In the article, Embry notes that oil-and-gas businessman Cranberg has made political donations of about $500,000 in Colorado during the past six years, while giving a single $2,000 donation to a Texas candidate — U.S. Rep. Randy Neugebauer — during that time.

A further review of campaign finance records shows that Cranberg and his companies have together donated nearly $1.1 million to Colorado committees and candidates at the state level since 1994, according to Colorado Secretary of State records. (Cranberg’s companies include Aspect Energy, Aspect Holdings, Aspect Management, Aspect Resources, Azimuth Energy, Long Canyon and Walnut Software.)

Since 1992, Cranberg has donated nearly $290,000 to federal candidates and committees, in states including Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Virginia. In 2003 and 2006, Cranberg gave a total of $6,000 to Neugebauer’s campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Meanwhile, R. Todd Neugebauer is president of Cranberg’s Aspect Holdings, according to the company’s website. One of Neugebauer’s two sons is named Todd.

In 2005, Cranberg gave $4,200 to the Colorado congressional campaign of Rick O’Donnell, who held several top appointed spots in Colorado state government, including head of the Department of Higher Education.

According to the Texas Public Policy Foundation website, O’Donnell is president of the Acton Foundation for Entrepreneurial Excellence, an organization affiliated with the Acton School of Business’ MBA program. (Read more about Acton from the Texas Independent.) O’Donnell is also on the board of advisors for the Alliance for Choice in Education, the Denver nonprofit founded by Cranberg.

In 2003, Cranberg donated $2,000 to then-Pres. George W. Bush.

As our sister publication the Colorado Independent reported in 2007, Cranberg was a bundler for and a member of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s “Statewide Finance Committee,” holding the title of “Honorary Finance Chair.” (Read more from the Colorado Independent here.)

In 2008, the Colorado Independent documented Cranberg’s ties to the failed U.S. Senate campaign of Bob Schaffer (a former Cranberg employee), via a 501(c)4 nonprofit and a bevy of other entities with various disclosure requirements. In one instance, Cranberg donated $600,000 to 527 group Coloradans for Change in 2006.

Cranberg has also thrown his money around in state-level contests around the nation, giving nearly $140,000 to state candidates in locations such as Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and South Carolina, according to data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Included in that total is $100,000 to Minnesota House and Senate committees, as well as $5,000 to former Railroad Commissioner Victor Carrillo in 2004.

Cranberg’s donation of $5,000 to the successful 2006 campaign of South Carolina state Rep. L. Kit Spires (along with other contributions from out-of-state donors) drew the attention of Columbia, S.C., newspaper The State. At the time, reporter Tim Flach wrote that Spires’ campaign “is fueled by donations from out-of-state sources with an agenda promoting state aid for private school students.”

During the same 2006 election season, The State associate editor Cindi Ross Scoppe opined on Cranberg’s contributions (via himself and four of his companies) of $17,500 to state superintendent of education candidate Karen Floyd. At the time, Scoppe wrote that she had “no problem with Denver businessman and voucher aficionado Alex Cranberg bankrolling [pro-charter school] candidates […] What I have a problem with is the way they shuffle money around to circumvent our law, which is supposed to stop anyone from giving more than $3,500 to a statewide candidate per election.”

(Efforts by the Texas Independent to calculate Cranberg’s donations to South Carolina’s campaigns in 2006 were unsuccessful because the South Carolina State Ethics Commission only keeps political donations online for six years.)

Additionally, National Institute on Money In State Politics‘ data show that Cranberg’s Aspect Energy and subsidiaries gave nearly $110,000 from 2004-2010 to state-level candidates, including $56,5000 to candidates in South Carolina.

Cranberg also appeared in a 2006 article by Amy Lane in weekly newspaper Crain’s Detroit Business. Lane reported that Cranberg gave $3,400 to Republican gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos, in part because “He shares DeVos’ interest in school choice and is on the board of the Phoenix, Ariz.-based Advocates for School Choice, an organization whose board members include DeVos’ wife, Betsy.”

In today’s Statesman story, a Texas Democratic Party spokeswoman questioned Cranberg’s record of involvement in Texas. A spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry told Statesman reporter Embry that Cranberg graduated from Westlake High School and UT; his parents live in Austin; and he has “substantial business activities in Texas.”

Embry reported that Cranberg voted in Colorado in November 2010 and registered to vote in Texas Jan. 18.

