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Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Nine men telling Idaho women what to do
Before you understand what the latest health care professional "conscience" bill does, you have to know what it does not. It does not stop abortions. Although the U.S. Supreme Court says a woman has a constitutional right to an abortion, no physician is obligated to provide one. It does not stop ...
A charitable act, this was not
WASHINGTON - Anyone sitting in a dank, fetid Haitian jail for any reason probably deserves at least a measure of sympathy, so in that sense I feel sorry for the Baptist missionaries from Idaho charged with kidnapping 33 "orphans" and trying to take them out of the country. But what the ...
Monday, February 8, 2010
Another black eye for Idaho Transportation
Gov. C. L. (Butch) Otter has been in public life since the 1970s. Idaho Transportation Board Chairman Darrell Manning has held just about every major state post imaginable. Yet, when they found themselves attending a spree of extravagant highway project ground-breaking or ribbon-cutting ceremonies last year, neither bothered to ask some ...
Retreat from hyperpartisanship
"Come now, let us reason together ..." - Isaiah 1:18 --- A few words about that important speech President Obama gave last week. No, not "that" important speech, the other one. Granted, Obama's State of the Union address was the one parsed, sifted and winnowed by pundits for clues as ...
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Millions for subsidies, not one cent for services
Suppose you own an outfit named Idaho Parks Inc. It has 30 installations across the state. With 150 employees, you have a payroll of $11.5 million and a budget of $18 million per year. The people who camp in these sites contribute more than $35 million to the economy, much of ...
The flattery of wearing pants
One day years ago, a naturalized American was speaking to an assembly at my grade school when he produced a storm of naughty giggles from his young audience by declaring that, unlike those of us who were born here, he had arrived in the United States with his pants on. ...
Obama is tone deaf on terror
There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, or whether it is reciting terrorists their rights, or whether it is the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists will be tried ...
Reform or ruin, take your choice
WASHINGTON - The economic collapse of 2008 and 2009 did so much damage to the United States that only now can we begin to measure the devastation. A sentence buried in the budget that President Obama submitted to Congress this week screamed for attention. "Household net worth fell from the third ...
If baby sitter's car breaks, who watches the kids?
WASHINGTON - My husband and I were away last week - working, but away. My mother was watching the kids, but she also works. So it was particularly important, I told my new but already somewhat spotty baby sitter, that she turn up on time, every day. Monday, she came. Tuesday, ...
Toyota glitch is a story of stealing fire from the gods
WASHINGTON - A friend of mine once had a Toyota that wouldn't die. The odometer had only a dim recollection of passing 100,000 miles, the body was dinged and the paint was faded and the interior was worn, but the thing just kept running. He finally parked it at the airport, ...
Two GOP policy wonks chart U.S. path to solvency
WASHINGTON - In 2013, when President Mitch Daniels, former Indiana governor, is counting his blessings, at the top of his list will be the name of his vice president: Paul Ryan. The former congressman from Wisconsin will have come to office with ideas for steering the federal government to solvency. Not ...
Death of an enigma signals the dearth of privacy
WASHINGTON - My favorite thing about J.D. Salinger wasn't his seminal work - or his most famous character, Holden Caulfield - but how little I knew of him, thanks to his relentless pursuit of privacy. It's the same thing I also love about two other favorite writers, both, coincidentally, great Southern ...
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Slap the petition pros, slam the grassroots
As envisioned by Progressives such as Teddy Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson, passing a law at the ballot box was a safety valve, allowing ordinary citizens to bypass their legislatures and the special interests dominating them. Today, it's anything but a grassroots process. This has become a business. Getting a measure on ...
Hear, see no Climategate
Is this a scientific scandal or a journalism scandal? It took an inordinately long time for the original Climategate scandal to percolate to the surface of the mainstream news media's consciousness. In that one, files were hacked from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University exposing the biggest names ...
Friday, February 5, 2010
Looking ahead
CHEERS ... to Washington State University and University of Idaho students. Their recent protests in the face of deep higher education spending cuts should remind the current generation of politicians that history will not judge them kindly. Governors and taxpayers see only today's bottom line, financially and politically. If they're looking ...
Missing the point of 2010
WASHINGTON - Vice President Joe Biden is tired of seeing the Obama administration's economic stimulus plan demeaned, derided and dismissed, and he wanted to talk about it. But a funny thing happened in the course of an interview at Biden's White House office on Tuesday afternoon. The vice president's ...
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Region's lawmakers can fix backyard mess
Having waged and lost his fight against a law that requires him to live in Idaho County, 2nd District Judge John Bradbury will drop much of his Clearwater County caseload. That's going to be hard on his fellow district judge, John Stegner, who must commute 75 miles from Moscow to Orofino ...
Brown follows his own lead
WASHINGTON - When I heard Scott Brown, the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, describe himself as a "Scott Brown Republican," I groaned. It sounded as if he's coming to Washington to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. We don't need another knight in shining armor, don't want ...
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Luna's budget focuses on today's students
Last year, it was President Barack Obama who took the sting out of Idaho school budget cuts. This year, that task falls to state schools Superintendent Tom Luna. A year ago, Obama passed a massive economic stimulus package that pumped $145 million into Idaho public education. Even with that money, lawmakers ...
Next up: a new campaign ad war
WASHINGTON - The sober, sprawling State of the Union address President Obama delivered last week was marked by one extraordinary moment. It came when the president looked down at six robed members of the Supreme Court, seated directly in front of him, and criticized their recent 5-4 decision that he said ...
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