I went to the Schlegel v Pippin permanent protective order hearing today, 4-27-2012. The Denver Post’s immediate coverage of the hearing seems to be scripted to a narrative the Post is comfortable with. I have some different take-aways. [Read more…]
Archives for April 2012
paranoia will destroya
In today’s BOCC webcast, Commissioner Schwab once again admonished that the BOCC’s open mic segment was not to be used for political campaign purposes. Shortly thereafter candidate Rowland led off with a little campaign number that could have been titled, “I’m Transparent And You’re Not.” [Read more…]
2012 YTD open records requests
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Look at all the fishing expeditions. Look at those making the requests. County employees who could be engaged in productive work on behalf of taxpayers instead must serve these partisans in this blatant abuse of process. It does Elbert County no good. The sole beneficiaries are the selfish few who think government exists to satisfy their personal entertainment desires.
public policy
Supreme Court of Colorado, En Banc.
BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS, COSTILLA COUNTY, Colorado,
Petitioner, v. COSTILLA COUNTY CONSERVANCY DISTRICT and Michael McGowan, Respondents.
No. 02SC743.
April 19, 2004To resolve this dispute, we now turn to the language of the [Open Meetings Law] OML and our case law construing it.
D. The OML Applies to Meetings that are Part of the Policy-Making Process
Based on our reading of the statute as a whole and our case law construing it, we hold that a meeting must be part of the policy-making process to be subject to the requirements of the OML. A meeting is part of the policy-making process if it concerns a matter related to the policy-making function of the local public body holding or attending the meeting. If, as a threshold matter, a meeting is part of the policy-making process, then the requirements of the OML must be met. If not, nothing in the OML prevents some or all members of a local governing body from attending a meeting, even if public notice has not been given.
public policy:
Black’s Law Dictionary, 7th Ed.
1. Broadly, principles and standards regarded by the legislature or by the courts as being of fundamental concern to the state and the whole of society. 2. More narrowly, the principle that a person should not be allowed to do anything that would tend to injure the public at large.
Notwithstanding the heroic image promulgated by the band of New-Plains brothers and sisters currently harassing the Board of County Commissioners, this tribe in no way represents the interests of the whole of society or of the public at large in Elbert County. They claim to, but they’ve never been elected, never achieved a plurality of votes in Elbert County. Most of them don’t have the substance to admit their true political philosophy by presenting themselves to the public at large in a political party that accords their agenda. These self-anointed inquisitors occupy their meeting seats at the BOCC with intent to find any grounds whatsoever — factual, legal, interpretive, procedural — to excuse speaking their truth to power to bring down the ruling conservative candidates.
Theirs is a non-stop political campaign that shoehorns reality by any means possible into their ongoing narrative.
what makes life worth living
“People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned—it cannot be self-respect if it’s not earned—and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing. People need intimate relationships with others, but intimate relationships that are rich and fulfilling need content, and that content is supplied only when humans are engaged in interactions that have consequences. People need self-actualization, but self-actualization is not a straight road, visible in advance, running from point A to point B. Self-actualization intrinsically requires an exploration of possibilities for life beyond the obvious and convenient. All of these good things in life—self-respect, intimate relationships, and self-actualization—require freedom in the only way that freedom is meaningful: freedom to act in all arenas of life coupled with responsibility for the consequences of those actions. The underlying meaning of that coupling—freedom and responsibility—is crucial. Responsibility for the consequences of actions is not the price of freedom, but one of its rewards. Knowing that we have responsibility for the consequences of our actions is a major part of what makes life worth living.”
Charles Murray, Coming Apart, 2012.
things change
We took a short ride this morning on Evans between Monaco and Broadway, up Broadway to Alameda, then over on Leetsdale for a bit. On this short drive we found a thriving medical marijuana dispensary industry. Here are some of the sights we saw today. They represent only a fraction of the dispensaries in operation.
The medical marijuana dispensary industry serves 89,646 registered Colorado patients with 13,815 in Denver. Presumably the dispensaries shown below serve only a fraction of registered Denver patients. Colorado patients have an average age of 42.
I’m sure medical marijuana helps people with chronic pain in a way no other drug does. But is it necessary to have a dispensary on every block? Somehow we’ve managed to survive without a Walgreen’s on every block and there are far more consumers of prescription medications than there are of medical marijuana.
Maybe recreational marijuana use should remain illegal, maybe it should not. But this green-cross farce masking recreational marijuana use under the guise of wellness and compassion makes jokes of statutory law and the legislature. I doubt the legislature intended to create a hippie urban renewal of small business marginal commercial properties throughout Colorado through medical marijuana. This sort of thing makes our present ruling generation — people my age — look, well, stoned.
health insurance claim denials
Who would go into a business where 15% to 25% of gross revenue is lost out the back end? Medicare is worse but commercial is almost as bad. The beneficiary model of health insurance is broken. No regulation the government is selling at either the Federal or State level is fixing or will fix this situation. Only market reforms that re-connect health care buyers to health care sellers, that re-establish supply and demand based pricing directly between market participants, that remove government regulation and payment systems from the entire process, and that stop empowering third parties to distort the health care transaction, can fix this market.
Pleasantville
Not long ago here in the basement of the Lions Hall I sat many Wednesday evenings listening to the penumbral emanations from the infiltration of country-in-county no-growth western Elbert County RINOs into Republican Central Committee meetings. More than a decade later, the names have changed but the game remains eerily familiar — hardball politics in the softball park of our dearly beloved local Republican Party. [Read more…]
Congress v. Court
Article III, Section 2, Paragraph 2 of the Constitution states, “In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
In Ex parte McCardle (1869), the Supreme Court upheld the right of Congress to withdraw appellate jurisdiction from the Supreme Court over a pending case. Congress had repealed the statute which gave the Court appellate jurisdiction in McCardle and the Court acquiesced in the repeal.
The McCardle opinion of the Court did not rely upon the Marbury doctrine of judicial review to reach a decision. The above plain language of the Constitution stood without tortuous chains of lawyerly reasoning to make the point. And despite occasional cases which have attempted to narrow the reach of the above constitutional clause through the years, it is still settled law today. Congress may exercise this power under the Constitution to limit jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.
Today, if Congress did not want the Supreme Court to decide the constitutionality of Obamacare by using the Marbury doctrine of judicial review, it could pass a law tomorrow to remove the subject of, say, the insurance purchase mandate, from the Court’s jurisdiction. [Read more…]