No rest for politically weary, 
the tax-hike debate starts now

It’s only been a little more than half a year since our fair swing state was inundated with an all-consuming deluge of campaign activity for and against Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. If it seems like the presidential election was a lifetime ago, that’s because it has been wall-to-wall, nonstop politics in Colorado just about every day since. As I noted last week, the victors of the 2012 election in Colorado have been zipping around like a throng of ADHD-crazed bees in feverish ...

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Horrific crimes, weakening of laws 
may renew law-and-order demands

Law and order is about to make a serious comeback, I predict, and I’m not talking “must-see TV.” It’s been a while since societal concerns about crime and violence have ranked anywhere near top of mind for most Americans, either nationally or here in Colorado. It’s that whole “Maslow’s theory of human needs” thing. When your stomach is fed and your streets are safe, you tend to occupy your mind with things other than the next meal and public ...

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Democrats’ legislative extravagance 
exceeded liberals’ wildest dreams

When the gavel came down on the 2013 edition of the Colorado Legislature, the Twitter and Facebook feeds lit up with the kind of self-exultant cheers from liberals that you’d expect in a year when they won wholesale victories for an aggressive progressive agenda. In the Chinese calendar, 2013 is the year of the snake. In Colorado, it is the year of the unabashed liberal. Like the chocolate-slathered fat kid in “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” the party in power ...

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Defiant spirit of Boston reminds 
us of what is best about America

Bostonians are a seriously different breed of Homo sapien. If you’ve seen the film “Goodwill Hunting,” or been in a sports bar when a group of Red Sox fans were watching the ball game, this isn’t a total news flash. It’s well-known that the folks from Boston are wound a little tighter, talk a little tougher and — how to say this delicately — exude a little more emotion than most of the rest of us. Two years ago, I took my son to a Denver Nuggets ...

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Rubio shows backbone in his contributions to ‘Gang of Eight’ immigration overhaul

F or Marco Rubio, the hard work starts now. Earlier this week, the Republican senator from Florida, along with an unlikely band of seven other senators, unveiled the long-awaited details of a new federal immigration plan, one that is big, complicated and controversial.  There are 1,001 reasons why the Gang of Eight immigration overhaul will fail, leaving in place the current system of de facto amnesty, in which 11 million illegal immigrants make up a sort of permanent underclass, ...

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Liberal agenda aggressively pushed in brave new world of Democratic rule

Donald Rumsfeld popularized the terms “known-knowns” and “known-unknowns” during a now-famous Pentagon press conference in which Iraqi WMDs were the subject of the day. The terms are useful in describing the horrors of the legislative session in Denver, too. Let’s look at the known-knowns. First, the Democrats in the Legislature have pushed an aggressive social agenda to the exclusion of much anything else. Senate President John Morse was excoriated by his ...

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End easy bail and kid gloves for straw purchasers of guns

A Colorado judge’s decision to give easy bail to the woman who made the straw purchase of a 9 mm pistol allegedly used by Evan Ebel to fatally gun down Colorado’s correction chief and a pizza delivery man demonstrates the simple-minded perils of those pining for “one more gun law” to save “even one life.” Too often our judicial system treats horrific violations of existing gun laws with the equivalent of a shoulder shrug.   Sara Marie Vigil, ...

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Medicaid expansion likely to be 
a financial disaster for Colorado

Albert Einstein reportedly called compounding interest the most powerful force in the universe. He knew of what he spoke. Compounding interest is that irresistible force which transforms the cost of a $300,000 house into one with a true price tag of something more like $500,000 over the life of a mortgage. Compounding interest also works in our favor, making our savings grow. It is the reason bankers are rich. In Colorado’s state Capitol, the state’s Democratic leadership, ...

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Park status for monument is an idea whose time has come

The idea of redesignating the Colorado National Monument as a national park has been talked about in coffee shops and boardrooms for a very, very long time. But while the concept as concept enjoys widespread local support, it has never made it off the drawing board. Why? For those wanting to grant this western Colorado crown jewel its just due as a national park, the devil’s always been in the details. What to call it? How to maintain historic access for adjacent residents, ...

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Legislature shows little interest in boosting Colorado’s brand

Earlier this year, Gov. John Hickenlooper launched an effort to “rebrand” Colorado to make it a more attractive place for businesses and skilled-professionals to come and, ideally, stay.   By the time the current legislative session is over, though, Hick won’t need a Madison Avenue marketing guru to improve the state’s brand. He’ll need a magician. If Colorado was hoping to position itself as the place-to-be for business, you’d have a hard time ...

