In case you missed it | Trading places

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TRADING PLACES

Strange days, indeed. Two Boulder County cities have become like that movie Freaky Friday, where a mom and daughter switch bodies.

Longmont used to be a Republican bastion of rural conservatism, bashing lefty Boulderites at every turn. Boulder used to be a hornet’s nest of liberal activism.

But with Longmont residents’ recent vote to ban fracking, and its city council’s approval of new progressive regulations on oil/gas operations, not to mention its exploding arts scene, affordable housing, and ethnic and economic diversity, this Boulder County L-town has become a model for even the most die-hard leftist rabblerousers in Boulder. Why, at the Nov. 13 county commissioners meeting and the fracking protest that preceded it on the Pearl Street Mall, the word “Longmont” was uttered more times than the word “granola,” which is a first.

Meanwhile, in Boulder, certain city council members have gone all old-school prohibitionist on us, cracking down on alcohol served in the University Hill area and trying to restrict drinking there and on Pearl Street. They’ve also cracked down on 4/20 protest, passed measures to make life harder for the homeless and even flirted with making it illegal to protest without permits issued by the city. The only rights Boulder civic leaders seem to care about these days is the right to an uncluttered Flatiron view.

Maybe someday soon we’ll come full circle, and no one will be able to afford to live in Longmont, and we can all live in surrounding communities and commute into our Longmont jobs. Who could have imagined we’d ever see this?

MITT’S HITS

They only ever liked him because they thought he would win. At least, that’s the suggestion of “Disappearing Romney,” a website dedicated to tracking the Facebook Likes of failed Republican presidential candidate Gov. Mitt Romney. The site combines the odd fascination of a watching a graph update in real time with the evil joy of watching born winner Romney lose. There’s also a not-funny Photoshop of Obama.

The page’s title might be a pretty accurate prophecy: Romney has stated he’s leaving politics after the election. The last time a losing — or, we should say, “losing” — candidate didn’t have a political office to return to was Al Gore, who has remained active in politics. But Gore has turned to vocal advocacy for the environment; we fear to think what Romney’s pet issue would be. (Hedge fund welfare? Investmentism? Yachts’ rights?)

Of course, history tells us there will be diehard Facebook fans. Even John McCain’s Facebook page still has more than 800,000 likes as it admirably maintains the illusion that McCain updates the page or has any understanding what Facebook is.

In the span of writing this, by the way, Romney lost 180 more fans. It’s OK, Mitt. In times of trouble, you find out who your real Facebook friends are.

SCUM OF THE WEEK

Longtime Boulder Weekly readers will remember that nearly 20 years ago we used to pick a “scum of the week” in every issue. Now we aren’t about to resurrect that tradition on a regular basis — let’s just say that sitting in the publisher’s office every week listening to some pissed-off citizen or politician or unscrupulous business owner who had just won the honor scream at us got a little old after a while.

That said, we just can’t pass up the opportunity to pull the old scum award out of mothballs this week and present it to the 17-year-old dickhead who had the incredibly poor taste to put on a Joker mask inside one of the theaters at the Twenty Ninth Street mall on Saturday night during the screening of a horror film.

The idiot, who shall go unnamed only because he is a juvenile, terrified a group of five women at the theater so badly that they fled, believing their lives were in danger. The theater has banned this moron for life and he got off lucky. Just think what could have unfolded if a few moviegoers had been amateur pistol-packers hell-bent on stopping another Aurora.

Congratulations, Joker-masked moron, you are the “scum of the week.”

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com