Author: Janelle Dam

As colleges and universities get stupider, the University of Colorado keeps getting smarter. Last week, the school’s leaders proposed teaching American values and law to a culture lacking “shared knowledge” of the country’s history and purpose. Visualize mandatory knowledge of the American Constitution. Across the country, universities resemble asylums more than rigorous institutions of academic…

Democrats and Independents have been asking for months, to little or no effect, when traditional Republicans would stand up to the chaos presidency of Donald Trump. As Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria points out elsewhere in these pages, traditional elites have not exactly been a profile in courage. But last week, Mitt Romney, the party’s…

We don’t know what Sean Conway, Mike Grillos and Jordan Jemiola talked about during the nearly 300 phone calls between them in the past year on Conway’s taxpayer-funded cellphone. But we do know this: There are an awful lot of dots that can be connected to conclude Conway sought undue influence through the two members…

Joe Parker walked the Sheely neighborhood in central Fort Collins on July 20, answering questions about the under-construction stadium that loomed just to the north. Barriers and bread were broken that day at a community block party that would have seemed impossible five years ago when Colorado State University decided to build a $220 million…

It is official: Medicaid is gobbling up an important chunk of Colorado’s budget. The Gazette’s editorial board has explained this for years, and our friends at the Denver Post published a story Friday under the headline “Is Medicaid gobbling up Colorado’s budget?” The answer is yes. Reporter John Ingold did a good job of simplifying…

RethinkX, a San Francisco think tank, released a report in May that should cause transportation officials all over the country, including Boulder and Boulder County, to re-examine assumptions and biases that could lead them to make major investments in transport modes and ideas that are about to become obsolete. The report, titled “Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030: The…

Moratoriums and bans are defeated, yet concerns about oil and gas drilling have expanded – due to April’s deadly house explosion in Firestone – from merely clean air to the very lives of those whose homes sit on or near the northern Front Range’s oil and gas fields. But the problems presented by the overlapping…

Health care providers are not being reimbursed in anything like a timely manner since Obamacare’s huge expansion of Medicaid started overwhelming many of the states’ systems for managing the unprecedented growth. Colorado’s Medicaid agency – the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing – says long delays in payments began when the state required providers…

As the Denver Broncos’ two quarterbacks underwhelm in training camp, sports media stars have increased pressure on Executive Vice President John Elway and other team management to sign NFL reject Colin Kaepernick. The Broncos should not, under any level of desperation, sign free agent Kaepernick. If Kaepernick takes the field for the Broncos, fans will…

The fact that an admitted cat killer has supporters speaks to the divisive nature of cats in general. From a purely sociological perspective, cats seem to fall somewhere between vermin and dogs on the sanctity-of-life scale. We freely kill insects, rats and bats – and possibly even squirrels or birds that try to nest in…