Interestingly, Cranberg appeared in an April 2006 story (not available online) by Julian Brouwer in London’s Daily Mail, the chief subject of which was Cranberg’s Belfast-born wife Susan Morrice and their Belize Natural Energy company, backed by 70 Irish investors. The topic of the story, headlined, “How self-help guru beat Texans to an oil strike,” is how BNE — with the assistance of Irish ‘mind technology’ guru Tony Quinn — struck oil in the Caribbean country after the failure of “greedy Texas Tycoons who spent 50 years trying to plunder Belize for oil and only managed to produce 50 dry holes in the ground,” according to the article.

Throughout the story, reporter Brouwer uses colorful descriptions characteristic of the British tabloid to contrast Cranberg and Morrice’s company with Texas oilmen, portrayed as ‘J.R. Ewing’-type figures from the soap opera Dallas. The story concludes:

“Meanwhile, JR and his Texan friends may have left Belize with their tails between their legs but since the Irish struck oil rumours abound that oil barons wearing big Stetsons are desperate to cash in too.”

“When you see Texans coming down here, you know that something is up,” said bartender Robert Williams, at the Smoky Mermaid in Belize City.

However, Cranberg and Perry do have at least one thing in common — a shared interest in the Boy Scouts of America. According to Cranberg’s bio on the website of Sendero Capital Partners, Cranberg served as a trustee for the Denver Area Boy Scouts Council.

While Buck claims the case was so flawed as to have been impossible to prosecute, the fact is the suspect virtually confessed, according to a police transcript (below) of a phone call between the victim and suspect.

In establishing whether there were grounds to arrest the suspect, Greeley police had the victim phone the suspect from the police station. That call was recorded and entered into evidence.

In the call, this exchange takes place:

Victim: “You do realize that … it’s rape.”

Suspect: “Yeah, I do.”

Victim: “Like in a number of different ways, because I didn’t want to do it and because I was intoxicated and because I was afraid.”

Suspect: “Yes I do. I know.”

Read the complete transcript of the call here.

This first ad, though, is focused almost entirely on Bennet, calling him unfair and a “rubber stamp for his friends in Washington.” Buck says Bennet has established “a record of overspending, overregulating and overtaxing.” In the last 10 seconds of the ad, Buck tells viewers his plan as Senator is to “do what’s right for Colorado, not [for] the big spenders in Washington.”

Buck’s ad comes on the heels of an ad put out earlier this month by Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS. Despite the feeling that Buck would embrace a sort of division of labor approach to the campaign– allowing the Karl Rove-style independent groups to work the low road while the Buck campaign worked the high road– the ads so far produced aren’t substantially different. They’re both 30-second spots that focus on Bennet and that attack him as a typical big spending Democrat.

The Independent goes on to note that Buck and Crossroads GPS were accused of planning to coordinate campaign activities behind the scenes in a complaint filed with the Federal Elections Commission during Buck’s primary fight against Jane Norton. Now that Buck has sealed up the nomination, the Republican author of the complaint has requested that it be withdrawn, but a coalition of progressive groups are now demanding that Buck answer to the accusations before the November election.

Scattered problems amid a big Election Day turnout is the story from polls in five states covered by the Center for Independent Media network.

In Oakland County in suburban Detroit, a key swing county, election officials are preparing to hand count ballots after the county clerk complained that four voting machines had failed pre-election testing, according to the Michigan Messenger. A voter hotline in Michigan is reporting machine malfunctions at 14 different voting spots around the state.

The Colorado Independent’s Twitter feed reports that Latino voters in Greeley, Colo., are planning to protest because of trouble with bilingual help at the polls.

Up to 50 Grinnell College students face problems casting absentee ballots, according to the Iowa Independent.

And in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Independent reports long lines but few problems.

Kaplan suggests that Sen. John McCain’s voter-fraud charges against ACORN might be motivated by a desire to undermine the legitimacy of an Obama presidency and deter future political participation by African- Americans.

While Obama’s voter registration effort is a part of his presidential campaign and entirely separate from ACORN’s, the McCain campaign and its surrogates have continued to falsely link Obama to ACORN.

“The reason that it is [more intense] is because Obama is black, that’s the difference,” former Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Calif.) said, adding that the attacks have longer-term implications. “This is a good way of raising the race card without raising it.”

“If [Obama] loses, two things happen. [Republicans] still have the race issue and then the black community becomes turned off” to electoral politics, Coelho said.

In Kaplan’s piece, political scientist G. Calvin Mackenzie points to historical precedents. He argues that the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush, who both won contested elections, were legitimized by the fact that their opponents stopped crying foul.

McCain might be hoping to avoid a repeat.

Check it out yourself.