Category Archives: Uncategorized

Downtown Denver has become a pus-filled sore in an overflowing post-apocalyptic outhouse

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Denver was my home for most of my adult life while I made a career in law. It wasn’t exactly Paris, but even Paris isn’t exactly Paris anymore. Denver was at least pleasant, clean and fairly safe.

Cheapskate that I am, I made a practice of parking about eight blocks away from my downtown office, in the direction of the “bad” part of town. (The parking rate was 10 cents a day – really!) I never had any problems.

As many of you know, I then retired and moved to Aspen. About six years ago, I bought a second home in Denver, in a downtown high-rise condo. I get around.

But now I’m done with my downtown Denver condo. What’s happened to downtown Denver in just the last three years is disgraceful and disgusting.

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The Western Wall

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Note: I published this piece nine years ago when I was treking in Israel for a while. The unspeakable horror of last weekend prompts me to publish it again, my own small tribute to my Israeli and other Jewish friends.

Muslims have the Taj Mahal and Mecca. Catholics have St. Peter’s Basilical and the Vatican.

Jews have a wall.

The Western Wall is a stack of massive stone blocks a few dozen feet high and a couple of hundred feet long. It’s all that’s left of Jerusalem’s second Jewish temple, a structure that astonished even the Romans. The Romans destroyed it to punish the Jews for their Great Revolt in 70 A.D.

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Did the Biden administration withhold intel from Israel?

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Palestinian terrorists (no, that’s not necessarily redundant) in Gaza launched a brutal terrorist attack on Israel yesterday. They slaughtered at least 800 Israelis, many of them unarmed women and children. Some were taken hostage back to Gaza where they were paraded through the streets and beaten.

It was a massive and highly coordinated attack with incursions by land, air and sea. From a thousand miles away, Iran was likely funding and coordinating it. There had to be a lot of cyber chatter preceding the attack.

Yet Israel was apparently caught by complete surprise.

The question being rightly asked is, how could Israel’s intel operations – one of the most sophisticated in the world – have been caught so off-guard?

The answer may be in Washington. The Biden administration has never gotten along with the Israeli government, nor did the Obama administration where Biden ws Vice President. Biden and Obama have both seemed determined to let Iran – a terrorist state that has vowed to destroy Israel – get a nuclear bomb, and experts think that at any given moment they could have one in a matter of months. Biden just gave Iran six billion dollars in exchange for American hostages that Iran had taken.

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Hillary wants to send you to the nuthouse

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Hillary Clinton – remember her? – appeared for a friendly interview this week with one of the adoring lefty media people.

Hil lamented the fact that Donald Trump has a constituency that would charge through fire with him. (Whether Trump would lead that charge from the front or from behind is a topic for another column.)

Joe Biden’s constituency, in contrast, is of a different type. They wouldn’t follow him to the ice cream stand, and they certainly wouldn’t let their daughters do so. Most of them don’t even want him to run for re-election.

If you’re a Democrat, this is a problem. Unenthusiastic voters don’t vote.

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But wait, I thought walls didn’t work!

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We were told by illegal immigration activists for years that walls don’t work, Oddly, however, they lobbied vigorously against a wall along our porous border with Mexico. If walls don’t work, I wondered, why are the pro-illegal immigration activists so dead set against them?

And if walls don’t work, I further wondered, why did the Berlin Wall succeed in imprisoning freedom-seekers for decades? Why are there walls around prisons? Why is there a wall around the White House?

But I’m not a wall scientist, so I figured there must be good answers to those questions but the answers were beyond my ken. I did learn from yard signs that it’s important to follow the science and that there is no such thing as an illegal human. So, I figured there must be something I was missing about wall-atology.

Former and future President Donald Trump seemed to miss it too. He built walls on portions of our border with Mexico to reduce illegal border crossings.

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Hard-line Republicans just handed the House to the Dems

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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a smart guy and astute politician. Threatening to shut down the government, he put together a spending bill that cut spending dramatically (by DC standards, anyway). He was prepared to pass it in his House, and send it to the Dem-controlled Senate. There, everyone knew it would die, but it would be a starting point for negotiations between the Senate and the House.

But McCarthy never got the chance. Predictably, the House Dems opposed it on the grounds it cut spending too much. Less predictably, half a dozen GOP hard-liners also opposed it – for not cutting spending enough.

