It’s prediction time, so why not hear from a for-real New Year’s baby with a “proven” track record?

I was born on New Year’s Day in the year The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s, Time magazine named Lyndon Baines Johnson its person of the year (for the second time), and there were only 100 million phones in the United States.

So in addition to the fortuity of my birth date, I’ve got a little perspective.

My Baker’s Dozen.

1. Gov. Bill Ritter will win re-election in his race against former Congressman Scott McInnis.

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So it was this time last year that I took up the mantle of the prognosticator that my birth itself foretold. As a bona fide New Year’s Baby – born Jan. 1, 1967 – it was high time I joined the proud (i.e., slow-news-cycle) tradition of making predictions for the coming year.

How did I do?

Flip a coin.

By my count, I was 50-50, but showing promise.

I offered a Baker’s Dozen plus one. I got five right, six wrong and three of the predictions I rate a pass. Because the bulk of those passes lean in my favor, I’m calling it even.

Soon I’ll post my predictions for 2010. And this year I’m soliciting suggestions. So if you’re feeling prescient, please add your prediction(s) in a comment. I’ve also asked my Twitter followers and Facebook friends to make their divinations. (Please follow or friend me for more updates.)

But first: The ’09 results.

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(It’s the holidays, so a departure from politics seems in order.)

One Christmas Eve when I was a kid, my father stayed up late with a BB rifle and a flashlight.

Thus armed, he lay on the living room floor — in the dark and at the ready. His prey would be the mouse our kitchen had recently become host to.

The little guy was eating our bread and whatnot and leaving behind all these little mouse turds.

The fact that it was Christmas Eve wasn’t lost on Dad, who would later talk about how it felt odd to be stalking a mouse at a time when not even such things were to be stirring.

Finally the time came.

Dad heard the scurry of little rodent claws. He aimed in the direction of the sound. On went the flashlight. Dad took his shot.

What happened next he couldn’t say. The mouse wasn’t there. Nothing stirring but the adrenaline of the hunt.

But next morning — Christmas Day — we found the little mouse dead on the floor not far from where Dad had taken his shot.

The family remains unclear whether his death came from the bullet or the frightful spectacle of Dad behind the light blazing suddenly over what had always been uncontested ground.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

This mandate business.

It’s got me thinking back through the vast eons of time that have passed since I lived without health insurance.

When I was in my early-to-mid 20s, I rarely had health insurance.

I wanted to be a writer and was very much living the starving-artist life, going to grad school on a scholarship and living on the roughly $9,000-a-year salary universities paid to me for teaching writing courses part time, and whatever came from hash-slinging jobs I could patch together for summer work.

My wife was doing pretty much the same thing. Which meant we had to live frugally. We lived on the edge, but that was our choice. With college degrees in hand, we could have traded that temporarily meager life for ones with better jobs.

It is funny to me now how little health insurance meant to me. Though insurance wasn’t an option at my first school, it was provided free at the second one. Once I realized all I had to do was fill out some forms – which I failed to do the first year – I was covered.

Obviously, I was one of the lucky people. I was fit and fortunate enough to lack any kind of ailment or condition that required me to see a doctor. I came from an upper-middle-class background. Adversity didn’t know me. I had a dear professor friend who supplied plenty of food and fun at his expense. Grad school tends to bring out a we’re-all-in-this-together atmosphere of friends joining together to make the lean years pass more pleasantly.

Meanwhile, we all know that as soon as we slog through our deprivations, we’ll have the kinds of higher educations that make us more employable and more prosperous.

So this mandate.

Here’s what bothers me about it. I might have missed out on that education and life experience (which I adored) if I had had to make the kind of money that would have enabled me to buy health insurance. (At least at that first school.)

Why? Because I don’t believe it would have been right for someone like me, who wasn’t harmed by job loss or real problems like sickness or the death of a provider, to take advantage of taxpayer programs meant to help those who are truly in need.

