U.S. domestic production peaked in 1972 and we won’ t reach those levels again……this fact was shouted down by many readers. Well, there isn’t a responsible expert in the oil industry who would argue with it. Check it out: Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage. It’s a book by Kenneth Deffeyes, a University of Princeton expert who spent many years in the oil patch. His title honors his mentor, M. King Hubbert, an oil industry expert who used a model to predict that domestic production would peak in 1970. Actually, it peaked two year later, but Hubbert was essentially correct.

Applying Hubbert’s model to the world, Deffeyes predicts world production will peak by 2012. Other experts put the peak year a few years farther out, but the point is that oil is a finite resource. Yes, there are new fields to be drilled, but the world’s consumption is increasing at a rapid rate. Americans use more oil than ever and China’s economy now has become a big consumer of oil, as well.

Drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge surely would boost Ameircan production, by an estimated 2 million barrels a day. Opening more off-shore areas to drilling would add more. Oil companies have had leases for deep sea areas in the Gulf of Mexico and have not tapped them because operations there would be quite a bit more expensive and their profit margins would be less. But all of this combined wouldn’t be nearly enough to reach the production levels America had in 1972. Readers who are suggesting otherwise simply have not educated themselves about the history of the business. It’s better to educate yourself than to live in some fantasy denial land, believing there is plenty of oil if we just go after it.

One Web site: http://www.hubbertpeak.com/

The Colorado School of Mines, no liberal bastion, has a research center named for Hubbert http://hubbert.mines.edu/ Click there and you can find, among other things, research that lays out the world supply situation http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/Campbell_02-3.pdf.

(a) being forced to endure another primary season without substance.

(b)being treated to an intellectually engaging contest between rival philosophies.

(c)witnessing a comic trio of cartoon figures, none of whom ever will be allowed enough clout even to make Nancy Pelosi’s coffee in the morning.

(d)none of the above.

It’s tempting to say we all deserve better, but when one political party dominates a congressional district as it does here, and the other political party doesn’t have enough power to keep the dominant party honest, well, you get the caliber of candidates that we have now.

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated seven times in 1858 and it caught the public’s imagination. Newspaper sent stenographers to the events and ran the full text. Oh, it was a different time, but we all must hope that times haven’t changed so much that political debates now come with a cover charge at the door. People have become apathetic about politics, Instead of charging for tickets to their debates, the 5th Congressional wannabes should just post a sign that says, “stay away.”

To read about Lincoln and Douglas, click on http://www.nps.gov/archive/liho/debates.htm. Political debates have been patterned after their example since then, but the formats, especially on television, has changed. One aspect that has remained constant is that attendees have not been required to pay an admission charge. 

Dramatic, but overly dramatic. Americans know it’s unrealistic to think tanks will ever roll down their streets. The truth is your freedom is in far more danger when city councils, legislatures or the U.S. Congress are in session. These well-intended bodies will take bits of freedom here and there, without kicking anyone’s door in.

Chuck Baldwin of the Baltimore Chronicle wrote a nice piece about freedoms lost during the Bush years http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/020105ChuckBaldwin.shtml. Dan Noble, the Colorado Senate Majority leader in the 1980s, had a sign on his desk that said, “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” It was a not-so-subtle reminder to those who entered his office that Noble took a dim view of proposals that infringed on individual rights.

Historically, American freedoms are most in danger when the nation is at war. A current example is the Patriot Act. In World War II, Japenese Americans were moved to camps without a shred of evidence they were subversives. We were fighting the Germans and the Italians, too, but Americans descended from those nationalities were not placed in camps. Moving the Japanese Americans to camps was an act of blatant racism that was unanimously upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.  It didn’t make us safer at all, it just made us less free. Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War.

For an opinion piece that supports the loss of civil liberties in times of war, check out http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200112/posner.

On Aug. 16, the Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs is sponsoring an immigration event.: There are environmental concerns about the border fence, but courts allowed the Department of Homeland Security to circumvent environmental refviews. To read about that, click on http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bushs-border-fence-destroys-wilderness-804005.html

President George W. Bush is a Texan, so it’s ironic that some of the loudest opposition to the border fence has come from Texans, who sued the federal government in May. To read about that click on http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/16/usa.immigrationpolicy.

The joke making the rounds is that the first result of a 10-foot border fence is the increased sales of 11-foot ladders. For some material on how easy it is to defeat the fence, see http://www.offthekuff.com/mt/archives/011522.html.

  “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too….

 It took many years after that was written for the American Psychiatric Association to declare, officially, that homosexuality is not a disease to be cured. To read about that, click on http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbc/policy/discrimination.html

More recently, the APA filed an amicus brief in the recent California Supreme Court case, joining other organizations in supporting the right of gays to marry. The read that, click http://www.apa.org/pi/LGBC/policy/California.pdf.

