Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

Wildfires: House Passes Proactive (Really?) FLAME Act

It's been 20 years since the devastating Yellowstone fire, the cataclysmic event that pushed wildfire into the national psyche. In those 20 years, sustained drought, shifting weather patterns, diseased forests, and decades of forest mismanagement have combined to give us one horrific fire season after another. The costs of fighting these fires has been compounded not only because of the volume of them, but because more and more people are moving into wooded areas forcing agencies to protect life and property. Already this year, the National Interagency Fire Center reports more than 2.1 million acres have burned in nearly 37,000 separate wildland fires--that's as of June 30.

Fire has eaten up more than just acreage. Fully 48 percent of the Forest Service budget in recent years has been consumed by fire. Last year, the Forest Service spent $741 million more than budgeted and Interior spent $249 million more than budgeted for emergency wildfire suppression, or a total of nearly $1 billion

Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

Got Fossil Fuels?

For those of us of a certain age, there's a real feeling a deja vu this week. Between the president's illegal wiretapping of Americans and skyrocketing gas prices, it's like living in the early 1970s all over again. Back in the 1970s, Congress responded to the first challenge by curtailing the president's powers and protecting our civil liberties. I guess that idea went out along with wood paneling, avocado green appliances, and bell bottoms, at least as far as the current Congress is concerned. Let's see if they can do any better this time around with our energy crisis.

Ah, where's Jimmy Carter when you need him?

Diary Of A Mad Voter: Jessica Peck Corry

Catering, Fundraising and Other Woes Plague Democrats’ Convention

As national Democrats prepare for their party's convention in Denver next month, they find themselves questioning a longtime ally for liberal causes: The New York Times. The controversy arose after a Times report Sunday highlighted concerns with Democratic National Convention planning.

Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

When in the Course of Human Events….

Happy Fourth of July! Celebrate by raising a little patriotic hell.

Diary Of A Mad Voter: Heath Haussamen

New Mexico GOP Should Be More Open

Shortly after the 2006 primary election, the Republican Party of New Mexico's central committee entered a closed-door meeting with J.R. Damron as its gubernatorial candidate and emerged with John Dendahl as its candidate. Damron's withdrawal from the race, which allowed the party to place Dendahl on the ballot, was a surprise move that didn't help the party at all: Dendahl was steamrolled by the Bill Richardson re-election train later that year.

The switcheroo earned the GOP some criticism. What happened in that private meeting? Was Damron pressured to drop out? Who orchestrated the change? Rank-and-file Republicans had no opportunity to vote in the primary for or against the man who represented their party at the top of the ticket that year -- a controversial, fire-breathing politico many Republicans loved but others were embarrassed to call their own.

Diary Of A Mad Voter: Heath Haussamen

McCain and Obama: Reformers Or More Of The Same?

Barack Obama and John McCain claim to be candidates of principle and reform. But the actions of both related to public financing in the presidential race raise doubts.

McCain used the public-financing system when he needed it to jumpstart his campaign and rejected it when that was no longer necessary. In the meantime, his campaign took a huge amount of money from the very Washington lobbyists the system is designed to marginalize. Now that McCain is again facing a better-funded opponent, he’s returning to the public-financing system.

Obama said he would use the public-financing system when he needed to appeal to the progressive wing of his party that wants ethics reform. Meanwhile, he was planning a revolutionary attempt to raise a huge amount of money from average people. When that worked, and public financing became a hindrance, Obama also rejected the system.

Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

Outside vs. Inside: A Western View

Last week's vote in the House of Representatives to give big corporations who broke the law a free pass and to expand the powers of the president to spy on Americans essentially at will provided some stark contrasts among our leaders and would-be leaders. Case in point, Colorado Rep. Mark Udall and Wyoming candidate Gary Trauner.

If you had to choose whether the "Boulder liberal" or the guy facing a tough race in solid red Wyoming would take the corporatist, conservative track on this legislation, siding with the Bush administration, you might be in for a surprise.

Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

Republican Woes Stretch to the Rockies

The national Republican party is staggering under the weight of a president as unpopular as Nixon at the height of Watergate, fundraising woes, a near-record number of members of Congress under some kind of ethical or legal shadow, and a presidential candidate that might not win his home state. The stress fractures are even showing in some reliably red mountain states.

Last weekend's Republican convention in Sandpoint, Idaho provided no small amount of drama, with Gov. Butch Otter and Norm Semanko having a rather public and apparently heated disagreement, and that was even before Semanko ousted Otter's man Kirk Sullivan as party chair. Semanko's ascension signals a new fault line in the fissure that's been pulling the party apart. Otter and the more establishment side of the party stuck with their guy Sullivan, but Semanko's big tent of party outsiders, some of the more fringe insiders, like U.S. Rep. Bill Sali and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna, as well as party activists newly invigorated by the presidential run of Ron Paul.

Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

Cowboys, Mythical and Otherwise

He simply did what had to be done ... It would be easy, he told himself, to throw everything overboard and disclaim any responsibility. All he had to do was saddle up and ride out of the country. It sounded easy, but it was not that easy, even if a man could leave behind his sense of guilt at having deserted a cause. To be a man was to be responsible. It was as simple as that. To be a man was to build something, to try to make the world about him a bit easier to live in for himself and those who followed. You could sneer at that, you could scoff, you could refuse to acknowledge it, but when it came right down to it, [Conagher] decided it was the man who planted a tree, dug a well, or graded a road who mattered.

That's Louis L'Amour, describing Conagher, the title character of one of his novels. That description, argues Jeffrey Lockwood in the cover story for the current edition of High Country News exemplifies why we still need the Cowboy Myth to solve not only the problems facing us in the region, but the nation.