Tucked away in Friday's Denver Post was this little plea for flexibility from the state college presidents:
Several prominent college leaders want lawmakers to step aside and allow them to raise the price of tuition as they see fit -- especially with severe state budget cuts looming.
University of Colorado president Bruce Benson -- with presidents at other schools lining up behind him -- is urging the legislature to loosen regulations that public colleges and universities have to abide by in doing business every day.
Benson believes the schools could save money and time if they could make decisions for themselves and not have to run everything through the loop of the legislature and the state Department of Higher Education.
I'm sure they could save time, but saving money doesn't seem to be much on their minds. In fact, the one thing you almost never see is any questioning or examination of how colleges are spending their money.
Note that this is the same set of college presidents who ran as from the plague from a suggestion that they get exactly that flexibility in return for forgoing state support altogether. Translation: keep funding us, but relinquish any control or right to question how we spend or what we charge.
Yeah, that's going to go over well in a recession.
The single best description of the big business that colleges have become is still, "Higher Ed, Inc.," by James B. Twitchell, published almost four years ago.
We'll be interviewing CU Regent Tom Lucero, who's already announced he's running for CD-4 in two years, tomorrow evening on our Blog Talk Radio show, and you can bet that funding and spending at our state's universities will feature prominently.
A large rally, in support of Israel's war with the terror group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, has been announced for this Sunday. It will take place at 2PM on the west steps of the Colorado State Capitol Building. The theme will be: "Support Israel's right of self-defense in Gaza."
Inside the Hebrew Educational Alliance, the pro-Israel speakers and community members met to promote moral clarity. I had been afraid that it would be heavy on the peace and light on the moral distinctions between the two sides, but I was pleasantly surprised. Below, Rabbi Bruce Dollin gives a strong defense of Israel (I missed the first 30 seconds or so). Gil Artzyeli, the Deputy Consul from LA, also addressed the group, and his video is at my YouTube channel.
Towards the end, the assembled recited the prayers for the IDF and for the State of Israel. I think it's important to reprint the IDF prayer here, so you can see what a Jewish prayer for the military looks like:
Bless the soldiers of Israel's Defense Forces, and every one who stands guard in order to protect our people. May the Holy One, Blessed be He, protect them and save them from all troubles and afflictions, from all sickness and injury, and send blessing to all their endeavors. May the words of the Prophets come to fruition through them, "and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. And each shall sit under the vine and under the fig tree and none shall be afraid," and let us say, Amen.
That's slightly different from the sentiments expressed by the pro-Hamas demonstrators outside the synagogue:
Note the one sign that says, "Live by the sword, Die by the sword," featuring a mushroom cloud. Can anyone find me any interpretation other than a naked threat of annihilation?
I also like the claim that "750,000 were murdered by the 'Israelites.'" Unless they're out there representing the Canaanites, Amalekites, and Moabites, I have no idea what they could be talking about.
And of course, for some reason, the chants of "Allahu Akhbar" went unremarked by the media.
Does The AP Realize That North Korea Is a Dictatorship?
Evidently, not until the 10th paragraph of this puff piece about a pro-government rally (is there any other kind in Pyongyang?) that attracted conscripted 100,000 hapless souls. Here's how it starts:
Tens of thousands of North Koreans rallied in Pyongyang in a display of might and loyalty underscoring their government's guiding "military first" principal amid tensions with rival South Korea.
The government mobilized 100,000 North Koreans for Monday's annual New Year's rally, which honors leader Kim Jong Il and reaffirms full public support for his rule in the year ahead.
Pumping their right fists in unison, they marched through Pyongyang's main Kim Il Sung plaza pledging their loyalty, some waving huge red flags as top officials watched from a viewing stand.
Gee, do you think maybe their participation was...coerced? Eventually, in paragraph 10, we find out that North Korea is a "totalitarian state."
Sometimes, it's best to avoid making enemies. Out of nowhere, Gov. Ritter has appointed Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennett to succeed Ken Salazar in the Senate.
People are perplexed.
I have no reason to doubt that Gov. Ritter really believes that Mr. Bennett will make a good senator, and he may. But he's not a former legislator at any level, and has never held elective office. In fact, he's never run for anything. (Neither, you know, has, you know, Caroline Kennedy, you know, but at least, you know, from a political family, don't ya know.)
There's general agreement that he'll be a weaker re-election candidate than just about any of the other headline choices. I'm not sure that's true, given CoDA's ability to raise and distribute non-candidate money, and they may well feel that he'll fit right in with their "educate the idiots" agenda. But let's assume for the moment that that's correct.
