James LaRue - myliblog

Here's a brief introduction to the top candidate for Douglas County Commissioner. Do NOT forget to vote in the primary!

For fifteen years in Douglas County, Colorado. I was a Republican. The reason was very simple: Republicans ALWAYS won the general election. The only one that mattered (for people, anyhow, not issues) was the primary.  When the general election came, I have to say that I don't think I've ever voted a straight ticket. No matter how displeased I might be with one party or the other, I'm not an ideologue. I vote for the most capable candidate, and I've observed that neither party has a lock on competence. After I left my position as Douglas County Libraries director, in part (but not mostly) because of partisan pressure by a couple of county commissioners trying hard to get me fired, I was pleased to go back to my Unaffiliated status. I am, and always have been (like a lot of Coloradans) an independent. Tell me the issue, I'll tell you my take. But I get to decide that, not a party. In general, I suppose I would consider myself a social liberal and a fiscal con...

Archivists at the Douglas County Libraries have set up an appointment with me in a couple of weeks to record an oral history. I was the founding director of the district (it was a county library before then) in 1990, and I guess I do know a lot of institutional history. I also wrote a newspaper column  from April 11, 1990 through January 5, 2012). So it's all online, but I gave a copy of the text file to our archivists, pointing out that somehow I lost track of about a dozen columns over the years. So we have an intern who is tracking down the missing ones, which is kind of neat. Then I was thinking about maybe packaging all of these as an ebook.  Then Shaun Boyd (of DCL's Douglas County History and Research Center) told me that it would be 3,000 pages long. No one would read that! So one of the tasks I might set myself next year is going through that and producing a more digestible version. There would be at least four themes: the development of the Douglas County Li...