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Reagan Did some Good, and Some Bad
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 1, 1989
Roses in winter? Yep! And raspberries, too. They're right here ready for a brand new year. So -
Roses for commentator Paul Harvey, one of this country's truly, all-time great newsmen. Said he: "Mr. Reagan, I've watched nine presidents come and go; you are the greatest ... (But) I cannot let you leave office without recommending that you clear up one item ... before leaving.
"Please don't leave your trusted, loyal and obedient servant - Col. Oliver North - hanging - twisting in the wind."
Harvey went on to note Mrs. Reagan disagrees (with Harvey). He neglected to add, unfortunately, she is also a big, bosom buddy with Armand Hammer, super-liberal, big business tycoon and close confidante for decades to the communist government of the Soviet Union. Believe it or not.
"Remember," said Harvey to his friend Reagan, "That President Nixon, after a 49-state victory, was destroyed over "Nothingate" by a collusion of Congress and press.
"And sir, there are still those who would like to destroy you. Don't supply their weapons." (He should have added a suggestion for his more dull-witted readers and listeners to get off their fannies and flood the White House with telegrams supporting the pardon.)
Raspberries to Mr. Ronald Reagan, which is what his name was when I first got acquainted with him years ago. He has raised the spirits of conservatives, bless his heart, perhaps more than any other living human being. An impossible task, too, because they (we?) are indeed mostly negative. But he did it. Sad to say, though, his follow-through tended to peter out somewhere along the way. So I'd guess he'll pardon neither North nor Adm. Poindexter partly due to his wife, Nancy, and partly due to his liberal advisors. A Nobel Peace prize may not otherwise be had by an anti-communist.
Roses anyway, to this fine man, for whatever else one may say about him the Gipper certainly thinks of himself as an anti-communist.
Roses for another movie actor, Tom Selleck, who tells it now like Reagan once did. According to "Libertarian International" newsletter, when millionaire actor Tom Selleck was asked in an interview in Cosmopolitan magazine: "Don't you feel guilty (making so much money) when so many people are starving?" he replied:
"I don't apologize for making it ... I strongly believe that my success has created lots of jobs ... I don't stick my money in a mattress; I spend it. I directly employ a lot of people. The fact that I'm hired in a movie gets it financed, creates work. It's not that I take a bigger slice of the pie - I make the pie bigger."
Raspberries for higher education (with, admittedly, some reservations.) Here's why. Just what do they teach at the College of Idaho, Northwest Nazarene College, or for that matter, in any of the government universities' departments of humanities that is more genuinely humane than the above Selleck chronicle? And, for that matter, how else can America pay the bill, assuming it wants to pay the bill for more education, unless it creates (read, produces) the bigger "pie" of capitalism's goods and services?
Who knows, since President-elect George Bush wants to be known as the "education president" (his words), Tom Selleck just might be a great pick for U.S. secretary of education. Certainly he shows signs of being another "great communicator." Still, the suspicion lingers, Bush's liberal advisors (and they are beginning to surface) might not want to risk that kind of competition - come the election four years from now. Great communicators can be a real pain.
Raspberries for President-elect Bush's apparent reliance on Michael Boskin as a key economic advisor. Daily News Digest of Phoenix, Ariz., sees this as "... perhaps the most dangerous signal as to the future direction of the Bush administration economic policy. Boskin, currently an economics professor at Stanford University, is rumored to be in line for ... chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Bush administration.
"Boskin ... has been hailed by no less an interventionist than Lawrence Summers - a Dukakis advisor and liberal Keynesian economist. Summers has praised Boskin as a 'smart solid guy. He's from the Rockefeller-Feldstein wing of the Republican Party.' Boskin is obsessed with new gimmicks to raise taxes."
Maybe a slew of telegrams to Idaho's senior senator, Jim McClure, a great big and close friend of Bush's, would be in order before "me-too Republicanism" sets in again.
The Good News, Conservative-Style
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 8, 1989
Here's some good news for a change (pun intended). In what seems to be an eternal struggle between conservatives and liberals, the latter claim they are for change while the former are against change.
Some truth in this you say? I agree, at least to some extent, but it should be seen in context. Let me explain.
A new book is just about to come off the press. The title should ring a bell to those conservatives and many liberals who were active during the Goldwater era in the early 1960s when John Stormer wrote his blockbusting book, None Dare Call it Treason. Many believe that its 7-million (that's right, 7 million) copies laid the foundation for the Reagan Revolution a decade or two later.
The new book is an updated 25th anniversary edition of this anti-communist classic. It is entitled None Dare Call It Treason - 25 Years Later. It will first be issued as a hardback, library edition. It will have 384 pages and will be published by the author who still lives in Florissant, Mo. He has, since 1964, authored two or three other books that have sold in excess of a million copies each, so we may have every expectation this new updated version will be as exciting and, hopefully for conservatives, as influential as the one 25 years ago.
Stormer's earlier book was perhaps the most talked about publication the conservative movement had ever come up with by the time they nominated for president of the U.S. the now-venerable and retired elder statesman Barry Goldwater, Republican U.S. senator from Arizona. If there was an exception, it had to be Phyllis Schlafly's monumental, if miniature, book, Choice, Not an Echo, without which many think Goldwater could not have been nominated as a Republican standard-bearer for president in 1964.
This writer was a delegate to that national GOP convention held at San Francisco's famous Cow Palace. Thus it is clear that while it is true the outspoken conservative Arizonan was defeated, it was the first time in well over a generation that conservative Republicans had had a leader who was both outspoken and articulate. He was also colorful and articulate. He was also colorful and intelligent, especially where principles are seldom understood and held high by politicians. We've been losing these since the days of Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers.
In the interim period, at least for the most part, the group having by far the most influence where ideas and concepts were concerned, were the liberals and their respected forebearers, the socialists. These hyperactivists included, but were by no means limited to, most of the professors on America's college and university campuses.
But most of all these liberals wrote books. Hundreds and hundreds of their books rolled off the presses down through the years (still do, by the way) almost without competition from the traditional conservatives and especially the libertarians and neo-conservatives - until Stormer's book.
Another appropriate title Stormer might have used could have been Wake Up America. Well, wake up America it did indeed. The liberal establishment just went ape. Despite liberals' attempts to discredit the book, Stormer succeeded - in spades. Here are some of the reasons:
Chapter 1 is entitled "Have We Gone Crazy?" Early therein he writes, "The cold war is real war. Yet most Americans refuse to admit (it)." Remember now, he's writing in the early 1960s but with great insight. He goes on about "hot" wars in China, Malaya, Indonesia, Algeria, the Congo, Cuba, Iraq, Gaza Strip, Hungary, Korea, Angola, Burma, Tibet.
In 1963, there was fighting in Laos, Vietnam, along the 38th parallel in Korea and terrorist activity in Africa. The forces of freedom have lost or will lose them all.
"There has been no 'big' war because the communists are winning without one."
Stormer went on to detail both America's blundering foreign policy and domestic policies and while not perfect (1964) his batting average was little short of phenomenal, hence the quote from where his title None Dare Call It Reason came from:
"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason." The quote is from Sir John Harrington (1561-1612.) It drove the liberals up the wall in the 1960s and my guess is so will the Stormer update, "... 25 Years Later," again. Sorry I don't have the current address, but with a little effort you can find it. Buy it. If you like it, spread it around.
As an interesting aside, local folks may be especially interested to know that a graduate of the College of Idaho of about 60 years ago played a super key role in 1963 by distributing more than 3 million copies of Stormer's first book. He is Maurice Brainard now of Whittier, Calif., and, with apologies to the major political makeup of today's C of I (ho, ho, ho) this graduate is easily one of the country's grand old heroes (he's well up into his 80s and going strong) of modern conservatives.
Reversing Caldwell Chamber Mistake
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 15, 1989
For some time now, I have been asking my friends in Caldwell, most of whom are business or professional people, what they think of the "new" location of our Chamber of Commerce north of town. The consensus is overwhelming: an unmitigated disaster!
Let me hasted to add that a lot of sincere, conscientious and intelligent concerned citizens worked hard to decide where to relocate the new office after the old one was sold. That sale, by the way, enabled Caldwell Paint and Glass to make a beautiful expansion, thus affording our downtown with some welcome addition to a rather dismal looking business district. (They paid well for it, too.)
In fairness, one should also note that not everybody favored selling and moving the chamber from downtown, but these members' ideas did not prevail. Maybe they should have; then again, perhaps the alternative locations they suggested were not properly explained or adequately and enthusiastically promoted. Who knows?
One thing, however, seems dead sure now that we have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. We have made a mistake, but having made it there is no reason we should just "cry in our beer" as the saying goes, and leave it that way. Let's explore some ways out of the swamp. Good people made the old decision (to move from downtown); these same good people can make a new decision.
Here is the result of my informal survey along with some suggestions in no particular order of importance:
1. Downtown Caldwell has a very serious case of the doldrums. "Something needs to be done," everyone says, "even if it's wrong." That is their way of saying the matter is both worrisome an worthy.
2. The appearance of downtown's empty buildings is sad, but many of the businesses formerly occupying them are still here, e.g., Safeway (now Albertsons No. 2) and Lanny Berg Chevrolet have merely moved. Paul's market is new and just outside right downtown.
3. One can make a case either way, that is, to ask, is Caldwell's "glass" half full or half empty? Yes, is no answer.
4. Our leadership is a kind of basket case. Why? Well, nobody knows quite where they (we?) want to be led. We seem to be more enthusiastic for what and who we are against rather than what and who we are for.
Comes now Caldwell's Bob Bushnell, an entrepreneur of no mean proportions. Not all of his enterprises have been rousing successes, but most of them have. In any event, Bushnell has purchased what is known as the Trolley Square complex right downtown just across 8th Avenue from the government's post office (there are now private ones, too, remember?.
The innovative Bushnell has remodeled Trolley Square at great expense into a real convention center and multi-faceted meeting place. Its considerable proportions and attractive, if rambling, hallways and numerous sizes and shapes of rooms and interesting classic antiques are well worth a special visit.
But a visit for us curiosity buffs is one thing - of much more importance to the survival of downtown is activity. Trolly Square stands a good chance of helping revive our little city but it will need activity between, as well as during its conventions, meetings and other events. (Even a wedding has already been scheduled there.)
So here's the punch line: Why don't they (we?) move the Chamber of Commerce downtown into Trolly Square? While I have not talked to Bushnell, my guess is he'd be glad to let the Chamber have adequate space virtually rent free for two or three years to help publicize his newest creation. The present chamber building could surely be leased or rented to some company or some entity to whom the location well might be an advantage.
Oh sure, it is easy to suggest how someone else should "donate" office space for a good cause, but this scheme suggests two good causes, i.e., Bushnell's as well as the chamber's cause. If ever a deal seemed to be synergistic it is this one. Remember that.
When I tried the idea on a Caldwell businessman, the venerable Gene Graves, he remarked: "I was one of those who favored and pushed to move the chamber office way out there north of town. But it was obviously a mistake. We probably should admit it and set about rectifying it before it's too late."
Now then, not everybody loves Bushnell. Also his new convention center manager, the delightful (Mrs.) Jackie Carter, has a neat husband presently the manager of the Chamber of Commerce, who just may run for mayor next election. So:
Caldwell's naysayers, and there's a multitude of them, could have a field day alleging some claptrap about conflict of interest, or a free lunch, etc. Balderdash!
If you ever gave a damn yourself - take sides now. Or ask the last one leaving town to please turn out the lights.
Democrat Sets GOP Agenda
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 22, 1989
On the matter of politics, principles and pragmatism - a few observations about the recent election and subsequent happenings springing from it:
Now that Canyon County Chairwoman Cheryl Pleak, head of the Democrat Party organization, is setting the agenda for both political parties maybe it's time for a merger or, with apologies to big business, a hostile takeover.
