Opinion & Commentary

By inching over 10 percent of the vote last Tuesday, Dan Maes saved the Colorado Republican Party from the humiliation of falling to minor-party status. But while Tom Tancredo didn’t win the race, his 30 percent-plus of the vote elevated the American Constitution Party to a major Colorado party…

Even as John Hickenlooper was heading to the Capitol the day after the election to discuss his plans for the state, city employees were reading this e-mail from the governor-elect: “Many of you have already asked what happens now. As excited as I am for my new role, we want…

Tom Tancredo didn’t win Colorado’s wacky gubernatorial race, but at least he went out in style: Not only did he concede graciously — and far more quickly than Dan Maes — on election night, but he did so while rocking a great Western shirt. Only one problem: Like the Wrangler…

“I can’t keep saying I’m not a politician,” governor-elect and definite politician John Hickenlooper said yesterday as he stood the State Capitol, outlining his transition-team plans. From where he stood, he could see his mayoral office at the Denver City & County Building. But his political career really got his…

Tom Tancredo was about to concede the gubernatorial race, but many more Colorado contests were up in the air when I walked into the ballroom of the downtown Marriott, site of the Colorado Democratic Party’s election party. And what was on the TVs? Not CNN, not local newscasts shunted off…

Tired of the endless Ken Buck/Michael Bennet attack ads that have made it unsafe to turn on your television for the past month? Blame Barack Obama, who pulled Ken Salazar from his spot in the U.S. Senate and put him in the cabinet as the Secretary of the Interior. How’s…

Think this campaign season has been messy? The all-mail August primary created an unprecedented amount of confusion with voters who assumed a November 2 ballot would arrive in their mailbox. Get a clue: If a ballot hasn’t been delivered, it’s not coming. But you can still vote. And in this…

The Aguirre family was not having a good month. They’d temporarily closed the 25-year-old Rosa Linda’s Mexican Cafe — once the only restaurant in what’s now a hot-hot area of Highland — on September 20, hoping to do a week or so of much needed mechanical updates. But at the…

Jeff Peckman, who spoke to Westword last week about a rash of recent UFO sightings, waited a long time to get his proposal for Denver to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission on the ballot — but the time might finally be right for Initiative 300. Because in this crazy Colorado…

Democratic gubernatorial nominee John Hickenlooper has kept to his vow to keep his campaign positive. Had he decided to go negative on Tom Tancredo, though, he would have found no shortage of material on the American Constitution Party candidate: Google “Tancredo” and “controversy” and your computer starts smoking…

The battle between My Brother’s Bar and Brothers Bar & Grill is over. Attorneys for the two restaurants — one the oldest continually operating saloon in the city, the other a link in a Wisconsin-based chain — met with a magistrate last Friday and arrived at a deal…

The scene last Friday was off-the-planet crazy — appropriate enough for a city considering a proposal to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission. But Initiative 300 is far from the wackiest item on next week’s ballot. After all, there’s also the election of the next governor of Colorado. The Denver Botanic…

Politics makes strange truck-bed fellows. Four years ago, Helen Thorpe, a veteran Texas political reporter who’d married John Hickenlooper and moved to Denver in 2002, was a passenger in Tom Tancredo’s tan Chevrolet pickup, touring the part of northwest Denver he called Tancredoland, where he’d grown up — and where…

After a six-month battle to place its McCruelty statue — a giant maimed chicken — near the McDonald’s on the 16th Street Mall, a fight that involved plenty of legal squawking and wing-flapping, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has given up on Denver. The city should be lovin’…

The truck stops here: The mediation session last Thursday was supposed to calm tensions around the 5300 block of East Colfax Avenue, a stretch of asphalt that’s only improved since Erich Roorda and Jill Warner opened Mod Livin’ nine years ago. But that was before the Little Orange Rocket threw…

The horrors that Kristen Stillman has endured in her short life are beyond imagining: abandoned at the age of eight by her mother, raped repeatedly by the man she was left with, bearing four children fathered by her rapist before she was twenty. And then the final injury, one far…

Another day, another appearance by Tom Tancredo on Fox News — which now has a page devoted to the American Constitution Party’s candidate for Colorado governor. Last night, Tancredo explained his eleventh-hour run to Bill O’Reilly. Watch the clip below…

Was Dan Maes offered a deal, maybe even a govement job, to drop out of the governor’s race? The blogosphere was abuzz after the Post’s Lynn Bartels broke the Maes story, wondering who might have made the offer. The bigger question: What job could you possibly give Dan Maes? Here…

Against all odds, Denver has a vibrant downtown that weds the present with the past — and today, it celebrates both something old and something new, starting with a ribbon-cutting at the Four Seasons Hotel Denver at 1111 14th Street…