Freedom Unaffiliated

The speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, has called for a vote on funding for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. He has done so at sizable professional risk. His isolationist Republicans might remove him from his leadership position for it.

By the time you read this column, you’ll likely know how those votes went. As I write this, I have no idea. But I do know there’s one vote that could be wildly important, if only there were a representative to cast it.

With Ken Buck’s resignation well before his term ends, he has left the voters of Colorado’s 4th Congressional District without a voice in government, and at a remarkably critical time.

Not only is the future of Ukraine’s very existence at stake, but, again, so could be the leadership of the U.S. House. And collapse there could have a sizable impact on November’s elections nationwide.

Even given my very libertarian leanings, I understand providing for the common defense is a core, enumerated duty of the federal government.

I see a very big difference between supporting our allies with American dollars and goods versus with American blood. One I support. The other I’d fight.

Our president has given a very clear message to our foes around the globe. The United States will always back down, always be the first to flinch.

President Joe Biden said our withdrawal from Afghanistan would not be like the fall of Saigon, with people clamoring to grab onto a helicopter. He was right. Instead, they were fighting each other to grab on to the side of a plane.

He sent a signal of what U.S. commitment looks like. And Putin was watching.

While Biden’s words of encouragement for the people of Ukraine are occasionally stirring, he has doled out military supplies and technologies so miserly that Putin’s aggression, which could have been stopped had the Ukrainians had the right equipment, might well be victorious.

Ukraine was in a remarkably advantageous position to win this conflict if only they had the tanks and air superiority needed in the vital first months of the conflict. Biden refused to make that happen for fear Putin might escalate.

In case no one’s noticed, Putin is escalating. And Xi Jinping is watching.

Biden takes credit for the American-made air defenses that intercepted about 300 Iranian missiles headed toward Israel. Trying to convince Israel’s prime minister not to retaliate, he encouraged Benjamin Netanyahu to “just take the win.”

If someone shot at you 300 times but you were able to dodge them all, would you call that a win? And if you did, might it encourage the shooter?

As an example of the beautiful irony only history can provide, in the 1980s, Biden was one of the loudest voices against then-President Ronald Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, sometimes lampooned as “Star Wars.” Out of Reagan’s work toward a missile-defense shield, Israel has just been saved 300 times over, for Biden to take credit.

There are important and valid policy differences on foreign military aid. All I know is Colorado is down one important vote in Congress at a very critical time in history.

I suspect Buck left well before the end of his term so he could be more saleable as a commentator on CNN or MSNBC. They need the credibility of a hardcore conservative, which Ken is, but they’d only hire one who is willing to throw rocks at Donald Trump.

And what good would Buck be to a cable news show looking to take on Trump from the right if he could only join the team after the election. Thus, his market value as a talking head will be much higher as the presidential campaign heats up.

Of course, this is just my speculation. But Buck does make a very good talking head.

Sadly, America doesn’t need another talking head. At this precarious moment in a world of growing instability, it would be nice to have a representative working on behalf of 720,000 Coloradans.

A special election to fill the remainder of Buck’s term will be June 25.

Two months can be a long, long time as international tensions boil far from home and leadership voids create havoc here at home.

By Mike Rosen

The conventional definition of patriotism is love for and loyalty to one’s country. A 2023 survey published in the Wall Street Journal found that only 38% of respondents thought patriotism was very important to them, down sharply from 70% when that question was first asked in 1998.While 59% of seniors 65 and older feel that way today, only 23% of adults under 30 do.

I vividly remember America’s 200th birthday in 1976. Patriotic activities and celebrations abounded across the country leading up to a grand finale on the glorious Bicentennial Day. What has doused that American spirit? The American left.

It’s been a long slog but I’d trace its roots to the 1960s and 70s with the emergence of what came to be called the “New Left.” Violent political demonstrations from Vietnam War protestors and bombings from the radical Weather Underground were a fertile breeding ground. A major ideological inspiration for the New Left was Herbert Marcuse, a German philosopher in what was called the Frankfurt School in the 1920s, a collection of Marxist academics and intellectuals who sought to take Karl Marx’s theories to a higher level and perfect its imperfections.

