Two of my prolific-writing Colorado friends have pieces published today that are well worth reading. Though I’m short on time to elaborate extensively, let me just point you in their direction:

First, Jessica Corry highlights an underhanded liberal tactic to deceive voters about Ward Connerly’s Colorado Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) by placing a contradictory copycat on the ballot. Here’s a clip:

The CCRI reads: “Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado constitution concerning a prohibition against discrimination by the state, and, in connection therewith, prohibiting the state from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, and public contracting?”

Initiative 61 uses this exact language, but adds the following 40 words to its own version that guts the former initiative’s entire intent:

“…nothing in this section shall be interpreted as limiting the State’s authority to act consistently with the standards set under the United States Constitution, as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court, in public employment, public education, or public contracting.”

Yep, if you can’t beat them with arguments, confuse them. Straight out of the Lefty playbook.

Second, in an article for Human Events, Ross Kaminsky interviews respected Colorado conservative activists about the evolution in their thinking toward supporting John McCain. Two of the three are good acquaintances of mine: former state senate leader and interim treasurer Mark Hillman, and former state legislative candidate Kevan McNaught. None of them initially supported McCain, and all have worked or are working to overcome serious reservations about him.

It’s all worth reading, but I especially respect Hillman’s insights, as stated here:

It’s not about McCain. It’s about conservative principles: the war, taxes, and spending, and the Supreme Court. McCain has a record of moving us in the right direction on each of those issues. Obama or Clinton will move us in the wrong direction.

Of course, there still are the ultra-con Fundamentalists among us who believe McCain is insufficiently pure as a conservative, and that by extension anyone who says anything favorable about McCain is a heretic and couldn’t possibly be a conservative. This sort would read virtually everyone in Colorado out of the conservative company, including Bob Schaffer and Mark Hillman. To these hard-core purists, I say, enjoy paying higher taxes and living under an ever-more liberal judiciary from your very small tent.

There are serious concerns to work through about McCain, but to treat the decision and process like a code of religious dogma is misguided. I agree with Ross, and suspect that people like this will become part of an ever smaller minority and less significant factor as the year rolls on.

It’s not often we get to wish one another Happy Leap Day – the only other time for this blog was in the very early days of its existence. So let’s celebrate the opportunity to catch our calendars up to the earth’s solar revolution schedule, and enjoy the irony of what this day means.

One of my favorite February 29 memories comes from my freshman year in college, walking to the buildings on “the Hill” and seeing homemade signs posted urging us to wish fellow student Sam a happy 5th birthday. No, Sam – whom I later got to know and appreciate for his good nature and good humor, not to mention his artistic and literary gifts – wasn’t some sort of amazing prodigy. He was what Wikipedia informs me is called a “leapling.” Another “leapling” is the legendary Al Gansee, who – depending on your reckoning – is either 80 or 20 today.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to be one of the more than 200,000 Americans who three-fourths of the time have to borrow somebody else’s birthday. Well, today, all ye leaplings, enjoy this day all your own. But does anyone know what else one is supposed to do to commemorate the quadrennial arrival of February 29?

I almost missed this one… From the editors of the New York Sun comes notice that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama may be more cynical and duplicitous than widely given credit for:

No sooner had we issued Elizabeth Green‘s dispatch under the headline “Obama Open to Private School Vouchers” than his campaign was scrambling to undo the potential damage with the Democratic primary electorate. On February 20, his campaign issued a statement headlined, “Response to Misleading Reports Concerning Senator Obama‘s Position on Vouchers” that said, “Senator Obama has always been a critic of vouchers.” The statement went on, “Throughout his career, he has voted against voucher proposals and voiced concern for siphoning off resources from our public schools.” It noted that Mr. Obama’s education agenda “does not include vouchers, in any shape or form.”

Clarifying statement aside, there is no taking away what Mr. Obama actually said in the interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentininal that was the subject of Ms. Green’s dispatch. “If there was any argument for vouchers, it was ‘Alright, let’s see if this experiment works,’ and if it does, then whatever my preconceptions, my attitude is you do what works for the kids,” the senator said. “I will not allow my predispositions to stand in the way of making sure that our kids can learn. We’re losing several generations of kids and something has to be done.”

