Science is anathema to the far right wing of the GOP

Just when you think those wild and crazy guys and gals who live out in the barren wilderness that is the far right wing of the Republican Party have reached the comedic depths of their zany ideology, they up and outdo themselves yet again. After making fools of themselves with their complete misunderstanding of economics and history, and mangling the King’s English in the process, they now have decided to take on science. When it’s all said and done, all of us will fear ...

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Libel laws apply to bloggers, as well as traditional journalists

A seasoned newspaper editor a couple years ago said most bloggers, at least those who try to deal in news and opinion, are much like high school journalists. They don’t quite yet have a grasp of what they are dealing with, they have no concept yet of the responsibility that comes along with the privilege of writing for a mass audience. Most of them are much more interested in opinion, usually their own, than they are in facts. To that I might add that eventually, if they stay with ...

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Coincidence? Trump hosts debate as giant black hole is discovered

It took seemingly forever, but finally the Republican presidential contest has become at least a little bit interesting. And on top of that there was what some might think an unrelated development last week that could make it even more interesting. More on that later. First the main event. That is the upcoming First Ever Biggest And Best Donald Trump Hosted GOP Presidential Debate. It will feature Donald Trump asking some questions and some candidates answering some questions asked by ...

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Building a forward-looking community in an anti-tax county

A few conversations I’ve been involved in and a few things I’ve read during the past few weeks have me thinking maybe I shouldn’t be too glum about the outcome of School District 51’s TABOR override election last month. I still think the magnitude of the defeat — 3-to-2 — sends a message about Mesa County that I and more than a few others don’t want to send. It’s a message that perhaps education isn’t important, that our priorities ...

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Cupcakes, not compromise, were all super committee could agree upon

So the super committee wasn’t so super after all. As it turned out it was just another much-hyped inside-the-Beltway bunch of pontificators who got all dressed up and said a lot of solemn and important-sounding words at the outset, then, when it was over, congratulated themselves for all their hard work, said they couldn’t agree on anything and went home for Thanksgiving. There had been faint glimmers of hope that these 12 people, entrusted with what we’d been led to ...

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Study provides shocking news about political news coverage

The information in the next few paragraphs will shock most of you. It shocked me when I read it. I suppose I’d fallen victim to believing the message that was the loudest and the one heard most often must be true. In this case that was the one spouted by the right-wing noise machine. At the moment, it does have the biggest bullhorn in America. Ever since the dawn of The Age of Obama, we have been told over and over that the press is in love with Barack, that he gets a pass from the ...

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‘The Hurt Locker’ defining film of defining event

Back when I had to spend a good portion of my week with my nose to the grindstone, a lot of films I wanted to see managed to get in and out of town without me ever seeing them. One of the benefits of retirement for an avid movie-goer is the time to see just about any movie that comes to town. So, afternoons you can often find me in a dark theater. A few weeks ago, a friend said I should be a film critic. I replied I’d be lousy. I tend to like most movies. I go simply to be ...

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Internet is a great tool for gathering information, and nonsense

I love the Internet. It’s an essential part of my day. Every day. I can’t remember what life was like without Google. It makes life more efficient. It makes us smarter faster. At least most of the time. Sometimes, though, it doesn’t serve us well at all. It is, after all, nothing more than whatever we put in it. The old saw “garbage in, garbage out” still applies. A reader a couple of weeks ago spotted some garbage, in the Letters to the Editor section of ...

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Average Americans are frustrated, even if they haven’t joined movement

A few weeks ago, not long before the first protesters took over lower Manhattan and began the Occupy Wall Street movement, I asked out loud to my other half why there was not more unrest on college campuses. It seemed to me that college kids circa 2011 had about as little to look forward to as any class since those of our generation. Back in those days, the job prospects may have been better but first we, at least those of us who were male, had to navigate the treacherous political and ...

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Rep. Frank deserves big share of blame for our economic mess

Writing a column about who was responsible for the Great Recession should be easy. Very easy. Just list the members of Congress, the names of a bunch of high-ranking Treasury Department officials all the way back to the Carter administration and a few top executives of some investment banks who have tony addresses on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and don’t take the subway to work. Column finished. It would more than likely be accurate, but some people are more responsible than ...

