Peter Boyles, the Denver-based radio host, had me on this morning.  It was great fun.

https://710knus.com/content/members/peter-boyles-podcast

Orchestrated media bias extends all the way down to small town newspapers owned by big-time media companies. Consider the Aspen Times and its parent, Swift Communications.

That lefty little newspaper in this lefty little resort town started publishing my conservative columns seven years ago, back when Donald Trump was known as a blustery reality TV host.

My columns sometimes went to the top of the newspaper’s trending list, generating more clicks than frontpage news. They invariably produced more comments and letters to the editor than all the other columns combined. Most were positive.

I usually dealt with national political issues where I often but not always criticized the clown car of Democratic presidential candidates while siding with Trump’s policies if not his personality. My stuff contrasted with the mindless and unread Trump-bashing of the other half dozen columnists.

My columns also covered touchy local issues such as Aspen’s $3 billion (yes, with a “b”) subsidized housing program, where the yearly income limitation for a family of four is about a quarter million dollars. In that black hole of taxpayer money, many local politicos along with Aspen Times editors and newspaper staff who endorse them enjoy seven-figure housing for dimes on the dollar, sometimes in the middle of town or even slope-side.

I revealed that some of the lucky recipients of this housing welfare illegally sublease their near-free housing for five-figure rents at Christmas time while evading lodging and income tax on the rental proceeds. That scandal has attracted attention in the Denver media 200 miles away, which sent an investigative reporter to cover it, but is often overlooked or back-paged in the Aspen Times.

I also wrote about the silly feel-good hypocrisy of locals who make a show of banning plastic straws on the fanciful notion that the straws somehow get transported from Aspen to the ocean a thousand miles away.

Meanwhile those same locals happily use coal-generated electricity to be transported up snowy hillsides in order to amuse themselves by sliding back down, over and over, by a big ski company that buys carbon indulgences from the local greens by banning plastic straws in its restaurants.

Ten days before Christmas, I wrote a nuanced column – the last as it turns out – about the human side of Jesus. It was widely admired by both Jews and Christians including a prominent Episcopal bishop and a longtime local religious leader.

All that wasn’t enough, or maybe it was too much. On Christmas Eve, I received an email from the managing editor of the Aspen Times notifying me that effective immediately, without prior notice or even discussion, they had terminated our seven-year relationship. The reason he gave was that my bi-monthly column was contrary to their “values.”

His boss later contended that I should have anticipated this blindsiding. Their reasoning is apparently a syllogism that goes like this: I knew that (1) they are lefties; (2) lefties don’t tolerate disagreement; and (3) lefties like to express their intolerance rudely.

The corporate parent of the Aspen Times is Swift Communications which owns 26 newspapers. In effect, 26 newspapers around the country have banned this conservative voice.

Letters to the editor blasting the Aspen Times flooded into them but they printed only a fraction of them.

Then they announced that they would replace me with another “conservative.” But by the replacement’s own account she is not a conservative.

They also promised that the replacement will focus not on national politics but on local issues, though their other columnists face no such constraint in their non-stop Trump-bashing.

The replacement’s first column, published last Sunday, announced that “what we desperately need” is … (come on, you can guess) … additional taxpayer-subsidized, city-provided housing welfare.

As for me, my story became national news. Power Line led with it the day after Christmas and then other outlets picked it up as well. That weekend, more people read my column predicting the events of the new year than read the Aspen Times.

You can join them. See all my work at theAspenbeat.com and subscribe for free at theAspenbeat@gmail.com.

(Published Jan 11, 2020 in American Thinker at https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/banned_in_aspen_newspaper_chain_fires_its_only_conservative.html)

The “death to” slogan began in Iran in the days of the Shah. It wasn’t enough to depose the Shah. They wanted “death to” him.

After the Shah died, gleeful Iranians evidently concluded that it was their sloganeering that killed him. They weaponized this discovery with other slogans similar in hateful meaning but not in lethal effect. Think “death to America” and then “death to Israel.”

Other countries such as Yemen joined in the chorus and expanded it. Soon it was “death to America, death to Israel and damnation to the Jews.” That was off-putting to Israelis, and also to Americans who were little comforted by the slogan’s absence of damnation to them specifically.

Israel and America weren’t the only nations targeted by these voodoo death wishes. “Death to the Soviet Union” was popular until Continue reading →

Yogi Berra observed that predictions are tough, especially about the future. But tough as they are, readers inform me that predictions about the future would be more useful to them than my usual predictions about the past. So here goes.

President Trump will win reelection easily on the strength of the best economy in the lifetime of most voters despite the dreams of compassionate Democrats for a bone-crushing, job-losing, starvation-inducing depression.

Also helping Trump will be the weakness of a slew and stew of old, uninspiring, grouchy,  white male Dem and dim candidates (plus one womyn who used to be Native American).

Donations to the charitable (cough … cough) Clinton Foundation will, um, continue to decline. Frustrated by such little bribe for their buck, past donors may ask for their money back.

Instead of Hillary, the Dems will nominate Biden. Continue reading →

Two thousand years ago, a Jewish carpenter lived a conventional life for 30 years in a tiny village in the Middle East. Then he became as they might say today, “radicalized.”

Historians agree that Jesus did exist – there are reliable ancient records of him. But most of what we know about him is limited to opaque and contradictory accounts written decades after his death in what we now call the Gospel of the New Testament.

In one sense, those Gospel accounts are profoundly simple. They say Jesus was the Messiah prophesized in the Hebrew Bible. As such, he performed miracles to save those needing saving. He came back from the dead. That’s the word.

But in a personal sense, the Gospels present a more complicated and contradictory man than the one presented in Sunday School or even adult church services. Continue reading →

A Gallup poll shows that while 74% of Republicans are “extremely proud” to be Americans, only 32% of Democrats and 23% of self-described liberals feel the same.

Why does the left hate America?

Let’s stipulate that America is not perfect. I don’t need to list the imperfections, because the left and their news puppets remind us of them daily.

But notwithstanding her many flaws, America stands tall against other countries. Here are some metrics: Continue reading →

The Democrat field for president may see its second billionaire, Michael Bloomberg. The former New York City mayor laments that the current field of Dems are “not the way to run a railroad.”

Indeed. The guy in charge of baggage on this railroad is named Joe, and he has a lot of it. He’s been toting his baggage in and around the political tracks for most of his long life.

He’s never become the train engineer because he still hasn’t learned to stay awake at the switch. He’s a serial plagiarizer and thinks FDR went on TV in 1929 to talk about the stock market crash even though TV hadn’t been invented yet and Roosevelt didn’t become president until 1933.

He told a false war story extolling his courage and permits his smarmy son to sell political influence around the world for millions.

Up near the front of this Dem choo-choo is Continue reading →