Just found some more great news regarding the resistance to Obamacare. According to the Colorado News Agency, the Colorado House passed a resolution yesterday calling for a constitutional convention to repeal Obamacare. Looks like were beating back this health care takeover on all fronts!

Keep it up everyone!

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?

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.

Christmas is the time of year for giving. For example, I’ve been giving myself seconds and thirds at all the holiday parties I’ve gone to. (I’m still accepting invitations through the rest of this week). Amy Oliver and Michael Sandoval have been hard at work the past month giving the world a much needed dose of reality when it comes to “green” energy. Remember this article and this one? Those were just the tip of the iceberg. Amy and Michael have no plans to stop their crusade to give every green energy advocate a headache for Christmas. Their latest piece on Townhall.com goes further into the wilderness of green energy fallacies with, “Green Technology that Pollutes the Planet.” Turns out, green energy is the gift that keeps on giving.

Keeping with the theme of green fallacies, another great enviro-lie is that hydraulic fracturing is a boogeyman that sneaks into your house at night and contaminates your drinking water. As with all distortions of reality, a lie repeated often enough eventually becomes “true.” The latest opportunity for anti-fracking fanatics to re-tell their scare story came from an EPA report on groundwater contamination in Wyoming. Predictably, the enviros jumped on this AP story and screamed to the heavens, “SEE! We told you fracking is dangerous!!!!”

Umm…. guys, did you read the report?

Unfortunately for the loony Left, our intern Donovan Schafer did. He found that the Wyoming report did not indict fracking as the Left would have you believe, but rather, exonerated fracking. In this op-ed published in the Colorado Springs Gazette last week, Donovan goes into detail how the Wyoming report concluded that fracking is safe. Here’s a snippet,

So was any drinking water contaminated, and is anyone’s health at risk? The results from the 51 domestic wells respond with a resounding “No!”

There you have it folks. A couple more green energy gifts from us at the Independence to you.

Well, it’s that time again. Time for us at the Independence Institute to say, “I told you so.” It’s quite easy to say I told you so when you have FasTracks around. Anyone can do it really. All you have to do is this: read RTD’s cost estimates and completion dates and… not believe a word of it. They continue to underestimate costs and completion dates for every single one of their rail lines. And why shouldn’t they? It’s the best strategy for selling an inefficient, bloated public works project to voters. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet caught on that “X amount of dollars” really means “X times 5 amount of money.” And “completed by year 20XX” really means “completed by year 20XX + 30 years.”

It’s been the same story, full of lies and deceptions since the 1970’s. Check out this short video we made chronicling RTD’s lies over the years.

The question remains: will voters be fooled a third time? We know RTD will ask for more money. That’s for sure. We just don’t know when they’ll come groveling back to voters to fund the same project yet again.

How many times are you willing to pay for the same project?

By now we’ve had some time to reflect on the beating the Prop 103 tax increase received from Colorado voters a couple weeks ago. It’s pretty amazing isn’t it? We were outspent around 6 to 1 but we managed to destroy the tax hike nearly 2 to 1. Granted, Prop 103 probably would have gone down even if we did nothing, but our side working well together ensured that the beating would resonate for a long time. Like I told Colorado Peak Politics, this tax hike unified us and instead of embarrassing ourselves like we normally do, we worked together to embarrass the enemies of limited government. It proved that we can work together for a common cause. Let Prop 103’s gross failure be our guiding light for the future.

Let’s talk about that future.

Senior Fellow Penn Pfiffner was a guest on the Tax Foundation’s podcast show the other day to talk about Prop 103’s failure and what we need to do to fortify our state against the barrage of calls for bigger and bigger government. Yes, it’s heartening to score such a resounding victory against big government, but it wasn’t the first proposed tax increase and it certainly won’t be the last. It’s a matter of time until we hear about the next government expansion “for the kids.” Likewise, it won’t be long until we hear the next round of sob stories that are designed to pry open our wallets. One victory will not shut down the Left’s super highway into our bank accounts. Penn knows this and does a good job of explaining that we must change our tactics if we are to ensure long-term success. As long as we continue to play only defense, it’s just a matter of time until they break off a big play and dance in our end zone. Even a good defense has holes and weaknesses. Stopping 99% of scoring drives means that 1% are getting through. Therefore, it doesn’t hurt to be on offense every now and again. As the old saying goes, sometimes the best defense is a good offense. Just ask Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.

