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.

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?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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!

First of all, if you’re conscientious about registering for the frequent flyer program every time you step on an airplane, you may accumulate a few thousand points on various airlines which you fly only occasionally. You’ll never get to the level of a free ticket, but the points expire if you don’t use them. So use them for magazine subscriptions. I’ve been enjoying the daily Wall Street Journal that way for several years, and have used low-level points for dozens of other year-long or half-year subscriptions over the past decades.

Second, there’s a lot to be said for trying many different periodicals with one-time subscriptions. You may find a magazine that becomes indispensable for you (as The New Republic was for me, for about 15 years), but just reading something for a year or a half-year can broaden your knowledge, and then you can move on to something else.

Some category recommendations:

Newsweeklies: Back in the olden days of the 1970s, these were truly great. Then, the daily New York Times wasn’t available outside of the New York area, and the Wall Street Journal was sparse on non-business news. Time and Newsweek, and to a lesser extent U.S. News & World Report, provided in-depth, thoroughly-reported stories of the major issue of the week, the deep inside of presidential campaigns, and so on. These days, it’s hard to make a case for reading the remnants of those once-important magazines.

The Economist is still probably the most influential periodical in the world. If you read its U.S. coverage, you’ll quickly discover that the analysis is not nearly so sharp and insightful as the omniscient tone would imply, and that the coverage has numerous blind spots and biases. Knowing how flawed the U.S. coverage is makes me question The Economist’s accuracy on topics for which I don’t know enough to judge the coverage. So in a sense, the less you know about something, the more useful The Economist is. For example, the latest issue had an article explaining that Poland is going full speed ahead with natural gas development via fracking. Because I previously had never thought about Polish natural gas, I learned a lot by reading the article. Overall, The Economist is still a strong source for weekly world news, as long as you don’t take its editorial judgements too seriously.

If you read French, Courrier International is definitely worth a trial subscription. This Paris-based weekly takes stories from newspapers all over the world, and translates them into French. You’ll get acquainted with many fine newspapers. I ultimately gave up on Courrier because their story and source selection leaned so heavily to the official left. If the choice is between a particular nation’s version of The Guardian vs. The Telegraph, Courrier almost always goes with the former. Their special issues were particularly tendentious and one-sided. But since tastes vary, I’d recommend that people who read French give it a try.

Le Figaro, one of the leading French daily newspapers, publishes a weekly edition for a U.S. audience. It’s well-written, and has good coverage of all the Francophone world, including African analysis that is hard to find in U.S. papers. As with The Economist and Courrier International, there’s also plenty of European news that you won’t find in the U.S. dailies. Le Figaro is right-wing by French standards, which places its approximately in the same zone as the New York Times. Le Monde, which is left-wing by French standards, also has a weekly; I’ve read occasional issues, but never subscribed, and, ideology aside, Le Figaro has bigger print and better layout.

Business and Finance: If you’re a law student, or in the same general age group, the time to start learning about business and investing is now. Don’t wait until you’ve saved $50,000 in a 401(k)  and have to figure out where to put it. The sooner you start reading and thinking about investing and business, the more you’ll see fads and bubbles come and go, and the less likely you’ll be to invest foolishly 25 years from now, or to allow yourself to be led around by a self-dealing financial advisor. Besides, whatever kind of lawyer you become (or whatever other career), you’ll almost certainly be more useful to clients and yourself if you have some background knowledge of business–whether you’re serving as a volunteer on the Board of a small non-profit, or urging your friend not to spend his life savings on program trading.

Forbes, Fortune, and Business Week remain the big three of the business magazines. Give each of them a try, and pick your favorite. I life Forbes, for excellent writing, and its pro-capitalist orientation. Barron’s is worth a trial subscription. It’s purely about investing, not about business in general. For a person just starting to think about the stock markets and other financial investments, Barron’s is a good choice. You may not want the avalance of daily information that comes in the Wall Street Journal or Investor’s Business Daily. Rather, in the learning stage, you may be better off with the weekly perspective. Especially useful are the big articles which provide the viewpoints of numerous experts on a major topic (e.g., how will the economy perform in the next 12 months?). As you’ll find, experts, even well-qualified and sincere ones, are often wrong about economic predictions. One of the reasons to start reading the business/finance press early in life is to develop a healthy skepticism about following any single expert’s advice.

Money is OK if you know absolutely nothing about money, and have to start at the very beginning.