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Homage to the iPad, Steve Jobs and the latest, greatest apps

Call this my encomium to Steve Jobs, a couple of weeks late, the confessions of a late-middle-aged techno-geek, some musings of a retiree with too much time on his hands, or simply a slow news week. Nearly two years ago,when I started writing in the space, the first piece I did was about the joys of reading books on a Kindle, the electronic reader pioneered by Amazon. That joy has not waned. In fact, since then, with the acquisition of an iPad and the installation of the Kindle app for the ...

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Guitars, Cadillac salaries and waste in federal government

Earlier this year, game wardens, armed in black like the SWAT team members they were, burst into the plant of the venerated Gibson Guitar Co. in Tennessee. What did they expect? Heavy resistance from guitar neck-wielding moms trying to make ends meet by working the night shift? They seized documents, computers and, what they were really after, evil rosewood and ebony from India, the tonewoods that give Gibsons and other high-end guitars the sound so coveted by guitarists around the ...

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Anonymous comments on websites do nothing to further public discourse

Newspapers have been trying to figure out this whole World Wide Web thing since the dawn of the Digital Age. Way back in the 1990s we were struggling (really) with questions like should we or should we not have a website. What content should we put on it if we do? All of our content or just some of it? Should we post it before we publish it in the dead-tree edition? Wouldn’t that be beating ourselves? Should we charge for it? We got some of it right and some of it not so right. And ...

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Support needed for District 51 ballot measure, even in tough economy

The omnipotent “they” say there’s never a good time to ask for a tax increase. “They” usually know what they’re talking about. And 2011 seems to be about as bad a time as any to ask voters to fork over more money. The economy is in the tank. The naysayers, led by the newly ascendant tea party, are as noisy as ever. Voters are in a generally foul mood, about as happy as crabs around boiling water. And along comes School District 51 and asks us to let ...

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Neither Keynesians nor supply-siders have right prescription

It’s become Republican mantra to say the Obama stimulus failed to create a single job. That’s not true, of course. In fact, when one peels away emotion and ideology and simply looks at the facts, the stimulus created or saved between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs. That number is from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. What the stimulus didn’t do was live up to its hype. It didn’t reduce unemployment to 8 percent, as the administration claimed it would. ...

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Reflecting on the costs and gains of a post-9/11 world

“Put your feet in those two squares, face the wall, hands above your head.” The gulag? No. It was San Diego International Airport. It was last week. I was going through the latest incarnation of post-9/11 airport security, the body scanner. It is either the most efficient, thorough and fastest way of getting people aboard airliners without such things as weapons and bombs, or it’s the government’s latest assault on our civil liberties. I count myself a civil ...

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Grand Junction’s downtown has few rivals in similar-size cities

When visitors come to Grand Junction for the first time and it comes time for some sightseeing, there are Grand Mesa and Colorado National Monument, of course. But chances are that high on that list is also Main Street. I’ll stick my neck out and say there aren’t many communities our size — any size, for that matter — who can say that. I was reminded of that last week when I was in my hometown of Hannibal, Mo. It likes to call itself,  “America’s ...

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President should rein in head of National Labor Relations Board

A $750 million plant in South Carolina, as big as 12 football fields, for the time being won’t turn out a single airplane. At the moment, not a single job will be created by Boeing, the company that built it, and the company that wants to ultimately employ as many as 5,000 highly paid workers at the plant and turn out up to 10 Boeing 787 Dreamliners a month. The federal government this summer filed a suit to stop Boeing from creating those jobs. That’s the same federal ...

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Cable news channels have diminished America’s understanding of politics

So Michelle Bachmann won the Iowa straw poll. That’s a big deal these days. It was on the front pages last Sunday morning of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post, or at least their websites. And of course The Daily Sentinel. I can’t help but wonder if it would have been 30 years ago, before the advent of the 24-hour cable news channel. I don’t think it would have been. I’m not sure it was such a great win. After all, it’s a contest ...

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Some things deserve more attention than Washington political battles

One cannot live by politics alone. The past few weeks we’ve certainly had our share of it. Wall-to-wall coverage of the fine and not-so-fine points of government and politics is the norm when not much is going on. When real news happens, as has been the case recently, there is seemingly no escape. The news is everywhere. It’s on every television channel, in every newspaper and magazine. It’s what everyone is talking about everywhere you go. You can’t get away from ...