Rejecting Marx’s pathway to socialist utopia, Marcuse believed the “proletariat” would not rise up in revolt to overturn capitalism. He later emigrated to the U.S., and while teaching at Harvard in the 1950s told leftist students to forsake violence and instead engage in a “long march through the institutions,” especially educational institutions which could be a refuge for radicals. Many of his followers later became the tenured left and two generations of their ideological spawn have now fully taken over higher education, fulfilling Marcuse’s dream.

Another legacy of the Frankfurt School is “critical theory,” the application of Marxist social justice and identity politics to all kinds of things like the law, history, race, economics, and culture. One of its early outposts in the U.S. was at Harvard Law School within a department of radical leftist professors spewing Critical Legal Studies. So called “critical thinking” instruction in K-12 with a distinct leftist spin, and Critical Race Theory are offspring. Beware when you hear the term “critical” attached to almost anything.

The left’s poisoning of American history is blatant propaganda. To be sure, slavery is anywhere an abomination but why single out the U.S.? It’s as old as the dawn of humankind and has been ubiquitous. In 6800 B.C., Mesopotamia’s captured enemies were enslaved as laborers. There was slavery 5,000 years ago in Egypt, and later in Ancient Athens, throughout the Roman empire, Asia, in Europe and Africa. American Indians enslaved captured whites and captives from other tribes. It should be noted that that U.S. and Britain were among the first nations to abolish slavery it in the 19th century. America paid for that with treasure and blood, our Civil War taking the lives of 620,000 soldiers on both sides and ending slavery here.

Yes, slavery is a stain on our history, as it is on most every nation in the world at some time in their history. History can’t be reversed, nor should it be forgotten. But the full measure of our country must also consider its virtues and achievements which are second to none in so many fields of human endeavor. Just one of which was our dominant role among our allies in saving the free world from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II.

The left denigrates our history. They sanctimoniously and unfairly judge the culture and standards of those who lived long ago in far different eras through a modern lens, thereby condemning our ancestors. And they undermine American patriotism. The method to their madness is to create a mentality of guilt and self-loathing about who we were and who we are in order to dismantle our foundations, values and culture, to replace it with their socialist paradise on Earth.

The ultimate death blow was laid out in a 1966 article in the far-left “Nation” magazine by Richard Clowen and Francis Fox Piven, a duo of Marxist revolutionaries at the Columbia University School of Social Work. Their strategy to create a new socialist state, here, was to overwhelm the system by creating crises only the government could solve with enormous spending programs, the weight of which would bring on fiscal collapse. In the aftermath, a popular revolution would follow led by Marxist activists in the name of the poor and legions of dependents on government handouts.

In 1996, that may have seemed crazy. Today, with our national debt at $34 trillion and climbing who’s going to stop it? Certainly not Joe Biden and progressive Democrats.

By Jon Caldara

State Sens. Kevin Priola and Chris Hansen are doing their very best impersonation of Carrie A. Nation, the early 1900s prohibitionist who attacked liquor establishments with a hatchet in one hand and a Bible in the other.

But “Mother Nation” just beat up drinkers. She didn’t steal their money and give it to opium users.

Do you know why bailing out student loans feels so morally broken? It’s because people who didn’t go to college are forced to pay people who did. The working class pays so the economic class above them can go to college to make yet more money than them. It’s the opposite direction we think redistribution should go.

Likewise, the current slate of anti-gun bills feels morally wrong to us gun owners (as if we have feelings). We get punished for other people’s crimes. We become criminals for having been responsible and legal.

A bill to punish gun crimes more harshly was shot down by this legislature. So, legislators don’t want to punish the bad guys, just us who haven’t hurt anyone. Even if you love gun control you can see how this warps the brains of we gunnies (I mean, if we had brains).

There is a moral and ethical harm to society when people are penalized for actions others take.

Senate Bill 181 takes this idea to a strange new level. It taxes alcohol to pay for rehab for drug addicts. You drink a beer responsibly, so you should pay to treat a meth junkie.

And of course, the bill labels the tax a “fee” to get around getting the consent of voters. Because of TABOR, tax increases must be put up for a public vote. So-called “fees” don’t.

We voters got so tired of this “Label a tax as a fee” game we passed a citizen’s initiative, Prop 117 in 2020, requiring any fee that takes more than $100 million from us be voted on by … us.

Senate Bill 181 takes more than that, so on the ballot it goes, right? Of course it doesn’t. What kind of state do you think you live in?