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President Obama’s drone policy 
is inconsisistent but mostly correct

Libertarian Rand Paul’s 13-hour filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination as CIA director, a proxy to rail against the Obama administration’s drone policy, created a remarkable torrent of praise from right-leaning America on media platforms large-scale (Fox News) and small-bore (hundreds of conservatives and libertarians on my Facebook and Twitter feed took to the social networks to #standwithrand.) It was a very good day for Kentucky’s junior senator. But for those ...

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Fracking-fluid consumption verus 
giving up produce made with gas

Of the other local Daily Sentinel columnists, I like reading Jim Spehar’s stuff the best. Ole’ Jim is a crafty cuss. Bill Grant’s San Francisco-style liberalism tends to sound like, well, San Francisco liberalism. Spehar packages that same brand of San Francisco liberalism (watered down ever so slightly) a little more artfully, usually in the folksy clothes of West Slope charm that does seem, incidentally, to be very authentically in his DNA. In deeming Spehar my ...

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Environmentalists have become 
fringe element for Democrats

That some Republican candidates for high office have landed well outside the political mainstream is a fact so indisputable that it has become mainstream even among conservatives to say so. Harry Reid, that wretched partisan to whom great blame for Washington’s mess is due, is only a senator today because Nevada Republicans picked an out-of-the-mainstream, glassy-eyed gorilla of a nominee named Sharon Angle to challenge him in 2010. Every time I see Reid on the TV, my head nearly ...

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New state ranking systems say School District 51 is ‘so-so’

A slew of new school ratings systems that measure the quality and performance of Colorado schools is out. The picture the ratings systems paint of Mesa County School District 51 is neither great nor terrible. Faithful backers of School District 51 can keep the bubbly on ice and the Prozac in the medicine cabinet. Like so many schools and school systems around the country, School District 51 is, by these measures, decidedly average. An optimist might say the district is “meeting the ...

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Generational change driving GOP on immigration reform

When tea party darling and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio announced his support for a broad, new approach to addressing illegal immigration in this country — a framework that includes new border enforcement and, controversially, a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the country — it triggered more than a debate about American immigration and border policy. For Republicans, it also started a debate about exactly what kind of party we want to be. Much is made of the ...

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Liberal overreach seen in D.C. 
and in the Colorado Legislature

Before I hit the pillow Wednesday night, I saw a Fox News replay of soon-to-be former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s appearance before a Senate committee to talk about Benghazi. When pressed for details about the motives and circumstances that gave rise to the deadly attack on the American consulate that took the life of four Americans, Clinton responded with self-righteous fury, saying, “What difference does it make?” Moments before this defiant exchange, Clinton ...

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Delayed and denied? Justice for 
Aurora killer hangs in balance

The wheels of justice in the James Holmes case started their glacial-paced grind this week in a courtroom not far from the theater where he massacred a dozen moviegoers. For those who may have forgotten just how horrifyingly unhurried our justice system moves, be reminded. Indeed, beyond the prosecution’s release of new evidence exposing the lucid depravity of Holmes, the most notable part of this week’s preliminary proceedings is just how exasperatingly slowly even an ...

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Interstate 70 is an example of 
large projects we no longer build

We don’t build great public works projects any more. It’s sad. More than too bad, really. I wish we still did. I got to thinking about it on the Interstate 70 drive back to Grand Junction for the holidays. Even though this patch of federal interstate highway is anything but just another road, when you drive it a lot, it sort of becomes, well, just another road. You know what I mean. A blur. A means to a destination. Four hours of twists and turns, punctuated with the same gas ...

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Stubborn optimism required to face tribulations of 2013

Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. – Ghandi Optimism is in short supply these days. It’s hard not to feel bearish about the prospects of our country — or humanity, for that matter. When you survey the world around us — Aurora, Newtown, Sandy, the fiscal cliff, the rise of poverty, the decline of the American ...

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Suburban, middle-class parents 
must start asking tough questions

I don’t know what is going on anymore. I don’t like what we have become. This one was bad, worse than all the others. And the others were breathtaking, unspeakable, incomprehensible, awful. A theatre. A mall during Christmas. A high school. A man shoved in front of a subway. A 10-year-old girl kidnapped, raped and dismembered by some strung-out-on-violent-video-game, white, teenage punk. Dear God, what is becoming of us? It could never be worse than Century 16 in Aurora, ...