Hat tip to the Fordham Institute’s weekly Education Gadfly, which aptly opines:

Obama’s words were apparently taken “out of context”; the senator has always opposed vouchers and still does, his campaign says. Words taken out of context? Baloney. One of two things is going on here: Either Obama, in his bid to win Wisconsin, decided to lie to the Journal Sentinel and pretend to support proven-effective voucher programs, or he is actually open-minded but being censored by his campaign. Either way, it’s a giant disappointment.

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Over at Pajamas Media, Scott Johnson eulogizes the late William F. Buckley, Jr.. First, probably his most significant accomplishment:

When Buckley founded National Review as the voice of the [conservative] movement, he performed two acts of statesmanship that were vital to the movement’s ultimate, if unlikely, success: he reserved exclusive ownership of the magazine to himself so as to prevent the kind of sectarian brawls that had killed other such magazines, and he prohibited John Birchers and other kooky anti-Semitic organizations from the magazine’s precincts.

Johnson also observes what is left undone:

Until [Buckley] gave up public speaking in 1998, his frequent campus speaking engagements were part missionary work, part performance art, and like nothing else available on the campuses he visited. In the decades following the founding of National Review, the conservative movement experienced successes that must have exceeded even Buckley’s visionary imagination. Yet the university remains almost entirely untouched by Buckley’s call to action. In fact, it understates matters considerably to say that circumstances on campus have not improved since the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951.

Except for my quibble based on the fact that I distinctly remember attending a Buckley debate at Penn State in 2000 (after the 1998 cited here), I think this is a larger point that has been overlooked by some. While we certainly ought not diminish Buckley’s giant and consequential legacy, Johnson reminds us – in the spirit of President Abraham Lincoln – of “the great task remaining before us.”

As though a reminder were needed, El Presidente today focuses on a clash of politically incorrect student journalism and the university Free Speech police. While we mourn Buckley’s passing, the world keeps on turning.

A bill that would ban strikes for Colorado state workers passed a Senate committee yesterday, reports the Denver Post – all unleashed by the stroke of Gov. Bill Ritter’s pen. Today’s article omits the significant detail, so it’s incumbent upon this blogger to remind you that the Democrat proposal is weak and ineffectual.

Colorado Senate News features the best commentary on the bill:

“Obviously, this bill wouldn’t have been introduced at all if Republicans hadn’t urged the governor to do the right thing and assure taxpayers their vital public services wouldn’t be jeopardized by the threat of a strike,” the GOP’s Sen. Bill Cadman, of Colorado Springs, said after the committee vote.

“Unfortunately, what we got from the governor and his allies in the legislature was a bare, minimum kind of guarantee,” Cadman said. “This thing is enforced with a wet noodle.”

Though for a variety of reasons a strike of state employees is by no means imminent, some day Colorado may regret having elected a majority party that took the “wet noodle” approach to enforcement. Otherwise, sadly, this issue will be largely forgotten among the slew of Democrat missteps that hit taxpayers more closely at home. Only so many big government transgressions can be remembered, after all.

Via K.J. Lopez at the Corner, news comes today that the great William F. Buckley, Jr., has passed away.

While very few writers and speakers have ever had a greater facility with the English language than Buckley did, there was much more to him than the elegance of his prose. He was an intellectual champion for conservatism long before there was any popularity to be gained by it. From his seminal book God and Man at Yale to his great legacy in the founding of National Review, he did as much as any American in the 20th century to advance the conservative cause through logical, forceful, and passionate argument, as well as through refined wit and good humor.

To get a glimpse of the man – his ideas and his rhetoric – you can search a comprehensive online database of Buckley’s writings and speeches – created by my alma mater Hillsdale College.

In November 2006 we lost the great Milton Friedman, and now Buckley. Together they represent perhaps the two greatest minds in the broader conservative movement and the two most influential voices for free markets, limited government, and personal freedom – not to mention the strong roots and high ideals of Western Civilization – America had in the 20th century.

