Dear Dean Singleton, Please Charge Me

Westword's Michael Roberts reports that "Dean Singleton... plans to start charging readers for lotsa online content at select MediaNews papers in California and Pennsylvania beginning in 2010." This is relevant to us in Colorado because Singleton also publishes the Denver Post. Are fees for the online Post in our future?

God, I hope so.

Good journalism is hard work. Good investigative journalism is especially hard and time-consuming work. People tend not do do a lot of hard work without compensation. (I imagine Roberts would confirm this.) Thus, journalism needs to pay.

Journalism can pay in one of three general ways: advertising, philanthropic contributions, and reader payments. Advertising can be direct or indirect; for example, Michelle Malkin runs direct advertising, and her entire blog serves to advertise her books. (You'll notice that I advertise my own book, Values of Harry Potter, on my web page. And it makes a fine addition to the tree or stocking!) I would be interested in learning how much of the Incredible Shrinking Westword's revenues come from print versus online advertising. (While the weekly's print edition has gotten noticeably smaller, its online content has expanded dramatically.)

I doubt anybody is going to make a generous gift to the Post.

That leaves reader contributions to supplement advertising revenues. These payments can be by the piece or via subscriptions.

As I suggested earlier, I think papers (and it's funny even to still call them "papers") should give readers a choice: watch an annoying ad, pay a monthly or annual subscription, or pay to read a single article at a time.

How is that not the best of all worlds? Cheapskates can still read content for free, except they have to pay with their time by watching a real advertisement. Regular readers can subscribe, preferably for a low annual rate (I would seriously consider paying, say, $50 per year to read the Post online). And occasional readers who value their time can pay some token amount -- perhaps an amount that varies with the ambition of the piece -- to read a single article. As I also mentioned before, the key to this is to figure out a very-fast way to make micropayments (else there is no time savings).

The fact is that readers who value good content and don't want to waste time looking at ads will be prepared to pay to read that content. I absolutely hate the Post's online ads that pop up, block text, push text down the page, and otherwise annoy the living hell out of me when all I'm trying to do is read a spot of news. I would much rather pay a little than deal with those sorts of ads.

I think it's worth revisiting what Post editor Greg Moore said in September:

In terms of advertising being a means of supporting original [journalism]... right now advertising provides like 85 percent of our revenue. It's still a huge, huge, huge driver. It's a huge source of revenue. It's going to be probably for a while. But I think our survival -- and when I say survival I'm not talking about the newspaper, I'm talking about our ability to do journalism -- I think we'll have to shift to a different model. And I think that model is that the user will have to pay for the content that he or she consumes.

I don't think that the cat is out of the bag. I think that the record industry sort of proved that, the music industry sort of proved that you can change people's behavior. Napster, in the mid-1990s, everyone thought that would just sort of kill everything, and they put those people in jail, put them out of business, and now people pay for music. They do it differently -- they don't buy albums anymore, they buy singles, but they still pay a lot of money for music.

So I think there's still hope for us, that we can sort of reverse this trend. As somebody said, I think the worst decision that was made by the owners of newspapers was to sort of be stampeded into giving away their content for free. But it doesn't mean that it's over.

Unfortunately, rather than quote somebody who knows what he's talking about, such as Moore, Roberts quotes some clueless blog post by Rob Burgess.

Burgess quotes survey results from NewFiction:

80 percent of consumers recently surveyed by Forrester Research say they would discontinue their favorite free print content if they were asked to pay for it. Less than 10 percent of respondents would agree to subscription models; only three percent would opt for micropayments.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner nicely summarize the problem with this in their new book SuperFreakonomics: "There is good reason to be skeptical of data from personal surveys. There is often a vast gulf between how people say they behave and how they actually behave" (page 7).

If you ask people if they want to pay for something they now get for free, what do you expect them to say? They're going to give you some variant of "no."

But if a person actually has a choice of reading a great article and paying, versus not reading that article, in at least some cases the person is going to pay up and ask for more. (Again, I think newspapers would be smart to offer a third option of spending time watching an ad, probably in the form of a short video. These sorts of ads are already common on a variety of web pages.)

So Burgess's first argument is bunk. Let us turn to his second argument:

You ruined everything in the beginning by starting with giving everything away for free. It has now been almost 15 years since the Internet broke wide and you're just NOW getting around to asking people to pay for your content? I don't blame people for not wanting to pay for it anymore, why should they? Who would pay for something they can get for free?

The options are not "get free content" versus "pay for content." The other option is "get no content," at least as far as investigative journalism is concerned. With that as the alternative, paying doesn't look so bad after all. People "should" pay, and they should be willing to, if that's the only way to get hard-to-produce content they want to read. (Again, easy-to-produce content will remain free, and ads can help pay for hard-to-produce content.)

What Burgess seems to think ridiculous is Singleton's comment, "We have to condition readers that everything is not free." But Singleton's comment is perfectly sensible. Moore uses the example of paying for music online. Today many people pay to receive television stations that they could otherwise get for free, because the reception is better and the broadcast stations are packaged with cable-only stations. Consumers change their behavior all the time, even (or especially) after they say they won't.

There ain't no such thing as free journalism. If journalists aren't willing to work without compensation, philanthropists don't pay, and advertising doesn't pay enough, the only alternative is for readers to pay, if they want the benefit of the product.

Really advertising is a way of extracting a payment of time from readers. Again, I think papers should offer that alternative. I would much rather pay in dollars, as for me that would be the far less costly alternative.

Could Micropayments Save Newspapers?

At last month's media panel, somebody (I believe Adrienne Russell) mentioned the idea of micropayments for online media content. Such payments might help save the newspaper industry as well as help fund better bloggers.

The idea is that readers would pay a small fee -- say a quarter or fifty cents -- to read an article online. A popular story that drew a hundred thousand readers could do quite well for a publication.

Consider how the Wall Street Journal presents its news stories. It gives you the headline and the opening sentences, then asks you to subscribe. But I don't subscribe to that paper, because I rarely want to read one of its news stories (and its opinions are available for free). But, if I could pay a small, one-time fee to read the occasional story, I'd probably pay that paper a few dollars per year. That's not a lot, but multiplied by a few hundred thousand extra readers it could add up. Indeed, newspapers could offer monthly subscriptions for regular readers as well as micropayments for occasional readers.

At the media panel, Greg Moore of the Denver Post said a couple of things of particular interest to this issue. First, he said that newspapers might have to print less frequently. Second, readers would have to pay for online content, eventually, for newspapers to survive and thrive. I can envision a newspaper that goes to press, say, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. The print edition would be stuffed with ads, comics, classifieds, crosswords -- stuff people like to touch and feel. They would be big, perhaps nearly as many pages as seven days runs now, so subscription rates could at least stay even while production and distribution costs dropped dramatically. This would be the answer to traditionalists, who actually enjoy getting their hands dirty reading the paper. (I would as soon eat dinosaur eggs for breakfast.)

Under such a scheme, the Post would raise revenue from print and online ads, print and online subscriptions, online only subscriptions, and micropayments for individual stories. Publications that used micropayments would probably want to make some significant portion of its content available for free.

Bloggers (the kind with actual readers) and strictly online publications might also be able to employ micropayments for more ambitious stories.

The key to micropayments, of course, is to make them easy. A PayPal account might get the job done, or perhaps PayPal could adapt its existing program to make micropayments easier. Most people aren't going to pay a small fee to read an article unless it's as easy as clicking a button or maybe two.

One publication that has already combined ads, micropayments, and subscriptions is The Objective Standard. The publication shows the first part of an article online for no cost. To read the entire article, one must subscribe or "Purchase a PDF of this article" for, in this case, $4.95. (Micropayments for journal articles or specialty articles can be higher than for regular newspaper stories.)

The more I think about it, the more I love the idea of micropayments. Don't saddle me with a long-term commitment. I have enough of those. Don't litter my screen with pop ups and flashing lights trying to sell me crap. (That said, a third option to a subscription or a micropayment might be to watch, say, a thirty second video advertising some product before reading the article. I notice that Fox already does this for online video.) Just give me the option of paying a small fee to read something that interests me.

This article has been brought to you at no cost by FreeColorado.com.

Activism and Writing Letters to the Editor

I led an "Activism and LTE Workshop" October 6 (thank to the Independence Institute for lending me the space). Here are my modified notes.

The type of activism we should pursue is Intellectual Activism, marked by presenting reasonable arguments based on logic and evidence to the public. The goal is to reach active minds in the culture through various means of communication.

