http://www.newwest.net/topic/main/C530/L/ New West Network: The Voice of the Rocky Mountains en info@newwest.net Copyright 2008 Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:49:58 MDT Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:49:58 MDT http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/when_in_the_course_of_human_events/C530/C530/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/when_in_the_course_of_human_events/C530/C530/ Fri, 04 Jul 2008 11:15:40 MDT Happy Fourth of July! Celebrate by raising a little patriotic hell. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/new_mexico_gop_should_be_more_open/C530/C530/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/new_mexico_gop_should_be_more_open/C530/C530/ Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:14:00 MDT 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. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/mccain_and_obama_reformers_or_more_of_the_same/C530/C530/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/mccain_and_obama_reformers_or_more_of_the_same/C530/C530/ Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:50:00 MDT 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. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/outside_vs_inside_a_western_view/C530/C530/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/outside_vs_inside_a_western_view/C530/C530/ Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:20:00 MDT 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. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/republican_woes_stretch_to_the_rockies/C530/C530/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/republican_woes_stretch_to_the_rockies/C530/C530/ Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:28:00 MDT 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. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/cowboys_mythical_and_otherwise/C530/C530/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/cowboys_mythical_and_otherwise/C530/C530/ Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:40:01 MDT 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. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/richardsons_looking_beyond_new_mexico_losing_focus/C530/C530/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/richardsons_looking_beyond_new_mexico_losing_focus/C530/C530/ Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:19:00 MDT There were signs when Gov. Bill Richardson returned to New Mexico after a failed presidential campaign that his power had decreased. A dropping approval rating appears to be another indicator of his lessening influence in the Land of Enchantment. His approval rating in a May poll was 56 percent - still healthy but down 18 points from a year earlier, when Richardson's presidential campaign was at its height and he was climbing in the Democratic presidential primary polls largely because of clever television advertisements. Richardson's campaign petered out after that. And his gubernatorial approval rating in the monthly SurveyUSA poll conducted for KOB-TV in Albuquerque started dropping. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/obama_is_not_king/C530/C530/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/obama_is_not_king/C530/C530/ Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:19:00 MDT With reporters gushing from coast to coast, Barack Obama announced late Tuesday that he has finally -- after a lengthy battle with Hillary Clinton -- secured the Democratic presidential nomination. Media fawning has now turned to the prospect of Obama as the first black president and this generation's Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. In a speech designed to imitate King's famous 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, Obama was at his eloquent best on Tuesday night. King declared then, "Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!" But while King dreamed of an America that could one day judge his children based on the content of their character -- and not the color of their skin -- Obama should not be seen as the dream of a color-blind America realized. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/are_we_there_yet/C530/C530/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/are_we_there_yet/C530/C530/ Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:13:00 MDT South Dakota and Montana are enjoying the national spotlight today, as one phase of our four year national carnival winds down, readying for the next phase. Meanwhile, a new report from the inspector general for NASA proves why, for so many, January 20, 2009 can't come fast enough. The Bush administration's relationship to science has always been strained, at best. Nowhere more so than with global warming, a phenomenon that everyone actually being subjected to weather has a hard time denying. In an administration that politicizes everything, it shouldn't particularly come as a surprise that, once again, political appointees overruled scientists again in policy-making, but somehow it does. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/obama_education_reform_and_teachers_unions/C530/C530/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/obama_education_reform_and_teachers_unions/C530/C530/ Thu, 29 May 2008 14:04:00 MDT Barack Obama wants western voters to believe he visited an innovative school north of Denver yesterday to highlight his commitment to educational progress. His real purpose: winning the support of affluent unions seeking to stifle real educational reforms. At Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts in Thornton, Obama was introduced by a giddy former Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, who referred to Obama as the next U.S. president. Excited students eagerly greeted Obama with a chant of "Yes, we can!" Mapleton, an option school run by a union-controlled collective bargaining agreement, saw all 44 of its high school seniors this year accepted into four-year college programs. This is, indeed, a reason to celebrate. But only momentarily.