislation is even needed to provide so-called “orphan counties” with local network television. [the Peak‘s emphasis]

Got to love when our elected officials take credit for solving a problem they have, what appears to be, absolutely no power over it.  We mean, why shouldn’t Bennet fight for this meaningless piece of legislation while not more actively fighting against something he can actually control, like the listing of the Gunnison sage grouse.  Yes, for Bennet, it is more important that people in Durango know what’s going on in Denver, than say the fact that the whole southwest corner of the state is now developmentally paralyzed because bureaucrats in Washington D.C. think they know what is best for us here in Colorado.  Then again, we suppose Bennet doesn’t know anything about southwest Colorado from his perch in Denver.