insights
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Insights: CU political report suggests it’s a chilly year to be too conservative
Editor’s note: Scott Adler, the director of the American Politics Research Lab, contacted Colorado Politics to say the staff reversed the racial makeup of one of its questions. The original column is below. The headline from the newly released Colorado Political Climate Survey is that Sens. Cory Gardner and Michael Bennet, as well as the governor…
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Insights: Tax reform loot comes in a mixed bag for Colorado
There’s no denying that the tax overhaul delivered by the Republicans and President Trump put money in Colorado’s pocket, albeit wealthy people and corporations did better than most of us. In the wake of the new law, minimum-wage workers at Walmart are getting a pay raise to $11 an hour, even as thousands of their…
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Insights: Colorado’s Cory Gardner rides the Trump roller coaster from Yuma to the spotlight
Coloradans in the U.S. House and the Senate seem to have a handle on this Trump thing. And Colorado Politics is no longer the only institution taking note. And sometimes that means saying nothing at all. Lots of publications have been heaping praise on Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner of Yuma for his willingness to choose his…
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Insights: A cloud hangs over a Colorado Capitol that knows rain
What will surprise me next session, I asked Colorado Senate President Kevin Grantham over country fried steak and gravy New Year’s weekend. He looked to his left for a long pause inside the Waffle Wagon in Canon City.”Probably the same things that will surprise me,” he said. Grantham runs the zoo in the upper chamber…
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Insights: California, here we come, if you follow the hyperbole
How did it get to be fashionable to beat up on California again? Going on 16 years ago, when I was a newcomer to our great state, both Texas and Cali were Colorado’s straw men. My accent, I learned to point out, was Deep South not East Texas. If something was bad, from enchiladas to…
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Insights: In a web of confusion few Colorado parties are neutral on net neutrality
Between the pendulum of fake news and alternative facts, the average citizen trusts in a leap of faith to understand anything out of Washington these days. The issue of net neutrality lays this bare. Three Republicans outvoted two Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission this month to abolish rules established in 2015 with the open…
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INSIGHTS | In Roy Moore’s Alabama, old times there are not forgotten
It was unusually cold and snowy across Alabama the Saturday morning before the special election, when I burst into a local Republican club’s Christmas breakfast. I knew a handful of the large group gathered in the back dining room at Kelly’s Kitchen. I offered to tell some Roy Moore jokes, but an uneasy laugh rippled up…
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Insights: James O’Keefe’s ‘journalism’ exposes accountability problem in Colorado
James O’Keefe fancies himself a guerrilla journalist, but the conservative provocateur was stung by his own fake news again recently when he tried to sting the Washington Post with clumsy spy-kid tactics. The Post easily sniffed out a woman who falsely alleged U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore impregnated her in Alabama when she was a…
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Insights: Colorado ski industry poised to be heard about climate change
When outsiders think of Colorado, most don’t think of cows. They don’t think of aerospace, energy, Palisade peaches or Olathe sweet corn. To those drawn to our wide-open spaces, all the pieces of Colorado are overshadowed by evergreen mountains draped in snow. The Rocky Mountain way runs through the high country. Everything else follows. With…
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Insights: Hiking national park fees picks winners and losers
Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican father of our national parks, said it in 1906. “The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books,” the old Rough Rider said. That’s why you find Teddy Roosevelt, and not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, creator…