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Challenging year lies ahead 
for Gov. John Hickenlooper

John Hickenlooper is in for a difficult year — one that will test the Hickenlooper brand and potentially pose a threat to the overwhelming popularity he has accumulated, first as Denver mayor and now, governor. In November, voters gave Democrats large majorities in both the state House and Senate, putting an end to a divided government arrangement in the Capitol that prevented many of the most bitter political fights from ever reaching Hick’s desk. For two years Hickenlooper ...

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Obama’s likability and celebrity were 
more important than his performance

President Barack Obama got his second chance. His first term has been a literal disaster. His re-election bid, though, was anything but. Books will be written on how he did it. A few reasons stand out now. First, Obama is, at root, a beloved figure for vast segments of America. How could a president with such a stunningly poor record of performance still win 51 percent of the vote? It’s easy: People like him, they really like him. In 1996, Bill Clinton proved that like is more ...

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The return of the ‘dinosaur fish’ to the Grand Canyon

The razorback sucker is one awesome critter — a pre-historic river runner that is so flat-out cool it would even make a hardened skeptic wonder whether it is the handiwork of a higher power having a particularly good day. The fish, can grow to an expansive 3 feet in length, and can live as long as 40 years. For 5 million years (give or take), the razorback, named for the unmistakable humpty hump just behind its head, has roamed the mighty Colorado River and its tributaries. Five ...

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The case for the re-election 
of Barack Obama? There isn’t one

There is no intellectually serious argument for the re-election of President Barack Obama. Roughly half of voting Americans, if current polls are to be believed, disagree. That’s their right, even though they are wrong. On a historical and practical level, there simply is no credible case for him. As president, he has been a historic failure, one of the worst presidents in the modern era. Like Woodrow Wilson, a presidential failure of the first order, Obama’s proudest ...

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Standing on the edge of fiscal cliff; wooing independents

With just over three weeks until the election, there’s a lot to talk about. So let’s start talking. First, Mark Udall is right. In an interview with The Daily Sentinel’s Gary Harmon last week, the state’s relatively-new-but-still-senior senator said that the so-called “fiscal cliff” represents still another opportunity for the bumbling miscreants in Congress to steer out of the path of a coming debt crisis. The fiscal cliff is that moment later this ...

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Autumn has arrived for the president’s unfulfilled promises

There was a stiff, crisp breeze in the air as the audience attending Wednesday’s much-anticipated presidential debate poured out of the University of Denver and onto University Avenue. The protestors that had lined these streets earlier — a slew of youngish Republicans spoofing Obamacare, a rally mocking Romney’s wealth and hair, a critical mass proclaiming Mitt was a menace to the reproductive rights of women — were all long-gone now. They had retreated to the ...

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Current events on political stage 
give a person cause to wonder

The awesome power of the United States government swung into action last week to protect a nifty natural resource in southern Colorado called Chimney Rock, when President Barack Obama invoked his authority under the Antiquities Act to prevent future development in and around the desert landscape. I thought the president’s action was neat, but I can’t help wonder: Shouldn’t the president have used his presidential powers to protect our Libyan embassy instead? Speaking of ...

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A tale of two West Slope races, 
one unconventional, one familiar

The race to replace outgoing Mesa County commissioner Craig Meis is something of an oddity. In a day-and-age when many voters would love to have the option of voting for “none of the above,” this is the peculiar race where a goodly number of voters are probably wrestling with whom to support because “all of the above” are intelligent, compelling candidates. It’s no secret that I have an affinity for John Justman. If you’ve met him, you like him. ...

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Everyone should agree on this: 
No more apologies to terrorists

You wouldn’t know it by reading media accounts, but there’s common ground somewhere in the gray space between all the black-and-white bickering between President Obama and the Romney campaign about who said what, when and to whom in the aftermath of the attacks on American embassies. There is a unifying principle that, at least if we are to take the various public statements at face value, should unite Obama, Romney and the press. Mitt Romney says the Obama administration, ...

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‘The home of the brave’ is close
to becoming ‘the land of the weak’

There it is, lovers of Americana, happening right there in front of our eyes. Another proud American institution is being torn to smithereens by the media, the flaccid forces of political correctness and the unwitting complicity of a growing population of Americans who are so easily whipped into fear-writhing panic that it’s a wonder they can even muster the gumption to face the world most days. Is this still the nation that bum-rushed Normandy? Some days it is hard to tell. The ...

