Our Monthly Be Nice to Mark Udall Post

We have written elsewhere that we find Mark Udall the easiest Colorado politician to criticize, and we do.

It is hard to maintain credibility as a blogger if one only provides unending criticism of a politician. That is the mistake that sites like Media Matters and PlagiarismNowAction make.

We'd like to not repeat that mistake, so here are three things that we think that Mark Udall did right recently. We apologize for not providing links and may add them later as we have time to do a Google search to find them. (Edited to fix the English. Written English is sometimes our fourth or fifth language. Edited to two hours later to add: Google Alerts picked our mangled sentence to highlight, but even bad publicity is good publicity, lol)

1. Mark Udall said something very nice about John McCain and McCain's treatment of his father, Mo Udall, who was McCain's mentor and friend in Congress. He told how McCain was one of Mo Udall's very few regular hospital visitors in Mo Udall's dying days, and how he took the time to read to him and talk about what was going on in Congress.

Mark Udall could have kept that story to himself. To his credit, he did not.

2. What comes next may or may not be to Mark Udall's credit because it is part of a Nancy Pelosi scheme to try to take the earmarks issue away from Republicans. Udall is reported to have spoken to his staff about forgoing earmarks this year. We don't know what the outcome of that conversation was, but earmarks are a congressional disgrace. They need to be addressed in some way.

We (this author at least) would hate to see earmarks go away entirely. They are a good mechanism for funding small, worthwhile projects that otherwise wouldn't see the light of day in Congress. On the other hand, too many earmarks is a lot like too much food. It isn't healthy.

If it turns out that Mark Udall is insincerely playing politics with this issue, we will be the first to hammer him over it.

3. Finally, it is good that Mark Udall and Doug Lamborn can work together to solve the Leadville mine drain problem. They have a joint bill requiring that two government agencies work together to pump out and treat the water.

Again, this is a bit of a political football as the left wing blogs and left wing newspapers are trying to claim that there isn't and never was a problem. How they would know that is beyond knowing given that they have no engineers on their staff and cite no engineering studies. They just spew mindless propaganda that would quickly change to blame every Republican in sight if there was a blowout. How convenient. How transparent.

Kudos to both Mark Udall and Doug Lamborn for trying to keep this from becoming an environmental disaster.

Wasn't that refreshing? See how we try to be different?