There still are a few holdouts, a few psychologists who advocate sexual orientation conversion therapy to “cure” gays. It’s weird science. Many experts warn that the “therapy” can cause long-lasting damage to those subjected to it.

Students and parents chose school districts other than their own for various reasons. Curriculum and location obviously play the largest role. Sometimes a student has peers in another district and wants to go to their school. Talented athletes have been known to switch districts because of a specific sports program. D-11 is surrounded by other school districts and it loses students in all directions. But it also gains students from Falcon District 49, which has had growing pains associated with being the fastest growing district in Colorado. Manitou District 14 had a net gain of 343 students last October, including the loss of 97 students, most of whom went to D-11.

Because schools get much of their money from the state on a per-student basis, it hurts a district to lose too many students. It’s safe to say the open enrollment law has rescued Manitou Springs. About 80 percent of the property owners there do not have children in school. If the district had to depend on the town for all of its students, it might be caught in a downward financial spiral, because the state funding scheme punishes districts with declining enrollments. The remarkable thing about Manitou Springs is that its aging voters defied the norm by approving a mill levy increase to pay for salary increases and the addition of more teachers.

Colorado’s open enrollment law began with the 1994-95 school year. To read it, click on http://www.cde.state.co.us/choice/download/CRSopen_enrollment.pdf.

Now, the gaming industry wants a bet limit that is 20 times larger than the existing one. This idea will soon appear on a ballot near you. No holds barred. The sky is the limit. And governing this brave new world would be a town hall that allows the casinos to do anything they want? That’s why the city reversed itself this week and fined the three casinos that were in violation of the smoking ban. The whole situation created the wrong public image heading into November.

Walk the streets of Cripple Creek during the day and you see and hear the evidence of casino construction activity. It is evidence that the casinos, despite what they might say in the upcoming ballot inititiative campaign, are not struggling. At the current $5 bet limit new casinos like their chances of making money and they keep springing up.

At http://www.myfoxcolorado.com/myfox/pages/Home/Detail?contentId=6722266&version=1&locale=EN-US&layoutCode=TSTY&pageId=1.1.1 you can read about the latest trend for casinos in Colorado, where revenues declined substantially in the first quarter of the year. Some blame the smoking ban, but revenues also fell in Las Vegas, where smoking is allowed, so the economy is certainly playing a role.

The way the insanity defense has been handled in U.S. courts has not been static; it has gone through an evolution. The pendulum swung more in the direction of legally insane defendants form decades but partly because of the case of John Hinckley, the man who tried to kill President Ronald Reagan, the pendulum has swung back. At http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/hinckleyinsanity.htm you can read about that perspective.

Some forensic patients at the Colorado State Hospital have been there for 40 years. It is no country club. The idea is to treat insane people so they can function again in society. Some citizens have a hard time accepting that someone might commit a heinous crime, yet be deemed able to resume life in free society once again after years of therapy. Those citizens should think about it a bit more before giving in to the very human desire for revenge.

Revenge is very understandable. It is one of the reasons we put people in prison and in many cases, there is nothing at all wrong with society acting on its collective revenge.  But the insanity defense is an appropriate tool in a small number of cases. We have experts to sort it out. They are not infallible, but they’re pretty good at their jobs.

The insanity defense is one of the things that separates us from the rabble.  

The Colorado court challenge may succeed in removing some suspect signatures from petitions, but it appears likely the measure will remain on the ballot for November. Even after criticizing the petition effort in Michigan, the court allowed themeasure to go forward and voters approved it. To read more about all this, check out:

– http://www.diversityinc.com/public/1365.cfm

– http://www.campusprogress.org/tools/230/

– http://www.racialicious.com/2008/01/29/evil-ward/

Will Colorado vote for a Democrat in the presidential election? It hasn’t happened often, but it has a decent chance of happening this year. For a state-by-state analysis of polling in the predential race, check out http://www.electoral-vote.com/. This survey is updated regularly with new polling. Polls show Barack Obama is slightly ahead of John McCain in Colorado now, but it is an eternity until election day, so officially Colorado would have to be classified as “up for grabs.” If the election is close, Coloradans might see a bit more of the candidates this time around. Poll also show Congressman Mark Udall with a lead over Republican  Bob Schaffer. That’s less surprising, given the results of the past two election cycles in the state, where Democrats have been steadily gaining on Republicans.

In the state and the nation, the influence of the Christian Right has declined, right along with George W. Bush’s approval ratings. That’s one reason for the popularity of McCain, who has not courted evangelicals, who are not very excited about his candidacy. Of course, what he loses with them is gained elsewhere. Unaffiliated voters like it that McCain is not beholden to the Christian Right and he is a bonafide national hero.

Here is a web site that tracks several polls: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/polls/. This site offers polling on the approval ratings for the president and Congress, as well as the presidential race.

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