New York City:  If you’ve ever lived there, it’s fun to stay in touch. Of course the New York Times takes care of this for plenty of readers who used to live in The City, but there are other options. New York magazine is lively and interesting, and captures the NY feel in a way that the Times doesn’t. It also sometimes has strong reporting on national politics. Also worth trying is the weekly New York Observer newspaper, which has great coverage of state and city politics. As with New York, the political slant is firmly to the left, but the factual reporting can sometimes be very good. The New Yorker remains, for eight decades running, the best cartoon magazine in the world. It has, unfortunately, also become a favorite vehicle for character assassination–sort of a highbrow version of ProgressNow. I’d trust its non-fiction articles only on topics which don’t involve U.S. politics.

Legal newspapers: Especially if you can get a law student discount subscription, the National Law Journal (general national news), Legal Times (D.C. focus), and American Lawyer (corporate lawyers) are all worth trying. The same goes for any local/regional law paper in your area, such as New York Law Journal. Because of the Internet, none of these are probably as influential as they were 20 years ago, but they’re still a good way to diversify your diet of legal news.

Daily newspaper: Coverage of legal issues in the mainstream daily press is typically horrible, with stories tending to concentrate only on who won or lost, while leaving the reader in the dark about the precise legal issue in dispute. But for general coverage of the state where you live, there is still nothing that comes remotely close to the daily newspaper. So if you live in the Denver area, you ought to be a daily reader the Denver Post; in Dallas,  the Dallas Morning News, and so on. Yes, those papers can be biased and selective, but they’re still far superior to any other single source for state and local coverage.

On top of that, I’d recommend a high-quality national newspaper. In other words, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. The Times has a much larger “news hole,” except for business news. But the Journal’s new stories are much less likely to be DNC opinion essays misplaced in the news section. While both papers are well-written, the Journal is better-written. And the Journal’s Friday/Saturday culture and leisure coverage has gotten quite good. For the Times, I’d recommend a partial weekly subscription (e.g., Monday to Friday), rather than the Sunday paper. You’ll get a better variety of stories in the weekday editions, and the weekly special section on Science and Technology is sometimes excellent.  The Sunday Times does have the Book Review, which is now more important than ever, given the harsh cutbacks in book reviews at almost every other newspaper. But you can always subscribe to the Book Review separately, if it’s important to you.

For a change of pace, London’s Financial Times can sometimes be obtained with airline points. Like the Wall Street Journal, it’s a business newspaper which covers lots of regular news, and some culture. And of course plenty of U.K. news. The editorial viewpoint might, roughly speaking, be considered somewhat similar to The Economist: supportive of free markets and globalization in general, but not at all afraid of big government activism.

Gun Week: Despite the title, published tri-monthly by the Second Amendment Foundation. Pre-Internet, the indispensible source of news on the firearms industry and the gun control issue. Even today, the best single source for people who follow the topic closely.

Bonus on-line reading: One of the big differences between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times is reporting on the United Nations. The Journal has done excellent investigative reporting on the U.N. The Times has also done some good work, as in coverage of the “peacekeeping” fiasco in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But Times coverage of U.N. HQ often consists of running p.r. interference on behalf of the U.N. For daily coverage of the U.N., by far the best source in the world is the indefatigable Matthew Lee, of the on-line Inner City Press. Lee’s personal viewpoint is definitely from the Left, but he is relentless at digging into the corruption, lies, and human rights abuses perpetrated by an organization which too often escapes serious journalistic scrutiny, all the more so because of budget cuts in international coverage in most of the rest of the media. To his credit, the United Nations Development Programme temporarily convinced Google News to disappear Inner City Press.

p.s.: In response to some of the comments: Legal Times and National Law Journal merged last year; all the more reason for law students to give NLJ a chance, I guess. The above periodicals are only a small fraction of the periodicals to which I subscribe, and those to which I’ve subscribed in the past. Not included are categories including public affairs (e.g., Mother Jones, Natonal Review, Reason), Congress (National Journal etc.), hobby/lifestyle (Sky & Telescope), sports (Field & Stream), or scholarly journals. I’ll write about some of those when mood strikes.

Oooooohhhhhh, that must sting a little.

First, check out research associate and health care blogger Brian Schwartz in the Denver Post as he warns us against getting mugged by a politically controlled insurance exchange.

Then check out Mothers Against Debt (MAD) director Amy Oliver Cooke in The Daily Caller as she calls out members of Congress on their “reckless spending that enslaves our children to a nightmarish economic future of crippling debt, high unemployment, skyrocketing interest rates, outrageous tax rates and limited economic opportunities.” Geez Amy, tell us how you really feel.

And over at the Huffpost Denver, I take a look at a recently passed bill that will hopefully give lawmakers pause before passing new punishable offenses that further overcriminalize the economic and personal lives of Coloradans.