I was technically poor, or objectively poor, but my life experiences and expectations were those of a privileged set.

Yet with a mandate that I buy insurance, I couldn’t have added the expense. I would have had to either take a government subsidy and buy insurance, or go out and get a better job and leave grad school behind.

A lot of young people now would be in that position. And not just college kids. It would also apply to young innovators living on the edge while trying new ideas in business, technology, the arts and other endeavors that make our lives more interesting.

The new reality would instantly create a generation of young people – even industrious young go-getters not really in danger of actual poverty – who are taught to believe that they should take advantage of taxpayer largesse in order to get their start.

That, or accept a life with fewer risks and less education.

Even if you assume (and I don’t) that this health-care bill provides the kinds of changes that are best for society, I think it’s fair to say it would be a true shame to start forcing the next generation into those kinds of decisions.

Several readers of my “Coloradans did not vote for Dr. Reefer” post have expressed justifiable consternation at some of the math in the piece.

In the piece I take a light-hearted attempt to show that a caregiver with five patients could make thousands of dollars by supplying them medical marijuana.

The reason for the argument is to counter state Sen. Chris Romer’s contention that there isn’t enough of an incentive for small-level suppliers to grow the drug needed by chronically ill people.

Romer is arguing for medical-marijuana dispensaries.

My calculations are based on a medical-marijuana patient using an ounce of the drug a week.

Let me just say: Dude. I know that an ounce a week is a lot of marijuana.

But Romer has met with lots of folks with legitimate medical conditions, and they use more than do recreational users, he says.

They do not simply because they are in pain. Many get their THC delivered through edibles, which can require more of the grass to make.

I had challenged Romer on the ounce-or-more-a-week figure when he met with our editorial board last week, before I wrote “Dr. Reefer.” I thought I heard him say that that’s what it took to do the job.

This afternoon I called him, and asked if I was crazy.

“The sickest of the sick use a surprising amount of marijuana,” Romer said.

And, because the point of medical marijuana is to help the truly sick, the ounce figure is the one I went with.

But Romer (and I) concede that many other uses on the registry, who are suffering from nothing more than a desire to get baked, use far less. Maybe only a half ounce a month.

Anyway, I’m for legalization of marijuana. But I’m not for back-door legalization, holding up sick people as a shield so that healthy people can get stoned bothers me.

Because I’m thinking of the truly sick in my arguments, I went with the ounce.

Hope this clarifies the issue.

As we approach the gift-giving season and the spiritual renewal we feel in making resolutions for the New Year, here’s a notion: newspaper subscriptions.

Yes, those old-fashioned things. By subscribing to your local paper and maybe a national paper too, you can save an industry. Consider it the equivalent of making an annual donation to doing such worthwhile things as saving the whales, rain forests and National Public Radio.

If you subscribe already (and God bless you), take out a subscription for a friend.

Yes, I’m a biased fan of this little novelty, but not simply because a newspaper pays my bills.

For all the doom and gloom going around about the newspaper industry, the fact is that we are ginormously lucky to be living in this Golden Age of newspaper-produced information that is dizzying in its wealth.

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The recent fumbling by the panel of experts on enhanced drunken-driving penalties reminds me of a joke about a psychiatrist acting more concerned about the perpetrator of a stabbing than the victim.

Before I try my version of it out, a little stage-setting.

Here’s The Post’s David Olinger:

A divided state commission decided Friday not to recommend mandatory jail time for people repeatedly convicted of drunken driving in Colorado.

The commission’s vote came after it had previously recommended lessening potential penalties for driving with suspended or revoked licenses — a change intended to create jail space in anticipation of a recommendation that drivers caught driving drunk for the second or third time go to jail.

“This is a banner day for traffic offenders,” a frustrated Attorney General John Suthers declared to the room immediately after the vote.

No wonder Suthers said it was a “banner day” for drunk drivers. The panel appointed by Gov. Bill Ritter will suggest making it easier for them to avoid penalties for driving without licenses. The panel’s recommendations also would maintain a system that lets repeated drunken drivers go free until they cause serious and fatal accidents.

