Author: The Boulder Daily Camera

Bills being floated in Congress by a handful of Republicans would impose taxes on remittances – money U.S. residents send abroad, usually to relatives – to pay for President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall. The idea is as flawed as Trump’s own ridiculous assertion that Mexico must and will eventually pay for the wall. Mexico…

Control produces confidence. Unchecked, confidence metastasizes into overconfidence and smugness, which opens the door to challengers, which starts the process all over again. This is a succinct history of American business, or what capitalist theoreticians call creative destruction, and, to some extent, American politics as well. It is the risk Colorado’s oil and gas industry…

I’d hoped to find someone who might defend the city’s decision to cut off funding for BOHO’s overnight shelter on May 1. What I found was far worse: there was apparently no “decision” at all. The city’s shelter contract with BOHO simply expired, and wasn’t renewed. There was no substitute shelter available if Tuesday’s rain…

In Donald Trump’s America, the mere act of reporting news unflattering to the president is held up as evidence of bias. Journalists are slandered as “enemies of the people.” Facts that contradict Trump’s version of reality are dismissed as “fake news.” Reporters and their news organizations are “pathetic,” “very dishonest,” “failing,” and even, in one…

One of the more encouraging developments during the early days of the Trump administration has been the pushback from big business on the president’s attempts to repudiate climate science and encourage a return to the dirtiest of our energy sources. Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive officer of General Electric, basically told employees in a blog post…

Another day, another smug victory lap by oil and gas propagandists who know their industry has taken ownership of Colorado state government in its entirety and can show you the receipt in the form of an obedient legislature, docile governor and supine state courts. We are told it is important not to normalize the machinations…

The Justice Department asked 46 U.S. attorneys to resign Friday. Some Democrats squawked when the dismissals were announced. “The independence of the Justice Department is at risk,” huffed Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. The dismissals, though, are routine. U.S. attorneys serve at the president’s pleasure. When the White House changes hands, they’re usually replaced.…

Ben Franklin was a prolific inventor, but he’s become even more so in the 227 years since he died, which is hard to do. Just as droll orphan aphorisms seem to attach by default to Mark Twain or Yogi Berra, orphan inventions are sometimes attributed to Franklin, especially if he ever entertained the general subject,…

The WikiLeaks document dump on the CIA’s hacking division appears to be far more damaging to U.S. spying abroad than threatening to average Americans at home. This is not the outrageous domestic mass surveillance by the National Security Agency revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 and rightly curtailed by President Barack Obama and Congress in…

In 1959, author Allen Drury published “Advise and Consent,” one of the most popular political novels of the time. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was made into a movie starring Henry Fonda. The plot revolved around Senate consideration of a nominee for secretary of state, but the subtext was Drury’s fear of…