Ridenbaugh Press

Though already posted elsewhere (see the Oregonian and NW Republican), we can’t let this go here either.

A longish video at more than 16 minutes, but not a moment too long. And you never thought the legislature was entertaining . . .

Micron technology

Possibly nowhere else in the Northwest would a quarterly stock report for a single corporation carry such significance, or be (legitimate) cause for so many major news stories. Even when the corporation isn’t talking to the main news outlet in the area.

So it is with Micron Technology and Boise; the firm is headquartered at Boise and employs somewhere around 10,000 people in the area (with the employment of many more connected to those thousands). A drop in prices for computer memory left Micron with a $225 million loss in the last quarter, a loss evidently considered serious enough to require a substantive response to Wall Street. CEO Steve Appleton responded, in a lesser way by stepping down from the corporate presidency (a lesser position, and ultimately probably an unimportant move) and in a bigger way by promising serious employment cutbacks.

The Associated Press reported that “Micron did not say how many of its 22,000 workers will be laid off, but reductions will likely affect Idaho employees as the company moves production closer to customers in Asia, where it does more than 70 percent of its business. Spokesman Dan Francisco said some of the job cuts will affect Micron facilities near Boise . . .”

Pay attention to the phrase “moves production closer to constomers in Asia”; it seems likely to become a phrase familiar to Boiseans in the months and years ahead. Another instance, from a stock analyst report after the quarterly announcement: “Recent checks indicate that Micron Technology has achieved a significant rebound in Asia with its new DRAM 78nm process.”

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Did you know that Skipper’s seafood restaurants are northwest-based - in SeaTac (previously Edmonds)? (Admittedly, we didn’t.) Or that it filed for bankruptcy protection last December?

Apparently, a number of the people who work there didn’t know, and consequently have been taking by surprise with the news: Many of the chain’s outlets will be closed and others sold, in many cases within a day or two, as a result of bankruptcy action.

Skipper’s has (according to its web site) 70 outlets, including 30 in Washington, 13 in Oregon and eight in Idaho; the site also reports operations in Alaska, Montana and Utah. Wikipedia says that the action number is 58, and bankruptcy filings in December indicated 59.

Always liked their chowder . . .

Mike Crapo

We will say up top that singling out Idaho Senator Mike Crapo on the question of earmark information release, as the Anderson Cooper show did last night on CNN, isn’t fair, on two grounds. One is that the bulk of U.S. senators of both parties take the same position - or at least hold the same bottom line - as Crapo does. The other reason is that Crapo picked up the notoriety because his press secretary was trying to helpful and explanatory, which shouldn’t have earned a ding.

The larger point the program was making, though, is another matter, largely undiminished after we went through it this morning with Susan Wheeler, the press secretary. Let’s run through this, and see whether most of the Senate (not Crapo alone) are right or wrong.

“Earmarks” are budget items specified for a particular purpose. A county, for example, might seek an earmark for federal funding for a park, or maybe a state seeks one for a health building. Or whatever. Certainly, private parties are interested in earmarks too.

For our purposes here, you can fit the earmarking process into three parts. There’s the request from someone in-state to a member of Congress that their request be included for federal funding. The second stage comes as members of Congress and their staffs sift through these requests, and propose some of them to an appropriations committee or subcommittee for action. The third stage is the formal, public action by the committee to approve some of those requests (extending, of course, into further floor and committee action on the way to ultimate bill signing).

The third part of the earmarking process, at the committee level and beyond, is public, and there’s no dispute about it. The first part of the process, which involves constituent communications (a category that also includes such things as constituent negotiations over Social Security payments), is commonly taken as a confidential communication, and there’s not much dispute about that either (though we’ll partially asterisk that and return to it below). The dispute concerns the second area - the work that the member of Congress and staff do before the committee acts on the proposal: Most senators, including Crapo, say information about what earmarks they propose to the committees should not be released to the public.

What gets left out of the process is any information about earmarks proposed but rejected by the committee, and about which senators proposed any of the earmarks at all.

