GOP BLUES

Hispanic Vote, Transplants Helped Democrats Rise in the West

For the first time in a century, the mountain West has more Democratic senators, and more Democratic congress members, than Republicans.

That’s part of a shift across the region and the nation, say a pair of Stanford University professors, that has the Republican Party in crisis.

“There is no silver bullet for Republicans,” says Doug Rivers, professor of political science at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. “For the short-run, the news is pretty bad.”

Are We Stimulating Sprawl?

Report: Western States Spending Too Much Stimulus on New Roads

A report out this week from the national Smart Growth America group takes a look at where transportation stimulus money is going on the state level and it found that in most cases, especially in the West, states are spending too much on new roads and not enough on maintenance and repair of existing infrastructure or on public transportation options.

The report is exhaustive, and you can read the whole thing here, but two main points from the group are these:

Not enough money is being spent on repair and maintenance: “Despite a multi-trillion dollar backlog of road and bridge repairs, states committed almost a third of ARRA STP money—$6.6 billion—to new capacity road and bridge projects rather than to repair and other preservation projects”

Not enough money is being spent on public transportation: “By allocating few funds (3.7%) to public and non-motorized transportation, states made less progress on modernization, rapid job creation, enhancing public transporation, long-term economic growth, reducing greenhouse gases, oil dependence and providing low cost transportation choices,” the report states.

Read on to see the report’s findings on how specific Western states rank in the group’s assessment.

Western Book Roundup

“Reading the West” Gets the Word Out About Regional Books

A few weeks ago I wrote about some creative ideas people are coming up with to support books in the midst of this changing media landscape. In keeping with that theme, the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association recently launched the Reading the West program, with the goal of helping bookstores promote books that are set in the West or those written by Western authors. The first featured books are New Mexico writer Rick Collignon's Madewell Brown and Austin-based Jaqueline Kelly's The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. I spoke to MPIBA executive director Lisa Knudsen this week on the phone from her office in Fort Collins about the program.

Knudsen said that the MPIBA started the Reading the West program because "in these troubled economic times, we were looking for projects and programs that are free to our member booksellers and are a potential win win win—for the publisher, bookseller, and author."

"I shamelessly copied from my fellow regional bookseller associations," Knudsen said, noting that the Midwest and Great Lakes Bookseller associations sponsor similar programs. The Reading the West program makes advance copies of the featured books available to booksellers, as well as materials to use in their display and promotion. The authors are also available for readings at regional stores.

The MPIBA board hopes publishers will begin to send them information about relevant forthcoming books to be considered for the program, but for the first selections, the members discussed among themselves what good books of regional interest they knew were coming out.

"Rick Collignon is very popular in our region," Knudsen said, "and the committee was enthusiastic about his latest book. We also wanted to do what we could to promote independent publishers." Madewell Brown is published by Unbridled Books, an independent publisher based in Colorado.

And Here We Have Idaho

The High Mountain Pleasures of an Idaho Family Hike

Hiking to Shirts Lake, accessible from West Mountain Road around Cascade Reservoir in Idaho’s beautiful Valley County, was a part of our kids’ childhoods. The fishing, camping, swimming and messing around in the mountains turned them both into lovers of nature and the earth. Son is a hiker and mountain biker, and Daughter, close to finishing a degree in environmental science, wants to spend her life trying to save the planet. Getting kids outdoors really does help them stay rooted in what’s real.

The lake, no doubt named after somebody named Shirts, rises from the town of Cascade’s 4,760 foot elevation to 7,700 in Idaho’s beautiful Valley County, where it is no longer early spring but not quite mid-spring.

That means wildflowers and songbirds, and a weekend family hike to Shirts took us through meadows and mountainsides grinning with both.

Feeding the Growing World One Small Farm At a Time

"How else would we feed the world?" is an easy defense for keeping the status quo of the commodity-led American agribusiness system. It's also a good way to encourage genetically-modified crops in the U.S.

But, according to a new study from the climate change research division of Deutsche Bank, increasing commodity crops, GMO crops and irrigation alone aren't going to feed our growing planet.

The report does highlight the need for increasing acres in cultivation and yes, it recommends GMO technology and investing in better irrigation systems, but it also recommends at least considering a return to small, diversified, local farming.