The sponsors of the bill, Lords Priola and Chris Hansen, wrote it to expressly avoid Prop 117. To hell with voters.

In the past, legislators would split a huge fee increase into smaller fees, each one just below the $100 million limit. So omniscient are our lords under the Gold Dome, they don’t even try to hide their ostentation with such a pedestrian trick.

So, they call this massive tax a “fee” to avoid voter consent, and willfully ignore a citizen’s initiative that we vote on such “fees.”

The team running around screaming, “we have to save democracy from Trump” is the team giving the middle finger to the voters who democratically passed TABOR and Prop 117.

The word you’re looking for is “hubris.”

The bill taxes booze at the wholesale level, not at the cash register where consumers could see it. That hides taxes so those beer-swilling idiots get angry at the greedy liquor companies, not the politicians.

To the new left, “the ends do justify the means.”

The idea of a “fee” is that the money charged goes to service the person who paid. You pay a building permit fee, so a city inspector makes sure your building is safe. You pay the fee. You get the service.

But like paying off student loans, with Senate Bill 181 you pay and someone else gets the service. The money goes to aid boozers and, and this is the bait-and-switch, drug addicts.

Wait a second — chardonnay sippers must pay for services to fentanyl users?

Yep. Since illicit drug dealers haven’t been filling out their tax forms properly, you’ll have to pay for their damage with the sherry you use for cooking. That makes it not a fee. Those paying aren’t getting the service.

If I didn’t double check my calendar to make sure it was 2024, I’d think this bill came from the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family in the 1980s to pressure people away from the sin of alcohol, you know, for their own good.

If taxing my beer to treat meth heads is a great idea, wouldn’t voters easily pass it?

They know we wouldn’t. So, they trample on democracy. Remember that when they complain about Trump.

By Jon Caldara

Every conversation about the Colorado state Legislature should begin with this preface: “And these are the people who say Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. …” 

The Legislature is moving forward with a bill to rip away direct elections of the Regional Transportation District Board, with the largest population of any local government in the state.

Yes, they are willing to allow a couple of “window dressing” elected seats to “represent” the 3 million suckers in the Denver metro area, while minion political appointees seize control of the state’s largest local government. But the goal is clear: end taxation with representation.

And these are the people who say Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.

The Legislature is moving forward with plans to tax alcohol and give the money to meth heads without a vote of the people, by calling it a “fee,” and the bill is written specifically to do an end-around a citizen’s initiative passed to stop that very thing.

And these are the people who say Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.

Voters rejected a ban on hydraulic fracturing. Months later, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 181 to put harsher restrictions on fracking than what the voters just rejected. But Donald Trump is the threat to democracy.

Voters rejected Prop CC in 2019 to keep their TABOR refunds. So, the Legislature just passed fee after fee after fee to steal most of their refunds anyway. Alas, Trump is a threat to democracy.

Voters rejected Proposition HH, to again keep their TABOR refunds. So, the Legislature passed HH on their own. Trump, blah, blah, blah … democracy!

We can play this game all day. But the Legislature will never admit they’re purposefully working against the expressed will of the people. Well, until now that is.

One Democrat said the quiet part out loud.

Rep. Bob Marshall, acting like that guy at a David Copperfield show quietly explaining how the tricks are done, accidentally spoke the truth during a committee hearing for House Bill 1311.

This bill will, and I know this is gonna be a big surprise to you, take away roughly half of your TABOR refunds for wealth redistribution. And it grows, year after year, guaranteeing your TABOR refunds diminish year after year.

According to the fiscal note on the bill, it could cost you $870 million annually. That’s about half of the expected state surplus — you know, your TABOR refund.

Marshall let slip the observable truth when he said of this bill, “To me it shows somewhat of a deep contempt for the voters because of TABOR, of what they put in place in ‘92, and we’re trying to find a way around it because we don’t like the fact that we have to give $2 billion back to the taxpayers.”

Focus on the magic words, “deep contempt for the voters.”

Bob Marshall, I’d like to thank you for being the first Democrat to say the emperor has no clothes. And, may I suggest you always check under your car before starting the engine.

This tax credit would send cash to poorer Colorado families with children who already get the federal Earned Income Tax Credit among a myriad of other benefits.

But helping the poor is not reason for HB1311. This tax raid will be paid for almost solely by people paying income tax, particularly high-income earners. This erodes our flat income tax rate and forces those useless repugnant people to pay more.

