By Martha Quillen I used to be a news junkie, but even I find modern politicking exhausting and somewhat pointless. I once harbored the idea that our elected officials represented the people’s mandate, but today there are seldom mandates. Now, elections are often ridiculously close, probably because Americans usually elect partisan players who deliver partisan …
By Martha Quillen
If you look at the big picture, the United States is doing very well. Per capita income is up, and murder rates, war deaths, and unemployment are down. But Americans are increasingly unhappy. The World Happiness Report (an independent project published annually by the U.N.) indicates the U.S. dropped from 14th place in 2017 to 18th in 2018.
By Daniel Smith
After months of politics and campaigning, the decisions finally fall to the voters in the Fifth Congressional District in the Primary Election.
June 26 is the date the electorate gets its say after what arguably has been a unique election cycle this time around. And, for a first time, unaffiliated voters can participate in either political party’s choices.
By Martha Quillen
For years now, the media and Pew Research reports have indicated Americans are growing increasingly partisan, which is generally characterized as a bad thing, and has been credited with spurring extremism, gridlock, Congressional ineffectiveness and politically motivated violence. But what shocks me in recent years is not the national news; it’s how much vitriol is making its way into our local newspaper.
By Mike Rosso
Wow, another year has come and gone and we are now staring down the barrel of the late Twenty-teens.
By Forrest Whitman
There was a lot of hopeful passenger train talk on my recent trip from Denver to Seattle on AMTRAK. On the first leg of that trip, the California Zephyr carried over 800 passengers. The train up the coast from Sacramento to Seattle looked full too. No one in either train’s lounge car doubted the popularity of passenger rail.
By Martha Quillen
What a coincidence; the theme of this month’s magazine is music, and I’d been planning on writing about harmony for more than a year now. Of course, I hadn’t planned on writing about our local music scene, because I don’t know anything about it.
But I’d been reading about some of the ways various economists, psychologists, historians and journalists think we can address our political problems without undue discord. And I’d intended to share some of their ideas once the election was over. At this point, it seems as if the hubbub over the 2016 election may never subside.
This is clearly not a good time for harmonizing. In recent years, our world has been transformed by a seemingly limitless flow of information which provides enough material for people to compose whatever reality they want, and Americans clearly aren’t choosing the same one.
In previous Centrals, I devoted considerable space to fretting about people’s increasing tendency to embrace highly partisan, diametrically opposed views regarding news, issues, facts and even truth itself. A lot of critics blame social media for that trend, because users tend to form like-minded communities, but I’m not so sure about that.
I figure journalists, networks and websites are just as responsible, since they often rely on gossip, sensationalism and controversy to build their audience. And political campaigners certainly play a role, because they tend to get derailed by financing, and who’s with them and who’s not, and what’s wrong with their opponents.
And the tendency of public officials to focus on their own agenda – rather than on workable solutions for the voters – encourages gridlock, stasis, lies, corruption and anger.
So is our process oriented toward picking leaders? Or fights?
By Martha Quillen
Surprise! The November 8 election delivered a shocker, not just to Democrats, but probably even to Donald Trump himself. From the beginning of the 2016 season, Trump was the candidate whom reporters noticed. Even when Hillary Clinton was deemed the presumptive winner, Trump was the media star. Pundits and pollsters kept saying Trump’s chances were almost nil, but Trump won.
Afterward protesters marched in the streets. Then some citizens urged Electoral College participants to overturn his victory, and I was astounded. What would happen if they actually succeeded? Riots? Shootings? Pandemonium?
The answer is obvious, because subverting and repressing other people’s rights, opinions and votes is nothing new. Districts are gerrymandered. Polling places get shut down. Complainants are shunned, booed and heckled at public meetings. Drifters, minorities and street people are harassed because they look different. And America’s poor, homeless and unemployed frequently get disparaged by national and local governments and citizens alike.
Violence is common in our society. So I suspect our first priority today should not be to attack our opponents or ignore their concerns. We’ve been doing that for decades, and it has clearly made things worse.
Our current level of distrust is alarming. This season, I’ve heard perfectly sane citizens say there’s undeniable proof that the Clintons killed Vince Foster and that Foster wasn’t their only victim. I’ve heard all about how Hillary Clinton planned to put gun owners in concentration camps, and how Trump was going to round up and torture immigrants and Muslims. And I’ve heard about how both Clinton and Trump planned to plunder the public monies.