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Watching what occurs in Washington is so funny it hurts

There’s only one thing left to do. When it comes time to take a look at what’s going on in Washington, all we can do is laugh. It hurts too much any more if one tries to take it seriously. Really, how could anyone take that bunch of yahoos seriously anyway? Any of them? From the president on down to those 87 mischievous freshmen Republican House members who are wagging the dog, as well as all the puffed-up stuffed shirts in between who can’t keep their troops in ...

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Three cheers are due for a very pleasant July

More than likely you don’t remember July 26, 2005. I didn’t until I started thinking about what to write about for today. Here are a couple of hints. On that date six years ago, Mumbai, India, was pelted with torrential rains. More than 5,000 people died.  The space shuttle Discovery was launched from the Kennedy Space Center that day, ending a two-and-a-half-year hiatus for the American space program after the breakup of the shuttle Columbia on its return to earth in ...

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Tea party postition on debt ceiling and tax increases is irresponsible

And just what is it that Nullifier, Toleration, Proletarian, Progressive, Vegetarian, Communist, Union, Christian, Silver and Tea have in common? They are all political parties that have, or in the case of Tea, will be, consigned to the dust bin of history. They were born of some perceived, or perhaps real, sleight at the hand of the federal government, attracted followings of various sizes with varying degrees of enthusiasm and then died. Many, including the tea party, claimed to channel ...

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Dreamer envisions city funds helping with Avalon and rail depot

This is about dreaming. It’s about what if Grand Junction, Colorado, were a community in which the box was huge and had no boundaries. It’s about a Grand Junction in which the city fathers managed to get voters to sign on to letting them keep all the extra sales tax revenues they collect, something they are at the moment contemplating asking. And instead of using the extra money for something very practical, as they are quite likely to do, they used the money to make the ...

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Great guy films shouldn’t leave you with a hangover

A few weeks ago I saw “The Hangover, Part 2.” About all I can say about it is director Todd Phillips should have stopped at “The Hangover.” The original, with Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis, was the perfect mix of raunchy male juvenile humor. Galifianakis may be the funniest guy in Hollywood at the moment. Phillips got pure chemistry from them in “The Hangover.” “Part 2” was about as funny as … a hangover. Oh well. ...

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Hoping for a sign of change in Colorado National Monument

A couple years ago, I was asked to serve on the board of the Colorado National Monument Association. I agreed. Unfortunately I didn’t do my homework first. That was my mistake and I regret it. Board members for any organization should be in substantial agreement with the broad goals and underlying philosophy of management. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I didn’t share the same values as the National Park Service. I understand the monument is a federal facility ...

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Bermuda residents search for rain in midst of lengthy drought

A native of Bermuda visiting western Colorado and gazing at the roaring Colorado River last week might have scratched his head, wondering why it is that we in the western United States have heated battles over, of all things, water. If anybody should know anything about the scarcity of water, he’d think, it should be him. After all, where he comes from, a tiny archipelago 700 miles off the coast of South Carolina in the Atlantic Ocean, the only naturally occurring fresh water is that ...

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Former Fannie Mae chief used tax funds to protect cash cow

By now we all know what The Great Economic Collapse of 2008 meant to us. Maybe you’re one of the hundreds of thousands who lost your home. Or saw your life savings shrivel to little or nothing. Or had to put off retirement for a few more years, or forever. Or maybe your kids didn’t get to go to the college they wanted, or get to go at all. Or maybe you lost your job. The consequences of the perfect economic storm of 2008 were swift and they were severe. It produced a familiar ...

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Fox News is anything but fair and balanced

A few years ago, back when the tea party thought it was relevant, Fox News came under fire for drumming up support for tea party rallies. At any reputable news organization, and particularly those that are so despised by the television and radio shouters, commonly known as the mainstream media, such behavior would have led to one place and one place only: The unemployment line. That’s exactly what should happen to any news man or woman who blatantly takes up a political cause. But ...

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The state’s TABOR Amendment has served Colorado well

A bipartisan, but mostly Democratic, group of Coloradans has filed a federal lawsuit that claims the Colorado Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, more commonly known as TABOR, is unconstitutional. I’m no legal scholar and am perfectly willing to let the lawsuit work its way through the courts, but the legal theory behind the suit is creative, to say the least, and my non-legal mind says it will stand little chance of winning. Frankly, that’s a good thing. TABOR was passed nearly ...

