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Thursday, March 18, 2010
Idaho's budget will claim its silent victims
Spend less money on prevention and you'll end up paying more later. That's the theme of this year's string of Idaho budget cuts. Cut schools and higher education today, and run the risk of a less educated, less competitive work force. Cut rehabilitation programs and run the risk of a expanding ...
Feds unload toxic trailers
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is making a big health care mistake. I'm not talking about the final push for comprehensive reform legislation, which is righteous and necessary. I mean the sale of more than 100,000 contaminated trailers and mobile homes - a move that could make people sick. The trailers ...
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
A bit too cautiously, Idaho targets tax cheats
Gov. C. L. (Butch) Otter and lawmakers on the budget panel have agreed to spend more money to collect delinquent taxes. Good for them. In a unanimous vote Friday, the budget panel added $1.8 million to the state's tax auditing and collection effort. That's not as ambitious an amount as it ...
Abortion politics trump reality
WASHINGTON - There are any number of good reasons for House Democrats to vote against health care reform. Abortion isn't one of them. At least, it shouldn't be. There is scant difference between the House bill that anti-abortion advocates deem acceptable and the Senate version they claim would allow federal ...
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
If Parks and Rec cabins pay fair rates, others can
Idaho's plucky Parks and Recreation Board has been able to do what the state's top elected officials have not - collect what it's owed for leased cabin sites. For years, Idaho's Land Board - currently make up of Gov. C. L. (Butch) Otter, Attorney General Lawrence Wasden, Secretary of State Ben ...
Iraq's fate tied to its refugees
Even though Iraq's election is over, the vote was so divided among political coalitions that it may be weeks before a new government is formed. However, we do know that the parties that claimed to rise above sectarian divisions did well - most notably Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Rule of Law ...
Monday, March 15, 2010
Has Boise become Sacramento-North?
Idaho budget writers could always take solace from one fact: No matter how bad the situation got in Boise, it couldn't compare to the headaches in Sacramento. Just to balance their budget, California legislators resorted to a myriad of charades - delaying payment of bills, moving peas from one shell to ...
Obama needs courage, not polls
Googling to my heart's content on a recent eve, I decided to match "health care" with "ram" to see what would happen. What I got was about 9.8 million hits, some of them right on the nose and reflecting the current conservative meme that after more than a year, several votes, ...
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Four votes, a golden parachute and no answers
The top dog at Lewiston City Hall has been fired. Now you can speculate why City Manager John C. (Jay) Krauss got the ax. But all you truly know is that a newly elected city council took office in January. Councilors engaged in a series of closed-door meetings. Monday, they voted ...
The happy fate of hard labor
I saw a man outside a lumber yard stuffing boards into the back of a pickup and I had an overwhelming urge to say to him what everybody says to a man in that circumstance: "That looks like work." There are two reasons I would never say that to him: ...
Today, sibling rivals; tomorrow, siblings and friends
WASHINGTON - This time, I dispensed with the wheatgrass. Two years ago, I wrote about my daughter's bat mitzvah, the ceremony marking a Jewish child's transition to adulthood. I have a self-imposed rule that personal columns must contain a broader message, and the theme of that column was about ...
Next State of the Union, Obama should mail it in
WASHINGTON - The increasingly puerile spectacle of presidential State of the Union addresses is indicative of the state of the union, and is unnecessary: The Constitution requires only that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union." But a reaction may ...
Choking on sweetheart deals
WASHINGTON - Skipping through the Candy Land of the health care bill, one is tempted to hum a few bars of "Let Me Call You Sweetheart." What a deal. For deal-makers, that is. Not so much for American taxpayers, who have been misled into thinking that the sweetheart deals have been ...
This would-be terrorist skipped central casting
WASHINGTON - It took the case of "JihadJane" to illuminate what should have been obvious by now: Anyone who claims to be able to identify a potential terrorist by appearance or nationality is delusional. There's a reason why all of us have to take our shoes off at the airport. For ...
States accomplish what feds won't
WASHINGTON - There is a great divide in American politics. It's not between Democrats and Republicans. It's between the president and Congress in Washington, on one side, and governors and legislators around the country on the other. The record of the Washington politicians is summarized in the report that came ...
Knowing when the cure is worse than the disease
The snow is melting in the woods of North Carolina and the kudzu is greening up. This ravenous pea-like vine was introduced to prevent soil erosion and now it is devouring the South, which goes to show you that some solutions are worse than the problem. Likewise, the judge in Yolo ...
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Risch got his tax shift, Otter got the shaft
Why is Gov. C. L. (Butch) Otter taking ownership for one of his predecessor's worst foul-ups? Responding to a series of editorials, Otter - joined by House Speaker Lawerence Denney, R-Midvale and Senate President Robert Geddes, R-Soda Springs - recently rejected out of hand any attempt to repeal the 2006 measure ...
Taxing the guy behind the tree
The Washington Democrats' scheme to seduce the electorate into granting Olympia the power to afflict the state with an income tax is a stark reminder of why we should never trust them. While thrashing about for ideas on how best to close the state's budget chasm, Senator Majority Leader Lisa Brown, ...
Friday, March 12, 2010
Standing by no longer
WASHINGTON - For those who feared that Barack Obama did not have any Lyndon Johnson in him, the president's determination to press ahead and get health care reform done in the face of Republican intransigence came as something of a relief. Obama's critics have regularly accused him of not being as ...
Slapped down
CHEERS ... to Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire. When Idaho Gov. C.L. (Butch) Otter ridiculed the Evergreen State's refusal to gut every last program in the name of avoiding any and all tax increases, Gregoire slapped him down. With good cause. "Legislators in the state of Washington are talking about even bigger ...
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