Politics

Mark Balzer

Well it is really going to get interesting in that great theater on the Potomac we call Washington this month.

Let us look at our cast of characters for this comedy that will soon play out on our national stage.
Our hero the President-elect, his former competitor and future U.S. Secretary of State, several Senate candidates and state governors, and as spear carriers the rest of Congress.

Act One, Scene One opens in Washington, D.C. where  we are introduced to the President-elect. He humbly states that he is not the hero while meeting with Fancy Nancy and working back room deals to pass legislation for him to sign the day he is sworn in—a trillion dollars worth of legislation that lawmakers will have only a few days to read.

Fancy Nancy only makes a cameo in this play, kind of like Alfred Hitchcock.

Scene Two introduces us to the rest of the House of Representatives, some of whom will make an effort to reject the deal worked out in Scene One. By the end of the act we see a bill passed in the House which no one, even the people who “wrote” it, has read or much less understood. At the end of the act we see this bill passed and sent to the Senate.

Act Two takes place in three different states.

Scene One takes place in New York. Our intrepid Senator, soon to be Secretary of State and past competitor for the prize with our hero, prepares for her new duties. Our worthy Governor prepares to anoint yet another Kennedy, and one with such valuable experience.

If Sarah Palin had only known maybe she would have edited a book of her mother’s poetry instead of all that silly government stuff, and maybe President Bush could have taken diction and speaking lessons from Caroline as well.

For Scene Two we move to the great state of Illinois. The worthy Governor of this state, now facing impeachment because he tried to sell our hero’s Senate seat, appointed Roland Burris to that vacancy. Mr. Burris is now trying to get the courts to force the Secretary of State in Illinois to certify his appointment so he can go to Washington.

Scene Three takes us to Minnesota for a fiasco that only Mark Twain could adequately explain. After numerous recounts and changes in method comedian Al Franken is now leading the Senate race there by a meager 49 votes, with more challenges to come.

For Act Three we return to Washington, D. C.

In Scene One we see the bill passed in Act One Scene One arrive on the floor of the Senate just in time to meet the new junior senator from New York. She seems surprised at this newly discovered volume of poetry and thus becomes the only senator to actually read the bill. It does not get a vote in time for our hero to sign it on his inauguration day

Scene Two takes place on the Senate floor where the Republicans are filibustering to prevent Al Franken from taking his seat because he does not have a certificate of election because of the challenges still taking place in Act Two. They are having a very easy time with the filibuster because all the Democrats are blocking the doors to prevent Roland Burris from taking his seat after the courts forced his certificate of appointment to be issued.

Our final scene takes place in the Oval Office where our hero is signing the bill. Senator Kennedy (Caroline) is still the only person who has actually read it, her only comment being that it didn’t rhyme well.

But like the movie “The Sting,” it is the audience that is being laughed at by the players because the ticket price for this play has just increased by another $1,000,000,000,000.00, and you pay when you leave.

By Phil Quinton

Once again we see turmoil in the Middle East resulting in the loss of life. Anytime that happens it diminishes us all, but in Israel it happens all the time. It shouldn’t have to be this way, but it seems there are a people that want it.

The Israelis just want to raise their children in safety, to see them grow into adults. Unfortunately, the people of Gaza have a different view. They want death for Israel, plain and simple.

Hamas has been sending rockets into Israel for over a week. It took Israel a few days of trying to negotiate before finally striking back. Why did they take so long? Israel, not Hamas, tries to keep from killing the innocent. Hamas fires rockets that are mostly unguided. They hit schools, playgrounds, hospitals, marketplaces, etc. Hamas stockpiles its weapons among the civilian population, making its arsenal more difficult for the Israeli military to destroy. When an Israeli air strike hits the weapons cache, the civilians killed in the attack are presented as martyrs and Israel is vilified by the EU and other Middle Eastern countries.

But isn’t that the objective of Hamas?

And why does that illustrious body called the United Nations only tell Israel to use restraint? I don’t hear them telling that to Hamas, Iran or anyone else trying to destroy Israel.

I haven’t seen resolutions against Hamas or Hezbollah when they attack Israel and kill the innocent, but I do see resolutions against Israel over and over if they strike back. Can anyone say “anti-Semite?” I get amazed at how hypocritical the UN is.

It’s an organization that says it stands for peace, but I guess the spirit of Saladin is alive and well in that impotent body.