From Mark Fulton, Global Head of Climate Change Investment Research, in his editorial letter in the report:

To feed and fuel 9 billion people ... farmers, markets and governments will look at a whole host of options. Alternative approaches are being researched and tested in development such as the reemergence of small, self-sufficient organic farms, characterized as, local, multi-crop, energy and water efficient, low-carbon, socially just, and self-sustaining.

Hat-tip to the New York Times' Green Inc. blog.

Click here to read the full report (PDF).

Retailing

Big Boxes, Bigger Boxes, and Independent Businesses

Last week I posted a piece about the closing of the downtown Missoula Starbucks, and expressed some ambivalance about the idea that locally owned versus chains was always a black-and-white issue. Today I came across a piece that takes a different kind of look at this issue, arguing that Walmart and Costco are killing the so-called category killer big boxes in product categories such as music, books, electronics, toys and more. (Hat tip to Roger Millar for the link). The story, by Stacy Mitchell, is on the Website of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, not a group I was previously familiar with, and it definitely has a point of view. But it makes some great points, and calls for more vigorous anti-trust enforcement on predatory pricing by the mega-retailers.

ASPEN JACKSON

Michael Jackson’s Aspen Visit Showed a Troubled Man

Add this to the list of Michael Jackson memories, and to the ongoing struggle to understand the enigmatic man behind the sequins and dark glasses.

You can’t claim celebrity status without ending up in Aspen sometime. I think it’s written in the celebrity union rules somewhere. The King of Pop was no different.

Aspen should have been a good place for Jackson. Locals have a famously low-key approach to the A-listers who haunt the slopes and the shops. Paparazzi have become a phenomenon, but they’re still rare.

For the famously reclusive Jackson, this should have been the perfect Neverland to get away from Neverland Ranch. But Jackson not only managed to get himself noticed. He nearly got himself arrested.

Why he thought it would be a good idea to go shopping in the Glenwood Springs Wal-Mart wearing a ski mask is a mystery. But there are many mysteries behind Michael Jackson.

Coffee Wars

Goodbye, Starbucks: Not So Glad to See You Go

Author's Note: This story first appeared on The Big Money, a business news website that's part of the Slate group. I write a weekly small business column for The Big Money called "Making Payroll".)

When a Starbucks opened across the street from our offices in downtown Missoula, Mont., a few years ago, a lot of people in this liberal college town were not too pleased. The national behemoth would squeeze the local coffee shops, critics said, and contribute to the homogenization of Missoula.

As an independent local businessman whose largest competitor is a multibillion-dollar national chain, I've always been more than sympathetic to this argument. As a company, and as individuals, we're all about supporting locally owned businesses and the eclectic downtown commercial culture that goes with them.

But last week, we learned the Starbucks would be closing—it couldn't compete with the excellent alternatives. And I don't see that as a good thing.

News Bite

Western Senators Form Caucus to Combat, Among Other Things, “Anti-Oil Agenda”

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch says he, his fellow Senator Bob Bennett, Idaho's Jim Risch and Wyoming's John Barrasso have created the Western Senate Caucus because: "We have to fight very, very hard to make sure that the West is being treated fairly."

In an announcement yesterday, the three Senators detailed a plan that Hatch likened to the Sagebrush Rebellion during the Carter years.

Barrasso says in the Salt Lake Tribune: "We believe in Western values, values of rugged individualism, of self-reliance and economic freedom," said Barrasso. "We oppose the federal intrusion in the everyday lives of the people of our great country. The government should get out of the way of prosperity and liberty."

The Senators times the formation of the caucus with its introduction of the Clean, Affordable, and Reliable Energy, or CARE, Act, legislation that Hatch described in a press release as, "A comprehensive energy bill... aimed at ensuring that all the energy tools are in place to fuel our economy and fix our nation’s dangerous overdependence on foreign oil."

Hatch also said in the release, "One of the aims of the Senate Western Caucus is to thwart the anti-oil agenda of the Washington elite and their extreme environmentalist allies, while at the same time promoting alternative energy," and he referenced Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's decision this week to repeal oil and gas leases in Utah. You can read some of the details of the CARE act on Hatch's Web site.