Speak up for your ability to know what your government is doing. Colorado Dems lose ground on county commissions. Overdrive, Libby, and Tolstoy.

Speak up for your ability to know what your government is doing.

On Monday 12/30 at 11 AM the Executive Committee of the Legislative Council (see the picture heading this post and the link below) will hold a hearing on Colorado Open Meetings Law.

This is a great chance to offer more feedback and speak out against the changes voted in by Democrats in the last legislative session.

Changes which they've already used (see the second link below) to exclude you from what they're doing.

Please join me in offering thoughts on them excluding their actions from public scrutiny by testifying (in person or remote) or sending in an email. The link to sign up for testimony is third below. If you want to send an email, you can find the legislators that make up the committee on the committee page. Just click an individual legislator to find their contact info.

Defend your ability to know what your government is doing by speaking up.

https://leg.colorado.gov/committees/executive-committee-legislative-council/2024-regular-session

https://coloradosun.com/2024/08/23/colorado-special-session-open-meetings-law/

https://www.leg.state.co.us/CLICS/CLICS2024A/commsumm.nsf/signIn.xsp

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Colorado Dems lose ground on county commissions

Rejoice, for as the headline of the Complete article linked below has it, "Colorado Democrats targeted county commissions in November; they ended up losing ground."

I wrote earlier about an effort by Colorado Democrats to move to take local seats, specifically those on county commissions. This meant writing some sizeable checks to local Democrat politicians.

Quoting the article:

"In July the [Democrat] party divvied up a total of $30,000 to local Democrats in Alamosa, Chaffee, Douglas, El Paso, Garfield, Grand, Huerfano, Mesa, Ouray, Park, Pueblo, and Routt counties."

The results are listed county by county in the article below, but the summary is that, well, the effort didn't work.

As a whole, the state may have continued to be blue and liberal in many respects, but when it came to flipping local races to blue, the Democrats didn't.**

Perhaps it's because conservatives (and Independents who have watched in dismay at the direction the politics have moved in Colorado) have been so down for so long that they somehow got the idea that there is something inevitable in the Democrats' hold on power here.

Perhaps it was just me.

Whatever it was, the results of this last election were that the seemingly inexorable march to complete state control at all levels by Democrats was stopped dead in its tracks.

That should give you the same hope it does me. That should also inspire you to get involved or stay involved because there was no magic in this result.

It was ordinary people getting so tired that they finally acted.

**One notable exception was Chafee County which gained one Democrat seat at the expense of an Independent. Probably not a surprise. Mountain (esp wealthy mountain) enclaves are pretty liberal.

https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2024/12/12/colorado-democrats-county-commissions-lost-ground/

Related:

Speaking of local control and acting locally, the Town of Superior recently voted to become a home rule jurisdiction.

More in the link below.

https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/superior-home-rule-colorado-special-election/

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Overdrive, Libby, and Tolstoy.

Got some sad news recently: Overdrive (the program I had used to listen to MP3 audiobooks from the library) is no more.

That time of the week again: it's the last post on a Friday so it's time for something fun, something not related to politics.

I have alluded to listening to audiobooks before. They are (along with music) my companions as I work around the house. Free entertainment as long as you have a library card. I check them out, download to the app on my desktop, copy over to my MP3, and, when done, delete them.

Alas, the last time I went to get a new book, the software I had used was no more. There is still a library page to get audiobooks with your card, but the new version of the software will not allow you to download local copies. It will let you listen online, or on a smartphone, but I don't have a smartphone and carrying around my desktop computer while I do chores is a nonstarter.

After a respectful period of grieving, I started looking for alternatives.

You can sign up for paid services to be able to get local copies of audiobooks, but I'm on a budget. I'd rather not put money into that when I can put it into plants.

So I kept looking and tried to find free version. I found one and thought it worth sharing in case you were similarly situated.

The site is called Librivox and it's linked first below. It's (as opposed to others I found) got a pretty good catalog of audio recordings you can download for free with no ads. The way they make it work is by having volunteer readers reading books that are in the public domain (no longer under copyright).

Tailor your expectations: these aren't exactly first-run fiction read by voice artists. I'm finding that the quality of the readers varies, as well as the selection being the kinds of books you expect to be in the public domain (old and not all of them classics). Still, they're free and you can put them on your little MP3.

I have a feeling that as I go further into their catalog I will find that free means paying with time as I pick out the valuable nuggets from the tons of overburden.

Speaking of valuable nuggets, I have one more recommendation before signing off. I recently listened to the audiobook version of Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Illyich".

This is my first foray into Tolstoy and I have to say I enjoyed it. It's a great book: nice themes, approachable, not a lifetime commitment like I have heard of some of his other works.

And it lets you toss around the name Tolstoy at those upcoming holiday parties. I recommend checking it out in audio or print.

That's it for now. Have a great rest of your Friday and back at it Sunday.

https://librivox.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilyich