UCCS Professor Joshua Dunn can’t help himself. He can’t believe the audacity of Denver District Court Judge Sheila Rappaport’s decision in the epic saga we know as the Lobato case. He’s been sounding the alarm on this ruling ever since it came down last month. If you haven’t heard Professor Dunn’s argument yet, here are a couple great resources. First, you can listen to our iVoices.org podcast featuring Professor Dunn and our Education Policy analyst Ben DeGrow. They hit the airwaves shortly after Judge Rappaport’s ruling came down. Additionally, Joshua wrote an op-ed for us that hit the Colorado Springs Gazette’s opinion pages last night. In both venues, Professor Dunn argues that Judge Rappaport disregarded the totality of our state constitution when deciding the Lobato case. Instead, she chose just the sections that suited her worldview and threw out all the inconvenient stuff. Joshua says her decision was entirely political, not constitutional.

AG John Suthers sat in front of the Joint Budget Committee yesterday to discuss the Lobato case and its potential time frame. He indicated that he believed it could be a full year before we’ve reached any resolution. That seems hardly adequate considering we’re dealing with a large chunk of the state’s budget. How can we plan for the future when Lobato threatens to eat away a majority of our general fund?

Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine is just as excited as we are about this year’s Founders Night celebration. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that he gets to spend more time with me or that he gets to debate Ann Coulter in front of our audience. Nick let his readers know about our event in this Reason blog post. Thanks Nick, we appreciate it. And yes, we DO know how to throw a good party. Remember that bet I won at our annual ATF Party this past summer? I’ll take my winnings in scotch at Founders Night.

If you want to RSVP for Founders Night online, you can go to our event page here. If you’d like to RSVP over the phone, please call Mary MacFarlane at 303-279-6536, ext 102.

Hide your gold, lock up your liquor and prepare to guard your liberties, the Colorado legislature is back in session. Be sure and tune in to Devil’s Advocate this Friday night as I am joined by Associated Press statehouse reporter Ivan Moreno and CBS Channel 4 reporter Shaun Boyd for a 2012 Colorado legislative preview. That’s Friday at 8:30 p.m. on Colorado Public Television 12. Re-broadcast Monday at 1:30 p.m.

Mercedes-Benz’s latest marketing ploy is to associate itself with Che Guevera. Over at the Huffington Post, Michael Gonzalez (Heritage Foundation) supplies the details.

It’s not surprising that a corporation which is currently pro-Che was pro-Hitler, far more so than many other German businesses during the Third Reich. As recounted in Cecil Adams’ “The Straight Dope”:

Daimler-Benz . . . avidly supported Nazism and in return received arms contracts and tax breaks that enabled it to become one of the world’s leading industrial concerns. (Between 1932 and 1940 production grew by 830 percent.) During the war the company used thousands of slaves and forced laborers including Jews, foreigners, and POWs. According to historian Bernard Bellon (Mercedes in Peace and War, 1990), at least eight Jews were murdered by DB managers or SS men at a plant in occupied Poland.

UPDATE: Regarding Eugene’s post, immediately above. My own view would be that a corporation is a collection of individuals (and, I agree with him, therefore entitled to free speech and other constitutional rights); in the same sense, a human body is a collection of cells. Over time, all of the individuals in a corporation may change; likewise, the collection of cells that constitute “David Kopel” is today very different from the collection that constituted “David Kopel” 45 years ago. Yet the corporate body, like the human body, has a continuing existence as the same entity. (That’s one of the benefits of incorporation.) Corporations sometimes have cultures or other enduring traits that distinguish them even while their individual members may be replaced. It would be accurate to say that Yale Law School is a corporation that places far higher value of scholarly prestige than on teaching ability, and this was true not only today, but also 40 years ago, even though the Yale faculty is now entirely different. (Yes, to be precise, Yale Law School is just a unit within the larger corporation of Yale University.) None of the original personnel at National Review magazine are still there, but one can find many similarities between the corporate culture and mission of NR in 1955 and 2011. That the various corporations of the Ivy League schools discriminated against Jews in the 1920s is, in my view, of some relevance in understanding their current discrimination against Asians. That Mercedes-Benz was, compared to other German corporations, unusually supportive to Hitler then, and is similarly unusual (compared to other German corporations) in its attitude towards Che today, suggests that the corporation may lack an internal self-regulator which recognizes the wrongfulness of extolling totalitarian thugs.

Two of my good drinking buddies, libertarian Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine and social conservative Ann Coulter agree on one thing:  I’m a lot funnier after a glass of scotch. What else can we all agree on this year? Find out at our 27th Annual Founders’ Night Dinner! We will have a spirited “can’t we all get along” style debate between Nick and Ann.

This year we are holding the event on Thursday, February 16th at Infinity Park in Glendale. You can click here to buy tickets online. Or call Mary MacFarlane at 303-279-6536, ext 102 or email her at Mary@i2i.org.

In addition to featuring Nick Gillespie and Ann Coulter that night, we’ll be honoring Colorado’s most famous businessman Jake Jabs – President and CEO of American Furniture Warehouse!

QUICK – tickets are selling fast!

What the heck is going to happen at the legislature this year? Watch to find out!

What are the most draconian three-strikes laws currently on the books? Do any states still have a 25 year mandatory minimum for the third strike?

Tonight at 10 pm mountain I broadcast my last late night edition of my 850 KOA radio show. Sorry to disappoint you, but no, I am not leaving Denver radio. But I will be getting some sleep. I’ll still be filling in for all your favs like Boyles, Rosen, Caplis and gang. Also I be hosting my own show on 630 KHOW Sunday evenings. I’ll tell you all about it tonight.

The important thing is that we stay in touch. My Facebook page is filled to the maximum 5000 friends, so PLEASE “like” my fan page by clicking here.

Also please follow me on Twitter by clicking here.

We’ve all heard about the Solyndra scandal, but have you heard about the Lowenstein Project? Wait, you didn’t know you had the Lowenstein “investment” in your portfolio? Didn’t know you made a loan that was never repaid? Me neither.

In an op-ed the Reason Foundation’s Harris Kenny wrote for us that landed on the pages of the Denver Post, we learn about Colorado’s version of corporate welfare gone crazy. (side note: Abound Solar will be next). Harris describes the filthy process that starts with an idea and ends with taxpayers getting hosed for millions of dollars. I find it odd that politicians discover these great “investment opportunities” and can only come up with other people’s money to use as capital…

Here’s the takeaway:

Government-issued loans are often based on insider favoritism and politics. They rarely fulfill their supposed purpose of the public good. The companies that receive government welfare are given an unfair advantage over those that don’t. Corporate welfare encourages companies to be good at politics, instead of good at business.