To avoid a shutdown, McCarthy watered down the bill. The watered-down bill didn’t cut spending as much, but did garner the votes of most of the Dems and most of the GOP too. The Senate Dems and Joe Biden were delighted with the bill, and promptly passed it and signed it.

Which infuriated the GOP hard-liners. They moved to remove McCarthy from the speakership.

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Demo-rats are jumping the Biden ship

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Most Americans say they will vote against Joe Biden next year, even if four-time indictee and twice-impeached Donald Trump is the Republican nominee.

Most Americans say Biden was on the take from foreign governments – they think he accepted bribes directly or through his criminal son. And most Democrats think Biden is too old to be president.

A recent poll by ABC/WaPo (not exactly “far-right-wingers” as the media likes to label dissenters from their narrative) puts Biden’s approval rating at 37% overall, in the low 30s on economics, and in the low 20s on immigration. And it says if the election were held today, he’d lose to Trump by 10 points – a blowout that would surely cost the Democrats the Senate as well.

Republicans would then own the presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and most state governorships and legislatures. Yikes, that scares even me, but I’ll take it.

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This conservative is canceling his subscription to the Wall Street Journal

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I’ve been a moderate conservative for over 40 years. My principal source of news has been the Wall Street Journal. Its investigations, reporting, writing and opinion work have been without parallel. (I’ll admit that my regard for the Journal may have been heightened when they published a piece I wrote on mountaineering.)

But no more. Yes, sometimes they still do very good investigative work. And the opinion pages are still very good and mostly conservative. (And their mountaineering stuff is fabulous, albeit limited.)

I’ll note that those opinion pages often include opinions from the other side. Joe Biden has guest-opined there, as have Elizabeth Warren, Charles Schumer and other leading Democrats. I don’t respect those Dems’ opinions, but I do respect the Journal for publishing them.

Publishing opinions that run contrary to an outlet’s leanings is unusual these days. When Senator Tom Cotton got an opinion piece published in the New York Times, the staff revolted and the NYT editor who approved the piece for publication was forced to resign.

If democracy dies in darkness, credit the mainstream media – the so-called fourth estate of our three-branch system – for turning out the lights.

But aside from good investigative work and the opinion page, the Journal has deteriorated. The writing is increasingly hackneyed and littered with millennial colloquialisms. You can almost see the bosses gathered in a conference room scheming to get more silly slang into the writing in order to attract, they think, the next generation of readers.

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Treat Iranian hostage-takers like Barbary pirates and Palestinian terrorists – kill them

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The Barbary pirates were a ragtag gang of North African pirates who terrorized Europe for centuries. They pirated commercial shipping, raided as far north as Ireland and Iceland to abduct and enslave Europeans –especially women – for the harems of the Middle East, and exacted tribute in exchange for safe ocean passage.

In two wars, the new United States of America put an end to them. The first was in 1801-1805. The second was ten years later and lasted just a few days, permanently putting the barbarian Barbarians out of business. America and Europe finally stopped paying tribute and ransom and enduring slave raids.

Fast forward to the year 2023. Modern-day Barbary pirates in Iran routinely kidnap Americans and Europeans to hold for ransom. Last week, the Biden administration paid an astonishing $6 billion for the release of six of them – a billion dollars each if my math serves.

Does this not encourage future abductions?

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There’s so much more to Deion than neon

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The University of Colorado football program over the years often contended for the Big 8 title. It was the home of great athletes like Kordell Stewart, Darian Hagan, Eric Bieniemy, Rashaan Salaam, Dave Logan and Cliff Branch.

But it fell on hard times the last few years. Last year, they finished 1-11, lost their last four games by an average of over 30 points, and fired the coach.

Then they did something crazy. They hired a guy whose coaching experience was limited to several high schools, one of which was plagued by scandal, and then a historically Black college that played second division football.

But this new coach had some things going for him. He was a three-sport athletic star in college baseball, track and football. In high school, he was also a basketball star. He became a solid major league baseball player and a star in the NFL – the only player in history to hit a major league home run and score an NFL touchdown in the same week. After retiring, he was promptly inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame.

He goes by several names. His first was Prime Time, which was given to him by teammates on his high school basketball team. Later in college football, they called him “Neon Deion.”

Yeah, it’s Deion Sanders. His players call him “Coach Prime.”

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