It’s a sad day for the conservative moment and for anyone in this nation who respects a good, vigorous, civil, and intellectual policy debate. But condolences especially to his family and dear friends. I’m sure far more eloquent elegies will be written in the coming days, but wanted to add my two cents while the news is fresh on my mind.

R.I.P., William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008)

From Lorne Gunter at the National Post yesterday:

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter’s weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it’s not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

“We missed what was right in front of our eyes,” says Prof. Russell. It’s not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind’s effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as “a drop in the bucket.” Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to “stock up on fur coats.”

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It’s way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it’s way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

Now there’s another giant splash of ice-cold water in the face of Algore’s Nobel Prize tour.

Here is a true tale based on the published insights of two men, highlighting an important contrast in credibility. Both men are named Alan. Both are from the Denver area. Both are Democrats. There the similarity ends.

The story stems around Denver’s Life Skills Center charter school, a program tailored to serve the city’s most desperate “last-chance” students. The school has made a positive difference with some, but not all, of the students it serves. As this Denver Post story points out, Life Skills has struggled to meet its performance standards but is showing improvement.

The first Alan is Alan Franklin, a paid Left-wing hack who does the bidding of political attack dog Michael Huttner. Franklin jumped on the Life Skills story to make a crass and totally unfounded political smear against the honorable Bob Schaffer, a State Board of Education member who happens to be running for the U.S. Senate.

Last year, Schaffer was part of a 4-3 State Board majority that decided to put Life Skills on one-year probation to improve its performance. Then Schaffer was quoted as saying:

“The bigger question is, how does the school compare with the street?” Schaffer asked. “Because that is the option that is being weighed and compared here. It’s not whether these students are going to go somewhere else. I think the district has amply established that the likelihood of that is rather remote.”

So the State Board told the Denver Public Schools (DPS) board to give Life Skills another chance, which they did.

Giving in to ignorance, however, Franklin writes:

Obviously, in voting to force DPS to remain saddled with this failing program intended to serve Denver’s most at-risk students, Schaffer had the best interests of…somebody at heart. Though it doesn’t appear to have been Denver’s most at-risk students.

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Diverting from our regular blogging fare on this Friday, we pause to remember the 46th anniversary of the decisive and destructive Battle of Cambria. It is also the 12th anniversary of the founding of Cambria Tours (Facebook account required to view page).

The ill-fated, crushing defeat of February 22, 1962, along the frozen pond and quiet streets of a midwestern hamlet, marked the ultimate demise of the small and short-lived Socialist Union of Al Gansee. It’s all chronicled in the biography of the quixotic and eccentric, Michigan-born dictator, Passion and Purpose: The Rise and Fall of Al Gansee. Rumor also has it that the battle’s story is being adapted into a screenplay. We’ll see if it goes anywhere.

Questions linger regarding how much of the story is a figment of the author’s vibrant imagination.

Mr. Bob (via the amazing Michael Yon) points us to “The Last Major Battle in Iraq?” It is to my discredit that I don’t keep up with events in the Middle East as well as I should. With the success of the “Surge” strategy, events in Iraq largely have fallen off the MSM radar and out of the Presidential campaign debate. But it was interesting to read this news today.

After you check out this post, remember also to stop by the Victory Caucus website, which is loaded with tons of information and commentary.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) has created a new user-friendly Web feature that enables online political contributors to give to any or all of the Republican candidates for U.S. Senate in one stop. It’s called Two Seats.

For conservative Republicans with limited resources who want to give strategically, I recommend campaign donations not only to Bob Schaffer, of course, but also to incumbent Sen. John Sununu (New Hampshire) and Norm Coleman (Minnesota), and to challenger John Kennedy (Louisiana).

The party of compassion (aka Democrats) shows one of its true weaknesses – more compassion for the established interest groups that run our education system than for kids with special needs and their families:

Waving off pleas to give parents more educational options for children with special needs, majority Democrats on a Senate committee today thwarted a Republican bill offering tuition assistance so those kids can attend private schools.

Senate Bill 142–authored by assistant Senate GOP leader Nancy Spence, and sponsored in the House by Republican Rep. Spencer Swalm–would have started a pilot program in Denver Public Schools granting $3,000 in public funding toward the private-schooling of any child who isn’t being well served by a neighborhood school….

