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Stories by Vincent Carroll

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CARROLL: Coyotes strike a little too close to home

February 25, 2009

Now, I've never been one to worry about the coyotes that apparently infest my southeast Denver neighborhood, perhaps because I've never actually seen one. We've had the odd fox or two in our backyard and, two months ago, a large deer who somehow got over the 6-foot fence and managed to chew off half of the shoots on our bushes before I slipped down to a gate and released him (on the advice of a police officer, by the way).

CARROLL: Holder's hot air

February 20, 2009

Was Eric Holder in seclusion in 2008? Did the attorney general miss the historic year just gone by in which the role of race in America was dissected, debated and deconstructed at greater length than at any time since the 1960s?

CARROLL: Peddling pedaling

February 18, 2009

When Denver officials recently announced they would launch a bike-sharing program this summer, they cited the Parisian experience as an example of what we could expect if the startup succeeded.

CARROLL: Ethics violation?

February 17, 2009

Gov. Bill Ritter's new "climate change coordinator" seems to have quite a sense of entitlement. As The Denver Post revealed Sunday, former House Majority Leader Alice Madden of Boulder took a trip at state expense last summer to a conference in New Orleans after her work in the legislature was finished. She was term limited and wasn't running for re-election.

CARROLL: Reckless senators

February 6, 2009

'The fact that trade protection hurts the economy of the country that imposes it is one of the oldest but still most startling insights economics has to offer." So writes Columbia professor Jagdish Bhagwati in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

CARROLL: Hard to swallow

February 3, 2009

If Monty Python had invented a nutritional law for use in a skit, it would have been something like the one proposed by state Sen. Paula Sandoval, D-Denver, governing the types of snacks in Colorado schools.

CARROLL: Hard to swallow

February 3, 2009

If Monty Python had invented a nutritional law for use in a skit, it would have been something like the one proposed by state Sen. Paula Sandoval, D-Denver, governing the types of snacks in Colorado schools.

CARROLL: Climate czar sponsors

January 29, 2009

Democrats always oppose "privatizing" government - except of course when they favor privatizing government, as we discovered this week.

CARROLL: Obama's stealth tax

January 28, 2009

First, do no harm. If physicians can abide by that precept, why shouldn't the president - especially in a turbulent time like now? If a policy is likely to damage economic growth, then don't do it, or at least not until we've emerged from the scariest downturn in the history of anyone under the age of 80.

CARROLL: Watching your mileage

January 23, 2009

State Rep. Joe Rice, D-Littleton, has got the right idea when he says "we've got to figure out something besides the gas tax" to pay for roads. Hybrid vehicles and, later, a growing fleet of fully electric autos are going to destroy the link between the miles you drive and the amount of fuel tax you pay.

CARROLL: Promising signs

January 21, 2009

What's that he said? "It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom." Was that President Barack Obama channeling the free-market economist Milton Friedman in Tuesday's inaugural address?

CARROLL: Tourist trap

January 20, 2009

"When you look at our core functions of government, is tourism funding one of them? Probably not." - Sen. Moe Keller, D-Wheat Ridge

CARROLL: Polis above it all

January 15, 2009

Touchy, isn't he? Newly minted Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, the man who doesn't trust a lobbyist to buy so much as a cup of coffee for a state lawmaker, is curiously reluctant to reveal the recipients of his own official largess.

CARROLL: Cell claims ring false

January 14, 2009

I was braced for mixed feelings regarding a proposed state ban on cell-phone use while driving. But I needn't have worried: House Bill 1094 treats cell-phone users differently, for no good reason, and deserves to be quashed.

CARROLL: Not yet his own man

January 13, 2009

You won't glean much insight into Michael Bennet - aka, Colorado's next U.S. senator - from his early interviews with the media. He played it safe and never strayed outside the four corners of received Democratic wisdom.

CARROLL: No empty word

January 8, 2009

Paul Campos says he "never denied" the moral difference between killing civilians during an assault on military targets and killing civilians purely because they are civilians. So this is progress.

CARROLL: Why be frugal?

January 7, 2009

If you're like me, you're getting a little tired of hearing about the silver lining in the recession - how it's going to teach us the value of thrift and how "you can't spend what you don't earn," as Alan Murray of The Wall Street Journal put it the other day.