Intellectual activism may be contrasted with a couple of bad types of activism. Intimidation is what we think of regarding the typical far-left protest, where the goal is to scare people, break property, and throw stuff at police. Any sort of threat or violence falls into this sort of bad activism.

Sophistic or postmodern activism uses language as a battering ram or a weapon to change policies, irrespective of the facts. This is the modern version of what the Greek Sophists did: use language to persuade people through deceit and trickery rather than through sound arguments. On the left, this sort of activism is marked by postmodernism, using language as a social tool rather than as a means of conveying the truth. This sort of activism involves distorting statistics, cherry picking data, taking quotes out of context, and pushing logical fallacies. This sort of activism often relies upon crafting some "narrative" to spin one's policies or vilify one's opponents, as with calling opponents of Obamacare an unruly mob. Closely related is the obsession with unfounded conspiracy theories.

The primary goal of intellectual activism is to present the case for liberty and individual rights to the public. Generally this is done by presenting arguments in written or oral form. Other goals of intellectual activism can be to promote a positive article, person, or group, or to draw attention to some cause.

Many types of activism can be good or bad depending on the context. For example, rallies can be great, but if the participants are off message they can be counterproductive. Partisanship, or beating up the other side, can be appropriate if partisan attacks are rooted in the facts and if they put principles above politics.

So what are the types of intellectual activism? This can best be seen in graphic form (thanks to my wife Jennifer for creating the image):



The image illustrates the roots of activism, the main three divisions -- activist training, politics, and mass communication -- and the written and oral branches of mass communication.

Note that one particular campaign of intellectual activism can involve multiple branches. For example, promoting a good article written by an ally might involve writing a blog post, posting a social media link, and mentioning the article in a letter to an elected official.

Obviously, intellectual activists generally specialize in a few branches, though a well-rounded activist can swing easily among various branches.

Writing letters to the editor is one small branch of the tree, but it is an important one. The ability to write a good letter to the editor is an essential skill of any good activist. If you can write a good letter, you can also write a good blog post, learn to write a good op-ed, and translate your skills to oral communication. That is why the workshop I led focussed on developing this skill.

I recorded my presentation on writing letters, so I'll turn the reader over to those YouTube videos. Some of my material finds inspiration on the article by Robert W. Tracinski, "How to Write an Effective Letter to the Editor."

Part 1


Part 2

Media Panel: Discussion Continues

The Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition hosted a media panel September 24 at the Tattered Cover in Denver. Previously I transcribed my opening comments and added a quick answer to a participant who asked whether she should enter journalism. Here I continue my review of the discussion.

First, though, as an aside, just yesterday I heard about the Nevada News Bureau, edited by conservative Elizabeth Crum (whom I met at the Sam Adams Alliance earlier this year). This service allows free, attributed reproduction of content. The about page states: "We're launching this news service in part because the owners of newspapers and television news teams have, in many cases, cut back on statehouse reporting and investigative journalism which in turn has eroded their ability to be a true 'watchdog' for the voter and taxpayer. ... The Nevada News Bureau is a non-profit project of Citizen Outreach, a 501(c)(3) exempt organization." So, I don't know anything about that nonprofit, and I don't know what caliber of journalism the service will produce, but it struck me as an interesting model.

Now on with the media panel discussion. I'm pulling quotes from the longer recording, and again these quotes are slightly redacted to ease the transition to text.

Adrienne Russell added weight to my point that independent writers often conduct original journalism: "What are bloggers going to do if mainstream journalism dies [one of the questions asked]? I think anyone who knows anybody who is an online journalist knows many many cases of journalism stories that break into the larger news media landscape that actually originated in the blogosphere. And most often times, it's not even traced back to that after the first couple hours or the first day."

Russell continued:

I think what I want to try to focus on for my few minutes is.... [journalism's] role as a public service or a public interest. ... What is the future of newspapers? But I think what obviously we really should be asking is, what is the future of journalism, and its ability to facilitate, and further, and make for a healthy public discourse, in this democracy and all over the world. ...

I think those two questions go hand in hand. But recently there have been all these stats that have come out, specifically one recently from the Pew Foundation... report that says that web traffic to the highest ranked news sites has gone up 27 percent from 2007 to 2008. And so what does that tell us? I'm actually not a huge stats fan, I usually don't throw them around. I'm more of a cultural studies person. But what does that tell us? It tells us that people are still interested in news.

And also I recently read that the Columbia journalism program, the masters degree program, got almost twice as many applicants this year as they did last year, which also signifies something about our attitude, and our understanding, and our relationship with journalism in this country.

... I think that the question of the business model has to look beyond newspapers, and has to look at all of these great examples that are actually emerging and beginning to flourish. Like, whether or not you like the politics associated with them, or you think they could be sustained in this giant model, things like the Colorado Independent, the Huffington Post, Slate -- there's all these examples of journalism that is flourishing, that is serious journalism. ... One of the better examples is ProPublica...

So probably what needs to happen is, traditional news organizations need to keep paying really close attention to what's going on with these successful models, whether they be for profit or not for profit. ...

Like Ari said, this is a time of innovation and great flourishing in terms of journalism, if not the journalism industry as we know it. And one of the reasons for this is that the new media technology, which is so often framed as threatening journalism as we know it, is creating these new possibilities for people to get involved in creating media. ...

So I think embedded in one of your questions was this idea of, are we just going to be inundated with this information that hasn't yet been debunked, and what are we going to do with it, and how are we going to... function without the filters that we've come to depend on. An the answer to this, to me, is that we're all, not only having an increased capacity to create media, but in that process we're learning how to assess it. So we're learning -- we have to learn a higher level of media literacy. So, in that way, we're so much more engaged in the media landscape than we ever could be.

And the old model was great in certain respects, but I think we all know that it also privileged particular sectors of society, it propped up the status quo, it's failed us in major ways. In ways I'm not sure that is possible anymore, given the dynamic environment where people are actually contributing. ...

Dominic Graziano feared that his classes aren't preparing future journalists for new media. He also said he thinks more people are applying to graduate school "because there's no jobs." Russell said at least "they must have a faith that there will be [jobs available] some day."

Graziano continued:

The points that we're making about how journalism -- decent, investigative journalism -- can still be seen on the internet... I truly believe that. ... But, my problem as a student at least, is [this.] We can take this upon ourselves. Every citizen can take it upon themselves to look into whatever they believe deserves looking into, and write a story about it. The question is where does the money come from. As a blogger... you're not going to get corporate sponsorship. ...

I can spend weeks up on weeks researching a story, and doing interviews, and stuff like that, and post it up on my blog, and it can get picked up by CNN, or the Post, and they can spend eighty bucks as a freelancer. ...

The problem with getting rid of corporate journalism is you get rid of the possibility of a salary. And when everybody's working freelance hours on freelance budgets, we will see a decrease... What happens when we're not covering everything? What happens when we can't be at every [hearing?] in the courtroom? ... Where are people going to get this information? ... That's really what concerns me the most about the future of journalism.

Ari talks about bloggers being able to provide feedback to content that's being published. But when that content isn't being published, when bloggers are responsible for all that content, it's going to turn into very partisan arguments... People will visit the websites that either completely support what they already believe, or [are] completely against what they already believe, in order just to argue with it.

We need to focus a lot more on balanced reporting, fair reporting, in-depth reporting. And my fear, as a student, and as a journalist, is that as everything moves away from these media giants, is you lose the ability to pay somebody to do a good job.

I thought of the fact that newspapers of old tended to be overtly partisan, but I never saw the opportunity to discuss this point at the forum.

Wendy Norris followed:

... I think there is a crisis in our nation around critical thinking. And that hits on the editorial/journalistic side, and that hits on the readership side. People are too willing to believe whatever is delivered to them, whether it's in the newspaper, or a blog, or on television. And I think Tom's example of Justice Sotomayor is a very good example of that. It's very easy to find that speech online and learn that those remarks were taken completely out of context.

And I think that we talk a lot in this country about First Amendment rights, but there are also responsibilities with the First Amendment. And I think that if we're going to find a new way to deliver news content -- and I'm a huge proponent of blowing up what we've got now and starting anew, because it just simply does not work in this era -- then we need to be really honest about what it is that we're trying to do and what it is as news consumers that we want.

Norris said that even when working with a nonprofit organization, "I had to fight constantly to do the kind of investigative reporting that I thought was important for this community to have access to." She said that readers have a responsibility to support something better than fluff and sensationalism.

