Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Local politics -- the gift that keeps on giving

There are two fantastic stories in the local section of today's Denver Post. The first concerns an interesting skirmish that occurred at the Monday night meeting of the Denver Public School Board. If you missed it, the skirmish concerned the board's addressing of several issues that were hot topics during last month's board elections. The lame duck board had planned to deal with these issues and then inaugurate its new members at the end of the meeting.

One of the newly elected members, Andrea Merida, decided she didn't want to wait and sit through a controversial meeting in which she couldn't participate, so she went to a district judge earlier in the day and had herself sworn in early. This prompted lots of anger and tears at the meeting. ColoradoPols derided Merida's move as a shameless power play, although see Steve Balboni for a much different take.

At any rate, the board has now decided to hire a marriage therapist to help it deal with factional strife. I swear to God I am not making this up. If Obama is serious about post-partisanship, he should refuse to sign another bill until Congress sees a therapist.

Oh, the one other story is that a city initiative to form a seven-member commission to study UFOs has now received enough signatures to be placed on next August's ballot. While I plan to vote against it, I'd really love to be on this commission should it pass. I'd like to think of myself as the Dana Scully of the group.

2 comments:

Eric Rubin said...

you are SOOO Dana

Robert said...

Steve Balboni crystallized the thought I had when I read the story about the seating of the new board member, i.e., that the lame duck board was trying to subvert the will of the electorate by passing a slate of reform measures that flew in the face of the election results. As I recall, the story itself said that lame duck boards traditionally only considered "administrative" matters. There was a quote from one of the lame duck members that flipped logic on its head by suggesting that the sweeping reform measures they were voting on were only "administrative."