CARROLL: Bennet's dilemma

January 6, 2009

Michael Bennet, Colorado's soon-to-be U.S. senator, has experienced first hand how unions tend to suffocate innovation and change. Which is what makes his likely vote this year on Democratic legislation to abolish the secret ballot in union-organizing elections so interesting.

CARROLL: Kick the kicking habit

December 30, 2008

Counseling! Did the man actually say that Barack Obama should consider counseling?

CARROLL: It's dangerous to call - but still safer to drive

December 19, 2008

The death of a 9-year-old girl in Fort Collins - the heartbreakingly cute Erica Forney - may be the catalyst for another attempt to ban cell-phone use while driving in Colorado. The woman whose car struck the girl is thought to have been on the phone at the time and has been charged with careless driving resulting in death.

CARROLL: The latest visual insult

December 16, 2008

The artist John McEnroe says he's encouraged "that a single object can still provoke thought and action" - referring to the towering stack of crimson intestines, or slippery sausages, or whatever they are, plopped on a pedestal near the pedestrian bridge at Interstate 25 and Platte Street.

CARROLL: Polis off to great start

December 11, 2008

Will a liberal freshman congressman from Colorado turn out to be the most eloquent opponent in the coming year of federal bailouts of failing corporations? Could be. Second District Rep. Jared Polis is off to a terrific start.

CARROLL: No room for judgment

December 10, 2008

Let's assume you're the sort of person who never leaves a car running when you're not seated at the wheel. That would waste fuel and attract thieves - and besides, it's illegal in this state.

CARROLL: Going to the dogs

December 4, 2008

The black-tailed prairie dog frolics on more than 2 million acres in 11 states. There are perhaps 20 million of the critters - and quite possibly millions more. As recently as four years ago, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service concluded that the animal was "not likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future."

CARROLL: Roads to ruin?

December 3, 2008

'Colorado's two most pressing needs are in transportation and energy infrastructure," Gov. Bill Ritter said at a National Governors Association meeting in Philadelphia this week. Which explains why his tax proposal this fall was designed to pay for them, right? Actually, no. Those were college scholarships he wanted to fund with a hike in the severance tax, not the state's "most pressing needs."

CARROLL: Looking back at Bush

December 2, 2008

'If the intelligence had been right," ABC's Charles Gibson wondered, "would there have been an Iraq war?"

CARROLL: Bias on the brain

November 26, 2008

Researchers have been hunting for proof of widespread bias among Denver police for most of this decade, with inconclusive results. Now they plan to do brain scans of cops - and even test blood and saliva.

CARROLL: A mortgaged future

November 21, 2008

Paul Anthony Baker is Exhibit A for why many people have mixed feelings about a broad federal bailout of those at risk of losing their homes. He's an Aurora-based mortgage broker - or was, until he agreed to surrender his license - who was co-owner of Encore Lending. He is also a cheat and a scoundrel whose career provides a bracing peek at the lengths that some people are willing to go to buy property.

CARROLL: Penley cashes in

November 20, 2008

What's wrong with this picture: Colorado State University President Larry Penley resigns this month and the CSU board hands him a year's salary, or nearly $400,000, on the way out the door.

CARROLL: Day-off reckoning

November 19, 2008

If you work for the city of Denver, you can stay home the day after Thanksgiving, but with the following catch: You won't get paid. The mayor is trying to save money in this rough economic stretch and is offering an unpaid furlough to those who want it.

CARROLL: So much for principle

November 14, 2008

The "core mission" of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce "is to fight for business and free enterprise." It is also "to advance human progress through an economic, political and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity and responsibility."

CARROLL: Like, ready to lead

November 12, 2008

So Sarah Palin is, like, ready to run for president in 2012 if, like, it is something that is going to be good for ... no, wait: Let's have her tell us, shall we?

CARROLL: History for the hopeful

November 11, 2008

When the world changes, for good or bad, some people seem to get carried away.

CARROLL: Conflict-free politics

November 6, 2008

'Imagine a world where our elected officials work as one," declared AARP in a large Election Day ad.

