Boise News

Column: Politics

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has announced she’s running for Senate in California, hoping to unseat Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer.

Long one of Boise’s biggest employers, HP is part of Idaho culture. It didn’t take long for the Fiorina chatter to show up on Idaho blogs, including Tom von Alten’s Fort Boise. von Alten, a mechanical engineer who worked at HP for twenty years and still holds stock in the company, wrote, “Her campaign slogan will presumably not be ‘Let me do to the country what I did to HP,’ but I have no doubt she will put a positive spin on every aspect of her career to date.”

As a longtime resident of Boise with friends who worked at HP, I’ve sat at many a dinner party where people told tales of how, instead of “bringing people together,” she repeatedly did the opposite. Notorious for egotistical, divisive and manipulatory tactics, one of her biographers, Michael Malone, said Fiorina “created a pestilential culture” and “a poisonous stew.”

There are numerous reports of employees literally cheering and dancing in the aisles the day her “resignation” was announced.

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From the Panhandle With Cate Huisman

The Sandpoint City Council hit a hot button last year when it proposed a temporary restriction on the construction of drive-through fast-food places. Council members wanted some time to consider how this kind of land use fit with the newly minted Comprehensive Plan, and the city had sprouted a drive-through Jack-in-the-Box while the plan was being cogitated over. Shortly thereafter, a corrugated metal farm shed turned up next to Highway 2 that turned out to be a drive-through convenience store.

After the ban was passed, certain members of the community vehemently voiced their disapproval, and one owner of a restaurant that had both drive-through and sit-down options posted a notice on the order counter suggesting that the city planning director go back to where he came from, inspiring some other community members to dine elsewhere.

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

Finally, some good news about drinking and driving.

Car and Driver magazine reported that texting while driving is more dangerous than drunken driving, thanks mostly to self-absorbed teenagers and undisciplined technodorks behind the wheel. Texting and talking on cell phones while driving resulted in almost 6,000 deaths on U.S. roads last year, according to DOT officials gathered for a “distracted driving summit” last month. Although that’s only about half the number of people killed by drunk drivers, it’s an alarming—and fast-growing—statistic. And that doesn’t even include the hundreds killed while trying to dig out a warm hunk of Dunkin Donuts sausage biscuit from deep in their crotch. (As far as the five-second rule goes, that remains a grey area. So to speak.)

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NEW PROGRAM NEEDS MORE PRIORITY

Open Fields was a “major victory” for hunters and wildlife conservation, according to the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) and many other green groups that lobbied for it. It passed back in December 2008, but almost a year later, this innovative hunter access program is still mired in the administrative rule making process.

Now, predictably, conservationists who struggled mightily for the program are asking Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack for a little more priority.

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Is that guano we smell?

For the past several days a walnut-sized lump has been throbbing on the top of my skull. This morning when I attempted to shampoo my hair, the scrubbing motion nearly brought me to tears. I can’t wear my blue baseball hat without feeling pain.

The cause of the hideous and horribly painful lump on this writer’s noggin? It came from a sharp-ass rock in a dark-ass cave.

A lava cave, to be precise.

And despite the injury, I encourage everyone to go check out the lava caves in central and eastern Oregon for themselves. Just try not to be an idiot and get hurt yourself hurt, okay?

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Land Use

More than 3 million acres of farmland in the country is ready to be broken again this season, freed up from contracts from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a little-known farm program that has large implications for land-use in the West and Midwest.

Roxana Hegeman of the Associated Press details the changes afoot with the program in a story today. The basics are these: CRP was created in 1985 in the thick of the farm crisis. The program pays landowners to take their land out of production and let it “rest” in native grasses for a specified period of time. Contracts range from 10-20 years. In September of this year, 33.47 million acres were enrolled in the program. But, the 2008 Farm Bill, passed last fall, capped the total acreage at 32 million, so as contracts expire, more and more land is coming out of CRP.

According to Hegeman’s story, more than 3.4 million acres were taken out of the program in September—most of them in Texas, Colorado and Kansas, but “hundreds of thousands” of acres are also going back into production in Montana and the Dakotas. In September of 2008, more than 2 million acres were taken out of CRP nationwide compared to September the previous year.

The USDA has boasted CRP as the largest private-public conservation effort in the country and indeed, studies from the agency show great benefits to water, erosion and habitat since its introduction. But, in the last five years it has come under fire for a number of things, the largest being the criticism that it takes farmers off of the land and thus contributes to the depopulation of rural America. It’s also been panned for being a “retirement plan” for farmers, driving up land prices by making cropland attractive to amenity ranch buyers who are looking for places to hunt and fish while getting income from the land. 

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