Anyhow, your refund will get cut in half without your vote, because, as you know, Trump is a danger to democracy.

Tax credit scams are the same as the “call it a fee” scams in that it takes away our TABOR refunds without voter consent (sometimes called democracy).

You might recall candidate Jared Polis ran on a promise to end about $1.6 billion a year in “special interest tax giveaways,” to lower the state income tax rate.

Instead, our libertarian governor has signed a cascade of tax giveaways. Last year alone, he signed on to 12 more costing $1.81 billion. According to an Independence Institute report, that’s about $514 more that would have been in your TABOR refund.

Let Marshall’s moment of honesty start a conversation: do we deserve such “deep contempt” from our elected servants?

Oh — and Trump is a threat to democracy. 

Senate Bill 129 and The Case for Donor Privacy

By Jon Caldara

Let’s set the stage with a question: Should Donald Trump become the dictator the left fears, do you want him to know who’s giving to organizations that criticize him?

There are reasons people don’t want others to know with whom they associate and the groups they support.

On Nov. 27, 2015, Robert Lewis Dear Jr. went to the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs and began shooting. Five hours later, a SWAT team crashed their vehicle into the building to capture him, but by then one police officer and two civilians were killed. Five police officers and four civilians were injured.

Many people give donations to Planned Parenthood. And the organization does not release a list of those donors. But let’s imagine they did.

It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine a scenario of someone like Dear using such information to show up at donors’ homes.

Planned Parenthood has a life-or-death reason to keep the list of their supporters private, especially in this highly polarized time.

And if donations weren’t private, those who would like to support Planned Parenthood would have reason to reconsider, and who could blame them.

This isn’t a modern concern. Those who funded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, risked their lives. Founded in 1909, the NAACP focused on racial integration and ending lynching. For protection of their donors, Black and White, the NAACP kept, and still keeps, their donations private.

During the battles over integration the great state of Alabama wanted to pierce that wall of privacy and make those names public. It doesn’t take a genius to theorize they did this so people could threaten their donors and destroy the organization.

But the NAACP fought them all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing their members had a First Amendment right of association and speech, both of which would be greatly injured if they were forced to make their donations publicly available. In a ruling that potentially saved many lives, in 1958, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed.

The harm to donors of controversial organizations might not be physical violence for it to be greatly damaging.

I run Independence Institute. We work for personal and economic freedom in Colorado, freeing us from the coercive power of the state.

For our nearly 40 years, many of our stances have been unpopular with powerful groups. Thus, we have always had a strict policy of donor privacy. If donors want to make their gifts public, well that’s their business.

Among our supporters are business owners who fear retaliation. Imagine a developer or any business that requires interaction and approval from various governmental districts. When found out by those in power an owner supports an unpopular or “dangerous” (to them) organization, it could end their business.

Anyone who has had to deal with getting building and operational permits through a city’s bureaucracy knows how fickle the process can be and how easily it is abused.

But it’s not just those who own businesses that worry about ramifications.

Independence Institute has been a fierce proponent of educational choice since its beginning. David S. D’Evelyn, one of our founders, was the driving force behind making charter schools here a reality. Charters have been perpetually under attack since.

We have donors who are public school teachers and give us maybe $50 a year. These teachers tell me they fear what would happen if their co-workers found out. Their work lives could be ruined. They’re very livelihood could be in jeopardy.

Last Thursday, I had a very odd experience. I went to the state Legislature to testify in favor of Senate Bill 24-129, which would clarify governments in Colorado cannot compel membership lists of, or donations to, organizations like mine.

The oddity? There supporting the bill was Mark Grueskin, longtime powerhouse lawyer who represents the wildly progressive organizations, including the teachers union, with whom I have battled for the last three decades. We disagree violently on public policy, but agree people need to express themselves and associate with whom they wish without fear.

This bill has support from conservative groups such as Americans for Prosperity and Advance Colorado. But it is also supported by leftist groups such as Colorado Wins, ACLU of Colorado, One Colorado and Planned Parenthood for obvious reasons.

Transparency is for government. Privacy is for people.

Give Chance a chance to produce, build, create and belong.

