Queen for a day: All that congressional talk of welfare cuts so concerned Denver resident Clarissa Pinkola Estes that she contacted Congress herself, offering to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee as a living, breathing example of a welfare recipient. “Either I’m a welfare queen, in which case…
In the original, which goes back to 1941, Robert Montgomery played a prizefighter who’s accidentally spirited off to heaven before his time, then forced to return to Earth in a different, far less efficient body. When they remade the thing in 1978, complete with a new title, Warren Beatty was…
Denver school-board candidate Wazir-Ali Muhammad, who told the Denver Post last week that the school district’s $14 million budget deficit “almost boggles the mind,” apparently knows what he’s talking about when it comes to educational funding shortfalls. Two years ago Muhammad defaulted on more than $20,000 in taxpayer-backed student loans…
The 150 people gathered at a local church last Saturday were irked by the thought of liberal journalists putting their clammy secular fingers on America’s pulse. But judging by the performance of Rocky Mountain News deputy editorial-page editor Dave Shiflett, they would be lucky to encounter a journalist who even…
Ann Jessie felt fine when she reported to her doctor’s office for the results of a routine physical. A few minutes later the 58-year-old Denver woman emerged, shaken by the diagnosis that she had an incurable–and potentially fatal–disease. That was a year ago. Now, Jessie is preparing to launch a…
It’s been four months since the Aronsons of Evergreen charged in a civil lawsuit that their neighbors, the Quigleys, tried to drive them out of town because the Quigleys hated Jews. Since that time, lawyers for each side have been busy gathering evidence showing numerous alleged low-level infractions of neighborly…
City of Denver officials continue to hold out hope that debt-ridden airline MarkAir can bail them out of a jam at Denver International Airport–even though the Alaska company’s own attorney says it’s on the verge of financial collapse. The city, which backed away from handing MarkAir a $30 million tax-funded…
A Touching Story Regarding Karen Bowers’s “A Wealth of Trouble,” in the March 15 issue: Barbara Huttner’s story was extremely poignant to me. I know her pain, her anger and frustration, because I endured the same. For four years I suffered through the supervised visits with my every move being…
part 1 of 2 Barbara Huttner pulls a thick wedding album from a shelf in her family room and flips through it, looking for a picture of her daughter. The volume contains dozens of photos that have been ripped into pieces and defaced with a black marking pen, the faces…
It has been four and a half years since Colorado’s state health department began a study of the health risks posed to Denver area residents over the past four decades by the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons factory. In that time the study has consumed $8.7 million in federal funds and…
part 2 of 2 In the weeks following the original confrontation with her daughter in the therapist’s office, Barbara Huttner succumbed to serious depression. For the first month, she says, “I’d sit around the house in dirty sweats, watching TV and drinking coffee all day long.” Her face broke out…
Hi-ho, Silverado! If you’ve got a great big new airport and no business around it, who’re you gonna call? Paging Bill Pauls. Recent media accounts of Pauls’s planned purchase of a huge chunk of land around I-70 and Pena Boulevard hailed him as a captain of industry. Those stories neglected…
Don’t let this get around, but any foreign power still interested in invading the United States would do well to try it, say, this Saturday. Half the nation is already catatonic from watching the O.J. Simpson trial, and by Saturday night the other half will be in college-basketball-induced shell shock…
A few blocks west of I-25, along 46th Avenue in an industrial area of northwest Denver, four boys from the nearby Quigg Newton housing project finish stoning a discarded TV and scurry up a stack of pallets to point out the scene of some of their recent exploits. “We play…
The Art of the Deal Regarding Michael Paglia’s “A Site for Sore Eyes,” in the March 8 issue: Bravo to Westword–Michael Paglia unmuzzled! To those of us who stopped reading Westword three articles into your former art reviewer’s mush, it is the honest, stinging, insightful prose of Paglia that marks…
An Aurora waitress was on a Rocky Mountain high last September 5, five days before her marriage, until a minor fender-bender resulted in her losing her driver’s license for drunken driving–despite having had drunken-driving charges against her dismissed in court. Terry Faust’s situation isn’t quite the same as singer John…
Has Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Colorado secretly been nickeling-and-diming its clients so it can earn extra millions of dollars in profits? The company denies it, and in a lawsuit settlement reached last week it admitted no wrongdoing despite shelling out $3 million to consumers. Yet officials in states…
The brochure showed a lake surrounded by snow-capped peaks, with horses gamboling about in the meadow. It looked like the place Elena and Larry Crossgrove dreamed of: a little ranch of their own. They were sold before they ever stepped foot on the land. Four years later, the Crossgroves’ bank…
In 1972, when Nixon was in the White House and the notion of a black hole first was conceived, two promising young scientists met and became close friends. One was an academic who went into university research. The other worked for a huge drug company. Over the years, both rose…
Seeing redskins: Would Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell have switched parties if he’d realized it had been a while since Abe Lincoln was an active Republican? Maybe Campbell would have thought twice if he’d checked out the Jeffco GOP Men’s Club, the regular breakfast gathering in the largest and most powerful…
Behold the joys of spring. Tulips in bloom. A fragrance of love on the soft breeze of evening. Arrival of the, uh, new Michael Jordan-model baseball bat. And the spectacle of the grand old game’s canny geniuses trying to replace everything they can replace without closing the place. To begin…
When local journalist Stephana Major takes the stand to defend herself against charges that she diverted nearly $10,000 from bank accounts of the Colorado Association of Black Journalists, she might well claim her arrest was a case of mistaken identity. Major, after all, has told police that the blame for…
