After all the Hickenhoopla dies down, Colorado voters may experience a sick feeling of déjà vu as the Denver mayor and Democrat candidate for governor claims that he’s “business friendly.” We’ve been down this campaign trail before, just four years ago, when nice guy Bill Ritter bent over backward to ingratiate himself to every gullible [...]

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Barack Obama may be a far better orator than George W. Bush, but when Bush delivered a message, despite his sometimes mangled syntax, everyone knew what he stood for.  Because Obama’s elocution is superior, only later do people realize they have no idea what he really meant. If overhauling the nation’s health care system is [...]

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Conservatives and libertarians fight about social issues so routinely that we assume the differences are insurmountable. Most everyone on the center-right is dubious of big government, but when it comes to protecting the unborn or preserving the traditional definition of marriage, we are divided as to government’s proper role. Yet when the threat of big [...]

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It’s natural to sympathize with the parents of Brandon Patch, the 18-year-old baseball pitcher who died after he was hit by a batted ball in 2003. Sooner or later, sympathy must yield to logic and reason, so when Brandon’s parents sued the bat’s manufacturer, Louisville Slugger, and a jury awarded them $850,000, they contributed to [...]

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In an audacious power grab, the Colorado Supreme Court recently embraced, by a 4-3 decision, a judicial doctrine that would relegate the other two branches of government — and the voters — to a perfunctory role. The high court’s activist majority used Lobato vs. State not only to intrude on the legislature’s constitutional authority to [...]

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Talk about personal responsibility is cheap. Legislating personal responsibility isn’t.  Take the movement to require everyone to purchase government-approved health insurance. If at first this seems like a reasonable requirement necessary to reduce cost shifting by those who do not pay their own fare, then step back and think again.  The damage caused by such [...]

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Say what you will about Bill Clinton’s foreign policy shortcomings, but for the most part he had the good sense not to squander Ronald Reagan’s legacy of peace through strength. By contrast, Barack Obama’s foreign policy seems to be predicated on a boundless faith in his own persuasive powers and the naïve notion that our [...]

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Our ongoing debate about government’s role in health care is proving worthwhile because it forces people to focus on the real tradeoffs in a system mandated — if not directly operated — by government, rather than one selected by individuals or their employers.  Today, our system is a dysfunctional hybrid.

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It’s becoming a ritual at the State Capitol: a committee is meeting to study the competing pressures of spending mandates and spending limits on the state budget.  Like those before them, this year’s panel has heard from a litany of experts and special interests, almost all of whom will complain about the Gordian knot in [...]

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Impending mortality tends to focus the mind, and looming elections tend to focus politicians’ ears on vox populi.  But just as theologians debate the sincerity of “deathbed conversions,” voters should be skeptical of lawmakers who find religion as elections near. Although 15 months remain until the 2010 elections, Democrats are learning — just as Republicans [...]

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