The jockeying and posturing is in full force for the chance to run for the Colorado Springs Senate seat, SD 12, being left open by term-limited Senate President Bill Cadman.

It seems freshman state Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt threw down a not-so-subtle gauntlet against another potential hopeful for the heavily Republican district at a meeting of the Colorado Springs Business Alliance at the Capitol on March 11. Klingenschmitt has repeatedly drawn the slings and arrows of Democrats for his over-the-top rhetoric (he compared U.S. Rep. Jared Polis to ISIS last year and compared Planned Parenthood with the terrorist-run Islamic State earlier this month), but took a more subtle approach this time.

Our sources tell us Klingenschmitt distributed a handout slamming former state Rep. Bob Gardner — who was present at the meeting and has expressed an interest in running for Cadman’s seat.

Here, Bob, I have a handout for you…

In the leaflet he distributed, Klingenschmitt chastised Gardner for sponsoring a bill last year that was intended to bring state statute into alignment with federal law. The problem: Gardner’s bill was cosponsored with Denver Democrat Beth McCann, but even worse, it was intended to fix some statutory issues with the state’s health care exchange. Obamacare! Them’s fightin’ words in Cadman territory, our so sources tell us.

What we want to know is where’s Waller? Does the former House Minority Leader Mark Waller — and a well-known friend of Gardner’s — have his eye on the Senate District 12 seat as well?

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It’s musical dominos in the south metro area, where term-limited state Sen. Linda Newell, a Littleton Democrat, is leaving an open seat in next year’s election. State Rep. Daniel Kagan, a Cherry Hills Village Democrat, is running for her notoriously swingy seat — Newell landed the nickname “Landslide Linda” when she first won it in a squeaker seven years ago, with the final results not in until days after election night — and Arapahoe County Commissioner Nancy Doty has thrown in on the Republican side. But that’s not all. It seems state Rep. Kathleen Conti, a Littleton Republican, had also been eyeing Newell’s seat but worked things out with Doty to avert a primary and is instead running for Doty’s seat. No word yet on who plans to seek Conti’s House seat, though, so stay tuned.

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The movement by hardcore Republicans to recall one of their own, state Rep. Dan Thurlow, is gaining steam in the wake of another vote the Grand Junction Republican cast this week — casting his no vote on efforts to repeal a fee assessed against motorists who register their vehicle late — although some Mesa County elephants caution that it’s all just a lot of hot air and Facebook ink until a Republican emerges as a viable challenger. Although some recall organizers seem to be under the impression they have to wait six months to initiate a recall, the statute only requires a legislator to be in office five days before the pitchforks can be brought out. That pushes off threats to oust the independent spirit until at least early July, a lifetime in politics, or until organizers find out the law reads differently.

But Thurlow bashers are charging full speed ahead in the meantime, stoking furor over the Republican’s votes on a Facebook page that was festooned for a while this week with a graphic photograph of an enraged elephant attacking a rhinoceros, symbolizing the RINO (Republican In Name Only) characteristics that have enraged Thurlow detractors.

Particularly enraging, according to the owners of a Recall Dan Thurlow Facebook page — it had 121 “likes” at press time, although some who clicked the thumbs-up make clear they’re only liking it to keep track of things — was a vote Thurlow cast with Democrats for a bill to ban so-called “gay conversion” therapy. It was, the recall page wrote, a vote “for a gag order on therapists under penalty of law. If a patient asks for help from a Therapist on gender identity issues or same sex attraction — the therapist must be silent or face losing his/her license but only if the therapist is a person of faith.” The proposed legislation, the page wrote, “is targeted at faith based counselors and forces them to only discuss options that go against their faith.”

One of our sources in God’s Country — or Mesa County, as the maps have it — tells us that Thurlow is grabbing the elephant by the tusks and has the opportunity to fend off the hitherto unprecedented threat of a recall at the hands of his own. Some support him, some are angry, but most are confused, our source tells us. But it’s a tough needle to thread, since it doesn’t take much for the angry people to convert the confused people.

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The Capital Press Corps rallied around beloved Denver Post scribe Lynn Bartels this week after she lost her father, Fritz, 83, who passed away on Saturday after a long illness.

At services in South Dakota on Sunday, Bartels wrote on her Facebook page that she’d been keeping it together while everyone around her was crying but then she glanced around and saw former GOP head Dick Wadhams in one of the pews and burst into tears herself. Her voice, she wrote, was shaking throughout the eulogy she delivered. Afterward, she joked with her family that they can blame Wadhams for ruining her delivery. “After all, my mother has been blaming him since John Thune got elected in 2004!”

In the obituary she wrote for her father, Bartels said that he “could count on one hand the things that really mattered to him: his family, friends, his wife’s brisket, the USD Coyotes and the laughter he inspired with his famous one-liners.” She then provided a sampling:

“When his youngest children — otherwise known as the ‘four little girls’ — bought him a multi-colored pair of ‘jams’ for Father’s Day one year, he said, ‘I look like a peacock in heat. ‘But it wasn’t the shorts that drew laughter, it was his bird legs.

“When his wife Mary said she needed a banana every day to keep up her energy, he quipped, ‘It would take a Chiquita factory.’ ”

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State Sen. Mike Johnston’s father, Paul, passed away this week, and a remembrance the Denver Democrat wrote had Capitol denizens wiping away tears, we hear.

“Yesterday my father Paul Johnston went home to heaven,” the senator wrote. “He was a soldier and a peace activist, a painter and an author, an art dealer and a realtor, a small town hotel and laundromat and movie theatre owner, a cowboy and a bartender, a pilot and a motocross rider, a mayor and a hospice volunteer and an ecumenical minister. Most of all he was the most gentle and generous and selfless man I have ever known.”