Author: Kelly Sloan

Kelly Sloan Concerning the election that just passed, a few observations: The “red wave,” anticipated even by Democrats, did not come to pass, at least not to the magnitude expected. By any accounting, this election cycle offered everything needed for a broad and decisive Republican victory – a deeply unpopular Democratic president in Joe Biden, an…

Kelly Sloan I received the awful news as many of us did, via a text Sunday morning. Hugh McKean had passed away. The sort of news that stuns, to which your first reaction is that you must have read that wrong. Then the icy realization that you hadn’t. Throughout the course of day, the details…

Kelly Sloan As with every election in a state possessing such an affinity for plebiscitary eruption as Colorado, there are a number of propositions and constitutional amendments presented to the voters on this year’s ballot. There are some good ones – Amendment E extending the homestead property tax exemption to the surviving spouses of military veterans,…

Kelly Sloan One might be tempted, almost, to feel sorry for Joe Biden. Whatever one’s own individual analysis of the President’s mental acuity (generally underestimated by Republicans and overestimated by Democrats) he is certainly acutely aware of the fact that midterm elections are, for the most part, a referendum on the sitting President’s performance. His –…

Kelly Sloan Every two years Americans get to flex their democratic enzymes and vote. It’s a brief exercise in which one is afforded the burst of satisfaction that accompanies the tactile expression of either exuberant support for a candidate, visceral detestation of one, or – if indifferent to the personalities – a personal judgment on how…

Kelly Sloan Gov. Jared Polis found himself in a bit of a dilemma recently. He didn’t obtain for Colorado a waiver from federal ozone pollution regulations despite the fact much of that pollution is from out of state. Nevertheless, he’s effectively condemning the federal agency who’d grant that waiver, the Environmental Protection Agency, for reclassifying…

Kelly Sloan When a U.S. Senate Republican candidate from Colorado attracts the attention of The Wall Street Journal, George Will and umpteen millions of dollars in directed ire from the national Democratic Party, you know he must be on to something. Joe O’Dea is running against the Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet in a race that…

Kelly Sloan It’s interesting seeing the juxtaposition of approaches to energy policy around the world, especially between those places where electricity and mobility are taken for granted – which seems to breed a certain ideological resentment of its abundance – and those where that abundance is now existentially threatened. Take California, for instance. The sheer…

Kelly Sloan That this is a deeply personal column for me to write is something that I imagine is difficult for most Americans, understandably, to understand. Her Majesty Elizabeth II, by Grace of God Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Canada, and all her other realms and dominions, died last…

Kelly Sloan Peter Rodman once wrote, about the time of the final collapse of the USSR, that “Mikhail Gorbachev will go down in history as the man who destroyed the Soviet system, by mistake.” Gorbachev died on Tuesday at the age of 91, and that remains the most accurate and eloquent description of his legacy.…