Rocky Mountain News - Editorials

The initial budget Gov. Bill Ritter recently presented to the legislature, which foresees growth in tax collections this fiscal year and in the one beginning July 1 of next year, will probably bear little resemblance to the measure that becomes law next spring. The past two months have shattered the economic outlook, and officials need to begin preparing for possible major adjustments in spending.

It's a sign of unsettled economic times when we get to worry about, first, inflation, and, now, deflation in the same year.

Must be something about that U.S. Senate seat.

After a generation plagued by United Nations ball-dropping - whether it was the genocide that claimed up to a million lives in just 100 days in 1994 in Rwanda or the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs right under peacekeepers' noses - the U.N. attempted to set things right in April 2006. The Security Council passed Resolution 1674, which reaffirmed "the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."

Individuals' 401(k)s aren't the only investment portfolios taking a beating during the current financial meltdown. Public pensions have also been whacked by the market collapse.

Barack Obama perhaps didn't directly intervene to save Joe Lieberman's chairmanship but it certainly didn't hurt when the president-elect said he would be "happy" to have the Connecticut senator and party apostate continue to caucus with the Democrats.

Are Denver's legal settlements getting out of hand? Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz has raised the question because of the city's $3 million settlement in a lawsuit by the family of Emily Rice, who died in a jail cell nearly three years ago from internal injuries despite her impassioned pleas for help.

Inexorably, the cocoon that Barack Obama will live in for the next four or eight years is tightening around him.

The question could ignite a stinging controversy: Should Denver residents be allowed to keep beehives in the backyard?

Is it worth mentioning that the federal budget deficit has taken an alarming turn for the worse? Does anyone in this devil-may-care moment of federal spending actually care?

It appears that Barack Obama will make closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay an early order of business for his administration. Good. For too long that camp has stood as a symbol of perhaps the single most troubling aspect of the Bush administration's war on terror: a willingness to keep prisoners who haven't been charged with crimes, let alone convicted, in a state of indefinite legal limbo.

Gov. Bill Ritter's transportation panel held its final meeting on Thursday, and the timing was certainly appropriate.

When Congress established the $700 billion bailout fund, it promised strict and thorough oversight. Over a month later, with $290 billion already committed, we have our answer as to what that means: There isn't any.

Denver developer Richard "Buzz" Geller has spent $1 million just in the past year trying to build a dramatic condo tower in Bell Park west of Larimer Square in Denver's lower downtown.

Dozens of landowners in the Lower Arkansas Valley who received tax credits under Colorado's overly generous conservation easement program feel blindsided. Federal and state auditors are reviewing those transactions and finding that appraisers overvalued some property, leading to tax credits that were higher than the easements' actual value. The government will sock those landowners with bills for back taxes.

The $700 billion bailout was rushed through Congress as a way of pumping liquidity into the financial system by letting the Treasury buy up so-called toxic assets, the most troubled loans on lenders' books.

The Obamas can be grateful that it looks like they'll be spared the debate that dogged the Clintons - public versus private school for their children. Chelsea Clinton had attended public school back in Little Rock, Ark., and the Clintons' liberal supporters had hoped she would do the same in Washington. Conservatives, understandably, noted the irony of Clinton, an opponent of vouchers, considering a move to private schools.

You would have thought that, after letting 60 birthday-suited cyclists pedal through the streets of Boulder in June, that city's police chief would have turned the other cheek when it came to the 10th annual Naked Pumpkin Run.

Panic seems to be growing among homebuilders, real estate agents and just about anyone else whose livelihood depends on a healthy housing market.

Veterans Day honors our veterans, but it also honors an ideal that now seems naive but still survives as a matter of international law.