This week’s feature, “The Zen of Ken,” deals with the formidable challenge facing Colorado’s own Ken Salazar at the Department of the Interior. It also notes in passing the growing contingent of politicos with Colorado connections that the new Secretary is adding to his leadership team, including former Senate candidate…
On January 21, Ken Salazar walked into the Department of the Interior headquarters in Washington, D.C., and found a crush of employees waiting for him. It was his first day on the job, less than 24 hours after President Barack Obama’s inauguration and the Colorado senator’s own speedy confirmation as…
A film crew from Munich-based FOCUS TV Produktions was in our southwest suburbs during the past few days, interviewing people whose lives have been altered by the Columbine shootings ten years ago — school and police officials, parents and survivors of the massacre, journalists and others. The program plans to…
Last week I wrote about the shocking death of 18-year-old Whitney deMoraes Hendrickson — “On a Dark Day, Celebrating a Good Life” — and the remarkable community response to the tragedy in Colorado Springs. Now that blog and several other reflections about Whitney, as well as news accounts of the…
A blog by The Atlantic’s James Fallows gives a shout-out to a 2002 Westword feature, “The Mystery of Pai,” dealing with one of the more mysterious figures in the Enron debacle. Fallows was apparently catching up on his Netflix backlog, including the searing 2005 documentary about Enron, The Smartest Guys…
Once a year for several years, I sat across a table from a slender, graceful girl named Whitney DeMoraes Hendrickson. This happened during my annual pilgrimage to Colorado Springs, when I would have dinner with my old college friends, Dave and Clelia Hendrickson. Dave is a political science professor at…
They’re going to need some pretty big signs to hold all the names of the august Denverites honored at the city’s new justice complex. After a contentious, sometimes bitter and racially charged process that stretched over several months, the Denver City Council finally agreed Monday night, with one notable abstention,…
On Monday, March 9, shortly after one in the morning, Denver police had a call of shots fired at an apartment house down the block from my home, in an otherwise placid section of west Denver. According to the cops, two Latino males wearing red fired several rounds through one…
Read a list of Denver’s eight worst intersections on the Latest Word blog. Just south of downtown, a fender bender on Speer Boulevard jams up a long line of cars, which spills into the intersections at 13th and 14th avenues. A white van making a right turn on red from…
In this week’s Westword, Alan Prendergast looks at the future of traffic in Denver. In reporting his story, he got the scoop on Denver’s worst intersections. The police keep track of the city’s most dangerous intersections, based on accident reports. But we wanted to know the busiest traffic nightmares in…
As Christoper Osher reports in this Denver Post article, Mayor John Hickenlooper has added one more to the list of candidates whose names might end up on portions of the new city justice complex: Van Cise. Gangbusting DA Philip Van Cise, the son of a prominent attorney and father of…
Not so long ago, downtown panhandlers merely had to proclaim their misfortunes — disabled, homeless, stranded, just got out of the hospital or the military, pregnant, or any combination of same — in order to secure that every little bit that helps, God Bless. Like Scott, pictured here, working 18th…
This much I know: Russ Fitch is a retired investment advisor who grew up in Illinois, moved to Colorado in 1972, worked for the EPA at one point and now lives in Heather Gardens with his wife, JoAnn, and their cat, Hops. He’s also an artist who claims a kinship…
Ken Salazar, the new Secretary of the Interior, who spent much of last week traipsing around the Denver area declaring that there’s a new sheriff in town, has taken what he calls “an important first step” in restoring balance to federal public lands policy — pulling the plug on a…
A task force has named four finalists in the naming-rights battle over the new Denver Justice Center — and historic gangbuster Philip Van Cise isn’t among them. To those who know anything of Van Cise’s remarkable but much-neglected story, the news is a bit puzzling, and disheartening. Not that the…
Amid all the revelations connected with Ted Haggard’s attempted resurrection on HBO and Oprah, the accusations of payoffs involving yet another young man lusted after by the former pastor (“Watch the KRDO report featuring Ted Haggard’s latest accuser”), and assorted other sordidness, a greater bit of deception and denial at…
Catching up on my reading over the weekend, I found that the January 19 New Yorker has a terrific piece by Caleb Crain discussing the emergence of new, revisionist accounts of the Ludlow Massacre. “There Was Blood” delves into the bloody conflicts in the southern Colorado coalfields a century ago that…
The knock on Tom Strickland, during his two unsuccessful runs for the Senate, was that he was a (shudder) “lobbyist-lawyer.” Not as appealing, it turned out, as folksy horse-vet Wayne Allard, whose basic charm seemed to be an almost complete absence of anything that might be described as a fresh idea…
In the battle over naming rights for Denver’s new Justice Center, two clear favorites have emerged: Dale Tooley, the city’s district attorney for much of the 1970s, and Philip Van Cise, the one-term DA of the 1920s who busted a sophisticated ring of con artists and took on the Ku…
You might expect a confirmation hearing for a new Secretary of the Interior to be tough going, given the multiple scandals and vast challenges facing the agency after years of Bush administration bumbling and plundering. After all, the Department of the Interior manages a fifth of the land in the country,…
At 7:30 am Mountain Time on January 15, U.S. Senator Ken Salazar will sit down with his colleagues on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and seek their approval in his quest to become the next Secretary of the Interior. Expect our man to be grilled by Big Oil stooges…
U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Babcock has at last issued a ruling denying a motion for acquittal or new trial filed by attorneys for William Orr, the alternative fuel entrepreneur whose battles with the EPA led to a guilty verdict on 23 counts of fraud and tax charges in Babcock’s courtoom…
