Tag: Obama administration

Thursday’s court filing by the Department of Justice in the 10th Circuit Court in Wyoming, which has federal jurisdiction over Colorado, indicating the DOJ...

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has been making the rounds in Colorado the last couple of days, earning points from enviros at the North American...

VAIL — A small but scary wildfire that broke out in the national forest above West Vail Friday afternoon perfectly underscored the ongoing debate between the state’s Department of Natural Resources and environmentalists over Colorado’s controversial roadless rule.

While conservation groups called Wednesday’s federal appeals court decision reinstating the Clinton-era roadless rule a major victory, the state of Colorado contends its own revised rule is still a far more practical way of managing the state’s 4.2 million roadless acres. Mike King, deputy director of Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources, said Wednesday that the 2001 Clinton rule, which provided sweeping protections against road building on nearly 60 million acres of largely undeveloped public lands nationwide, did not take into consideration wildfire mitigation or other critical economic drivers.

Pulling hard-rock minerals like uranium, gold and copper out of the ground is a royalty-free proposition in the United States, despite the often enormous costs of cleaning up public lands after the fact.

The long, winding and seemingly endless road to adopting Colorado’s controversial roadless rule took another turn Monday, when Gov. Bill Ritter announced that an...

President Barack Obama rolled out his plan to overhaul financial regulation last week. While much of the Obama plan relies on the same regulators and structures that led to the current meltdown, there is one key exception. The establishment of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency would give ordinary citizens a seat at the financial policy table for the first time and prevent the abuses in credit card and mortgage lending that have wreaked havoc on households all over the country.

President Obama today made official an $80 billion deal with the pharmaceutical industry to cut prescription drug costs for the nation’s seniors. As it is, Medicare patients are forced to pay the full cost for their prescription drugs when annual expenses fall between $2,700 and $6,154. Under the new agreement, drug companies would pick of 50 percent of the tab for some of those patients falling into Medicare’s so-called doughnut hole.

I’ve just conducted a phone interview with Akbar Ganji, one of the leading Iranian dissidents and most prominent voices in the international community for a more liberal Iran. He knows its brutality in a deeply personal way: the regime imprisoned Ganji for five years after he wrote a series of articles exposing its human rights abuses. Although the Bush administration sought to fund Ganji’s efforts in the hope of encouraging his fellow dissidents, Ganji took a high-profile stance against American support, arguing that even the suggestion of U.S. backing would set back the cause of human rights in Iran.

U.S. Rep. Jared Polis said he was happy -- but not very happy -- President Barack Obama would be extending certain benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees Wednesday afternoon. The openly gay Boulder Democrat, who a day earlier ripped the Obama administration’s defense of a federal law banning same-sex marriage, told The Colorado Independent the federal benefits extension amounted to "a far cry from the equality we seek."