And since the election? I’ve heard tales about Chicano kids who have been so traumatized by Trump’s victory that schools have sent them home to assure them that their parents hadn’t already been deported. I’ve likewise heard stories about Islamic children who can’t be lured out of their homes.
By Mike Rosso
So, that went well…
I’ve voted in every presidential election since Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976 and have never witnessed anything like this year’s.
By Martha Quillen
Most people think they know the difference between little white lies and huge deceptions; and simple, ordinary facts and profound truths. But do they? Psychologists warn that when verifiable facts collide with our cherished beliefs we tend to disregard the facts. But most of us assume questionable perceptions only sway other people, not us.
And it’s obvious that people judge their rivals and opponents more harshly than they judge themselves and their friends and allies. Rudolph Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump prove that point. Their disgust with Bill Clinton’s indiscretions and Hillary’s enabling is almost comically hypocritical. But does that make it wrong?
In a column posted on Wired.com, Issie Lapowsky called Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg “one of the most skilled politicians of our times.” That observation came after conservatives accused Facebook staffers of suppressing conservative content in its Trending Topics feature. In response, Zuckerberg invited more than a dozen prominent conservatives to a meeting in the Silicon Valley, and the attendees (who included Glenn Beck of talk radio fame and Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of the Tea Party) came away satisfied and appreciative.
By Martha Quillen
I’ve always thought of Salida as a sweet, old-fashioned sort of place with picturesque houses, tree-lined streets and a bandstand in the park. To me it seems a lot like River City, the fictionalized Iowa town in The Music Man.
By Martha Quillen
It’s hard to know whether the most serious problem facing our world today is rising temperatures or rising tempers, but perhaps they’re related. Maybe tempers are rising because modern life confronts people with so much that seems out of their control, such as climate change, war, terrorism, escalating costs and changing technology.
What prompted you to begin writing poetry? A mother thwarted in her dream of becoming a surgeon because, although she got accepted into an accelerated high school program in San Francisco in the ‘30s, her alcoholic father beat her if he found her reading or doing homework at home. Running away at 16, she met …
by Martha Quillen I’m really concerned about American politics. Our public discourse has been divisive and immoderate for decades, but the citizenry never seemed as burned out, fed up and over it as some of my friends and acquaintances do now. People tell me that our political process is broken and bankrupt, that it’s been …
by Martha Quillen Republicans and Democrats seldom agree on anything, and Congress is determinedly divisive. But what about us? Do we still agree on America’s founding principles? Do we still believe in the proposition that all men are created equal? And that people have certain inalienable rights, among them Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of …
by Mike Rosso
What began in the 1970s as a review and evaluation for wilderness designation has become a jumble of information and falsehoods – involving politicians, off-highway vehicle enthusiasts, wilderness proponents and the National Rifle Association.
If designated, the proposed Browns Canyon Wilderness Area in central Chaffee County would be one of the lowest elevation wilderness areas in Colorado and one of the few actual wilderness areas combining both U.S. Forest Service (USFS) as well Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land.
I had already penned a piece to go in this spot, even going as far as dropping it in the layout, when Martha Quillen’s column came across my desk.
About halfway through it I realized she was voicing many of the same thoughts I had written except with a bit less cynicism. You see, what had prompted my unpublished tirade was a bumper sticker I had seen that day. It was stuck on an oversized SUV driven by an aging woman in downtown Salida equating liberals with laziness and unhappiness. Although I prefer not to be pigeonholed into all-too-convenient liberal/conservative tags, I certainly cannot side with a group of paranoid, angry folks who consider people like Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck their spokespersons.
By Kenneth Jessen
They had committed no crime, yet 110,000 of them were forced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to leave their West Coast homes and move to concentration camps scattered throughout the West, including Colorado. There they would remain, held behind barbed wire, treated like criminals, and guarded by military police. They were singled out because of their physical characteristics, as well as their ancestry with America’s new enemy, the Japanese. One of the smallest of these camps was located in southeastern Colorado, officially called the Granada Relocation Center and locally known as Camp Amache.
Column by George Sibley
Politics – January 2009 – Colorado Central Magazine
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.–Henry Thoreau, Walden
RONALD REAGAN had one thing right when he was elected in 1980: it was “morning in America.”
Essay by Ed Quillen
Politics – December 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
GRANTED, I was reasonably happy with the outcome of this year’s election, at least on the state and national level. On the local level, there hasn’t been much good news lately. We can start with the local economy.
