Free Republic

The Boulder City Council unanimously passed a sweeping gun control ordinance Tuesday night banning "assault weapons" and bump stocks, even as a pro-Second Amendment group threatened to retaliate by suing individual councilmembers. In a surprising turn, one Colorado councilwoman admitted that she disagreed with the ordinance "in many ways," saying it would invite a flood of litigation -- despite voting for it.

**SNIP** A new “Witnessing Whiteness” workshop in the Centennial State encourages participants to form groups that can “dismantle the systems of white supremacy that support current structures of inequity.” The 11-part series, first reported by the educational watchdog Campus Reform, was created by Shelly Tochluk, who is also known in academic circles for organizing the “Unmasking Whiteness” conference. Indicators of “white culture” include “individualism, consumerism, meritocracy as an ideal, superficiality, competition, ambition, productivity, [and] extreme exploitation of labor/resources for profit,’” an online workshop document tells readers.

The video clip lasts just 20 seconds, but it’s long enough to anger anyone who believes public officials and their loved ones secretly suffer from a strong sense of entitlement. Jordan Hancock, the 22-year-old son of Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock, had been clocked going 65 mph in a 40 mph zone in Aurora, a suburb of Denver. It’s unclear what preceded the heated exchange between the young man and the officer captured in the video, originally obtained by Denver ABC affiliate KMGH. But at some point, the 22-year-old unloads on the officer, spewing a stream of profanity and gay...

As employees from the paper protest against massive cuts to the newsroom and top editors resign, staffers tell The Daily Beast, ‘This is chaos.’ ==================================================================================== It seems odd that they’re fighting for the right to speak at a place called The Lipstick Building. Today, 150 journalists from the Denver Post, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and the Mercury News, and 49 other smaller papers who are accustomed to reporting the news will become the news, as they protest the owner of their papers in what some have called “a fight for their lives.” Alden Global Capital has been surprisingly silent...

A police body camera video leaked to Contact7 Investigates shows the son of Denver Mayor Michael Hancock using a slur against an Aurora police officer during a traffic stop. “My dad’s the mayor, you f---ing f--got,” Jordan Hancock is shown saying in the video clip. “Of Denver? Well you’re in Aurora,” the officer responds. “Guess what, I’m about to get you fired you f---ing b---h,” Hancock is heard saying later. The video clip sent to Contact7 Investigates by an anonymous source is only about 20 seconds long and ends with 22-year-old Hancock driving away. Denver7 requested the full video from...

An editor at The Denver Post who oversaw an editorial critical of budget and staff cuts made by the newspaper's New York-based hedge fund owners has resigned. Editorial Page Editor Chuck Plunkett ... The Post last month published Plunkett's initial editorial headlined "As vultures circle, The Denver Post must be saved," calling on Alden to sell the newspaper. ... Plunkett said he was warned afterward "not to bite the hand that fed us" but couldn't stay silent.

And that’s just one of the ways bad guys are putting drones to use, law enforcement officials say. DENVER, Colorado — Last winter, on the outskirts of a large U.S. city, an FBI Hostage Rescue Team set up an elevated observation post to assess an unfolding situation. Soon they heard the buzz of small drones — and then the tiny aircraft were all around them, swooping past in a series of “high-speed low passes at the agents in the observation post to flush them,” the head of the agency’s operational technology law unit told attendees of the AUVSI Xponential conference...

By a unanimous vote Tuesday evening, Boulder, Colorado’s City Council advanced a ban on the sale and possession of America’s favorite rifle, the AR-15. They also voted to ban bump fire stocks, standard capacity magazines and similar sporting rifles as well. With a third vote, the ban will take effect for residents as well as visitors to Boulder. Of course, the rule-making exempts law enforcement and military users. As for the little people, The Berkeley of the Rockies’ Mayor Suzanne Jones said, “I think, by and large, we’re focused on a type of weapon to keep it out of civilian...

A Berthoud High School graduate was killed in action Monday while serving in Afghanistan, weeks before his unit's deployment in the country was scheduled to end. The U.S. Department of Defense announced Tuesday that Spc. Gabriel D. Conde, 22, died of small arms fire in the Tagab District while supporting Operation Freedom's Sentinel, according to a release from the department. The incident is still under investigation. Conde was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, U.S. Army Alaska, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska.

A federal judge's ruling has put #CO05 Rep. Doug Lamborn back on the GOP primary ballot.

