Red State Rebels

Hail the new!

This will probably be my last post for 2006. I'll be back online next Tuesday (or maybe Monday night, after the Fiesta Bowl, if I am so moved). Meanwhile ...

• Feel free to add your thoughts to the Best of 2006 thread.

• I'll be updating my blog roll soon, possibly including some non-political blogs as well as ones from across the political spectrum a la Idablue. Please let me know if you are writing and regularly updating an Idaho-based blog that I ought to add.

• Use this as a resolutions thread, if you like. Here are mine: Use more public transportation. (I'll be writing more about that next week.) Get another paid blogging job by the fall, ideally a full-time-equivalent gig. Land an assignment for at least one magazine where I've never before had a byline. (Top targets: The American Prospect and/or The New Republic, or at least their websites.) Read more books.

• Enjoy the waning hours of 2006 and the first fruits of 2007!

Ada Dems are ready to roll

The dozen Ada County Democratic legislators are ready to get to work in the new year. In District 16 (Northwest Boise), Senator David Langhorst, Representative Margaret Henbest, and Les Bock will hold a town hall meeting on Thursday, January 4 at 7 p.m., at Collister United Methodist Church, 4400 W. Taft.

In District 17 (the Boise Bench and BSU), Senator Elliot Werk and Representative Bill Killen will hold a pre-session forum the same night and same time at the Borah High School Library, 6001 Cassia St. (Rep. Sue Chew can't attend due to an orientation for freshmen women legislators scheduled at the same time.) These meetings are always informative and, of course, they are open to all. There are probably town meetings in Districts 18 and 19, too, but I don't have details on those.

Two evenings later, on Saturday, January 6, the Ada County Democrats will present "Democrats Under the Dome," the annual pre-legislature get-together. Guests of honor will be the incumbent Dem legislators (Mike Burkett, Henbest, Kate Kelly, Langhorst, Nicole LeFavour, Anne Pasley-Stuart, and Werk) plus the five newly elected Democrats: Bock, Chew, Branden Durst, Killen, and Phylis King. Cost is $25 per person for the event, set from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at Piazza di Vino, 212 N. 9th St., Boise. To reserve your ticket, click here or call 331-2128.

The 2007 Idaho Legislature gets under way Monday, January 8.

PC or Mac?

What sort of computer(s) do you use, and why?

I made the switch to Mac about 13 months ago (before the cool and fun ads). I was mainly tired of battling spyware that seemed to infect my PC no matter what anti-spyware protection or browsers I used. After several hard drive crashes in one year, I'd had enough, and I ordered a iBook G4. It took me a while to figure out a few things - like the fact the apple key equates to the command key, f'rinstance - but overall, it was a painless switch and I wished I'd done it years ago (like my Dad, who is on his third Mac after buying himself one at retirement. I'm not sure he ever had a Windows-based PC).

I was pleased enough with the iBook that I decided this fall to buy a desktop Mac for our family computer as well, to replace one aging laptop (a 2001 Dell) and another 2004 model (an Averatec) that's had one problem after another. I ordered a refurbished iMac this fall, direct from Apple. It's basically been fine, but it has its quirks, mostly with printing. Sometimes we can print documents from the Internet; sometimes we can't. Sometimes we can print from Word for Mac; other times, no dice. So I probably need a Mac-savvy tech to come over and assess the situation. Any good recommendations?

Overall, I am pleased with my Mac experience. However, I've learned there are some things that I just can't do on a Mac. For example, I can't access the Idaho Democrats' voter data base on a Mac, and the website-building tools at Network Solutions - on which I've built professional websites for many years - also performs poorly on Mac (and NetSol seems uninterested in remedying the situation, despite the growing numbers of Mac users). So we keep the rickety Averatec laptop around just for these situations. It's literally falling apart, though. And no, just because the new Mac can reboot to run Windows doesn't mean I'll let it. The whole idea with ditching Windows was to get around spyware and viruses.

Happily, TypePad (this blogging platform), my email, and just about everything else works great on a Mac, though I do find myself switching back and forth between browsers. (Safari is best for email; Firefox, for just about everything else).

Iraq digest

Three quick hits:

Gerald Ford told Bob Woodward in 2004 that George W. Bush made a mistake in invading Iraq. He stipulated that the comments couldn't be made public until after his death.

Forget a "surge." The more accurate word for what we want to avoid in Iraq is "escalate."

Meanwhile, Saddam sounds resigned to his fate and, in a letter to Iraqis, urges them "not to hate the nations that assaulted us.''

Edwards: Take action now

John Edwards announced his 2008 candidacy for the presidency today in New Orleans. There's full video on C-SPAN. He'll be doing a live blog at 10 a.m. Mountain here and a town hall meeting at 4 p.m. Mountain here.

Edwards' slogan is "Tomorrow begins today." His point is that we can't wait until January 2009 to start working on the essential changes we need to make as a country, including:

• Providing moral leadership in the world -- starting with Iraq, where we should begin drawing down troops, not escalating the war;

• Strengthening our middle class and ending the shame of poverty;

• Guaranteeing health care for every single American;

• Leading the fight against global warming;

• Getting America and the world to break our addiction to oil.

Update noonish: Edwards' blog crashed for the live blog this morning, but he wound up holding forth at Daily Kos.

Update 6:20 p.m.: I have a diary about Edwards' announcement day posted at Daily Kos.

Film and best of threads still up ...

I am still trying to watch a movie a day until 2006 is done. I've missed two days in the last two weeks. Read my "movie mania" thread here.

The best of thread is still up, too. Please chime in with your picks for the year's best in music, movies, books, blogs, cultural phenomena, whatever.

