Opinion & Commentary

If at first you don’t succeed, tri, tri again. The first Biennial of the Americas was a very ambitious, very confused celebration that brought international stars to Denver in July 2010. So confused, in fact, that when the time came for a second biennial, the event was pushed back to…

At the downtown Sheraton, where he worked as a bellhop, they called Jesse Capen “the gentle giant.” And he had a big dream — to find the Lost Dutchman Mine in the Superstition Mountains. But after Capen disappeared in the area east of Phoenix three years ago, he became part…

Yes, that’s the entrance to El Diablo, the restaurant in the big corner space of the old First Avenue Hotel building — which was tagged, again, this morning with “Danger” signs and a notice to vacate…immediately. Two city officials, accompanied by a Denver police officer, posted the notices shortly after…

When the dust finally settled on December 31, a complicated $10 million land swap involving the Colorado State Land Board, Boulder and Boulder County, Jefferson County and the Department of the Interior — which now owns Rocky Flats, the former nuclear weapons plant — had gone through. And that paves…

In the wake of the shootings in Newton, Connecticut two weeks ago today, experts have tried to find clues in the dozens of school shootings over the last three decades. They’ve found that 60 percent of the shootings happened in small towns. And almost inevitably, the culprit has been a…

Running for governor “was the most fun I’ve ever had,” Tom Tancredo said last week, in a conversation that ranged from his rogue 2010 candidacy against John Hickenlooper and Dan Maes to Amendment 64 to the slopper at Gray’s Coors Tavern to the Sudan to immigration. A lot about iimmigration…

No one could have predicted that all the wacky doomsday predictions tied to the Mayan calendar and December 21, 2012 would mark a new beginning for PeaceJam, the homegrown effort that links Nobel Peace Prize winners with kids, teaching them how to make a difference in the world. But assuming…

The query came from Jim Romensko, who covers media across the country: “Hi Patti, I’m checking to see how Colorado news outlets are responding to the relaxed marijuana law. Have you screened new hires in the past? If so, will you hire journalists who smoke marijuana on their own time…

“Does the GOP have a death wish?” That’s what former congressman, former gubernatorial candidate and longtime rabble-rouser Tom Tancredo asks, in the wake of a number of Republicans signing off last week on the Colorado Compact on Immigration. Tancredo, who left the Rrepublican Party to run for governor in 2010,…

If the world doesn’t come to an end on December 21, it could be the start of very big things for PeaceJam. “We’re an overnight success story…seventeen years later,” says Ivan Suvanjieff. Actually, he got the idea for PeaceJam almost twenty years ago, during Denver’s so-called Summer of Violence, in…

The lights went on outside the Lowenstein yesterday — ten hours after we published a post about frustrated business owners who’d had been kept in the dark about the status of the “enhanced transit corridor”” project along East Colfax Avenue. But shortly after 6 p.m., we got the word from…

Businesses along a stretch of East Colfax Avenue have been in the dark about why, well, they were still in the dark last week – months after a new lighting project had started on the street, as part of a package of city improvements to “create an enhanced transit corridor.”…

A week after John Hickenlooper signed Amendment 64 into law, and four days after President Barack Obama said that the feds have bigger fish to fry than prosecuting recreational users of pot in states that have made it legal, Colorado’s Task Force on the Implementation of Amendment 64 will have…

Pardon our dust! Exactly a year ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a complicated land swap at the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge — the former nuclear weapons plant, minus several hundred acres too contaminated to go public — that would expand the refuge to the west in…

All those outdoor fireplaces at the big-box stores look like they’d make great holiday gifts — but not for Denver residents. Because outdoor fires are banned here, unless they’re used for cooking. One fire-loving Platt Park couple learned that last winter, when they were huddled around their backyard chiminea and…

The situation was stupid enough that Ken Salazar probably wanted to punch someone. When the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was unveiled in 2011, eagle-eyed wordsmiths quickly pointed out that one of the quotes etched into the granite monument had taken King’s words out of context, making him seem like…

The Backseat Budgeter, our Best of Denver 2011 winner for Best Way to Understand the Budget, is back — and just in time. Mayor Michael Hancock’s push for the passage of 2A last month — a deBrucing that allows the city to retain extra money collected — resulted in an…

When John Hickenlooper addressed the Democratic National Convention in early September, he emphasized how Coloradans could overcome party differences to collaborate — unlike Congress. And Coloradans offered an impressive display of collaboration yesterday, when former Senator Hank Brown, a Republican, and Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, unveiled the Colorado Compact…

With all the bad news about media layoffs, here’s a real reason to celebrate: Tonight, the Open Media Foundation will celebrate six years of independent voices on Denver Open Media — which not only runs Denver’s public-access channels on Comcast, but also provides training and services for non-profits and kids…