With the year about to turn over into 2011, here are our top picks for New Year's resolutions.
Everyone living in or visiting the Sun Valley area: To be thankful for the incredible gift of visiting, working or living in one of the best places on Earth.
Government workers: To avoid whining about pay cuts until they've experienced the not-so-tender mercies of the private sector.
All skiers and boarders: To learn the Skiers Responsibility Code, live by it and survive to slide another day.
Electronic gamers (and their parents): To read the studies emerging about the potentially addictive effects of overplaying and rethink play time.
Visitors and residents at 6,000 feet: After dark, to look up at the Milky Way and restore a sense of wonder.
Facebookers: To repeat daily, "Facebooking is not real life."
Cable "news" channels: To replace fake news with real news.
Congressional Republicans: To take off the boxing gloves; put on work gloves.
Congressional Democrats: To own their positions and learn to use power.
U.S. senators and representatives: To get comfortable with the name "Cat Food Congress" because that's what seniors may be eating if the payroll tax isn't returned to normal.
President Barack Obama: To develop enough backbone to refuse to allow himself to be held hostage by the opposition.
U.S. representatives and senators (you know who you are): To quit campaigning to ban earmarks while behind the scenes pushing federal agencies to quietly allocate money to your districts.
Idaho Land Board: To quit spending money on public relations while driving schools to beg local companies to pay for field trips and ordinary school supplies.
Boise State football team: To give the BCS more major heartburn next year.
Obama administration: To get the nation out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and to wean it from reliance on hostile oil-producing nations of the Middle East.
Sen. Jim Risch: To take off the jester's hat in trying to hold up a nuclear arms treaty with the Russians on the grounds that they had stolen some U.S. Humvees.
State Republican leaders: To quit condoning the actions of Rep. Phil Hart, who refused to pay taxes and illegally cut 8,000 feet of state-owned timber.
State Rep. Phil Hart: To pay taxes or resign.
Ketchum City Councilman Larry Helzel: To recognize that if corporations alone had determined land planning and zoning in the Wood River Valley, it likely wouldn't be a place he'd want to live.
Ketchum Mayor Randy Hall: To quit believing that nearly free pork chops will magically materialize if the city guts its zoning to attract a third supermarket.
Valley drivers: To develop patience and use it when in traffic or dealing with defenseless pedestrians.
Global warming naysayers: To consider the consequences of being wrong.
Deficit hawks: To balance cost-cutting fervor with the need to invest in creating a prosperous future.
All Americans: To start paying attention to the politics of oil even when the price at the gas pump is low.
SV City Councilmen Nils Ribi and Bob Youngman: To quit regarding marketing as rocket science and making perfect the enemy of the possible.
Wyoming: To come up with real wolf management and put away the wrecking ball it's swinging at the Endangered Species Act.
Idaho Transportation Department: To fix dangerous Timmerman Junction.
Disgruntled taxpayers: To discover that no taxes ultimately means no services, no education, no Social Security, no Medicare and no Army, Navy or Marines.
112th Congress; To prevent corporations from secretly pouring money into election campaigns.
Right coast residents: To wake up to the drug wars on our border with Mexico.
Idaho Legislature: To overhaul the Tax Commission and end favoritism in tax settlements for the politically connected.
Backcountry tech geeks: To realize that all the technology in the world can't replace training and good judgement.
Parents of college-bound students: To lobby to make higher education affordable for the good of our kids and country.
Sun Valley and Ketchum: To open meetings of the new publicly funded marketing board to the public.
Authors of online comments: To clean it up and quit abusing the privilege.
Army Spc. Bowe Bergdahl, same as last year: To survive kidnapping and imprisonment by the Taliban in Afghanistan and to come home to his family in Hailey.
U.S. Senate, same as last year: To get rid of filibuster rules that allow the minority to stop bills favored by the majority.
Hailey Mayor Rick Davis, same as last year: To resolve the impasse between the city's primarily volunteer fire department and Wood River Fire & Rescue: To get the best protection for the city.
Idaho legislators, same as last year: To actually read the pile of research on phoning and texting while driving and to prevent needless deaths by phone.
