With all this snow left over from the storm last month still melting and refreezing in curious layers, my walks to work have me navigating through a pleasantly shifting glacial streetscape.
Last week during a stop in at Scharder's convenience store on College, my eyes glanced down at the metal newspaper rack by the counter. The bold headline above the fold rocks me:
"Musgrave votes against student loan legislation."
"Geesh," I think to myself, "things are getting bad for poor old Marilyn. Only two months since the election and the Coloradoan is already laying it on..."
Sure the issue in question was student loans, a topic you'd assume would play strongly in a university town like Fort Collins. But the Coloradoan never used to give a non-wedge issue like that much real play, especially if it embarassed the current office holder. Used to be that outside of campaign season, you could read the front page headlines of the Coloradoan for weeks on end and hardly see the name our Congresswoman. Her votes usually were not considered newsworthy enough to feature in such a prominent fashion.
Poor Marilyn can't catch a break anymore. Not since the election. Sure she won, but all eyes are now following her every move and every vote. That's the way it should be. It's the way it always should have been.
This new scrutiny was probably a large factor in her "decision" to forgo introducing the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The quotation marks are meant to indicate a completely unfounded suspicion on my part that the course of action may actually have been out of her hands. Inside the Republican Party, Congresswoman Musgrave is no doubt considered as radioactive as plutonium. They needed her vote to help operate the "Hate Reactor," but now they are left with only the poisonous waste product.
On the good side, I heartily salute the news staff of the Coloradoan down on Riverside Drive. It may have been a Gannett article, but you were the ones who chose to run it on the front page in bold type. This is journalism, real journalism. Bravo! Keep us informed. Keep us over-informed. Assume we want to know a lot more than you have been telling us. Tell us the candid truth about Musgrave--how she votes, what she says, and no doubt during my visits to Schrader's in the morning, I'll start laying down quarters for your paper a lot more often than I do now. There's nothing like great investigative newswriting at Starbucks in the morning, that broadsheet newsprint spread aross the sunlit tables. It smells like...democracy.