During the recent election campaign Pleak repeatedly bawled like a mashed cat with the claim that two incumbent Republicans running for re-election to the Idaho House of Representatives were not loyal GOPers, but really closet Libertarians in disguise. Believe it or not Democrat Pleak was alleging that conservative Reps. Robert Schaefer and Elizabeth Allan-Hodge were not loyal to her (Pleak's enemies, the Republicans. Egad!
If that seems strange to you, it should. But just like so many things in politics not everything is open and above board, hence until one knows the "why" of seemingly strange goings-on, then the "what" doesn't make much sense. Here's some of the why:
It's difficult at best to get elected to office in Canyon County if one is a Democrat. It's possible, but it's tough. So, given the nearly impossible task of electing two youngsters who, in addition to being Democrats, were all but incompetent Pleak had nothing to lose. She pulled all the stops alleging every goofy claim in the book all the way from Hitler's total government to the anarchist's no government at all. She tried to scare the voters into total confusion.
This is the oldest ploy in politics going back centuries and, if cleverly done, sometimes it works. One remembers Hitler's propaganda minister's statement: "If you tell a lie, big enough, and often enough, then most people will believe it." This is especially so if there is room for a half-truth, which is much tougher than a lie.
Now then, the half-truth is that both Schaefer and Allan-Hodge properly advocate dramatically less government. They also want to make the case for private property which is the single most important distinction between our system and the communist system. This tends to make these GOPers "guilty" of being anti-communists, especially when they are blunt and forthright unlike most of today's politicians.
Comes now the Libertarian Party. It is saying much the same thing, except it usually wants to go farther than Allan-Hodge and Schaefer. The latter often point out, a does the Libertarian Party, that America's founding fathers were libertarian. In fact Thomas Jefferson is probably its most important patron saint. Unfortunately, today's politicos use the collectivist herd instinct and the media's ever-present personality-cult and sensationalism to sell both candidates and phony vote-buying schemes.
Even sincere candidates must deal with the cheese in this trap. So Pleak's ploy was to shoot from the hip, and shoot and shoot and shoot. It didn't work, but it panicked the Republican establishment, namely, Dr. Bill Watkins, Canyon County chairman of the Republicans. Why? Because he reads the newspapers. And Pleak's ploy made great grist for the media, I must admit, partly because Pleak, or her candidates' charges were so bizarre and partly because newspapers love to give somebody - anybody - a bad time.
This latter syndrome, however, seldom applies to Janet Hay, a very liberal, if charming, Republican. The media, for some strange reason, is especially protective of Hay. Maybe it's the personality-cult. I don't know. But more about her in a moment.
Comes now Maurice Clements, prominent Nampa farmer, former two-term GOP legislator and, as of last campaign, a Libertarian Party candidate for the seat held by the very liberal lady Hay. She was by far the district's biggest government spender in 1987 having voted for $95 million in new taxes. That is 32 times more than Allan-Hodge votes for. Clements knew he wouldn't win, what with a very small budget and having to campaign during farm harvest-time with a big farming operation. But he wanted to try to sell some ideas. So did most of the dozens who signed his endorsement ads in the newspaper.
Pleak's ploy to sell Democrat socialism was a windfall profit for Clements, but it caused Watkins some headaches. This writer begged the GOP chairman to use the opportunity to "sell some ideas" and explain to the public that merely because Schaefer and Allan-Hodge wanted much less government they were still qualified as good Republicans - not Libertarians "in disguise" as claimed by his Democrat counterpart, Pleak.
Yet Watkins refused not only my suggestion but others' as well. Not even a feeble defense of his two loyal Republicans who had come under such a vicious attack. Why? Well, one wonders. If he had done so, however, it would have tended to make the two candidates, charged by Pleak as being "closet Libertarians," look good - on principle. If they looked good especially on principle, Watkins' pride and joy, Janet Hay, thus had to look bad, i.e., against Clements the Libertarian now loved by so many formerly hardrock Republicans. Many Republicans publicly endorsed him against the liberal Hay including even a precinct committeeman and a whole bunch of GOP regulars.
Watkins, who is said to harbor big political aspirations himself, was between a rock and a hard place. How would he solve his dilemma?
Unfortunately, and not unlike President Reagan with North and Poindexter, Watkins left his most loyal conservatives - hanging, twisting in the wind.
Ex-Church Aide Cheap Shots Symms
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 29, 1989
What does a washed up former press secretary to a U.S. senator do when he hates the present status, or lack of it, in his current job?
Well, depending on how good, or in this case, bad, his self-image is there is one of them who spends a better part of his life on a personal vendetta against the man who defeated his hero, pal and former boss in a U.S. Senate election.
Recently Bill Hall, long-time extreme liberal editor of the editorial page of the Lewiston Morning Tribune (LMT) and one-time press secretary to former U.S. Sen. Frank Church, did a dastardly deed. He found an opportunity to continue his mean-spirited campaign against Idaho's junior senator, Steve Symms. With the help of a New York underground cult magazine called SPY, Hall was able to turn half-truths into a column of garbage and use it to publicly smear his old adversary Symms. Space prohibits reprinting the whole article, but it was real nasty.
As an interesting aside, it was Hall who, no less than 17 years ago, quite unwittingly helped give the then candidate for Congress, Symms, the credibility he needed to break into newsworthiness. I say "unwittingly" because Hall rather liked the libertarian style of the mostly unorthodox campaign of ideas launched by Symms in 1972. Without the Lewiston editor's temporary support, even if some of it was tongue-in-cheek, the apple grower would have had a much harder time getting the media's attention.
Symms' slogan, "Take a bite out of government," appealed even to super-liberals like Hall in those days particularly since the latter never in his wildest dream thought folks would actually vote for Symms' bizarre ideas to get the government off people's back, Hall has lived to regret ever having given a dime's worth of space to the vigorous and ever-so-electable Idaho conservative.
But back to SPY: The trouble with the cult-magazine's allegations is that the subscribers are never informed in the article that its source is Bill Hall who sounds like little more than a sore loser drowning in a tub of self-pity when he launched his assault on Symms.
Most of the allegations are obvious exaggerations but Hall, knowing Symms would never respond publicly, exerts his "editorial license" of lies and deceit. Hall's gun-type attack on Symms would have gone unnoticed by the public and served to relieve Hall of his holiday blues except another super-liberal newspaper (even worse than LMT) the Washington Post, saw an opportunity to draw blood.
The Post ran an article which simply listed the congressmen mentioned in the SPY magazine article. The Post by no means mentioned the fact that reporters from those congressmen's own states were responsible for the "information" (read, hatchet-job) in the article. In all of the cases the reporters were known antagonists of the senators.
Good reporters would never think of taking part in such a juvenile and unprofessional project. Inside sources of SPY magazine said they originally had intended to include many more congressmen, but could not recruit enough "reporters" to write the smear jobs.
To add to an already unprofessional hatchet job, newspapers in Idaho hear of the "report" in the Washington Post. But do they attempt to get to, or even confirm, the truth behind the SPY magazine article? Of course not. Why SPY surely must be a credible publication what with an anti-conservative story like that. They grabbed the story.
Once again Idaho newspapers followed the lead of the Post - in all probability the country's most left-liberal regular paper. It is also the most anti-conservative. Thus the Idaho papers followed one of their most liberal mentors into the journalist's swamp of sensationalism.
Or, as characterized by a vice president of another day, the "nattering nabob's of negativism" were at their wolf-pack journalistic best, or, if you prefer, worst.
It is at least interesting how one disgruntled ex-press secretary can single-handedly fool the state's papers into thinking that the national media consider Idaho's Sen. Symms to be one of America's "10 dumbest." That was only part of what Hall's all but libelous lies and half-truths "reported" for publishing in SPY then the Washington Post, then in Idaho papers and then, of course, miscellaneous papers across the country.
Symms is not, even in this part-time admirer's and part-time critic's opinion, as libertarian-leaning as he was in 1972, Mr. Hall. Furthermore, he may not be as brilliant and libertarian as Thomas Jefferson, who is one of his greatest mentors of all time. But when almost nobody else in the country thought Symms could pull it off - he was smart enough to beat you and the then longest reigning (a quarter of a century) Democrat senator in recent Idaho history, the late, famed U.S. senator, Frank Church.
Hall's piece done for SPY was as Shakespeare described one many years ago: "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury - signifying nothing."
More Raspberries, Roses
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 5, 1989
It is a bit sad that new readers cannot hear the flappy, sputtery sound of a raspberry directed towards somebody who deserves a Bronx cheer too. But regular readers of this column will know what I mean when I say:
Razzberries to the Canyon County members of the Idaho Legislature, all of whom are Republicans by the way, for "accepting a huge pay increase in a closed meeting." That's what the front page headline said (Idaho Press Tribune, Feb. 2) in a bylined story by political reporter Sam Lang quoting W.O. "Bill" Taylor, R-Nampa, saying he thought it was "justifiable because of the money we have to personally spend because of the demands of our district." Apparently most of the others agreed. But this begs the question.
In addition to the approximately $2,500 a year increase paid to each politician, the issue is whether or not the public is entitled to see an open vote, up or down, "signed" by each legislator. Instead they chose to do it in a closed meeting - in secret.
Roses for two exceptions from Canyon County. Straightforward Reps. Robert Schaefer and Elizabeth Allan-Hodge both publicly pleaded for the "public's right to know" how each legislator voted. All of which involves considerable risk, and some extra guts, for the two Republican dissenters. Why?
Because their leadership, also Republican, wants the pay increase. Said leadership controls not only who gets to chair important committees, but also the key appointments on those committees. If Schaefer and Allan-Hodge raise too much public debate, then they risk the wrath of Speaker of the House Tom Boyd's (also Republican) extreme power to lean on them and lean on those he disagrees with - which he does. Sometimes arbitrarily and hard. But at their own peril and risk Schaefer and Allan-Hodge spoke up. To her credit, Rep. Frances Field, R-Grand View, voted likewise.
Razzberries for most of the politicians in Congress, too, for their intellectual dishonesty in the similar raising of their own salaries. Idaho's pay raise pales by comparison for the extreme amounts of money involved. But the intellectual dishonesty is largely the same. Both state and national groups know full well the voters will be furious if the politicians raise their own pay, especially in such huge amounts, i.e., from $89,000 to $135,000. That, ladies and gentlemen, is not over a period of five years, it is all in one year. It is not merely dishonest, it is being arrogant and power-hungry.
Roses for U.S. Sen. Steve Symms, R-Idaho, who along with the other members of the Idaho delegation oppose the pay raise. Symms is singled out, however, with these roses for his proposed amendment to the pay raise bill. In a conversation with the new Senate majority leader, Symms explained: "First we leave our salary right where it is at $89,500, but if we balance the budget the Congress gets a 25 percent bonus and if they (we) cure the deficit, the bonus is increased to 50 percent. There would be a limit in any case to their total compensation at $135,000."
According to Symms, Sen. Mitchell, a Democrat of course, noted with some glee if not exactly an endorsement, that of all 11 proposed amendments pending, Symms' was easily the most innovative.
Roses too for Congressman Larry Craig who has been doing his dangedest to force the extreme liberal speaker of the House, Jim Wright, D-Texas, to have an open public vote on the current proposed automatic pay raise jump to $135,000.
Razzberries to Boise City Council person (forgive me) Mike Weatherell and State Sen. Marie Callibretta, D-Kellogg. Both of these extreme liberals have pushed hard to force the exclusive men's Arid Club of Boise to accept females for membership into the century-old organization.
Voted down last year, the club voted Thursday night 67 percent to 33 percent to knuckle under to Weatherell's threat of passing a city ordinance canceling the club's liquor license.
While some members wanted to admit women without the blackmail tactics of the extreme liberal politicians, many others grumbled at the obvious coersion against what they saw as their social freedom of association. But all across America today individual freedoms of choice are disappearing almost without a whimper.
