Getting all this love the past week from so many people from all over the country got me thinking: I wonder what someone on the Left thinks about me leaving nightly radio… hmmmm… and then the phone rang. It was Jason Salzman. He wanted some commentary from me on leaving my nightly radio spot for his blog, The Big Media Blog. We chatted for awhile and in no time, I got to read his latest blog post about me. I’m glad he will miss me. And I’m glad he decided to publish some of the best material I gave him. Thanks for giving us the Left’s perspective Jason.

However, I wonder if most people on the Left believe I was “advancing evil” every night like Jason does.

Whether you think my ideas are evil or not, you can still listen to me spew something on the radio on a weekly basis. I have a new time slot, this time on 630 KHOW. That’s right, you didn’t get rid of me yet! I’ll be on KHOW from 5 to 8pm every Sunday, with appearances on both KOA and KHOW as a fill-in host when needed. Which means now I’ve got a regular gig AND I’ll be coming out of the bullpen in relief. And don’t forget about my Public Television channel 12 show, Devils Advocate!

Thanks again to everyone who left me encouraging messages. It means a lot. For those on Left who thought I’d go away quietly. Sorry. I’m still here.

First Independence Institute intern and president of the Denver chapter of Liberty on the Rocks Donovan Schafer explains why hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is nothing to panic over. Writes Donovan:

In a recent report, the EPA linked groundwater contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming to the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) used to extract oil and gas. You can almost hear the collective “Hooray!” from anti-fracking advocates. But the actual data in the EPA report make it clear that fracking is safe.

Check out the whole thing here in the Colorado Springs Gazette.

Also be sure and check out II’s Amy Oliver Cooke and Linda Gorman in the Summit Daily as they point out the huge threat to medical privacy from Colorado’s “All-Payer Claim” database. According to Cooke and Gorman:

Colorado state government, and local foundations and health policy elites, have become so ideologically invested in failed health reform policies that they now see nothing wrong with forcing Colorado citizens to give their medical records to a centralized repository, free from scrutiny by state auditors, open records requests and open meeting requirements.

Read the whole thing here.

And don’t miss Senior Fellow in Technology Barry Fagin writing for the Colorado Springs Gazette’s editorial board on the Stop Online Piracy Act, which Barry calls a “bipartisan pile of waste making its way through the bowels of Congress…”

Check it out here.

We’ve got to face the facts. All eyes are on our tiny little state and its 9 electoral votes. Even the Wall Street Journal couldn’t help but notice when we voters demonstrated our intolerance for higher taxes in this past Tuesday’s “killing fields.” Check out what the Journal said about us in this house editorial:

You probably won’t be reading much about it, and don’t look for the results to get a lot of airtime on CNN or MSNBC, but Colorado held a referendum on taxes on Tuesday. The tax increasers got blown away. By a nearly 2 to 1 margin, voters rejected a $2.9 billion income and sales tax increase ostensibly earmarked for education. Proposition 103 would have raised the income tax rate to 5% from 4.63% and the sales tax to 3% from 2.9%. Supporters claimed the tax would merely have been “temporary” and was needed to make up for recent cuts in state spending for K-12 and college education.

Both are familiar ploys to sell tax hikes that fund higher spending and typically become permanent.The education gambit was a sneaky attempt to undermine the state’s landmark and popular Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which was approved by voters in the 1990s and has slowed the growth of government. Tabor, as it is known, caps the state budget to the growth of population and inflation each year while rebating revenues above that limit to taxpayers. The union scheme was to erode the spending caps by exempting education spending and earmarking new tax revenues to schools, which already command 40% of the state’s general fund budget.

The Independence Institute, a free-market think tank, warned Coloradans that exempting education from the spending cap is what undermined California’s Gann Amendment budget ceilings in the 1980s. California’s spending and tax burden exploded in the aftermath, leading to its current fiscal and economic laments.

Colorado’s antitax mood was equally clear at the local level. The Denver Post reports that “Aurora voters rejected a $114 million tax increase for recreation centers, Douglas County voters said ‘no’ to school tax increases, and Cañon City voters rejected a tax for library improvements.” The paper called the overall results “a killing field for tax measures.”

It’s not everyday the Journal writes about you in the house editorial. I imagine as November 2012 inches closer, we’ll see more and more coverage of what’s going on here. So my advice to my readers is simple: be on your best behavior. Don’t let the Journal or say, Time Magazine catch you picking your nose or peeing in public. That could be embarrassing.

Speaking of… I’d like to remind the national media outlets that nothing, absolutely nothing of importance happens anywhere in or around Shotgun Willies. Don’t even bother going near it.