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Flooding Colorado is not the mighty Mississippi

When you come of age on the banks of the Mississippi River, the word “flood” is fraught with more meaning than it is if you grow up in, say, western Colorado. Not that the high water we’re about to face is not serious. It is. But there’s high water, then there is the flooding Mississippi River. They are not the same. When I hear the word “flood,” the first thing I think of is 1965. That was the year of The Great Flood. It was before The Really Great ...

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A roadtripper’s view of the news

I was on the road last week, a solo road trip around the American Southwest. It started at the Grand Canyon, a beautiful place, but after 24 hours, it becomes very … analog. The itch to keep moving must be scratched. It is, after all, a road trip. There’s no place less analog than Las Vegas. So here I am, ensconced on a high floor overlooking The Strip as I write this. Natural and man-made wonders both have their charms. Once this column is finished it’s off to Moab to ...

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Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden are truly heroes

I’ve thought for some time the world “hero” has been much overused since 9/11. There have been American heroes since then, but not every soldier who went off to fight the War on Terror was one. Most, in fact, were simply patriotic Americans serving their country quite capably. We owe them a debt of gratitude, but not necessarily hero status. But some truly were heroes. And one, a member of Navy SEAL Team Six, whose name we’re not likely to ever know, ranks above the ...

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One indication why cutting the budget strikes sour note

All that jazz. That, and tens of thousands of other tiny federal programs is, if not the only thing, certainly one of the main things that stands between us and the elimination of red ink in the federal government. Nat Hentoff, the novelist, historian and columnist, is also a titan in the music world, jazz in particular. He probably knows as much about what many consider to be the only truly American art form as just about anyone. He’s a columnist for Jazz Times, and his column this ...

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Birth of first grandchild prompts reflections, sentimentality

The vital statistics first: Beck Anderson Meyer arrived on the planet at 4:18 a.m. March 30, 2011 in Jackson Hole, Wyo. He weighed 7 pounds, 3 ounces and was a tad more than 20 inches long. He is the first child of Liz and Sam Meyer and the first grandchild of Steve and Anne Meyer and Kathy and Denny Herzog. Yes, this is about a grandchild. Not just any, but the first. I did some research before I sat down to write this, looking for some good grandparent quotations. Frankly, everything I ...

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New facilities will house improved police department

If things go according to plan, in a little more than a year Grand Junction’s finest will no longer have to work in a facility that’s not nearly as nice as the jail to which they send the city’s criminals. That’s not much of an exaggeration. And all of us who foot the bills for the city of Grand Junction will no longer have to be embarrassed about the sorry excuse of a building that we call police headquarters. Construction began last week on a new $35 million ...

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Some of us aren’t destined to be kitchen whizzes

It’s been nearly a year and a half since I started this retirement thing. I can’t say there isn’t anything about getting up and going to the office every day that I miss. It was — and still is — a great bunch of people who spend their days (and for many of them, nights) on South Seventh Street. I’ll always miss them. But in November 2009 I turned a page and, as the saying goes, started a new chapter. It was to be a chapter filled with new ...

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Country is coming to its senses after calamity of 2008

It’s been nearly three years since an erstwhile wannabe anarchist and a few friends decided to lay down in front of a limo carrying at-the-time vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin from Walker Field to a rally in Grand Junction. Jacob Richards, the perpetrator of that act of civil disobedience, has since undergone a remarkable makeover, and now does a fair job of passing himself off as a responsible young adult who is engaged in his community and wants nothing more than to be a ...

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Colorado’s legislative ‘management’ bows to state workers

Here’s where I’m coming from, right at the top: Unions are not on my list of most admired institutions. I know there are perfectly defensible points of view on the other side, but I’ve always thought, for all the good organized labor might (or might not) do, it also promotes mediocrity. Unions are a drag on the workers who want to excel. That thought crossed my mind in a couple of conversations I had last week. The first was my annual trip to the accountant’s office ...

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Colorado National Monument is the Yosemite of bicycling world

The local organizing committee for the proposed Quiznos Pro Challenge bicycle race and the regional director of the National Park Service will sit down later this week and try to reach agreement on a race next year that, in part, would cross Colorado National Monument. There is reason for hope that the regional director will overturn the monument superintendent’s denial of the permit for the race. A park service insider told me the director is a reasonable person and he’s ...

