Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Northern Pike: A**holes of the Fishing World

Are you a trout fisherman? If so, I hope you savor every cast, every strike, every last fish you bring to the net between now and the day you lay down your rod for good. Enjoy these sleek, spirited gamefish that help make Montana one of the finest fishing destinations in the world. Because your children will be pike fishermen. The northern pike is laying waste to the trout population of Western Montana with such ruthless efficiency, it makes whirling disease look like a paper cut by comparison.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

A Food Pyramid For the Rest of Us

Here’s my grocery list: Meat, Fruit, Veg, Milk, Eggs, Cheese, Snacks. I’ll grab a cart for the first six items on the list, because I know I’ll be buying stacks of Top Loin Pork Top Chop Loin Top Chops of Pork, plenty of apples, bananas and oranges, and maybe one five dollar tomato that I will hoard like the last Fun Size Milky Way in a Halloween bag full of wax-wrapped candy and stale-ass Easter Peeps. I’ll hide my hot-house prize in the vegetable drawer, the one where we store root vegetables and what looks like some kind of knapweed experiment. Daddy needs his tomato.

What Does Your Stuff Really Say About You?

Should we spend more time thinking about the external costs of the material goods we fill our homes with? And is America’s addiction to consumerism a response to the diminishing role social interaction plays in our day-to-day lives? The Story of Stuff offers a compelling argument for people to re-examine their relationship with consumer goods.

idaho legislature

Labrador Becomes First Latino to Preside Over Idaho House

Continuing a process begun with Representative Margaret Henbest, D-Boise, in 2008 of inviting retiring members of the Idaho House to serve as Speaker for part of the day’s session, Speaker Lawerence Denney, R-Midvale, handed the gavel to Representative Raul Labrador, R-Eagle, who is leaving the House to run for Congress.

And in keeping with other “firsts,” such as Henbest’s first woman speaker, as well as being a Democrat presiding over the largely Republican House—and Representative George Sayler’s, D-Coeur d’Alene, turn on Monday as the first Speaker from Kootenai County—Labrador may have been the first Latino to preside over the chamber.

Naturally, House members treated Labrador with all the deference due the Speaker.

Mostly.

idaho legislature

Idaho State Affairs Committee Passes ‘Conscience’ Bill

After two days of testimony, mostly in opposition, Idaho’s House State Affairs Committee voted to pass this year‘s version of the “conscience” bill, which lets medical professionals such as nurses and pharmacists refuse to perform medical actions or fill prescriptions that could cause an abortion—as well as emergency contraception—or hasten the end of life. The bill has already passed the Senate.

This year’s bill is different from last year‘s in several ways, such as the inclusion of the end-of-life component, which brought in other opponents such as AARP and, perhaps, made debating and voting against the bill more palatable to legislators who would not otherwise want to be perceived as being pro-abortion. In addition was the fact that the bill went through the State Affairs committees in both houses—reportedly not only because the State Affairs committees are thought to be more conservative, but because of the perception that Health & Welfare committees—each headed by women—would be less receptive to the bill, especially after chair Senator Patti Anne Lodge, R-Huston, held the bill in her committee last year.

Lending credence to this argument, voting on the bill was split not only along partisan lines but also among gender lines: All three votes on the bill featured Republican men on one side and Democratic women on the other.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

No Child Left Behind, Unless They Can’t Keep Up

Today marks the end of Week 1 of MontCAS testing at Missoula public schools. Montana Comprehensive Assessment System is a series of standardized tests administered each spring under the heinous, deceptively-named No Child Left Behind program implemented by Congress in 2002. You would think from the very title of the program that the federal government will be providing assistance to lagging or underperforming students, in order to improve the U.S.’s educational standards and better prepare our youth to compete on the international stage.

Oh, hell no. NCLB is all stick, no carrot. Citing our “failing public schools” (which is bullshit), what President Bush and his duplicitous cronies did was create a system of punishment with no reward, putting pressure solely on state and local school systems to take several weeks away from their standard curricula in order to “teach to the test.” The MontCAS and other NCLB tests are geared solely to math and reading comprehension. No science, no social studies, no history, and none of that pesky arts and music that is cloggin’ up these kids’ heads.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

First Grilling of the Season

Still digesting the first grilled food of the season. Every time I burp it smells like burnt moth wings.

Of course I cleaned the grill, but most of my efforts went into the surfaces the food will be touching. Now that we’ve got that first grilled meal behind us, I’ll be scorching meat almost every day from now till around Halloween. If this global warming thing can’t be solved, I might even be flipping ribs into December this year.

But after a full winter of squatting on the back porch looking like Darth Vader’s Thalidomide baby, my ten-year-old propane Sunbeam was in need of some major cleaning and maintenance. I started to pull off the heavy vinyl cover, and it quickly became apparent that I’d put in on after a few too many gin ‘n tonics last fall, not really waiting for the grill to cool off between drunken rounds of backyard horseshoes. The cover had melted to parts of the grill housing, so I used the burger flipper to pry it loose. Well, it was probably time for a new cover anyway.

From the Idaho Panhandle

Rezoning: Not for the Faint of Heart

Municipal zoning is not for the faint of heart. Only those who know the future can take it on with complete confidence. Sandpoint’s all-volunteer Planning and Zoning Commission doesn’t seem to have anyone that prescient, so they must make the best decisions they can with the information they have.

What they have is the Sandpoint Comprehensive Plan, a document that was debated at length in numerous community meetings and extensive city council sessions before finally being officially adopted last fall. And they have examples of zoning that other communities have used in an effort to meet similar ends. The commission is charged with moving past those examples to draft new zoning that provides for the future that Sandpointers have said they want.

Utah Gets Uppity

Utah’s current legislative session is and has been considering a number of bills which would limit the federal government’s powers under the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution. To whit:

A bill which would allow Utah to opt out of federal health care.