Opinion & Commentary

An hour after getting all the appropriate permits, the long-awaited Houston’s finally opened this past weekend at 303 Josephine Street. This sibling of the Cherry Creek Grill and other restaurants in the Hillstone chain has an expansive, sleek dining room and an inexplicable eleven seats at the bar. Eleven seats?…

“In this country, we have to let every child — it doesn’t matter if they are documented or undocumented — live the American dream and have a chance to go to college,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said yesterday on a tour of Bruce Randolph School with Michael Bennet, the…

A strong, independent streak runs through Colorado politics, a vein of common sense that cuts across party lines — and leads straight to Ari Armstrong, the creator of FreeColorado.com, and a man always ready to smack down political correctness. When Independence Institute head Jon Caldara was slapped for saying “bitch…

The pert young anchor turned to the avuncular weathercaster. “So,” she said. “What happened to that eight big inches you promised me last night?” The inches have changed over the years — to ten, to twelve — as the story takes on all the trappings of an urban legend, but…

I caught the Ward Churchill verdict from a thousand miles away, on the nightly news shows. And after all the local hand-wringing about how young these jurors were, it sounds like they got some things right. In its response to any complaints about Ward Churchill, the University of Colorado has…

The Lab at Belmar (for now, before the Lab moves to the Museum of Contemporary Art later this month) tonight hosts “Bitch! The History and Politics of a Word,” part of the Feminism & Co. series. You can read about all the theory behind the program in our Night &…

At 6 p.m. tonight, Denver gets to see the first episode in what’s being billed as a “very special two-part Divorce Court.” Through the mysteries of TV programming, I’m watching it right now in Tucson. And Judge Lynn Toler isn’t giving “the former reverend” Ted Haggard and his wife of…

Don’t forget: Today, Ted Haggard and his wife, Gayle, appear on Divorce Court, to discuss how revelations of Haggard’s extra-curricular (and intra-sex) activities affected the marriage. On the show, the disgraced former New Life pastor says he wanted his wife to divorce him, but she refused, even though he said…

It’s official: Hillary Clinton yesterday confirmed that the Obama administration is no longer fighting a “War on Terror” in its battle against al-Qaeda and militant Islam. So are those prisoners still incarcerated in Gitmo considered “terrorists”? Some of those prisoners could soon be living at Supermax, the federal prison at…

You auto know better: In advance of the Denver Auto Show, which revs up in the Colorado Convention Center April 1 through April 5, the Metro Denver Automobile Dealers Association is hosting the second annual Rocky Mountain Auto Summit today, covering everything from technology to financing to green developments. The…

Danger! Danger! No one has driven down my street since I arrived home late last night (after carousing through a close-to-empty downtown last night). There’s no telling when, if ever, the newspaper will arrive. Maybe tomorrow, when the temperature returns to fifty degrees. I am looking at the foot of…

David Lane presented his last witness in Denver District Court yesterday — Ward Churchill’s wife, Natsu Taylor Saito — and the University of Colorado lawyers started delivering their defense. But if you happened to tune into The O’Reilly Factor on Tuesday, the day Churchill finished his testimony, it’s all over…

Yesterday morning, before heading to the office to finish up the Best of Denver 2009, our 25th anniversary celebration of this city, our annual orgy of niceness, I stopped for a moment at my favorite spot in Denver. Denver got its start at the confluence of the South Platte River…

There have been other school shootings in the ten years since Columbine, horror scenes with even bigger body counts. But for some reason, Columbine is the crime that resonates; “Columbine” is the word that keeps getting repeated in the tales of similar plots — some carried out, some foiled. It…

Barack Obama spilled way past 60 Minutes talking about the economy last night, and there’s still plenty of talk to come. Trump University is in session, offering four days of classes on how you can “make a fortune” in real estate; today’s are at 1 and 6 p.m. at the…

You don’t need a calendar to know that it’s just one month until the tenth anniversary of the shootings at Columbine. You can tell by the flood of programs, movies and books pouring out. The day-long “Colorado Rising: A Columbine Update,” sponsored by School Safety Partners, kicks off at 9…

“This is part of Ted’s journey,” Gayle Haggard told a reporter. “It’s made him a better man. I see what has happened as a divine rescue.” Of the Haggards’ bank account, if nothing else. Three years ago Ted Haggard, then pastor of the New Life Church and head of the…

Even as Jason Wren’s family was mourning the Littleton freshman’s tragic death at a Kansas frat house, Leslie Lanahan, the mother of Lynn “Gordie” Bailey, a pledge who was found literally dead-drunk in the the Chi Psi fraternity house in Boulder in 2004, agreed to settle her lawsuit against the…

Even in a state full of stunning scenery, many of Colorado’s most remarkable sights are man-made. A castle made out of stuff in southern Colorado. A tower filled with stuff out on the plains in Genoa. And north in Tinmath, just off I-25 by Fort Collins, the Swetsville Zoo, a…

News is busting out all over today — and not just in Denver District Judge Larry Naves’s courtroom, where Ward Churchill may take the stand in his case against the University of Colorado, now starting week two. Or on the Auraria campus, where veteran newshounds of the Rocky Mountain News…