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The Oregon Legislature’s main web page says that regular sessions usually last about six months. The last few years, that’s been a little embarassingly optimistic for sessions running from January into August. This year, remarkably, it was an over-long estimate - this session, adjourned shortly after noon today, ran not a lot more than five months. As widely noted, this was the shortest regular session in a dozen years.

We should note here as well the other departures mentioned at the Statehouse this week. In addition to Senate Majority Leader Kate Brown, about whom we’ve blogged earlier, Blue Oregon cited three more indicated from today’s floor sessions: Senator Avel Gordly (currently an independent from Portland) and Representatives Karen Minnis (R-Wood Village, a former House speaker) and Donna Nelson (R-McMinnville, one of the chamber’s most colorful characters) also indicated they were opting out.

(Politically? Gordly’s seat likely will revert to a Democrat; Minnis’ may well go Democratic; Nelson’s probably but not definitely will stay Republican.)

And Senator Vicki Walker, D-Eugene, is apparently the first in the race for secretary of state in 2008. (Running in mid-term, she would retain her Senate seat if unsuccessful.)

A side note: Don’t be surprised if the next couple of weeks doesn’t unplug a bunch of announcements on hold while the session lasted.

In most sports, a team can lose by default - by failing to show up to play when appearance was expected. Same thing can happen in court cases. But wouldn’t you know there’s a gray area involved?

Consider this - three decisions on the matter today from the Washington Supreme Court.

One day in November 1998, a car owned by Bonnie Burris but driven by her son Jeffrey Barth rear-ended the car driven by Sherri Morin, who later reported medical costs as a result. Insurers were contacted and some money exchanged, but after a year with no settlement Morin hired an attorney to case the case to court, where it was filed in June 2001.

When that happened, Burris, the car owner, was personally served notice, and Barth, who couldn’t be found, was given notice “by publication,” an ad in the newspaper. Neither of them responded formally to the court, however, and in December 2002 a trial court gave Morin a default judgement against the other two. Many months later, in February 2004, Barth and Burris filed papers asking that default decision be set aside, since they had “informally appeared” at various points. As the Supreme Court wrote, “The trial court agreed and vacated the default judgment. Morin appealed. The Court of Appeals, Division One, concluded that in light of the prelitigation contact between Farmers and Morin, including the payment for property damage, the trial court had not abused its discretion in setting aside default judgment on the ground of an informal appearance.”

The Supreme Court disagreed.

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An indicator of the times, via the Spokesman-Review’s Huckleberries blog: “Coeur d’Alene faced another loss this month. Its only full-service gas station closed. Many people with a wide assortment of impairments cannot perform those seemingly simple duties offered by a full-service gas station attendant. Each withdrawal of such a service takes a new toll on people who are already challenged by daily living.”

It’s a useful point. (Dave Oliveria adds, “It would be nice if a gas station offered curb service at certain times of the week. And mebbe profitable.”)

And maybe useful too as a comeback from Oregonians who put up with snickering from their neighbors about the illegality of self-serve gas: At least service, oftimes mechanical as well as for fuel, is still available.

Oregon statehouse

What you think of the actions of the soon-to-be history 2007 Oregon Legislature will vary according to perspective. What’s becoming clearer, almost indisputable, is that it was highly productive - the most productive session in Oregon in many years, somewhere in the ballpark of the unusually strong 2005 Washington session.

In both cases that was allowed for by the arrival of unified (one-party) government, both chambers and the governor’s office. Unified control doesn’t always equate to productivity, but it did in both of these cases. And in Oregon’s case, this really ought to be noted, since the top criticism of legislators in Oregon for this decade and more has been that they’re the gang that could get nothing done. (Probably an over-stated complaint, but one with some validity.)

The Oregonian has up, online, a summary of the session’s doings. Among the items noted there: A rainy day fund, massive increases in public school funding, major increases for higher education and a string of new capital (building) expenses, an increase (by 100) in the number of state troopers on the roads, a batch of consumer bills, a slash at junk food in schools, major cutbacks on indoor smoking, domestic partnerships for gays and seniors and a cigarette tax/child health ballot issue. They didn’t even get to the item we think could be the most significant of all, a first step toward universal health coverage, or to the batch of environmental legislation passed (the failure of the Metolius River bill notwithstanding). And you could easily add more items of significance to the list.

