Opinion

As news begins to trickle in about improvements to our economy, the political implications about who will benefit most will have both high stakes for the interests who will battle for the increased resources a better economy makes available, and high drama as our state’s leaders decide where to dedicate the newly found money.

I’ve never been fond of compilation columns or the laundry lists produced when deadline arrives before any decent ideas, but I’m going to indulge myself this week with a list of thank-yous amid the holidays:
• For the news-room staff at Evergreen Newspapers, the most talented and hardest-working group of journalists I know. We are small but mighty, and your 20 awards in this year’s Colorado Press Association contest say everything that needs to be said.

Thanks to supporters of, volunteers for Charlie’s Place
Editor:

Tis the season: Tiny Tim Time, unless you’re a member of the latest cult of personality. Then it is Mighty Tim Time.
Some might confuse Tiny Tim Cratchit of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” with Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, which is understandable with them both being Tim. Tim is diminutive for Timothy, so one might sense timidity when hearing “Tim,” but generally Tims are far from being timid.

Remember commenting as a kid about a schoolyard fisticuff, “It was a fair fight”?
We celebrate the underdog, who despite daunting but not impossible odds, perseveres.  
Pro sports have worked on establishing parity, obligating larger-market teams to share revenue with their smaller-market opponents.  
We speak of a “level playing field,” the place where young people learn fair play and sportsmanship, and develop integrity as a metaphor for fairness.

In a recent article, Joyce Shelby, emeritus professor of history at UCLA and the author of “The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism,” writes, “From 1776 to the present, the bottom 60 percent of the American population, as University of Southern California historian Carole Shammas has documented, has never had more than 11 percent of the country’s wealth.”

I’ve been considering changing the name of this column. Not that it matters; after all, New York Times columnists don’t title theirs nor do Denver Post writers Vincent Carroll and Mike Littwin, though I hesitate to mention them in the same breath as Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman and David Brooks.
I feel bad about that because they’re home-town boys, and one should always support their own even if one finds them disagreeable or finds him/herself disagreeing with them.

I’m going to miss Andy Rooney. Not that I watched him without fail or hung onto every word he uttered while poking fun at life’s absurdities and us for taking ourselves too seriously.  No, it will be because he got to do what he loved doing — writing and commenting — and didn’t much care what we thought. Like me doing this.
Andy was a living institution, an everyman philosopher, a symbol of and model for …yada yada.  
Ouch!  He would’ve hated that.  

A few weeks ago, I wrote Americans are not revolutionaries by nature; let me add cynics to the list of what we’re not. The can-do spirit is part of our DNA, an article of faith in our secular religion like salvation to Christians.
A recent poll shows 57 percent agree that we can fix any problem, which seems incongruent to the current political clime.