Charleton Heston campaigning for right-to-work laws in Idaho and comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson

A federal judge struck down two Idaho laws designed to undercut workers rights Thursday, re-establish the right of construction workers to use project labor agreements and to use union dues to subsidize member wages in order to make competitive bids for contracts. Two separate laws that banned the practices were ruled illegal by U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill. The rulings were a big victory for construction workers in the state:

The state’s construction unions were outraged when anti-union legislators took aim at Project Labor Agreements, the pre-hire construction contracts that aim to set wage, benefit and safety standards as well as minority, female and veteran hiring goals.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (1228)

PLAYS: (2226)

Embed

[h/t Heather]

Meet Tom Luna, Idaho's Republican Superintendent of of Public Education, architect of the gutting of Idaho public schools, massive teacher layoffs, and union-buster. Tom Luna is an interesting character. He's a good, solid Republican, 2-year veteran of the Bush Administration's Department of Education, and doesn't really have any educational qualifications for the office he now holds.  No, seriously. He doesn't. Here's his resume in a nutshell:

Education:

Classes at Boise State and Ricks College, Bachelor of Art (2002) in Weights and Measures from Thomas Edison State College, a non-accredited on-line degree factory supposedly based in New Jersey.

[Commenters have pointed out that TESC is indeed accredited, so the person I quoted above is wrong about that.  Even so, there is nothing about a degree in weights and measures that qualifies Luna for the office he holds.] Also, he owns a scale company whose largest account is an Idaho corporation owned by Frank Vandersloot -- Melaleuca. Remember that name. I'll be talking about him later.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (641)

PLAYS: (3264)

Embed

Y'know, it kind of figures that Sarah Palin -- whose selection as John McCain's running mate raised enduring questions about the Republicans' vetting operations -- would have such a deft touch when it comes to endorsing candidates.

First there was the Nikki Haley fiasco, which of course is very much still ongoing.

Now we have another Palin endorsee, Idaho's Vaughn Ward, caught red-handedly plagiarizing a well-known speech by ... Barack Obama!

Vaughn Ward, a GOP candidate for Idaho's First Congressional district, is facing charges that he swiped key passages from Barack Obama's iconic 2004 Democratic National Convention speech for his own campaign kickoff speech in January.

The specific passages in question have since been spliced together by a Tea Party activist who asks, "Who Is Vaughn Ward Really?"

Mike Tracy, a spokesman for Ward's campaign tried to downplay the video, telling Politico that the attack was a sign that "[f]olks are getting desperate -- they're saying anything to get Vaughn to go after him. If anyone thinks he's anything like Obama, they're dead wrong."

These allegations come after a series of missteps for the GOP candidate's campaign. Ward fired his campaign manager following an embarrassing discovery that he had borrowed heavily from the campaign language of various other GOP politicians. Ward later sought to rebound from that hiccup with a high-profile appearance with Sarah Palin, who endorsed him -- along with other military veterans -- back in March, but the event was slightly tarnished by multiple reports showing that Ward had referred to Puerto Rico as a "country" during a recent debate.

Notes Jared Keller:

Palin stopped in Idaho to endorse Ward as the GOP nominee to challenge Democratic incumbent Walt Minnick in Idaho's first congressional district. Unfortunately for Palin, Ward has been subject to his own controversy after apparently plagiarizing a speech from another politician: Barack Obama. More specifically, the congressional hopeful cribbed a passage nearly word-for-word from Obama's famous speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, a speech which made him a household name.

"Palin's endorsement is seen as something of great value among Republicans," writes Adams. "But the string of unfortunate events that occurred not long after Palin has given her support makes one wonder if there isn't a 'reverse Midas touch' effect: that rather than turning things to gold, Palin instead turns everything she touches into ... well, the opposite of gold."

One of Vaughn's GOP primary opponents, Lucas Baumbach, is being credited with the video.

Ah, the Schadenfreude.

Religion and the voters!

For those in the media and elsewhere that are trying to downplay the religious vote, I have a little story.

I called a customer service rep. for a problem I had with my DirectTV, and the person who helped me was in Idaho. The poll results in Idaho was Bush 68% or 408,254 votes to Kerry 30% or 180,920 votes.

I asked the person the main reason why Idaho voted for Bush, and he said it was completely an issue with religion! Nothing else mattered to all the people that he talked to and knew. He lived there all of his life. "Bush is pro-religion bottom line," he said. I asked if presidential performance, health care, jobs, terrorism, or the war in Iraq had any influence on the voters that he knew and he said a flat-out "no!"

