Red State Rebels

Quick legislative action opps

The 2008 Idaho Legislature is winding down. Here are a few quick action ops you can take this week.

TUESDAY - The Senate will be voting any day now on H599, the personal property tax phase-out for businesses This sounds like a pretty good deal until you realize that most of the benefits will go to Idaho's largest businesses and worse, families will pick up the slack through higher taxes. The House passed this bill by only four votes, and many representatives from BOTH parties opposed it. It just barely passed the Senate Local Government & Taxation Committee tonight on a 5-4 vote. Contact your senator and ask her or him to vote NO on H599.

Update: It's also not too late to ask your senator to vote no against HJR4, Mike Moyle's poison pill amendment to severely restrict how local communities can work regionally to solve transportation issues. The bill hits the Senate State Affairs Committee for a hearing Tuesday morning in Room 204 of the Capitol Annex. The meeting starts at 8, but members also will be considering the latest version of a bill (S 1506) to require modified open primary elections in Idaho.

WEDNESDAY - The Idaho Women's Network and allies will hold a rally at 12:30 p.m. on the south steps of the Capitol Annex to protest the fact that S 1323 - a bill that would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity - didn't even get a public hearing this session. It's true: You can still be fired in Idaho based on your sexual orientation, even though the latest Boise State public policy survey found that 63 percent of Idahoans say that's wrong. Speak up Wednesday to let the legislature know that we won't let this issue die.

Obama and race

I'm still in DC ... I accepted a bump from my flight this morning, so I'm back at Take Back America and will be in the nation's capital for this afternoon's commemorations of five years of war before flying home tonight - unless I manage to get bumped again, that is. (Hey, for another free ticket? I have a free place to stay here, so I'm flexible!)

As you can imagine, Barack Obama's speech about race is the talk of the town today. I happened to catch a replay of it just before a panel discussion here on racial equity - an experience I posted about at DemocracySpace, my nonpartisan day job blog. Check it out.

I thought the "A More Perfect Union" speech was one of Barack's best yet - and that's saying something. If you missed it, you can watch the video and/or read the transcript here. I also really liked the NPR coverage this morning, wherein reporter Ben Calhoun pointed out that the Biblical prophet Jeremiah - like Obama's former pastor - was "thrown into a pit and left to die because he didn't seem to love his country. But in reality, it was Jeremiah's love for his country that drove him to point out his nation's problems."

Idaho's media and Randy Jackson

Tonight the Nampa Public Library will once again reconvene in order to hear Randy Jackson make his case (yet again) to pull the New Joy of Sex and the Joy of Gay Sex from library shelves. And once again Idaho's Media has failed to uncover Mr. Jackson's larger political agenda.

The Nampa Public Library Board will meet today (March 10th) @ 4 p.m. in the basement of the library located in Downtown Nampa at 101 11th Ave. S. to discuss the removal of the books mentioned above. If you can make it down there please try, everyone who wishes to is supposed to be allowed 3 minutes to address the Board.

Note to Idaho media: Randy Jackson is not a "concerned parent from Nampa". He's a right wing Conservative operative who runs the group Youth4Revolution, a group which operates a website with pictures of aborted fetuses and other bits of Conservative propaganda. Mr. Jackson routinely works with Bryan Fischer of the Idaho Values Alliance, and Brandi Swindell of Engage the Culture, two groups who have a history of wasting taxpayer dollars for their pet "concerns".

Mr. Jackson's affiliation with the above groups is entirely relevant to this case. The media, whether intentionally or not, is portraying Mr. Jackson as a lone "concerned parent". The fact that Mr. Jackson is a political operative working a larger agenda is an extremely important part of this story -- a part that responsible reporting would have uncovered and reported to the public.

Mr. Jackson is not working this issue because he is "concerned" about his children (What? Is he not a capable enough parent to watch over his children in the Library?), this is just a small piece in a much larger political agenda.

Boise State Radio: No mention of Mr. Jackson's fundamentalist ties.
Idaho Statesman:  No mention of Mr. Jackson's fundamentalist ties.
Idaho Press-Tribune: No mention of Mr. Jackson's fundamentalist ties.
KTRV: No mention of Mr. Jackson's fundamentalist ties.
Arbiter Online (BSU): No mention of Mr. Jackson's fundamentalist ties.
KBCI: No mention of Mr. Jackson's fundamentalist ties.
KTVB: No mention of Mr. Jackson's fundamentalist ties.

I'm sure the list goes on and on. It is called Google -- please use it.

For the Library Board to even be wasting their time with this issue again is absurd; is Mr. Jackson going to be allowed to raise this issue every year and continually waste the Library Board's time? Does Mr. Jackson have a right to continually raise this issue in front of the board until he achieves his desired outcome?

Note to readers: Please contact Library Director Karen Ganske at the Nampa Public Library and let her know that you support keeping these books in the library's catalog (she can pass your email on to the Library Board members). It is not for one or two citizens to decide what the rest of Nampa's population can or cannot read.

...also posted at the unequivocal notion.

Update Monday night ... from the Idaho Statesman:

Two much-debated books about sexuality will be removed from the shelves of the Nampa Public Library but will be kept in the library director's office and provided on request, the library board ruled Monday in a 3-to-2 vote. ...

... All three of the board members who favored taking the books off the shelves -- Kim Keller, Sandi Levi and Bruce Skaug -- have been appointed since Jackson's first attempt in early 2006. Board chair Rosie Delgadillo Reilly and member Barry Myers voted to keep the books on the shelf, a stance supported by library staff.

