Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in March 2013

Review: Beautiful Nate

March 5, 2013
book
Beautiful Nate/Dennis Mansfield
Howard Books

Beautiful Nate: A Memoir of a Family's Love, a Life Lost, and Heaven's Promises, written by Idahoan Dennis Mansfield about the son who died four years ago, is as much as anything else about finding the beauty within a mess. Mansfield does, although doing that has meant rethinking much of what he once thought he knew.

Those who got to know Mansfield when he first moved to Idaho a bit over 20 years ago, when he emerged as a state leader of Focus on the Family and maybe the state's most visible social conservative, encountered a person of near-total certitude. An activist on the abortion and gay rights fronts, and tightly connected through much of the Idaho (and national) evangelical community, he seemed easily defined by stereotype. In his personal life too, he writes, he had a definitive take on among other things how to raise children.

Then Nate happened, and if what followed didn't upend everything in Mansfield's world, it changed a great deal.

He still is a highly active evangelical Christian and a political conservative, and his faith runs through a book which feels written more for an evangelical audience, or at least within that framework, than for people of other persuasions. But it's well worth reading for non-evangelicals too, partly for the insights Mansfield offers here into the mindset, and partly because the story at the heart of the book, Nate's, is at its core a human tale of tragedy and hope, running well beyond limitations of religion or politics, a sequence of events that could happen to anyone and has happened to many.

We're all of us complex people, but Nate Mansfield, Dennis' eldest son, may have been more obviously so than most. A political conservative and an evangelical Christian - he evidently shared those things with his father, to some degree at least to the end - was both gifted and capable on a number of fronts (as a teenaged campaign manager, for example) but also rebellious, ferociously angry and driven toward drug abuse. The roots of this aren't completely spelled out (Mansfield may here be telling as much as he knows about those origins), but before Nate left high school he had been arrested - creating a problem for Mansfield's 2000 congressional campaign - and would be arrested repeatedly in the years to come. Periodically addicted to substances both legal and not, heroin among them, Nate died in 2009 of a drug interaction.

The story of how Nate and his parents related uneasily over the years to come is unfortunately not an altogether new tale these days. There is a notably breathtaking and wrenching section here where Mansfield and his wife have to decide whether to allow a then-imprisoned Nate out from behind bars and back into their house, and decide against. You can feel the pain on the page.

The background is distinctive, however, because Mansfield had come into parenting and into much of his early activist work out of certainty that he knew the right way to raise a child - he describes in some detail what that was, where it came from, how he tried to put it into effect and how it periodically smashed into practical application - and was thrown when it didn't work out. (In Nate's case, that is: We aren't told quite enough about the other two children in the house, but their lives apparently proceeded on less eventful and markedly smoother tracks to adulthood.) (more…)

This week’s Briefings

March 4, 2013
pontoon
Concrete is poured on the Highway 520 pontoon bridge east of Seattle by Department of Transportation crews. (photo/Washington Department of Transportation)
 

Washington: Financial bill introduction cutoffs are imposed at the statehouse, which means session tensions are about to ratchet upward. That and the fact that not a lot of time remains before the constitutional session cutoff arrives. Notably likely: Little immediate fallout from the Supreme Court decision on supermajorities and tax bills; the split legislature provides a brake on that and on the idea of a constitutional amendment to allow for it.

Oregon: Approval in the Oregon House of key financing for the Columbia Crossing bridge project was hot enough material that Governor John Kitzhaber sent a press release about out from his meeting his D.C. He may have been hoping that presages success on the more difficult project he has set for himself this session – PERS reforms.

Idaho: The University of Idaho's president for the last four and a half years, Duane Nellis, appeared headed to a university job in Texas by week's end. That apparently will set up another year-long national search for the next UI president (who, based in recent history, might last at the institution as much as three to four times as long).

Busting the Club

March 3, 2013
idaho RANDY
STAPILUS
 
The Idaho
Column

Idaho voters may despise Congress, but they do not often throw out their own members – they've done it just four times in the last half-century. Less often than that do the voters of a party reject an incumbent of their own party for another term.

The last time it happened was almost 40 years ago, in 1974, when Orval Hansen, a three-term incumbent in the second district, was defeated in the primary by former Representative George Hansen. The campaign was messy and a number of factors, some of them personal to the candidates, were at play. But the ideological dynamic was one familiar to Idaho voters today: The challenge to Orval by George was seen as a challenge of the right against a more moderate conservative.

You wonder if the Club for Growth is doing a little research on that election.

The Club, which made a splash in Idaho in 2006, is described in Wikipedia as “a fiscally conservative 501(c)4 organization active in the United States of America, with an agenda focused on taxation and other economic issues. … According to its website, the Club for Growth's policy goals include cutting income tax rates, repealing the estate tax, limited government and a Balanced Budget Amendment, entitlement reform, free trade, tort reform, school choice, and deregulation.” It does not much compromise on any of that.

In 2006, when Idaho had an open seat in the first district, it threw massive money and support to then-legislator Bill Sali, enough that you could fairly say it was the number one reason Sali won his primary and general election that year. One piece of evidence is that in 2008, when Sali ran as an incumbent, the Club stayed out of the race, and Sali lost.