You can take some of this in various ways. Critics (not all of them Republicans) took due note of the high level of spending in this session; warnings, for example, that ongoing state spending will almost inevitably crash into the next economic downturn are well founded. (The rainy day fund was a sound move but unlikely to fully plug the dike.) Depending on your perspective, you may see the actions as good or bad.

What you can’t, any longer, is diss the Oregon Legislature as inconsequential.

Greeting Gonzales in Boise/Idaho Democratic Party

The thinking must have been something like this: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, embattled on all quarters, needs a respite. Fine. Have him talk about something popular, like local anti-gang efforts. In some place deep red, like, say, Idaho. Safe.

The prep overlooked that Boise isn’t quite as red, anymore, as much of the rest of the state. As Gonzales headed to a news conference at the Boise Community Center, protesters - blasting him on his torture advocacy and related matters - made themselves plenty visible. What had been planned as an outdoor press conference, in sight of the general public, was moved indoors, out of general sight. And the press conference reportedly lasted maybe five minutes.

No place to hide.

We don’t know a lot about Warren Jones, the appointee - as of today - to replace Gerald Schroeder on the Idaho Supreme Court. He is apt to bring some difference in viewpoint to the group of five: On swearing-in, he will be the only one of the five who had never served as a judge (three of the others previously had) or in other elective office (Jim Jones, the other Jones on the court, a two-term attorney general).

Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter remarked on the selection, “His colleagues in the Idaho Bar agree that he is balanced, fair and impartial, and that his temperament will fit well in a collegial setting with the other justices.” Certainly he isn’t a bounce-around kind of guy: He’s been with one Boise law firm, the old and cohesive firm Eberle Berlin, Kading, Turnbow, McKlveen and Jones since 1970 - for 37 years. You don’t see that kind of one-shop career run very often any more.

He has not been an especially publicly visible attorney (not the same thing, of course, as in-profession visibility), so we have a limited amount of background to go on. The Idaho Statesman has noted a couple of cases from his background: “He was counsel to a couple accused of slander in the 2004 state Supreme Court case that found charter schools cannot sue for slander. Jones also represented Quickburger Ltd. of England in a 1993 lawsuit against J.R. Simplot Co. about eight months after Otter resigned from his post there. Simplot was ordered to pay Quickburger $1 million for breaking a license agreement and misappropriating trade secrets.” You get the sense from that, maybe, of a successful attorney and also one not necessarily wedded to the most popular and powerful local interests; not a bad thing, if such conclusions could be drawn.

But, as all governors learn, we’ll all find out from scratch what we have after Warren Jones puts on the robes. Most justices turn out to be at least a bit of a surprise.

Interesting ruling published in the Federal Register today on air quality in Washington and Idaho, essentially giving a checkoff from the Environmental Protection Agency on some new Northwest air rules.

The state agencies involved are the Department of Ecology in Washington and Department of Environmental Quality in Idaho. Here’s the summary:

These provisions require each state to submit a State Implementation Plan (SIP) revision that prohibits emissions that adversely affect another state’s air
quality through interstate transport. EPA is proposing to approve IDEQ’s and Ecology’s SIP revisions because they adequately address the four distinct elements related to the impact of interstate transport of air pollutants for their states. These include prohibiting emissions that contribute significantly to nonattainment of the NAAQS in another state, interfere with maintenance of the NAAQS by another state, interfere with plans in another state to prevent significant deterioration of air quality, or interfere with efforts of another state to protect visibility.

To all things, there are limits, even in go-go places like the metros of the Oregon high desert. From the Bend Bulletin today:

Another Bend manufacturing company is leaving the city to expand elsewhere, saying Bend’s limited industrial land supply and the high prices that the land commands have priced it out of the market. . . . Light industrial space in Bend is nearly gone, economic developers say, as the city’s growth has quickly absorbed available land. While space dwindled, costs shot up, says Roger Lee, executive director of Economic Development for Central Oregon, or EDCO.

