Opinion

As the Constitutional Convention wrapped up in September 1786, a woman approached Benjamin Franklin and asked him, “Well, doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?”

“A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”

In many ways, the closest thing we have to a city council in Evergreen is the board of the Evergreen Park and Recreation District. While there are other special districts with elected boards here, the combination of EPRD’s mission and the facilities it manages gives it a much more overreaching presence than other districts.

With precinct caucuses now in the books, the 2010 election season is officially under way. Caucuses are an important first step in the nominating process, through which each major party selects its nominees for the general election this fall. 

With the exception of presidential nominations, there isn’t much public attention given to the way parties pick their candidates. It’s as though each November we’re presented with a ballot listing a Democrat, a Republican and perhaps one or more third-party candidates, with the winner assuming public office.

Dominick Paoloni will be giving President Obama a bit more time to actualize his campaign promises. He’s disappointed about what hasn’t been delivered yet — the public option, a return of civil liberties repressed during the Bush regime, and troops out of Iraq. With his expertise in finances, this Lookout Mountain resident is thinking (and that’s refreshing) about why Obama has moved so far to the right of moderate.

The great New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell has an unfailing ability to find interesting things to write about. In his recent collection of essays titled “What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures,” he explains what makes some topics so interesting. “Curiosity about the interior life of other people’s day-to-day work is one of the most fundamental of human impulses,” he writes.

We are relational beings, and we’re interested in how others live their lives.

Last week’s shootings at Deer Creek Middle School were an awful reminder of the events at Columbine and Platte Canyon. Yet in the midst of our concern for the two wounded students, there was also cause to celebrate the heroic actions of Dr. David Benke, a math teacher whose split-second decision to tackle the shooter undoubtedly saved lives.

A recent story on National Public Radio suggested that people who find themselves with mortgage balances that are more than their homes are worth would be smart to stop making payments, have their homes foreclosed upon and then go buy another house in the same neighborhood based on the newly diminished housing values. They even found a contracts lawyer to say the reason there are default provisions in contracts is because defaulting on contracts is a rational option that is available to anyone who enters into any contract.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision allowing more corporate spending on elections has generated a great deal of attention. 

In Congress, politicians (who fill their own coffers with corporate dollars) feign indignation: They are shocked — shocked! — that tainted money is influencing elections. To fix it, they propose a set of “reforms” to clean up campaign spending once and for all.

When I first met former Colorado attorney general Duane Woodard in 1981, he was a member of the Public Utilities Commission. He and the other two commissioners were charged with evaluating requests from utilities to raise their rates. A variety of businesses, governments and residential consumers that needed utility services would routinely challenge the rate hikes. The PUC needed to determine that utilities received a fair rate of return while ensuring that consumers got fair rates.