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Posts published in “Day: December 16, 2008”

Publius, Silence Dogood and Rep. Hartgen

December 16, 2008

REPORT The antecedents of this political blog run back, through intermittent gaps, back to about 1994 - it has been Ridenbaugh Press since the beginning - and that surely makes it one of the older blogs, online years before the term "blog" was born. Even many of the leading national blogs have been around less a decade; many of the highest-traffic have six or seven years of existence. The medium of blog is in its infancy.

Newspapers were at that stage in the 1700s, especially the later part of that century and the early years of the one following, and in those days they looked and read a lot differently. Facts were interspersed among opinions and aphorisms, and the people now revered as founding fathers were targeted with mud that makes even our recent elections look sickly sweet. Routinely, writers on matters public used pseudonyms, even when almost everyone knew who they were anyway. Ben Franklin probably fooled none of his neighbors masquerading as Silence Dogood. Eventually, newspapering became a bigger deal and a more established deal, and professional standards tended to rise. No regulation was necessary.

Stephen Hartgen

Stephen Hartgen

Newly-minted Idaho state Representative Stephen Hartgen, R-Twin Falls, is a former publisher and editor of the Twin Falls Times News, and other papers around the country before that; and just about everyone who wrote an opinion for those papers - like other conventional daily papers - had to sign their name to what they wrote. (Excepting of course the "institutional" editorials, which as at many other papers bore no signature and were often strongly worded indeed, but we'll move past that.) As the Idaho Statesman's Kevin Richert wrote some days ago, Hartgen "is drafting a bill to require bloggers to post under their real name, and require online commenters to do likewise. In essence, Hartgen wants online commentary to more closely resemble newspaper opinion pages, where letter writers are generally required to identify themselves." (more…)

Avista-CDA deal

December 16, 2008

READING The deal announced today between Avista (once known more understandably as Washington Water Power) and the Coeur d'Alene Tribe looks like a pretty big deal - among many other components, there's something about $150 million changing hands over a period of years. Flying to some extent under the radar, this may be one of the key Inland Empire developments of the year.

A description from the Avista statement:

"Avista and the Tribe have agreed to support the issuance of a single 50-year license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for the Post Falls hydroelectric facility and the Spokane River hydroelectric projects. The agreement also supports continuation of existing water levels on the lake. . . . The comprehensive settlement provides for payment over the life of the long term license of over $150 million both for environmental measures in and around Coeur d'Alene Lake and for compensation to the Tribe. Also addressed are rights-of-way for transmission lines over tribal lands and future storage payments connected to a new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license for the Post Falls dam. Included in the settlement are provisions for Avista to make payments to the Tribe for past and future use of submerged Tribal lands and to satisfy Avista's obligation to mitigate the impacts of the Post Falls dam on the Tribe's natural and cultural resources on its Reservation.

Wyden and the next few years 2

December 16, 2008
Wyden in Astoria

Ron Wyden

BACKGROUND When Ron Wyden was elected to the U.S. House in 1980, he arrived in counterpoint to a predecessor - Bob Duncan - who though also a Democrat had a very different take on legislating. He was not, generally, an activist on socially expansive legislation. Wyden, a co-founder of the Oregon Gray Panthers and a lobbyist and organizer on various legislative fronts, had other intentions for his office.

He took office at the launch of the conservative ascendancy, his early years at the height of Ronald Reagan's popularity and with only the House in Democratic hands - and many of those Democrats of what now would be called the blue dog variety. The times for an activist Democrat were far from ideal.

Second of

three posts.

In contrast to many Democrats of the time, though, Wyden's stance didn't come across as defensive. (A supportive district back home probably helped.) In his pre-Congress activist days, he worked on measures not especially ideological but with a specific practical bent - a ballot issue to cut the cost of dentures, for example.

In the House, in the 80s, he dug into federal spending in sometimes obscure areas and pushed measures intended to foster competition in health care and change rules on federal reimbursement; there were specific, sometimes technical, regulatory changes related to business phone billing and computer crime and even baby formula, during the era of deregulation. He worked on federal legal backing for certain community health operations, to cut malpractice insurance rates. He found Republican alliances in measures to expand unemployment insurance (in cases where some of the money would go to business startups) and developed new incentives for investing in low-income housing. The Almanac of American Politics in 1988 said that "he approaches issues with an almost child-like wonder but works out solutions that are politically shrewd and make sense as policy." A fair number of these ideas cleared the House.

In the Senate his pace seemed to accelerate. He worked on Internet anti-censorship measures, restricting gag rules by HMOs and other measures of seemingly technical but actually wide-ranging import. With conservative Idaho Senator Larry Craig, Wyden pushed through federal payments to rural counties, maybe the piece of legislation each senator is best known for in the region. (more…)