Ted Pike, 1924-2009
Posted by: Julie in public service, Democrat, Bonneville County on May 21, 2009
Former Bonneville County Democratic chairman Edward "Ted" Pike passed away this week at the age of 84.
"Democrats across Idaho are mouring the passing of a good friend" said Jim Hansen, executive director of the Idaho Democratic Party. "Ted was the Democratic prosecutor in Bonneville County and served the community in many other ways as well. Even in the face of tough opposition, he never gave up working as an advocate for ordinary people."
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Where did all the bailout money go?
The government has pledged $11.3 trillion for economic rescue – and has spent one-quarter of that. On what?
By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor from the April 26, 2009 edition
It's enough to boggle the mind. If all goes well, it'll be enough to help the economy recover.
The US government has deployed more than $3 trillion in an all-out effort to resolve a financial crisis and end a recession. It is acting as lender of last resort, investor of last resort, and consumer of last resort.
After more than a year of extraordinary federal interventions in markets and private companies, much still hangs in the balance.
At best, the federal efforts could stabilize the banking system, ease a record foreclosure wave, and kick-start an economic recovery. Then the Federal Reserve and Treasury would withdraw their stimulus before it sparks inflation or a run on the dollar by foreign investors.
At worst, the rescue could fizzle. While putting out a fire for a season, it could leave key banks still weak and the economy stalled, all while piling up a dangerous level of federal debt that limits options for the future.
Or the result could be something between those extremes. However it all turns out, the government strategy in some ways echoes the very banking behaviors that helped to launch the crisis: expanding its own leverage (debt) to extend high-risk credit to others.
Here's a guide to the rescue programs, in questions and answers.
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Pharmacy bill unnecessary,
bad for business, patients
By Rep. Sue Chew
The Idaho Senate will soon consider legislation - House Bill 216 - that would provide pharmacists immunity from liability when they refuse to fill a prescription based on religious or ethical reasons. As a licensed pharmacist, I see two major problems with the bill: The proposal seeks to provide a right that pharmacists already have, and it has far-reaching effects that may create troubling and unintended consequences, especially for Idaho business owners.
Pharmacists in the state of Idaho have always had the right to turn away business like any other business or profession. The absence of a "duty to fill" in Idaho Pharmacy Rule, by default, allows pharmacists the "right to refuse" a prescription that would result in a fatal overdose as well as many other circumstances.
I have received letters from fellow pharmacists who say HB 216 is unnecessary. Sam Hoagland is a pharmacist who practices law and has taught pharmacy law for ten years at the School of Pharmacy at Idaho State University. According to Professor Hoagland, David Ripley of Idaho Chooses Life brought his desire for a conscience bill to the Idaho Board of Pharmacy. The board urged him to consult with pharmacists to review and discuss the idea before drafting legislation. Neither he nor the bill's sponsor, Rep. Tom Loertscher, chose to do that.
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Proposed Pharmacy Bill by Idaho House Committee Targets Moral Issues
Reporter: Tammy Scardino
Posted: March 18, 2009 10:39 PM MDT
Updated: March 18, 2009 10:47 PM MDT
The state of Idaho is now one step closer to passing legislation that would put into writing an unspoken understanding that pharmacists have the right to refuse filling a prescription. What makes this a hot topic is the specific type of medication that gets denied.
It really comes down to a difference in people's moral opinion about the "Morning After Pill", also called the "Plan B" pill.
The same type of person that would be against the now over-the-counter medication might also not believe in dispensing any form of birth control, if say for instance they were Catholic.
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Jon Stewart takes Jim Cramer apart: getting mad at the 'Mad Money' man
Mar 13, 2009, 12:04 AM | by Ken Tucker
Categories: last night, Television
What The Daily Show With Jon Stewart billed as "the week-long feud of the century" almost ended in a very funny fizzle: Instead of being his usual feisty self, financial advisor Jim Cramer could not apologize fast enough to Stewart for what he repeatedly called his "shenanigans" as host of CNBC's Mad Money.
Note I said "almost," because something pretty amazing happened. Things got dead-serious as Stewart played 2006 clips of Cramer talking about how to manipulate stocks and create Wall Street rumors during the time he was a hedge-fund manager. You could almost see the blood drain from Cramer's face every time the camera returned to him in the studio with Stewart. Talking about the present-day crisis, Stewart tore into Cramer, saying for doing things like urging his viewers to buy Bear Stearns stock shortly before that investment bank collapsed. "It's not a f------ game," said Stewart, asserting that what Cramer and other financial reporters did could be considered "criminal at worst."
