It seems that Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and Democrat gubernatorial candidate John Hickenlooper can’t get along.

First Mayor Hickenlooper embraced global warming and former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, while Candidate Hick doesn’t share the same enthusiasm for either.

Candidate Hick criticized Governor Bill Ritter’s new oil and gas regulations until part of his Mayor Hick base — the Eco-Left — got mad. Now he is backtracking. Oh, wait, Hick’s clarifying.

And now, Todd Shepherd of Complete Colorado reveals that Mayor Hick supported the proposed “crash tax” for any visitor who has an at-fault accident within the city limits of Denver:

Hickenlooper’s office again defended the idea, this time through spokesman Eric Brown, and this time a little more forcefully. “We support it. This ordinance follows through on part of the 2010 budget presented to and approved by City Council last year,” Brown told the Denver Daily News.

Yet Candidate Hick has a different take as Todd summarizes:

“We support it,” the Mayor’s office said unequivocally.  And even though John Hickenlooper sees a horrible economic injustice of the fact that good drivers subsidize the accident response costs for bad drivers, and even though he needed to right the injustice of other kids in the sandbox not playing fair (never mind the fact THOSE districts may have been concerned about the injustice of good drivers subsidizing the bad), the Mayor still says, “I don’t think we’re terribly wedded to it one way or the other.”

Hick also says, if he is elected Governor, he will sign legislation banning crash taxes.

Let’s get this straight.  Mayor Hick wants the crash tax because Denver spent too much of your money and need the cash to help plug the $100 million budget shortfall.  Candidate Hick knows the crash tax wars won’t play well statewide on the campaign trail so he isn’t “wedded to it one way or the other.” And he would be willing to ban them if elected.

Confused? Understandable.  So is Hick.

A little noticed article in the Fort Collins Coloradoan raises some big questions.  The newspaper reports that bills introduced into both the House and Senate would provide tax cuts for small breweries such as the Fort Collins Brewery and New Belgium Brewing Company.  The purpose of both pieces of legislation is too make the breweries more competitive with larger breweries and to create jobs:

Paul Gatza, director of the Boulder-based Brewers Association, said research conducted at Harvard indicates that the bill would create 2,700 jobs in the first 12 to 18 months and an additional 375 for the next four years for the nation’s breweries.

‘A company the size of New Belgium could save around 12 percent on its annual federal excise bill every year,’ Gatza said. ‘For everyone else in the Fort Collins region, it would mean a 50 percent cut on federal excise tax.’

Congresswoman Betsy Markey, whose district includes both the Fort Collins Brewery and New Belgium Brewing Company , is a co-sponsor of the House bill.

Now for the rest of the story…

Does Markey’s support for tax cuts signal a change in economic and political philosophy?  Could the woman who voted yes on Cap and Trade and ObamaCare, two enormous tax increases, suddenly realize that tax cuts actually spur economic activity and create jobs? Color me skeptical.

Or could her support for the tax cuts be for a different purpose?  According to the Federal Election Commission, New Belgium founder Jeff Lebesch and CEO Kim Jordan donated $4800 each to her campaign. I’ll let you decide, but at least now you know the rest of the story.

Columnist Peggy Noonan is a master of language and understanding human nature.  Her most recent Wall Street Journal column suggests what we, as average taxpaying Americans, would like to hear from those who played roulette with our money and lost big.

“Let’s be real. This is what happened the past 10 years. You, for political reasons, both Republicans and Democrats, finagled the mortgage system so that people who make, like, zero dollars a year were given mortgages for $600,000 houses. You got to run around and crow about how under your watch everyone became a homeowner. You shook down the taxpayer and hoped for the best.

“Democrats did it because they thought it would make everyone Democrats: ‘Look what I give you!’ Republicans did it because they thought it would make everyone Republicans: ‘I’m a homeowner, I’ve got a stake, don’t raise my property taxes, get off my lawn!’ And Wall Street? We went to town, baby. We bundled the mortgages and sold them to fools, or we held them, called them assets, and made believe everyone would pay their mortgage. As if we cared. We invented financial instruments so complicated no one, even the people who sold them, understood what they were.