One is reminded of the great C.S. Lewis' commentary: "We raise men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We remove the organ and demand the function. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
Licensing Bill Hurts the Little Guy
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 12, 1989
One of the comments most often repeated by the news media during the recent presidential campaign was that it was so "awfully negative." The comment was repeated so often that it became more or less chiseled in stone, so to speak.
Please let me suggest to you that such an allegation, that the campaign was excessively negative, is, well, balderdash.
Both George Bush and Michael Dukakis wanted the job as president of the United States more than anything else in the world.
Both set about, then, with considerable vigor, to show the voters the differences between them, not the similarities. So, quite logically, if there by anything logical at all in politics, both negative qualities and positive ones are "logically" called for. All of this is quite proper in an important political contest. Indeed, one often is motivated more to vote against the badness of one candidate than the goodness of the other. Not a bad idea by the way.
In President George Bush's budget speech last Thursday night, he said, "The people did not send us here to bicker." He meant, of course, the Democrat Congress and his own Republican administration. It's called "being positive." And it sounds good, too. But he's wrong.
More nearly it is a fact that that is exactly what people did do, or thought they were doing. They were to bicker, or debate, if you like that word better, so that neither side would have too much power to do things they, the people, didn't like.
The liberal media, especially the TV anchor people, are so very liberal they seemed actually to fear that government (a more appropriate word would be "statism") would get a bad name thus the powerful media bigshots might not have such an easy time dominating public policy as they do now.
Well, so much for the cliche: "Don't be negative." Why, it has almost become a social no-no to be against anything, witness even those who are against AIDS, the dreaded social disease mostly attributable as solely among homosexuals. True, some perfectly innocent victims have become infected through blood transfusions, etc., which is indeed tragic. But by and large one had better tread ever so lightly on the matter else he or she might be accused of being against (negative) homosexuality instead of AIDS itself.
Aside from the well-known, if poorly understood, message of the Ten Commandments, which are immensely and incontrovertibly negative, one can make as good a case for being negative against bad things and/or people as compared to being for good things and/or people.
We can tip our hat to the great Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago for a neat expression of all this foolishness. This political philosopher alluded to it in his spectacularly successful best-selling book, The Closing of the American Mind, when he advised us to stop talking about the term "values" which is too ambiguous anyway. He said we should rather start teaching "good and bad" because these words make more sense.
A case in point comes up in our Idaho State Legislature next week as House Bill 119 has its committee hearing Wednesday mornings. Reps. Dean Haagenson and Jerry Deckard, both of whom are rather large contractors, are pushing the bill. They're doing this with little less than a fantastic frenzy to compel small building contractors to get a "work permit" from the government in order to compete in their chosen trade.
The bill is called "the contractor's licensing law." It demands an extensive (some say a Soviet-style) array of restrictions, hurdles and unnecessary requirements for the little guy who wants to work as a "contractor."
Generally speaking, it adversely affects only the small entry-level builders, but it has all sorts of ramifications for related trades and professions.
The Associated General Contractors (AGC) and the AFL-CIO are feverishly working to pass this bill or some watered-down version of it which is certain to be added to in the future. Bureaucracy and special interests always work that way.
Those opposing HB 119 are admonished by their advisors - at all costs "not to appear negative" to Haagenson and Deckard and their bill to restrict entry. "The rest of the legislators might tend to have sympathy toward their colleague's bill."
Egad! The more things change, the more they remain the same. Now, you can see why.
Good Guys 1, Licensing Guys 0
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 19, 1989
Something big happened in the Idaho Legislature last week. It made the news, but some misunderstanding still exists. The reason it was "big" is that an unusual blow was struck for freedom. That is to say, an old idea of protection for the establishment was shot down. Very unusual.
A bill called HB 119 was offered to force small building contractors to get a "work permit" (license) in order to pursue their chosen trade. A rather interesting assortment of groups was pushing the bill, a similar version of which was narrowly defeated last year. The large contractor association spent sizable sums of money in support of the bill along with the AFL-CIO and, believe it or not, of all people, a group of bureaucrats called building inspectors.
A few miscellaneous individuals and contractors both large and small were also present, but virtually no consumer groups at all as is typical in most licensure efforts. It is almost always the practitioners who make these requests ostensibly to protect the consumer, but in reality licensure is to restrict competition and free entry into the market against the little guy. Understandable, perhaps, yet a poor deal, generally, for public policy.
Against the proposed bill were a number of individuals, consumers and a few professional people. But most of the opposition came from a group of small contractors, entrepreneurs and consumers loosely bound together as "People for Consumer Protection" (PCP) which included several medium-size builders and at least one large one.
It was millionaire Walter Opp, well-known Nampa contractor who built such large structures as Boise's Westgate Mall and virtually the entire set of buildings of the giant Hewlett-Packard Corporation's complex, who made a most colorful claim: "If this bill had been the law when I started up in the 1950s I could never have got started." He went on to say that the bill "would not stop the crooks and unscrupulous contractors and could very well wipe out 90 percent of the small builders."
Many others like Opp are already licensed in this and other states, but said the proposed law will not help consumers but will keep out the competition of small contractors, thus driving up the cost of houses and buildings unnecessarily.
Most of those testifying against the bill were real small builders, about 25 of whom could not get in the crowded House State Affairs Committee room and had to take turns peeking through the doorway and listening from the hallway to those who might and could put them out of work.
Still, many sincere citizens feel more secure if the government passes more and more laws even though the time-worn and ancient idea of work permits, licenses and miscellaneous mandates are fast being discredited by most economists and social critics. Many attending the HB 119 hearing so testified in favor of the contractor licensing law and cited cases of poor workmanship and fraud.
But the committee members decided the bill, pushed with great gusto by Reps. Jerry Deckard, R-Eagle, and Dean Haagenson, R-Coeur d'Alene, would be mostly just another layer of bureaucracy. They shot it down hard by a vote of 13-6.
There were a few laughs during the three hours of lively and sincere testimony from both sides, but by far the most spirited and colorful took place right after the vote. In the hallway just outside the main door to the hearing room was a heated exchange between the two biggest contractors at the hearing. Opp, who said he was "for the little guy" and against the bill, attempted some conciliatory gesture toward Haagenson who had lobbied long and hard for "quality and consumer protection" via his just defeated bill.
But the testy Coeur d'Alene politician was steaming from the drubbing just sustained at the hands of the House committee of which he himself was actually a voting member. He rebuked his (former?) friend Opp by virtually calling him a liar. The latter suggested among other, well "recommendations," perhaps then they should go outside and settle it. Considerable shouting ensued with Haagenson alleging Opp was little more than a "reader" of this columnist and the "blankety blank crap" (actually a four-letter word) he writes in the Idaho Press-Tribune.
For some reason this really infuriated Opp until I pleaded: "Hey, don't get too mad Walter. I seldom get such a big compliment."
Somehow my remark didn't assuage Opp's temper very much, since the volatile Nampan prides himself on being his own man - in spades. But we did manage a civil exit.
Nampa contractor-to-be and former Washington builder, Herb Jennings, who also opposed Haagenson's bill, and so testified less than an hour previous, was not so lucky. Haagenson called Jennings a "special" kind of liar possibly due to the latter's two letters to the editor denouncing Haagenson's proposal (The "special" kind of expletive is the one used in certain sex sequences.)
So much for special interest legislation and self-righteous and kindred politicians who should be, but are not, ashamed of themselves.
More Roses, Razzberries
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 26, 1989
A "rose is a rose is a rose," so it is said. But oft-times it is the unflattering noise and the raspberry's "heat" that makes 'em notice the light. So:
Razzberries for Rep. Dean Haagenson, R-Coeur d'Alene, also a big building contractor. His special interest bill, HB 119, was defeated recently in the House State Affairs by an overwhelming vote of 13 to 6. The bill, only narrowly defeated last year, is offered to protect the consumer, but was exposed this year in a hotly-contested hearing as mostly a special interest bill to keep out the competition from real small contractors.
Haagenson is reliably reported to be frantically searching for a Senate committee, more sympathetic, to re-introduce his anti-competition bill so severely clobbered in the House.
Roses to those "kinder and gentler" souls who refuse to push their own special interest bills in the Legislature, especially when they themselves are members of the Legislature. One remembers the criticism school teachers used to get when they first began to dominate the discussions on schools. Their own pay and money for their own infrastructure was blatant, a withering fire and effective. Witness they are now getting 75 percent of the state's entire budget and, aided by others who want the government to subsidize their voted dependent work force from whence cometh their future employees, i.e., their unsatisfiable appetite is still rising fast.
Razzberries for super-conservative activist Paul Weyrich who led the anti-John Tower forces demanding defeat of the former U.S. senator's confirmation for secretary of defense. Weyrich's blue-noses complained that Tower drank too much booze. One is reminded of President Abraham Lincoln's answer to those complaining that Gen. Grant drank too much: "Get me the label off one of his whiskey bottles and I'll recommend that same grand to my other generals."
Roses to President Bush for resisting numerous critics who did not want him to attend the Japanese state funeral for Emperor Hirohito. The critics claimed the Japanese figurehead was largely responsible for the attack of Dec. 7, 1941, on Pearl Harbor. While the claim is unlikely, I would also note that Hirohito was most helpful to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's peaceful occupation of the defeated country after WW II. We can forgive - even if we don't forget.
Roses for skeptics, I should hasten to add, who remember the torture and abuse inflicted on American prisoners of war taken by the Japanese, but who tend to forget that the United States uprooted thousands of our own Japanese nationals here in America in 1942. Some of these folks lost their farms and homes. Only recently has any remuneration been made from our government to pay damages for the loss.
Razzberries, however, for some black Americans who are now trying to get a similar reparations penalty payment. It is to be made to so far unidentified blacks because their ancestors were forcibly "kidnapped" from Africa and brought to America as slaves. Egad!
Razzberries are not a strong enough criticism for Arizona State University. Their Office of Student Life has denied party status to the Libertarian Party, although it recognizes other parties, including the Young Communist League. So says the Daily News Digest of Phoenix.
Razzberries, again, are too mild for the Pentagon's Navy Department. A 9,600-ton Navy Ticonderoga class cruiser carries 26 tons (yes, tons) of manuals on how to maintain and operate its complex weapons systems. The Pentagon is moving towards storing of this type of data on computer disks, microfiche cards, and someday, laser disks.
Razzberries for a Biloxi, Miss., federal judge and the various jackasses in the Congress and federal judicial bureaucratic do-gooders. The judge ruled that the Salvation Army violated a woman's constitutional right to freedom of religion when that great and good church fired the woman because (now get this) she practices witchcraft. This message, by the way, was in the Feb. 13 issue of Fortune.
One guesses the left-wing media all across America and the government TV's McNeil/Lehrer Report doesn't see the Salvation Army as newsworthy.
Republicans Acting Like Democrats
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 5, 1989
Has Phil Batt, the popular ex-state senator from Canyon County, undergone some sort of political transformation since his retirement from more than a decade of service in that zoo?
Don't know. But for an excellent suggestion he made on the phone to this writer last week here is a bouquet of:
Roses to the ex-solon for his, "Why don't those people over at Boise just print up a ballot for statewide circulation with only Democrats on it from which we would vote for all our legislative representatives? That's almost all we have there today anyway. They all act like Democrats. The whole dang bunch seems to be going crazy. I thought they were spending too much last year. But this year is far worse."
Razzberries for Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Blackfoot, who said last week "We are subsidizing business with the state's investment tax credit (ITC)." Horsefeathers and razzberries both.