Development of the Climax Mine above Leadville is pretty much on hold, and one of Salida’s better employers, BBI International, announced it was closing its office here and laying off 25 to 30 full-time employees.
Letter from Slim Wolfe
Politics – December 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
The letter I wrote for November’s issue was apparently stolen by trolls, but I refer readers to Alexander Cockburn’s essay in the November 10 Nation magazine (“Against Obama, www.thenation.com). I shared little of the jubilation of the crowd at Hattie’s as the election results came in.
Brief by Allen Best
Politics – December 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
During the presidential campaign this year, supporters of Barack Obama strenuously objected to letters, e-mails and other campaign materials that included his middle name, Hussein. Their argument was that using his middle name was a sly attempt to link him in the public mind with Saddam Hussein, the late dictator of Iraq.
Brief by Central Staff
Politics – December 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Back on Oct. 15, the New York Times ran a story about how race was or wasn’t a factor in the presidential election in Chaffee and Lake counties, which are almost entirely white.
Among those quoted was Leadville Mayor Bud Elliott, who “said he thought Mr. Obama would win there because of the historic alliance of the mining unions and the Democratic Party. But Mr. Elliott also expects a gap, with Mr. Obama winning by a smaller margin than other Democrats, because of race-based defections.”
Essay by Ed Quillen
Politics – November 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
BY THE TIME this arrives in your mail, early voting will have already started in Colorado. I’ll likely take advantage of it, given the length of this year’s ballot and thus the likelihood of long lines at the polling place.
Brief by Central Staff
Politics – November 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Colorado is under a lot of scrutiny in this presidential election year, since it’s deemed a vital swing state that could go for McCain or Obama.
That’s a novelty, since the Centennial State is reliably Republican. Only three times in the past 60 years has a Democrat carried Colorado: Harry Truman in 1948, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Bill Clinton in 1992.
Brief by Central Staff
Politics – November 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Public meetings in Central Colorado can get rather lively, but we haven’t heard of anything recently that would match a town meeting in Eads, which sits out on the plains east of Pueblo.
Essay by Martha Quillen
Politics – October 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
WHAT TRAITS make a candidate viable? What does it take to be a contender?
Having been the opposite of an outgoing, trailblazing, student-body-president type all my life, I never gave much thought to running for office. But now that Sarah Palin’s on the scene, I’m beginning to reconsider my attributes.
Letter from Slim Wolfe
Politics – October 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
It must be terribly limiting to be a candidate for high office. You’ve got to stick to the same old litany of: I’m for change, the other guys are gonna ruin us, and on and on. You never get to talk about cargo pants, dormer windows, Cadillac tailfins, or all the other little things which add up to wasteful spending of the earth’s resources.
Brief by Allen Best
Politics – October 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Several of the ski-anchored counties of Colorado’s Western Slope are threatening to bolt from Club 20, the regional public interest lobbying group. The flashpoint for the dissatisfaction is the increasing domination of the group by the booming oil-and-gas industry.
Brief by Allen Best
Politics – October 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
With candidates for mayor in ski towns spending $30,000 and more to get elected, as was the case in Aspen last year, is it surprising that state legislature candidates are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In the state house district that includes Summit, Eagle and Lake counties, Republican candidate Ali Hasan has already spent $191,000, nearly all of it his own money. His opponent, Christine Scanlan, a Democrat, has raised only $31,000, and spent only a third of it.
Brief by Allen Best
Politics – October 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
The New Yorker in a recent article examined the politics of Colorado. The article argued that if Barack Obama hopes to win the West, he needs to understand how Democrats came to control Colorado. The ski towns were mentioned as what political operatives called a “blue strip.”
For most of the last 60 years, Republicans have controlled the Rocky Mountain West. They still do in those areas where ranching prevails.
Column by George Sibley
Politics – September 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
IT WAS AN INTERESTING WEEKEND. I spent most of Saturday doing “community stuff,” but of the enjoyable sort (no meetings) — helping set up the Library’s Used Book Sale (highgrading a couple of books); then over to the Farmers’ Market to pass out copies of the new Gunnison Valley Journal, a collection of local writings and pictures I’d helped edit; then back to the Book Sale for another foray (found a brand new John LeCarre I hadn’t read); then back to the Farmers’ Market (via the Gunnison Brewery for a liquid lunch and The Bean for liquid dessert) to help dismantle things; then back to the Book Sale to help pack up the unbought books (free by then, and I found a “Cremation of Sam McGee” for the new grandson)….
