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As opposed to a crystal ball, I'm staring into a vacuum tube that is connected to a crystal that vibrates 75 million times each second, and instead of caressing a Ouija board, I've got my stubby fingers on a Qwerty board.
This abandonment of tradition means that these predictions for next year may not be accurate, but whose predictions ever are?
· George W. Bush will be elected president in 2000. He will appoint Sen. Ben Campbell as secretary of the interior to take office in 2001.
Gov. Bill Owens would like to appoint himself to fill out Campbell's senate term, but that would make Joe Rogers governor. They don't get along that well.
So Owens will appoint Rep. Scott McInnis to fill out Campbell's senate term, which will leave the Third District's house seat open.
Either Russell George or Ken Chlouber will be appointed to Congress, depending which one the hard-core Republicans in the legislature most desire to export from Denver.
· Colorado's motorized recreation lobby will continue to perpetrate its successful scam.
Here's how it works. They keep saying We don't need
more regulations on public lands. We just need to enforce
the regulations that are already in place.
Then they support politicians who keep cutting the Forest Service and BLM budgets, so that there's no chance that the existing regulations will be enforced to any effective degree.
It's a great way to say you're for protecting resources while insuring that they don't get protected from your wheels.
· Growth issues will continue to dominate Colorado politics.
Every politician will say that growth should pay its
own way,
but all arrangements that subsidize growth
from public money -- i.e., tax abatements and exemptions,
utility assistance, infrastructure construction,
tax-increment financing, enterprise zones -- will continue
to be kept secret, insofar as possible, from the
taxpayers.
· It will be a close race with Davis, Calif., but Boulder will become the first city in the United States to ban not only indoor and outdoor smoking, but any form of tobacco possession.
City police will be equipped with special
tobacco-sniffing dogs, and those found in possession will
not only be fined, but their property will be seized and
auctioned, with the proceeds going toward the city's
Diversity and Tolerance Education Center.
· And while we're speaking of Boulder, the Ramsey case will not be solved this year. And I'll continue to get confused, perhaps on account of advancing age.
When the kids were home for Christmas, one of them asked
Do you remember when we went to the Ramses exhibit at
the Natural History Museum in Denver?
There's an exhibit about the Ramseys?
I asked.
No, I don't remember any such thing. I know there's a
lot of stuff on the web, but I didn't know there was any
museum exhibit.
Eventually, I figured out that they were talking about a pharaoh, and remembering a venture to civilization that made me swear never to go the Natural History Museum again if there was any chance I might encounter a school field trip.
We went there with our daughters, all on our own. All sorts of officious types assumed that we were parents accompanying our children's field trip, and kept telling us to get with our group and to move along.
I almost went hoarse trying to explain that we were our own group, and that the charm of a museum is that you can stand around and look at things as long as you want to. No sooner had I made this clear to one supervisor than another one would appear.
There may have been mummies and sarcophagi and hieroglyphics and wondrous ornaments of gold -- but all I really remember is getting hurried along by people who had no business telling us anything.
School field trips may be a fine thing, but if you value your sanity, don't ever get caught up one.
Of course, that's advice, not a prediction, but I'll blame an early attack of the Y2K bug for pushing me off course here.
· And if you read this, civilization didn't collapse and the world didn't end with the arrival of 2000.
So far, so good, and a happy new year, decade, century and millennium to you.
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