By Jon Caldara

Last Thursday was World Down Syndrome Day. You know, one of those well-intended “awareness” days where we’re supposed to learn about some sad cause or affliction. I usually roll my eyes at these kinds of days because there’s a million of them and I have important shows to binge on Netflix.

But my son, Chance, has Down syndrome, allowing me to be one of those annoying people to force what impacts me into your face. Yes!

When I found out I was going to have a kid with Down syndrome, well, let’s just say I didn’t handle it well.

But life, despite what modern schooling tries to teach, doesn’t give a damn about your feelings. And neither did Chance when he was born.

He quickly became the frat brother I never had, happy, silly, gregarious, reckless, the reincarnation of John Belushi, all Three Stooges in one.

He is the walking definition of the phrase “and this is why we can’t have nice things.” Not that he sets out to break things, he’s just having so much fun being himself, things around him just seem to fall apart, including my back, not to mention my checkbook. ( Younger readers can Google what a checkbook is.)

You know that stupid inspirational poster, “Dance like no one is watching”? He will jump in front of you to make sure you’re watching. That’s his fuel – forcing you into his goofiness.

Chance is the Buddha. I’ve never known anyone who can live in the moment the way he does. Whatever it is he’s doing, he’s loving it completely, otherwise he’d just stop doing it. Just like you right?

He has many health issues. Open heart surgery at about three weeks saved his life. Beyond sizable development delays, life-long health issues are the cost of being in the three-chromosome club.

When we go to Children’s Hospital, where we are frequent fliers, I’ll pretend to be very frightened and try to run out of the doctor’s office saying, “It’s too scary here, I’m out!” He’ll then grab me and say “no, Jon! Be brave like me!”

Yes. He calls me Jon, just started one day. For about five years straight he called me “father,” which was the coolest thing ever. There were about eight months there he named me “Janelle.” Every time I walked by him, he would say “Hi Janelle,” and laugh his head off.

My biggest frustration as a caretaker is dealing with the bureaucracies like Medicaid, the state and the school district.

Well, there is an exception. You know saying something nice about the city of Boulder is like a root canal for me. But Boulder’s park and rec department runs a program called Expand. It’s been as important to Chance’s life as Children’s Hospital which keeps him alive.

It’s where he socializes with his peers, both developmentally disabled and typical, through their activities like camps, sports, game nights, parties, and opportunities just to hang out and socialize.

Chance learns more from those peers than he has ever learned from a school district or a Medicaid program.

Now that he is entering adulthood my worries are how he will fill his days. There is a tendency for people like Chance just to be warehoused and it called compassion — not be part of productive society.

All my son wants to do is work. He’s in a program to get him some work training. You can see the pride beaming from his eyes when he comes back from a job site.

Close to 90% of all adults with Down syndrome don’t have a job. What a shame for all those workplaces that don’t have someone like Chance.

Watching a person with Downs overcome so much just to try to be helpful, well, it puts everyone’s problems into perspective. The workplace changes.

During COVID I learned with disappointment and great heartache how many Americans were happy to forego work to be on the dole. People became addicted to unemployment and handouts.

By contrast Chance shows what I believe is the natural state of man — a longing to produce, to build, to create, to belong.

How heart wrenching to watch so many people who are able to work but refuse to do so while so many like Chance want nothing more than a job, never to be offered one.

All we are saying is give Chance a chance.

Colorado ‘deep fake’ bill a solution in search of a problem

By Mike Rosen

As usual, unlimited-government Democrats in our state legislature are concocting yet another law to protect us from an imagined threat. Now, it’s fear of Artificial Intelligence posing a threat to “free and fair elections” via fraudulent deepfake images or videos depicting “an individual appearing to say or do something the individual did not say or do without the person’s consent.” Another exercise in passing needless and ineffective laws for the sake of “doing something.”

AI is with us and it’s not going away. Like so many other inevitable technological innovations it will bring good things and bad, like atomic energy or the Internet. AI is the latest panic du jour, reminiscent of the Y2K scare just before the turn of the new millennium in 2000. Then, the panic was that computer programs representing four-digit calendar dates with only the last two digits would cause the year 2000 to appear to be 1900. Warnings abounded that computer systems would crash worldwide creating havoc and chaos, and planes would fall from the sky. When the dreaded calendar page ultimately turned, damage was minimal at worst.