So a blue-ribbon panel walks into a bar. Its members call out that they are horrified.

They just saw a drunken driver narrowly miss running down a little schoolgirl.

“We’ve got to find the driver,” they say. “We’ve got to help him.”

We’ll weigh-in tomorrow with an editorial.

Looks like Obama is trying avoiding another bow-gate by declining to meet Norway’s king while in Oslo to accept to Nobel Peace Prize.

In a Daily Beast piece titled “Obama Snubs the King,” Katarina Andersson reports that the Scandinavian pride has been bruised by an Obama reluctant to look that excited about the prize.

Clearly this is one of those damned-if-you-get-excited-for-a-prize-you-shouldn’t-have-won-and-damned-if-you-do situations.

But it would appear Obama hasn’t handled it too well, at least from the European point of view. (Andersson quotes a Norwegian public-relations expert as saying that the president “is acting like an elephant in a porcelain sho.”)

A day before President Obama receives his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the president’s treatment of his Norwegian hosts has become hot news across Scandinavia.

News outlets across the region are calling Obama arrogant for slashing some of the prize winners’ traditional duties from his schedule. “Everybody wants to visit the Peace Center except Obama,” sniped the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, amid reports the president would snub his own exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center. “A bit arrogant—a bit bad,” proclaimed another Aftenposten headline.

“It’s very sad,” said Nobel Peace Center Director Bente Erichsen of the news that Obama would skip the peace center exhibit. Prize winners traditionally open the exhibitions about their work that accompany the Nobel festivities. “I totally understand why the Norwegian public is upset. If I could get a few minutes with the president, I’d say, ‘To walk through the exhibition wouldn’t take long, and I’m sure you would love the show. You have no idea what you are missing.’”

Meanwhile, the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet is reporting that the president has declined an invitation to lunch with King Harald V, an event every prize winner from the Dalai Lama to Al Gore has attended. (The newspaper’s headline: “Obama disses lunch with King Harald.”)

(snip)

Indeed, judging by statements surrounding the president’s trip to Europe this week, it is beginning to appear as if the European love affair with Obama—which culminated in giving him the Nobel Prize—is over.

The Swedish news agency TT reported today that 44 percent of the Norwegians found Obama’s diss to King Harald V to be “rude.” Even more—53 percent—are upset about the fact that he is not attending the traditional concert. And by now a third of the Vikings believe that the U.S. president doesn’t deserve the Peace Prize. At the same time, 20 different Norwegian organizations have applied for a permit to demonstrate during Obama’s visit.

According to a USA Today investigation, the meat at your local McDonald’s or Burger King is safer than the meat government is feeding poor kids.

In the past three years, the government has provided the nation’s schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn’t meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants, from Jack in the Box and other burger places to chicken chains such as KFC, a USA TODAY investigation found.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the meat it buys for the National School Lunch Program “meets or exceeds standards in commercial products.”

That isn’t always the case. McDonald’s, Burger King and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day.

Doesn’t the USDA care about the children?

You know why this happens? (It’s chilling to even say the word) Profit. Government will, most often, do the bare minimum as it has no incentive to do any more.

Burger King will flame broil, bless them.

(Update: Some readers are reasonably questioning the idea that patients are using an ounce or more a week. Please see this new post to clarify.)

What if I told you about a business model that, with minimal upfront investment and a minimal amount of daily work, would gross a few thousand dollars a month?

Any takers?

If so, please tell state Sen. Chris Romer, who, poor man, has taken on the task of making sense of Colorado’s medical marijuana situation through new legislation.

He needs to hear from you. (Oh, yes, Dude, this means you.)

Romer is in the process of presenting a bill that tries to get its arms around the spike of interest in medical pot.

We’re going to editorialize on Romer’s bill tomorrow. But after meeting with him this morning, I came away full of questions about a key piece of his legislation.

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