Once again, we at Boulder Weekly have spent months talking to candidates and analyzing ballot measures in our effort to provide our readers with the absolute best election guide possible. But it appears that our best efforts missed one very critical piece of election information.
According to Joseph Tecca, a psycho-physiologist from Boston College, all of our hard work has been a waste of time. Tecca’s research has found that the only thing that matters in electoral politics is how often the candidate blinks during a debate. All the other stuff, like say for instance the words that come out of their mouths, is just ear candy.
Tecca’s system of counting eye blinks has picked the winning presidential candidate correctly in every election since 1980, except one … sort of. The exception was George Bush in the year when he actually lost the popular vote, so it might be fair to say that Tecca is actually still perfect in his predictions. It appears that only the Electoral College is more powerful than the blink of an eye.
We should point out that Mitt Romney blinks like a contact wearer staring at the sun in a field full of ragweed at full bloom. We’ll be watching, and counting.
ANOTHER AMENDMENT BITES THE CU DUST
University of Colorado faculty members are pretty freaked out by the idea of students toting around firearms on their campus. Can’t blame them a bit. But we are puzzled by their proposed fix to the problem.
The faculty is counting on state representative Claire Levy, D-Boulder, who has put forward legislation that would allow local authority to supercede the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment which establishes the right of every citizen, no matter how inexperienced, inept, panicked under fire or deranged, so long as they haven’t yet been diagnosed, to carry around a loaded gun.
But doesn’t the university already have that right or at least think it has that right? Isn’t this the same university that already claims it has the right to send out armed S.W.A.T. teams every April 20 to prevent people from exercising the free speech rights granted to them by the U.S Constitution’s First Amendment?
We’re confused. Maybe CU could do all of us in the news media a favor by providing a press release explaining which constitutional rights the campus already has the right to deny to Americans and which ones it intends to eventually deny to everyone. We’d be happy to provide the university with a copy of the Constitution if they can’t find one. We heard Ward Churchill might have stolen the last copy on campus just before he was illegally fired for things he said.
AND THE AWARD FOR HYPOCRISY GOES TO…
Encana’s natural gas processing facilities at Rifle were just awarded one of our state’s top environmental honors. Encana, a Canadian natural gas company with its U.S. headquarters in Denver, won the “State Industrial Energy Efficiency Award” for its efforts to conserve energy and thereby make our state a better, cleaner place to live and raise happy families.
You may also recall that Encana is the gas producer that starred in the Gasland documentary for its purported role in the Pavillion, Wyo. water contamination segment, the Weld County, Colo. light your tap water on fire scene and the Western Slope river of bubbles that can catch fire sequence. And don’t forget Encana’s more recent claim to fame as the company that insists it is perfectly safe to frack gas wells around schools in Erie.
Bottom line, the state of Colorado sucks as bad when it comes to environmental awards as it does at regulating the oil and gas industry that feeds its politician’s campaign coffers.
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