Deal with Churchill the Indian way.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: On Colorado - Obscenity-of-the-month, Ward Churchill - Editorial

WARD CHURCHILL.

There, I've written an obscenity in ColoradoBiz.

I must be the magazine's first editor to have printed an obscenity in these pages, although if I'm not, I'm sure Jeff Rundles, our columnist and a former editor of the magazine, will correct me.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Churchill was last month's (and perhaps January's, too) obscenity-of-the-month; and along the way he became the latest way for our governor to attack the state's premier university system--the University of Colorado, which Bill Owens greatly regrets he can't control.

But the governor is not the problem raised by Churchill becoming an obscenity-of-the-month. The problem lies with the entire political and media establishment of Colorado becoming so distracted by the University of Colorado professor that problems needing real solutions go unattended. Read; budget, drought mitigation, transportation infrastructure, the Gallagher amendment.

My daughter, Catherine, knows Ward Churchill, although I doubt, despite all his pontifications about being an agent of the people, Churchill actually knows my daughter.

They were defendants together in the multiple-court prosecution of protestors of last year's Columbus Day parade. Churchill, as everyone knows by now, was acquitted by a jury; the silly charges filed against Catherine, a juvenile at the time, were dropped after the acquittal. But Churchill's activism for Native Americans was metaphorically tsunamied by the wave of news coverage following criticism of his being included on an academic panel in New York.

Which brings me back to our governor and the business implications of the Ward Churchill brouhaha. Essentially, the whole affair has given Owens one more round of ammunition to use on a university system he hates, but which Colorado's business community values as a crown jewel among the state's economic assets.

My boss, ColoradoBiz Publisher Bart Taylor, asked me to write about the governor's initial comments on the Churchill affair shortly after Owens made them, and post them as a column on our website, www.cobizmag.com. To be frank, I didn't want to do that then.

Owens came late to the Churchill party because he was off again at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland--I hope studying ways to break budget impasses that threaten state governments. The news story of Churchill's stupid three-year-old...