Opinion & Commentary

The horrors of Haiti hit close to home for Mary Nguyen, owner of Parallel 17: Her husband, Raphael Jouvenat, is from there. “Haiti has always been a poor country; a country with political turmoil and limited resources neglected by most of the world,” she writes. “However, it is the place…

Dan Jeune chose the most unlikely place to look for people who wanted to help Haiti: the bars of LoDo. Luke Turf watched Jeune, a native of Haiti whose father is a minister, recruit among the hat boys and frat boys, and then followed Jeune and the group he’d gathered…

One day back in 1985, one of the Westword artists who lived at the edge of Highland — we called it Barbaria then — called with a tip about a great storefront burrito at this new place, Rosa Linda’s. He was right, and we quickly became lifetime fans of the…

The country’s largest parade in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. will kick off this morning in Denver, Colorado, a mid-sized city with a small black population, but a big record of fighting for equality. Wilma Webb, then a state legislator, was instrumental in pushing to make MLK Day a…

Forget Charlie Sheen. The biggest scandal in Aspen these days involves Dan Sheridan, a 44-year-old singer musician who’s lived in that mountain town more than twenty years, doesn’t like some of the changes he’s seen, and describes them very eloquently in his song “Big Money.” But while Sheridan croons that…

Worried about who’ll be running Denver while John Hickenlooper is running for governor? Fear not: councilmember-at-large Doug Linkhart (who’s rumored to be taking a look at running for mayor himself) is on the job, as he explains in his latest e-mail blast, “Hick Up! Not a Problem.” Which ends with…

Colorado was the first state to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday, and the annual Marade, the march/parade in his honor, is the largest in the country. So how does Denver Public Schools mark this august occasion? By offering a lunch menu on January 15 — the same day…

It may be “giddyup” time for John Hickenlooper, but his announcement that he does not plan to resign as Denver mayor in order to run for Colorado governor put a major “whoa” on all the dark horses already preparing for a run at the top slot at City Hall. And…

First Atomic Cowboy started serving pizza, thanks to the addition of Fat Sully’s. Now it has fresh biscuits and sausage gravy (made fresh daily), along with other Southern breakfast comfort-food items, courtesy of the Denver Biscuit Company, which just opened inside the Bluebird District hangout at 3237 East Colfax Avenue…

Our throats were dry, our eyes were red. Blame it on pot. Specifically, on listening to four hours of pot testimony and discussion — on top of the salute to the National Western Stock Show and another hour of civic housekeeping — at last night’s Denver City Council meeting. But…

On the 1400 block of Market, the Ruth’s Chris space is still dark and the former home of Buca di Beppo is slated to become a medical marijuana dispensary — but Gaslamp got the lights on this past weekend. Gaslamp is owned by Greg Gallagher, who also owns the Front…

Despite suggestions that he hold his horses and wait to see what the Colorado Legislature does, Charlie Brown pressed on with his proposal to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries in the city of Denver, and that proposal will go to a vote of the full council tonight, after a two-hour public…

The Fort will be closed from January 11 through January 21 for a kitchen renovation — the first since the Morrison restaurant, a recreation of Bent’s Old Fort, was built out of 80,000 handmade adobe bricks back in 1962. Some of those bricks are right behind the dishwasher, which helped…

Governor Bill Ritter hosted more than thirty business leaders at the Governor’s Mansion yesterday for a roundtable discussion of one of his major priorities for 2010: job creation. But Ritter had already given job creation a major push the day before, when his official announcement that he would not run…

As the owners of 8 Rivers, their fourth restaurant, Wanda James and Scott Durrah know the food business. And as the owners of Apothecary of Colorado, the medical marijuana dispensary they opened in December at 1730 Blake Street, just two blocks from their restaurant at 1550 Blake, they know their…

In December 2008, would-be candidates — a dozen of them, by casual count — were all counting on Governor Bill Ritter appointing Denver mayor John Hickenlooper to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Ken Salazar, a move that would opened up the top job in City Hall. Ritter went with…

Scott McInnis, who’s really the frontrunner for governor now, doesn’t know his mountain ranges, and he apparently doesn’t know his Western art, either. This summer, the Republican gubernatorial candidate took a hit when his campaign website debuted with a lovely panorama of the Rockies — the Canadian Rockies, as it…

They weren’t just blowing smoke. Last night, all thirteen Denver city councilmembers agreed to send Councilman Charlie Brown’s proposal to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries in the city to a public hearing and official vote next Monday night. But not before Councilwoman Carol Boigon raised the same spectre of her unpleasant…

Its inevitable demise was long rumored, but Bump & Grind managed to hang on until the very end of 2009, when a “closed indefinitely” sign appeared on the door of 439 East 17th Avenue and this message on its voicemail: “We are closed, and quite possibly forever. Right now it’s…

Charlie Brown’s proposal to regulate the city’s medical marijuana dispensaries will be presented to the full Denver City Council at tonight’s meeting. Since the council’s Safety Committee first started considering his proposed ordinance in November, the number of sales-tax licenses issued to medical marijuana dispensaries has more than doubled, to…