Greg Moore rounded out the introductory remarks:

I'm really surprised that so many people are out tonight. I think it's great, and to see so many young people in the audience is really heartening.

The first question was, what will become of the newspaper business model in the next five to ten years? Is there any hope for advertising as a means of supporting original reporting? And then the whole thing about public or nonprofit subsidization.

I don't believe, first, that we're in a post-journalism era. We are not. And I don't think we'll ever be in a post-journalism era. It may take on different forms or be done by a disaggregated sort of collection of people like what we're beginning to see now. But there're always going to be things happening that we didn't know, or that we're intensely interested in. We'll always be looking for people to help us understand what's happening.

In the next five to ten years, I think that newspapers will be still around. I think there's something about the authentication of an event that is really important. I'll just give you an example. When Barack Obama won the election, that was posted online. But people were lined up in our lobby to get a newspaper. Why? Because 100 years from now, would you rather have a printout from this blog or whatever, or would you rather have a 92-point headline that declares the election of the first black president? That's simple.

If your kid runs for 350 yards for the football game, do you want a printout that could have been manipulated or whatever, or would you want it in a newspaper? You'd want it in a newspaper.

So I think there'll be newspapers. I think we'll be smaller. I think we probably will come out less frequently. I think it'll cost more. I think the notion of being a paper of record, of trying to cover every city council meeting and things of that nature, will increasingly be left to bloggers and other sort of independent gatherers of news and information. ...

In terms of advertising being a means of supporting original [journalism]... right now advertising provides like 85 percent of our revenue. It's still a huge, huge, huge driver. It's a huge source of revenue. It's going to be probably for a while. But I think our survival -- and when I say survival I'm not talking about the newspaper, I'm talking about our ability to do journalism -- I think we'll have to shift to a different model. And I think that model is that the user will have to pay for the content that he or she consumes.

I don't think that the cat is out of the bag. I think that the record industry sort of proved that, the music industry sort of proved that you can change people's behavior. Napster, in the mid-1990s, everyone thought that would just sort of kill everything, and they put those people in jail, put them out of business, and now people pay for music. They do it differently -- they don't buy albums anymore, they buy singles, but they still pay a lot of money for music.

So I think there's still hope for us, that we can sort of reverse this trend. As somebody said, I think the worst decision that was made by the owners of newspapers was to sort of be stampeded into giving away their content for free. But it doesn't mean that it's over.

In terms of public or nonprofit subsidization, I think it's still an open question. We're sort of like still the nascent stages of that. I stood on the advisory board of ProPublica, and I think that it's a really interesting experiment. We've published some of their stories. I think they do good work. But they look more like old media than new media. I think that's important to acknowledge.

I also think it's really sort of hard assess what the future's going to be like, because the people who work for ProPublica are some of the best old media print journalists ever. And so that whole thing about a firewall between the people who pay for the news operation and the people who gather the news operation is really scrupulously adhered to. ...

Second question is about the internet. Is what we see on the internet from sources other than mainstream media really journalism? I will say, yeah, it is. It's a different kind of journalism. But, when we put together our newspaper, it's a menu of things. While I would not necessarily describe everything that's being done by bloggers as journalism, I think it's content generation. And it's interesting content. Sometimes it does lead to stories in mainstream media.

And I might add that bloggers have existed since the beginning of newspapers; they wrote letters to the editor. ... There's always them, when you write a story, somebody out there who knows a lot about a little. They know a lot. And they can finds things you left out of a story, they can find things you got wrong. So bloggers don't bother me. I don't have any problem with blogging. But what will bloggers do and cable commentators do? They'll just do what they've been doing. And hopefully they'll do it a little bit better.

But here's the big distinction. And you can deride corporate journalism if you want to. But the thing about corporate journalism is that you have a support structure to do tough things. That's my lawyer, okay? I mean, I pay him a lot of money to open doors, to stop people from trying to prevent us from publishing stories. And the question is, what's the structure an independent blogger has? What happens when you're trying to write a really tough story, and they say, you know, I'm going to sue your butt off? I'm going to take your house, I'm going to take your car, I'm going to take everything? Does that journalism get done? Well, it's much more likely with the sort of support structure that we have -- corporate journalism -- that we can. ...

What do we need to do to keep the public service component of newspapers alive? We need money. You know, what I always say is, a free press ain't free. It costs a lot of money to do journalism that matters.

And to your point, that newspapers or journalism has supported the status quo, I vigorously disagree with that. I think that newspapers and journalism is about challenging the status quo. It always has been. ...

We're not entering a post-journalism era. We are entering a post-fact era, where facts aren't really that important to a lot of people. And I don't mean that they don't care about facts, they just care about the facts that agree with their position. And there's this really interesting book that's out that's called... True Enough. And it talks about sort of the belief society, where people actually won't let in information that challenges things that they believe, and only accept information that sort of supports their point. ... So we're in a post-fact era, and I think we run the risk of getting in really deep trouble by only letting in stuff that we agree with.

I think that one of the things that sort of contributes to a vigorous democracy is finding out about things that challenge your assumptions. That make you question what you believe. And I worry about the silo mentality that seems to be developing in this post-fact society. ...

I will say this about the Sotomayor quote. ... The day after the story came out, when Newt Gingrich accused her of being a racist, we read the speech. We read the speech -- we do have time to do good journalism. We read the speech, and we actually wrote a story that said that's out of context. Here is what she said. Here is what she meant. Here's what she said before, here's what she said after. And that's really what journalism's about. Journalism is about the business of verification. And we as a society can't afford to lose that.

During the questions I offered one final push (and this is where I'll leave things here):

One big issue that we're talking about here is this idea of impartiality or disinterestedness, versus partisanship. ... I think that, as a goal, disinterestedness is completely wrong. If you're disinterested, that just means that you're lazy and you don't care about the story. What you ought to be is passionately interested in obtaining the truth.

So it's not about being disinterested versus being partisan. It's about, are you looking for the truth, or not? And I totally agree with Greg Moore that we do need some larger media enterprises with these checks and balances, with good editors. Because there are a lot of bloggers who just don't have the discipline to write good stuff. ...

That doesn't mean that a large organization is overcoming this partisanship. I've seen some what I consider overtly partisan "news" stories in the pages of the Denver Post. ... You're not going to escape the problem by having big media versus little media. The difference is, is the individual reporter going to go after the facts.

So I'm overtly partisan. I mean, that's why I do journalism, because I'm a political activist. I'm an advocacy journalist. I'm oriented toward free markets and individual rights. That's my thing. So, for instance, I did a lot of original research into corporate welfare in Colorado. ...

Instead of having a distinction of disinterestedness versus partisanship, I would like to make another distinction, which is the straight, easy, fact-based news... versus more of the analysis, the integration of the facts. Now, with that integration of the facts, that's a lot harder, and that's where we get into a lot more disagreement. So that's why I love reading Colorado Independent, Westword (some writers at Westword tend to have sort of a left-wing bent), but I love reading these publications because they look up good facts, and that's useful to me. I mean, a fact's a fact, it doesn't matter if you're a Republican, Democrat, right winger, left winger.

I'd like to briefly address the Sotomayor issue, just because that illustrates what we're talking about. So, if you tend to lean toward the left, and you're reading a publication that tends to lean toward the left, and it says that a quote by Sotomayor is out of context, it's like, "Yes, we're all right, and everybody who's beating up Sotomayor is wrong." But, you know what, I read that speech too... I've done a detailed analysis of that speech on my web page. ... And the fact is that she is basically a judicial subjectivist. That's what she is, and she repeats the point over and over again, in many different ways. So the broader point is not out of context. ...

So one of the complaints is we filter the facts according to our perception. But a lot of people saying this, and beating up the other side, are doing the exact same thing, right? So it's a mirror that we need to hold up to ourselves too. ... Whether we're partisans overtly or unnamed partisans, I think that that's very very important.

Light in the Digital Age: Media Panel

I joined a media panel September 24 at Tattered Cover in downtown Denver. There were a few sparks. I sat right next to fellow panelist Greg Moore, which was a great position to heap abuse on the Denver Post (which Moore edits). One guy treated the question period as his personal monologue time and finally was asked to leave with security.

Yet the panelists also shared much common ground, and the discussion was interesting. Here I recount much of it. (Due to the fact that I sat on the panel, I was unable to capture any photographs or video of the event.)

The event was sponsored by the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition and moderated Thomas Kelley. The other panelists were Wendy Norris, founding editor of the Colorado Independent; Dominic Graziano, editor of the campus Metropolitan; and Adrienne Russell, a professor at the University of Denver.