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Executive Privilege Compromise:
Win-Win-Win
Posted by Andrew Cohen
March 4, 2009 10:16 PM
(CBS)Believe it or not, this is precisely the way the Founding Fathers envisioned how the Constitution could work. Pressure from the judicial branch (a pending deadline to file a substantive brief) and the legislative branch (Congressional subpoenas to Bush officials) forced the White House into compromising over the scope of executive privilege in the U.S. Attorney matter. It’s a win-win-win, Steve Carell would say.
Or, you can look at it another way. The deal that finally delivers Karl Rove and Harriet Miers into Rep. John Conyers Congressional den of inquiry came about because neither the Obama Administration, nor the Congress, wanted to risk creating “bad” legal precedent about the scope of the privilege—federal law that might be political convenient now, but which could hinder future administrations (or even this one, a few years down the road).
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Cost of locking up Americans too high - Pew study
Mon Mar 2, 2009 7:44pm GMT
WASHINGTON, March 2 (Reuters) - One in every 31 U.S. adults is in the corrections system, which includes jail, prison, probation and supervision, more than double the rate of a quarter century ago, according to a report released on Monday by the Pew Center on the States.
The study, which said the current rate compares to one in 77 in 1982, concluded that with declining resources, more emphasis should be put on community supervision, not jail or prison.
"Violent and career criminals need to be locked up, and for a long time. But our research shows that prisons are housing too many people who can be managed safely and held accountable in the community at far lower cost," said Adam Gelb, director of the Center's Public Safety Performance Project, which produced the report.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the biggest prison population of any country in the world, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Most of those in the U.S. corrections system -- one in 45 -- are already on probation or parole, with one in 100 in prison or jail, the Pew study found.
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Republican obstinacy: How's it working?
By Derrick Z. Jackson
Globe Columnist / February 18, 2009
NOT EVEN the stimulus bill stimulated the Republican Party into any human feeling. It heard not the screams of 4 million people losing their jobs in the last year, not the slamming doors of shuttering factories, nor the shrieks at kitchen tables from Saco to Sacramento as working Americans open their mail to see they've lost 40 percent and more on their 401ks.
With the collective livelihood of America at stake, only three of 219 Republicans in the House and the Senate voted for the $787 billion economic recovery package, and the three who did - Maine's Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, and Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter - slashed what they could before passage in the Senate.
The party displayed the very obstinacy that lost it the White House. Lest we forget, and the party sure must have thought we did, its standard-bearer, President Bush, turned the $128 billion surplus of President Clinton into a $1.2 trillion deficit. For that, a grand 17 percent of Americans in a New York Times/CBS poll approved of Bush's handling of the economy as he left office. In a Gallup poll, only 5 percent of Americans thought Bush made progress on the economy, a gracious 7 percent said the economy stood still, and 87 percent said we lost ground. The 5 percent who said the economy was better could only have been Wall Street CEOs, the Patriots' sudden star and suddenly rich Matt Cassel, and free-agent baseball pitcher C.C. Sabathia, who signed with the Yankees for $161 million over the next seven years.
A CNN poll found that only 13 percent of Americans believed the outgoing Bush "brought the kind of change the country needed." So America elected Barack Obama as the "Change We Need."
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Human evolution kicks into high gear
Researchers debate whether our species is growing apart or together
By Kathleen McAuliffe
updated 12:21 p.m. MT, Tues., Feb. 10, 2009
For decades the consensus view — among the public as well as the world’s preeminent biologists—has been that human evolution is over. Since modern Homo sapiens emerged 50,000 years ago, “natural selection has almost become irrelevant” to us, the influential Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould proclaimed. “There have been no biological changes. Everything we’ve called culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.”
This view has become so entrenched that it is practically doctrine. Even the founders of evolutionary psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, signed on to the notion that our brains were mostly sculpted during the long period when we were hunter-gatherers and have changed little since. “Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind,” they wrote in a background piece on the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
So to suggest that humans have undergone an evolutionary makeover from Stone Age times to the present is nothing short of blasphemous. Yet a team of researchers has done just that.
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Mortgage Madness: Protest targets 'predator'
Posted on 02/09/2009
By AMANDA NORRIS
anorris@thestamfordtimes.com
STAMFORD -- Stamford and Greenwich became the stomping grounds of a grassroots campaign against corporate greed Sunday as part of a three day homeowners' workshop sponsored by the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. Between 350 and 400 people, most of them members, staff or volunteers for the Boston-based nonprofit organization, converged outside the Greenwich home of William Frey, manager of Greenwich Financial Services, at around 1 p.m.
