Author: Hal Bidlack

Hal Bidlack Elbridge Gerry was an interesting man. Born in 1744, Gerry was an important founding father, albeit one now known for something entirely different. He was strongly anti-British and signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. He might have gone three for three, but he refused to sign the new…

Hal Bidlack There is a term well known in the political world, and that term is “NIMBY,” standing for “not in my back yard.” This term sums up the idea that people may support the concept of something, like, say, low-income housing, as long as it isn’t near them. And few things bring up NIMBY…

Hal Bidlack If you’ve read more than, say, a quarter of one of my essays, you likely know I was part of the Air Force Academy’s Department of Political Science for a number of years (a total of 17 to be precise, 15 as an active duty military officer, and two stuck on at the…

Hal Bidlack Did you miss me? I’m just back from a week away, camping in southern Colorado as part of my local astronomy club’s annual star gazing event. The skies were mostly clear, and the weather cooperated and about 400 people and I’d guess 300 telescopes peered upward. It was a fun week, and now…

Hal Bidlack A while back, during the first Trump administration, I went to lunch with a fellow I knew from our time together as “finger-on-the-button” ICBM launch officers up in Cheyenne. My friend was quite conservative yet had always been a good friend and was a kind and reasonable fellow. We didn’t agree on politics,…

Hal Bidlack For 15 of my 25 years of active duty, I was fortunate to have been assigned to the faculty of the U.S. Air Force Academy here in Colorado Springs. I was hired by the Political Science Department after I completed my first operational tour as a “finger-on-the-button” guy in the ICBM world, stationed…

Hal Bidlack As my regular reader, Jeff, is currently on a cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico (he’s actually in the Caribbean, but I wanted an excuse to say “Gulf of Mexico” a time or two), I’m hoping other readers will recall my ongoing fascination with Colorado Politics great Out West Roundup section. There…

Hal Bidlack If you are above a certain age, perhaps 60 or so, you may recall in your youth the local TV stations’ weather reports each evening were very different from what you see today. If you grew up within a few hundred miles of Detroit, you likely remember the ever-cheerful Sonny Elliot, the long-serving…

Hal Bidlack Long ago, way back to when I was a new second lieutenant and brand new to the Air Force, I showed up at then Vandenberg Air Force Base to start my career and to attend what was called “missile school” for short, a very intense sixteen-week course that took students from zero knowledge…