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Theater rampage suspect has allies 
in opponents of the death penalty

A winding saga that involves the fatal beating of a Limon prison guard 10 years ago, the flamboyant lawyer who represented Ward Churchill and the fierce campaigning of anti-death-penalty activists will play a prominent role in determining whether James Holmes receives the death penalty. Holmes is the brainiak allegedly turned butcher who is the suspect in the methodical rampage that took the life of 12 men, women and children in an Aurora theater last month. It is a tale so bizarre that ...

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Political courage, not civility, is what’s missing these days

A month or so ago, Martelle Daniels, a respected local figure whom I have always liked, wrote a letter to the editor taking me to task for tough words I aimed at U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet. Others have followed suit and, strange as it may seem, I enjoyed every one. Generally, I appreciate it when readers take to the desktop to critique what I write. If there’s anything I miss about politics, it is the brass tack, give-and-take of the American political process. As much as it may not ...

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In humanity’s quest to know ‘Why?’

The quest to know the world in all of its unknowable dimensions is as old as the moment the human mind first fused itself with the human spirit. My preliminary research failed to identify the precise point this happened, but we know anecdotally that it was sometime before the birth of Einstein or Galileo. Also before the Ancients. The human mind, that symphony of 20-billion neurons that communicate back and forth along protoplasmic broadband lines as a means of creating smell, taste, ...

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Obama’s ‘you didn’t build it’ slip and Romney’s possible Veep picks

Can you imagine FDR, JFK, or LBJ uttering the now infamous phrase turned by BHO last week: “If you have a business — you didn’t build that”? Seriously, sort through the names of Democratic leaders who have risen to a position of prominence at the local, state or national level — Bernie Buescher, Mark Udall, William Jefferson Clinton — and try to imagine any one of them showing the imperiousness, the audacious disconnectedness to ever wag their finger in ...

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Chief justice proves that he’s a wolf in ‘umpire’s’ clothing

“Judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules; they apply them.” — John Roberts, during his Senate confirmation hearing as chief justice of the Supreme Court. To understand the full magnitude of Chief Justice John Roberts’ plundering of the ideals of federalism, limited government and judicial restraint, you can’t simply look at Robert’s contorted opinion in Thursday’s Obamacare ruling. For the full view of his judicial perfidy, ...

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Colorado and United States stuck in economic purgatory

Economic news from close to home and around the world this week paints a picture of unrelenting uncertainty for an economy that just can’t seem to shake the shackles of recession. The news isn’t all bad, but it is mostly so. With Europe teetering on collapse, American markets in tangles, global ministers of finance continuing to play the role of bucket brigade in the midst of a 100-year flood, and two continents worth of political leaders who are leadership-averse, it’s ...

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Carville exposes politically tone-deaf Obama (again)

James Carville and Stan Greenberg, two veterans of Bill Clinton’s national election sweeps who, more than a decade on, still happen to be two of the smartest guys in the upper reaches of the Democratic brain trust, dropped a heavy-duty dime on President Barack Obama this week. They criticized Obama’s audaciously out-of-touch re-election trope that everything is getting better. “Today is an encouraging day,” the President said in a campaign stop in North Carolina ...

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Justman is the more conservative candidate

Somewhere in the space between slow/sleepy and a wild/wooly election rests the county commissioner contest between former Fruita Mayor Ken Henry and Fruita farmer, John Justman. The race is the open-seat election to replace Craig Meis. The pace of election activity has been moderate, but the consequences of the race loom large. County commissioners in this state wield key decision-making powers. Picking the right candidate matters in this one. For Republican activists, both Justman and ...

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In Colorado political battles, Dems have more tanks, better strategy

Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian soldier and famed Hegelian thinker of the early 19th century, whose writings still play a foundational role in the training of the world’s top military brass, famously opined that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” Clausewitz posited that the fundamental objectives of both politics and war — i.e. consolidating power, accumulating resources, etc. — were ultimately the same. For Clausewitz, politics was simply ...

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The political gravity of a bad economy drags down Obama’s re-election prospects

President Barack Obama had a bad week. OK, that’s not really news. Obama has had a lot of bad weeks since becoming president. But the last week was especially grim for 44th president of the United States, with a lot of polling data providing fresh kernels of evidence affirming an old truth that the Obama re-election campaign just can’t shake — namely, that weak presidents presiding over bad economies have a really hard time winning re-election. Some things in politics ...

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Will the French wave the white flag on fiscal austerity?