Deep faking images are nothing new. It’s basically a much advanced version of photo shopping, a deception, I’ll confess, I once committed. At a stop on a media junket in the Soviet Union in 1987, our group was hosted for a tour and discussion at RIA Novosti, a government-controlled news agency in Moscow. On a table, was a collection of historical photographs, copies of which were on sale for $5.00 each. I bought one of Vladimir Lenin, circa 1920, seated at a conference table while leaning to his side listening attentively to comments from an aid. Back home in Colorado, a friend who owned a photography studio artfully photoshopped my head in place of Lenin’s confidant. Needless to say, I’m not a Lenin admirer. But I loved the irony of Vlad intently seeking my sage advice. I’m not really worried this self-inflicted deepfake will be spread around to expose me as a commie sympathizer.

Democrat legislators are aping Don Quixote, tilting at a windmill imagined to be the AI dragon. Cheering them on are the usual suspects, Colorado Common Cause and Public Citizen, left-wing activists whose idea of a fair election is one that elects progressive Democrats. Aly Belknap of Common Cause is worried that AI disinformation will add to “declining trust in the media among Americans,” and make it easier to spread large-scale propaganda, “leaving voters confused and further questioning what they see and hear.” What constitutes disinformation is highly subjective and open to bias. Editorial cartoons, by their nature, tend to be grossly exaggerated and partisan. Is that disinformation? How about clever satire, like the Babylon Bee?

In 2022, Biden and congressional Democrats created the Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security. Critics compared it to Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s novel “1984,” a dystopian classic of totalitarian government. Nina Jankowicz, a radical left-wing partisan Democrat, was installed as its executive director. Ironically, she was promptly exposed as being a disinformer, on record for lying about the Trump-Russia investigation and its connection to the Hillary Clinton election campaign and lying about Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop emails. Amidst a storm of protest, she was forced to abruptly resign.

Declining public trust in the media has been well deserved long before AI. The dominant-liberal-establishment-mass-media blatantly favors Democrats and progressive causes led by The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, and the Associated Press, along with our own Denver Post, whose combined audience hugely overwhelms the FOX News Channel’s rare conservative platform. Late-night TV talk show hosts are overwhelmingly on the left, demonizing Republicans and pandering to Democrats. Their opening monologues routinely exaggerate and distort issues for laughs. (After his departure nine years ago, Jon Stewart is back hosting Comedy Central’s Daily Show just in time to ridicule Trump and praise Democrats throughout the election campaign.) Does this fit Common Cause’s definition of “disinformation?”

Lying is the language of politics, it’s only a matter of degree, but it’s rarely prosecutable. Constitutional protection of free speech in the media tolerates spin, bias and distortion just short of libel or slander. There’s no practical legislative remedy for this. As for deep fakery, in our free society it’s an insignificant factor in the imperfect universe of opinion, news, and entertainment —to say nothing of the open sewer of acrimonious social media. Confused voters should absolutely question what they see and hear. AI deepfakes will be a minor test of their gullibility.

By Jon Caldara

Any regular reader of this column knows its recurring theme of the immorality of political majorities abusing political minorities. But now, the Colorado Legislature is stepping it up to openly target racial minorities.

They are taking action to keep Black and Brown people from owning firearms, you know, like Whites.

The legislature is making clear that Black and Brown people, since they are statistically poorer, shouldn't own firearms, or at least should face a substantially higher hurdle to exercise this right.

Despite whatever flowery words they use to describe it, their actions assert White upper-class citizens can be trusted with guns, poorer minorities cannot. As if putting firearms out of their reach makes the state safer.

The first gun control laws in the nation were likewise designed specifically to disarm Black freed slaves and other low-income people in the South by taxing them out of reach.

Colorado legislators believe those laws made for a better, safer America.

In a revival of antebellum policy, legislators are now cleverly working toward disempowering such people in Colorado.

House Bill 1349 would place an 11% sin tax on firearm and ammunition purchases. Certainly, this burdens all people who wish to defend themselves in a state with skyrocketing crime. But some will be able to handle this cost increase better than others.

Sure, minorities will argue they live in more dangerous areas and therefore need access to self-defense even more than those in safer, more affluent White areas. But the Legislature is saying out loud what racists think — that they know why those urban areas are more dangerous. Certain types of people who live there can afford guns. Once they can’t, crime will plummet.