Simpson, a relatively conservative legislator before he was "elevated" into GOP leadership this year, must have taken leave of the common sense with which he used to view fiscal sanity
Roses for Ralph Smeed who wrote in a column a few years ago, relative to such faulty reasoning as calling ITC a subsidy, that when Caesar took huge sums of tax monies from the Roman countrymen against their will, he thought it was his to spend. One could suppose that since Caesar had the guns, so to speak, the taxes were indeed his. Nowadays the modern Caesars (politicians) also collect large sums of taxes from the citizens, including corporate citizens. Today's "Caesars" offer to forgive, or give back, a portion of those taxes so that they may be plowed back into the businesses to make more jobs and production. It is sometimes called an ITC investment!
Why, in heaven's name then, should the likes of Simpson say the state is thus "subsidizing" business? He might have called it "allowing" capitalism to work except that that is a dirty word in today's legislatures. Unfortunately it is all across the nation. Idaho is fast following the Kennedy, McGovern and Dukakis-like "Caesers" who don't know the difference between capitalism and statism.
Roses, too, to the lion's share (though not all) of the educators and education buffs in our fair state who, if they do know the difference between Adam Smith's capitalism and Karl Marx's statism, which I doubt, they are honest enough not to brag about and label their preference - publicly. Market capitalism, to most, is a campus no-no.
Razzberries, then, for a large number of our corporate philanthropists, many of whom reside in Boise by the way. They give money to statist organizations who hate their capitalistic guts. Now then, I hasten to add that many don't hate the tycoons' capitalism. But the public dialogue about the contest which rages furiously, if sub rosa, in the faculty lounges on most campuses is remarkably silent.
It is also seldom talked about candidly in the corporate board rooms. Social status and a kind of snobbish acceptability can be purchased instead - much of it with stockholders' money. Some of this no doubt is intended to buy "respectability" from environmentalists, tree-huggers and extreme elements of so-called consumer advocates, usually left-wingers. But to the everlasting credit of the latters' intellectual honesty they are seldom, if ever, for sale. The capitalists, however, feed the alligators hoping they (the alligators) will eat them last. Egad!
Roses for Press-Tribune reporter Dave Wilkins for his front page story last week entitled "Cattlemen stymied by juniper trees." Jordan Valley rancher Mike Hanley and many others face dire consequences by a vast and prolific growth of juniper trees which they have successfully controlled for decades simply by burning. Most of this has been with the cooperation of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), but now the tree-hugging environmentalists threaten to sue the BLM if they allow any burning at all. So the BLM is letting the ranchers hang - twisting in the wind. Treasure Valley Chambers of Commerce please take note. A big chunk of your neck is in that same noose. You survive on those cowboys' raw material.
Wilkins' front page story should have been headlined "Cattlemen stymied by impotent bureaucrats and important tree-huggers."
Razzberries for Boise's Idaho Statesman whose editorials can almost always be depended upon for more government (read, statism). Last Thursday's editorial read in part: "The GOP ... is facing a failure of the will in the Senate ..." The Statesman demands even more money for the college construction budget.
This session began with a $52 million surplus. Already they have spent that plus an estimated $14 million more. Some GOP resistance such as the one the Statesman labels "the tight-fisted Mack Neibaur" says whoa.
Instead of a "failure of will," the GOP, who are said to dominate the Legislature, face a "failure of won't." Most of them won't stop thinking like Democrat - statists.
Batt was right.
Public TV Unfair Competition
By Ralph Smeed
March 12, 1989
An event took place last week about which I should like to comment, partly because it is about the news media and may be cause for a little alarm, if not righteous indignation.
The Idaho Legislature decided in its infinite wisdom: "taking back money they'd already agreed to spend on court computers and shifting it to public TV." Said another way, the lawmakers voted to give $2 million (of the $4.5 million originally earmarked for the courts) instead to the government TV.
In spite of what some people claim, the people do not own the Public Broadcasting System (PBS, Channel 4), located, by the way, on the campus of the government university, Boise State University (BSU). Why do I say "they don't own it?" Simple! Because if they owned it they could sell it. That's why. And, of course, they can't.
What does all this have to do with the Legislature "taking back" $2 million from the court system? Well, our government has virtually denied the little guy reasonable access to the courts and it just may be that that money could have made reasonable and swift justice via the court system more available - sooner. So says one of the court's former expert administrators, since retired. You know the old saying: "Justice delayed is justice denied." Well, this question never ever even got debated on the floor of the Legislature. Just glossed over.
So much for which department of the government has the most clout in this session of runaway big spenders who took a $52 million surplus at the beginning of the session and spent it into a $17 million deficit in less than 60 days. The so-called PBS has the best lobby and thus more clout than the court system - this time and for this particular $2 million.
But all this is not the most important error in public policy we should be looking at concerning the government TV (PBS). By this I mean to call your attention to the growing advertisements on Channel 4, KAID-TV. You surely must have noticed that more and more "information" is given for the benefit of those giant national and international corporations and enterprises who advertise on public TV. They are called "credits" and "acknowledgements" for the "grants" given to those fine folks at PBS who are doing such a pleasant job of entertaining us.
Well, that's true enough, at least to an extent, but the government TV system doesn't have to make a profit, doesn't have to compete on a level playing field of entrepreneurship and competition either. But the commercial stations, the newspapers and magazines, etc. etc., do. These private sector companies are forced to compete for many of those same "advertising" dollars from those same giant, and some not so giant, companies. It just "ain't fair" competition no matter how popular the PBS-TV programs may be "without the commercials."
Just you watch, my friendly taxpayers, and you will notice the "ads" on the government TV get longer and longer as time goes on. And, too, just ask some of your friends in the advertising business who have lost accounts to companies whose limited budgets go instead to the government TV.
One supposes the "what's-in-it-for-me?" generation won't be too shook up if the competition isn't on a level playing field - for the other guy. We seem seldom concerned unless the "unfair" competition affect us directly. That, of course, is how a free society falters, than fails. Freedom is like shaving, i.e., each morning you get up and look in the mirror - and you have to cut back the stubble, all over again. It's forever and ever.
All of which is not to say that the friendly folk at the government TV in Boise, and one supposes, elsewhere all over the nation, are not decent, likeable, intelligent and well-meaning people. There's Jerry Garber, the big chief, Bruce Reichert, the outdoorsman, who takes us hunting and fishing at least when the legislators are not "biting" and spending like wolves with ravenous appetites when he and Barbara Pullam give us their overview each night in Idaho Reports. All are nice and good guys, too. They really are. And they try hard to do their job.
Still, some suspicion lingers. Remember when the last three "stars" on Idaho Public Television terminated their employment with Channel 4 to go to work full time (pun intended) for three separate major Idaho Democrat politicians, all three were what many would call - wild-eyed liberals. If you ever see a wild-eyed conservative there, call me collect.
Competition may be the spice of life, but when government furnishes the "spice," mild as it may seem at first, heartburn may be just around the corner.
Watch the Government Screw This Up
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 19, 1989
Whatever one thinks of President Woodrow Wilson, some think he was great and some think he was poor, one thing this fine gentleman said was indeed great. It was: "The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power - not the increase of it."
Thomas Jefferson had used similar words and certainly believed in these ideas, so don't you think we should pay some heed? Sure! So do I.
But the Idaho Legislature apparently does not. In fact they seem to have taken leave of their private sector senses. Following hard on the heels of a whole string of silly laws and big spending schemes the House did it again last Tuesday. They voted by a substantial majority to put the government in the savings business. Now, if you are not put off by oxymorons, they voted to put the government into the investment business. Egad!
While I haven't read it yet (there are several hundred bills already considered, and more to come) House Bill 346 says the citizens may put big bucks per year into some government bureau for their children's education. Some years in the future the state government is supposed to give it back, so to speak, plus interest for the child's in-state higher education. Each year's deposit gets a generous tax deduction and the total amount is supposed to be returned, plus interest also tax free, to pay for students' "higher" education. They are careful not to specify what it's higher than.
There are other facets of the bills, not to mention its good intentions, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Remember?
Suffice it to say that costs in schooling are going up like most everything else, thanks to our big spending legislators. But putting the state government into competition with private businesses such as insurance annuities, stockbrokers and regular savings institutions will not make costs go down.
What can government do that makes sense? Can it run a bank? No. Can it run a welfare agency well? No. Can it farm? No. Can it repair a car? No. Can it even educate well? Not very, that is if one believes even half the plethora of articles in today's national magazines and newspapers about kids who can't function.
So why do the legislators want to put the government into yet another business? This time into the savings business. Why? Well, three or four items seem critical. Education has become the state religion. Merely mention the word and anything goes. It's not altogether unlike the proverbial "sacred cow" in India.
Another reason is the Idaho Education Association (IEA). The teachers' union is easily the most powerful union in the state. Its big sister, the National Education Association (NEA), is the most powerful union in America. Both are extreme left-liberal in their political thrusts all of which are for more government and most of which are anti-capitalist.
Next is the news media, easily the most powerful intellectual influence on a day to day basis in the U.S. and through which we get almost all our political criticism, commentary and constructive news (How's that for an oxymoron?). Almost 90 percent of the media is anti-business and pro-left on education matters.
Then last but not least are the lawyers of America who should easily be the country's first line of defense against Big Brother government oppression. While some of the criticism this profession gets is not deserved by many attorneys, much of the scorn heaped upon the practitioners is spotlighted by a glaring lack of self-criticism among their own profession - publicly. Competition serves to keep most businessmen in line, but among lawyers, well, try to get one to sue another one or to criticize him (or her) publicly.
These professionals, some of whom are indeed pillars in their community, could and should be the watchdogs for our republic. But somehow it almost never happens. So, small wonder not one lawyer spoke out publicly on the HB 346 as "unfair competition" which, of course, it clearly is.
We are indebted to Playboy magazine for a timely case in point commentary and at least a partial explanation. Here it is:
"An attorney was working late in his office one night when the devil suddenly appeared and offered him a deal. Beginning immediately, Satan said, the lawyer could win all of his cases, make twice as much money, work half as much, be loved by his partners, be worshiped by the office staff, be attended to by a beautiful nymphomaniacal secretary and be assured of living to a happy, healthy, virile old age.
"All I want in exchange," said the devil, "is your soul and the souls of your wife, children, friends, ancestors and descendants."
The lawyer considered the offer. "So," he asked, suspiciously, "What's the catch?"
One of those "catches" is the deafening silence from Idaho lawyers - about Big Brother government.
On the Road to Financial Slavery
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 26, 1989
Surprise, surprise, the Idaho Legislature started its current session with a surplus of $52 million. Then the Joint Finance-Appropriation Committee (JFAC) reported out so many big spending bills the so-called surplus turned into a $17 million deficit.
The media should love to report on this, since they love to tell us about bad news. Good news, whenever there is some, seems to be no news at all. Some good news would be a smaller budget headline.
Well, surprise, surprise again. At last report they have their spending spree cut down to a small surplus. By the time you read this, anything could be the case. Thank heaven Idaho's Constitution demands the budget be balanced. Were it not so the Gem state would be a fine training ground for politicians aspiring to higher government office, namely, Insane City, D.C.
But let's not hold our breath waiting for a new batch of politicians so much against spending they would be naming names in the present batch. That way the voters could tell who's on first. For some strange reason representatives of both parties would rather rail in general at the other party than to cite name, rank and serial number of the specific "culprits." It's safer, of course.
Much of this is because the writers and TV news readers, having learned well from their journalism professors, convinced us long ago that to be plain-spoken and name names is only to be negative.
Yet even at this late date most folks and certainly 90 percent of the media have forgotten what the French genius Alexis de Tocqueville told us in the mid-1800s: "America is great, but as soon as the people find out they can vote themselves money from the public treasury their system will crumble."
And crumble it is doing, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, but strangely enough many voters and even the more enlightened non-voters seem impressed more by the numbers-crunchers on the nightly business report and with politicians itching to get into office by sounding "positive."
Those who try to warn us about the deluge are like Noah at whom they laughed about his building the ark - until it started to rain.
