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NewWest.Net/Politics

Casper’s hometown girl Lynne Vincent Cheney has penned a love letter to the past in Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family, which covers the pioneer histories of both families that ultimately produced the “Second Family” in the Bush-Cheney administration.

Yet because the memoir stops in 1959 with high school graduation for Lynne and Dick Cheney, there’s only tantalizing clues and some irony in their 1950’s coming-of-age story, and silence about how they were shaped by the 1960s to become the iconic conservative couple of Wyoming and ultimately national politics. [more]

NewWest.Net/Politics

According to the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives, Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyoming, voted six times today – her third day of voting since she resumed voting on Wednesday of last week.

Cubin had missed about 46 percent of all votes in the House this year, before she resumed voting on Wednesday and Thursday last week, when one of her nine votes helped uphold President Bush’s veto of an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

While there were no House votes on Friday, there were 12 roll call votes on Monday and Tuesday of this week – all of which Rep. Cubin missed. [more]

NewWest.Net/Politics

Gary Trauner, a Wilson businessman who lost a squeaker of a race last year against Representative Barbara Cubin, R-Wyoming, announced Monday he was going to run again for Wyoming’s at-large seat in the House of Representatives.

Trauner lost last year’s race by a mere 1,012 votes. He distinguished himself through his approach to campaigning, going door-to-door across Wyoming to 15,000 homes -- a style that was in marked contrast to Cubin’s campaign style. Cubin once famously said she’d “rather eat roadkill” than go door-to-door.

At his announcement today in Casper, Trauner said he’d been mulling over whether he should run again as the Democratic candidate when a recent incident pushed him into running again. [more]

State officials address backlogs & understaffing

While problems with understaffing, retention and training new scientists have contributed to half-year backlogs at the state crime lab in Cheyenne, the long delays raise the question of whether some habitual offenders are going unpunished.

“You know, the longer a perpetrator is out there, the more opportunity there is for them to commit crimes,” Forrest Bright, Director of Wyoming’s Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI), said when asked recently if repeat offenders were getting away with additional offenses due to his agency’s backlogs and personnel issues.

“Sometimes it’s the investigation,” he added. “Sometimes it takes time before forensics are discovered. That can take months or years.” [more]

Event Showcases Increased Attention on Cowboy State

Three Republican candidates for president -- Fred Thompson, Duncan Hunter and Sam Brownback -- all ventured into “Cheney country” this weekend, during a meet-the-candidates forum held at Swede Erickson Thunderbird Gymnasium at Casper College.

The Wyoming Republican Party has scheduled a Jan. 5 convention, allowing Wyoming to compete in staging the first presidential primaries and county conventions in the country.

“We’re going to break the lock Iowa and New Hampshire have on selecting presidential candidates,” said Fred Paraday, state party chairman.

It is widely believed that this move has brought increased attention from Republican candidates. Two other candidates – Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo -- had been scheduled to attend the forums in Casper and Riverton, but dropped out in the prior week. [more]

Guest Opinion

On balance, the nightly televised news once again failed the nation last week, leaving open the question of who’s the bigger loser.

Given the opportunity to knock a softball out of the park in the bottom of the 9th and bring the long-suffering home team a much-needed win, Big Media whiffed. What’s worse is they got caught looking like overpaid chumps, like Jake LaMotta taking a last nosedive for a fat payoff, instead of going down swinging.

Of course, I’m talking about the mainstream packs’ fraud disguised as objective reporting on the Andrew Meyer's fiasco at Florida University on Sept. 17. Nearly to a news station and to an anchorman or woman it was about as bad and biased as it gets.

But let me say here that my complaint has nothing to do with whether Meyer's behavior was legal or illegal.

Further, this jeremiad is not about arguing against whether Glenn “No Neck” Beck or others believe Meyer to be a jerky, self-promoting publicity hound.

