New West Network

My Page: Jill Kuraitis

Congress

Saturday, Idaho Senator Mike Crapo delivered a national address on the health care legislation expected to be considered by the U.S. Senate Saturday evening.  Crapo was chosen by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to offer the Republican response to the President’s weekly radio address. 

A vote in the Senate on whether or not to allow debate on the bill is expected Saturday night.

Congress

It can be scary for adults to change careers, but the recession has handed many American workers no choice. Enrollment at trade schools, community colleges and specialized private colleges has increased all over the U.S.  But whether or not graduates of these programs find work in their new area of competence varies based on the quality of the training, the choice of skills to learn, and whether or not the training suits an industry with hiring needs.

Rep. Walt Minnick, D-ID, has announced his new bill, H.R. 4072 or the American Manufacturing Efficiency and Retraining Investment Collaboration (AMERICA) Works Act. Minnick has spent eight months developing and writing the bill, which is co-sponsored by three Democratic House Members: Frank Kratovil of Maryland, Debbie Halvorson of Illinois, and Bobby Bright of Alabama.

“Thanks to the diverse coalition behind the bill, there will be more co-sponsors of both parties signing on,” said John Foster, Minnick’s spokesperson. That coalition includes the National Association of Manufacturers, Northwest Carpenters, and community colleges and trade organizations.

“American workers are the best in the world,” said Minnick. “They are resilient, innovative and hardworking, as is made so clear by the success of many great companies in my home state of Idaho. We need to make sure that those American workers, many of whom are retraining, are given every opportunity to achieve certifications, degrees and qualifications for the jobs American industry needs to fill.”

Essay: A week in our national town

Washington, D.C. is a town where an arcane government and a logical street grid are muddled by overlap and diagonal lines. But the reverent preservation and displays of America’s history have a clear and tangible path.

In a town where the ghosts of American history wait for you to discover them, your hosts are cabdrivers, waiters, and doormen from Eritrea, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia. They are a twenty-year wave of immigrants just as the Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans who are the backbone of the Eastern seaboard were at the turn of the 20th century, and by working as hard as their role models they remind you why America exists.

In a place where federal buildings are so baffling that in looking for the “Anteroom” you run across a door marked “Not the Anteroom” you can still simply have your bag scanned and then walk straight to your congressman’s office and state your plea.

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.

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.

No child left inside

The classic American sound of the baseball playoffs on television reminds me of something our family used to do this time of year. 

According to the research done by the Children and Nature Network – and dozens of other organizations – “Children are smarter, cooperative, happier and healthier when they have frequent and varied opportunities for free and unstructured play in the out-of-doors.”

In other words, go hit a rock with a stick for awhile, kid.  Good for ya.

In the 90s, when my two kids were school-age, we’d have a yearly party called “Catalapa Leaf-Whomping Day.” Two eight-stories-high catalpa trees grow in our streamside backyard - those monsters with dinner-plate-sized leaves and two-foot seed pods that look like dried green beans on crack (perfect for whacking your little sister).

When the leaves fall from these godzillas, holy smokes! - it’s a mess. The kids and their friends would go door-to-door organizing the neighbors on a Saturday afternoon for a raking party, which, after some mighty raking, produced a leaf pile the size of an SUV.

H1N1 report

“Ha ha ha, I don’t believe in flu!” I used to toss off that stupidity when I was young and, well, stupid, and had never had the flu.

In my late 30s and 40s I had the flu a few times which reversed my belief system, but secretly I thought it was my fault for getting run down and eating too many Doritos. I had flu shots a couple of years but got flu anyway, so figured there were too many strains around to make the shots worth it.

Writing about swine flu for NewWest made the possibility of getting it seem remote. The outbreaks were in outer space, like the Panama Canal zone and the Russian gulag. Okay, then it was Texas. But still.

Now on the fifth day of having the H1N1 virus, it’s clear that no amount of denial explains this wretchedness. The exhaustion, nausea, aches and misery is like you took on the hangovers of everyone at the party, then hiked to 8,000 feet where Sasquatch flattened you with one foot before tossing you back down the trail. 

Every day you wake up thinking, “THIS IS THE DAY I’M GOING TO FEEL NORMAL” and then you collapse in the shower. That I can sit up with the computer at all is a miracle, and writing this far has already exhausted me.

::::::nap::::::

Okay, I’m up - with a damned RASH of little red DOTS that are all over including my FACE and which is PISSING ME OFF.  And now there are painful EARS and more ACHING and I might throw UP again. And everything tastes like swill.

You should have the idea by now.

Obituary

The respected theologian, author, and minister the Reverend Forrest Church has died of the cancer he fought for three years. He was 61.

Forrest was the grandson of Idaho Governor Chase A. Clark and son of the late Senator Frank Church and his widow, Boise resident Bethine Church. Longtime minister of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City, Church is survived by his mother, his wife Carolyn Buck Luce, his brother Chase, and his children: Frank, Nina, Jacob and Nathan.

Family friend and spokesman, Boise attorney Dan Williams, told NewWest.Net that Church spent his last days in the hospital, but there were no treatments left to try. His family knew he was ending his days and were prepared. Williams also said that memorial services in New York and Boise are in the planning stages.

Forrest Church earned his Ph.D. in early church history from Harvard University in 1978, and was hired by All Souls the same year, when he was twenty-nine years old. He was minister at All Souls until his death.

His friend, NBC newsman and former Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw told the New York Times, “Forrest Church made all of our lives so much richer with his friendship, his faith and his optimism. He was a leading citizen in the world of all of God’s children.”

Boise Biking Heroine

The Idaho Statesman’s Brian Murphy had it first: Boise’s Oympic Gold Medalist Kristin Armstrong won the gold medal in the cycling world championship time trials Wednesday. In other words, she’s the fastest female cyclist on Planet Earth.

Murphy quotes her as saying, “It’s amazing. It doesn’t matter what year or how many times you become world champion, it always feels the same.”

Next she’ll compete in the international road race, which will be aired on the Universal Sports channel tonight (Wednesday) at 9 p.m. Mountain time.

After the road race, Armstrong plans to retire.  But Boiseans will never let that happen without a welcome-home-again party when she returns from Switzerland, and I’ll go out on a limb here with the prediction that it will be a doozy.

Armstrong’s roster of medals and awards is well-known by Idahoans, but what is less well-known is her persistent and affectionate work in promoting safe cycling and good bike trails and the health benefits for children from riding bikes. In July, she’d been home from Italy just hours when she participated in a public panel on cycling safety in downtown Boise, and her city rides with children and their parents are fresh in our memories after her 2008 Olympic Gold Medal win.

Wildlife

When grizzly bears were removed from Endangered Species Act protections in 2007, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition sued in federal court, and on Monday, they won.

“But the biggest winner is the grizzly bear, an iconic symbol of Greater Yellowstone’s power and beauty,” says a press statement from the Coalition.

The decision, handed down by Judge Donald W. Molloy in Montana district court, finds that, among other reasons, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did not adequately consider the impacts of global warming and other factors on whitebark pine nuts, a key grizzly bear food source:  “There is a disconnect between the studies the agency relied on here and its conclusions.”