The title of the event was ominous: "Darkness in the Digital Age: Has the Advent of Citizen Journalism, the Blogosphere, and the Demise of Newspapers Made Us Less Well-Informed?" When Kelley asked us for our comments beforehand, I send back a note, "I do not see 'darkness' in the digital age, but more light. The average person can much more easily obtain quality news and views than ever before in human history."

In case you're wondering how I came to sit on a panel with the likes of Greg Moore, here's what Kelley said in his introduction: "Finally we have Ari Armstrong, a writer of several prolific and eloquent blogs, some say veering toward the right. I find him to be thoughtful." This elicited a chuckle. So I was the token conservative (even though, as I later noted, I'm not really a conservative). At any rate I was delighted to be invited, and Kelley ran an informative and well-attended event.

Prior to the event, Kelley sent out some questions to set the tone for the evening:

1. What will become of the newspaper business model in the next five to ten years? Is there any hope for advertising as a means of supporting original reporting? Is public or non-profit subsidization the answer?

2. Is what we see on the internet from sources other than mainstream media really journalism? Are we entering a "post-journalism" era? If the industry of independent reporting is dying, where are the bloggers and the cable commentators going to get their content?

3. What do we need to keep the public service component (by that I mean digging out information on all subjects of public interest and reporting it according to a code of ethics that requires disinterest) of the newspaper business alive?

4. What is the cultural effect of a post-journalism era? Are we becoming more partisan, less broadly educated, and more exposed to un-debunked bogus information?

By luck of the draw, I spoke first. Following are my (slightly redacted) comments. In a follow-up post I'll continue with the comments of other panelists.

One of the questions that was asked of us in e-mail prior to the event had to do with what's going to happen now -- it's kind of a "woe is us" scenario -- what's happening now that many newspapers are going out of business. I think the title is "Darkness in the Digital Age." ... To me, I see a lot of lightness in the digital age. So that's kind of the theme that I want to focus on.

To me, there's been no better time, ever, to be a consumer of journalism. Today I read articles from the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Denver Post, Denver Daily, Westword, Colorado Independent, and I could probably name a dozen others if I'd kept track of that during the day.

At the click of a button you can read the best quality journalism in the world, which you simply couldn't do before [the interent]. I remember years ago, stringing a telephone line to my computer, and that was pre-internet. So now we have more opportunity than ever as consumers of news.

But then of course there's the problem of if you're a professional journalist. I guess we're shipping some more of ours off to Canada these days, from the old [Rocky Mountain News] positions. So there are definitely some transitional problems here.

I'm sure other people here know more about the industry. But I just wanted to mention a few examples of how other publications are solving these problems.

So the Wall Street Journal has in fact gone to paid, online subscriptions, and then they make their editorial content available for free.

The weeklies, Westword and Boulder Weekly, seem to be doing pretty well with a combination of online ads and print ads. But they have less printing costs, obviously. And the Westword has cut back, obviously, too.

Other things like NPR, Face the State on the right, Progress Now on the left (which does some journalism), operate by philanthropy. And this is great. So I tend to be free-market oriented, but to me voluntary charity, philanthropy, is a perfectly legitimate part of the free market.

I just looked up the Christian Science Monitor. They're going from a print publication to a strictly online publication. But they do have a subsciption-based weekly publication, and they also will charge you for a "Daily News Briefing" for $5.75 per month. So I don't know if that's going to work for them, but there are certainly people who are trying to find the balance between philanthropy, online advertising, print advertising [and subscriptions].

I'm going to jump now to one of these points that was mentioned prior to us coming on, which is: What's going to happen if the flow of journalism stops going from established newspapers to bloggers? I want to say that that whole premise is basically false.

There's not a one-way flow of information. There's a two-way flow of information. Now it's true that a lot of bloggers tend to focus on commentary, which means they're integrating news facts that they're reading around them, such as Mike Littwin might do at the Denver Post or the editorial staff might do. So it's a similar function.

But that's not the only function. Just like Mike Littwin might do original journalism, original investigative work, so bloggers might do the same thing. And often the journalism flow is coming back to the newspapers. So I'm just going to give a few examples here.

Last year, Katy Human of the Denver Post wrote an article about health insurance, and about the effects of children and health insurance, and the effects of not having any. And she mentioned these studies that prove her point. Well, the studies sounded a little bit fishy to me, so I sent her an e-mail and said, hey, why don't you send me what the list of your studies is. And she hemmed and hawed, and finally I sent an e-mail to David Kopel and Jason Salzman, because at the time they were the media critics at the [Rocky Mountain News], and finally she was persuaded to hand over her studies.

But then David Kopel wrote up a follow up for the Rocky, pointing out that none of the studies supported her point.

So this is an example I thought of bloggers and people on the editorial side sending feedback to the journalism side of the news.

I'll just give one more example. The Denver Post published an op-ed by a guy named T. R. Reid (again on the health policy issue, since that's what's hot). [Read my critique.] And he completely misstated international comparisons on waiting times for elective surgeries. Now I know this because I looked it up. I did the research, I looked at the original sources, and I found the real stats. He simply misstated them. And he also omitted stats on emergency visits and specialists. Unfortunately, the Denver Post chose not to run my letter correcting that piece. But nevertheless the flow of journalism goes both ways.

I wanted to quickly run through a few examples of some real journalism being done by bloggers. And I also contribute to a group of vaguely right-wing, conservative bloggers called the People's Press Collective. So I want to mention several examples.

If you want to hear what people are saying at some of these rallies -- the tax rallies, Tea Party rallies -- there's really no other place to look, if you want extended interviews with the actual participants, than my web page. [Listen to interviews from 4/15, 7/4, 7/28, 8/6, and 9/12.] Because I got my video camera, interviewed them extensively, and had a lot of them published online. The Denver Post maybe quoted one or two people in very short snippets (and that's just the nature of the medium). So that's one example of positive journalism.

When an economists named Thomas Woods came to Colorado to speak about his new book on economics, I looked up some of his older articles in which he blasted abolitionists and was praising antebellum culture. So I thought that was a little odd. I thought that was worth looking up as a journalistic enterprise.

Earlier this year, in response to a CNN report, I conducted my own "Low-Carb Food Stamp Diet." Now this was more proactive, obviously -- I was part of the story. But I thought it was a fun way to illustrate some of the facts surrounding the story.

In 2007, I solicited and published a letter from Mark Udall about the separation of church and state, which I thought was a pivotal issue in that election.

So you heard about the vandalism at the Denver Democratic Headquarters. Thankfully Denver police caught the [alleged] perpetrator, the name of Schwenkler. One of my friends, Michael Sandoval, did some searching online and found that this character had been paid by a left-wing organization to do Democratic campaign work. So this was an important break in a big story.

I'll just give one more. A guy named Todd Shepherd, who actually works for the Independence Institute, recently found that Jared Polis, the congressman up in the Boulder area, was investing in medical tourism, meaning companies that specialize in taking people to other countries to get medical treatment. Which I thought was an interesting detail given the current national debates.

My main point here is that journalism works both ways. Independents and bloggers can feed back journalism to newspapers, and they can do their own original investigative reporting. And this is a great thing. So, while it stinks if you were an employee of the Rocky Mountain News (and I don't know if the Post is looking at any layoffs, hopefully not), in the world of independent writing and blogging, there's been an explosion of great content.

NPR Gets Liberty On the Rocks Reaction to Obama's Health Speech

NPR reporter Jeff Brady watched Barack Obama's health address to Congress with members of the Denver Tech Liberty on the Rocks. He interviewed numerous participants and quoted three in his report.

Amanda Teresi, founder of Liberty On the Rocks, explained why forcing insurers to ignore pre-existing conditions runs contrary to the basic purpose of insurance: "The idea is that it's health insurance. And the whole concept of insurance is that you get it before you get sick, or before something happens to you. It would be the equivalent of not having any car insurance, hitting a tree, and then calling Geico and saying you want to sign up. It doesn't make sense."

(I've written a first and second article on the topic.)

T. L. James suggested that Obama's comments about tort reform won't amount to much. James told Brady, "Tort lawyers fund an important part of the Democratic power base, their funding base for their elections. There is no way that he's going to do anything that's going to turn them away from the Democratic party."

Finally, Orin Ray said he didn't think Obama's speech really changed anybody's mind.