Now the Club is signaling it wants in again, time targeting 2nd District Representative Mike Simpson, now an eight-term member and probably the member of the Idaho delegation with the most clout within Congress. He describes himself as a conservative, and certainly is a loyal member of the House Republican caucus, and close to House Speaker John Boehner. (more…)

A parting gift

March 3, 2013
carlson CHRIS
CARLSON
 
Carlson
Chronicles

University of Idaho President Duane Nellis left a parting gift for Governor Otter, his State Board of Education and all those Republican legislators who have consistently underfunded higher education as well as public education during his four years at the helm of the State’s major research university.

The message was contained in one word in Nellis’ terse statement that he would be leaving to take the helm of Texas Tech University , a school three times the size of the University of Idaho. The dunderheads who robotic-like sign off on the Republican’s slow strangulation of state support for higher and public education will undoubtedly miss the word. It was too subtle for them.

Boise State University President Bob Kustra and his government affairs aide, former House Speaker Bruce Newcomb, won’t miss the word, however, since it was aimed directly at them.

So what’s the word that symbolizes the entire message of Nellis’ disgust?

Flagship.

As in Idaho’s “flagship” university, a modifier stripped from the University of Idaho ’s mission statement last year with malice aforethought by Bob Kustra who wanted to drive home the message that Boise State was now the true flagship university in Idaho. A gullible, naïve, asleep at the switch, compliant, lazy board of education bought Kustra’s orchestration of this symbolic demotion of the University of Idaho hook, line and sinker.

Notice how Nellis’ farewell statement (Don’t hold your breath waiting for a longer statement when it is official in three weeks) referred to Idaho ’s “flagship” research university?

Read between the lines, folks. That one word said it all. Bob Kustra will get the message that his hubris and vanity contributed to a solid if not spectacular colleague leaving the state. University of Idaho boosters, both on campus and off campus, will get it. Current University of Idaho students, paying an ever higher percentage of their college costs, will understand it.

Whether Governor Otter and his hand-picked set of pawns that has been rubber-stamping declining state support for all of public education and pretends to be a Board of Education gets it is highly debatable.

One can hardly blame Nellis for leaving and I have to doff my hat for the clever way he sent the message as to why.

The unfunny

March 1, 2013
rainey BARRETT
RAINEY
 
Second
Thoughts

Have you noticed that comics in what’s left of our newspapers aren’t funny anymore? They’re really not. Some deal with families and kids. Others have weird characters appealing to narrow audiences. Even my favorite - “Doonesbury” - uses mostly unfunny political issues - but does so with wit and savagery. I love it.

I was brought up with “Dick Tracy,” “Terry and the Pirates,” “Smilin’ Jack,” “Li’l Abner,” “Smoky Stover,” “Little Orphan Annie” and dozens more. Funny and adventurous and memorable for well-drawn characters and good storylines. Even some laugh-out-loud stuff. All gone.

So, what’s a guy who likes daily doses of the humorous do for giggles? Well, I turn to the right wing of what remains of the old Republican Party. If you don’t take the characters therein as seriously as they take themselves, you’ll get lots of laughs. And much of the time, those characters are no more real than a good comic strip. But nearly always laughable.

I used to watch folks on the Democrat left, but they weren’t much fun. Even going back to the ‘60's, they’d pick a spot and usually stay put. Maybe anti-war. Maybe anti-Wall Street. Things like that. Pretty predictable stuff. No fun.

Ah, but the GOP right. The far right is the amoeba of American politics - always moving, shape-shifting, splitting, re-splitting. Then splitting again. Always predictable - but always different - because that’s how the right was born. Folks who were afraid and distrustful. It hasn’t changed in decades. Fear and suspicion are in the DNA. People drawn to the right move far out on that political limb because they fear government - they fear foreign countries - they fear the United Nations - they fear any monetary currency except gold - they fear people of color - they fear chlorine - and sooner or later, they come to fear each other. Always! More predictable than gravity.

And, because they’re the most fearful of any of our native political movements, easy pickin’s for the Karl Roves, Rick Perrys, Gingrichs, Bachmans, Koch Brothers and all the other hustlers that come along. Full of fear, the far right’s accepted them But, then, they’d trust anyone who talks like they do or “thinks” like they do or says things they want to hear.

Take the Tea Party scam. “Grassroots,” right? “Just we ‘average’ Americans in the street,” right? Yeah, right. Wrong! In spades!

The whole scheme was created several decades ago by the Koch boys and others in the tobacco and fossil fuels businesses. National Institutes of Health - in particular it’s National Cancer Institute of all places - discovered the long-term strategy to promote anti-science and anti-government agendas going back to 1971. Here’s a direct N-I-H quote from the research. (more…)

First take: Tax hikes, university presidency

March 1, 2013
news

TAX RESTRICTIONS The big governmental news story of the week, the Washington Supreme Court's overturning of an initiative requiring a two-thirds vote of each legislative chamber to pass tax or fee increases, may have long-term effects. But it likely will have only marginal effects for the time being. Half of the Washington legislature effectively is in Republican hands, and tax increases are a no-starter there, for this term at least. At the same time, expect plans for a two-thirds-based constitutional amendment to be, similarly, a no-starter.

NELLIS HEADING TO TEXAS University of Idaho President Duane Nellis apparently has been all but formally chosen for a university presidency in Texas. Nellis has been at UI for about four years. So: How high will be the proposed salary to be dangled at the next president, with the idea of ensuring long-term loyalty and stability?