Wearing bright yellow hats and t-shirts with pictures of sharks and the words "Stop Loan Sharks," protesters had already targeted the home of John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley, at 6 Club Road, Rye, N.Y. earlier in the day.
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On Biblical RIGHT-eousness
It is not fair to expect secular journalists to be biblical scholars, nor should it be anticipated that they would spend the necessary time to research the issue. It is for that reason that they tend to accept uncritically the oft-repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti-gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro-slavery and anti-women.
There is also a widely accepted mentality that if the Bible is opposed, the idea must be wrong. That is little more than nonsensical fundamentalism. The rise of democracy was contrary to the "clear teaching of the Bible," as the debate over the forced signing of the Magna Carta by King John of England in 1215 revealed. The Bible was quoted to prove that Galileo was wrong; that Darwin was wrong; that Freud was wrong; that allowing women to be educated, to vote, to enter the professions and to be ordained was wrong. So the fact that the Bible is quoted to prove that homosexuality is evil and to be condemned is hardly a strong argument, given the history of how many times the Bible has been wrong. I believe that most bishops know this but the Episcopal Church has some fundamentalist bishops and a few who are "fellow travelers" with fundamentalists.
The Bible was written between the years 1000 B.C.E. and 135 C.E. Our knowledge of almost everything has increased exponentially since that time. It is the height of ignorance to continue using the Bible as an encyclopedia of knowledge to keep dying prejudices intact. The media seems to cooperate in perpetuating that long ago abandoned biblical attitude.
That is not surprising since the religious people keep quoting it to justify their continued state of unenlightenment. That attitude is hardly worthy of the time it takes to engage it. I do not debate with members of the flat earth society either. Prejudices all die. The first sign that death is imminent comes when the prejudice is debated publicly. The tragedy is that church leaders back the wrong side of the conflict, which is happening today from the Pope to the Archbishop of Canterbury to the current crop of Evangelical leaders. That too will pass and the debate on homosexuality will be just one more embarrassment in Christian history.
–John Shelby Spong
30 January, 2009
Four Things the Republicans Don't Want You to Know About the Economy
Keith Boykin
Keith Boykin is editor of The Daily Voice, a CNBC contributor and a BET political commentator.
Posted January 26, 2009
In the past few weeks, I've heard lots of Republican talking heads make some pretty damning arguments about "liberal" Democratic economic policies and Barack Obama's "wasteful" spending plans. The arguments may sound convincing at first blush, but the Republicans aren't offering any serious alternatives. So I did some research and came up with a quick list of four things Republicans don't want you to know about the economy.
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Inaugural Address
Obama puts stamp on DNC
By LIZ SIDOTI
01/21/09
WASHINGTON (AP) — A prolific political fundraiser and grass-roots organizer, President Barack Obama is quickly putting his stamp on the Democratic Party in an attempt to build on the success of his groundbreaking campaign and Democrats' recent election results.
One day after Obama was sworn into office and a few after he announced that his massive campaign organization would become a special project of the party, the Democratic National Committee formally elected the president's choice for chairman — Tim Kaine — and several vice chairmen who are presidential allies. They are taking the reins of the party won sweeping victories in back-to-back elections
The team's task: taking a Democratic Party that's extraordinarily empowered to the next level by supporting Obama's governing agenda while preparing for the midterm elections in 2010 and, ultimately, Obama's anticipated re-election campaign two years later.
In his first speech as chairman, Kaine channeled Obama when he added another objective: defining the Democratic Party as a problem-solving, positive, unifying body that embraces the values of hard work and equality, while rejecting ideological fights, partisan gridlock and hard-core negative rhetoric.
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A Balanced Strategy
Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age
Robert M. Gates
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009
Summary: The Pentagon has to do more than modernize its conventional forces; it must also focus on today's unconventional conflicts -- and tomorrow's.
Robert M. Gates is U.S. Secretary of Defense.
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Muslim woman defies male dominance.
By Farah El Alfy in Cairo, Egypt
Amal Soliman was ridiculed for wanting to be a marriage registrar [Jasmin Bauomy]
Amal Soliman, a 32-year-old Egyptian woman, has endured intimidation and ridicule in the year since she applied for a job as the Muslim world's first mazouna, or female marriage registrar, but she says her victory has been worth the fight.