Brady did a nice job with his brief report. However, I wish he had mentioned the more fundamental issues. The fact that Obama wants to force everybody to buy politically-controlled insurance is a huge deal, as is the fact that Obama wants to expand subsidies. Nor did Brady mention the political causes of today's problems in medicine, or that Massachusetts has already tried -- and failed -- to successfully implement Obama's key "reforms." (I discussed all of these issues with Brady.) Yet Brady didn't have much time for his portion of the report, and he was basically fair.

Health Policy on the Radio

I joined Bob Glass on his "Radio Free America" show on Tuesday evening. I appear about half way into the first hour.

To correct a minor mistake: I talked about a swimmer shackled with weights; that example actually came from economist Peter Boettke of George Mason. Here's the direct quote:

"If you bound the arms and legs of gold-medal swimmer Michael Phelps, weighed him down with chains, threw him in a pool and he sank, you wouldn't call it a 'failure of swimming'. So, when markets have been weighted down by inept and excessive regulation, why call this a 'failure of capitalism'?"

We spent much of the first hour talking about why health insurance is so often tied to employment. It has everything to do with federal tax manipulations. The result is that, if you lose your job, you lose your insurance (on such plans). Another result is that a lot of people develop medical conditions, then lose their job-tied insurance and have a hard time buying insurance elsewhere. To a large degree the federal government has destroyed the health insurance market.

I talk a bit about Health Savings Accounts, which allows people to use pre-tax money to pay for routine care and spend less on a high-deductible plan. I suggested that expanding HSAs would be a good reform moving in the direction of free markets.

The article I mentioned by Paul Hsieh, MD, and Lin Zinser, about political meddling in medicine, is available through The Objective Standard. See also the web page for Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine.

In the second hour, we talked about how Obama is trying to steel the rhetoric of "competition" and apply it to his "public" plan, which is all about imposing force to drive out the legitimate competition of the free market.

We also got more philosophical, talking about why health care is not a right. Bob offered some particularly nice comments on that score. The upshot is that you have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but not to goods and services produced by others. A legitimate right does not entail any claim on the resources of others, nor does it permit the use of force to confiscate the wealth or labor of others.

Near the end we talked about Obama's claims that, under his plan, you'll continue to be able to choose your own doctors. I said, "That's like choosing your own bread line in the Soviet Union... You might be free to choose Doctor A or Doctor B. But what's going to happen with the political takeover of medicine is that the best doctors are simply going to leave the field. The best students are not going to go into medicine. We're going to be left with the people willing to kiss the backsides of Washington DC bureaucrats. Is that the kind of doctor you want taking care of your health?"

Featured in Money

Money magazine features a short write-up about Jennifer and me pertaining to our Health Savings Account. See page 80 of the July issue.

The upshot is that we pay $148 per month for health insurance (for the two of us) for a high-deductible plan, then use our HSA (which is pre-tax money) for all our health care.

I thought this was a good quote from me: "We are thinking all the time about how our behavior is affecting our health. We eat the right foods. We exercise."

And, by the way, I just scheduled a doctor's visit for myself (my wife sees a different doctor in the Fall) and dental visits for both of us.

The photo in the magazine shows us standing on the dam of Ketner Lake (reservoir actually) in Westminster.

Around Colorado: March 10, 2009

Massachusetts Again

Apparently the advocates of socialized medicine will never give up, no matter how many times a variant of their schemes fails, no matter how many times their premises are defeated.

Michael Salem, president and CEO of National Jewish Health, argues -- no "argues" is not quite the right word, since he doesn't actually offer any argument -- that "Colorado should look at various models (such as Massachusetts)" in designing political controls of medicine.

To learn why that would be a disaster, and why we need liberty in medicine rather than more political controls, read the article of Paul Hsieh, MD, "Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America."

Brian Schwartz also has out a good op-ed on health policy, published by Colorado Daily.


Keep Electoral College

Here's another one for the "Why Are We Still Talking About This" file: "If lawmakers ultimately approve House Bill 1299, Colorado will join a still-small coalition of states that vow to cast their electoral votes for the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide, regardless of whether that candidate won in their state."

I've explained over and again why doing away with the electoral college would be very stupid and bad for Colorado.

Unfortunately, the Denver Post has sacrificed clarity for cuteness with its headline: "Bill 'popular' enough to get 1st panel's OK." Very funny word play; I'm rolling. Nevertheless, the measure lost in a popular vote in 2004 by nearly two to one.

I am tempted to mention how idiotic the Democrats are for pushing this sort of nonsense, but then I remember the Republicans...


Keep Asset Forfeiture Reforms

I've collected some of the key information about a bill that would gut the asset forfeiture reforms of 2002. (See also the update.)

Now Ed Quillen of the Denver Post has weighed in:

[T]he government could also attempt to take the house in civil court... even if [the criminal suspect] was acquitted. That's "civil asset forfeiture." ...

Obviously, this procedure is ripe for abuse, and in 2002 Colorado adopted a law to prevent such abuses. It requires a criminal conviction before forfeiture, and protects innocent property owners whose tenants commit crimes. It requires forfeiture proceeds to go through the regular budget process, rather than to the policing agency. It has reporting requirements.

In other words, our current law allows asset forfeiture as a legitimate tool of law enforcement, but makes the process fair and open.

But apparently, it doesn't bring in enough money, and thus House Bill 1238, sponsored by Joe Rice, a Littleton Democrat, would repeal the requirement for a conviction as well as the reporting requirement. In other words, it allows cops to seize property on mere suspicion and auction it off, with a big chunk of the profits going to the "seizing agency."

Hey, why pay taxes to support police departments when they can finance themselves this way? And why bother with the burdens of convicting someone in criminal court when you can just grab his assets through a civil procedure, where there's no right to counsel and no protection against self-incrimination?

Applied vigorously, HB 1238 could enhance revenues without raising taxes, and I can't think of any other reason that this legislature would even consider such an assault on a quaint, old-fashioned concept like "No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

Jerry Kopel has also blasted the measure in an article for the Pueblo Chieftain: "We should not go back to a system that made police and district attorneys look like pirates out for loot instead of providing enforcement of criminal justice standards."


Energy Crisis Looms

The Obama administration, along with Democratic leaders in Colorado, seem determined to forcibly restrict the production of real energy (coal, oil, natural gas) while lathering fantasy energy (windmills, solar panels) with corporate welfare. If these trends continue, the result will be phenomenally more expensive energy for our homes and cars and a "fantasy energy economy" essentially controlled by politicians. (I'm all for alternative sources of energy, provided that people adopt them voluntarily in a free market.)

Nancy Lofholm begins her recent article for The Denver Post: "The number of rigs drilling for natural gas and oil in Colorado has plunged 46 percent in the past year -- one of the steepest declines in the country." Obviously broader economic trends are a factor.

Meanwhile, Vincent Carroll points out, "At the very moment Obama is poised to direct waves of subsidies into forms of renewable energy that account for a minuscule slice of the nation's electricity, he would strip oil and natural gas producers of incentives to drill."

But, again, a huge part of the problem is that the federal and state governments own most of the land from which energy is drawn. And so decisions are made not by private land holders, environmental groups that buy up conservation lands, and civil courts defending real property rights: decisions are made by politicians and bureaucrats.

The Denver Business Journal reports:

Colorado lawmakers Friday heard testimony on proposed oil and gas rules that energy leaders say are turning the screws on one of Colorado's largest industries.

The regulations are intended to reduce the environmental impact from drilling by requiring oil and gas operators to keep compliance checklists and confer with the Colorado Division of Wildlife on minimizing the effect of drilling on wildlife. The regulations also set stricter standards on crude oil storage.

On a free market, land owners would have the incentive to balance land uses. Typically oil firms would look for side revenues from recreational use, and environmental groups would look for side revenues from energy production. But today we have a system in which wildlife rules are twisted to environmental ends in order to force down energy production.

Ah, but might not the environmental rules make Colorado more desirable for tourists? Sure, we'll make up the revenues by catering to hunters and the like. Right. Leaving aside the fact that there's limited inherent conflict between energy production and recreation use. Of course, if people can't afford to travel here due to high energy prices...


End Beer Protectionism

As I've argued, current law that restricts grocery store sales of beer are protectionist, and they are wrong. But now the "Baptists" have trotted out another ludicrous argument for protectionism:

One contention they have is that the bill would allow grocery store workers and convenience store workers who are under the age of 21 to be able to sell full-strength beer.

Clerks at liquor stores must be at least 21, they point out.

"The bill weakens rules aimed at keeping alcohol out of the hands of underage drinkers," said Sen. Lois Tochtrop, an Adams County Democrat.