Among those testifying in favor of the bill was 12-year-old Caleb Close, who suffers from Asperger’s Disorder, a form of autism. Close said his parents finally have found a school that can help him with his disabilities, but he pointed out that many others aren’t so fortunate and could use Spence’s proposal.

“All kids should have this choice,” he said.

Kudos to Caleb for speaking up and speaking out. Too bad the majority Democrats running our State Capitol weren’t paying attention. A party of compassion, indeed.

If you missed my live online radio interview earlier today on Gov. Ritter and Colorado union issues, you can still listen to the show. The one-hour edition of RighTalk radio’s “Leave Us Alone” program will replay every hour up to noon local time tomorrow (Thursday, February 21).

So you can head over now to RighTalk and hear what you missed. I’m on from about 5 minutes past the hour to 42 minutes past the hour. Enjoy!

Following the Bruce Randolph and Manual HS episode in Denver, the teachers union now says it has a proposal coming to run its own school:

Denver’s teachers union plans to submit a proposal this spring to create its own school, hoping to launch a teacher-led demonstration site for how to improve student achievement.

“Teachers are supportive of reform,” Kim Ursetta, president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, said Tuesday. “We have ideas how to improve student achievement and we want an opportunity to put our ideas forward.”

More power to them. Given an ideal public education system guided by parental/consumer choice where the money followed the child based on need and local schools had autonomy over employment, curriculum, and program, the DCTA should have just as much right as anyone to offer its educational services and compete in the marketplace.

But given the realities of the current system, if DCTA’s request is approved, to whom will they be accountable? Will there be collective bargaining, and if so, will management bargain with itself? Who will handle employee grievances when the union is running the show? And who will they blame if the school is unsuccessful?

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of Colorado education reform.

In order for me to live up to my “anti-public education” billing from the teachers union, I wanted to bring your attention to a stunningly clear and beautiful editorial today from the Colorado Springs Gazette. Key excerpts follow:

Throughout the country, most teachers belong to a chapter of the National Education Association. The Colorado branch is known as the Colorado Education Association, which is broken down by local chapters. Dues exceed $600 a year, which can be tough for teachers supporting families on wages that average $40-some thousand a year.

In some school districts, such as D-11 in Colorado Springs, the union assumes membership and takes dues from a teacher’s wages unless the educator jumps through hoops to opt out during a short window of opportunity. The union has never succeeded at getting teachers the wages they deserve, and it typically works against efforts to reward excellence with above-average pay. The only tangible benefit most teachers see for their membership fee is liability insurance to cover lawsuits….

In addition to maintaining educational mediocrity, the NEA and its affiliates have used the hard-earned money of teachers to fund a variety of endeavors unrelated to education. A report by the U.S. Department of Labor showed the NEA funding Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, People for the American Way, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, among an array of other noneducationrelated causes.

While thousands of teachers struggle to make ends meet, more than half the NEA’s 600-plus employees and officers earn salaries of six figures and up — wages paid by teachers who typically earn far less than half that much for more important work….

Colorado teachers have been choosing the Association of American Educators over the union in such numbers that the organization opened its own Colorado chapter last year, known as PACE — the Professional Association of Colorado Educators (www.coloradoteachers.org). Still, few teachers know about it. That’s because local NEA chapters have worked hard to prevent PACE representatives from distributing literature in schools or setting up tables at teacher orientation functions and benefit fairs. At one school in the Harrison School District of Colorado Springs, CEA representatives physically blocked a hallway to prevent teachers from reaching the PACE table.

The NEA is yesterday’s union, with no place in the cuttingedge classroom. To usher in a new era, introduce teachers to the Association of American Educators and its local branch, PACE — a non-coercive association designed around modern educational needs. Young minds are too important for an outdated union to waste.

Teachers in Colorado indeed have a real membership option now. As the editorial highlights well, it’s not in the interests of CEA/NEA to have teachers fully informed and fully empowered. For example, they don’t like it when teachers visit this website. Here is a plea to open up the teacher organization marketplace, to stop limiting the flow of information and access, so individual professional teachers can see their alternatives and decide what suits them best.