Who’s Saladin? He was a Muslim prince that in the 12th century made peace with the Crusaders in Jerusalem. Once the Crusaders let their arms and guard down, Saladin destroyed them and took Jerusalem. Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accords then flew to Saudi Arabia and spoke in a mosque, telling the adherents that he just made the peace of Saladin with the Jews. People need to listen to what the leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas say to their own people. That’s where we’ll hear the truth. To world representatives, they will say what’s expected. But to their own people, the truth comes out loud and clear. When are we going to start listening to that? I guess after we have appeased ourselves right out of our own country.

This current episode is just another in a long line of unwarranted attacks upon a country that is only trying to live in peace with its neighbors. One neighbor, Iran, wants to see Israel destroyed. Others in the region have voiced they won’t stop until all the Jews are pushed into the ocean. What if the United States were to say that about Australia or France? Or about China? Would we get the silence Iran gets when it spouts off? Or would the world body politic condemn, and rightly so, us?

In our country the spirit of Saladin is more alive now than ever before. Appeasement is a word that you will hear a lot in the next four years. If you want to observe what it can cause, look at Europe today. See any identity? Is there anyone standing up for their nation, trying to preserve what their history has made them? Or do you see a people, rather governments, doing all they can to appease?

 

Once you begin to appease anything, you’ve lost. The national identity of Israel is under threat of extinction every day, yet the Israelis still stand. Why won’t the world stand with them? Why are they hated by most cultures and peoples? Is it jealousy because the Almighty chose them? Is it because the world needs something to kick so it feels better about itself? I think each one of us needs to see where we stand and then answer why.

I have friends in Israel. I don’t worry about them, but I do pray for their safety. People of the world need to stop listening to the “politically correct” version of what is happening there and choose to listen to the truth. The “politically correct” way of doing things is to tell a lie often enough that people believe it as truth. We’ve heard enough lies about Israel. Learn the truth for yourselves.

 

 Author Phil Quinton is retired and lives with his wife and daughter in Chubbuck.

 

 

Idaho State Journal Editorial

Let’s see if we have this straight.
Phosphate mining companies may be allowed to pollute groundwater beneath their operations, if the Legislature says it’s OK.
Specifically, under a rule being put forward for legislative approval, mining companies could pollute groundwater below their extraction, reclamation and tailing activities with high concentrations of naturally occurring elements such as selenium.
True, they would be required to monitor groundwater at so-called points of compliance as close as possible to the mining area, to be sure there is no pollution.
But what if there is?
You may remember that at least four horses and hundreds of sheep died in the late 1990s after drinking selenium-contaminated water from defunct phosphate mines and their waste piles near Soda Springs. Even the mining companies don’t want that to happen again.
After wrangling over possible remedies for a decade, the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality developed a draft proposal in 2007 which would have required companies to clean up groundwater below their mines within eight years of ceasing activities. Too onerous, the Idaho Mining Association said.
So the DEQ board approved the relaxed rule, which will come before the Idaho Legislature this year, and that body in the past has been reluctant to reject measures which have board support.
Justin Hayes of the Idaho Conservation League contends the state agency caved to industry pressure. The League and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition say the revised rule gives mining companies near the Idaho-Wyoming border license to pollute forever. Mining lobbyist Jack Lyman scoffs at that, saying environmentalists exaggerate the danger that mining pollution will migrate.
He says the septic tank at his home near Caldwell never causes a problem for neighbors, and he says just because groundwater below a mine is polluted, it “does not mean that’s going to flow down into Soda Springs, Idaho.” Besides, without the new rule, companies aiming to develop new mines or expand existing ones would be hamstrung by “onerous, unrealistic cleanup mandates.”
“The department came up with a rule they think is workable, without putting our industry into a difficult situation where we’d be unable to comply,” Lyman says.
Before the Legislature goes along with the new rule, it needs to include an indemnity clause binding the mining companies. If the pollution escapes the mine boundaries, someone should pay, and pay dearly.
The phosphate industry is important to Idaho, but the area’s wildlife, cutthroat trout fishery and domestic livestock are just as valuable. They should never be put at risk under any rule which may, or may not, be adequate to protect them.