One of those giving yeoman service to both the masses and the monied is Harry Langenberg of St. Louis, Mo. Harry is a successful stockbroker of long standing and more importantly has for decades spent his own time and money trying to warn about "why and how" we are screwing up our private heritage. He is a farsighted financial and freedom fighter in the good sense of the words. But he seems to think the "what" problem we are wrestling with via our big spending political do-gooders is not exactly a financial one. It is rather a sort of moral problem that isn't understood.
A good and faithful friend of mine of long standing (he has been described as the Ralph Smeed of St. Louis - but much more successful), Langenberg wrote to me recently that it was, unfortunately, impossible to adequately measure the (financial) damage: The tax take has now reached about half of one's income leaving the other half for freedom of choice. He went on:
"In addition, the tax-take has reached a level where it raises a moral question. "Doesn't 'robbing Peter to pay Paul' involve breaking the Seventh Commandment - 'Thou shalt not steal'? Or is collectivized theft to be condoned versus individual theft?
Since there is no legal limit on governmental power to tax or inflate, at what point will the tax-take be regarded as confiscation which in turn could cause trouble or even revolt?
"Of course a 100 percent take would be slavery, but then the government would be forced to feed and clothe us. Eventually the issue of who owns the fruits of one's labor - the government or the individual - will no doubt be the issue."
It is now. Consider this:
Langenberg is an active alum of Princeton University who recently returned there in search of at least one professor who would be sympathetic to a conservative on-campus student newspaper. He couldn't find one single professor willing to help.
Well, my Idaho compatriots, just what is there in all the current crusade for even more higher education here in Idaho that suggests a conservative student newspaper would be any more welcomed by our own professors?
So, my friends, number crunching by the Legislature simply ain't where the problem is. For the most part it's on campus, especially in the liberal arts, all across America.
Play Some Cards, Yes; Pray, No
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 9, 1989
As government and the mentality which loves to see it get bigger grow more arrogant each day one wonders if my "razzberries" term is strong enough. But until I can think of one cranky enough to wake you up here are some:
Razzberries for the government in Valley Hills, N.Y. Earlier this month Shlomo Frankel and his son, Joseph, both rabbis, were fined $50,000 each for holding religious services for about two dozen people in their home. According to Virginia Postrel, associate editor of REASON magazine, "their zoning laws actually discriminate against religion. You won't be fined if you have a number of friends for bridge club or a Great Books discussion group, but you may run afoul of the law if you pray or read the Bible or the Torah." Egad!
Roses to the Wall Street Journal whose story on the insufferably liberal CBS-TV's apple hysteria helped to offset the network's virtually screaming "fire" in a crowded theater. Symms Fruit Ranch, for example, which had been shipping five truckloads per day, reported an immediate drop to only two truckloads per day following the recent 60 Minutes program.
Said the WSJ article: "Anti-apple campaign reached 60 Minutes and enlisted actress Meryl Streep to appear on Today and Donahue shows to talk up the risks of pesticides on apples. Apple growers protest, pointing out a person would have to eat 28,000 pounds of apples a day for 70 years to equal the dose of chemicals that causes cancer in lab rats. The EPA says apples are safe to eat."
Interestingly, these are the very same libs who tried almost daily for eight years during the Reagan administration to tell us that President Reagan was merely a movie actor - therefore didn't know much. But Streep does? Nuts!
Roses for a bunch of University of Washington physicians reporting their study on what could be called the "condom-nation" of our country. They said: "Sex ed in schools has little or not effect on when or whether teenagers have sex, use contraceptives or get pregnant."
Roses, and then some, for the great senator, Jesse Helms, whose story on the U.S. State Department's long-time attempt to give away the five Wrangel Islands (off Alaska) to the U.S.S.R. reached the front page of the Chicago Tribune last month. Sen. Helms' resolution opposing the giveaway of the five islands still has not been passed. Egad! And folks wonder why the John Birch Society thinks there's a conspiracy in the U.S. State Department. One wonders if our own Sens. McClure and Symms are also asleep regarding the attempted giveaway.
Roses for Idaho's U.S. senator, Jim McClure, for finally saying something as blunt and forth-right as his junior colleague often does. It was reported McClure said on Idaho TV recently, "House Speaker Democrat Jim Wright is a crook" and presumably should be convicted and put in jail.
Razzberries for the jackass who "reported" in the national news that the Valdez oil tanker spill in Alaska was the biggest environmental disaster since the Three Mile Island meltdown. Balderdash! What meltdown? While the drunken captain who allowed the tanker to be run aground and spill millions of gallons of crude oil did cause a screaming bad disaster, there was no meltdown at TMI and it ill-serves the media's credibility to say there was.
Razzberries to the top Soviet legal official who said there were no longer any political prisoners in Soviet jails. "I can look you in the eye and make this claim," said Alexander Sukhares. "We have a much more humane outlook now." My friend Johnny Johnson, Daily News Digest editor, says "Right! And the tooth fairy wears a green tutu."
And Ralph Smeed says "Jumpin' catfish! Even the U.S. cannot say we no longer have political prisoners, even in America. To those dreamers who doubt me - ask ex-Congressman George Hansen and the National Security Council's Marine Col. Oliver North."
Stop Giving Money to Your Enemies
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 16, 1989
"There are few phenomena so remarkable today as the seemingly relentless determination of America's largest business corporations to set aside a portion of their earnings for the benefit of their enemies."
That rather scary and unusual statement (read it again - it's awful) is made by William E. Simon, president of the John M. Olin Foundation and former U.S. secretary of the treasury. He wrote it in the preface in a new book published by the Capital Research Center (CRC) in Washington, D.C.
These people study critical issues in private giveaway programs with a special focus on public interest and advocacy groups, the funding that supports them and their combined impact on public policy and society. In the matter discussed here, it is private corporations and their so-called giveaways that are examined. Most folks tend to assume these corporate giants would be big boosters of the free-market, private-ownership, limited-government ideal and against the veritable multitude of liberal left-wing groups that have emerged in recent decades. But it just ain't so.
An earlier edition published in 1987 and edited by Dr. Marvin Olasky for the CRC examined the giveaways (forgive me, but calling it "philanthropy" tends to give the whole arena a sort of automatic blessing, if not an actual halo) of America's 100 largest corporations as rated by Forbes business magazine. Entitled Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy, the research determined "Seven of every 10 dollars these companies give away goes to left-of-center organizations." It was so successful and the book got so many rave reviews from nationally syndicated columnists and received so many favorable references in the Wall Street Journal that a new version was published this year encompassing a much broader range. The new edition is entitled Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy, Public Affairs Giving and the Forbes 250, but it expands by 150 percent the scope of the first book.
Consisting of 400 pages of interesting corporation serving, there are less than 30 pages of explanation, preface and commentary so it is delightfully plain-spoken and about as objective as such a subject could possibly be. Anyone interested in the matter of big corporation giving in the arena of public affairs should have a copy or read it at the library. Libraries, too, have a tendency to stock mostly statist-type books, hence may not have CRC's material. If not, just ask them and maybe, just maybe, they will stock it.
One's mind just boggles at the way so many people, yes, including Idahoans, seem relentlessly determined to "set aside a portion of their earnings" as Simon says, "for the benefit of their enemies." Social status and peer-group pressure, one supposes, drives them (not all), most of whom never even examine just how their money is spent, i.e., toward capitalism or toward socialism.
But authors Roger Meiners and David Laband, both of Clemson University, give us an inkling of where the corporations' dollars go: "There is an obvious bias (favoring) the left in the philosophical distribution of the $35,416,282 given to public affairs causes by donors in (CRC's) sample. The single largest recipient category, rated as left/liberal received $6,885,989, almost 20 percent of the total. The four most left of center categories got 26 percent, compared to 3 percent collected by the four most right of center.
"The (liberal) Council on Foreign Relations received $1,257,085, almost three times the $449,500 received by the (conservative) Hoover Institution."
Meiners and Laband conclude their essay in part summarizing the block-busting book with: "There is no single explanation for the public affairs giving programs of the corporations surveyed in this study, but one fact is clear: Contrary to common perception, there is nothing conservative about most corporations when it comes to their ... public affairs giving.
"No matter how they are explained, however, these patterns are profoundly disturbing. A disproportionate share ... supports partisans of the left, not advocates of the free-market system ..."
While visiting in Washington, D.C., recently, I had dinner with Willa Johnson, the delightfully bright high chieftess of CRC, who had only recently herself interviewed the great Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, probably the most famous economist in the world.
She quotes this most humane and brilliant scholar-in-residence at the Hoover Institution, located on the Stanford University campus, in her March CRC newsletter, "Alternatives." She gave me the very first copy to be distributed to anyone. In it Friedman said: "In practice, our universities have become overwhelmingly left-wing in orientation."
Now then, my friends, if you think all this doesn't apply to most Idaho corporations, most Idaho rich people and most Idaho colleges and universities - well, you are simply mistaken.
So, get the book, Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy, Public Affairs and the Forbes 250. It's a great guide for your own giving and helps unravel the many confusing but important and idealogical labels. That is, of course, if you care. And, if you don't speak Russian.
Clearly, Cowles No Intellectual Giant
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 23, 1989
One of the redeeming features of life in these United States is the tendency for poor, or even mediocre, political officeholders to be soon forgotten once they are out of office.
Such is not always the case, however, with dictators, especially in Europe. Benito Mussolini, the infamous political leader of Italy during most of World War II, speaking to his Chamber of Deputies in 1923 was both frank and arrogant about his world view, "I see the world as it really is: That is to say, as a world of unleashed egotism."
Among other problems today, Caldwell, too, seems to be enjoying or, rather, perhaps, enduring a similar burst of "unleashed ego." It comes from City Hall, more particularly from the office of His Nibs himself. In fact it's written on the official letterhead of the city of Caldwell listing thereupon the names of all six council members, City Clerk Betty Jo Keller, Mayor Peter B. Cowles and signed by hizzoner himself with the title "Mayor" typed after his name, and then "City of Caldwell," all nice and official and addressed to "Senator Rachel Gilbert, State of Idaho, 1111 Marshall, Boise, Idaho, 83706."
It is without doubt the most insulting and juvenile diatribe this writer has ever seen on official stationery of any officeholder in the state. Whatever our city deserves one thinks Caldwell ill-deserves this kind of foolishness especially at this stage of its economic difficulty. There's more on the mayor's letter, but first a little background.
Gov. Cecil Andrus, the super-liberal chief of the Gem state, is enjoying a parade of popularity with all but a few political watchers, special interests and conservatives in general who want less government. He was popular during his early years as governor before he resigned to accept the appointment as U.S. secretary of the interior in the Carter administration.
Though awfully liberal in his first term as governor he was then kind of the "happy warrior" whose charm and wit made him friends even with those of opposite political philosophy such as yours truly. I still consider him a friend, though a formidable adversary.
But something happened to the happy warrior during his stint in Insane City, D.C. Since he's been governor this last time many say he's been playing political hardball. This is in somewhat of a stark contrast to his early times as chief of state and even friends say there's a mean streak in him now - if and when anybody crosses him.
Much of Andrus' support comes from the labor unions, hence it comes as no surprise that he hates Gary Glenn who led the statewide and successful fight to enact the right-to-work (RTW) law in Idaho. Well known as politically smart and aggressive, Glenn triumphed over the objections of even many fainthearted GOPers, including Sen. Jim McClure who thought RTW proper in principle but too controversial for success.
After Glenn's rather spectacular victory for RTW he went to work for the Idaho Cattle Association as executive secretary-manager, but Andrus still hates his guts and threw him out of his office prior to a recent meeting with 20 members of the cattle association who have big problems and who wanted help for their industry from the governor and came to his office by appointment.
Comes now State Sen. Rachel Gilbert, bright, peppery and aggressive conservative of Boise. Taking the press with her the day after Andrus threw Glenn out she gave the governor Hail Columbia saying he had no right to oust Glenn from "the people's office." She demanded Andrus apologize, but to no avail.