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Every community needs a few teachers like John Snell

Teaching must be much like golf. There is always hope. It’s always possible that the next shot will be the 300-yard drive to the middle of the fairway, or the short iron to just inches from the cup. For a teacher there’s always the hope that today is the day when the student finally gets it, the day when all the hours and hours of work pay off.  Maybe today will be the day the student finally writes a well-crafted sentence, or solves the difficult problem. For John Snell ...

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One doesn’t need a reason to embark on travel adventure

A couple of years ago, Kathy and I spent a chilly, rainy afternoon in a spartan cabin on a cliff high above the Pacific Ocean. There was a cheesy gas fireplace for heat, furnishings that looked as if they’d come from yard sales, no television, no wi-fi, no telephone, not even cell service. We played gin and occasionally peered out the window at the Big Sur coastline some 300 feet below us. When the rain would let up, we’d venture outside and peer over the cliff and snap a few ...

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John Otto would have embraced Quiznos Pro Challenge bike race

Sen. Mark Udall and Gov. John Hickenlooper have what might charitably be called full plates. The senator has, among other pressing issues, an out-of-control federal budget to deal with. The governor has to find solutions for a state heading toward insolvency. So it was a shame indeed that last week both of them had to take time from those issues to deal with, of all things, a bicycle race across the Colorado National Monument. But that’s exactly what happens when a federal agency ...

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Washington’s new frugality will make it harder to get Colorado pork

John McCain made getting rid of earmarks a centerpiece of his presidential campaign in 2008. Wasteful government spending as exemplified by expenditures that never had to compete on their merits was mentioned in seemingly every speech he made during the campaign. I never subscribed to the theory that all of our many fiscal problems could be solved by eliminating the $17 billion or so in earmarks that bloat appropriations bills every year. Not that I supported them. I dislike them as much ...

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Weather stories in Colorado and Wyoming get no respect

The bane of every city and metro editor at every newspaper in the country is the slow news day. Or worse, the no news day. They’re those days when politicians aren’t saying stupid things, no great issues are being debated, the criminals are taking the day off, there are no major car crashes and no buildings are burning. It’s those days when city editors face their worst fears: A blank news budget, with a managing editor about to wander over to your desk any minute and ask ...

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Rep. Tipton on track to continue partisan business as usual

A well-read, well-educated friend, lamenting the state of politics in the United States, said recently that he’s fed up. He has no faith in the ability of our elected representatives to solve any of the country’s big issues. The Golden Age of America, as far as he’s concerned, is behind us. No longer will the U.S. of A. be that bright city on the hill, the country that leads the world in the production of ideas that make the world a better place for everyone. No longer ...

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Adopted greyhounds prove to be wonderful, though lazy, pets

Greyhounds can reach speeds of 45 miles per hour. That’s 7.5 mph faster than Secretariat ran the Kentucky Derby. Greyhounds are among the oldest breed of dogs on Earth. Drawings of dogs that resemble modern-day greyhounds have been found in 8,000-year-old Egyptian tombs. A greyhound is mentioned in the Old Testament book of Proverbs. Dog-racing enthusiasts may argue otherwise, but a fair number of dog lovers will also tell you that, racing greyhounds at least, are among the most ...

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Fifteen minutes of fame is not serving our country very well

It’s been 43 years since Andy Warhol famously said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” It was 1968, there were no cable news networks, the word “Internet” wasn’t in the lexicon, nor was “blog” or “blogger.” Maybe Warhol thought the world would be a better place when everyone had a better shot at fame. I don’t know. But given the vitriol, and now violence, that has accompanied the growing ease ...

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Service in Congress should not be a means to become wealthy

To William Allen White’s famed three things no one can do to the satisfaction of anyone else, add this: Fix Congress. There are plenty of ideas out there about how to fix what everyone seems to agree is badly broken. All one needs to do is ask someone. Anyone. Everyone who is breathing knows what should be done. Among the political junkies who peruse the Internet, there is a proposal that might actually work, or at least most of it might. And what’s more, the author, whose ...

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Palmer leads City Council toward more enlightened e-mail policy

When a neighborhood activist on Orchard Mesa asked to see digital correspondence between Grand Junction City Council members about a proposed gravel pit in her neighborhood a few weeks ago, she was told she could expect to fork over some $1,300. That was what the city estimated it would cost, based on a $50-per-hour search fee. As it turned out, the bill was only about $400. I thought then and think now the city should have given her the documents for nothing. But $400 is a lot more ...

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