To be sure, we’re not talking about moving out of region: the story is about Ameritech Machine Manufacturing Inc., a six-year Bend firm which is planning to move to Redmond, about 20 miles away. But it is an indicator: How high can prices go before they turn around and bite?

Washington presidential contributions

We’re not many days away from the next round of releases of campaign contributions numbers for the presidential candidates. Before wading into and being swamped by that, we decided to take advantage of a new tool by the Federal Elections Commission and take a look at the contributions reported by the candidates from around the Northwest.

We weren’t surprised to find the three states have highly distinctive patterns, but maybe a little to find that the state most different from the other two was Washington.

It was the one state of the three in which Democratic presidential candidates out-raised Republicans ($655,370 to $401,715). (A note: The Fred Thompson activity is too recent to show up in these numbers.)

Like the other two, the biggest single recipient here is Republican Mitt Romney, who who raised 68% of all Republican presidential money. (That percentage is bigger in the other two states.) Strikingly, his treasure chest wasn’t King County or even the Puget Sound area overall (where most people in the state live) – or even east of the Cascades. His big source was Clark County, Vancouver and Battle Ground, which accounted for $139,525, about half of his total.

By contrast, all of King County (with about five times Clark’s population) accounted for just about $100,000. Overall, King County yielded about $178,000 for Republicans, while Clark donated $142,715; practically all of Clark’s Republican money went to Romney. In contrast, second-place Republican raiser John McCain pulled about two-thirds of his money from King.

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Kate Brown

Here’s a guessing game: What’s the reason Oregon Senator Kate Brown said, as she did this evening, that she will step down as Senate majority leader (and apprently from the Senate)? She said today that she’s doing it, but not why.

Let’s see. Such moves sometimes happen on occasion of scandal, except that there’s been none (that we know of) in this case. Or on occasion of some awful political reversal (as last session’s House Speaker Karen Minnis left leadership when her party lost the chamber), but that’s not the case here either. Or there could be personal reasons, though nothing there has yet come to light. Another prospect is an impending run for higher office, an idea which is bound to raise some interest. Does she have interest in the U.S. Senate next year, or something else?

Not many answers yet.

UPDATE The first reports on this suggested a resignation from the leadership but not necessarily from the Senate. The Oregonian reports today that later Sunday she confirmed she’s planning to leave the Senate as well; this post has been updated to reflect that.

Increasingly looks as if Idahoans are going to have to choose their parties if they’re going to vote in primaries - the closed primary system.

We don’t think a majority of Idahoans would like the concept - to the contrary. But we take this quote, from the Coeur d’Alene Press by former state Senator Rod Beck, very seriously: “We now have a party rule that is in conflict with state statute. The only way to resolve that conflict is to have a court declare that statute unconstitutional.”

We noted in a past post that the Idaho Legislature is unlikely to do that, but Beck’s implication here is on target: A court probably would. Courts in a string of other states, including Washington, already have. Confirmation comes from Secretary of State Ben Ysursa - Idaho’s long-time elections guru - who said that a lawsuit was “inevitable” and that the current relatively open primary voting system will be hard to defend in court.

We half suspect the papers are being drawn as you read this . . .

Dennis Hession

Al French

Mary Verner

The last time Spokane voters re-elected a mayor was 34 years ago - 1973. (Compare that to the re-election-as-norm in Seattle, Portland, Eugene, Vancouver or Boise.) The incumbent mayor who is running this year, Dennis Hession, was appointed to the job in the middle of the current term, not elected, meaning both that he wouldn’t necessarily have to beat history to win, and also that he’s untested in a run for the top job.

Which may sound like an either-or, but we have some ease in suggesting the odds favor him.