By Perry Swisher

The late, great chess champion Bobby Fischer had all the fillings removed from his teeth because of his fear that the Russians, traditional rulers of the world of chess, would scramble his brain by transmitting subversive thoughts into those receptors and thus into Fischer’s head.
The year just ended, 2008, was tumultuous in the realms of investments and marketing in general. A resurgence of regulation — which had been waning ever since the 1980 presidential victory of Ronald Reagan and the free-market ideology — has economists and many others who live in proximity to banking and Wall Street alarmed. The case is being made that order will be restored only by introducing regulation more thorough than the nation went through at the height of the New Deal back in the 1930s and then World War II.
I bring up Fischer’s obsession with the lengths the Russians might have gone to curtail his primacy in chess simply because paranoia is spreading in conservative circles. With a new liberal president, Barack Obama, succeeding George Bush on Jan. 20, the air waves and the e-mailers besieging the editorial pages are building such a wave of hysteria that it is beginning to affect people in high places, people who should know better.
One case at hand is here in Idaho where Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter has announced his intention to second-guess the work of the Idaho Public Utilities Commission by asking the Legislature for a statute mandating full utility recovery of the money power companies invest in transmission.
How electricity gets from where it’s generated to where it’s consumed requires somebody — usually the PUC members or the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — to decide who pays for the power lines and the right of way costs and why.
In the past century, when I spent 12 years in regulation and a tad more than that as a legislator keenly interested in power, gas and telephony, the tendency was to look to the cost causer to foot the bills. However, householders and Main Street wanted additional agriculture badly enough that the Legislature supported including some of the cost of getting electricity to farms in their own bills.
In this new century, so many American jobs have disappeared, either by evaporating in new technology or by being taken overseas, governors and other politicians may try to attract new payroll to a state by making energy available to a “new” industry by offering rates lower than those paid in a competing state.
In that atmosphere, and in other states than this one, that has caused utilities to see to the enactment of CWIP laws. “CWIP” stands for construction work in progress. Such a law requires immediate and full reimbursement to the utility of any transmission costs and often generation capital outlay.
Who did the construction? Was there competitive building? How much was paid for right of way? For the plant site? Did a holding company, another utility or a generating company acquire new revenue through the project but without anybody questioning the cost to ratepayers? Cost per kilowatt hour varies widely by source, distance and time of day. Other than the new customer, how are the other rate classes affected?
There’s a ton of case law as to what’s fair because everything the rate-setters decided in the past has been subject to state Supreme Court opinion. There are lawyers and expert-opinion witnesses who specialize in this area. One way and another their clients pay for the litigation.
A generation ago, Montana’s then-governors and legislative leaders went on a deregulation binge. One consequence was that Montana Power Co. sold off some valuable plant that had been paid for by its customers and used the proceeds to go unprofitably into the communications business. Idaho utility rates are better than Montana’s because of that mistake.
Otter’s been around state government for decades. If he doesn’t know better than to get his office involved in the CWIP game, fellow Republicans should tell him why Montana at last, again, has a Democratic governor.

Perry Swisher of Boise is a longtime Idaho journalist and former state lawmaker.

By Nick Gier
 

During the last nine seasons, the University of Idaho football team has lost 82 of 105 games. Even with its winning seasons as a member of the Big Sky conference, its “all-time ranking” is 118 out of 125 schools. 

Even the hiring of the celebrated Dennis Erickson in 2006 did not do the trick.  In fact, after his quick departure after a 4-8 season, the earlier motto “Erickson is Back, Are You?” turned into phrases unprintable for this newspaper.

For the past three seasons the UI men’s basketball team has lost 73 of 89 games. Its current NCAA standing is 316th out of 341 colleges and universities.  

If any UI academic program had such a poor performance record, it would certainly be eliminated or reduced in its mission. But since 1999 state funding for UI athletics has grown from $1.78 million to $3.04 million, a 71 percent increase. By comparison general education budgets for Idaho higher education have increased 46 percent during the same period.

In 2003 UI athletics was given a $500,000 “gift” from the university president’s office, presumably to cover the costs of joining the Western Athletics Conference.

Also in 2003 the men’s basketball coach received a $15,000 pay raise, the second highest at the university. The UI athletic department tried to fudge the raise as one based on future performance, but the increment was added to his base salary before the season began. 

During the financial crisis of 2004-05 the UI liberal arts college was forced to cut $326,000, but $322,600 was added to the athletics department budget. A faculty committee recommended that then President Tim White reduce the athletic budget by $300,000, but he decided to fire 27 staff employees instead.