Comes now Caldwell Mayor Pete Cowles, no intellectual giant he, in said official letter to Gilbert dated April 17, 1989:
"Dear Senator,
"Very seldom do I write letters such as this. After watching the local news, you only allowed me that opportunity. I can appreciate political differences as it is an essential part of the process. Whether Governor Andrus is right or wrong on the subject of Gary Glenn, let the people decide. If I were you, I would be very embarrassed on my actions (sic).
Fine, call the Governor on the carpet and maybe that is part of your responsibility, but have the decency to do it behind closed doors." (Cowles didn't say just how the people would know of such incidents since Andrus has the State's biggest newspaper in his hip pocket.)
"Better yet, do it without having the media standing behind you. The Governor was elected by the people, just like you and I, so let him determine how he wants to run his job. If he does a good job, great! If not, the people will then decide. Do yourself a favor, Senator, and review the basics of political common sense. I hope you do run for Governor. It would be an honor to vote against you. By the way, take the advice of the recent number one song, Don't Worry, Be Happy.
"Sincerely, Peter B. Cowles, Mayor, City of Caldwell."
Now then, citizens of Caldwell, all this is not, repeat not, to compare Cowles with Mussolini, except in their worlds of - "unleashed egotism."
All That Power in a Few Hands
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 30, 1989
One of the great disappointments of modern society is excessive centralization. So pervasive has the structure become of big industry, big labor, big government, big education big foundations, etc., many see the idea of individualism as an endangered species.
In fact, Eric Sevareid, himself a product of one of the most giant organizations of all, big TV media, said in 1959: "The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness." But weakness in today's media, if true at all, hardly stems from lack of power or money. Dan Rather's salary, for example, is well in excess of $3 million per year. So what gives?
Well, the World Media Association (WMA) whose 10th annual meeting I attended in Washington, D.C., recently is looking into "what gives?" in a number of arenas. If our big, powerful and oft-times arrogant media is allowing "less courage and freedom" the WMA thinks it may have to do with "Media Standards of Journalistic Accountability," the theme of this year's convention. Earlier themes were "The Future of the Free Press" and "The Character and Responsibility of the Media" both held in New York City; "Social Issues and Values in the Media" held in Seoul, Korea; and "Media Credibility and Social Responsibility" met in Tokyo.
Other WMA conventions have been held in the U.S.S.R., Columbia and Europe, but of more importance than worldwide locations is without doubt the media personalities attending along with leaders of the political, business and intellectual community. Dates of former meetings: New York, 1978 and 1980; Seoul, Korea, 1982; Tokyo, 1984.
Many of these carry international reputations and most (though not all) hold strong convictions that much of the world's media is acting as a rogue elephant on a rampage, as well as a power kick and/or ego trip.
One of the more candid and colorful of these media critics was Nayyar Zaidi of the Daily Jang (Pakistan) whose lecture brought forth almost leg slapping laughter and applause for his penetrating wit. He explained Pakistan came into being after the British partition of India in 1947: "But its civilization may be traced back to 5,000 years before Christ ... one of the oldest cradles of civilization as we know it today ...
"This brief introduction was necessary to emphasize one point: The people of this area are not 'upstarts' in terms of civilization - a term frequently prostituted by Western (media) commentators." NO big fan of India the Pakistani explained "... the Indian system looks very attractive when looked at through the 'rose colored' glasses of the blind, i.e., the (U.S.) State Department and the elite U.S. media corps ...
"Then why would Sam Donaldson (and his colleagues) call the Indian political system a democracy? The answer requires an examination of the media hypocrisy."
There was much more by Mr. Zaidi but this keen observer showed us that our fanatic zeal for the cure-all "democracy" just might have a bit of a hole in it: "By pushing for a faster pace of political change, the U.S. supporters of the 'rise in international democracy' may scare the changing systems into going to the Soviets who make no demands about the internal system and only look at the bottom line of self-interest."
Most of the attendees were, of course, Americans such as Bill Rusher, publisher emeritus of National Review magazine, Ambassador and former Assistant Secretary of State Douglas McArthur, syndicated columnist James Kilpatrick, former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, who received two of the few standing ovations of the whole three-day affair, Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor in chief of the great Washington Times and former 20-year foreign editor of Newsweek magazine, and a host of others about whom more another time.
But to give you a bit of an idea of the scope and concern of the WMA there were 12 "newsmen" from the U.S.S.R., two of whom I got acquainted with in some depth. They, too, were brought to Washington by the association along with about half a dozen Red Chinese including the head red of the No. 1 Chinese newspaper in Peking (now Beijing).
The Soviets included the chief political analyst for ISVESTIA in Moscow and consultant to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of U.S.S.R., Vitaly Kobysh. There was a Japanese author-editor who said he was taken prisoner by the Soviet Army and sent to a Siberian labor camp after World War II. He asked Kobysh, a gutsy but seemingly forthright fellow, when Russia was going to return the four Japanese islands stolen by Joseph Stalin during the war.
"Oh sometime," came Kobysh's droll reply, "in the next 1,000 years." There had been some rather glasnostic-like and candid dialogue from the Soviet spokesman, but apparently the Russian bear can still snort a little, even under Gorbachev.
I've left the best of the terrific conference for another day, but the classic wisecrack of the whole affair came from the famous scholar and discussion leader, Robert Conquest, who confessed: "I'm not a political scientist, but then neither is anyone else."
Give the Media an Inch ...
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 7, 1989
Much of the best public commentary, even to this day, was made back in the 1800s. Consider the following made by the Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863:
"(The) daily news lies. (It) lies by means of pure fact alone; lies by means of invented facts; lies by means of facts distorted into their opposites ... And to cap the climax of this shameful business, the newspapers in most cases even refused to print a correction."
He might well have added: It lies, too, by the things it leaves out.
To which the media folk are quick to add, however, "We can't print everything." And, of course, they are right. But the public seems to be getting more and more intolerant of the media each year, not the least of whom is this writer whose withering fire of criticism sometimes provokes more newsmen than it persuades. Well, nobody likes criticism, one supposes.
Yet thanks in no small part to this newspaper's insight, the media is somehow the better for it. They tolerate its frequency in these columns, but I worry for an entirely different reason. In spite of the understandable tendency for members of any group to defend their clan against all comers there is a deeper concern.
If the public, for whatever reason gets sufficiently intolerant of the media there will be censorship laws passed - in spite of hell or high water. However understandable it might be, my friends, that would indeed be bad news. And it could be sooner than later.
Now then, newspapers have been around, and severely criticized too, for generations. But each town used to have competing newspapers. They tended to keep each other "honest." Mere competition tended to do that, but most towns and many big cities today have only one newspaper. Worse yet, the papers which do exist and overlap tend to be not unlike lawyers are said to be, i.e., almost never can you find one to criticize another - publicly. Professional courtesy, it is called.
And while exceptions do exist (there are fine ethical members of all professions, including newsmen and lawyers) about all that seems to happen is the familiar cry of freedom - special freedom, of course - for "our" profession. It is more important for society's own good, of course, for us to have a free hand, so to speak. And so goes the way of all flesh.
But it does not all go that way. TV has added a new dimension to our news. It has at least severely aggravated two old conditions that newspapers used to grapple with, namely superficiality and sensationalism. Each is far worse than before, even though the entertainment factor of beautiful anchorwomen news-readers is admittedly better than old Walter "Concrete" Cronkite used to be. Still, sensationalism and superficiality is big TV's big stick. One remembers the recent phony apple scare, the phony potato and grape disaster with only two lousy grapes for "evidence."
Furthermore, last week I talked to a professional oil man who at one time owned or controlled more than 40 million acres of oil leases in Alaska, before the oil boom up there really got in high production. He told me that the Exxon-Valdez oil spill was not the only spill of such huge proportion ever experienced in Alaska. "Twenty-five years ago almost to the day," he explained, "there was an equally bad dumping caused by a disastrous earthquake resulting in similar pollution. Bad as they were these spills came and went without permanent and irreparable harm.
"But then," he went on, "we did not have the super-sensational TV disaster-lobby and the environmental extremists to blow up the airwaves and panic the public."
Well, maybe that's a story for another day, but there is somebody finally trying to do something about getting some responsibility injected into the maddening media malaise before it's too late. The World Media Association's (WMA) 10th annual conference was held recently in insane City, D.C. (The name should be permanently changed from Washington, D.C.) Here, in part is what WMA is saying:
"News gathering and reporting: It's our career, our life and our passion. Yet fewer and fewer people throughout the world believe what we report on radio and television, or write in newspapers and magazines. In short, people have very little confidence in us.
"The solution? It's up to us," they said, "the worldwide media. We (must) report ... responsibly and morally. By ... understanding the media's role ... and encouraging a self-imposed discipline, we can restore declining media credibility to a wholesome level of trust and confidence."
I love these WMA people, who also own America's most influential non-liberal newspaper, the Washington Times, yet that "self-imposed discipline" idea is a tooth fairy's dream.
But the competition the Times thrusts daily down the throat of the Washington Post, the nation's most insufferably left-wing paper, is without doubt a real-world toothache for the libs.
When God Calls, I Answer
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 14, 1989
Roses to "God" who called on my pager last week. The message which came in a large and booming voice went: "Ralph. This is God speaking. Call God. G-O-D! This is God. Call God at 466-8993, extension No. 106."
As you might imagine I called! You bet I did. And guess who answered? It was the Rev. Nathaniel Pierce, now of Boston, Mass., merely posing as God. Many liberals do this, you know. One supposes it has something to do with their schooling, since most of them are well-schooled in liberal colleges and seminaries of the mainline religious sects like the Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and others.
Pierce led Grace Episcopal Church and I'm reliably told it reeled vastly from left to right (mostly to the left) under his leadership until he left Nampa to lead the huge, stained-glass windowed edifice of that denomination in Brookline, a suburb of Boston.
Father Nat, as some were wont to call him (I once heard him called "son-of-a-bishop" or something near that) was called a lot of things, many of them even endearing, when he lived in Nampa.
Nat and his lovely and charming wife, Audrey, were in town visiting old friends and, in my cast at least, enemies, too, as they are considering re-moving somewhere back out West.
They were addicted to the West but, one supposes, the addicts they saw too often way back there in Dukakis Country were "addicted" to other substances of a drug-like character. Maybe some not altogether unlike Nat's stinking pipe.
The latter was made even more stubbornly stinky by his insistence on using his pipe cleaners over and over and over and storing them in his suit coat's lapel pocket after, believe it or not, he'd reamed out his nicotine-laden pipe. Thus the naked cleaner was stored there for yet another ream-and-bore job on that stinking, air polluting, gaseous, outrageous pipe.
About the only thing any more grossly repulsive concerning the Episcopal gadfly (I cleaned that one up a bit) was his political philosophy. It didn't stink, mind you, it just had a liberal smell that, especially today, reminds intelligent conservatives of Ron and Nancy Reagan's "loyalty" to Ollie North.
Roses, too, to Caldwell's Asia Cafe where we went to supper. The absolutely superb Chinese food brought back fond memories to Nat, Audrey and myself when they lived here and we used to dine and debate the finer points of life, love and laughter - and you guessed it - politics. That was when the Episcopal couple lived in Nampa and Nat's witty (sometimes only half so) but well-written newspaper column appeared alongside of mine, usually with some foolishness in it about Ralph Smeed's or Steve Symms' "political and intellectual constipation."
I'm not exactly sure Idaho and/or even the West are ready for Nat's return, though it'd be great to have Audrey. But one thing is for sure; namely, I just wish my libertarian-conservative friends were even half as committed, dedicated and articulate about (our) causes and philosophy as Nat is about his. Oh, he's wrong, all right, on a lot of things, in my view. A whole lot in fact.
