The weekly newsletter of The Denver Post’s opinion pages.
This is The Denver Post’s Sound Off newsletter. Every Monday, we deliver to your inbox a roundup of what we’ve been publishing on the opinion pages over the past week, including both print and . That includes Denver Post , op-ed by Post columnists like Chuck Plunkett and Megan Schrader as well as nationally syndicated columnists like Eugene Robinson and Garrison Keillor, plus guest commentaries, and editorial .
Perspective
First, a summary of what was in our Sunday Perspective section this week:
Football’s day of reckoning: Bloomberg View columnist Joe Nocera asked: When science develops a test for CTE in active players, ? The answer is likely to come within 10 years.
North Korea, on the brink: Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote that the North Korean nuclear threat is for the U.S. and China, and for the new international order both nations say they want.
Does swearing indicate honesty? Benjamin Bergen, a language professor at the University of California at San Diego, wrote: The potty-mouthed among us — such as Anthony Scaramucci — and may or may not be passionate, regardless how much their word choices make them seem that way.
Leave DACA alone: Editorial page editor Chuck Plunkett wrote that immigration hardliners who are targeting the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program aren’t just being cruel, .
Faster buses for Colfax: Denver would be smart to invest $135 million on a for Colfax Avenue, and smarter still to increase the cost by about $35 million to make the buses run down dedicated lanes.
Letters to the editor: On the letters page, Denver Post readers tackled several issues. Here are several of their letters:
Dear Michelle: Attorney and Denver Post columnist Mario Nicolais penned an after attending her event at the Pepsi Center last month with his wife.
Dear Melania: Garrison Keillor had some for the current first lady: “Melania — do you mind if I call you Melania? — I assume that you love this guy. You owe it to him to tell him, ‘Darling, you’re making an ass of yourself.’ ”
Charter schools are public schools: Dottie Lamm, a Denver Post columnist and former first lady of Colorado, wrote: that critics led by the teachers union private school vouchers with public charter schools that keep public money in the public system.
Google echo chamber: Diane Carman joined the fray on a fired Google employee’s controversial manifesto on workplace diversity. She wrote: Tech companies are beginning to recognize the , and there is a tremendous emphasis across the industry on diversifying engineering talent.
The West’s saviors: Maddy Butcher of Mancos, a contributor to Writers on the Range, related the story of the Mancos (pop. 1,400) fighting a wildfire the night before putting on that town’s annual festival. She noted that nearly two-thirds of the approximately 30,000 fire departments nationwide are run solely by volunteers.
Don’t do it, GOP: Former Colorado Republican Party chairman Dick Wadhams urged the party . He warned that eliminating the primary would be the first step in repelling unaffiliated voters in the general election and setting the stage for a fourth consecutive gubernatorial loss.
Drawn to the News: For those of you who can’t get enough editorial , here are the two we featured on the back page of Sunday’s Perspective section, on the topic of Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump’s war of words:
The past week
Here are highlights from last week’s opinion coverage:
Denver Post editorials:
City housing relief: Denver has found an innovative way to bring to low-income residents struggling with rising rents, which have far exceeded the slow rise in wages.
Let Dreamers stay: President Donald Trump was right to let almost 750,000 undocumented childhood arrivals who are in limbo — known as Dreamers — stay in the country. Congress should .
Trump comes around: President Trump said he would order up paperwork declaring a national emergency to fight opioid addiction. His reversal on the question is .
Too clever by half: A campaign finance workaround by likely Colorado gubernatorial candidate violates the spirit of the law and the clear expectation of Colorado voters.
A Colorado parable: On The Denver Post’s 125th birthday, we remember , the first ski area operator in Colorado to sell lift tickets to snowboarders.
Op-ed columns:
Playground taunts with nukes: Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, responding to the war of words between Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, wrote: This is what we dreaded. Some international crisis was bound to flare up, and .
Tillerson and North Korea: The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson defended President Donald Trump’s reckless threat to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea, but he quietly that Trump laid down.
Why air tankers don’t fly: Denver Post editorial writer and columnist Megan Schrader explained that too often, air tankers are because of the federal government’s screwed-up system for contracting them.
Election lessons: Denver Post columnist Greg Dobbs, a former foreign correspondent for ABC News, wrote that he has never seen people more eager to vote than when he covered elections in .
Mike Pence for president: Syndicated columnist Froma Harrop wrote: As special counsel Robert Mueller dives ever deeper into the murky waters of Trump family enterprises — and the campaign’s possible collusion with Russia — a Mike Pence presidency .
Trump shouldn’t cooperate: George Parry, a former state and federal prosecutor who practices law in Philadelphia, offered a piece of advice to Donald Trump and attorney Ty Cobb: Cooperation with Robert Mueller’s lynch mob is the Trump or any of his people should do.
Shirtless Putin: Bloomberg View columnist Leonid Bershidsky explained why Vladimir Putin — whose shirtless vacation pictures were widely published around the world (again) this month — is .
Growth in Lakewood: Lakewood Mayor Adam Paul penned a guest commentary urging his city’s voters to that is expected to be on the ballot this fall.
Forget the $15 minimum wage: Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell wrote: The grass-roots left has made a rallying cry out of extracting more money from evil, exploitative capitalists — but it is largely for lifting Americans out of poverty.
It’s not “just a dog”: Merlin Chowkwanyun, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote that when someone loses a pet, don’t say, — because itap not.
Letters to the editor:
Notable and quotable
“The official new slogan of the Democratic Party, ‘A Better Deal,’ has left me and millions of other progressives underwhelmed. It just kind of sits there like a plate of cold scrambled eggs.”
Letter-writer Jack Farrar, Denver
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