Month: January 2023

(Colorado Peak Politics)

Almost as shocking as the Suncor oil refinery shutdown two weeks ago that’s expected to seriously disrupt Colorado’s fuel supply, is Gov. Polis’s acknowledgement of the situation as an emergency.

Our world is not powered by sunshine and giant lollypop turbines, Polis now grudgingly admits, but with oil refined into gas, diesel and jet fuel that moves people and goods across Colorado.

Due to numerous malfunctions caused by the holiday cold snap, the Commerce City refinery is offline until March taking 40% of Colorado’s fuel supply with it when the company’s supply runs out next week.

Polis promised during a Tuesday news conference to use every tool at his disposal to deal with the fuel shortage emergency.

“Our team is working to lessen the impact on Coloradans and our pocketbooks. We know higher gas prices are going to be a challenge until we are back at full refining capacity, but we are using all the tools that we have to reduce costs and increase supply.”

But so far he’s only lifted some state regulations on the trucking industry, which call into question whether the rules were even needed in the first place.

Truckers will be allowed to operate longer than 11 hours during a 13-hour day. That’s not all driving time. Truckers spend hours and hours and hours waiting in line just to pick up the fuel for transport.

Trucks will also be able to carry a heavier load of fuel into Colorado from other states.

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(Complete Colorado Page Two)

(Editor’s note: You can listen to this column, read by the author, here.)

I hear over and over that the true measure of a society can be found by how it treats its most vulnerable members. That refrain is sung every time another subsidy program is funded to support the vagrants who camp on our streets, defecate on our sidewalks and leave needles for our children to discover.

The recent super-cold snap that plunged temperatures past 10 degrees below zero proved just how inhumane we have been to the most vulnerable in our community — the handicapped, the elderly and children.

By putting criminals, addicts and transients before our most vulnerable we have exposed just how sick and cruel we have become.

My son with Down syndrome goes to day programs where he can interact with other developmentally delayed people as well as typical folks. This is where he learns, gathers life skills, finds community, makes friends.

People like him run a large risk of isolation as they enter adulthood; without these programs they can find themselves plugged into a TV set, warehoused away from society, alone and forgotten. Adult and special-needs day-programs are more than just a lifeline to the most vulnerable. They fill the most human need, connection.

These day programs are often housed at city recreation centers where there are rooms for activities, exercise and physical therapy.

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(Colorado Peak Politics)

With a straight face and without a hint of irony, Gov. Polis is busing migrants from the sanctuary city of Denver to New York insisting they don’t really want to be here and he’s just helping them reach their destination.

PeakNation™ will recall the nearly 4,000 creative border crossers who have arrived in Denver in as many weeks were transported from Texas by immigration activists who insisted the migrants were going to cities of their choosing.

Axios reports on Polis’s busing initiative:

Why it matters: The Democratic governor’s move echoes actions by Republican governors in Texas and Florida that were labeled callous and cruel.

Will Polis’s actions be labeled as callous or cruel?

Of course not. New York Mayor Eric Adams just called it unfair and insisted we all have a national obligation to take care of everyone who crosses the border illegally.

That obligation being free housing, free health care. Maybe the Democrats can revive the free Obama phone program so the unwilling visitors can check out the latest Tik Tok video while phoning home.

For all the posturing of Denver as a sanctuary city for what used to be called illegal immigrants before it was shortened to migrants so as not to offend, it’s turned out to be a very expensive bus stop.

So far, it’s cost Colorado taxpayers $5 million.

Denver Mayor Hancock even admits the failure:

“States and cities not on the border are ill-equipped to address these challenges,

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(Colorado Peak Politics)

The new session of the 118th Congress stalled today after 19 Republicans blocked the first order of business, seating Nancy Pelosi’s replacement as Speaker of the House.

Kevin McCarthy is the Republican candidate for speaker, Hakeen Jeffries is the Democrat’s candidate. Neither have enough to win, yet.

That means House members were not sworn into office. No committees were seated. No investigations into Hunter Biden got off the ground.

And Colorado U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert helped.

And there it is. The first ballot is done and no Speaker has been elected.

19 Republicans voted against McCarthy: Biggs, Bishop, Boebert, Brecheen, Cloud, Clyde, Crane, Gaetz, Good, Gosar, Harris, Paulina Luna, Miller, Norman, Ogles, Perry, Rosendale, Roy, Self

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 3, 2023

Undoubtably, many of her constituents will be pleased.

Not because her actions threaten to install a (GASP) Democrat as speaker for the next two years. And it does.

Many Republicans are just tired of business as usual in the House of Representatives, and they want change.

Don’t we all?

But will Boebert’s and the demands of others presented to Kevin McCarthy in exchange for their vote really change … anything?

