You might remember that we boiled Canadian Cheryl Baxter’s story down to just a few minutes on YouTube. Cheryl was one of several Canadians we met up with in Vancouver who got a raw deal from their “public option.” And by raw deal, I mean waiting years to get a new hip, then finally escaping to the U.S. to receive treatment. The question still remains: if we go all Canada on our health care system, where will the Canadians escape to?
Want to learn more about the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) and how you can use it to obtain information bureaucrats don’t want you to see?
TOMORROW at 2pm, we will be holding a FREE how-to CORA session here at our office in Golden! That’s right, you heard correctly. A FREE class on open records requests taught by none other than the CORA master himself, Todd Shepherd.
As Todd explains,
A lot of times, the media can make ‘open record requesting’ sound incredibly hard. The opposite in fact is true. Within 60-90 minutes, I can teach you just about everything you need to know about Colorado’s Open Records law, and how to use it effectively.
Please contact Mary MacFarlane if you are interested in taking the class. Either call 303.279.6536 or shoot Mary an email.
Wow. I’m still in awe. I just finished listening to this epic iVoices.org podcast with Dave Kopel interviewing none other than Alan Gura himself!! Or as Dave aptly refers to Mr. Gura, “the Luke Skywalker of the Second Amendment.” Alan Gura is the man behind the huge DC v. Heller Supreme Court gun rights victory. Because of his previous victory, Mr. Gura has taken on the new McDonald v. Chicago Supreme Court case. This new Second Amendment case will decide whether the Second Amendment is enforceable at the state and local level via the 14th Amendment. Now that may seem like a lot of legalese and Constitutional law jargon, but I promise that if you listen to a few of these previous iVoices.org podcasts before jumping into the newest one featuring Alan Gura, you’ll be fine. A special thanks goes out to Mr. Skywalker Gura for taking time of his day to speak with us.
With the crumbling print media, radio, and television industries, more and more folks are getting their news from Al Gore’s greatest invention since global warming. I for one spend more time on the Internet than I do watching TV, listening to talk radio, or reading much of anything — and it’s not just because the porn is free. Bloggers, citizen journalists or whatever you’d like to call them are doing more than picking up the slack for old media — they are leading the way. Take for example the People’s Press Collective. You could get most of your statewide political news just from that one website. Add in the Rocky Mountain Right, Todd Shepherd (Investigates and Complete Colorado), and a couple choice sports blogs and shizzam! All your news in a matter of minutes.
Case in point, our investigative reporter Todd Shepherd has uncovered some very significant stories in the last year. If you’d ask him how he does it, he’d likely respond with just one word: CORA. The Colorado Open Records Act is the statute that allows ordinary citizens like you and I to make open records requests. Trouble is, most folks who are interested in researching, writing, and doing their own investigations are not familiar with process, and often find it intimidating.
But don’t worry, we at the Independence Institute have got you covered! On Wednesday, December 9that 2pm, we will be holding a FREE how-to CORA session here at our office in Golden! That’s right, you heard correctly. A FREE class on open records requests taught by none other than the CORA master himself, Todd Shepherd.
As Todd explains,
A lot of times, the media can make ‘open record requesting’ sound incredibly hard. The opposite in fact is true. Within 60-90 minutes, I can teach you just about everything you need to know about Colorado’s Open Records law, and how to use it effectively.
Please contact Mary MacFarlane if you are interested in taking the class. Either call 303.279.6536 or shoot Mary an email.
Spots will fill up fast (much like the lines for “free” health care), so call now!
On this week’s Independent Thinking, Linda Gorman from the Independence Institute’s Health Care Policy Center and Wayne Laugesen from the Colorado Springs Gazette join me to talk about the Independence Institute’s recent health care fact finding trip to Vancouver to find real people with real stories about Canada’s single heath care system, and what government run health care might mean for us in the United States. That’s tonight at 8:30 pm on KBDI, channel 12, Denver. Rebroadcast the following Monday at 1:30 pm.
Those of us who are not bleeding heart, emotional hippies are used to being called names: selfish, mean-spirited, angry, malicious, greedy, and sometimes even, Jon Caldara. So it comes as no surprise that the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA) president called us “sinister” in this letter to his members.
Dear DCTA member,
BEWARE: You may have gotten a letter from the Independence Institute explaining how you can drop you Every Member Option (EMO) contribution to DCTA/CEA.
It reads like a public service telling you how to save money. But the motives behind the message are much more sinister.
The Independence Institute and the independent teacher organizations they support have a history of backing anti- public education and anti-union causes. They support vouchers and right to work, and just about any other initiative or candidate for office that promises to limit the growth of public education in Colorado. They correctly see DCTA/CEA as the strongest stumbling block to their cause so they want to limit our ability to be involved in school board races and the political process in general.
Turns out, neither the DCTA nor the CEA would like teachers to know about the “Every Member Option” (EMO). The EMO is a refund of the political money that organizations like the CEA and DCTA give back upon teacher’s requests.
Of course, these overly political teacher’s organizations do not want you to know you can get this refund. And surprisingly enough, simply telling teachers they can receive some of their own money back is “sinister.”
Well, I’m sorry unions. I’m a sinister kind of guy. Therefore, I am going to provide some resources to the teachers of Colorado, so that they might learn how to obtain the EMO refund, which can be up to $63.
Americans have been dipping into the history of the Founding Era for clues as to how to get our country out of its current mess.
Here’s an instructive story: In 1783, the Constitution had not yet been written, and Congress was operating under the Articles of Confederation. Congress had no ability to enforce its laws, no power to tax, and could not even meet its obligations to the newly-victorious Continental Army. Debts kept mounting up. In one humiliating incident, Congress felt compelled to flee from Philadelphia when armed troops demanding their back pay physically surrounded the congressional meeting-place at Independence Hall.
Congress re-convened in Princeton, New Jersey. Once there, the delegates started to talk about how it would be a great idea to have a national capitol in a district of its own. But Congress couldn’t agree on where the capitol district would be located. Votes were taken on locations in each of the thirteen states, and they were all voted down. More importantly, Congress was completely broke — it simply had no money to build a capitol.
Faced with a crisis, some of the delegates had an idea. If having one national capitol wasn’t feasible, then they would propose building TWO national capitols – one on the Delaware River, and one on the Potomac. And that’s just what Congress voted to do!
The lesson for today: The biggest domestic national crisis, almost every impartial observer agrees, consists of the massive and unfunded entitlement programs sweeping the federal government toward default and bankruptcy. The second biggest problem is health care costs — rising crazily because the government has replaced the traditional doctor-patient relationship with huge bureaucracies of “third party payers” ( government agencies and insurance companies).
The obvious cure for both problems is to find ways to disengage government and return these services to the free market. But both of those solutions are off the congressional agenda. Instead, a majority in Congress wants expansion of entitlements and third-party payments
Politicians haven’t changed much.
What finally cured the problems of the 1780s was a new Constitution that restructured Congress and clearly defined its powers. It’s becoming more and more clear that it is also going to take some fundamental change to deal with modern congressional irresponsibility — probably a constitutional amendment or two.
As promised from my web monkey, here are the rest of the 25th Annual Founders Night pictures. The ones you have not seen yet are at the end, about the last half of them.