For nearly a century, the Democrats loved Russia. Not the Russian people, mind you, who were being oppressed, starved and enslaved, but the Russian system. That system was communism. Forget that communism murdered about 100 million people in the last century. And forget that communist socialism failed economically every place it was tried, from the Soviet Union to Cuba to Venezuela to East Germany to North Korea. Because the real goal of communists was never economic prosperity. Their real goal was tyranny. They succeeded so wildly at tyranny for a while that the Dems thought the Russians might rescue us...

A far-left congressional candidate in Colorado secretly recorded a meeting he had last year with House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D.-Maryland) who attempted to pressure him into dropping out of the race against the establishment candidate preferred by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. As you can see in the April 26 video below, Hoyer definitely gave off 2016 vibes of the establishment Democrats rigging the primary system in favor of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Yes, I said "see" because The Intercept entertainingly combined cartoons with the secretly recorded audio.

The most popular place to put a city park is, increasingly, on a highway. Cities looking to boost their downtowns, or to improve downtrodden neighborhoods, are creating “highway cap parks” on decks constructed over freeways that cut through the urban center. Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Denver and Dallas have deck parks underway. Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis and Santa Monica, California, are among the cities considering similar projects. In crowded cities, highway deck parks are a way to create new acreage and provide green space that can spur downtown development. Capping a highway to create a park also can reconnect urban neighborhoods sliced apart...

Liberal groups demanded the resignation of a top House Democrat on Thursday after he was caught on a secret recording trying to strong-arm a progressive candidate to nix his congressional campaign and clear the way for party leaders’ preferred pick to win. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, told Levi Tillemann, a Democrat running in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District, to drop out because “a judgment was made very early on” that opposing candidate Jason Crow, an Army veteran, was the party’s choice to take on a vulnerable Republican. The recording, which Mr. Tillemann released to the...

In Douglas County, Colorado, the front line of the fight for school choice and vouchers on the SCOTUS level, Republican voters outnumber Democrats about two to one. Yet until recently, Republican taxpayers .. paying about $1.25 million a year to fund Democrats’ political campaigns. How so? Most of the district’s 4,300 plus teachers belonged to the local American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, to which they paid about $1.25 million in dues annually, according to the union’s IRS filings. Since teachers’ salaries are paid by the county’s property tax payers, their dues come out of those salaries. So the $1.25...

What do the three pictured flags have in common? The first is the flag of the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Estimates are that 40,000,000 to 60,000,000 people lost their lives under the rule of Stalin's iron fist. The third is the Chinese flag. Everyday hard-working people did not fare well in Mao's China either. Anywhere from 49,000,000 to 78,000,000 died under Mao's communist society. In the middle is the flyer that teachers' unions distributed to Colorado teachers with their Walk-Ins tool-kit encouraging Englewood's teachers to protest and walk out of class recently. Additionally, the teachers' unions are organizing...

The governor of Colorado does our nation a grave disservice by misleading the public about the impact of marijuana on his state in the April 9 interview in Rolling Stone magazine. Neither the governor's statements, nor the smoke rising from 4/20 events, can hide the fact that drug use and addiction, especially among youths, are a growing public health concern in communities across Colorado and the nation. ... According to the 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, Colorado is a national leader among 12-17-year-olds in: (1) Last year marijuana use; (2) Last month marijuana use; and (3) The...

A Colorado woman is facing a $500 fine from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for saving a free apple she received as a snack from Delta Air Lines on her way back to the United States from Paris, France. Crystal Tadlock told Fox 31 Denver, toward the end of her flight from Paris, flight attendants passed out apples in plastic bags as a snack. Tadlock put the fruit in her carry-on to save for when she was hungry during the second leg of her trip. Once Tadlock arrived in the U.S., she went through Customs and her bag was...

Scrolls, Scripts & Stelae A Norwegian Collector Shows BAR His Rare Inscriptions Hershel Shanks If you have a Dead Sea Scroll for sale, you should get in touch with Martin Schøyen (pronounced Skoo-yen) in Oslo. He is a prime prospect. He already owns several Dead Sea Scroll fragments—making him one of the few individuals in the world (I can think of only one other) who own Dead Sea Scroll material. In his spacious London pied-à-terre, Schøyen also has one of the unusual pottery jars from Qumran in which the Bedouin found the first intact scrolls in 1947 or 1948....

<p>An exhibit featuring replicas of the Dead Sea Scrolls has opened at the visitors center at the Mormon temple in Kensington, Maryland.</p> <p>The free exhibit, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Ancient Religious Texts at Brigham Young University, chronicles the creation of the scrolls in the ancient city of Qumran on the northwestern rim of the Dead Sea, as well as their discovery by a Palestinian shepherd in 1947.</p>