Former state lawmaker Ken Gordon is a passionate advocate of online communication, particularly emerging social media, as a powerful tool in the service of democracy. In bursts of electronic energy, known as “e-mails,” he’s reached out across cyberspace to encourage citizens to get involved and start tweeting their elected representatives…
It was a simple plan. Get the kid to bring a stolen car to an isolated parking lot, then tase his ass and take him down. No chase. No shooting. No fuss. Arvada detective Bill Johnson, the lead investigator on the case, went over the plan in a room crowded…
In our continuing analysis of the water musings cranked out by Scott McInnis during his two-year, $300,000 fellowship, one inescapable question emerges — the same question that confronts the weary slush-pile editor after wading through stacks of really bad writing: Has anybody else ever tried to read this stuff?…
We may never know what inspired the Hasan Family Foundation to shell out $300,000 for a series of remarkably slipshod “Musings on Water” by Scott McInnis. But as I pointed out in the first installment of our probing analysis, the candidate’s soggy prose offers clues about the kind of governor…
The blogosphere has been abuzz of late about the news that gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis picked up a $300,000 paycheck as a two-year fellow at the Hasan Family Foundation, mainly for writing a series of eye-glazing articles about Colorado water issues. Political junkies everywhere want to know what the Hasans…
Taking a cue from the Rambo fantasies of Gary Brooks Faulkner, U.S. Senate candidate Jane Norton has revamped her website to suggest she’s ready to bring us the head of Osama bin Laden. And that of Barack Obama. And all those liberal milquetoasts in Washington who’ve sold us down the…
The naming of a former prosecutor to head the scandal-plagued Minerals Management Service, coupled with President Barack Obama’s lackluster but occasionally pugnacious speech about making British Petroleum “pay” for the oil-slick disaster in the Gulf, suggests the administration is finally starting to look at poor regulation of oil-and-gas drilling in…
Friend, do you consider yourself both gifted and green? Do coworkers refer to you, without a hint of mockery, as some kind of ecogenius? Do you spend time wondering not why the doe crosses the road, but how the hell she doesn’t get eviscerated doing it? Are you the Da…
While his department’s handling of the oil-slick crisis in the Gulf continues to draw scathing criticism and political blowback, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has another ecological headache brewing out west over his wild-horse program. And judging from a public workshop held on the issue in Denver today, it’s…
The Obama administration’s ever-shifting damage figures and containment strategies for the mess in the Gulf — not to mention the ever-spewing oil — have disenchanted many former admirers of the President. Now a scathing dive into the disaster in the latest Rolling Stone blasts Obama and particulary his Secretary of…
After a costly effort to unmask the creators of an anonymous website backing three controversial tax-relief issues, an administrative law judge has fined three of the listed proponents of the measures for violating state campaign finance laws — and concluded that tax crusader Douglas Bruce was deeply involved in behind-the-scenes…
Reports that Charlie Sheen’s plea deal on domestic violence charges in Aspen is faltering because he won’t be allowed to smoke while on work release have left some of us court-watchers flummoxed. After all, Aspen is a celebrity-prone place. You’d think all that experience accommodating the special needs of hyper-extended…
The release of a twelve-month study about the mental effects of solitary confinement at Colorado’s supermax is still weeks away. But preliminary results leaked from the report — which suggest state prisoners suffer little, if any, psychological impact from even long-term stay in isolation cells — is already stirring outrage…
The last time I saw Kristen Des Marais, she was trying to track dozens of feral cats that had set up a fast-breeding colony in the crawl spaces under a Denver apartment complex. Des Marais and volunteer Carol Tudor were trapping the cats so they could be neutered and adopted…
On the eve of going to court in its effort to protect internal investigations records of police officers from public scrutiny, the City of Denver has agreed to settle a lawsuit by forking over many of the documents sought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado…
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is still getting roundly pummeled in the press over the Obama administration’s response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. But there’s increasing evidence that the administration is trying to shift the faltering Coloradoan out of the spotlight and find other, less compromised figures…
It was fairly predictable that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar would emerge as the whipping-boy of conservative pundits over the Deepwater Horizon spill. What better symbol of the alleged impotence of the Obama administration than a cowboy-hatted bureaucrat who blusters about keeping his foot on the neck of British…
It’s official: Even with the corrective measures British Petroleum is undertaking to try to contain the oil leak flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, the massive spill has been flowing at a rate two to four times greater than original estimates. In a teleconference with journalists this morning, United States…
After the embarrasing political scrum over the sex offender bill that prompted Governor Bill Ritter to veto the mess last week, it’s easy to overlook the fact that something was actually accomplished on the criminal justice front in the legislature this year. Yesterday, Ritter signed into a law a package…
As oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster begins to stain shorelines along the Gulf Coast, beauticians across the nation are learning that one of the more feel-good (and dubious) solutions proposed in recent weeks to the spreading slick won’t be tried after all. A couple of weeks ago, stories like…
As any viewer of MSNBC’s Lockup knows, prison is about punishment, plain and simple, not rehabilitation or even “correction.” But does that mean it has to be dehumanizing, too? Put aside the sadistic guards and power-mad wardens of pulp fiction who enjoy making their charges grovel; the reality of a…
In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil slick disaster, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is barreling ahead in his efforts to reform the embattled Minerals Management Service, the once-obscure agency responsible for overseeing offshore drilling. Yesterday’s announcement that Salazar is splitting MMS into not two, but three separate…