BREAKING: Rep. @LaurenBoebert speaks out against Kevin McCarthy for Speaker ahead of the vote. pic.twitter.com/1fVJuh4vHN

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 3, 2023

Many Republicans would argue that bartering for votes,

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(Complete Colorado Page Two)

I hope giving up convenient grocery bags was on your list of New Year’s resolutions, because you’ll be doing it whether you wanted to or not. Why make your own decisions when Democratic legislators can decide for you? They know better than you how to run your life, after all.

If you read my 32-page paper on Jared Polis’s supposed “libertarianism,” you already knew about the coming ten-cent fees on “single-use plastic carryout bags” and on “recycled paper carryout bags,” and about the ban on plastic bags starting in 2024.

Democrats think you’re stupid

The legislators who passed this bill obviously think that you are an idiot. One way you can tell this is that the bill, signed by Gov. Polis on July 6, 2021, takes effect between January 1, 2023, and July 1, 2024. Yet the bill contains the emergency “safety clause,” declaring itself “necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, or safety.”

Again, Democratic legislators know better than you, so if they have to flagrantly lie to you about an emergency to evade a possible petition to block the measure, so be it. Obviously if you can’t even be trusted to decide how to carry your groceries home, you can’t be trusted to decide whether to challenge the bill under the state Constitution. Clearly you’re just too stupid.

What’s the point of the bill? It states, “The General Assembly finds, determines,

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(Complete Colorado Page Two)

DENVER — Colorado state employees are getting up to four days of paid administrative leave if they are willing to work at emergency shelters set up by the City and County of Denver to accommodate the thousands of illegal migrants flowing into Colorado.

The decision to pay Colorado workers to take time off their usual duties and shift to the warming shelters appears to be made solely by Gov. Jared Polis.

On Dec. 21, Polis emailed all state employees to ask them to “volunteer” and included a Signup Genius link to do so. He initially offered up to 16 hours of administrative leave to employees who “volunteered” through Dec. 23.

“As state employees and dedicated public servants, I encourage you to volunteer to help support over the day and weeks ahead cold weather sheltering and migrant operations by signing up to volunteer at the shelters in Denver, (sic),” Polis wrote.

Several state employees forwarded the information to Complete Colorado, and some of those also confirmed the leave was paid.

As of Jan. 2, Denver officials report more than 3,000 migrants seeking asylum have arrived in Colorado since Dec. 9., with most originating from Central and South America. Officials do not believe they have been bused in by authorities in either Texas or Florida, as has happened in other states.

Then on Dec. 30, Polis emailed all state employees again to thank those who had already “volunteered” and to extend his initial offer to encompass up to 32 hours of paid time off for “volunteering” through Jan.

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(Colorado Peak Politics)

Welcome to the New Year, which promises to be much like the old year, with establishment Democrats and progressives battling for supremacy in the state legislature to regulate us into a socialist state.

Only this year, they’re not up for reelection so they don’t have to keep lying about “saving” us money while raising our cost of living.

As Aurora City Councilman Dustin Zvonek notes, reducing the cost of living was so 2022.

New bag fee, new gas fee, new restrictions on eggs. Reducing the cost of living was so 2022 – back to business as usual for #coleg #copolitics https://t.co/RxWl5OuGhx

— Dustin Zvonek (@DustinZvonek) December 30, 2022

The new year has already ushered in a shortage of eggs, which are a necessary ingredient to make baked goods, battered food, pancakes, cake, chips, crackers, pasta, salad dressing and soup.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis(D) and the Democrat-run Colorado Legislature caused a food shortage in Colorado.#copolitics #coleg pic.twitter.com/KOLNW8TPSS

— Mr T 2 (@GovtsTheProblem) January 1, 2023

And thanks to new regulations going into effect this year, prices have already spiked to about $7 a dozen — more than 50 cents an egg.

Watch for the egg effect to spread to restaurant offerings that requires the produce as a necessary ingredient, and be sure to thank a Democrat.

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(Complete Colorado Page Two)

You can think of temperature, besides quantifying everyday words like hot and cold, as being a rough measure of how quickly the constituent particles of a substance are zipping around.  If you had a microscope powerful enough to look at individual water molecules at room temperature versus water molecules at the point just before they break free of each other to become steam, you’d see that on average the room temperature molecules are moving around more sluggishly than the ones at the boiling point.

Chemical reactions, from the dramatic to the mundane, all proceed at a rate that is roughly proportional to the chances the molecules have to meet and interact.  That is, chemical reactions proceed at a rate that is proportional to temperature.  High temperatures mean the molecules are moving much more and thus have more chances to meet another molecule to partner up with.  You can say the converse for cold temperatures.  And this happens for all sorts of reactions, including those that take place when a photon of light interacts with the crystal inside a solar panel to free an electron and make electric current.

Colorado’s bitter cold  snap prior to Christmas, combined with a series of tweets by Independence Institute energy researcher Jake Fogleman, got me wondering exactly what kind of effect the extreme cold had on my own solar panels.  I wasn’t expecting a malfunction because there aren’t any moving parts and the panels are rated to survive cold snaps. 

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