“If taxpayers didn’t pay for my housing, I couldn’t afford to live in Aspen.  I’d have to live 20 minutes away and commute to my Aspen office.”

The person who spoke those words gets a two million dollar house here in Aspen.  Under the city’s “affordable housing” lottery, taxpayers pay 80-90% of the cost for people making up to $186,000 a year.  Some of that subsidy is paid for by people making, oh, about $34,000 a year.

The words quoted above were her defense of that scheme.  In short, she says the scheme is good because it’s good for her.

It is one of the great ironies of our time that socialists no longer promote socialism as beneficial to society.  Instead, they promote it as beneficial to themselves personally.

As in, Continue reading →

Katie Couric was the anchor for a while on “CBS Evening News” and was a correspondent on the investigation program “60 Minutes.” She was a star.

She’s fallen far. But she fell gradually, and there were signs along the way. Her $15 million-per-year gig at CBS was a box office bust but she was a hit in guest-hosting “The Tonight Show,” where she replaced Jay Leno’s solid-front desk with an open-fronted one that showed her legs.

Now she’s fallen all the way down to “global anchor,” whatever that is, at Yahoo, whose name is comically appropriate for the kind of “news” she’s doing there.

Which is politics porn. Continue reading →

A few months ago, the trendy insult hurled at Donald Trump was that he is just like Hitler.

I dislike Trump’s style and some of his policies, too. (Unlike the other two candidates still in the race, however, he’s not the subject of an FBI investigation that could transfer him from the White House to the big house, and he doesn’t subscribe to the economics school of Joseph Stalin.)

But not everyone I dislike is necessarily Hitlerian. So I wrote a column titled “Is Trump just like Hitler?” in which I patiently explained that he’s not. To contend that he is trivializes the enormity of Hitler and the plight of his victims.

Maybe I succeeded. Trump is no longer called Hitler.

But now a whole new set of names are on the name-calling menu. Just here in Aspen, Trump has recently been name-called an egomaniac, a racist twice, an ignoramus, a xenophobe, a misogynist twice (are they incapable of originality?) and a boob (well, I guess that’s original, but it’s meaningless).

And that’s just here. Go national, and you’ll see that this person who is drawing about half the nationwide votes is name-called such things as bigot, stupid, a–hole, fat, demagogue, jerk, idiot, race-baiter, narcissist, sexist and man-slut.

One pundit called him the “Lord of the Rings” nonhuman character Gollum. Continue reading →

North Carolina recently passed a law prohibiting transsexuals from using the public bathrooms of their chosen gender. No Y chromosomes are allowed in the women’s bathrooms. Lola, that means you.

I have three confessions relevant to today’s discussion. First, I’m a political conservative. (“No way!” you’re saying.)

Second, I consider myself a Christian. (Whew, I feel relieved to come out of the Christian closet, but now I fully expect the local Christianophobes to shun and ridicule me — in the name of diversity and tolerance, of course. Oh well.)

Third, I’m the father of two daughters. They’re now more able and adult than their dad, but I can remember when they were vulnerable young girls in need of my protection.

So I must support the North Carolina bathroom law, right? Wrong. Continue reading →

Aspen evolved organically. Unlike Vail, for example, it doesn’t have a prepackaged Disneyland feel. It feels authentic.

But the town has real growing pains, especially in the infrastructure. Some long-range planning is needed. Here are some suggestions: Continue reading →

Aspen literally stinks. I mean “literally” in the literal sense, not the figurative sense in which people who are literally illiterate use “literally.” Here’s the story:

Right downtown, it smells like a snowboarder in an overflowing outhouse in the August sun. Except it’s only April. All winter, this stink on ice has been ripening like leftover pizza forgotten in the vegetable drawer, and now it’s thawing and festering into putrescent pus. This stench is doing what stenches do, and it’s doing it well.

There’s evidently a problem with the sewer system. As the leaders in the presidential election keep inadvertently reminding us, money can’t buy class. In Aspen, it can’t even buy fresh air.

But don’t worry. Continue reading →

“No mistakes in the tango, darlin’. Not like life. It’s simple. That’s what makes the tango so great. You make a mistake, get all tangled up, just tango on.”

— Al Pacino, “The Scent of a Woman”

Terrorists struck again. Their bombs in Brussels massacred 31 men, women and children and maimed or dismembered another 300-some.

The terrorists stated that they were Muslims, and stated that they committed their terror in the name of Islam.

Attributing such words to the Islamic terrorists who speak them is deemed “Islamophobia” by the politically correct crowd. Their fear of Islamophobia rises to the level of a phobia itself. Call it “Islamophobia-phobia.”

As between Islamophobia and Islamophobia-phobia, the second feels better but the first is less lethal.

In that regard, Continue reading →

Hillary Clinton says that we should vote for political candidates based on their merit, not their gender.

But with the kind of word games for which the Clintons are famous, she immediately qualifies that statement. In her case, she says, her gender is part of her merit.

It’s as if Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a nation where people are judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character — and went on to dream that the color of their skin is part of the content of their character.

I’m reminded of a play back in 1996 which consisted of a series of monologues on women’s issues from the perspective of a vagina. It was called “The Vagina Monologues.”

The play is now Continue reading →

Ah, Snowmass, where the air is thinner and the conspiracy theories are thicker. A few semi-hypoxic individuals up there have issued a warning to the rest of us.

Their warning is that the stuff in our drinking water that we call “fluoride” is actually poison.

It’s true that dentists and other medical experts say that fluoride is the reason modern humans can live well past their natural expiration date without the pain and inconvenience of losing their teeth. Have you ever wondered why Joe Biden’s teeth look like Christie Brinkley’s, but George Washington’s look like his horse’s? It’s fluoride.

But don’t be fooled, say the fluoridophobes. It’s a conspiracy. Continue reading →

You might think the lucky recipients of taxpayer-subsidized housing in Aspen would be careful to maintain those houses. But the law of unintended consequences is at work.

Here’s what happens: Houses are bought at prices set by the local government housing authority. Those prices are way less than market value — often an 80 to 90 percent discount. Aspen taxpayers make up the difference.

When the residents resell their houses, their resale price also is set by the housing authority. Once again, it is a small fraction of market value.

Since the government-set prices are so far below market value, there’s no doubt that the sellers will receive that price in full. Whether the houses are in tip-top shape or falling down, the selling prices will be the same so there’s no economic incentive to maintain them. Indeed, the homeowner association reserves established by the residents of the projects for ongoing maintenance are only 22 percent of what is necessary. The maintenance that the other 78 percent is supposed to pay for is simply left undone.

The current debate is whether local government should give the homeowners associations taxpayer money to make up that 78 percent.

But what then? Continue reading →