20,000? A well-kept secret!

Chris Perez reports in the New York Post,

Colorado residents will soon be able to choose “Gender X” on their driver’s licenses if they do not identify as male or female.

“This is an important step,” said Michael Hartman, executive director of the state’s Department of Revenue.

“People are people no matter their sex identification,” he told The Denver Post.

The change will reportedly go into effect on Nov. 30. It stems from two different court decisions, in which Coloradans were found in favor of switching the sex on their licenses.

...More than 20,000 people in the Centennial State identify as transgender, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Read more here.

Who did the counting?

Colorado by drone!

Colorado 2016 from DAVID on Vimeo.

hat tip Curt Dale

Scalia, Gorsuch, Colorado! What's not to like?

Trump in Colorado today

3 p.m in Pueblo and 6 p.m. in Loveland. Staying far away from Denver. Are you going?

Read more here.

Blue sky

This is more like the Colorado mornings I enjoyed for over 40 years. Blue sky, with just a hint that white clouds might be coming later in the day.


In New Mexico if you are not careful, the clouds will come right down to grab you, even at a football game.

A purple state

Robert Knight writes in the Washington Times about a purple state.

Colorado’s pot o’ pot money is growing. In July, it netted nearly $17 million in combined marijuana taxes, up from nearly $11 million in July 2015 — a 55 percent increase. It’s almost enough to make you forget the impact on impressionable youth.

According to the 2009 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, one in 10 “A” students had smoked pot in the past month, versus 19 percent of “B”s, 30 percent of “C”s, and 48 percent of “D”s. That was before Colorado joined Alaska, Oregon and Washington State, plus the District of Columbia, in legalizing it.

Not to worry. In a November 2015 referendum, Coloradans voted to use $40 million of the pot for school construction, with $2.5 million more for drug education, which is supposed to undo some of the damage to the kids.

Driving around north-central Colorado, we saw no political bumper stickers, but a few Gadsden flags prominently displayed. The local paper in Steamboat Springs runs columns by liberals and conservatives. We got the feeling that outside the Denver area, the state was mostly conservative, and in some cases, aggressively so.

Read more here.

"The number 1 problem in schools right now"

Eric Owens writes at The Daily Caller,

Public school teachers and officials in Colorado say they are immensely concerned that large numbers of students are using lots of marijuana now that the drug is legal across the state.

The growing problem of dazed and confused students was a widely discussed issue among the 350 or so school officials, teachers and law enforcement officials who gathered at a Safe Schools Summit conference this week in Thornton, Colo., The Denver Post reports.

The Colorado School Safety Resource Center, the conference sponsor, specifically scheduled a panel on how marijuana legalization is affecting schools because many attendees had specifically requested it.

“It’s the No. 1 problem in schools right now,” Lynn Riemer, president of ACT on Drugs, told the Post.

...“It’s like they’re disguising alcohol as Kool-Aid and marketing it to kids,” Jeff Whitmore, a school transportation official in southwestern Colorado, told the newspaper. “These edibles are cookies and gummy bears, and they’re filled with high amounts of THC.”

Whitmore also suggested that some parents are to blame for the spike in student pot usage.

“Kids see their parents smoking it and see it marketed everywhere, and they think it’s normal and OK for them to do,” he told the Post.

Read more here.

Beauty

What a blessing it is to live in such a beautiful state. Parker, Colorado got about four inches of snow last night. It is the Spring variety, in which the snow will melt by early afternoon, if not sooner. The sky is bright blue, and the snow thickly covers every branch of every tree. So what am I doing staring at this computer?

Colorado's Olympic champion teenagers

Photo by New York Times photographer Doug Mills

There is something about Colorado teenagers and the Olympics. The star of the 2012 Olympics was high schooler Missy Franklin, who won four gold medals and a bronze in London's pool. The star of this year's Olympics is 18-year-old Mikaela Shiffrin, who won the slalom, the most technical ski race, "slam dancing" down the mountain through tight gates. Congratulations, Mikaela!