Much of my family still lives in Idaho, and my dad is fond of hanging at the gun range. He says he hears guys talking casually about how easy it would be to shoot President Obama with a long-range rifle. And how they'd really like to do it. Jokes like that are becoming common there, too.

So it really didn't surprise me when one of the wingnuttiest wingnuts in Idaho (this is really saying something) joked about how he'd happily buy a hunting tag for shooting President Obama:

Rex Rammell, a long-shot gubernatorial candidate seeking the Republican nomination, criticized Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter on Wednesday for not making good on a promise to buy the first wolf tag. Tags for hunting the gray wolf went on sale Monday.

Rammell's remarks on Otter came in an interview Wednesday after the Times-News asked about comments Rammell made Tuesday night at a local Republican party event.

After an audience member shouted a question about "Obama tags" during a discussion on wolves, Rammell responded, "The Obama tags? We'd buy some of those."

Rammell, a veterinarian and former elk rancher from Idaho Falls, said his comment was a joke and he would never seriously talk about President Obama that way, although he doesn't support anything Obama's done as president.

"I was just being sarcastic. That was just a joke," Rammell said. "I would never support him being assassinated.

"She kind of caught me off guard, to be honest with you."

Sure, just a joke. Except that to find it funny, you'd actually have to harbor that wish.

Rammell, as we said, is something of a wingnut's wingnut. He got into politics when the state shut down his elk-ranching operation for his disastrous mismanagement of the facility. So he ran as an Independent in last year's Senate campaign in Idaho, won by James Risch (Rammell finished a distant third, with 5.4% of the vote).

Just a few months ago, Rammell announced he was running for a House seat as a Republican. Then he shifted gears and is now running for Idaho governor as a Republican.

He's also written a wingnut tome that, as Randy Stapilus explored recently, is a real piece of work. Just like its author.

[H/t Julie F.]

The Republican Party has a huge problem on their hands. They are quickly being taken over by the most extreme, paranoid, fringe elements in our society and this case is just another glaring example of the path they are on:

BOISE, Idaho — An Idaho Republican Party leader who helped oust the state GOP chairman in 2008 faces charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after an altercation escalated while he photographed a home with a delinquent mortgage.

Challis McAffee, 33, the GOP chairman from the Boise suburb of Garden City and one of 231 voting members of the Idaho Republican Central Committee, was in Ada County jail after being accused of pointing a gun at the homeowner.

McAffee, a backer of libertarian-leaning former GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul and an activist in this year's anti-big-government "Tea Party" protests, helped organize Paul backers who aligned at last June's Idaho State Republican Convention in Sandpoint with other foes of then-state GOP Chairman Kirk Sullivan. Sullivan was voted from office in favor of Norm Semanko.

According to police in the Boise suburb of Meridian, resident Robert Lutes called officers just before 5:30 p.m. Tuesday to report McAffee had pointed a .357 Magnum handgun at him during a verbal confrontation. McAffee acknowledged he pointed the gun at Lutes, according to the police account.

"I'm unarmed, I'm an old man," Lutes, 51, told The Associated Press on Thursday. "I'm trying to find out why he's taking pictures of my house. I said, 'Knock on my door, let me know what you want.' Then, I think he's reaching for his business card and he pulls out a concealed weapon and I think he's going to blow my head off." Read on...

A group calling itself Idahoans for Liberty is trying to raise bond money for McAffee, but their version doesn't line up with the police account.

DOWNLOADS: (1930)

PLAYS: (4832)

Embed

CNN's John King went out to Idaho's Benewah County last week -- which is a fairly typical logging area which lies within Rep. Walt Minnick's district -- and produced an interesting report that ran last weekend. It was especially interesting if you know this country, which I do. (Sorry, John, St. Maries is in northern Idaho, not western Idaho.)

It largely was a sympathetic report exploring the kinds of pressures a Blue Dog Democrat like Minnick faces in trying to represent a largely conservative constituency -- particularly on an explosive issue like health-care reform.

But it also revealed, I think, the flaw in the kind of thinking employed by Blue Dogs like Minnick when confronted with tough issues like health care. Rather than represent the people who actually campaigned for them and put them into office, they kowtow to what are perceived to be the majority conservative sentiments in their district and vote the Republican line.