Gov. Ritter hasn't just avoided picking the winner in this sweepstakes. As importantly, he's avoided picking the losers. Any of them may perceive a primary worth running and worth winning. None of them feels locked out. All of them can proceed with whatever career plans they had just after the election, so nobody's worse off. They call plausibly claim to be disappointed, but not excluded. Down, but not out.
Plus, he may well have created a second target of opportunity for Republicans looking for statewide office in two years.
Among the central European countries to have regained their freedom after 1989, the Czechs have enjoyed the greatest run of success. Starting with the Velvet Revolution, that managed a peaceful transition of power, the country has consistently made wise choices. (Look, throwing Ceacescu and his wife up against the wall and machine-gunning them was one of the great moments in human liberty, but best viewed from a distance.)
But more than that, they've made common sense and moral choices, not easy when you're in an EU dominated by Germany and France.
They elected Vaclav Havel, one of the few poets with enough common sense and political smarts to guide the transition to democracy, and establish apparently enduring institutions.
They're one of only two European countries (along with the Poles) not resigned to living under Iranian nuclear blackmail, having signed onto hosting pieces of an anti-missile system.
Their current president, Vaclav Klaus, has penned a book defending economic liberty against the new religion of environmentalism
The current foreign minister has supported both for Israel's preliminary air attacks and its current ground offensive, no small matter as the Czechs current hold the EU's rotating presidency.
While other Europeans indulge their latent anti-Semitism, the Czechs, "enjoy the luxury of telling the truth."
Whence this island of common sense in the middle of Europe? I don't know enough Czech history to say for certain, but it would appear that whatever it is manifested itself early on, in the decision to try for a peaceful Soviet exit and de-Communification.
Tomorrow evening at 5:30 PM at the Hebrew Education Alliance, at 3600 S. Ivanhoe St. in Denver, the Jewish community is sponsoring a "Gathering for Israel." It has three sponsoring and 20 co-sponsoring organizations, including synagogues of every denomination and Faith Bible Chapel.
I don't have any more information at the moment about the program, but to paraphrase the old ad, you don't have to be Jewish to come.
The state of Colorado will allocate the HUD funds, and community development groups, with the help of elected officials, will use the money. NSP money can be combined with HUD's Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Program funds as well as other funding resources.
This doesn't even include all the administrative costs; some of the $6 million will go to those, as well. The fingers in the pie include: the IRS, HUD, the state of Colorado, community development groups, local elected officials, who will rely on local bureaucrats, all of whom have incentives to maximize their respective cuts, none of whom have incentives to actually improve neighborhoods. I'd love to see the cost accounting at the federal, state, and local levels for this cash, but none will be forthcoming, I'm sure.
Worse still, $6 million isn't even worth the effort. According to the City Assessor's Office, we can roughly value all the residential real estate, both real property and condos, at about $40 billion. Six million isn't enough to arrest a trend of declining home prices; it is, however, enough to pick favorites and reward allies.
If there are distressed properties for improvement at a profit, there are plenty of investors willing to risk their own money, without having to make the round trip through three different bureaucracies.
Maybe they could even hire some of those paper-pushers to do the framing.
The Governor of Oregon has come under fire for wanting to replace the gas tax with a mileage tax. He wants to use GPS to track residents' mileage, and then assess the tax at the pump.
At first glance, this might seem like the right way to assess the tax. Wear and tear on roads is more closely related to miles driven than to gallons of gas consumed. In practice, it's a terrible mis-assessment of taxes, raising questions of jurisdiction, cost-to-revenue matching, government-sponsored behavior modification, and CAFE standards. And that's without the intrusiveness of the government watching where you drive your car.
If gas tax revenues are down, it results from some combination of better mileage and less driving. Better mileage undermines the argument for higher CAFE standards, as it happened without them.
Less driving - supposedly the behavior we all want - shows the dangers of using the government as a massive behavior-modification program. Governments do a terrible job of matching revenue structure to cost structure; if successful, the programs that were dependent on sinful excess suffer.
I've written about Denver Water's experience (and now neighboring Aurora's experience) a couple of times. Almost all of their costs are fixed, so higher charges result in lower usage, and less revenue, but does little to lower costs. They raise rates even further, enraging consumers who are already watching their yards turn brown in years of plentiful snowpack.
We've seen this with smoking. Smoking in the US is down, and yields on tobacco-backed revenue bonds are up. Long-term bonds paying 5% coupon are routinely priced at 9% yield-to-maturity. This in a declining interest-rate environment, with a tax-free coupon. Often, these bonds are now rated at just over junk level.