“You’re finaglers and we’re finaglers. I play for dollars, you play for votes. In our own ways we’re all thieves. We would be called desperadoes if we weren’t so boring, so utterly banal in our soft-jawed, full-jowled selfishness. If there were any justice, we’d be forced to duel, with the peasants of America holding our cloaks. Only we’d both make sure we missed, wouldn’t we?”

Sadly you won’t find that in the official record because it was never spoken. But Noonan is correct it “would be a kind of breathe of fresh air.”   We’ve got a better chance of proving anthropogenic global warming than hearing that kind of raw honesty.

Here’s what we really heard this week when former Citibank CEO Charles Prince testified in front of the Financial Inquiry Commission and explained why we are experiencing the worst economy since the Great Depression. A commissioner asked Prince if he knew why American homeowners experienced a 30 percent decline in property values, Prince responded:

Yes, we haven’t had such a decline “since the Great Depression.” The reason is before the crash there was “a bubble.” There was too much “easy money.” Then the bubble popped.

With that kind of insight, it is no wonder that Citibank was granted $45 billion in taxpayer bailout funds.  Meanwhile a beautiful and historic home right next to mine has lost nearly 50 percent of its value.

Just about the time I think pompous members of Congress and other elected officials at the state level have done everything possible to infuriate me, I read something like from the CBS News: “Copenhagen Summit Turned Junket?”  

Fifteen Democrat and six Republican members of Congress, their staff and their families spent hundreds of thousands of our dollars going to Copenhagen, including Colorado’s own Diana DeGette who bragged about her taxpayer-funded, all-expenses-paid “junket” in the Denver Post.  She concluded her second “dispatch” with this observation:

At the time of this writing, the final agreement has not yet been approved. It is almost certain that the final binding deal will not be reached in Copenhagen, but we have every reason to believe that we are moving in the right direction.

Thank goodness they don’t have a “final agreement.” It’s one of the few times, I’ve been thankful that wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayers dollars resulted in nothing other than wasted money.

Or I read something like this about our state government: “Go on take a free ride.”  Parole bought more than 60 2009 hybrid sedans in the midst of the “worst recession since the Great Depression.”

Or this: “Road trip to Beaver Run Resort.”  Apparently Colorado spent nearly $300,000 on things like “official functions” and “customer workshops.”

If you really want to get MAD check out the US Debt Clock.

Is anyone really surprised at the anger that launched such movements as Tea Parties and 9.12 Projects or my new group Mothers Against Debt.  Please join MAD.  No dues.  No meetings.  Just a pledge to hold accountable any elected officials who recklessly spend our children’s money pushing them further into debt.  Let me know what you think of the new logo.

Congresswoman Betsy Markey’s pivotal yes vote on the controversial cap and trade legislation may come back to haunt her as she seeks re-election  to represent Colorado’s 4th congressional district.

Within Markey’s district is Weld County, the country’s  eighth largest producing agricultural county in the United States.  Reuters just reported that  Bob Stallman, head of the American Farm Bureau Federation, made the following statement about cap and trade:

American farmers and ranchers ‘must aggressively respond to extremists’ and ‘misguided, activist-driven regulation … The days of their elitist power grabs are over.’

Despite pleas from the global warming alarmist crowd, Stallman warned Americans that cap and trade would destroy farmers, ranchers and those who rely upon them.

Vast amounts of farmland could become carbon-capturing woodlands under cap-and-trade, “eliminating about 130,000 farms and ranches,” said Stallman. One federal analysis says 8 percent of crop and pasture land could be turned into trees by 2050 because trees would be more profitable than crops.

Good luck defending your vote Congresswoman Markey.

In an article that reads more like a proposal for a Saturday Night Live skit, the Telegraphreports that the Copenhagen climate summit “will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of ‘carbon dioxide equivalent’, equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.”

That’s the price the world will have to pay because the 15,000 summit attendees require 1200 limos and 140 private plans, along with caviar and free sex. 

