I woke up early in Colorado, still a battleground state, according to the November 4 Wall Street Journal. I prepared myself for battle by studying the election items that had arrived at my home yesterday: a flier under my doormat headlined “Vote for the Change We Need,” with a number…
We first noticed the change in the mammoth LED billboard on I-25 near 50th Avenue during an afternoon rush hour in late October. The marquee, which normally just lists the time and the temperature, was now offering an opinion on which way the political winds were blowing, flashing a McCain/Palin…
Jay Lewis assumes the position. He slouches, arms folded across his chest, knee bent and foot braced on the wall behind him. He looks like your typical green-tunic-clad felon, lazily taking in the passing show at the Cheyenne Mountain Re-Entry Center, a 750-bed private prison in Colorado Springs. “He’s jailin’,”…
k.d. lang. You’ve got questions. Our blogs have answers. Today in Backbeat Online: • A revealing Q&A with k.d. lang. • A live review of Metallica at the Pepsi Center. • Getting to know former Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus. • A vintage Pavement profile that hinted at the breakup to…
Ryan Frazier. Aurora city councilman Ryan Frazier was largely unflappable during his beleagured year-long attempt to pass Amendment 47, the right-to-work ballot issue he sponsored; see the Westword feature “Ryan Frazier Puts His Job On the Line for Amendment 47” to learn more. And he’s just as composed confronting the…
Adam Brickley as he appeared a few months back on The Colbert Report. Blogger Adam Brickley was credited in many quarters — including Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report — with helping Alaska governor Sarah Palin rise to national prominence via his PalinForVP.blogspot.com website. (See his appearance on Stephen Colbert’s signature…
Union Station. The developers behind the new-and-improved Union Station — the subject of the August feature story “Union Station May Become Denver’s Gateway Again… If It Stays on Track” — are hard at work crafting a plan for the public spaces around this future transit hub — plazas and walkways…
Chill… 10. No uncontrollable giggling. 9. No naming babies “Barack” or “Obama” or any mash-up of his name. 8. No changing your e-mail to Obama_Mama@yahoo.com 7. No smugly walking up to white people and saying, “Boo-Yah!” 6. There will be no “Hustle,” “Running Man,” “‘Electric Slide” or dances inspired by…
An image from Mike Kessler’s 2007 article “Out in the Cold.” The March 2006 Message column headlined “Altitude Check” focused on 5280, a Dan Brogan-founded publication that had broken what seemed like a jinx against successful city magazines in Denver and was continuing to grow at a time of contraction…
The joy of electoral participation. YouTube’s VideoYourVote channel features clips of voters all around the country talking about their voting experiences — and plenty of Denverites participated. Look below for multiple clips in which your friends and neighbors share balloting stories. Also included: a video of Tinkerbull, a bulldog wearing…
Carol Chambers. Marilyn Musgrave isn’t the only dyed-in-the-pantsuit conservative wandering around this bleary morning wondering what the hell happened to his or her mandate. Several other presumably well-entrenched GOP incumbents around the state hung on by their fingernails in what should have been walkaway races. The case of Carol Chambers,…
Nebuchadnezzar: the Obama of Babylonia? You had to figure that the folks at Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family would react to the election of Barack Obama with memorable dismay. After all, Focus on the Family Action, the outfit’s lobbying arm, recently published “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” which…
Dan Caplis. KHOW afternoon-drive host Dan Caplis spent the election season demonizing Barack Obama in a surprisingly literal sense, portraying the Democratic presidential hopeful as a dangerous creature sure to destroy all that is good and true and right. So now that his predictions of a John McCain comeback victory…
The front page of the November 5, 2008 Rocky Mountain News. It was a pleasure to look through the post-election print editions of the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. Both papers stepped up big-time, delivering hefty issues filled with vivid photos and articles whose attempts to provide instant…
Oh, sheet. Now that the election is over, there’s no need for that ballot privacy sleeve many of us carried with us as we exited our polling place yesterday. But simply tossing it isn’t an option — not for an environmentally committed voter, anyhow. So what to do with it?…
Seal it. Just minutes before the polls closed in Colorado, more than 300 election workers were fueling up with pasta, salad and strawberry shortcake from Jason’s Deli at Denver Elections Division headquarters, 3888 East Mexico Avenue. Other workers hauled in red ballot boxes to the building while members of the…
I have a feeling this band is going to break up pretty soon… We’ve been blogging the vote — and a whole lot more. Today in Backbeat Online: • The 2008 presidential campaign told as a ’70s rock opera. • A live review of the Beastie Boys and Tenacious D…
Anybody home? Not three doors into my door-knocking experience — part of the last-minute stumping campaign for Obama in Adams County — I started to think, “Maybe the Obama campaign does have too much money.” My sister, her hubby and I had hit up the Obama HQ at 94th and…
Where’d everybody go? I’m a little worried about voter turnout. All day, I’ve been looking out the window toward my polling place, the St. Charles Recreation Center in Denver’s Cole neighborhood, in search of a line or any hint of chaos. But it’s been very quiet. At 3 p.m., I…
Sticker shock? I’m so tired of seeing all the “free admission/ice cream/taco with an ‘I voted’ sticker” deals. Do all these businesses realize that 60 percent of all Coloradans voted early, most by mail? And if you voted by mail in Denver, you did not get an “I Voted” sticker…
A banner from the Colorado Progressive Coalition’s website. Earlier today, the news from the Colorado Progressive Coalition sounded dire. A press release from the nonpartisan group, which had been conducting get-out-the-vote campaigns in Weld County, said that Spanish-speaking voters were “running into major problems” casting their ballots, and a protest…
An Obama booster at East. Standing on a chair that makes him seem slightly taller than the high-schoolers and community residents gathered outside East High School, Anthony Graves of the Denver Democratic Committee begins to hype up the crowd around him. “People, we have to focus,” he declares. “We have…
