Jerry Kopel

Colorado’s schools of higher education have enough to do just surviving. Yet, the Department of Regulatory Agencies recommends requiring accounting students to pay more tuition costs and to take more semester credits so that Colorado standards match the rest of the nation. That position marks a change since DORA’s last reviews, in 1999 and 2004, when the department opposed such an increase.

Medical marijuana not only makes legal sense, it also can make legal cents for Colorado’s future budgets.

How Colorado got this far is based on past experience and also President Obama’s “advice” to the Department of Justice.

It is a long, grueling battle between those already under health care regulation and those who want to be regulated.

The subject of this column was the failed hijacking of a 12-seat airplane from Leningrad Airport in Soviet Russia in June of 1970. Ten refuseniks were involved. A refusenik is a Russian who wanted the freedom to practice his or her religion or the freedom of political life provided in a democracy.

Much ado about nothing? Or much ado about a lot?

Many licenses and regulatory laws have now been reviewed by the Department of Regulatory Agencies for consideration by the 2010 Legislature. You or your friends might be affected by the changes DORA will suggest in the reports to be released in the middle of October.

During his 12-year tenure as governor, Roy Romer often showed his dislike of the state lottery, but there was one issue he never really tackled: “IT.”

Spouse Dolores was driving our car west to Vail the afternoon of July 15. We were to attend a concert of George Gershwin music. Our car was in the right lane, getting close to the second exit to Vail, where we normally make our exit. We passed a semi-truck with two Vail police cars parked behind it off the road on the right shoulder. The red and blue lights on the roofs of the police cars were flashing.

Almost all of us use sign language. Even if you are not deaf or hard of hearing, you probably sometimes use sign language instead of swearing in anger. Nearly everyone realizes that pointing upward with the middle finger is a curse. And it’s now supposedly “cool” for people to knock knuckles in a “fist bump.”

Send me a politician. Let him or her be an attorney. Chances are high you will get a wrong answer to your question.

Unfortunate choices were part of the Colorado 1876 election and are still around to mock those “who know too much.”

The sweetest blue sounds came to me during the second week of July by way of Jack Boehm, who was appointed acting director of the Colorado Lottery in April 2008 and became the official director in July 2008. That sound was the news that the lottery’s ancient Wang computer system had been tossed out and replaced by “CLASS,” an acronym for a lottery computer system manufactured by IBM and presently in use in nine other lottery states.