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.

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Were you too busy having a social life this year to follow political goings on in Colorado? Then catch up by tuning in to the Independence Institute’s public affairs television show Devil’s Advocate tonight as Denver Business Journal reporter Ed Sealover and Colorado Public Television’s Dominic Dezzutti join host Jon Caldara for the political year in review. That’s 8:30 pm tonight on Colorado Public Television 12. Re-broadcast Monday at 1:30pm.

Back in the olden days, readers interested in the history of a presidential race would have to wait until the year after the election to read a book about it. Theodore White created the genre of presidential campaign books with The Making of the President 1960. It was published in 1961. White wrote three more books in the series, and they are still great reading for people interested in the history of American politics. Although be forewarned, the 1964 and 1968 books are enormous.

There was once a time when it was considered unseemly for even the most ambitious candidates to announce before the calendar year of the election. That’s one reason that John F. Kennedy waited until Jan. 2, 1960, to formally announce. George McGovern broke the mold by formally announcing on Jan. 18, 1971, which turned out to be the right strategy for a long-shot who needed plenty of time to organize. Jimmy Carter studied the McGovern campaign assiduously, and used its tactics, including the very early announcement, to win his own long-shot race in 1976.

So now, with almost everyone practicing McGovernism, the presidential campaign has been going hard for much of the pre-election year. If you want to know the history thus far, the just-published Election 2012: The Battle Begins is a strong choice. It’s written by Tom Bevan and Carl Cannon, and published by RealClearPolitics.com, the world’s best political website. Election 2012 is e-book only, and costs just $2.99. The ideal reader might be someone who lives abroad, is very interested in American politics, and only gets the limited coverage available from the International Herald Tribune, or foreign papers. In the United States, readers who are so fascinated with politics as to want to read a history of the election the year before the election will probably already know most of what’s in the narrative. Yet even those readers will find interesting details about the behind-the-scenes strategizing and the battles within the campaign staffs, especially for Gingrich, Bachmann, and Pawlenty. And the story of how Huckabee looked very seriously at a run, and then backed away. Readers will also learn about the inside of the Romney campaign, but not about behind-the-scenes turmoil, because this time around Mitt’s campaign is as smooth and unflappable as is Mitt himself while on a debate stage.

If you are looking for a back-up plan tonight in case that blind date is a disaster, consider tuning into the Independence Institute’s public affairs television program, Devil’s Advocate, at 8:30 PM on Colorado Public Television 12. Tonight, Denver Post reporter Lynn Bartels and Fox 31 political reporter Eli Stokols join host Jon Caldara to talk about the results of the recent elections in Colorado.

Re-broadcast on Monday at 1:30 PM.

Get used to the national attention my fellow Coloradans! It won’t be going away until after next November’s elections. For example, President Obama has “dropped by” what, a half dozen times already? He’s here so frequently I figure I’d ask him to do something useful the next time. Like water my plants or something.

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.

Today South Carolina Republican Senator Jim Demint hosted a forum at which five Republican presidential candidates spoke. The transcript is here.  Each candidate appeared one at a time, and the format allowed for in-depth questions and answers. Among the questioners was Princeton University’s Robert George. Prof. George asked each candidate if he or she would support congressional legislation, under section 5 of the 14th Amendment, to ban abortion. To state the obvious, such legislation would be contrary not only to Roe v. Wade and Penn. v. Casey (abortion rights are protected by section 1 of the 14th Amendment), but also to Boerne v. Flores (Congress cannot use section 5 to protect a right in defiance of direct Supreme Court holding about the particular aspect of the right).  The question explicitly presumed that Roe v. Wade had not been overturned, and that a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution had not been adopted.

The candidates’ answers were as follows:

Bachmann: Yes.

Cain: Yes.

Gingrich: Yes. Cooper v. Aaron‘s assertion of judicial supremacy was wrong. Following the precedent of the first Jefferson administration, I would abolish some federal judgeships. But I am not as bold as Jefferson. “I would do no more than eliminate Judge Barry in San Antonio and the ninth circuit. That’s the most I would go for. (LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE). But let me say this. That’s part of the national debate. That’s not a rhetorical comment. I believe the legislative and executive branches have an obligation to defend the constitution against judges who are tyrannical and who seek to impose un-American values on the people of the United States.”

Paul: No. Violence and murder should be dealt with by the states. The federal police are already too numerous. I support a bill to deprive lower federal courts of jurisdiction over abortion cases, so that state restrictions on abortion would be immune from judicial review.

Romney: No. I would focus on appointing judges who would return abortion regulation to the states. The George proposal “would create obviously a constitutional crisis. Could that happen in this country? Could there be circumstances where that might occur? I think it’s reasonable that something of that nature might happen someday. That’s not something I would precipitate.”

Personally, I agree with the Romney approach. Moreover, the next President is going to have to address a fiscal crisis that will devastate the United States economy soon if it is not solved. Dealing with the fiscal crisis is going to be quite difficult politically, in part because there are many millions of people who benefit from the current, and unsustainable, levels of federal spending. The tax consumers may be very highly resistant to any reduction in the amount of money that flows to them. So there will be no shortage of national division and acrimony. Thus, 2013 would be an especially bad time to precipitate a constitutional crisis over a social issue. The answers of Romney and Paul displayed prudence, which I think is a very important characteristic for a President, and the answers of Bachmann, Cain, and Gingrich did not.