One reason is the math of conventional political calculation. When an incumbent is on the ballot, the race almost always centers first around that incumbent - whether that person should stay or go. Hession, who is a former city council member (its president at the time he was chosen mayor, by a vote of the council), is opposed by two current council members, Al French and Mary Verner. Incumbents are ordinarily best-served by a divided opposition, and there’s a good chance that will play out in this case.

There are other considerations, a few of them countervailing.

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We should not leave unnoted - how could we? - the reports this week of the Virgin Mary siting at Twin Falls.

From the Times-News: “Late Monday night, a man left a message at the Times-News saying he’d seen an image of the Virgin Mary on a rock at Shoshone Falls. He did not return calls made on Tuesday to the number he’d left. However, along the winding road leading to the falls, a handmade cross rests against the base of a massive basalt slab - on which appears a human-like figure. It’s under the only tree along the road.”

The paper posted a picture of the rock in question (it appears at the link above); to our eyes, it simply looks like a colorful stain.

But perhaps it depends (as the Roman Catholic clergyman at Immaculate Conception Church at Buhl suggested) at least in part on what you’re looking for.

On the front page of the Times News site is a list of the most recent reader comments, which suggests area topics of concern: “On this parade controversy [concerning a gay orgainzation’s float]: Can we stop the hatred?; Accepting discrimination like this is outrageous; Religious miracle or natural phenomenon?; Push for homosexuality support worth fighting; Becoming ‘pobody’; Being homosexual is not a choice; DOE’s rich tapestry of broken promises; People at heart of parade angst are your neighbors . . .”

Friday may have been a landmark day in Oregon public policy, not to mention the health of Oregonians, with passage of Senate Bill 329 - the comprehensive health bill. When Governor Ted Kulongoski signs it, as he has said he will, prospects for a whole different health system in the state will start to take form.

Only by steps, and not immediately. First will come appointment of an executive director to oversee the effort, and then a board. In 2009 will come the toughest step - money, to be raised by the Oregon Legislature. All of these steps have the potential to become more contentious than SB 329 was this - and that was, in truth, not nearly as contentious as it might have been.

Still, partly because the first step is so often the most difficult of all, it’s entirely possible that Oregonians will look back on June 22, 2007, as an important day.

ADDITIONAL NOTE All that said, by all means check out these comments at Blue Oregon on the evidently impending loss of Senate Bill 27, which apparently will be left hanging at session’s end. Just how key is it to the success of 329? Our sense is, considerable but less than some of the commenters indicate. But by all means read for yourself - there’s a passionate debate here.

from the Clinton ‘Sopranos’ ad

The Democratic frontrunner, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, finally has a Northwest public figure in her camp. So, of the top three candidates on each side in the race (Fred Thompson isn’t formally in the race yet - though he does have blog/radio support), all now have someone backing them in the Northwest.

She has not, until now, in any of the three Northwest states. But today came word that Washington Representative Jay Inslee has signed on, and was named chair of her energy committee.

Of Washington’s 11 members of Congress, just three - Inslee for Clinton, Democrat Adam Smith for Barack Obama, and Republican Dave Reichert for Rudy Giuliani - have declared support for a candidate. How long will the other eight hold out?

Afew months back, 2006 Democratic congressional candidate Larry Grant, who lost to Republican Bill Sali in Idaho’s 1st House district, seemed to be rolling unopposed for the nomination to a rerun in 2008. (He has not formally announced, but is broadly presumed to be in the running, and has not discouraged the presumption.)

Matters have changed. An educator at Moscow, Rand Lewis, said last winter he plans to run in that primary as well. Then came last Sunday’s blast from Idaho Statesman columnist Dan Popkey, who recounted a string of self-induced problems from Grant’s campaign last year along with his determination that the campaign was run, essential, just right. That seems to have jogged loose some additional Democratic interest.

The New West site is reporting this afternoon that Walt Minnick, a Boise businessman who in 1996 ran against Republican Senator Larry Craig, is interested in the 1st district Democratic nomination, at least to the point that people on his behalf are calling around to gauge interest. That doesn’t mean he’s necessarily running, of course. But it does tell you something about the present mindset of Idaho Democrats, as regards the Sali race.