Articles by Tisha Casida

Often the issue of “regulation” is implicitly framed as “people who want no regulations” versus “people who want copious amounts of regulations,” but there is a very large middle-ground where most people will agree that some regulations are good, and that we must work together as a community and a country to understand how best to apply those regulations. When it comes to federal regulations, it could be argued that many of them and the agencies that enforce them are unconstitutional and could ...

As a Coloradan, I am heartbroken over the massacre that took place at Century 16 in Aurora. It is senseless, as are so many things. When a violent action takes the lives of innocents, we ask ourselves why someone would do this and how can we stop it from happening again. The sad reality is that you cannot stop every destructive action of mentally ill people who are prone to violence. There are no laws that can be written and enforced with a 100% success rate that can stop human beings from acti...

There are approximately 307 million Americans living in the United States of America, and we can gauge the ‘public opinion’ of most of them. Or can we? We talk about public opinion like it is a science, but I think it is an art– and most of it is in the interpretation of the data and the way that these data are gathered in the first place. Already nearly in full swing, the election year brings with it a bunch of talking heads that use various polls to spout their opinion and ideas about what wi...

Colorado is leading the way concerning several policies, and may eventually be a good model for other states for how to take divisive issues and hold positive and creative dialogue among the stakeholders (constituents). At least that is what I think thus far in our journey around the state. Colorado, in general, has a diverse mix of voters (713,506 Democrats; 829,259 Republicans; 668,182 Independents), which makes Colorado a swing State– a testing ground for ideas, and a stomping ground for inde...

The base word “tax” comes from Greek and means “arrangement” or “order.” The Supreme Court recently ruled that the federal government has the power to enforce the penalties in the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act under its constitutional power to tax. I can't help but remember that the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence took place so many years ago because of taxes. Whether or not the individual mandate is constitutional, it is flawed as a public policy because it ...

Politics can be a strange science. This last week, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany was called “the most dangerous German leader since Hitler” for her “austerity measures” (making a budget and sticking to it?). She is being demonized for cutting spending, and for sticking with her decisions to not ‘bail out’ others. They say that “Merkel won’t budge. She is a purveyor of the conventional wisdom which says that the economy is like a household that can’t borrow or spend more than it earns. But...

I know that Google is keeping a record of your searches and returning individualized results, because my searches are different than my colleagues. And after I make my search, promotional ads that relate to that search are suddenly everywhere on my screen. It is kind of neat that they can target you that accurately– it is also worrysome. Does privacy exist on the Internet? No– absolutely not. Does privacy exist in your home? Not if the powers that be really want to find something. Privacy is go...

Looking at Twitter today, I saw that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is actually on Twitter. And I guess I knew that already, except that I really got to thinking about the intricacies of that association this morning while figuring out how to best help people at the local, individual level with their endeavors to produce and sell local food. Because, see, whoever is tweeting for the U.S. Department of Defense is getting paid to tweet.  And I would almost rather have them working on defend...

This week, upon suspecting a robber to be in an area by an intersection, the Aurora police barricaded the area and stopped every single car to search it. While they were searching it, they held these adults who were driving their vehicle unsuspectingly through the intersection in handcuffs (maybe even at gunpoint-- I am trying to verify this). Let me repeat myself-- the police did not know who exactly they were looking for, so they detained everyone and held them in handcuffs while searching the...