"This will double the number of outlets selling full strength beer," said Kory Nelson, a Denver city attorney who prosecutes stores that sell to underage customers. Emphasizing that he was speaking only for himself, he said in the press release: "There will be beer sliding out the back door and slipping through the cash registers. It will mean kids selling beer to kids."

I cannot offer the most apt description of these protectionist claims, as I have a policy against swearing. So let me say only that the cited arguments are stupid.

Grocery stores already sell 3.2 beer; why would sales of other types of beer pose any greater problems? Other states already allow grocery store sales, and apparently the sky has not fallen there.

Nelson's argument seems to be that grocery store employees will steal beer from the stores in order to sell it black market. And yet, for some reason, grocery stores are willing to take that risk, perhaps because they realize that Nelson's claims are moronic. What a stooge.

Grocery store employees are just as likely to steal 3.2 beer, cigarettes, and cold medicine (which can be used to produce methamphetamine). Yet we don't outlaw grocery store sales of those items.

I agree that the government plays a legitimate role in keeping stores from selling certain dangerous items to minors, on the grounds that minors are still under the care of a guardian and have not acquired the maturity to engage in certain transactions. But such police actions can never justify violating the rights of stores to sell lawful products to adults.

Protectionism "for the children" just doesn't fly.

Around Colorado: March 6, 2009

Today I've already covered gambling, antitrust, and spending limits. Now that I'm warmed up...


More on Inflation

The Gazette noticed my post on inflation and published a lengthier treatment of the issue:

Ari Armstrong, a rock star in Colorado's libertarian community and publisher of FreeColorado.com, recommends an alarming visual exhibit of the nation's growing money supply. Don't look at this if you don't have a strong stomach. It's a graph showing the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis' adjusted monetary base, the combined index of Federal Reserve activity pertaining to the money supply (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/AMBNS?cid=124). The graph shows the money supply's gradual ascent starting in the early 20th century until now. In 2008 the graph shoots straight up in the air, revealing a one-year inflation of the cash supply that equals its growth over the past 100 years.

I picked up the information from Paul Hsieh, whose post features a number of interesting comments about the meaning and potential implications of the data.

Also, I'm not actually a libertarian any longer, for reasons I've explained. Finally, what is needed now is not guns and God, as the Gazette suggests, but a true understanding of economic liberty, rooted in a moral defense of capitalism. Yet obviously I appreciate the Gazette's more detailed treatment of the crucial issue of inflation, along with the friendly mention.


Littwin: Si

I was giving Mike Littwin a bit of heck earlier today over spending limits, but he's on more solid ground when it comes to in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. I just don't see this as a big deal either way, though some Republicans are using it as an excuse to rile up the xenophobes and avoid the serious issues facing the state.

Should illegals get in-state tuition? The problem is that this shouldn't be a legislative issue. Colleges should not get tax funds. Colleges should be able to admit whom they please, at whatever cost they agree on with students. Those willing to accept those terms should be able to go. But Republicans couldn't possibly discuss any fundamental issue. They instead grant the premise that college students should benefit from forced wealth transfers, then debate the miniscule details over how to divvy up the loot.


Glass Is Back

Welcome back, Bob. Glass is back. A one-time leader of the now-defunct Tyranny Response Team and general all-around hell raiser, Glass is back in Colorado, and last night he was out protesting the domestic terrorist Bill Ayers and the plagiarist Ward Churchill. He got the attention of Boulder's Daily Camera:

“As a taxpayer, I resent any tax dollars going to a fraud like Ward Churchill,” said another protester, Bob Glass, of Longmont. “I believe in academic freedom, but let’s invite the Ku Klux Klan or the Neo-Nazis if we’re going to take this to the absurd.”

Glass also made an appearance on 7 News, where he said Ayers and Churchill belong behind bars, not in a lecture hall. Here Glass goes too far. While Ayers might have belonged behind bars at one time, that time is long passed. And Churchill, while a complete schmuck and a liar, hasn't done anything criminal. The worse offense is by the idiots at the University of Colorado who hired the fraud in the first place.

Glass is a passionate guy. If he can rein in his passion with good sense, he'll be a valued addition to Colorado's liberty movement.


Job Sharing

I shouldn't be surprised, but I'm still shocked by the raw stupidity that some people display about the economy. For example, Steve Luera argues in a letter to the Denver Post that "we" should "cut the jobs you do have in half and spread them around so everyone at least has something."

The basic mistake here is to imagine that there are only a set number of jobs, and once those jobs are taken, everybody else is out of luck. Obviously that's idiotic. "Back in July 1776, there were about 2.5 million people living in the colonies." Now there are over 300 million people in in the United States. So how did the economy manage to grow by scores of millions of jobs?

Since the Industrial Revolution, fewer and fewer people have labored in agriculture and have moved to an increasingly diverse array of jobs. Today people work in jobs unimagined at the nation's founding, especially in the technological sectors, and also in newer service jobs such as pet care and professional massage. There is no inherent limit to the amount of jobs an economy can support. If a billion people lived in the United States, a billion people could, in a system of liberty, find work, and the number of specialties would increase.

On a free market, one without the wage and employment controls of today's economy, everyone who wants to work can find work, excepting a relatively low and constant percent of people momentarily between jobs. It is a matter of supply and demand. True, economic shocks can temporarily throw some people out of particular jobs, but they can soon find new ones, unless political controls muck up the employment market, as they so often have and as they continue to do today.

Hoover imposed wage controls and job sharing, and the result was the worst depression in the nation's history. (He made many other mistakes as well.) The answer to unemployment is economic liberty, not more of the controls that caused unemployment in the first place.


Axe Taxes Not Jobs

Dave Thomas sent me a link to a liquor alliance fighting higher taxes on their products.

In the coming months, lawmakers will be proposing alcohol tax increases that will put jobs in your community at risk and raise the cost of your favorite drink. There's a real price to pay when elected officials misguidedly try to replenish state budgets with regressive taxes that will hit us at a time when we are already being hit hard conomically.

Cheers, brothers.


Federal Spending

Mike Rosen -- another Rocky carry over -- has a hard-hitting column out today about the democratic problem of "we the people" helping ourselves to other people's money. And David Harsanyi offers his take on federal spending that is at the same time humorous and terrifying.

Around Colorado: March 5, 2009

Mike McConnell Discusses Food-Stamp Diet

Yesterday (March 4) I appeared on Mike McConnell's radio show for about a quarter of an hour to discuss my "Low-Carb Food Stamp Diet." The audio file is available. I argued that the main problem with federal programs like food stamps is that, by forcing people to contribute, such programs sever the link between donors and recipients. (The more fundamental problem is that such programs violate people's rights, but I left that point in the background for this brief radio appearance.) This ruins the incentive of donors to watch how their dollars are spent as well as the incentive of recipients to use the benefits responsibly and gratefully. The result is hard feelings and an overpriced program rife with problems.


Government Transparency

This should be a cause that everyone can support -- everyone but those wasting tax dollars, that is: transparency, or putting all documents related to government spending on the internet, for everyone to see. Following is a March 4 media release from the Colorado House GOP:

Taxpayers scored a victory today when the House Finance Committee gave unanimous support of Rep. B.J. Nikkel’s, R-Loveland, Colorado Taxpayer Transparency Act. The act, House Bill 1288, would create an online database to detail how the government is spending the taxpayer’s money.

“The state government is one of the only institutions that will spend your money without telling you what it’s spending it on. This is not the government’s money, it’s your money, and you have every right to know how it’s being used,” said Nikkel.

The legislation is similar to bills that have passed in several states, including Missouri, Kansas and Texas, as well as in the United States Senate. The U.S. Senate version of transparency was sponsored by then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, and Sen. Tom Colburn, R-Oklahoma.

“Democrats and Republicans alike understand that this needs to be a law, not just an executive order that can be rescinded at anytime,” added Nikkel.

HB 1288’s next stop will be the House Appropriations Committee.

Forfeiture Update

The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition sent out an update regarding the nasty asset forfeiture bill. The bill is now scheduled to be heard in the House Judiciary Committee on March 16 at 1:30 p.m. CCJRC reports, "The bill sponsor, Rep. Rice, has requested a later hearing date because he is working on a substantial amendment to the bill as introduced." But why amend something that so obviously deserves a stake through the heart?

An Ode to Inky Fingers

For somebody who claims to hate reading ink-on-paper news publications (as opposed to reading the same publications online), I spent a lot of time yesterday and this morning getting my fingers inky.

