Sunset outside Weirdcliffe. Photo: Hal Walter | Hardscrabble Times
Judas Priest. More fires. Not in the immediate vicinity this time, but we’re sure as shit getting the smoke.
This is worse than anything the Black Forest fire threw at us (well, down here by Chez Dog, anyway). The Gazette says this cloud is either from a fire near Wolf Creek Pass or another going on in Jefferson County. Others are burning in Huerfano County near the Spanish Peaks, Cañon City, up by Rangely … gonna be a long, hot summer, folks.
The prevailing wisdom at the moment is that these are lightning-caused. So I’d like to know whether the NSA has been monitoring God’s communications, and when we can expect an arrest.
We used to train up there in the Nineties, when I was still racing, and from the sound of it the fire may have started near Black Forest Regional Park, where Team Mad Dog Media-Dogs At Large Velo promoted a cyclo-cross or two back in the day. Plenty of fuel up there, and with the humidity in single digits and the wind in double digits, you have a recipe for some very bad news indeed.
Herself and I saw a couple of Fort Carson CH-47 Shithooks whock-whock-whocking overhead toward the Forest this afternoon, but we didn’t see any buckets dangling. The Blue Zoomies are pitching in, too.
And this is only one of the fires going on at the moment. Others are at the Royal Gorge, La Veta, Douglas County and Rocky Mountain National Park. The Denver Post is also live-blogging the blazes — using actual live-blogging software, too, unlike our local cage-liner, which seems to be doing it the hard (and cheap) way while expecting the customers to keep refreshing the page. Spend some money, peckerwoods. Phil Anschutz has it to burn, you should pardon the expression.
Anyway, we’re just fine here, but sounds like plenty of folks aren’t. More as we hear it.
We’re all about the sweetness and light here at Mad Blog Media, as you know. In that spirit, it being Memorial Day, we present “Other than Honorable,” a special report from Dave Philipps and photographer Michael Ciaglo of The Gazette.
I’d not read the series until I heard a report on it from Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! But I have now, and you should, too.
The good news is, gas is cheap for anyone who wants to leave town in search of greener pastures.
The local unemployment rate has been at or above 8.9 percent for three and a half years, and would be more like 12 percent had not some 4,000 Bibleburgers given up looking for work altogether, according to the Gazette.
Interestingly, local number-cruncher Tom Binnings of Summit Economics LLC estimates that 24 percent of Bibleburgers are self-employed, “making money where they can and finding a way to survive, but not much more.”
That number seemed steep at first, until I started thinking about most of the local folks I know. A couple are educators, one has a gummint job, and a few are private-sector employees, but a substantial percentage of the others is self-employed: artist, screen printer, construction contractor, bike-shop owner.
We’re not all struggling to survive, but I’m certain we’d all like to be doing better. Thing is, how do we get there? Ranching the view doesn’t put beans in your burrito, blowing shit up seems likely to go out of fashion if DeeCee ever gets serious about reining in spending, and cheap gas isn’t much of a solace if you have nowhere to go.
That “Colorado company” just happens to be owned by Forbes 400 stalwart Philip Anschutz.
Our “local” daily newspaper just got sold for the second time this year. The lucky suitor this time around was Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz, who has a variety of interests, from Industrial Christianity to oil-and-gas exploration to bicycle racing.
His Anschutz Entertainment Group owns, among other things, the Tour of California, which last year concluded in spectacularly uninteresting fashion at L.A. Live, AEG’s HQ in Los Angeles, on the same day as the NHL Western Conference finals between the Phoenix Coyotes and the L.A. Kings at the Staples Center (the latter two being AEG properties) and game four of the NBA Western Conference semis between the Clippers and San Antonio Spurs (also at the Staples Center).
AEG, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Anschutz Company — which has its corporate fingers in everything from agriculture and real estate to the gathering, blending, transportation and storage of crude oil — has been for sale since mid-September.
Forbes estimates its annual operating income to be “in excess of $300 million,” so whoever wants to spring for AEG will need to write a bigger check than Anschutz did for the Gazette (the terms of the deal were not disclosed). The Wall Street Journal expects the price to be “several billion dollars,” according to the Denver Business Journal. Forbes guesses it to be in the range of $8 billion to $10 billion. Among the players said to be interested are Oracle’s Larry Ellison and that fabled private-equity powerhouse Bain Capital, according to Forbes.
And mind you, AEG is just one of Anschutz’s cookie jars. The 72-year-old has a net worth of $7.6 billion and sits 44th on the 2012 Forbes 400. He’s No. 133 on the magazine’s billionaires list.
So why does a player like this want to add a struggling newspaper in a smallish metro area to his Clarity Media Group? To have something to read while he’s hanging around the Broadmoor, which he bought last year? Beats the shit out of me. All the stories I’ve read are overflowing with the usual marketing gibberish — expanding product and market reach, creating a new level of excellence, having a passion for the paper and its community — but the “why” of the deal remains unanswered.
Speaking with the Denver Business Journal, former Gazette vice president and editor Jeff Thomas — who was laid off a year ago — said Anschutz “is making a bet that’s largely been decided to no longer pay off.”
“There’s no question readers will like a paper that’s fatter, and better and has more coverage,” he continued. “But that’s not the question to ask. Will they pay … and will advertisers pay to advertise in a paper that’s fatter, better and has more coverage?”
Indeed. And how much of that coverage will be devoted to the issue of oil-and-gas exploration via hydraulic fracturing — a.k.a., “fracking” — in a town whose city council just voted to approve a set of rules that would allow energy companies to drill for oil and gas within the city limits — a dubious practice wholeheartedly endorsed by the Gazette‘s editorial board?
I think I’ll stick with our locally owned paper for now. The Gazette is still in the hands of out-of-town right-wingers, and the only significant difference I see at the moment is that we don’t know what this new lot is up to yet.
Mad Blog Media 