Denver Direct: November 2014

Columbine High School was in the news during the 1994–95 school year. Al Wilder, a veteran teacher, sought to give students a view outside of the system’s artificial and banal boundaries. He so showed his debate class 1900, a powerful movie by Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci. It focused about life, growing up, fascism, resistance, friendship, and love. Included was a graphic scene about bought sex.
The result was horror and heresy. The students were receptive to the film. That was the problem. Their elders, led by Jefferson County’s premier lunatics, the school board, screamed with outrage. They made it plain that school was not a place to encourage eager youngsters to explore the world and question everything around them; on the contrary, it was to turn them into mindless zombies who readily accept the worst of the status quo. The Jefferson Public Schools consequently fired Wilder. Virtually nothing was said about his fate and the horrific world administrators gave students when the Columbine High School Massacre erupted at the academy in April 1999.

DEMOCRATS VERSUS THE ENVIRONMENT by Phil Goodstein - December 2014 Naysayer

Washington has again acted to protect Colorado from state officials backed by environmentalists. In particular, the
United States Fish and Wildlife Service, drawing on the Endangered Species Act which passed under the Richard Nixon administration with the support of the Republican president, has declared the Gunnison sage grouse an endangered species. This decree to protect a local animal and its natural habitat has particularly provoked the ire of Governor John Hickenlooper. Sounding just like a states’ right Democrat, he has yelled that Washington is interfering with Colorado’s ability to destroy the climate and obliterate its wildlife. He echoes the laments of Roy Romer and Federico Peña 25 years ago when the Environmental Protection Agency ruled Two Forks Dam was an ecologically devastating project that violated the most basic laws guarding the integrity of the earth. In the process, George Bush I came across as a sterling environmentalist compared to those Democratic officeholders backed by the likes of the Sierra Club.

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