Well, tonight Colorado answered Sen. Heath’s question loud and clear.  The resounding defeat (just minutes after the polls closed) of Heath’s Proposition 103, an immoral income and sales tax increase supposedly “for the children,” should tell the Senator and all other big government advocates what kind of government Coloradans want. Nearly 64 percent of voters statewide put the kibosh on more money for government.

Two key points. First, Heath actually showed restraint with Prop 103 because it was supposed to raise a $2.9 billion over 5 years. That sounds like a lot to reasonable people, but Heath would have liked more than $9 billion annually to massively expand government in all areas. Thus even a modest proposal from Heath’s perspective was met with a HELL NO! answer.

Second, Prop 103 was the “most high-profile statewide tax measure” in the country, and “the outcome is likely to be viewed as a barometer of attitudes toward the tough fiscal choices states have ahead,” according to Stateline.  Senator Heath even said that tonight’s results for Prop 103 “‘will be very telling to the rest of the country about how people are feeling.’” If Heath is right, there is no confusion in the message that Coloradans sent. No new taxes and no “for the children” BS.

Last week COST detailed the developments in Colorado’s APCD, a state-mandated data warehouse of all your private healthcare transactions.

The Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF) spun off the non-profit Center for Improving Value in Health Care (CIVHC) to administer the APCD. There is no state funding mechanism for CIVHC, which must rely on gifts, grants, and donations for funding. However, the All Payer Claims Database Council (APCD Council), a federation of government entities, non-profits, and academics focused on standardized “deployment” of state APCDs, provides suggestions for state funding of these medical data warehouses.

In a March 2011 paper titled “Cost and Funding Considerations for a Statewide All-Payer Claims Database” APCD Council wrote how various states fund their APCDs and provide suggestions for additional revenue, including the sale of your medical data:

The ability of APCDs to serve as ongoing sources of information to monitor cost and utilization trends depends on their long-term financial sustainability. Because state budget shortfalls are currently an issue for the majority of states, it would be prudent to diversify revenue sources in order to reduce the risk of catastrophic funding loss. Public APCDs are typically funded by one or more of the following sources:

• General appropriations (e.g. New Hampshire)
• Fee assessments on public and private payers (health plans) and facilities (e.g. Vermont)
• Medicaid match (e.g. Utah)
• Data sales (e.g. Maine).

Other states developing APCDs are also considering additional support from foundations (e.g. Colorado) and one state is using federal Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program funds (e.g. Rhode Island).

It has been discussed that states might be able to produce consolidated pay-for-performance or other value added services to help fund their efforts. Private, voluntary reporting initiatives generally rely on membership dues for core funding (e.g. Wisconsin). The majority of health data programs, public and private, eventually supplement their core revenues with data sales revenues, but these revenues do not occur until one or two years after the data system is established. As stated above, data sales are tied to release policies and broad release policies enable a state to spread the cost of the system to the data users. Data sales alone are not generally sufficient to support the core infrastructure of a health data program, but can provide supplemental revenue to maintain and update the system.

Not only will the state collect your private health care information but it will have the ability to sell it.

All the economists quoted in the story come from one school of economic thought, one school among many, who believe in Keynesian economics. The only dissent mentioned in the story is from ultra-Keynesians who didn’t think it goes far enough.

He went on to point out that good newspapers know the difference between opinion and news. He mentioned that the Wall Street Journal also presented some opinions about Obama’s jobs plan, but that in the Journal, they did it a bit differently…

The difference is the Wall Street Journal published these where they belong, on the editorial page, while the Gazette presented theirs where they didn’t belong, on the front page.

See the difference?

According to the Fort Collins Coloradoan:

The union asks that a judge strike down the new rules because they may unfairly impugn a teacher’s reputation, noting that an arrest is merely an accusation and not a finding of guilt. It also says there’s a possibilty about information about the wrong person might be dissemninated if two people share the same name.

COST understands that unions are more concerned about their members rather than taxpayers or parents or students, but honestly fighting this type of transparency seems like a bad PR move.

The Coloradoan began investigating after the arrests in 2009 of two licensed educators within Poudre School District: Rocky Mountain High School counselor Brad Boda and Poudre High School physical education teacher Amber Huber.

Boda was convicted of sexual assault on multiple children. Huber pleaded guilty to felony contributing to the delinquency of a minor after providing alcohol to two students.

Some teachers, regardless of union membership, just shouldn’t be around kids.

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Amy knocks it out of the park! She has a wonderful sense of communicating the somewhat esoteric idea of crushing national debt quite clearly. The analogy of someone knocking on your door and presenting your child with a $45,000 bill they had nothing to do with really hits home for Moms. Let’s hope Moms continuing heeding Amy’s warnings and continue becoming successful Citizen Auditors as well!