In other words, they're trying to solidify their positions by selling out the very people who elected them, while pursuing the votes of people who will never vote for them.

The main report featured some quips from a threesome of Idahoans who sat down with King at a cafe in St. Maries, including a belligerent NRA type named Don Griesel, who explained to King that even though Minnick was voting his way, there was no way he would ever vote for him:

Griesel: If he doesn't change his party, there's no way I can vote Democrat. Because like right now they have control of the House and all, and that's what's killing America.

King did a separate segment featuring just his interview with these three, and it was actually rather good, because he managed to obtain three people who probably well represented the three main socio-political factions in the district: the thoughtful, common-sense Democrat who ardently supports health-care reform; the middle-of-the-road, mostly suburban Republican; and the bellicose, Limbaugh/Beck-loving gun nut/government hater.

Continue reading »

Last spring a southern Idaho right-wing talk-show host named Zeb Bell made some minor headlines by featuring a conversation on his daytime show in Twin Falls by referring to the "negroid black Barack Obama" and calling Obama's mother "trailer trash" with a fixation on black men. Bell, you may recall, ultimately refused to apologize, claiming the remarks all came from his guest, a far-right nativist well noted for his racial slurs named Frosty Woolridge.

More recently, Bell has been plunging even farther off the deep end, attacking gays and lesbians as the centerpiece of his defense of California's Prop 8, even going so far as to argue that "God's laws" trump the Constitution.

Most notably, he's being openly defiant about the bigoted nature of his broadcasts, going so far as to assemble his audience under the banner of "Bell's Bigots".

The fine folks at Mountain Goat Report and at The Political Game (with a hat tip to 43rd State Blues) have been tracking this disturbing trend for some months now, and as Bell has picked up his volume and gained traction in Idaho, they've assembled a Zeb Bell page with links to the wingnuttery that Bell is spreading apace.

Continue reading »

My ex-boss is not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. I knew that when I fled his newsroom in 1985.

But now he's displaying it for all the world to see:

Steve Hartgen would like a law requiring people to use their real names when they post material online. As a retired newspaper editor and publisher from Twin Falls, Hartgen is doubly aware that the news media catches a lot of flak, much of it politicall motivated, and its origin can be questionable.

He recognized in an interview with the Lewiston Tribune that the Internet has provided an opportunity for users to sound off on just about any subject, often responding to news stories or editorials via e-mail. But unlike letters to the editor, those persons typically are not required to identify themselves before commenting online. As a result, anonymity spawns a ton of misinformation which often is spouted by those who like to blame "the media" for the country's various ills.

As we can see, this is all about protecting "the media" from those meanies who like to complain about them anonymously. Because, evidently, they really really need it.

Pay no attention, oh you peons on the other side of the curtain, to the frauds operating the media scam that the Web has exposed. After all, they have themselves spawned "tons of misinformation" over the years that has gone uncorrected, and all with their names out there on the front pages. A lack of anonymity certainly has not prevented that.

And might we expect a similar law for people who publish material pseudonymously in the non-Web publishing biz -- say, Joe Klein when he wrote Primary Colors? Or any of the many pseudonymous newspapers writers who've made careers over the years (such as Dear Abby)?

Continue reading »

Earlier this week former employees of Sproul & Associates (operating under the name Voters Outreach of America), a firm hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters, told a Nevada TV station that their supervisors systematically tore up Democratic registrations.

The accusations are backed by physical evidence and appear credible. Officials have begun a criminal investigation into reports of similar actions by Sproul in Oregon.

Republicans claim, of course, that they did nothing wrong - and that besides, Democrats do it, too. But there haven't been any comparably credible accusations against Democratic voter-registration organizations. And there is a pattern of Republican efforts to disenfranchise Democrats, by any means possible.

Some of these, like the actions reported in Nevada, involve dirty tricks. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired an Idaho company to paralyze Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts by jamming the party's phone banks.

But many efforts involve the abuse of power. For example, Ohio's secretary of state, a Republican, tried to use an archaic rule about paper quality to invalidate thousands of new, heavily Democratic registrations.

That attempt failed. But in Wisconsin, a Republican county executive insists that this year, when everyone expects a record turnout, Milwaukee will receive fewer ballots than it got in 2000 or 2002 - a recipe for chaos at polling places serving urban, mainly Democratic voters.

And Florida is the site of naked efforts to suppress Democratic votes, and the votes of blacks in particular. Read on...