Substack

Gaines: Polis’ picks for land board proves Colorado’s gone to the wolves

I wrote about Polis advisor Nicole Rosmarino being the sole finalist for the directorship of the State Land Board recently. That newsletter is linked first below if you want or need context.

On the heels of that newsletter, I got a message from a reader alerting me to the other two appointments that Governor Polis made to the State Land Board–this is the same board mind you that makes decisions on grazing leases, mineral-extraction (oil/gas) leases, and provides revenue to schools–Mark Harvey from Pitkin County and James Pribyl from Louisville. Harvey was appointed to fill the agriculture seat on the board and Pribyl the citizen-at-large seat.

If the name Pribyl sounds familiar, you’re not alone. He was a former member of the CPW Commissioners (see the picture heading this post whose text was taken from Pribyl’s Linked In account), a wolf reintroduction advocate, and one of the three co-authors of the op ed in support of Prop 127, the big cat hunting ban.**

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Hancock: The future of Colorado hangs between boom and blackout

There’s a difference between dreaming big and hallucinating. Colorado’s progressive legislators have yet to figure that out.

Once a beacon of frontier grit and entrepreneurial promise, Colorado is drifting into a twilight of self-imposed stagnation. This isn’t the result of some unforeseeable external shock. No. The decline is being engineered — brick by legislative brick — by a political class more interested in social signaling than in fostering economic vitality.

The question isn’t whether Colorado faces a reckoning. The question is whether we will admit the cause before we hit the wall.

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Sturm: Wisdom gained after debating a Pronoun Policy as a theater company board member

What would you do if the state called you an unfit parent — not for hurting your child, but for refusing to pretend your daughter is your son?

That’s the reality Colorado families could soon face under a bill advancing in the state legislature. And in Maryland, the Supreme Court is now weighing whether parents have any say at all over LGBTQ content taught in elementary school.

Policies once dismissed as fringe are ubiquitous. Silence shouldn’t become complicity.

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Hancock: Manufacturing chaos is the progressive blueprint for power

By now, the pattern is as familiar as it is sinister. A protest erupts into violence. A crisis becomes an opportunity. An institution is denounced, discredited, and dismantled. And always, always, someone else is to blame. 

This is not coincidence. It is strategy. 

We are witnessing the methodical deployment of chaos as a political narrative—a calculated tool of progressive activism that feeds on division, cultivates instability, and then offers itself as the only remedy.

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Amuse: Susan Rice and the buried sabotage inside the federal bureaucracy

I will admit, when I first read that Susan Rice was still ensconced on the Defense Policy Board well into the new Trump administration, I thought it must surely be fake news, some hallucination conjured by an overactive internet rumor mill. Yet, with the bitter taste of disbelief still fresh, the facts became clear.

Not only had she lingered, she had lingered officially, and with all the institutional imprimatur the position carries. It is the sort of stunning oversight that shakes one’s faith in the assumption that elections carry consequences.

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Trump’s victory lap at DOJ

On March 14, 2024, I was in the media room at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon at the time was presiding over a hearing on two motions filed by defense lawyers representing Donald Trump and his co-defendants seeking to dismiss the classified documents indictment handed down by then Special Counsel Jack Smith in June 2023.

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