Those wrapped up in the self-deceiving schadenfreude of seeing a loud-mouthed Florida J-school student get what was coming to him – and now insist he needs to take ‘responsibility’ for whatever they or Beck might think Meyer was irresponsible in doing – are too busy getting their rocks off getting ahead of the story to get the story. [more]

Where's Osama?

A guest OPINION

Larger than huge, far exceeding the massive, worldwide anticipation for the release of J. K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter movie this summer was the big splash Osama bin Laden made this week, appearing in his first video since October of 2004.

Out of the limelight since releasing a sensational audio tape more than a year ago, the top terrorist on the planet dispelled recent rumors that he had died of kidney disease.

Startling new images of the al-Qaeda leader reveal that all that had dyed was his mostly gray beard from previous videos. And the change gives Osama a younger, more vigorous look than western viewers might have expected.

This amazing comeback by a long-forgot major public figure is as remarkable as any death-defying feat performed by the great Houdini. A flair for the dramatic would be understating Osama’s inestimable ability for gaining attention — as proven by the timing of his return to coincide with the 6th anniversary of his notoriously repugnant world stage debut.
[more]

Public Corruption Probe Advances

Police continue to investigate an elaborate larceny and embezzling scheme involving the alleged over-charging of local vehicle buyers for their transfers of title and a “slush fund” kept in the desk drawer of an employee of the Teton County clerk's office.

“I was shocked to learn that a trusted employee was suspected of embezzling funds,” County Clerk Sherry Daigle said in an official press release Friday.

Her face flushed behind her desk, Daigle said late Friday that she had fired a county worker earlier that day. Due to the ongoing corruption probe, however, Daigle declined to identify the terminated employee.

Among items seized and inventoried in a search warrant returned to 9th Circuit Court Monday: 11 checks payable to the Teton County Clerk’s Office and four $20 bills “located in an open plain white envelope with stickers on the exterior, known as the ‘overflow slush fund’.”

(*See editor's note at the end of this article) [more]

War Debate Ducks The Real Question

Some freely available news analysis

With the expected arrival of top military commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus's and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s reports on Iraq, there’s one thing you can count on in Congress and on the home front this month: more hype and hand-wringing over the war.

You can also bet there'll be well-funded media blitzes to both sell more war and to end it as some in Congress clash, with Democrats offering a mostly symbolic fight, over what to do next.

Led by presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, some Democrats are already dismissing the general’s report. On the Right, for the most part, Republicans are calling for a continuation of the Iraq dilemma -- seeing in the alleged success of President Bush's "surge" a vindication of the overall correctness of our strategic posture there.

But neither of these two vociferous parties has so far as loudly explained whether America is "safer".

Are we really "safer" or just "lucky," because of the combination of the war, its continuation, the "surge" or the widespread assumption that “radical, militant Islamists,” or whatever the term du jour is, hate us for our "values"? [more]

Who Do You Trust to Tell the Truth on Iraq?

A freely available investigative OPINION

Last week, a local philanthropist, Republican moneyman and apologist for Vice-President Dick Cheney went on a full-blown marketing campaign questioning the integrity of a local anti-war group, calling on critics of the Bush administration to raise the tone of the bitter debate over Iraq to something he deems “civil.”

With clever derring-do, in his full-page color advertisements run in the uncritical local press, Foster Friess turned the tables on Jackson’s rising and vocal minority of anti-war protesters.

Some of those present at the march and rally on Aug.11, and afterward, charged the vice-president and other Bush administration officials with publicly "sexing up" the case about WMD and Saddam’s hand in 9/11, accompanying White House drumbeats leading to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In his ad, Mr. Friess opines that it’s the protesters who are lying, patronizing them, as if he alone held a monopoly on the truth, as: “(I)ll-informed or deceitfully willing to destroy another’s reputation to advance their own selfish political agenda.”

You’d think someone as sure of his own moral superiority and pedagogic denunciations of others would have thoroughly vetted his sloppy essay before allowing it to be published and so nakedly available for all the world to do for him. [more]

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