Requiring already federally licensed gun stores to get a duplicative, unnecessary, and expensive state license will add even more to the cost of gun purchases. House bill 24-1353 does just this.

And while the Second Amendment guarantees a right to keep and bear arms, House Bill 1270 mandates costly liability insurance to own a gun. People who can barely afford car insurance fortunately won’t be able to afford this.

Anything that adds to the cost of firearms prices the lower echelons out of the so-called “self-defense” market. And that’s the goal.

Many in the minority community have an uneasy relationship with law enforcement. So, the legislature will give police more oversight over them. House Bill 66 tracks and monitors gun sales by forcing private credit/debit card companies to follow such transactions, making these people easier to identify and profile.

Likewise, lawmakers believe it's important cops have more ability to defend themselves than African Americans and Hispanics. House Bill 1292 bans citizens from so-called assault weapons, the very rifles police have with them in Black and Brown communities for their protection. This makes clear that a policeman's life is more precious than any minority’s life in the eyes of the Legislature.

Certainly, the statistics on the 15% of Colorado adults who have concealed carry permits make clear these are the very safest and most responsible gun owners in the state. But that doesn’t stop lawmakers from attempting to price permits out of the pocketbooks of Black and Latino people.

House Bill 1174 requires expensive extra training for concealed carry permit holders. Again, while absolutely no evidence exists that the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people with permits have been irresponsible, this only jacks up the price of legally defending oneself.

Black and Brown people who can't afford the time or money for more training may choose to carry without a permit, providing law enforcement more charges during police stops and thus more jail time.

The legislature seems to think the more people of color are in jail for nonviolent offenses, the safer the rest of us will be.

And what if people of color can afford the much more expensive gun and the much more expensive training? Lawmakers don’t want them defending themselves in dangerous neighborhoods.

Senate Bill 131 makes concealed carry permits virtually useless by labeling many urban areas as “sensitive spaces” where carrying a gun even with a permit is banned.

It’s fine rhetoric that poorer minorities have the same rights as more affluent White people. But clearly that’s not what the Legislature intends.

Clever lawmakers write laws that on their face treat people the same, but in fact creates systemic racism. Bless them.

Indulge me as I quote a few old dead White guys. Yes, of course, we hate them because somehow, they victimized all of us. But, you know, that whole thing about a squirrel occasionally finding a nut…

Who would have guessed Nobel prized economist Milt Friedman was so right when he said there is no such thing as a free lunch. Quite literally.

With Prop FF in 2022 Coloradans voted to tax rich people to give free lunches to all public-school kids.

Taxing other people is a delightful pleasure. Political minorities are there for us to abuse after all, think cigarette smokers, out-of-towners who rent hotel rooms and cars, and people who make more than you, the scum.

But a small problem happened on the way to the lunch table. About 40% more families than projected are taking up the offer of free food.

I find it wildly surprising that when you give people free things, they gladly take them. 

State schools have been providing free lunches for less than a year and the program is already going bust, $56 million under water. Impressive.

There is a reason the “no free lunch” term was around a long time before Mr. Friedman used it.

Coined in 1942 by reporter and columnist Paul Mallon, it became even more popular in 1966 with Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi classic The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. 

The term was used in the 1800s when bar owners would give patrons a “free lunch,” usually a hard-boiled egg and peanuts. Even drunkards figured out while the egg was “free,” the alcohol was expensive. But Colorado voters still haven’t figured it out.

More and more families will be feeding their kids the free school lunch as food prices continue to skyrocket. The program is wholly unsustainable. It was from the start. We all knew it, including those who pimped it.

Will it ever be reversed? Of course not. As Ronald Reagan said, “there is nothing closer to immortality than a new government program.” 

But worry not! The Joint Budget Committee in the legislature has appropriated a quarter million dollars to hire a consultant to figure out how to close the funding gap.

The consultant might suggest having the program means-tested, so hideous rich kids don’t get the free meal their parents paid for. Of course, that flies in the face of the whole idea of Prop FF. The free lunch program we had before was means-tested, and therefore stigmatized the “not rich” kids.

The real solution, which I hear is currently being implemented, is making the food taste so hideous that kids won’t eat it. Sure, they’ll go hungry throughout the school day, but that just builds character, right?

The new FAMLI leave act will quickly fall to the same fate. We aren’t even three months into employees taking paid time off and there are whispers of needing to raise the payroll tax.

