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Stories by Vincent Carroll

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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"?

CARROLL: Out of frying pan . . . ?

September 23, 2008

You know the financial markets are in uncharted waters when a major investment company feels compelled to warn its customers by weekend e-mail that its money market funds - in which you'd parked some cash in the quaint belief that it could ride out any storm - aren't necessarily safe.

CARROLL: Vote early - or else

September 19, 2008

Did they change Election Day and simply forget to tell us?

CARROLL: That fabled $1 million

September 17, 2008

'If you go to college, over your whole life you'll make an extra million bucks," Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper told a group of kids when their school opened this fall. "I'm not making that up."

CARROLL: The bear facts

September 16, 2008

I'm a huge fan of the Rocky Truth Patrol - this newspaper's feature evaluating the claims and counterclaims of the political season - but Monday's item on polar bears got under my skin.

CARROLL: 'Car-free' a gimmick

September 12, 2008

Oh, no: another empty gesture. More sermons about the importance of not driving in a city where the vast majority of us get in a car nearly every day - or else waste hours each week of our already overbooked time. Another attempt to make us feel guilty that we don't live like sardines in a dense metropolis or mimic the transportation habits of 19th century factory workers.

CARROLL: Palin puzzler

September 10, 2008

A thought experiment: What if Hillary Clinton had defeated Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries and then, with no need to choose an old hand like Joe Biden as her running mate, picked a fresh-faced Western governor in order to boost her appeal in several critical swing states.

CARROLL: Ritter needs to step up and step on 55

September 9, 2008

Gov. Bill Ritter will spend much of this fall promoting his amendment to raise the severance tax. That's understandable but too bad. He ought to spend it trying to save this state from the most serious threat to its economic health in many years.

CARROLL: And baby makes two

September 3, 2008

Bristol Palin's pregnancy, according to The Wall Street Journal's Gerald F. Seib, "raises unanticipated questions about how the social and religious conservatives, whose support for [Gov. Sarah Palin] has been taken for granted, will react.

CARROLL: Pena gets a little carried away

August 27, 2008

After clinching the Democratic nomination in June, Barack Obama famously declared that "generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment . . . when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Former Denver Mayor Federico Pena didn't quite match this staggering spasm of self-praise when he spoke Tuesday at the Democratic National Convention, but he took a shot at it.

CARROLL: Unnerving Obama uncertainties

August 27, 2008

If you want to know why Barack Obama is not trampling John McCain in the polls despite the pathetic state of the GOP - assuming you don't simply blame his numbers on racism, as do some commentators - look no further than a New York Times article Monday that tries to decipher Obama's deepest political instincts.

CARROLL: Questions for Barack Obama

August 23, 2008

As Barack Obama gears up for his arrival in Denver next week, his commercials are blanketing the state's airwaves as if it were October, his lead over John McCain has nearly vanished in national polls, and he faces an electorate with nagging doubts about his qualifications for the presidency - and his beliefs.

CARROLL: Udall faces reality

August 15, 2008

If you want to know why U.S. Rep. Mark Udall switched his stand this week on offshore drilling, direct your attention to a poll that appeared in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. When unaffiliated voters were asked whether they would be more or less likely to support someone who favored easing restrictions on offshore drilling, 60 percent answered "more likely" while only 28 percent went the other way (the issue apparently didn't matter to some).

CARROLL: A Dem win, by default

August 14, 2008

Democrats in Colorado won a major battle Tuesday without firing a shot: They took over a statewide office - or, more precisely, are now poised to take it over - that they have coveted for nearly half a century.

CARROLL: Ritter can't lose

August 12, 2008

Oh, what a difference eight months can make.

CARROLL: Volts to the rescue

August 8, 2008

Headlines warn that utility bills are going to rise this winter by 20 percent. Why? Because the price of natural gas is up. Why? In part because natural gas has been tapped again and again in recent years to generate electricity, putting a squeeze on supplies.

CARROLL: Candidates at risk

August 7, 2008

Nearly a third of all American presidents have been assassinated, survived attack or were the targets of schemes foiled by police or bystanders.

CARROLL: Calling all whiners

August 6, 2008

When you're the 553rd richest man in the world, it's not a good idea to call your fellow Americans "a nation of whiners," or to insist that "this generation has never seen hard times."

CARROLL: Broadband use jumps without a state push

August 1, 2008

When Americans put their minds to it, they can almost always find the single dark cloud in an otherwise clear sky.

CARROLL: Privileged protesters

July 31, 2008

USA Today regally accused Denver the other day of treating would-be protesters at the Democratic National Convention "like a bunch of pests."

CARROLL: The race to the left

July 30, 2008

Is Joan Fitz-Gerald channeling Dennis Kucinich?

CARROLL: Gore shoots the moon

July 25, 2008

The single most abused argument in the English language? "If America could land a man on the moon in 10 years, why can't it . . ."

CARROLL: Ironic ad targets Polis

July 24, 2008

Jared Polis is being attacked on TV by reactionaries posing as political liberals. His adversaries are so reactionary - so opposed to progress and wedded to old ways - that their ad denounces the 2nd District Democratic congressional candidate for founding and supporting public schools that specialize in serving immigrants and at-risk kids who'd given up on regular school.

CARROLL: Gore's nutty idea

July 22, 2008

He's a former vice president of the United States, Nobel Prize winner and best-selling author, so the lavish news coverage of Al Gore's latest brainstorm was inevitable. Less understandable is why an idea so irresponsible - in economic terms, in fact, just this side of deranged - attracted so little ridicule.

CARROLL: Bogus attack on Udall

July 18, 2008

Republican Bob Schaffer has spent the week suggesting that his opponent in the U.S. Senate race, Democrat Mark Udall, is a hypocrite because he sponsored a resolution in 2002 denouncing Saddam Hussein in the strongest terms, stipulating that he possessed a variety of terrible weapons and describing Iraq as a state sponsor of terrorism.

CARROLL: Preening Post

July 16, 2008

They'll be quaffing champagne over at The Denver Post next month when Butterball LLC sheds more than 200 jobs from its Colorado operations - thus fulfilling a recent announcement - because of the escalating cost of turkey feed.

CARROLL: More pressing woes

July 15, 2008

Two of three Democrats competing for Mark Udall's 2nd District seat in Congress had no trouble at a recent debate identifying what they consider the most important issue in today's world.

CARROLL: Mickey Mouse ruling

July 10, 2008

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, striking that alarmist tone that is so helpful in justifying regulatory overreach, announced this week that the Preble's meadow jumping mouse will remain officially "threatened" in Colorado because "without the protection of the Endangered Species Act, most of the remaining habitat [for the mouse] will be lost or altered within the foreseeable future."

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