In 1987 the State Board of Education reinstituted the policy of using general education monies for athletics. Since then the annual athletics subsidy for UI has grown from $665,500 to $3,041,679, a 357 percent increase. Athletics on all Idaho campuses experienced a similar increase. Without that subsidy the Idaho Vandals won five Big Sky championships from 1983-87.

While all other UI faculty and staff received little or no raises this year, the athletic director enjoyed an 8 percent raise, and the salary line for football coaches with record losses has also increased 8 percent.

Since 1997 all UI departments have paid an administrative fee on all external funds to the central administration. The fee has now risen to 8 percent, but athletics only pays 3 percent. 

For several years after 2001 athletics paid no administrative fee at all, claiming that it had to reach gender equity goals.  Many other departments could have presented equally persuasive reasons why they too should be exempt.

For example, auxiliary services and facilities management generate lots of external funds, and they could very well argue that their salaries, 19 percent of which are below the poverty level, should rise before they are required to pay the administrative fee.

The athletic department has defended its low fee by boasting it returns $2.5 million back to the university in tuition, fees, room and board for scholarship students. Scholarship funds for all UI colleges total $4.1 million, so they have a much better reason to ask for a lower administrative fee.

If the implication of the athletic department’s claim is that athletics makes money for UI, then this is clearly false.  This year the athletics department estimated that it would take in $2.1 million in student fees in addition to the $3 million direct subsidy from the Legislature. 

A national study concluded that only nine athletic programs are able to actually return money to their respective academic institutions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, winning athletic programs do not increase alumni funding. 

As a vice president at the University of Notre Dame says: “There is no empirical evidence demonstrating a correlation between athletic department achievement and alumni fund-raising success.” Studies have shown that alumni give on the basis of consistent academic excellence not inconsistent athletic records.

The administrative fee issue has not been brought up in the UI faculty senate because some do not think it’s fair to pick on any one specific unit of the university during bad times. But when one program has been favored over others for years, then an appeal to equitable treatment is the only principled position.

Nick Gier of Moscow taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years.  He is president of the Higher Education Council of the Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFT/AFL-CIO, which has chapters on all six Idaho campuses. 

Idaho State Journal Editorial

It matters little whether former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris might be  qualified to fill President-elect Barack Obama’s seat in the United States Senate. That’s because any appointment by Gov. Rod Blagojevich is dead on arrival, poisoned by the barrage of federal corruption charges hanging over the governor.

Blagojevich’s nomination of Burris is widely regarded as a cynical ploy to put the race card into play. Rep. Bobby Rush, an African-American as is Burris, told reporters that Senate Democrats  should not “hang and lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointer.”

For his part, Burris said on the “Today” show “it is a fact, there are no African-Americans in the United States Senate.” That by itself hardly qualifies him to become Obama’s successor. The seat should be neither black nor white, male or female. 

To review, Blagojevich was arrested Dec. 9 after federal prosecutors allegedly recorded conversations in which he discussed appointing someone Obama favored in exchange for a position in the new president’s Cabinet, or naming someone favored by a union in return for being given a high-level union job. The governor is out on bail, and is paying no heed to the flood of calls that he resign.

Senate Democrats counseled the governor not to make the appointment because doing so would be unfair to Burris and to the people of Illinois: “It is truly regrettable that despite requests from all 50 Democratic senators and public officials in Illinois, Gov. Blagojevich would take the imprudent step of appointing someone to the United States Senate who would serve under a shadow, and be plagued by questions of impropriety.”

Impropriety? The governor clearly does not know the meaning of the word.

Obama has weighed in, calling Burris “a good man and a fine public servant, but the Senate Democrats made it clear weeks ago that they cannot accept an appointment made by a governor who is accused of selling this very Senate seat. I agree with their decision.”

It’s likely that Congress will convene Jan. 20 with the Obama seat still empty. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is seeking a 90-day extension to return an indictment of Blagojevich, a move which seems likely to stall any movement in the Illinois Legislature for impeachment or to draft legislation for a special election that would remove any hint of impropriety in choosing a senator.

Meanwhile, Burris will be left swinging in the wind. That is unfortunate, but it is important for the people of Illinois to have the corruption case resolved than to now accept this dubious appointment.