Letter from Slim Wolfe
Politics – August 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Is health care a right? Or is it just plain ridiculous to debate the topic while the bulk of the nation wallows in a toxic sludge of junk foods and drinks, cigarettes that taste like ether or formaldehyde, carpets and building materials that exude nasty gasses, and sedentary lifestyles? Is there any hope of mental health for a population bombarded by commercials and sleaze TV? Should taxpayers carry the burden of health care while free enterprise is free to foist degeneration on the body public?
Brief by Central Staff
Politics – August 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Even though the major and minor political parties have pretty well agreed on their presidential candidates, and Colorado voters had a say, the official state primary elections are on Aug. 12.
What happened last February were precinct caucuses, where party members gathered to select delegates to the county assemblies, which in turn selected delegates to the state convention, and then in turn, to the national conventions.
Essay by Martha Quillen
Politics – June 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Last month, I received a flattering letter:
Editor
Martha Quillen:
I would like to read a short (12 pages or less) editorial detailing exactly how you as President, or the President You Elected, should have responded to 9/11 & the five years following.
Essay by Ed Quillen
Politics – May 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
FOR A WHILE, I was following the Democratic presidential contest every chance I got, and those chances come frequently when you spend most of the day sitting at a computer with a broadband Internet connection.
Brief by Central Staff
Politics – April 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
We’re all for congressmen staying in touch with their constituents. That’s why they have a “franking privilege,” which allows them to send mail at public expense.
Essay by Martha Quillen
Politics – April 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
PEOPLE WHO HOPE may be audacious. But hope itself is fragile. Or as Shakespeare put it:
This is the state of man: today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honors thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost;
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls….
…
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again.
Letter from Slim Wolfe
Politics – March 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
I enjoyed Lynda LaRocca’s story about woodstove cooking. The intrepid chef can manage stovetop items on most any flat-topped range, potatoes can be steam-baked in a lidded casserole in a half-inch of water, or use a dutch oven. If I had my druthers — for baking — I’d rather use a Canadian farm-kitchen range with a self-stoking gravity-feed wood chamber large enough to handle four or five big chunks of wood, since the typically small fireboxes on the stoves we see around here need frequent attention, especially to keep the oven heat up. Seems a shame that so many stoves were made with that built-in inconvenience.
Brief by Central Staff
Politics – March 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
At least one Central Colorado resident will be attending the Democratic National Convention that runs Aug. 25-28 in Denver.
That resident will doubtless have a voice, if not a vote. Mordecai, a 7-year-old donkey owned by Curtis Imrie of Buena Vista, was selected as the official convention mascot on Jan. 26 at the National Western Stock Show in Denver. The burro was shown by Sophie Herzog of Fairplay.
Essay by Martha Quillen
Politics – February 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
CHANGE IS THE BUZZWORD for the 2008 Presidential campaigns — at least for the moment. But initiating desirable change is harder than the campaigners contend. It’s even harder than Hillary Clinton professes when she insists that is takes hard work and experience (while simultaneously implying that her opponents would contribute neither).
Letter from Slim Wolfe
Politics – February 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Moment of truth: It was the night of the New Hampshire primary and BBC news anchor Dan Damon was on the line to his stringer in Concord: “So Jamey, what were the substantive issues in play?” With all the smoothness of the politicians surrounding him, poor Jamey had to sidestep the question. Americans have learned that we aren’t entitled to debate substantive issues, we just get to place bets on the horse-race called a campaign.
Brief by Central Staff
Politics – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Central Colorado is in the state’s third and fifth congressional districts, but it’s the second district that has caused considerable political shuffling in recent weeks.
The second district basically comprises Boulder, Grand, Gilpin, Eagle, Summit and Clear Creek counties. It has been represented by Democrat Mark Udall of Eldorado Springs (or, as you will doubtless hear often this year, “Boulder liberal Mark Udall” ).
Brief by Central Staff
Politics – July 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Locals rate well in Legislature
Central Colorado appears to be represented pretty well in the Colorado General Assembly, at least if you go by a “report card” issued at the end of the session by Colorado Confidential, an award-winning website that should fascinate any Centennial State political junkie.