But the world needs the likes of Nathaniel Pierce, his irreverence toward the huge establishments in religion as well as in business and industry and his skepticism even for formal education. Yes, maybe especially formal education with all its left-wing puffery and sacred cows and the virtually indescribably power and double-standards it is assembling and wielding today.
Roses too, though not maybe a full dozen, for the letter Nat wrote from Boston to be read publicly at a testimonial dinner and sort of roast held here in my honor last October. If I may be forgiven a little immodest comment, it was thought by some to be the most entertaining (if not the most accurate) of the 30 or 40 letters sent by friends from around the U.S. who couldn't attend that evening. Written for the "Friends of Ralph Smeed Committee" and attended by almost 250 friendly if misguided, souls, Pierce's letter to the committee said in part:
"And knock off this garbage about 'Friends of Smeed.' I know Ralph Smeed and he doesn't HAVE any friends - except perhaps, me. In my own sweet, compassionate and tender-hearted attitude toward the mentally handicapped ..."
Enough about an irascible if lovable man supposed to be in the business of saving souls. Pierce has only one sort of competitor who contests him, like movie actor George Burns, calling himself "God." This competitor is also a pal of the pious preacher and is his former editor-boss at the Press-Tribune. So:
Razzberries for Rick Coffman who answers my phone calls with the frequent salutation: "This is 'God' speaking."
Egad - and the likes of both THESE were made in His own image?
Dealing with Alar Hysteria
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 21, 1989
"Perception is truth," said Idaho Lt. Gov. Butch Otter a long time ago, but if the public cannot tell one from the other what difference does such an observation make? Comes now CBS-TV's program 60 Minutes, which tends to bastardize all but "liberal" truth.
Razzberries for the knee-jerk liberal network and their hysteria program about our perfectly legitimate and healthy apple industry. The chemical "Alar" has long been OK'd as legal by the federal authorities, but the industry has been phasing out its use anyway because the jury is still out, so to speak. In any event, if it isn't "out" it seems to be confused - thanks to 60 Minutes' penchant for sensationalism. Or is it just their all-too-typical knee-jerk liberal ideology? Methinks, to a great extent at least, it is.
Roses for Gov. Cecil Andrus, who has cooperated with Idaho's apple-growing industry to try to mitigate, to some extent at least, the hysteria. It has been so vigorously promoted by Meryl Streep, a movie actress, cum political scientist, cum medical seer, cum political propagandist on top of CBS-TV's panic mongers that the mothers and school-teacher crowd of America are literally piled up like frightened baby chicks in the corner of the coop after somebody sneezed. The chicks on the bottom often die for lack of air to breathe. Andrus, a long-time friend and compatriot of the left-wing, anti-business, pro-public-property crowd, seems to have been at least open enough to see the dilemma thrust upon Idaho's first-class apple industry.
In a press release and at the request of the apple growers, the governor issued a statement last week strongly suggesting at least careful, if not skeptical, examination of the Alar scare. Given the anti-capitalist hysteria so long promoted by the tree-hugger, edo-nut crowd on almost every college campus all across America, the wonder is that this pitiful situation is not even worse.
Roses for at least a small section of the news media. The latter have been virtually limited to a one wire-service news monopoly held by Associated Press (AP). The "small section" referred to above is the Idaho News Network (INN).
Thank Heaven for some measure of non-establishment news source. Given the over-weaning tendency for professional news persons to hover around their own peer group for re-enforcement, one supposes, thus giving a peer-group flavor to the news, the new INN may have its non-establishment work cut out for it.
Here's a recent sample of their news item report: May 15, 1989 - INN: "The head of a Boise watchdog group said today that the secretary of state has refused to fine the Idaho Education Association (IEA) for hiring an illegal lobbyist. Peter Watt of the No Tax Hike Committee said that the secretary of state has informed him that no fines would be applied against the teachers' union even though that organization was in violation of Idaho's sunshine law when it hired unregistered lobbyist David Ripley in January of 1988.
"Ripley was fined for running a clandestine telephone lobbying effort for IEA during the 1988 legislature. The secretary of state admitted that the IEA was in violation of the sunshine law by hiring Ripley but said bringing charges against the IEA would be 'redundant.' The No Tax Hike Committee had filed a complaint against the teachers' union after the Ripley affair was exposed in a local Boise paper."
Now we will watch and see if this rather obviously newsworthy tidbit of non-establishment news makes it into the "regular" news media.
Roses to Idaho's hard-pressed and hard-working agriculture and livestock industries, which are fighting the good fight just to keep their harassed heads above water. Last week they hosted, believe it or not, a very successful National Federal Lands Conference on ownership, control and/or access to government lands (sometimes called "public" lands.) And, boy, oh boy, did they ever talk about private property as a proper concept and as a condition to the use of grazing rights. Not often does one hear that in the public dialogue nowadays.
Sponsored by the Idaho Farm Bureau, Multiple Use Land Alliances, National Inholders Association, Oregon, Idaho and California cattle associations and a host of others, it has mushroomed into a crusade that is being dubbed the "Wise-use Movement" and includes a rather wide variety of users of government lands. An almost spectacular array of speakers, both experts and laymen, gave an articulate and long-overdue account of their problems with the anti-private-sector government agencies on top of the anti-capitalistic environmental extremists and eco-nuts.
Let's wish the "wise" land users luck. They'll need it. Two-thirds of Idaho is owned by the socialists now, and they are hell-bent to lock it up.
GOP Letters Too Much to Swallow
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 28, 1989
On the way back from a meeting in New York last week I met the great Dr. Alfred Kahn, former chairman of President Carter's Council of Economic Advisers. It was this delightfully clever, articulate and charming economist, you may remember, who was admonished to stop using the term "inflation."
Keenly aware of the politicians' penchant for avoiding meaningful content in their pronouncements, Kahn agreed.
"From now on," he explained, "we will substitute the term 'banana' for the word 'inflation.'" The economic czar's rhetoric from that time forward was utterly devastating and enabled him to beat the politicians at their own game, so to speak, of fooling the people. A game, sad to say, played regularly by both political parties.
All of which brings me to my case in point. Upon my return from the above-mentioned trip, two letters from the Republicans were waiting. One was from the state GOP and one from the national. Both wanted money, of course, which is both routine and understandable. In fact, that is almost the only thing they seemed to say that made a whole lot of sense.
On a letterhead topped by an eagle, no less, was the national organization: "Republican Presidential Task Force." In fine print was the name George Bush, president, and (U.S. Sen.) Don Nickles, chairman. Very official looking, it began:
"Dear Mr. Smeed, It's not every day you're called upon to serve the president of the United States.
"So let me be the first to congratulate you!
"Mr. Smeed, you were nominated by the Executive Committee which included every Republican member of the U.S. Senate and President Bush, to serve as a member of GEORGE BUSH'S REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL TASK FORCE. (emphasis theirs).
"As soon as the committee approved your nomination, President Bush directed me to write you immediately. (Gosh! Just me and George.)
"You see, the president and I are calling upon you make a most unusual sacrifice." There was more, but the punch line was:
You guessed it - send money!
Now then, in return for all this "sacrifice," Sen. Nickles goes on. His PhD (piled higher and deeper) gets even better:
"and at the president's urging I am extending to you this invitation to become a CHARTER MEMBER (their emphasis, again) of George Bush's Republican Presidential Task Force." (Wow, I can hardly wait. Imagine! President Bush and me. Why, we may someday even exchange valentines! But it gets better, at least farther out.) Get this:
"That's why I've prepared the enclosed memorandum to have delivered to him, via special courier, to let him know you've accepted this prestigious honor."
My gosh, folks. Are we to believe this stuff - sells? And GOPers are said to be skeptical. Jumpin' catfish! Makes one wonder if the Democratic Party, too, hired people to write similar grade-school junk and expects democracy to survive.
Now then, political parties and politicians need money. Nothing wrong with that. But "serve, nomination, prestigious, task force, honor"? Egad!
Comes now Randy Ayre, newly elected state chairman of the Idaho Republican Party and something of a wheel, too, in the mammoth Boise-Cascade Corp. of Boise. He replaces Blake Hall, a lawyer of Idaho Falls, and not too bad a fellow, either, by the way. Only "a friendly reminder," Ayre's letter also wanted money.
Not unlike many of the BC executives for the past several decades, the new Idaho GOP chief is more, rather than less, of a liberal. But to his credit he didn't expect me to swallow a wheelbarrow full of that "baled hay" (after it was "processed" through the horse) in order to get it. Hats off to Randy for a bit more intellectual honesty.
Now, I'll probably send a modest donation to the Idaho rubber-stamp-for-more-government GOPers, but not because Ayer's party letter told us the differences between the two parties.
It will be at least partly because he was intellectually open enough to say publicly there was plenty of room in the GOP for "conservatives, moderates" and, believe it or not, he did not use that awful label - liberals - with which Bush destroyed Dukakis while Boise's liberal establishment gasped. He used instead an old liberal Democrat term, "progressive." Room for everybody, he seemed to be saying.
Still, Alfred Kahn keeps haunting our GOP house. I wish Ayres had substituted for his term "progressive" Kahn's word "banana."
We could have at least hoped he (Ayre) really meant - common sense.
Holding News Media Feet to Fire
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 4, 1989
Whatever one tries to say about the news media the terms roses and razzberries are hardly adequate to the task of critique. Anyhow:
Roses to Libertarian Party (LP) members Maurice Clements and Greg Johnson, each of whom achieved vote totals in last November's election deserving of national recognition. Both ran for the Idaho House of Representatives. Clements received 33 percent of the total vote for the post held by liberal Rep. Janet Hay, R-Nampa, and Johnson 25 percent of the total for the office held by liberal Rep. Dorothy Reynolds, R-Caldwell. Unfortunately these record percentages were ignored by the national media along with their arrogant and similar news-censoring of the Libertarian's national party bid for president and vice president of the U.S. However:
Roses also for some local Idaho media members giving attention to the LP by way of a press panel recently. Organized mostly by Johnson, who resides in Middleton, the panel consisted of Rick Coffman, editor of the Press-Tribune, Lindsay Nothern, news manager of Boise's Channel 7, and Randy Stapilus, political writer of the Idaho Statesman. Held at the College of Idaho's Boone Science Hall for the express, though good-natured, purpose of holding the media's "feet to the fire," an enthusiastic crowd of almost 50 people attended. Most of these asked pointed and penetrating questions of the newsmen with both sides chuckling.
The latter gave as good as they got, but the overwhelming consensus after adjournment seemed to be that both the Libertarians and the media moguls actually may have learned a little bit from each other. Given the power wielded by the media and the egos involved, one must assume that any learning at all by the media gods-of-the-gauntlet would be seminal at least.
For example, Stapilus' former boss, Rod Gramer, now Nothern's boss at Channel 7, said in a speech to the Boise Libertarians a year ago that they had good ideas and deserved a better hearing. That was when he was at the Statesman. As I said, however, no one ever noticed the insufferably liberal rascal lift a finger to bring it about. Well let's watch now to see if Nothern can arouse a little of his (Gramer's memory or a lot of his (still Gramer's, since he's still boss) intellectual honesty - on the air. But let's not hold our breath.
Roses for conservative Rush Limbaugh, a talk-show host on a national radio program, who calls former U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright, D-Texas, accused of unethical political practices, "Fort Worthless Jim." It is just too bad nobody seems to notice the differences in zeal with which the congressional "fort worthless" liberal establishment attacked former conservative Congressman George Hansen, R-Idaho. His peanut-size so-called violations sent him to prison while liberal Democrat former Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro's pumpkin-size violations were arrogantly ignored.
Ollie North, former Marine emissary of conservative President Reagan, gets a $42 million witchhunt-prosecution and is left hanging, twisting in the wind. Compare that with Jim Wright being allowed to merely resign in quiet sorrow from his high liberal post in Congress - only to go home and count his money.