If you only read one article today, please read Amy Oliver and Michael Sandoval’s new Townhall.com article on the great “green” energy scam: A Stupid Energy Policy. They combine forces once again to thoroughly destroy the idea that government can efficiently create an entire industry based on their own fantasies of what’s good for the environment. Colorado is just one of many states that requires a certain amount of “green” energy production. In our case, it’s pretty high – 30%. This mandate, along with massive subsidies and protections, has enabled an entire industry to be built on a faulty foundation. As we’ve seen, the foundation is coming down… rapidly. Everyone knows the story of Solyndra, but do you know the story of Colorado’s Ascent Solar? What about the fact that Colorado ratepayers will be forced to pay an additional $100 million in 2011 to fund the renewable fantasies mandated by our government?

This new Townhall article is a MUST READ. It will blow your mind and leave you outraged. Additionally, Michael Sandoval appeared on Amy Oliver’s radio show on 1310 KFKA. They spent around 30 minutes talking about the article. Here is the 1310 KFKA audio.

There’s just something refreshing about Vincent Carroll’s writing. It’s clear, it flows well, it’s to the point, and clever all at the same time. I wish I could do what he does. Hell, I’d take doing it half as well. Look at his latest piece in the Denver Post’s opinion section on red light cameras. I love how he sets up his argument with the, “photo-radar system is working just fine if you believe….” x, y, and z preposterous propositions. Then he puts the punch behind his argument with statistics from reports from the likes of Fox 31’s Heidi Hemmat, CBS4’s Rick Sallinger, and our very own investigative reporter Todd Shepherd. Todd released his own report yesterday on one day’s worth of red light tickets at the intersection of 36th and Quebec. Turns out, a full 94% of the tickets issued “were written to vehicles in the right lane” and “many, if not most, were turning or preparing to turn right on red.” In Vincent’s words, the system is working great if you believe a car making a right on red is one notch less dangerous than driving drunk.

Ultimately, Vincent believes we should do away with these transparent attempts at generating some easy revenue. The facts indicate that they do not make us any safer, and as Vincent points out, nor do they make our governments much richer.

There are few times when we at the Independence Institute agree with the Denver Post editorial board. When it happens, our first reaction is… “Check the calendar. Is it April fools?” As far as we can tell, it’s October, so the Denver Post must be completely serious when they wrote this editorial opposing Rollie Heath’s Proposition 103 tax hike. (Side note: I wonder if the Post editorial board is more disturbed by the fact that they agree with us or that they agree with Mike Rosen?)

You can imagine the predicament Rollie Heath finds himself in: he can’t even sell a tax increase (for the children) to the Post editorial board. He must know he has a loser on his hands. Thankfully however, Rollie can always find a friend in Colorado Public Radio. There’s no way CPR would give Rollie a tough appearance.  It would have to be all softballs and sunshine when a Boulder Democrat talks raising taxes on public radio right?

Rollie could not have been more wrong.

Rollie did get his appearance on Colorado Public Radio, just as you’d expect. But unexpectedly, CPR decided to invite our Penn Pfiffner on as the opposition. Sorry Rollie! Take a listen to this CPR audio of the two men debating Rollie’s massive tax increase: $3 billion over the next 5 years. Then after digesting Rollie’s justifications for raising taxes during a recession, take a look at these two research papers by the Independence Institute. The first explains what we all intuitively know: raising taxes kills jobs. Lots of them. Over 11,000 jobs lost in Colorado, that’s the real cost. The second is a quick Issue Backgrounder from Penn Pfiffner himself. It is Penn’s analysis of this huge tax increase.

The writing is on the wall for Proposition 103. Rollie Heath essentially failed to sell fresh chocolate chip cookies to a hungry Cookie Monster. Turns out, Cookie Monster couldn’t stomach what Rollie was selling in this economy. Who knew?