Michael Conniff
Michael Conniff purports to be a third-generation newspaperman, the son of a Pulitzer Prize winner, the first person ever hired fulltime in new media at NBC, the first writing instructor at Harvard ever to use word processing as a teaching tool, a Breadloaf Scholar in fiction, a ballboy for the world champion New York Jets in 1969-1970, the host of "Con Games" on KNFO 106.1, the editor-at-large at Aspen Peak, and the guy's guy behind Post Time Media Inc. and Aspen Post, Snowmass Post, Skiing Post, and Fractional Post.
In typical fashion, an inexperienced reporter at the Aspen Daily News called me up twice in the last two days to let me know I was in “hot water”—that’s a direct quote—for the investigative reporting undertaken by Post Time News for the new nonprofit, Factual Aspen Investigative Reporting (FAIR).
As this story unfolds, you need to understand a couple of things about the reporter in question—Curtis Wackerle, part of the hack Wack a’ Sack tag team covering Aspen City Hall with kid gloves. I know for a fact from inside the newsroom that Wackerle, in direct competition at City Hall with Post Time News, is feeling the heat from our coverage.
Let me put it more directly: we’re making him look bad because we’re covering the stories that he and Sack are missing.
Continue Reading November 14th, 2008
In this wacky-tobaccy world of 21st Century politics, if you can’t parboil an idea down to a sound byte then you might as well chug it raw. We the people like our politics plain and simple, like meat and potatoes: Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives, good guys and bad girls—with nothing much in between.
The problem for pols, pundits, and poobahs is that the world doesn’t work that way here on Lifeboat America. A black-and-white world nowadays is vacuous and often insulting, with all nuance lost in the rigidity of pre-sharpened saws and crackpot sound bytes presented like precious family gew-gaws.
And guess what? Voters have noticed: in state after state they’re simply not buying. We’re not talking about Ralph Nader or John Anderson or Ross Perot or even Bob Barr—third-party candidates who now and again arrive on the Presidential stage with a megaphone for disenfranchised citizens and license to scream bloody murder because they just can’t win.
Continue Reading October 22nd, 2008
The fate of the unrepentant synergist is to see the seeds of all things in all other things and that goes double for your friendly neighborhood Con Man. In the spirit of everything telling us something about something else, I give you my trenchant analysis from the trenches—or, how football as we now know it is no different now than our national politics on the cusp of a major realignment.
Let’s go into the huddle and I’ll draw ’er up for you.
Continue Reading October 20th, 2008
Hmmm... let's see.... God-like cycling champeen and testicular cancer survivor Lance Armstrong announces his comeback, wins a bike race in Aspen--and puts in a bid for a house in the West End of Aspen.
Can it be true? Is it possible that our lonely outpost lost in a box canyon in the Rockies is about to get an injection of star power? Could this be the start of something big?
Continue Reading September 11th, 2008
All that would be well and good if the story in any way backed up the twin contentions. Yes, in the story City Attorney John Worcester says it will come to a vote but no other evidence is presented to confirm the story’s premise or to indicate that getting by without a vote is “not likely.” As for those dissatisfied residents, one can eventually find “Aspenite Phyllis Bronson” as the one resident (singular) who remains unconvinced on the record that the museum on the Z-G property may not be a great idea.
Continue Reading September 9th, 2008
The Con Man responds:
The power to intervene in other nations overtly and surreptitiously has also been growing in this environment where the laws don't seem to apply. Under cover of "the war on terror," the Bush-Cheney Administration intervenes wherever they see fit. Before the Church Committe, the Allende assasination in Chile and attempted assasination of Castro were historical examples of the same impulse. You use the example of Iran, but did you know we were in effect supplying weapons through Egypt to Fatah to fight Hamas, even though Hamas was democratically elected?
These interventions in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere have unintended consequences that indicate we should keep out of these internal deliberations. Perhaps the best example is "Charlie Wilson's War." We armed the mujahideen to the teeth to fight the Russians, and in so doing we literally made an obscure character known as Osama bin Ladin into a hero in the Muslim world, and set the stage for the rise of the Taliban.
Continue Reading September 5th, 2008
When it comes to fateful decisions, nothing beats the one by Aspen City Council to “bank” land—to spend $35 million, far more than they had in the bank, for a series of land purchases that culminated in the controversial $18 million-plus that went to pay for the BMC West lumber yard.
If the Council had kept the money in the bank—and not borrowed $8 million or so from the city-owned Wheeler Opera House—then there would have been a margin of error for the Burlingame affordable housing project when things went south. As it was, the City had no safety net when disaster struck. That set me to thinking about whether the City might have missed what was right under theirs noses: some choice land, already owned by the City or within the realm of possibility, that would have filled in the blanks when it came to bankable land.
Continue Reading September 4th, 2008
One of my biggest regrets as a journalist in Aspen is that I knew in 2002 about the cruel and unusual punishment meted out to helpless sled dogs at Krabloonik in Aspen and I did nothing about it. I put it on the list--the list of stories that I would get to when I had a chance. I never got to it, and months went by while the dogs at Krabloonik suffered.
Fortunately, two women walked in off the street one day saying they had been to Krabloonik and I referred them to Thomas Watson, a reporter from England who did a bang-up job on a series of exposes. Krabloonik owner Dan MacEachen stopped shooting unneeded dogs in the head, and some reforms were made. Thomas and his wife Katie even adopted one of the dogs. But now there's evidence that conditions for the dogs are as bad as ever, if not worse, at Krabloonik.
A new group of citizen activists--including Bill Fabrocini, Lisa Consiglio, Leigh Vogel, and Lee Ann Vold--have put together a Web site to stop the abuse of the Krabloonik dogs, and Leigh's pictures are unforgettable. Some of them met Tuesday again with MacEachen, and again promises of reform were made.
Continue Reading September 3rd, 2008
The words I said to myself upon the ascension of Alaskan Governor Sarah Pallin were she’s too good to be true.
Hockey mom. Moose-stew maker. Hunter-fisher. Jogger. Motther. Wife. Governor. Right to lifer. Quintessential conservative.
Did we mention Republican John McCain’s veep candidate has a 17-year-old daughter pregnant out of wedlock and a hubbie with a driving-under-the-influence conviction under his belt?
Continue Reading September 2nd, 2008
The Con Man finds out about auditions for Aspen Community Theatre's production of "Chicago" from director-choreographer Marisa Post, then turns his attention to Barack Obama's acceptance speech.
Click here for the complete "Con Games with Michael Conniff" for Thursday August 28, 2008.
August 29th, 2008
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