I still haven't gotten used to the new morning routine. By habit, I check DenverPost.com, then RockyMountainNews.com -- because I like to save the best for last. But now the second page contains the same old content, as the Rocky has gone under. I felt like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone when I pulled up Vincent Carroll's first column for the competition.

That is great news, by the way: the Post has picked up not only Carroll but Lynn Bartels, the capitol reporter, and Mike Littwin, the writer of political humor and humorous politics (and sometimes politics quite serious). With Carroll on the editorial board, perhaps the Post's editorial page will improve. Though I sincerely miss the Rocky's editorial page, and I doubt the Post will ever come close.

(It's hard for me to complain too much, though, as the March 4 Post featured a letter of mine arguing that, despite State Senator David Schultheis's "repulsive and shameful" comments about HIV testing for pregnant women, "politicians need to stop manipulating our health decisions, whatever their motive." The letter follows up on my first and second post on the matter.)

The upshot is that the Post seems to be making a genuine effort to reach out to Rocky readers and improve its publication.

Of course, there is also the Denver Daily News, where, upon checking, I immediately found a story of great interest to me (about contraception). So perhaps I'll have to start checking out that publication more regularly.

Back to the inky fingers. Last night my wife and I stopped by the local King Soopers to pick up some milk. We noticed that the store had some copies left of the final Rocky. (Perhaps the Denver Newspaper Agency released extra copies.) So we flipped through the paper -- every page of it -- in profound sadness. It was a history lesson in fifteen minutes, as the paper reviewed its major stories over its many years.

About half way through the paper, the neighborhood suffered a blackout. For a few moments, the store went completely dark. (I was happy to have a mini flashlight in my pocket, which I've started carrying around all the time.) The store has emergency power, so the lights (at least some of them) quickly came back on. For the Rocky, it is lights out, for good.

Westword

I had also fallen behind my reading of Westword, Colorado's most important "alternative" weekly. I finally read Joel Warner's fabulous article on Colorado's medical marijuana industry.

I read Patricia Calhoun's new story about that rights-violating bastard Steve Horner and his enabling bureaucrats.

I also read four papers' worth of Jason Sheehan, the food critic, finishing the final one this morning. Listen, I don't give a crap about fancy restaurants. If I eat at a restaurant, a rare occurrence, I almost always to go a local chain food shop. I never, ever read food criticism. It seems so silly to me, to write about food, of all things, especially considering everything that's going on in the world.

But I love Jason Sheehan. I even imagine myself sitting in the restaurants he describes, and almost wishing I were there (I mean, for the ones earning good reviews). Sheehan loves food. He adores it. He lives for it. He always finds an interesting back story. And it is inspiring to read a talented writer with a sincere passion for his work.

I figured out just this morning that, to read all of Sheehan, one must turn to not one, not two, but three pages of Westword. He writes, "Cafe," "Bite Me," and "Second Helping."

I don't even know what the hell grits are, and I don't even know whether I've ever eaten them. Some sort of corn dish, I gather. But grits are religion to Sheehan:

Once cooked and plated, grits become recalcitrant. They refuse to absorb sauce, refuse to even mix well — becoming clotty and stained rather than blended, ugly and foul and (if any food can be) ill-tempered. Grits are tough. They have very specific ideas about their proper employment on the plate and will brook no f***ing around.

(Sorry about the asterisks, but I've sworn off extreme swearing for this page, and I'm going to stick to the policy even when it seems unnecessary.)

Considering some of Sheehan's descriptions -- "the dried cherries were another smart addition, cutting the richness of the bacon and the weight of the white corn with a little zing of tart and sweet," "fresh thyme and garlic, an unexpected dart of spice that hits you right on the back of the tongue" -- it occurred to me that Sheehan is not a food critic, after all. He is still a chef, except now his ingredients are words.

* * *

My beloved Rocky Mountain News (and it's easy to forget my criticisms of it over the years in a time like this) is dead. Print journalism in Colorado will never be the same. But, new and old, personal and corporate, online and ink-stained, journalism continues. Anyone who has taken a peek at our region or our world knows that good journalism is more important than ever.

9News Covers 'Low-Carb Food Stamp Diet'

From February 4-10 I went on the "Low-Carb Food Stamp Diet," during which I ate nutritiously for around $4 per day, after subtracting the estimated value of the leftover food. Tonight, after interviewing me on February 18, 9News (Denver's NBC station) broadcast a story about it.



It's a great story, and obviously I'm thrilled with it. I do want to expand on a couple of points, however.

In the text version of the story, Shawn Patrick, the reporter, makes the potentially confusing claim that "even Armstrong admits it was an extreme low-carbohydrate diet." The whole point of the diet was to be low-carb. I was trying to cut carbs. I estimate I was eating between 100 and 150 grams of carbs per day, whereas the USDA recommends around 300.

To counter the claim that those on a tight budget can only afford carbs, starch, and bad fat, I spent the week eating a diet totally free of grains, potatoes, hydrogenated fat, and vegetable oils. Obviously, a low-carb diet must make up calories through increased proteins or fats. Part of the argument behind (at least some) low-carb diets is that eating a little more fat is not a problem, health-wise. However, some argue that vegetable fats -- canola oil, especially hydrogenated fats, etc. -- aren't really that great for you. So I ate fat only from olive oil, meat, dairy, eggs, and nuts (and trace amounts in produce and chocolate). (Usually I also eat coconut fat.)

A diet higher in carbs is less expensive, if those carbs take the form of low-cost flour, rice, oats, and potatoes. Obviously things like soda, sugary cereal, and frozen pizzas can cost a lot more and dramatically increase carb loads. The primary reason my wife and I were able to spend a month in 2007 each eating for only $2.57 per day is that we ate a diet higher in carbs.

If I were on a true emergency budget, I'd pick a diet combining elements of the 2007 diet and the low-carb one. I'd buy healthy but low-cost fruits and vegetables, meat, dairy, eggs, and olive oil along with low-cost grains like brown rice and oats. I think that would be the best balance between good nutrition and low cost, and it's close to the diet I eat normally.

Nutritionist Dr. Carolyn Ross was somewhat complimentary of the diet, yet she worried that I wasn't meeting my calorie loads. But I estimated my daily calorie intake, and it was within USDA guidelines. Remember, I ate an entire turkey by myself in a week. I boiled the scraps to make soup stock. (Patrick suggested that I bought soup; I made soup from my purchased supplies.) I ate olive oil, which carries 130 calories per tablespoon. I drank whole milk and ate whipped cream on bananas. I ate grapefruit. I ate eggs. I added a few walnuts for the Omega 3 fats. Even though I cut carbs, I still got carbs especially in my fruit, and I made up calories in protein and fat. We can continue to debate the optimal calorie split, but, according to the low-carb assumptions, I did very well.

The broadcast story shows me dicing an onion. Perhaps viewers will be interested in what I made out of that. (This was on February 18, after my week's diet had ended.) I added olive oil, various diced vegetables, pureed peppers and spinach, diced chicken, quinoa (a grain known for its protein), and various spices, including curry. I made enough of it for several meals for both my wife and me, demonstrating that cooking need not consume a great deal of time per meal. The results were inexpensive, delicious, and healthy:

Around Colorado: 2/23/09

No Health Czar

Congratulations to Paul Hsieh, MD, for his article published today by the Washington, D.C., Examiner:

... The concept of a health czar follows naturally from the welfare statists' premise that government should guarantee health care to all Americans. Whenever the government attempts to guarantee universal medical care, it must also control its costs. Hence, someone must determine how health care dollars may be spent.

The Obama administration would control costs by creating a new Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research to determine which treatments are deemed most effective and thus eligible to be paid for by government. These decisions would be based on statistical averages that cannot take into account specific facts of individual patients. ...

The fundamental problem with universal health care is the faulty premise that health care is a right. Health care is a need, not a right. Rights are freedoms of action (such as the right to free speech), not automatic claims on goods or services that must be produced by others. ... In socialized medical systems, health care is never truly a right, but just another privilege dispensed at the discretion of bureaucrats.

Hsieh goes on to summarize the free-market reforms that would bring down health-insurance costs while restoring freedom and individual rights in medicine.


The Food Stamp Bureaucracy

Another problem with food stamps is that they are distributed by a clunky bureaucratic system. The Denver Post reports, "Thousands more people applying for food stamps mean wait times in 10 Colorado counties have pushed beyond 30 days, in violation of federal law."