I give them credit for superior denial skills.  In the face of Climategate, eco-totalitarians still behave as if everything is normal.  The global community believes them and won’t be troubled by their conspicuous consumption.  These are the same people who told Michael Jackson that he was perfectly normal.

Hide information and someone somewhere will find it.  Two stories, Climategate and Ritter-inaugural fund gate, are great examples.  I’ve discussed Climategate on my show before and will discuss Ritter’s dilemma today.

Enjoy this entertaining YouTube parody of Tommy James’ “Draggin the Line” called “Hide the Decline.” Global warming alarmists and eco-totalitarians are in full panic mode over Climategate.  Maybe these “scientists” shouldn’t have let their ideology get ahead of the data!

My Independence Institute colleague Todd Shepherd explains how Governor Bill Ritter, who bragged about full transparency when problems arose with his inaugural fund, now is being less than open about the “strange method of deposits” into the account.   Tune in to News Talk 1310 KFKA at 9:30 a.m. to hear Todd Shepherd full accounting.

Hotair.com published emails that seem to expose the fraud of global warming.  The correspondence indicates that some scientists either hid or deleted data that did not support their theory of global warming or they simply wonder where’s the warming.

One of the recent emails came from Kevin Trenberth of NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) in Boulder. Trenberth ponders the question that many rational people ask when considering the consequences of cap and trade legislation, which is supposed to curb the warming that isn’t happening.

From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming ? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author

I asked the same question back on the 4th of July when I saw a woman wearing ear muffs because it was so cold.  So I’ll ask all the eco-totalitarian, global warming alarmists, where has the warming gone?

The horrific piece of legislation known as “Cap and Trade” is also referred to as the Waxman-Markey bill, named for its sponsors Congressmen Henry Waxman (D-California) and Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts).   Despite a strong majority in the House, the bill narrowly passed with only a seven vote margin on Friday, June 26.  Forty-four House Democrats opposed the legislation including Colorado’s 3rd CD Representative John Salazar.

Congresswoman Betsy Markey voted yes.  Markey gave her reasons  during an interview on my show last week citing “green jobs” and protections for agriculture.  One thing she didn’t cite, a $2000 campaign contribution from Waxman on Thursday, June 25, the day before her yes vote on his legislation.  She also received $2000 from Congressman Jim Clyburn (D-South Carolina), House Whip, on June 24.

It was so cold at the Greeley Independence Stampede on Saturday night, July 4, 2009, that a woman ferrying guests about in a golf cart was forced to wear earmuffs to fend off the chill.   After a rain storm delayed the start of the Bucky Covington/Blake Shelton concert, the temperature dropped.  I was wrapped up in a sweatshirt and two coats.

The cold, damp weather isn’t unique to Northern Colorado.  According to the National Weather Service, Central Park in New York City suffered through one of the coldest, wettest Junes in history.  Some interesting Central Park June weather facts:

THIS JUNE IS TIED FOR THE 8TH COOLEST ON RECORD. THE AVERAGE
TEMPERATURE WAS 67.5…3.7 DEGREES BELOW NORMAL…WHICH ALSO
OCCURRED IN 1897.

CENTRAL PARK HAS NOT HIT 85 DEGREES IN THE MONTH OF JUNE THIS YEAR.
THE LAST TIME THIS OCCURRED WAS BACK IN 1916. THIS HAS ONLY OCCURRED
2 OTHER TIMES…1903 AND 1886.

The latest global averaged satellite temperature shows that Al Gore’s “fever” diagnosis for planet earth is just plain wrong! According to Climate Depot, “the Earth has cooled .74°F since former Vice President Al Gore released “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006.”  And it’s part of an 8 year trend.  It seems the truth is inconvenient for the Goracle.

UPDATE:  Al Gore is  insane — bats in the belfry!  Today the London Times Online reports that Al Gore, the high priest of global warming hysteria, likens his fight over global warming to the free world’s battle against Nazis — genocidal, facist Nazis.