By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com

October 30, 2007
They call it the Public Insight Network, but it ought to be called real people journalism.
For months, Colorado Public Radio has been using the Internet to construct a data base of thousands of regular folks to find out what they think about everything from the environment to the Rockies […]

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By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com

October 29, 2007
Buck McVeigh has a bumper sticker that he uses in the presentations he makes as administrator of Wyoming’s Economic Analysis Division. The bumper sticker says, “Please, God, give us one more energy boom. We promise not to screw it up this time.”
After 28 years working for the state, McVeigh has […]

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By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com
October 30, 2007
 
 
The rest of the Rocky Mountain West needs to learn from Wyoming’s love affair with fossil fuels. Here’s why: The economic and political pressure to drill for gas and oil and to mine coal is probably too great for Colorado and Wyoming’s other neighbors to fight off.
The pressure doesn’t sit well […]

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By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com

October 26, 2007
It is not clear where Colorado Supreme Court Justice Gregory Hobbs will come down in the case of the state’s embattled ethics reform amendment. But Hobbs asked the right questions Thursday at a hearing.
Hobbs wanted to know why those who challenge the amendment for being “broad as all outdoors” look […]

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By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com

October 24, 2007
As they raped her, tortured her, beat her and forced her to eat animal and human feces, Megan Williams says her captors told her: “This is what we do to niggers down here.”
Why that is not a hate crime defies explanation.
The decision by West Virginia prosecutors not to charge a […]

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By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com

October 23, 2007
When the group updating Colorado’s statewide suicide prevention plan held an information-gathering session in Cortez recently, participants had plenty to talk about.
“A couple in their late eighties had just committed suicide,” said Susie Street.
Street’s organization, Mental Health America of Colorado, has the job of modernizing a decade-old program to keep […]

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By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com
October 22, 2007
Start in Maria’s room. Not because it is the first place you go, but because it symbolizes so much of Denver’s old Children’s Hospital. The Children’s Hospital now carries on at a glimmering new facility in Aurora’s Fitzsimmons medical research park. But ghosts haunt “5 North” and other wings of its […]

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By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com

October 18, 2007
It’s been roughly 2 ½ months since the Telluride Town Council in southwest Colorado famously called for the impeachment of both the President and Vice President of the United States. That publicity stunt was as impotent as impeachment proposals introduced in 2006 in the state legislatures of Illinois […]

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By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com

October 17, 2007
She is a Denver-area businesswoman, who has always obeyed the law regarding immigrant workers. She still does it by the book. That’s why she laid off 20 long-time employees at the first of the year when their Social Security numbers didn’t match federal records.
Now, those ex-workers have been hired by […]

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By Jim Spencer
SpencerSpeaks.com

October 16, 2007
The number of votes still needed to override the president’s veto of expanded kids’ health insurance keeps changing. But 48 hours from a House of Representatives decision that Colorado Congressman Mark Udall calls “the most important this year on the domestic front,” the line seems drawn.
Support for the bi-partisan plan […]

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