In late September, Soliman, who holds a Masters degree in Islamic Sharia law, broke into what has until now been an exclusively males-only club.
However, the Committee of Egyptian Mazouns, an all-male organisation, challenged Soliman's application saying the job would be inappropriate for a woman and voiced their opinion in a statement issued by the committee.
A marriage officer presides over a wedding (or divorce) ceremony, recites verses from the Quran and signs the official certificates making the union legally binding.
Al Jazeera recently spoke with Soliman shortly after she conducted her first wedding ceremony on October 25.
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US intelligence report sees shift of power to east
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Published: November 21 2008 02:00 | Last updated: November 21 2008 02:00
The world is shifting towards a multi-polar system with a less dominant US and a more powerful China and India, and a "historic" transfer of wealth from west to east, according to a new US intelligence report.
The Global Trends 2005 report, released by the director of national intelligence yesterday, says that while the US will remain the most powerful country in 2025, the rise of emerging powers and regional blocs will constrain its ability to "call the shots" across the world.
The National Intelligence Council analysis concluded the US would be ever more constricted by scientific advances in other countries, the expansion of irregular warfare by state and non-state actors, the proliferation of long-range precision weapons and the growing frequency of cyber warfare. "The multiplicity of influential actors and distrust of vast power means less room for the US to call the shots without the support of strong partnerships."
The report said the international system prevailing since the second world war would be "unrecognisable by 2025 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalising economy, a historic transfer of relative wealth and economic power from west to east, and the growing influence of non-state actors".
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Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage
By JESSE McKINLEY and KIRK JOHNSON
Published: November 14, 2008
SACRAMENTO — Less than two weeks before Election Day, the chief strategist behind a ballot measure outlawing same-sex marriage in California called an emergency meeting here.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Frank Schubert was the chief strategist for Proposition 8, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman in California.
Election Results | More Politics News
“We’re going to lose this campaign if we don’t get more money,” the strategist, Frank Schubert, recalled telling leaders of Protect Marriage, the main group behind the ban.
The campaign issued an urgent appeal, and in a matter of days, it raised more than $5 million, including a $1 million donation from Alan C. Ashton, the grandson of a former president of the Mormon Church. The money allowed the drive to intensify a sharp-elbowed advertising campaign, and support for the measure was catapulted ahead; it ultimately won with 52 percent of the vote.
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Human Rights Rally Scheduled in Idaho Falls Saturday
Posted: Nov 14, 2008 03:54 PM MST
Updated: Nov 14, 2008 03:54 PM MST
A local group is gathering Saturday morning to stage a rally in Idaho Falls that is part of a nation-wide protest.
One of the participants told Local News 8 the rally is about human rights and the passage of Proposition 8 in California. He wants to show the area that there is a gay community presence in Eastern Idaho.
Similar protests are scheduled to happen across the country and are organized by Join the Impact.
The rally is sponsored by Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays, or PFLAG, Breaking Boundaries and concerned citizens.
It is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. at the Bonneville County Courthouse, 605 N. Capital Ave.
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Nebraska fears rush to drop off kids before haven law change
By Ed Lavandera
CNN
OMAHA, Nebraska (CNN) -- Nebraska officials said they're concerned about an apparent rush by parents to drop their teenage children off at hospitals before lawmakers change the state's troubled "safe haven" law.
Four children have been dropped off at Nebraska hospitals in the last two days.
The latest cases came on the eve of a special session of the Legislature on Friday to add an age limit to the law. On Thursday, a boy, 14, and his 17-year-old sister were dropped off at an Omaha hospital; the girl ran away from the hospital, officials said. A 5-year-old boy was left by his mother at a different hospital, officials said.
The day before, a father flew in from Miami, Florida, to leave his teenage son at a hospital, officials said.
"Please don't bring your teenager to Nebraska," Gov. Dave Heineman told CNN. "Think of what you are saying. You are saying you no longer support them. You no longer love them."
Nebraska's safe haven law was intended to allow parents to hand over an infant anonymously to a hospital without being prosecuted. Of the 34 children who have been dropped off at hospitals, officials said not one has been an infant.
All but six have been older than 10, according to a Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services analysis.
State officials said because of legislative procedures it will take at least a week to change the language of the safe haven law, creating a window where more parents could try to take advantage of the loophole in the statute.
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What does this say about,,,
EAST IDAHO DEMOCRATS