Read more here. Hello, Big Brother.

Representing for Sara

Our fellow blogger Sara Anderson may be having surgery soon for the mass in her brain that she and her docs discovered just a week ago. Keep sending prayers and healing vibes to Sara and her husband Andy, who has been writing on her behalf at F-words. Hopefully, we'll have good news soon. In the meantime, I thought I'd post about a couple of stories that I suspect would irk Sara. 

Did you see the Idaho Statesman piece today about the UCLA student magazine that performed what amounted to a sting operation on Planned Parenthood offices around the country, with a would-be donor at first masquerading as a person concerned about women of color, then morphing into a bigot who wants to abort black babies ("you know, the less black kids out there the better?") (Click here.) At least Planned Parenthood of Idaho has apologized for the incident, which - based on the transcript - really was handled horribly on the part of its employee. I don't expect the same from the zealots who proudly perpetrated this divisive stunt.

Note to The Advocate and others who would make abortion illegal: Without Planned Parenthood and its contraception services, there would be more abortions, not fewer, and more women and babies would die. If you really want to help black babies, stop electing extremist goons who won't fund health care and education for the ones already born, and who start unjust wars that are disproportionately fought by teens of color.

The Unequivocal Notion  notes that the morality police are at it again in Nampa, trying to ban library books that the library board voted to keep just last year.

Finally, the news that Gov. Butch Otter wants to raise Idaho vehicle registration fees may or may not rile Sara, but her fellow Northern Idaho scribe D.F. Olivera (at the Spokesman-Review's Huckleberries Online) had this to say yesterday: "I can't believe that Butch Otter would on one hand refuse to cut or eliminate the sales tax for grocery while on the other suggest raising vehicle registration fees sixfold - to rebuild Boise-area roads. Rich guys like him just don't get it. The vast middle class in this state are getting hammered by the new stagflation. Dunno whether he's hard-headed or surrounded by numbskull advisers, but Otter continues to not impress."

Personally, I'm embarrassed to say my household of three people has three vehicles and this would hit us hard. On the other hand, I am happy to report that we drive those three rigs less than 15,000 miles a year, total. (We drive our two main cars - a '97 Camry and '99 Cavalier - far less than the national average and use our '88 Chevy truck strictly for hauling.) I'd like to see registration fees somehow be linked to miles driven. It makes sense that long-haul commuters ought to pay more than people who bike, walk, use public transit, and drive as little as possible.

Legislature lacks a conscience

Something really disappointing happened at the Idaho Legislature yesterday. The Senate State Affairs Committee defeated a bill with strong bipartisan support aimed at divesting a tiny sliver of Idaho's public employees' retirement funds from backing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. State Sen. Curt McKenzie of Nampa - originally a co-sponsor of the bill - cast the deciding no vote on the 5-4 tally, killing legislation that probably would have passed the full Senate and House. Why did he do it? All he could say was that if the state voted to encourage divestment in this instance, it could lead to a slippery slope of continued calls for similar actions on other issues.

I know that a handful of Democrats opposed the bill. One spoke out at Tuesday's Ada County Dems luncheon with his fear - similar to McKenzie's - that if this bill passed, people would be seeking divestment for new political causes each year. But state Rep. Nicole LeFavour correctly pointed out that this is only the second time in four decades that a widespread divestment campaign has been waged, and that the last one - in South Africa - made a real difference in ending that nation's apartheid policies.

This shouldn't have been a political matter, and I hope it wasn't. "It's all politics," people sometimes say. But really, sometimes, politics is just courage and common sense. The Senate State Affairs Committee showed neither in its vote yesterday. There's more at Eye on Boise, the Idaho Statesman, Left Side of the Moon, and Rep. Nicole LeFavour's blog.
 

The battle is joined

Wouldn't you love to see these two ads run on every network all day on November 3?

Happy King Day!

Happy Martin Luther King Jr.- Idaho Human Rights Day! Here in Boise, several hundred people - including a good group of my peeps from the UU Fellowship - turned out for the wintry march from Boise State University to the Anne Frank Idaho Human Rights Monument.

Click here to learn about other MLK Week events at BSU, here to see what's coming up at the Idaho Black History Museum, and here to learn about service opportunities available in the coming days, weeks, and months.

A gift to the Constitution

Today marks the 220th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution being adopted in its original form with the signing at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

This particular Constitution Day, we not only celebrate the beauty and brilliance of what is believed to be the oldest democratic governing document, but we also celebrate the departure of one of its greatest foes--Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

As was announced in August, today, September 17, 2007, Alberto Gonzales will officially leave his post at the Justice Department, marking an end to a reign noted for the unconstitutional.

You may remember in January before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Gonzales stated: "There is no expressed grant of habeas corpus [in the Constitution]; there's a prohibition against taking it away."

After being questioned by a dumbfounded Senator Arlen Specter, Gonzales went on to clarify:

"The Constitution doesn't say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn't say that. It simply says that the right shall not be suspended 'except in cases of rebellion or invasion.'"

To this baffling argument Specter responded: "You may be treading on your interdiction of violating common sense."

If you read Article I, Section IX of the U.S. Constitution it in fact refers to habeas corpus as a "privilege" and a privilege that "shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion" at which time "public safety may require it."

Certainly the NSA warantless surveillance of Americans does not constitute an issue of public safety and certainly our civil liberties have been threatened as President Bush and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have carried out this program.

Today is without question a great day for the United States Constitution. The departure of Gonzales is not only fitting for this day, it is a gift to our 220 year-old Constitution.