Columns

On Nov. 1, 2011, municipalities across Colorado will conduct elections. Voters in those cities and towns will be picking mayors and members of their city councils. They will decide on tax questions and other issues concerning how their cities will operate.
And then there is Boulder.

In an oft-quoted line, President Calvin Coolidge famously declared in 1925 that “the chief business of the American people is business.”
Some have accused Coolidge of suggesting here that commerce is the highest moral aspiration of the American people, but he’d be the first to disagree. “We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want much more,” he said in the same speech. “We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization.”

Courier columnist Rob Witwer whet my appetite for a little repartee on politics with his recent comment that the next election cycle needs a leader like Ronald Reagan.
Granola and soy milk spewed all over the breakfast table as I guffawed. Ronald Reagan? Really? Whose American hero is he?
Reagan’s popularity soared when an insane would-be assassin with weak ties to Evergreen gunned him down. Some wish to credit Reagan with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but history favors Mikhail Gorbachev on that one.

The Candid Curmudgeon