Opinion & Commentary

The news spread faster than a beer spilling down the 72 foot (or 70.1 foot, depending on who’s measuring) bar at Duffy’s Shamrock on Court Place. The joint was closing — soon. Everyone had accepted that someday the owners, the Lombardi brothers, would sell the building that occupied a prime…

“I’m real optimistic about everything going on,” Eddie Maestas said, gazing out the window of Johnnie’s Market at the changing landscape of Larimer Street. “I see nothing but good for this area. I just hope God gives me enough time to see it through.” By then, in the fall of…

Last Tuesday was not John Hickenlooper’s day. Had he caught all the woo pitched his way a year ago and made a run for governor, he probably would have been elected. Instead, his town was having trouble electing anyone, thanks to the disastrous performance of the Denver Election Commission…

I got fucked by a male escort. Was it good for you? At 5:05 a.m. last Wednesday, Peter Boyles was telling his KHOW audience about an e-mail he’d gotten from a man who would be on the air that morning, talking about a prominent religious figure who’d gone to him…

Karl Rove’s Republican Party got wiped off the map yesterday. But the White House strategist has seen that before. Rove spent his early years in Kokomo, a town founded on the west side of Fremont Pass during the 1881 silver strike; the town boomed again during the glory years of…

Five minutes before the polls opened this morning, signs pushing Bill Ritter sprouted every few feet along Speer Boulevard. His name was everywhere — so omnipresent, in fact, that it was hard to remember that at this time last year, the Colorado Democratic Party was still on the Anyone But…

Denver will host the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Not because the Democratic Party will win big in this state on Tuesday — although it will. And not because Denver went through such contortions to guarantee a union hotel — although it did, with the Hyatt Regency recognizing UNITE-HERE in September…

You know your candidacy is in trouble when you hope that Dick Cheney, that man of the people, might be able to bring some votes your way. Still, the veep will be in Colorado Springs tomorrow to help push Republican Doug Lamborn’s chances in the fifth congressional district. There’s only…

It felt traitorous to vote early. I’d never done so before, partly because it always seemed rather undignified to fill out a ballot at the same place I’d buy broccoli, but also because I was loyal to my old polling place, located in a rehab center where the residents considered…

As a kid growing up in Colorado, Andrew Lee loved the Denver Broncos. He discovered his love of politics a little later — when his mother, an immigrant from southern China, decided that her son, the only Chinese kid in his middle school, should learn more about their culture…and rented…

She fought the urge. She really did. But finally, she surrendered. “Someone’s gotta do it,” Lisa Jones says, and sighs. Or, as her new website, VoterJones: The Fix Is In (www.voterjones.com), puts it: “Many voters suspect that the Denver Election Commission is messed up somehow. The purpose of this is…

At 11:15 this morning, Bob Beauprez will hold a press conference to discuss “the source of information regarding Bill Ritter’s plea bargains for criminal aliens.” That someone leaked info isn’t really the story, though — or it shouldn’t be. Journalists depend on leaks, and someone clearly leaked much of the…

It’s tough to end an interview with this question: “Oh, by the way, were you ever a neo-Nazi?” It’s tough, but it’s tougher to suffer through what can happen if you don’t ask that question. We learned that the hard way a few months ago, when we ran a light-hearted…

On Monday night, John Mark Karr faced the camera, wearing only slightly less eye makeup than JonBenét in full pageant regalia, and told Larry King that he was a “very private person.” What a difference a decade makes. Back in early January 1997, a week after the lifeless body of…

It was an ugly Sunday morning at the Las Vegas airport, with lines stretching for hours and a flood of overbookings after Saturday’s torrential downpour had washed away flights. The fellow at the far bar on the D concourse was holding his head and his wallet, having just shelled out…

Up in Arvada, there’s an intense interest in who will win the Nobel Peace Prize each year. That’s because PeaceJam, the international organization dedicated to linking Nobel Peace Prize winners with kids to teach them how to improve their communities, their countries, the world, is based in that ‘burb. In…