I finally got a Prius!

Yes indeed, right under the Christmas tree.

OK, so it's just a token in the new Monopoly Here and Now edition. I figure I will be driving my '99 Cavalier with 81,000 miles for quite some time.

Still, I made you look!

December 27 digest

Fast away the old year passes ...

So Butch Otter will take his oath in secret. Why is this not surprising? It seems like he could at least have the public represented by the media and a few members of the legislature ... say, two Republicans and two Democrats. Or , if the GOP wants to be snippy about it, three Republicans and one Democrat. Whatever.

Fare thee well, Gerry Ford. As the Decider notes, his presidency helped heal a badly divided nation. Fast forward 34 years: Who will do the same when we finally get rid of W?

Michael Medved has an absolutely laughable column in which he predicts that "the universal and appropriate sadness at the passing of President Gerald Ford should reassure President Bush that after his retirement he will inspire fresh affection from the public." Yeah, right. Ford was basically a caretaker president who committed one questionable act in pardoning Richard Nixon. Faced with one of the greatest crises of our history after September 11, George W. Bush abandoned efforts to capture its still-at-large architect and instead started an unfounded, unnecessary war of choice in Iraq. Meanwhile at home, he's built an imperial presidency based on deceptions and power mongering, and a chimeric economy based on artificially high housing prices (now punctured), stagnant wages for workers, and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans. Yes, there are parallels between Ford's lack of legitimacy and Bush's, and both men are buds with Dick Cheney. But that's where the similarities end.

Speaking of Iraq, Joe Biden hasn't been getting much traction for a second presidential bid - but if he continues to keep the war front and center, that may change. None of the other potential Dem candidates has as much foreign policy experience as the six-term senator and incoming Senate Foreign Relations committee chair. (However, Biden did vote to authorize the war in the first place; he now says he and Congress were misled and lied to.) Whatever happens in the political arena, Biden's efforts to call Bush officials to account are welcome and, of course, years overdue.

The Idaho Statesman names Boise State star running back Ian Johnson the most inspirational Treasure Valley resident of the year. Yeah, I'll go with that. The Broncos' awesome season has our community all fired up, and Johnson seems like a genuinely good guy. At the same time, I want to remember the people from my church who spent spring break mucking out houses in New Orleans six months after Katrina. That's inspiring, too.

Nebraska investigates robocalls

From MyDD via TPMmuckraker comes word that the Nebraska Public Service Commission is investigating allegations about robocalls that helped torpedo Democrat Scott Kleeb's chances at the polls last month. The calls are similar to ones made against Larry Grant here in Idaho as part of a widespread campaign by the National Republican Congressional Committee to confuse and anger voters. From the Lincoln Journal-Star:

Derek Brown of Kearney said he received about a half-dozen calls with Kleeb’s voice throughout the course of a Saturday just before the election. The first call came at about 7 a.m. and he did not recall sources of the calls being identified.

“It was like I was getting yelled at,” Brown said of the recordings. “I wasn’t going to vote either way, but I thought it was really annoying.”

The PSC is trying to track down the source of the calls. Fines could be levied if it is found that rules were broken.

Victor Covalt III, an attorney working for the state Democratic Party on the issue, said the findings of the PSC investigation could lead to legal action, including a complaint that the calls violated a Federal Communications Commission rule that says automated calls must identify their source at the beginning of the message.

The TPMmuckraker piece notes that the NRCC paid a firm called Direct Strategies $3,500 for phone banking in Kleeb's race shortly before the election. A look at the NRCC's November 2 independent expenditures shows that the Republicans also paid Direct Strategies $6,253 for phone banks opposing Larry Grant on that day alone. Yet the robocalls started weeks earlier in Idaho's 1st District, confusing voters who thought they were coming from the Grant campaign, although Grant's voice was not used in the Idaho calls. Congressman-elect Bill Sali consistently disavowed any responsibility for the $1.5 million in out-of-state special interest money plowed into his campaign by the NRCC, the Club for Growth, and other out-of-state special interests. Most of the money funded negative television ads, automated calls, and "push polls." Sali won with 49.94% of the vote.

Boxing Day-Kwanzaa water cooler

Who am I kidding? No one's reading blogs this week! Still, here's a roundup of some interesting stuff I've seen and read in these last 48 hours:

Randy Stapilus has a roundup of 10 influential books he read this past year.

As Sharon noted on an earlier thread, the Christmas Eve morning edition of Meet the Press offered a fascinating look at the past and present role of faith in American politics. Dr. Rick Warren - one of our most enlightened evangelicals - and Jon Meacham of Newsweek magazine were the guests. I came away with a feeling that it may be possible for Americans to stop using faith as a bludgeon and start employing religious faith (and secular moral values) as a force for good. Read the transcript and see what you think.

Today's Idaho Statesman named BoDo developer Mark Rivers the Treasure Valley's most visionary person. In its first full year, BoDo emerged as a cool blend of locally owned shops and big-name retailers, with a chain multiplex theater (the Edwards 9) that - I'm sorry to say - is far more comfortable (if not as cool)  than either the Flicks or the Egyptian. I'm eager to see how Rivers does with his next big idea: the Library Blocks, extending south from BoDo to the Boise River and including a "green library" and housing at all price points. If Rivers is able to help people of all income levels move downtown and stop driving as much, that would be  visionary indeed.

It's the 40th anniversary of Kwanzaa, which starts today. Dig the Nguzo Saba, or seven principles, of this holiday: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and culture. To my friends, colleagues, and neighbors of African heritage, thanks for your resilience and Happy Kwanzaa.

If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth. ~ Roberto Clemente