Dead White guys understood the hazard of people voting themselves free stuff. 

Thomas Jefferson purportedly said, “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” 

But a slightly more dead White guy gave a clearer warning. Alexander Fraser Tytler was a Scottish lawyer, writer, and history professor.

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”

Odd how, and I’m generalizing here, that those who promote voting themselves largesse today seem the most preoccupied with a new fear of “dictatorship.”

Tytler went on to say, “The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage. 

I was luckily raised in the “liberty to abundance” phase of this sequence. I fear we are dangerously close to the “apathy to dependence” phase.

But hey, my kid gets a “free” lunch.

People in Colorado should be allowed to smoke if they want to.

Authored and ready by Jon Caldara

Sharing a joint before sex is a legally protected right in Colorado. Sharing a cigarette afterward is a perversion so repulsive the Colorado state Legislature is going to stamp it out.

I’m so glad we hired the repressive preacher from the movie “Footloose” to play the role of our lawmakers. I quote directly from his diatribe: “If our Lord wasn’t testing us how would you account for the proliferation these days of this obscene ( well scratch rock ‘n’ roll music) smoking-reduction products with its gospel of easy sexuality and relaxed morality!”

No, seriously. They really do want to ban the stuff that helps people stop smoking, along with tobacco of course.

Coloradans voted to make this the first state to legalize recreational marijuana. So, burning that plant and inhaling the smoke is acceptable. However, when those same people burn a different plant, namely tobacco, it must be outlawed.

Does anyone else get a headache trying to find consistency here?

These are the same people who want safe injection sites for addicts using fentanyl. Yet they want to ban harm-reduction products to help folks step off tobacco.

Senate Bill 22 would empower county commissioners to ban the sale of cigarettes, tobacco and nicotine products.

So, literally, two nannies out of a three-member board of commissioners can decide no one in their fiefdom can have a cigarette after sex.

So much for their smug assertion government should stay out of people’s bedrooms.

Aren’t these the same people who stand up for trans people to legally claim their gender to whatever they choose?

What if someone identifies as a smoker? A man can identify as a woman so long as he doesn’t identify as a woman who smokes, because that’s just too damn weird and perverse to accept.

People should be free to smoke if they wish. Empowering a couple of nannyists to outlaw your lifestyle is more than ugly. It’s downright hateful.

Many people are trying to break the tobacco habit. Fortunately, there are more safe options for people to reduce smoking harm. Vaping is one way. Nicotine-delivery products like patches or oral pouches give people their desired nicotine without the carcinogens of burning tobacco. So let’s make that illegal.

There’s another wild hypocrisy going on at the Capitol. Basically, the Legislature loves “local control” when it pushes their command-and-control mandates and hates it when it doesn’t.

Giving localities the ability to increase gun control, but not to decrease it — they love it. Giving localities the ability to increase the minimum wage, but not decrease it — love that, too. And, of course, they gave localities the power to massively regulate tobacco and nicotine products.

But local control is a horrid thing when it comes to environmental mandates. Heaven forbid Weld County might make oil and gas extraction legal there again. And the governor’s plan to do away with local zoning rules to build additional units in backyards, well, “Did I say I liked local control?”

There is absolutely, positively, no consistency at the state Capitol except the theme of “you WILL live how we f---ing tell you to live.”

That said, a patchwork of tobacco and nicotine product bans across the state will make for fun cigarette smuggling.

For those of us old enough to remember another bad movie, “Smokey and the Bandit,” where Burt Reynolds sped Coors beer across state lines just one step ahead of the fuzz, we’ll soon have hipsters seeking nicotine patches running their Telsas in and out of Weld County like a drug cartel.

And I know no one gives a poop about small businesses in Colorado, like tobacco stores that will go bust. But you’d think they might care a bit about all the tobacco tax revenue.

Beyond the usual 20 cents per-pack tax, Amendment 35 in 2004 added 64 cents to fund health initiatives. Proposition EE in 2020 added $1.80 for Jared Polis’ universal preschool program. So light up across the street from a grade school to show your support of education.

Political minorities need protection from mob rule. Don’t the lifestyles of smokers deserve the same protection as the lifestyles of gays and lesbians?

Flying rainbow flags feels obligatory today to celebrate the gay lifestyle, while now smokers are treated like the gays of the past.

Do you feel any shame about that?