A far-reaching plan to curb Europe’s continental government debt crisis by imposing strict caps on government borrowing and spending will face its first major political test in the form of the French presidential election this Sunday, an election pitting President Nicolas Sarkozy, the nation’s center-right leader and avowed defender of the get-tough European debt reduction plan, against a surging technocratic socialist by the name of Francoise Hollande, a man whose big spending ...

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Tragedy in Trayvon Martin’s death and in our national discourse

The vehement national debate over the shooting of Trayvon Martin is about as strong of proof as you can find that it isn’t just the American political process that is dysfunctional these days — our entire social discourse is a distorted, contorted, discombobulated mess. If we are still the greatest nation on the planet, you sure couldn’t tell it by the way we behave on the 5 o’clock news. Simple, stereotypical storylines overwhelmingly dominate our discourse, while ...

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Laura Bradford answered call to serve, and did so admirably

Like a lot of folks, I suspect, I have decidedly mixed feelings about Laura Bradford’s decision to leave the Legislature. The turmoil of recent days left many of Laura’s most ardent backers bemused, but Rep. Bradford still has a deep well of support in the community. For me, Bradford’s name will always be synonymous with electoral accountability. Her dramatic election to the House of Representatives in 2008 was a powerful reminder that, in a free society where the ...

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Conservative electorate different than just two years ago

Elections are as much a barometer on the people voting in them as they are a reflection of the men and women running in them. And in the case of this year’s excruciatingly interminable GOP presidential primary, that is certainly true. There is much to ascertain about the mindset of the American conservative, the state of the tea party and the prospects of Grand Old Party heading into the fall from the long slog of a nomination contest that started in Iowa. Implicit in writing a ...

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GOP delegates should seek candidates like Meis and Rowland

The Mesa County Republican Party will have its bi-annual nominating brouhaha this weekend over at the Avalon Theatre. I’ve got to say, I don’t miss a lot about political life at this point. The pay stinks, the travel is tiring and rubber chicken gives me acid reflux. But these nominating assemblies are the hotbeds of our democratic process — and a lot of fun, to boot. Those, I miss. This weekend’s rendition should be especially interesting. At the top of the agenda ...

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Gov. Christie and Colorado representative refuse to back down to incivil bullies

Civility in politics is important. You hear it a lot. I agree. It is ridiculous that elected leaders can’t even carry on a conversation with one another. To be honest, that is one of the things I like most about Gov. John Hickenlooper — he doesn’t have that angry glaze of partisanship that taints the eyes of so many high-ranking types these days. Good for him. And there are others like him. Scott Tipton certainly comes to mind. But inasmuch as civility matters, so does ...

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George Will and Rush Limbaugh are Obama’s unwitting allies

To hear the ready-fire-aim drivel from certain members of the conservative commentariot these days is to understand, at least in part, why conservatives do not govern the country. Witness last week the ruminations of George Will, who argued that conservatives should surrender themselves to the nightmarish idea of four more years of the Obama-nation, and instead focus all of our collective resources on the transcendentally titillating goal of electing Mitch McConnell Senate majority leader ...

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Enough with presidential primaries and the idea Islam is about peace

Sigh. I am sick of this presidential primary. This thing is a slow-motion train wreck and it’s making my head hurt. Like the Oscars. Like Whitney Houston coverage. Like, somebody please make it stop. If I hear Wolf Blitzer tee up another segment telling me that the next state is the new battleground that Romney just has gotta’ win or else his presidential aspirations are baked, well, I’m going to throw something. Excuse me, Matt Drudge, do we really need any more ...

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School district double standard exposed in flap over choir song

Indulge me for a second, if you would. Put your morning coffee down, walk over to your couch, sit down, lean back and close your eyes. Now, join me in imagining the face of young James Harper — you know, the crooning Grand Junction High School Christian who captured the attention of the nation when he told his band teacher to take that Islamic tune and shove it. But in this exercise, James Harper is wearing something much more formal than a gray T shirt. He is wearing a cap and ...

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Will Mitt Romney fight? Newt found out in Florida

The prevailing critique of Mitt Romney among Republicans who can’t yet bring themselves to support the former Massachusetts governor is that he’s too bland to be inspirational, too packaged and buttoned-down to appeal to the white-hot sentiments of an angry populist throng itching for a fist fight with Barack Obama. For these, Romney is like a saltine cracker and soda pop at a time the right-wing nation is chomp-stomp-famished for a bag of right-wing Doritos chased by a shot of ...

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