Center Well

The general impression — some call it mythology — of Colorado Springs in the world beyond Colorado Springs is that the southern Front Range city falls politically right of the far right, an Evangelical Republican promised land. That's why the historic effort to recall Colorado Senate President John Morse, a Democrat, for gun-control legislation he supported and helped to pass last spring turns mostly around the question of how well Morse represents his district — or how well he ever could have represented it.

Today in Greeley, the city at the heart of Colorado's Front Range "frack country," a seven-member planning commission will consider a proposal by oil and gas company Synergy to add three more well-drilling facilities "and related equipment" to a site already being drilled in a scenic residential neighborhood roughly three miles from the city center. Synergy is one of the companies working the boom in natural-gas extraction in area of the rich Wattenberg Field, which stretches under most of north-east Colorado. The boom is mostly the product of the effectiveness of hydraulic fracturing, the extraction technique where millions of gallons of a mixture of water, chemicals and sand is blasted deep into the earth to free trapped gas.

A YEAR AGO this week, I found myself in Shove Chapel on Colorado College’s campus where, at roughly age 10, Mando and I had sneaked in with the idea of drinking from the baptismal font. We had goaded each other right up to that moment, but for whatever reason, it didn’t quite pan out — either the stone basin was dry or we couldn’t find it. The truth is, I already can’t remember. Regardless, we gave up on the font sipping and moved on to the trees outside the chapel, a grove of them, easy to climb, that offered high shade between the buildings in which our parents, CC professors, roamed offices, classrooms, pages.

AURORA, Colo.-- A podium stood empty, backed by gun-control advocates and the family and friends of victims of the Aurora movie theater massacre gathering their thoughts. The only sound was the rolling of the film, the clicking of cameras, the soft buzz of the lights installed for the live feed.

AURORA-- Advocates for gun control gathered at noon in a sun-blanched local park to mark the one-year anniversary of the midnight movie-theater shooting here that killed 12, injured 70 and gripped a nation grown accustomed to a news cycle that now features indiscriminate gun massacres at regular intervals.

WHEAT RIDGE, Colo.-- Last week U.S. Republican representatives voted to exclude the nation’s revamped food stamps program from the House version of the 2013 farm bill. This week, the Colorado Public Interest Research Group released a report on what it calls the farm bill’s wasteful agricultural-subsidy spending, joining with farmers to ask Congress to make real reforms before passing the vital five-year legislation.

Outcry is escalating around the decision made by the University of Denver's international studies school to honor former President George W. Bush at a fundraising dinner this September. In addition to 1,500 students and alumni protesting the award, 24 of 40 full-time faculty members at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies have signed a letter decrying the honor.

DENVER—In an upbeat State of the State address Monday, Mayor Michael Hancock expressed a vision where the key to bolstering quality of life here was to facilitate connections, between different kinds of residents and different parts of the city and, in an era when the public sector has come under attack, he underlined the powerful role government can play in the critical areas of transit and infrastructure and housing.

ASPEN-- This tony resort town, set high above the heavily plied natural-gas fields of the Colorado Front Range, was the unlikely scene on Saturday of the latest clash in the running battle in the state over the controversial natural-gas-extraction method known as fracking. More than 100 anti-fracking protesters gathered outside the Democratic Governors Association meeting held here, waving signs, shouting slogans and staging street-theater scenes in an attempt to draw the attention of Governor John Hickenlooper and the other "important state leaders and presidential hopefuls" in attendance.

The state of Colorado has joined a lawsuit filed by oil-and-gas companies against the city of Longmont that seeks to lift a ban on fracking passed by citizen initiative there last November.