Ideally, fees would allocate taxes to the roads being driven and their maintenance costs, from the drivers using them. But it isn't necessary to tax each driver preicsely; it's only necessary to make sure that aggregate collections match aggregate costs.
A mileage tax would tax only Oregonians. But they drive in neighboring states, and Washingtonians and Californians use Oregon's roads. All things being equal, I'm most likely to fill up in a jurisdiction where I do most of my driving. And under such conditions, a point-of-sale system would ensure that every jurisdiction would collect its fair share of road use taxes over time.
All things being equal. Of course, they're not. I no longer drive out of my way to get better gas prices. But I will try to nurse a tank to get to the cheapest gas near my regular route. Bureaucrats argue that this leads to competition. As though there were something wrong with that.
With a whole year ahead of us, it seems churlish to take up New Year's with complaints, so I thought I'd point out something good happening here.
The Colorado Senate Republicans are light-years ahead of their House colleagues in PR. I'm not certain if being on Facebook is a requirement for being in the caucus, but at least 4 of them are friends of mine on Facebook, and the web page is consistently kept up to date with committee assignments and legislative agenda items.
They even have a twitter feed, although for the moment, it seems to be mostly a stream announcing media appearances and press quotes. Hopefully, though, they'll find some creative uses for it during the legislative session. It'd be interested to see what Senators tweet during committee hearings.
On February, 13, we'll be having Sen. Mike Kopp on RMA Radio, and new media and social networking will be high on the list of topics.
Last night, Denver had its very own pro-Hamas rally on the steps of the state capitol building, mostly involving sign-waving, chanting, and evening prayers. Yes, organized in some small part by, well, she who doesn't use that last name any more since she got married.
"We have a neighbor who is active with Hamas. The entire neighborhood has evacuated. They are afraid of being attacked."
Shemsadeen Ben-Masaud, a youth director with the Muslim American Society, led the crowd in chants: "Hey, hey, ho, ho - the occupation has got to go" as well as "Long live Palestine."
They keep this sort of thing up and Islam is going to have an image problem.
As well as some of the other signs that somehow didn't make it into the paper.
Because nothing says, "a free people," like a bloody red fist punching through the bottom of their flag:
Ah, the police here aren't like the police in Gaza:
For the Powerline guys, yes, it seems as though the domestic political affiliations and hopes are the same here as in Minneapolis, just two sides of the same sign:
The obligatory appropriation of Jewish holidays and horrors:
Which for some reason isn't as bad as appropriating their food. Look, sushi, pizza, and hamburgers aren't American, either, but you don't see those countries going out and attacking the US, do you?
No American flags in evidence, for some reason, but the baby blues were there for all to see:
As I said, a fair amount of the chanting was in Arabic, there were public prayers, and there are plans for Friday public prayers to be held there either this Friday or on an upcoming Friday. Not a prayer vigil. Friday public prayers, as in, "which way to the wudu?" prayers.
But...I didn't think this had anything to do with religion.
Fourteen years is a long time at any job, but especially as an NFL head coach. Mike Shanahan hadn't replicated the great success of his two Super Bowl wins of the late 90s, hadn't even come close in a long time. And just when he seemed a cinch to put the team in the playoffs for the first time in 3 years, he pulled a Norv Turner, his team crashing and burning in spectacular fashion on Sunday night.
Denver, like Washington, is a football town. I remember in 1989, the season after the Redskins beat Denver in the Super Bowl, a Redskins pre-season game won it's time slot in what the WaPo,'s TV critic dubbed, "The Redskins devour everything in their path." Denver's pretty much the same way. The town put up with B+ teams for a decade only because of those two Lombardi trophies.
Coaches with total control, who double as GMs rarely do well. It's almost impossible to be both good cop and bad cop at the same time to the same player. Instead of working with what they have, they have to divide their attention with getting more. They'll fall in love with personnel decisions that are a mistake. (Some of Joe Gibbs's biggest blunders came when he demanded particular players. Almost certainly his success the 2nd time around was limited by the lack of a strong GM like Charley Casserly or Bobby Beathard.)
Still, those two Super Bowl wins, numerous playoff appearances, they count for a lot. Towns with winning teams tend to forget how hard it is to get there, and how long it can be between successes. Shanahan's time was probably up. But we should appreciate what he did while he was here.
On this, the 143rd anniversary of the birth of Rudyard Kipling, we present one of his most timely, and most timeless poems. Its sentiments express quite well why, although there is much to admire in libertarianism, I'm a Burkean conservative.
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
defending economic liberty against the new religion of environmentalism
