The Colorado Independent

Private education tax credit launches a flurry of education amendments For years, Senate Republicans have been trying to pass a tax credit for private K-12 education. Now that they’re in the majority, they have brought the tax credit…
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Lawmakers and their families face frequent threats; death and rape top the list. Former state lawmaker Amy Stephens, R-Monument, knows this well. In 2011, when Stephens ran an insurance exchange bill, she found herself in the crosshairs of…
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This is what political denial looks like in Florida, where Republican Gov. Rick Scott has allegedly banned state officials from uttering the term “climate change.” Video from a Senate committee hearing finds Bryan Koon, head of…
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Freshman lawmaker Rep. Dan Thurlow, a Republican from Grand Junction, has been making a lot of headlines lately for voting with Democrats. He ran afoul of hard-charging, far-right-politics group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners for voting against…
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As Ted Cruz took the stage at Liberty University to announce that he’s running for president as the One True Conservative, it suddenly occurred to me that he actually has a chance to pull it off. The smart money dismisses the idea,…
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Windfall Wind turbine maker Vestas held a job fair last week in Windsor, Colorado, in the gas patch just north of Greeley. The Danish company was looking to hire 300 permanent positions — or roughly 10 times the amount of permanent jobs the…
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Minimum wage comes to the Capitol   Advocates for raising the minimum wage to at least $12.50 an hour rallied on the Capitol steps today in support of two bills facing an uphill climb in the Republican-controlled Senate. According to the…
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While Colorado mourned the 2014 centennial of the Ludlow Massacre with earnest theatrical reenactments, filmmaker Kirk Loudon was busy cooking up his own morbid take on the event: Diggerz: Black Lung Rises. The movie reinvents the Ludlow…
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DENVER — Governor John Hickenlooper has recently made a strong case for the need to raise Colorado’s bottom-of-the-barrel vaccination rates, but he has fallen short of outlining a specific plan to make it more difficult to obtain…
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Shop Watch “In Colorado, about 420 people die by suicide each year using a gun,” writes Amy Hamilton, in The Daily Sentinel. Her story chronicles the efforts of The Western Colorado Suicide Prevention Network to educate gun shop owners…
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