Thinking Outside the Box

[This is an editoral I submitted March 6, 2017 to local newspapers in time for the Lafayette City Council vote on a Climate Bill of Rights ordinance on the following day.] With the conservative front pressing its agenda across the country, Broomfield's city council hesitating to pass their own fracking moratorium and prevent imminent drilling in its residential neighborhoods, and Colorado's AG suing Boulder Country over its moratorium on fracking, it is high time that the nascent community rights movement raise its head and tell the Colorado judiciary: we are still waiting for our day in court. I am going to tell a story here, a story about how the oil and gas trade representation group, the Colorado Oil and Gas Association, sought, and succeeded, in stopping a potent legal threat to its ability to control Colorado government at all levels; about how justice was not served in a Boulder court, and how the public was fooled into thinking it was; and about some legal slight of...

[An editorial by Paul Danish appeared in the January 19, 2017 issue of the Boulder Weekly, which can be found here . Because his editorial was so biased and one sided, but publicized in Boulder County's most widely read newspapers, I had to pose this response.] Paul Danish, age 74, ex-Dem turned Republican, past Boulder Council member and candidate for County Commissioner, has penned an editorial that ridicules civil disobedience, minimizes the accomplishments of the Standing Rock protest, is in favor of allowing fracking on Boulder Open Space, and favors a bill currently before the North Dakota legislature that would legalize murder of oil and gas protestors by automobile if they get run over on a state highway. Charming. Why the Boulder Weekly allows such an angry, biased, and inaccurate libertarian rant to be published is beyond me. I am only glad to see that they allowed a more balanced news story by Rob Jackson in the same issue about the Lafayette city council meeting w...