In addition to statewide contests (including a squeaker of a governor’s race), Election Day 2014 saw plenty of local initiatives on ballots, with one of the most interesting being Aurora’s Proposition 2D, which would have repealed the city’s longstanding prohibition on pit bulls. In the end, the measure lost handily,…
While most of the attention in regard to yesterday’s election has gone to Cory Gardner’s shellacking of Mark Udall and a governor’s race not called in John Hickenlooper’s favor until this morning, the outcomes for other measures on the ballot have been equally fascinating. Take the so-called personhood measure, which…
Update: Moments ago, 9News formally declared that Governor John Hickenlooper has been reelected. Some votes still are yet to be counted, but the station, as well as the Denver Post, has determined that challenger Bob Beauprez will fall short of victory. Continue for our previous coverage of election day 2014…
Mary DeForest believes in George Orwell’s theory that language rooted in Latin and Greek muddies communication and often covers up political agendas. And so she invented the Latinometer, a bullshit detector that analyzes text and determines how many words are rooted in Latin, German, French and Greek, then ranks the…
Election day is tomorrow, and if there’s anything Republican and Democratic activists can agree upon, it’s the importance of voter turnout. And according to the WalletHub website, folks in this fair state are among the most politically engaged in the country. Continue to count down the site’s political-engagement top ten,…
This has been a tricky election year, with bogeymen from outside Colorado pouring tens of millions of dollars into a grab bag of candy-coated campaign gimmicks. A week from now, it will all be over but for the shouting…and the indigestion. In the meantime, here are the top six tricks…
When Rachel Maddow teased her appearance in Denver this week, she cited a governor’s race that was “off the hook,” yet she made little mention of the contest in the actual Tuesday night broadcast from the Viewhouse Ballpark. Last night, however, we found out what this allusion meant via a…
If you ask those in favor of Amendment 67 and those opposed to it what it would do, you’ll get very different answers. Opponents say it would ban abortion. Supporters say that’s not the point. The point, they say, is to make it so unborn babies are treated the same…
In our preview of Rachel Maddow’s broadcast from Denver last night, we noted that she’d touted the show at the Viewhouse Ballpark by noting that the race for Colorado’s governor was “off the hook.” In the end, though, she spent little time talking about this contest during the highly entertaining…
Twelve years ago, based almost entirely on the testimony of a troubled adolescent girl with a long history of telling preposterous stories, an Arapahoe County jury found Charles Farrar guilty of a horrible crime. That testimony was recanted not long after the trial, but Farrar is still in prison, serving…
In case you doubted the importance of Colorado when it comes to next week’s election, here’s evidence that it’s seen as a key to control of the U.S. Senate and more: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow will be broadcasting from Denver tonight for a program that’s expected to take a close look…
This week’s cover story, “A Sporting Chance,” traces the rise of the Niyakko Rush, a grassroots youth soccer club made up primarily of refugees living in a single apartment house in Aurora. Many of the players have come from countries ravaged by political and military upheaval, including Myanmar, Somalia and…
Does a new Colorado law invite voting fraud by allowing pretty much anyone the ability to print out legal ballots from home computers? That was the argument made by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly this week in a video on view below. Only problem: It’s not true — and the person…
Like a lot of newcomers, Jason Hicks was a bit flummoxed by his first visit to the Shadow Tree apartments last year. The complex, just a short stroll off East Colfax in Aurora, is home to a growing number of refugee families, relocated from places like Nepal and Burma and…
Nineteen-year-old Jaime Leon Rivas, whose immigration case we wrote about this past spring, is back in the custody of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His crime? Going to visit his older brother at the GEO detention facility in Aurora, which houses undocumented immigrants detained by ICE. Although Leon Rivas was…
Earlier this week, Lakewood became the first Colorado city to pass an ordinance aimed at increasing condo construction, which has slowed to a near-halt in the metro area as builders back off for fear of getting sued for construction defects. The ordinance makes it more difficult for homeowners’ associations to…
Most people don’t associate Deadspin with incisive political coverage, and there’s a reason for that. The enjoyably snarky sports website published a piece accusing Colorado senatorial candidate Cory Gardner of lying about having played high school football, only to have this dubious scoop explode when Gardner was able to prove…
Update below: Doubtless there were many reasons behind a federal jury’s decision on Tuesday to stick it to the City of Denver over the 2010 death of Marvin Booker in the downtown jail, handing out a staggering $4.65 million in punitive and compensatory damages to the victim’s family. The video…
It’s politics as usual these days between Democratic Governor John “How many apologies do you want” Hickenlooper and Republican challenger Bob “47 percent of all Americans pay no federal income tax” Beauprez. The polls are tight, the money is flowing and rhetoric is heating up. And while both of these…
Is Denver Nuggets super-mascot Rocky a Republican? Signs point to “yes.” On Monday, @ColoGOP tweeted a photo of Rocky at an event for the Grand Old Party. Only problem: Ken Solomon, the man inside the Rocky suit, didn’t get an okay from his bosses about the gig — and afterward,…
A highly successful parole program that helped inmates serving decades-long sentences transition back to society — and had the potential to save the Colorado Department of Corrections millions of dollars each year in reduced housing and medical care costs for geriatric prisoners — has been scuttled without adequate explanation, say…
If you were wondering why immigration reform has been so difficult to achieve, the response to a recent story on CBS4 should quell your questions. The story, about a snafu that resulted in 524 non-citizens, “including some illegal immigrants,” receiving improperly marked drivers licenses has resulted in an explosion of…
