Politics News

Book Review

A coworker once quipped that a good study is one where the researcher’s stand on the issue  is hard to determine. This coworker then offered up Kristin Luker’s Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, an especially even-handed study of activist supporters and opponents of abortion, as a good example. An analogous measure of quality, I think, might be whether a researcher with little personal experience of the subject under study can observe and describe that topic sensitively and well.

Take the new book Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America by sociologists Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas. Admitted urbanites whose original research agenda didn’t include a detour through the country, Carr and Kefalas undertook an ethnographic study of youth pathways to adulthood in a pseudonymous small Iowa town, “Ellis.” But if you didn’t read their confession about not being rural residents themselves, you probably wouldn’t be able to guess it.

public transit

Public transit, such as Boise’s proposed streetcar, is bad for the economy and bad for the environment. Just ask Randal O’Toole, who works on urban growth, public land, and transportation issues at the Cato Institute, and who spoke in Boise today about public transit, particularly in Portland.

By the way, O’Toole also believes that urban planners caused the recession, that they’re using social engineering to try to turn the U.S. Communist, and that all roads should be privately owned.

Healthcare Reform

Congressional legislation to reshape the U.S. health insurance system, H.R. 3962, passed by a tiny five-vote margin late Saturday night, as 39 Democrats – most of them representing rural districts—broke with the president and opposed the sweeping bill.

Voting overwhelmingly along party lines, the House passed the Affordable Health Care for America Act 220-215. Of the 39 Democrats who voted against the bill, 33 represent districts with higher-than-average rural populations. (Congressional districts’ rurality is based on 2000 Census figures and calculations by the USDA found here).

Nationwide, 21% of Americans live in rural communities.

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.

HEALTH CARE

Richard Angus had been managing just fine without health insurance. A careful skier and cyclist, the Glenwood Springs, Colo., resident figured he could avoid the costs of health insurance, and the risks of going without it. Then last year, he contracted a blood infection that nearly cost him his life.

Instead, it cost him his livelihood. Three weeks in the hospital left him with $90,000 in medical bills he says he’ll never be able to pay off. His credit rating trashed, he’s seeking bankruptcy protection to stay afloat.

“You’re very happy that you get home. You’re alive!” says Angus, 48. “Then three months, four months down the road, you have to deal with the bills and the people. You almost wonder why they’re keeping me alive when they’re just going to make my life hell.”

Angus isn’t alone. The West has one of the highest rates of uninsured in the country, due largely to the region’s dominant industries. Apart from lots of small, independent businesses, much of the West is driven by the service sector, which often doesn’t provide health insurance. Neither do many construction contractors, energy industry contractors or agriculture operations. 

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. 

Election '09

The elections that attracted national attention Tuesday were all on the East Coast, with New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine (suddenly burdened by his previous job as head of Goldman Sachs) going down to defeat and conservative Republican activists like Sarah Palin failing in their effort to override the local party and elect a fellow-traveler to an open Congressional seat in upstate New York. Unsurprisingly, voters across the country were worried about the economy, not too keen on incumbent office-holders, and wary about measures that might cost them money.

In Colorado, open space and marijuana were the issues of the night, in Boise, the streetcar desire played a role in the elections and in Montana, the liberal bastion that is Missoula finally has a liberal city council.

Here’s a quick and dirty roundup of highlights from election night: 

Out state owners of our airwaves shut down progressive talk once again..... [more]

Opinion: Elections

Refusing to vote, declining to vote, or not being informed enough to vote is a serious wrong.

Ever since our high school civics teachers pounded our heads about the right to vote, we all should know this. But apparently we don’t.

The turnout in today’s election is estimated at 20 to 30 percent. We’ll see how it turns out – Boise in particular has a hot city council race centered around support of a downtown trolley system – but based on history, that’s probably right.

“If you don’t vote, you can’t complain” is a fundamental concept of democracy and fairness. If you don’t help to plant the seed, pull the weeds, harvest the wheat and bake the bread, no soup for you.

The response that there is nobody you want to vote for is acceptable only if you plan to keep your mouth shut about any civic issue that could have been addressed by electing someone else. And if there was nobody else who came close to your views, you can always run for office yourself.

When you fail to participate in a democracy, you are turning your vote over to people who don’t have your values and issues in mind – they have their own.

Justice and the Flathead Boat Crash

The prosecution of Montana State Sen. Greg Barkus for an alleged drunken-boating accident on Flathead Lake that left five people seriously injured is not exactly off to a smooth start. First, it took an inordinately long time for police to release key evidence - namely Barkus’s blood alcohol level - and bring charges in the case, which involved a high-speed crash into the shoreline and counted U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg among the injured.

Then all three District Judges in Flathead County recused themselves from the case on the grounds that they had worked with Barkus on legislation. A Judge from Livingston was moved aside at the request of prosecutors, and a Judge from Lake County is now being replaced at the request of the defense. Barkus has pleaded not guilty, and his attorney says he’ll challenge the blood-alcohol test, which prosectors say showed Barkus to be at twice the legal limit.

It’s easy to see why judges would view the case as the worst kind of lose-lose proposition. Come down hard on Barkus, and his influential friends (who might be your friends too) will hate you for it. Go easy, and your neighbors (and the voters) will hate you for it.