CARROLL: And the dead shall vote

November 4, 2008

I've been trying to imagine what would impel a judge to order the state to put 12 dead people back on the voting rolls after they'd been removed, yet that's what U.S. District Judge John Kane did last week in an attempt to show Secretary of State Mike Coffman who's boss.

CARROLL: Odious opposition

October 31, 2008

DeAngelo Starnes apparently didn't get the memo when Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, Al Sharpton and the NAACP last year urged an end to the use of all racial slurs - even among minorities, even when they're meant as humor.

CARROLL: Sleazier and sleaziest

October 29, 2008

You're a sap if you pay attention to negative campaign fliers that show up on your doorstep or in your mailbox. At their best they're breathless and lurid. At their worst they're a pack of lies.

CARROLL: What discrimination?

October 28, 2008

Barack Obama's candidacy "cannot possibly end the systemic discrimination reflected in state hiring, college admissions and contracting," The Denver Post's Kimberly Johnson asserted Sunday in that paper. And she's correct, although for reasons she would prefer to overlook. Only Amendment 46 can eliminate the discrimination in the areas she mentions - and yet Johnson's commentary was an attack on 46.

CARROLL: Biden flubs his articles

October 24, 2008

Now that the Rocky Mountain News has devoted a page-and-a-half spread to dissecting Sarah Palin's answer to a third-grader regarding the duties of the vice president - concluding she "bobble(d)" the query and her answer was "shaky" in terms of accuracy - let's stop for a moment and look in the other direction. In the spirit of fairness, let's recall Joe Biden's description of the same job during the vice presidential debate at the beginning of this month.

CARROLL: Psychologist's fantasy

October 23, 2008

J. Reid Meloy helped to convict an innocent man of murder, so naturally the forensic psychologist hopes to shift the blame to others for his error. This week we learned how he would perform this stunt thanks to a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Timothy Masters, a Fort Collins man who spent a decade in prison before being freed earlier this year.

CARROLL: Obama's record haul a boon to free elections

October 22, 2008

Barack Obama has not only rewritten the fundraising record books - $150 million in September, $600 million so far in the campaign - but he has probably obliterated any chance of retooling the system of public financing for presidential campaigns.

CARROLL: Oh, those 90,000 jobs

October 17, 2008

Gov. Bill Ritter made the startling claim this week that "the renewable energy industry is creating directly or indirectly 90,000 jobs" in Colorado - in other words, 20,000 more than the estimated employment associated with the booming oil and gas industry.

CARROLL: Metro's juvenile prof

October 16, 2008

So Andrew Hallam is off the hook. The Metro State English instructor who lugs his politics and foul mouth into the classroom "has not violated any college policies," to use the antiseptic phrase of the official report on his conduct.

CARROLL: Nuclear's new allure

October 10, 2008

"Mr. Udall, would you work to locate a nuclear power plant in Colorado?"

CARROLL: Stumping the hopefuls

October 8, 2008

State Rep. Rob Witwer, R-Genesee, asked a very good question of Colorado's two Senate candidates at Monday's 9News debate. Too bad he didn't get a very good answer.

CARROLL: Biden's hubris

October 7, 2008

Sarah Palin justly took her lumps from critics when she couldn't identify any Supreme Court cases other than Roe v. Wade that she thought had been wrongly decided. But few noticed that Joe Biden's answer to nearly the same question, in a separate interview with CBS's Katie Couric, was no less disturbing.

CARROLL: Even students like 46

October 3, 2008

Bad news for the defenders of racial and gender preferences in Colorado: Only 14 percent of college students agree that "qualified minorities should be given special preferences in hiring and education."

CARROLL: Udall panders on rescue plan

October 1, 2008

Mark Udall says he "listened to the warnings of many people in the last week about the condition of our credit markets, and I understand that we are in a grave situation. But these happen to be the very same people who not long ago rejected government intervention and told us that our financial sector was in good order."

CARROLL: Electric shock

September 26, 2008

In the past few days, Americans learned how important functioning credit markets are to the health of the economy. In the next few years they will learn how important an adequate electricity system is as well.

CARROLL: T-shirt out of bounds

September 24, 2008

What kind of a parent thinks a student has a hard-and-fast right to wear a T-shirt to school proclaiming "Obama - A terrorist's best friend"?

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