Opinion & Commentary

The people gathered in a meeting room at the Blair Caldwell library last summer were getting restless. “You all wasted our time,” proclaimed one community activist. “This was not a waste of your time,” replied Rico Munn, then-director of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Affairs, which includes the Division of…

The last time the House judiciary committee considered HB 1284, which would regulate medical marijuana from seed to sale in this state, the March 4 hearing went on for ten hours, and over 800 people signed up to testify. Today, when the committee again takes up HB 1284, there will…

Despite the lousy economy, 2009 was a great year for new restaurants. Some years, when we set out to pick the Best New Restaurant for the Best of Denver, we’re hard-pressed to come up with one worthy contender. This round, we have more than a dozen restaurants that last year…

Steve Horner, go back to your corner. This week, Westword received a packet that contained copies of a dozen letters sent to Horner, the anti-ladies’ night crusader, from Steven Chavez, director of the Colorado Division of Civil Rights, all dated March 11 and all starting this way: “This letter is…

Leadville has a long, colorful history. Colorful enough even without the latest colorful chapter: the much-publicized arrest in Ireland of Leadville-come-lately resident Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old blond, single mom whose own mother — also a recent addition to the Leadville lineup — has been all over TV talking about her…

The first sign that something was funny? People kept coming up to Jolt — real name Jeremy Silas Ulibarri — at First Friday, telling the urban artist that they’d seen his work on the History Channel earlier that evening, that his Guerilla Garden logo, a stylized graffiti gorilla, had been…

More than anything, I’m mad at myself,” admits Francisco Gallardo, program director of Denver’s Gang Rescue and Support Project, one of the key players in the Gang Reduction Initiative of Denver and a willing participant in “Mile High Killers” — until he actually saw that episode of Gangland. “Nothing but…

Want to give someone a quick feel for Denver? Walk the seven blocks of Wazee Street from Cherry Creek — where Denver got its start when gold was discovered 150 years ago — up to Coors Field, where the Rockies will start digging for gold in just a few weeks…

“What is the ‘medical’ in medical marijuana?” asks MyColfax.org. “There’s been a lot of talk about dispensaries and medical marijuana as of late. And because there are very strong feelings on all sides of this issue, not all of the information has been accurate or helpful.” And a lot of…

So many St. Patrick’s Day parades, so little time. Gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper, decked out in a shamrock-green blazer, had to zoom from Denver’s shamrock celebration to the Pueblo Democratic Party’s St. Patrick Day’s fundraiser. And there, he weighed in on one of Scott McInnis’s pet projects: the proposed expansion…

When he was still a student at the University of Denver back in 2002, Blake Harrison led a statewide campaign to allow liquor-store sales on Sundays. Six years later, Colorado finally removed the prohibition on Sunday sales. Harrison’s been campaigning to get rid of 3.2 beer — that weak holdover…

Plutonium lasts forever, and so do legal cases involving Rocky Flats. Yesterday, 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges Stephen Anderson, Jerome Holmes and Michael Murphy heard arguments in the appeal of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant class-action lawsuit — filed by neighbors of the facility back in 1990,…

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it — and maybe inhale it, too. Before he became a state representative, rancher Wes McKinley was the foreman of the Rocky Flats grand jury, empaneled in 1989 to consider allegations of environmental crimes at the former nuclear weapons plant. So…

The Visit Denver Hall of Fame dinner on March 4 served up a few ironic moments alongside the beef entree. There was John Hickenlooper, praising inductee Pat Bowlen — when the start of Hickenlooper’s political career has been tagged to his campaign against selling the naming rights of the new…

Plutonium has a half-life of 20,000 years, and the controversy over the former Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant should continue at least that long. With good reason: If we forget that the plant sixteen miles upwind from Denver processed plutonium and other deadly materials, some day the land could turn…

Denver’s already got a reputation as the cannabis capital of the country. But Jeff Peckman is setting his sights much higher: He wants to create a seven-member Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission for the city. And his campaign is taking off this week. Last night, Peckman held Extra’s official “Welcome to Earth”…

Our lawyers were told to stay by the phone last Friday morning, when the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was slated to hear Steve Horner’s appeal of the division’s recent decisions that found “no probable cause” to believe that Westword had discriminated against him by publishing ads promoting ladies night events,…

The March 8 issue of Time magazine includes a postcard from Denver, the cannabis capital of the country. This city’s reputation as a mecca for medical marijuana is so pervasive that local law enforcement authorities recently paid a visit to Visit Denver, the convention and visitors bureau, to see if…

Sing-a-Bong On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a public hearing on HB 1284, which would regulate — some say snuff out — the medical marijuana industry in this state. It’s a sad come-down for the Colorado Legislature, the very body that back in 2007 made John Denver’s “Rocky…