When someone's kind of a braggart to the bully... it makes me on edge just because I live that, and I don't think that's a model we want for our kids in this country.

I never ran for student council or class president or any of that stuff. I didn't hang out with those people. It was just a different universe from the one I inhabited.

Even as we continue to carry the banner of civil rights and environmental justice, we've also got to focus on many, many people - for them, life starts with a good job.

And if I lost I would have gone back to 12 weeks of vacation, because I was successful enough that I was spending much more time on non-profit boards and traveling a lot.

When I opened my first brew-pub, I did not include a checkbox on hiring applications that required applicants to disclose criminal convictions. And we were better for it.

What I remember most vividly was the sense of always being a little behind the other kids in class - that sense of I wasn't cut out for class or I wasn't cut out to read.

I think President Trump is trying to distract the country away from the failures he's had - the inability to get a health care bill that both sides could come together on.

If it was really successful, it was a life calling, a career I was excited about doing, so I didn't think the overall risk was anywhere near as high as what the reward was.

We are, by many measures, one of the more diverse cities in the country, growing more diverse all the time, and one of the more harmonious in terms of how we live together.

One of the defining experiences of my life came in the mid-1980s. After working for two years as a geologist in Colorado, I lost my job and my career during that long recession.

Let's face it: the War on Drugs was a disaster. It may be well intentioned... but it sent millions of kids to prison, gave them felonies oftentimes when they had no violent crimes.

Some of the anxiety has been laid to rest. We don't see a spike in adult use. We don't think we see a spike in youth consumption although there are some things that are disconcerting.

As a businessman, I learned something that Donald Trump never figured out: It isn't about how many times you yell, 'You're fired,' but instead, how many times you say, 'You're hired.'

Infrastructure is more than laying new roads and expanding transit: it's running the fiber and deploying new technologies for reliable, affordable Internet in every part of the state.

"One of the best things about marijuana legalization: "I think the black market has been damaged. I think people are willing to pay taxes and to go through pretty rigorous regulation."

Given that, and assuming that we begin to adjust to issues like climate change and the greenhouse effect, Denver's location in the center of the country becomes a tremendous advantage.

I grew up a skinny kid with a funny last name and coke bottle glasses, so I experienced my fair share of bullies. But I learned, with the help of humor and resilience, to never give up.

This is the essence of the American Dream - in the land of opportunity, if you have a good idea, create a solid plan, and work hard, you should be able to reinvent yourself and get ahead.

Now, I've never hosted a reality TV show, but I know the true mark of a successful businessman is not the number of times you say, 'You're fired.' It's the number times you say, 'You're hired.'

Is there some risk every day we walk out our front door? Every time we get in our car? Yeah. Are we materially less safe now than we were 10 years ago? Whatever delta there is, it's very small.

I assume we will have figured out a way to efficiently utilize solar energy and tied that to an efficient way to use nuclear energy in such a way that it doesn't pose a serious environmental issue.

I would argue that's because we had a bunch of smart people running around here. They were coming in and working very hard and many of them had left jobs in which they made significantly more money.

I loved baseball. I was a pitcher. I loved being on the mound because I also loved being at the center of the action, the cat and mouse battle with the batter on every pitch. You had to develop grit.

The policies we pursue to ensure safety and fairness for our citizens need to be applied equally - and people need to feel they are being applied equally - if we are to bring Americans together again.

Since Day 1 of his candidacy, Donald Trump has divided our country and threatened our democracy, attacked the middle class and alienated our allies. Under his administration, real people are being hurt.

There could have been more planning in New Orleans, but you look at all the devastation that happened there - have we gotten to 3,000 deaths yet? For that magnitude of a disaster, that's not all that bad.

Many of the basic lessons of business, such as the critical value of customer service or measuring risk against reward when investing capital, have essential application in government, but not in a vacuum.

One's ability to enter into thousands of lawsuits as a tool for success, or to use bankruptcy to avoid paying your former employees and vendors, have little relevance when trying to create good government.

To achieve the kinds of innovations needed to tackle the climate crisis, government must not shun the private sector, but rather must work closely with industry and our nation's great research universities.

Of everyone else who was running, and there were some very talented people, none of them had anywhere near the experience I had in hiring people, holding them accountable, creating systems for accountability.

On Mother's Day, we take a moment to stop and honor our mothers for all they do. It has been my privilege to know mothers who have turned incredible loss and pain into tremendous advocacy and greater social change.

I think the political reality for the Democratic Party is, you know, there are two sides. There's one side saying that we weren't liberal enough and another side saying we're too liberal. I think they're both right.

Money isn't everything, but the gaps between rich districts and poor districts ultimately mean a workforce that won't be as competitive as it could be, and individual Coloradans won't be as successful as they could be.

In 1999, I found myself the unlikely leader of a community-based effort to protect what was arguably Colorado's most important brand, and one once thought to be untouchable: the 'Mile High' part of Denver's Mile High Stadium.

I would argue that one of the issues which the public should be much more emphatic about with all politicians... is patronage, appointing people to high positions because they supported your campaign or helped you raise money.

No matter how the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, states are making progress in developing strategies to provide more access to quality health care coverage.

When I got inaugurated in 2010, OneRepublic donated their time and played for the inauguration. And my stepfather, who is 86, came out. He usually goes to bed at eight o'clock, but he stayed for the entire concert. It was awesome.

Today we're dealing with metropolitan Shanghai, metropolitan New Delhi or Paris. If we're competing at that level, our diversity, that richness of people coming from so many different backgrounds, is one of our greatest advantages.

While some people simply want to villainize the private sector, the fact is that the private sector drives jobs growth; we need to channel the energy and innovation of employers to generate opportunities for the entire labor market.

I think we're in good shape, but the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is in some small way mitigated by the fact that we now have more people talking about it, thinking about it and working on it, so that we will be more vigilant and ready.

Medicaid is one of the rare times where Democratic governors are saying, "Hey, states' rights." We don't want the federal government coming in and telling us how to do our environmental remediation or how we're going to do our healthcare.

Universal background checks work. You keep the guns out of the hands of dangerous people. That shouldn't be partisan - that should be something we can all agree to, but it became this huge battle and, you know, really, really a challenge.

The Affordable Care Act was passed in large part because of recognition that our nation's health care system is not working. The act is not perfect, but it is a starting point, and we have been using it to improve the health of Coloradans.

Some day, someone will do something wrong and there will be a scandal to report in the paper. When that happens, we will address it honestly and openly and try to deal with it as quickly and as fairly as we can, and keep moving the city forward.

The one thing that I don't think the Obama administration gets anywhere near enough credit for is the high level of administrators. They meet all the time so they can synergize the federal investments. That's the way any corporation would do it.

In the restaurant business, you never want to have enemies, whereas it seems that many politicians judge their success by how high their enemies are and whether they can show that they can hold their ground and give a punch for every punch they take.

"On unanticipated problems: There's been "a dramatic increase in edibles." And "no one had ever worried about dosage sizes. The original edibles that came out, once you took the packaging off there was nothing to show it was any different than candy."

Secure the border; have an ID system that works. Have a guest worker system. And then, finally, hold businesses accountable. Once you do that, most of the chambers of commerce and those who are clamoring around immigration will take a deep breath and relax.

People don't realize that almost two-thirds of the population in the United States lives in a state where either medical or recreational marijuana are now legal. Two-thirds of the country. I am looking at it as kind of a 10th Amendment, states'-rights issue.

The Democratic Party is always going to be the party of civil rights and fairness - everybody gets an equal, fair shot at the American dream. And we're going to be the party that really fights to protect planet Earth - enjoy whatever time we're going to get!

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