Politics & Government

A destructive march by anarchists leads to mayhem and a standoff in Washington, D.C. on Inauguration Day,

While rumors are flying that there could soon be more sweeps of the homeless in Denver, two court cases filed against the city late last year are slowly working their way through the county and federal judicial systems. In anticipation of upcoming developments, we’ve put together a reminder of what the cases are about, why they’re important, and where they stand.

By mid afternoon on Thursday, January 19, the mood in Washington, D.C., had shifted….and not in a good way. People were on edge. The radical left was getting paranoid. The alt-right was acting emboldened. And the vast majority of reasonable and empathetic people in between are totally at the mercy…

There were no arrests made in Washington, D.C. during President Barack Obama’s first inaugural address in 2009. That will not be the case this year, and Denver attorney Jason Flores-Williams has promised to arrest some of the activists who’ll be arrested pro bono.

On Friday, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States. And while Trump clearly has plenty of supporters with high hopes for his time in office, many critics already fear that he’ll join the ranks of the most ineffective, incompetent chief executives we’ve ever had. What are the chances The Donald will sink to such depths?

Three Denver law enforcement leaders sat in the front pew of the Shorter Community AME Church sanctuary, surrounded by roughly a thousand people, who were angry and respectful, demanding reform.

Chris Walker is in Washington, D.C., covering events around the inauguration — and keeping an eye on Westword cover boy Jason Flores-Williams, who promises to be in the thick of the action.  Here’s Walker’s first dispatch.

The Denver Police Department is gathering intelligence on activists around town — and there’s good reason for that concern. Not only have police officers been paying close attention to social-media posts, but in early 2016 the department purchased subscriptions to a powerful social-media monitoring tool called Geofeedia, which was used by law enforcement agencies across the country to monitor protests and other actions.

It’s going to get heavy. We all know it. We’re not sure how, and we’re not sure when. But the events taking place in Washington, D.C., this coming week are going to unfold like the plot of a paperback thriller. The protagonist would have it no other way. Whether you love him or hate him, Donald J. Trump’s inauguration will be historic. And Westword will be on hand to cover the chaos.

Just in time for Inauguration Week, Vibrant, a local company, has vowed to give proceeds from its signature line of sex toys to the Rocky Mountain chapter of Planned Parenthood.

We’ll be entering a new era on January 20, when Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States at his inauguration ceremony in Washington, D.C. Although most of the action will be in the nation’s capitol, Denver will also have plenty of inauguration-related events.

It’s the second week of the beginners’ Spanish course at the Language School. Five students, including Aisha, sit around a table and ask each other how to spell their names in the foreign language. Their instructor stands close by, listening intently and correcting any mispronunciations. Aisha, a mail carrier from Aurora, signed up for the course because she was tired of coming across non-English-speaking clients and being unable to ask them for simple things like a signature.

Colorado Democratic Representative Jared Polis tweeted about an unconfirmed Buzzfeed report that Russia has damning information on Donald Trump, including a claim that the president-elect employed  a “number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him.” Trump has branded the assertions “fake news,” yet at least one Republican state senator from Colorado has rejected a pledge to stop disseminating such false information and a former GOP gubernatorial candidate calls the media pundit behind it a “fake reporter.”

The national elections of 2016 taught us two very stark lessons: that one, people will vote against their own interests and their own espoused values if they feel desperate enough. And two, that politicians as a group are now the most reviled people in the country. It wasn’t so much about who won the election: it was about what lost, and what lost was politics as usual. So yes, we all make resolutions every year, and politicians both local and national clearly need to take a long and hard look at who they are and what they stand for—and what positive steps they can take in either party to improve the nation as a whole and Colorado in the specific.

Brianna Buentello has engaged in politics since she was a child. Both of her parents are Marines – they have been deployed several times – so world affairs have always been personal. But it wasn’t until this year’s presidential election that Buentello considered running for politics, and she’s not alone…