True, on a free market, in which individuals voluntarily funded food banks and other programs and personal efforts to feed the poor, a recession would stress the system as needs rose. However, people cooperating voluntarily would tend to be faster and more caring in addressing such needs.

By the way, Boulder Weekly published my article on my "Low-Carb Food Stamp Diet," and Westword published my letter following up on that paper's story.


Go Slumdog

I was pleased that the Oscars recognized Slumdog Millionaire, a little film eminently worthy of the recognition. I'm also pleased that Heath Ledger won.


Real Six Packs

Occasionally the Denver Post will actually editorialize in favor of liberty. The paper did so just yesterday, arguing that grocery stores should be allowed to sell regular beer. I've said so myself. Unfortunately, the Post hardly makes a principled case, conceding the law "no longer makes sense." But violating individual rights never "makes sense;" it is always wrong.

Speaking of beer, Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner has sensibly argued that the drinking age should be lowered to 18. If you're old enough to fight wars and vote, you're certainly old enough to drink a beer. Such a move would also move at least some drinking from party houses to bars, which would improve safety. Of course, as one who was no stranger to binge drinking in my younger days, I realize that there is a deeper cultural problem here, but that problem is not being addressed by the discriminatory drinking age.


Follow Up on Pork Roast Rally

The left keeps unjustly beating up the organizers of the Pork Roast Rally, so I keep responding (though I doubt I'll need to say anything more about it). As I've pointed out, the same leftist organization blaming the rally's organizers for an unknown person's sign calling Obama a Nazi itself features comments on its web page calling Bush a Nazi.

Jon Caldara has blogged about this, Face the State has covered it, and Vincent Carroll has written about it:

[T]hanks to Ari Armstrong of freecolorado.com, there's one delicious postscript. It turns out -- and this will surprise no one who has lived through the past eight years -- that ProgressNow Colorado has a Web site whose blogs and reader comments have included a number of Nazi and fascist references to former President George W. Bush and other conservatives -- which Armstrong has listed on his own blog.

What? The group can't be held responsible for every nutty leftist who comments on the site? Maybe not, but it exerts more control over them than the organizers of an open-air political rally have over their crowd.

The protest of the stimulus is growing. A blogger from Kansas writes about a rally in Overland Park:

The protest was held outside of the office of Representative Dennis Moore, who voted for the so-called “stimulus” bill. I almost didn’t go to the protest out of concern that it would be more of an anti-Democrat, pro-Republican protest, but it wasn't that way. There were some people who were obvious Republicans, but most of those that I saw and talked to where people who were against the massive spending that the government is pushing. Though the temperature was 10 degrees with the wind chill, I think probably 300-400 people showed up, and there was a LOT of great response from drivers who saw us.

Keep it rolling, brothers.

ColoradoPols.com Misreports 'Pork Roast Rally'

A February 19 entry at ColoradoPols.com, posted "by: Colorado Pols" -- I don't know the poster's identity -- misstates some facts and offers even more distortions. At issue is a February 17 rally organized by Jon Caldarda in protest of the so-called "stimulus" package. At that rally, a person unknown to Caldara and every other speaker showed up with a sign calling Obama a Nazi by putting a swastika with Obama's name. In its post, ColoradoPols.com lied about me and distorted my views, so I request a correction and a public apology.

ColoradoPols.com wrongly refers to "II [Independence Institute] blogger Ari Armstrong." I am not now, nor have I ever been, an "II blogger." FreeColorado.com is a completely independent entity that I have run for more than a decade. ColoradoPols.com is simply lying, unless it is operating on George Costanza's theory that "it's not a lie if you believe it." Regardless, ColoradoPols.com is playing fast and loose with the facts, and that's just bad reporting. (Years ago I worked on a single project for Caldara's Independence Institute as an independent contractor, and I continue to submit an occasional guest op-ed to the Institute, for no pay.)

Yesterday I issued a media release pointing out that Progress Now Action, the organization of Michael Huttner attacking the rally's organizers, itself features numerous comments calling George W. Bush and other conservatives Nazis or fascists.

ColoradoPols.com claims "Ari Armstrong, unlike Malkin, isn't upset with the still-anonymous 'Swastika Guy.'" This ignorers the fact that I condemned the sign in my media release about Huttner. I said, "Obama is obviously not a Nazi, so tagging him with a swastika is wrong." In another post I wrote that "the Nazis were particular sorts of fascists with a genocidal racist bent. Does that in any way describe Obama? No. ... So, again, dumb idea." ColoradoPols.com is willfully distorting my views.

It is outrageous for ColoradoPols.com to selectively quote my media release, ignore my condemnation of the sign within that media release, and then claim that I'm not "upset" over the sign. I request that ColoradoPols.com correct its post and offer a public apology.

ColoradoPols.com claims that "the examples cited by Armstrong consist of a bunch of anonymous comments and community blog posts from the general public." Some, but not all, of the examples are anonymous reader comments. To take the first example, a "Post from Richard Myers's Blog" links Bush to Hitler. This is a primary post, not a reader's comment, and certainly not anonymous. The fact that it is a "community blog post" does not alter the fact of what it says or where it appears.

ColoradoPols.com also misrepresents the context of the sign. The post quotes Westword's Melanie Asmar, who wrote that the guy carrying the sign "stood right at the top of the steps during the protest. He was one of the first people I noticed as a reporter covering the event." Well, that says more about Asmar than it does about the rally. This was a public rally. As such, the event's organizers had absolutely no control over who attended. As Huttner himself proclaimed, any effort to remove any participant would have been a violation of free-speech rights. Or does ColoradoPols.com endorse the policy of forcibly removing peaceful ralliers at a public venue?

As is obvious to anyone who has seen the state capitol, the west steps are quite broad. The guy with the sign stood at the side of the stairs -- not that Caldara had any control over where the guy stood. (Some lady with an anti-immigration sign stood right behind Caldara during the rally, even though that had nothing to do with the theme of the day.) I actually have a photo of the west steps that includes the guy in question (I've drawn in an arrow):



ColordoPols.com can pretend that the guy was somehow the center of what was going on, but that's obviously nonsense.

But what about Malkin? ColoradoPols.com reproduces a photo with Malkin smiling for a photo-op with the guy and his sign. I grant that Malkin ought not have suggested the guy is some sort of "plant" without evidence. (I don't think he was a plant, but I don't know who he is.) Did Malkin do anything wrong? Again, it would be useful for the left to recall the goose-gander rule. Has anybody ever worked a photo op with a famous leftists using imagery or language the leftist disapproved of? I saw people hoarding Malkin. I don't know whether Malkin even saw the sign prior to the photo. But the guy approached Malkin from the side, and he pointed his sign forward, away from Malkin. I doubt very much that, at the time of the photograph, Malkin was aware of what was on the sign. ColoradoPols.com can joyously celebrate the photo if it wants, but it should remember that the next time a leftist is caught in a similarly embarrassing pose.

ColoradoPols.com notes that, when Malkin attacked the left for similar offenses, she was "not exactly what you'd call apologetic." Yet she condemned the sign, and that is the extent of her responsibility.

(By the way, while I agree with Malkin on many fiscal issues, I profoundly disagree with her on abortion and immigration, as I wrote last year.)

ColoradoPols.com's conclusion is absurd:

Bottom line? There's a difference between a public blog where anybody can anonymously rant and a stage full of highly embarrassable public figures at an event you organize. And if that difference isn't stone-cold obvious to you, for the sake of those same embarrassable public figures you should really consider getting the hell out of the event organizing business.

True, there is a difference -- the difference is that, while the organizers of a public rally cannot legally eject any peaceful rallier, Progress Now owns its own web page and thus can control its content. Again, unless ColoradoPols.com wishes to argue that peaceful ralliers should be forcibly thrown out of a public venue, it can't blame Caldara for the appearance of the guy with the sign.

It is unfortunate that ColoradoPols.com, Huttner, and many others have obsessed about a random rallier's sign, when there are so many more important issues to cover. In contrast with these leftists, I (who am neither right nor left, neither conservative nor "liberal") wrote two substantive articles criticizing various aspects of the rally (see the first and second article). For example, I criticize Caldara for inviting Tom Tancredo, who ranted against immigration. I also point out the problem of partisans selectively supporting the "bailout" of their party man while condemning the "bailout" of the other party. I have responded to the ridiculous sign story only to the degree that the left has promoted it. Now I suggest that we get back to discussing real issues. Such as, was the "stimulus" a good idea? It so happens that there are some important things going on in the world, so perhaps we should talk about something that matters.