As for the Ninth Circuit, Gingrich has been saying the same thing since March, according to Politico. I have not found anywhere where he has provided details on this plan, but perhaps it would involve merging the 9th circuit states into the 8th and 10th circuits, since they border the 9th. The Politico article is not entirely clear, but it appears that Gingrich has claimed that he could get rid of the 9th circuit by signing an executive order. This would be plainly unconstitutional, a usurpation of power worthy of impeachment. Article III gives Congress, not the President, the power to “ordain and establish” the inferior federal courts. During the Jefferson administration, the Judiciary Act of 1802 repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801, in which the lame duck Federalist Congress had created many new federal judgeships, to which President John Adams had appointed Federalists in the waning days of his administration. As President Jefferson recognized, the choice to eliminate federal judgeships belongs to Congress, not the President acting by himself. [Update: a commenter says the video (for which a link was not provided) shows that Gingrich was not claiming that he could abolish the 9th Cir. by executive order. I looked on the Internet, and did not find a video of the March 25 Iowa speech by Gingrich. There's a video of a speech earlier that month in Iowa, in which he criticizes the 9th cir. but does not call for its abolition.]

Boy is the corporate welfare machine rolling in Aurora these days. Gaylord Entertainment is benefiting from a massive amount of subsidies and tax breaks from the city of Aurora for the honor of locating their hotel and conference center there. If Gaylord were not granted the $300 million in generous “support,” the theory goes, they would not have located their project in Aurora. Of course whether they put roots down in Aurora or somewhere else is besides the point. What matters is the massive wealth transfer from taxpayers in Aurora to a private corporation.

One way for a city to oil up their corporate welfare machine is to “blight” some land, which allows local governments, schools and special districts to “rebate to developers what they pay in property taxes for 25 years.” The word “blight” is to developers as the word “candy” is to children. Except that children have to work a little sometimes to get their candy. However, blighting some land only requires some fancy English language tricks and a stroke of the corporate welfare pen. Here’s what Sen. Morgan Carroll had to say in the Denver Post about this scheme,

It does not pass the straight-face test for the blighted designation… It’s a financing game to get public subsidies for a project that might be wonderful if it were privately financed.

Sen. Carroll hits it out of the park with, “if it were privately financed.” You know, I remember a time when companies would raise money the old-fashioned way – through bank loans. And, now I know I’m showing my age with this one, through private investors. Crazy right? Corporations used to raise capital through means that do not take taxpayers hostage. Not anymore. Now when a project isn’t profitable enough to catch the attention of folks who want to make investments with their own money (to earn a little profit), corporations go to city councils and pitch unprofitable ideas to be financed off the backs of the residents. If banks say no, governments say yes.

Beware of the terms, “incentives,” “grants,” “urban-renewal,” “blight,” “public-private partnership,” and “public investment.” They are all euphemisms for the taxpayer funded corporate welfare gravy train.

Here’s what senior fellow Randal O’Toole has to say about this Gaylord project in the Denver Post earlier this month: Taxpayers Should Reject TIF.

It’s a double whammy of Devil’s Advocate this Friday night. Same half-hour of public affairs television excellence, but in two segments. First, I am joined by Rob O’Dea, editor of BoCo360.com and Lindsey Sterling Krank of the Prairie Dog Coalition for a debate over what to do with Boulder’s burgeoning prairie dog population. Then I am joined by new State Republican Party Chairman Ryan Call for a discussion about the role of the state party and the Colorado GOP’s chances in 2012. That’s Friday, April 22 at 8:30 PM on Colorado Public Television 12. Re-broadcast the following Monday at 1:30PM.

I wanted to update my readers on the continued love affair between Xcel and our General Assembly. Yesterday, unsurprising to anyone following this close relationship, Xcel was able to get it’s way again under the gold dome as HB 1291 – legislation that approves the Air Quality Control Commission’s Regional Haze State Implementation Plan – passed out of Senate committee on a 3-2, party line vote. This was despite emotionally charged testimony from Pueblo union members describing the ill effects of high energy prices on families, workers, business, and the steel industry. It passed also in the face of compelling testimony from Environmental Policy writer William Yeatman, who flew all the way from Washington, DC to testify against this monstrosity. The fact remains: once Xcel makes its mind up about something, it almost assuredly gets what it wants.

So what does this mean? Well, it still has to clear a few more hurdles before it reaches the governor’s desk. But we all know the biggest mountain has been climbed already. It also means Xcel secures another source of big time revenue. “Seeing green” means something entirely different to the fat cats at Xcel. The bottom line is this: when Xcel wins, consumers lose. They are using their cozy relationship with lawmakers to hike energy prices and garner sweet deals – at our expense. Which is all the more upsetting when they secure fat deals that are, in all likelihood, ILLEGAL on their face. We despise all forms of corporate welfare here at Independence. But perhaps the worst kind is of the state-sanctioned monopoly variety. In this case, consumers really have nowhere to go.