Roses to the great conservative commentator Paul Harvey who said only last week, "If Jim Wright is to be allowed merely to resign after all his (questionable and probably illegal affairs) why not an immediate pardon for Ollie North?"
Roses again for that same Harvey who also said something to the effect: "Those are not President Bush's '1,000 Points of Light' - those are the taillights of Democrats leaving Washington, D.C." That's a great joke all right, but let's not forget Democrats still control Congress by landslide proportions and were returned to office by almost 98 percentage points for incumbency. So, pilgrims, don't expect much change without a $42 million inquisitory attack on each politician.
Roses to the Wall Street Journal whose editorial last week highlighted the Red Chinese students' eye-popping riot demonstration in Beijing for freedom and democracy: "The spectacle of raising a Goddess of Liberty statue (facsimile of our Statue of Liberty) in Tiananmen Square has a certain logic to it, but what does one make of the 400-member 'motorcycle gang' reportedly roaring through the square? After arresting the leaders, a police official described the bikers as 'juvenile delinquents, rascal ruffians, and idle businessmen and workers from private enterprises.' Maybe only the rascal ruffians of private enterprises could afford the motorcycles."
Meanwhile, back here in America our students sing songs of adulation for environmentalism - the new religion that worships trees and sacrifices people.
Interesting Changes in the News Media
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 11, 1989
There are some interesting changes taking place in the news media these days. Some of it is excellent. Thank goodness!
Last week the government TV station, Channel 4, had a 90-minute program moderated by the famous journalist, Fred Friendly. It considered media ethics - in spades.
Not in decades have we been treated to so many big-shot media limelighters and controversial entertainers, most of whom help set and expand the news agenda whether one calls the profession "reporting" or "entertainment" or both.
Notables featured on the lively exchange included Phil Donahue, Morton Downey Jr., Geraldo Rivera, 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt, the political editor of the Los Angeles Times and several others. As you might guess, a big subject brought up often was freedom of the press, but to their credit two or three participants shouted, "Whoa! Wait a moment. Freedom is not at issue here. Good taste and common sense is."
The female editor of the Des Moines Register complained even further: "You people are pandering to some" (read crud) "and low-class sides of human nature." She said that the media actually deserves the bashing they tend to be getting these days. Most of the participants were on the routine kick of favoring their own freedoms rather than their responsibilities.
Still, it was a remarkably open and forthright program which may tend to tell us something long overdue; namely, that the media is far too uniformly liberal, permissive, anti-capitalistic, etc., and should be blowing the whistle on each other in openly competing ways. This would expose bad manners and poor taste not to mention bias, selective omission and censorship, much of which we tend to see too often.
In other words how about the people's "right to know" about the gigantic media companies and news "reporters" whose awesome raw power is well-known but seldom of front page, or even page two, importance. Few other influences, including individuals such as CBS-TV's Dan Rather and his obscene annual $3.6 million salary, are more deserving of newsworthy watchdogging.
Today they are not news, but tomorrow they just may be if present trends continue.
On a local note, hats should be off, if not thrown into the air, for the Libertarian Party stalwarts of Canyon County who hosted a media panel made up of Boise TV news manager Lindsay Nothern, Press-Tribune editor Rick Coffman and Idaho Statesman political editor Randy Stapilus. The latter wrote something of the Caldwell meeting in his regular column awhile back and acknowledged the media's almost constant use of the terms "ultra, extreme, right-wing, hard-rock," etc., in front of the term "conservative" to describe Idaho political figures. They almost never use similar adjectives in front of political "liberals," their usual favorites.
So hats off to Stapilus for some small favors at least. However, he vowed to eschew labeling of any such kind in the future, which makes me wonder if he really got the message after all. In his column he neglected even to mention the Libertarians who put the newsmen panel on in the first place. It was not the intellectually constipated GOP or the Democrats.
In other words, labeling is not the problem. Rather it is - mis-labeling - and selective omissions that cause the confusion so rampant in Idaho politics. Worse yet, the philosophy of the particular reporter makes this "confusion" tend to add up to a difference in the elections and especially in the attitudes the people take toward what they "see" as the public figure's image. All too often the cumulative effects go completely unnoticed by the public as having been"programmed" by the liberal bias of most media persons.
Even the great Wall Street Journal, thought by many near-idiot businessmen to be the veritable alpha and omega of accuracy in media, does it. In its June 5, 1989 (page A-15) issue on Red China's recent mass slaughter of students it quotes two politicians of the highest profile, both super-controversial and on opposite sides ideologically:
"... if the president hasn't taken some action this week, the Congress will do it for him," Rep. Stephen Solarz of New York predicted yesterday on Face the Nation. "Another guest on the program, conservative North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms suggested ... (agreed) ..."
Get that, conservative Helms! Why the WSJ didn't even call Solarz a Democrat. Egad! This guy is even a left-wing liberal. I challenge you, pilgrims, find me someone, anyone, in the liberal House of Representatives more sympathetic to the liberal/communist crowd than Solarz.
But the Journal just had to label Helms.
Caldwell Road Patching Nets Rose
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 18, 1989
Visiting with a longtime political friend recently, I said, "The liberals do sometimes have a point - our side is oft-times pretty negative." He replied, "There's a lot to be negative about."
Well, one might say, touche! Still, there is reason for some roses and some razzberries:
Roses for the Caldwell city administration for an unusually attractive job of asphalt pavement patching in several places around town. Some especially nice-looking examples appear around the areas of 9th and Dearborn, and near the M&W supermarket, as well as near KCID Radio, Tots (Phillips) 66 Service Station on Cleveland Boulevard.
While the state highway department no doubt did the work on Cleveland, the city street's patches were done with equally professional quality and appearance. Even if these jobs were bid out by the city to private paving contractors, the compliments are nonetheless deserved. Appearances, both public and private, in the city make a big difference. Somebody managed well.
Roses, too, to one of our city's real live small businesses in the best sense of the word. The Cloth Merchants firm is quitting business. Located in the downtown mini-mall at Blaine and South Kimball Avenue for the past decade, it served those wonderful people who sew and stitch many of their own clothes, curtains, bedding, decorations and a host of other things familiar and not-so-familiar found mostly in the home.
Started and operated for most of the decade by mesdames Corky Weston, Beverly Burrell and Carolyn Ernst, the first two ladies sold out a few years apart with the latter remaining as sole proprietor for the past two or three years.
Operations such as the Cloth Merchants unfortunately have not proliferated as have McDonald's hamburger stands, Levi Straus's jeans and Nike tennis shoes, nor have domestic arts such as cooking and sewing been so popular as guitar playing and teenage car-cruising on Friday nights in downtown Boise. But these fine domestic talents and skills may serve those folks who do them well far, far better as their lives and career develop down through the years.
In fact, there have been a good many fine housewives whose domestic talent and skills virtually kept house and home together during times of hardship and peril when families without the know-how of a sewing and knowing mother may have otherwise had to give up some life-time pursuits.
Further, many lovely ladies have found the Cloth Merchants' regular courses in making and remodeling clothes a great hobby and satisfying pastime. They can be rewarding way beyond those whose skill are limited to a fine hand of bridge or pinochle.
So hats off to the beautiful, talented and charming entrepreneur Carolyn Ernst, whose 10 years' teaching, as well as merchandising the paraphernalia of her profession, has helped in great measure to make Caldwell a better place to live and do business. We'll miss her.
The 23rd of this month is her final business day, so stop by to say hello and gather up some of the super while-they-last bargains Ernst has there for those who love and appreciate "cloth merchants."
Roses to the great patriot and ex-Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, who's still calling 'em like he sees "em. "The Red Chinese are still butchers," he says. Why the surprised look on the faces of the media moguls? He explains: "What you are seeing today on TeeVee is merely the Communists being Communists." Apparently our media liberals didn't learn much from the government schools' history classes about Joe Stalin: "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." Sad, if you're the egg.
Roses to Nampa's Ed DeBoer, retired diary farmer, cum Amway distributor, roofing contractor, freedom fighter par excellence and Bible-thumper (in the good sense of the word), who says about the current controversy against almost any reference to Christianity in the schools: "Some religion should influence politics, not dominate it. Some politics should influence the economoy, not dominate it."
Ed says: "If they threw many of today's Christians to the lions the poor lions would starve to death." His frequent one-liner wise-cracks are fast getting to be a Treasure Valley treasure.
Roses to the great elder statesman of Arizona, ex-U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater. Asked by a twerp reporter, according to the American Spectator magazine, to give his reaction to the verdict in the Oliver North case, the 1964 GOP presidential nominee said that if he were president, "I'd pardon him in a minute." When his inquisitor foolishly pressed the point - after all, he argued, North broke the law, shredded official documents, lied - Goldwater squinted into the TV lights and snapped, "Look, I've answered your damn question, what more do you want?"
If our Vice President Dan Quayle were to take pages like that from Goldwater's book, he'd get an occasional rose from the media instead of their constant razzberries.
Democrats in GOP Clothing
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 25, 1989
There is a myth in our state that the Republicans have dominated the Idaho Legislature for more than a quarter of a century. One might say that is a lie. But I think it is rather a myth because the word "lie" suggests the untruth is deliberate, even malicious. I doubt it.
The fact of the matter is rather the Democrats have dominated the Legislature all these years. How? By running many of their candidates under the Republican label. Think about it. Here's a little background: Now, like it or not, there is some little bit of difference between the Democrat Party and the Republican Party. I know many intelligent and well-meaning people say there isn't "a dime's worth of difference" between them. OK, then, there is something to the statement, so let us talk about the 9 cents "real" difference.
One must take the trouble to examine those differences, then, if one is to be sufficiently informed to cast a responsible vote and discuss it intelligently. For example, the reason the jury system works fairly well and the one-man, one-vote system works increasingly poorly is that voters are not required to listen to each side's spokesmen. Furthermore a judge usually, though not always, will not allow said spokesmen to make altogether unfounded claims and accusations as to policy and personnel as politicians often do. Also, each opposing side in court must take an adversarial position in order to prevail.
In politics this isn't so. The idea is to get elected - come hell or high water. Both sides, then, want and often advocate the same generalities to get in power. OK, so what do they claim to offer to buy the citizen's vote? Well, they elect a party chairman to act as a sort of chief counsel or spokesman for all those of a particular party. How does one get to be a member of said party? Simple. Just show up with warm body? Nothing more? Well, yes, one must gather a number of folks' signatures. No problem at all.
Now, in Canyon County one must usually claim to be a Republican. If successful in the primary that usually does it. But let's see for example what "differences" the above-mentioned "9 cents" entails and what principles therefore must be buried.
A case in point might be the newly elected state chairman of the Idaho GOP, Randy Ayre of Boise, whose unstated, though understood, task is to elect Republicans all around the state. While it is too early to judge him yet, Ayre's job is to support candidates whose voting record is far, far apart.
For example, in Canyon County two GOP legislators' spending record for new taxes, fees, etc., a year or two ago were: Janet Hay in excess of $95 million and Elizabeth Allan-Hodge less than $3 million. That is more difference than between most legislators in opposite parties. How can Ayre justify such disparities within his?
Well, one way is to keep his mouth shut as did Canyon County GOP Chairman Dr. Wilford Watkins of Nampa. Faced during the 1988 campaign with the charge by his counterpart, Democrat Cheryl Pleak, that Allan-Hodge and Rep. Robert Schaefer were not loyal Republicans but closet Libertarians, Watkins stonewalled. Believe it or not, he absolutely stonewalled, refusing to defend the conservatives for fear of alienating Hay who, as you might guess, is a liberal big spender.
Given such courageous principle defenders as Watkins, it is small wonder the Republicans are losing even the label of control of the Idaho Legislature, not to mention control of the ideas and ideology - and haven't elected a governor for 20 years.
So what are we to expect of Ayre's leadership inasmuch as he has these disparities statewide? Well, he says, "There is room for everybody in the GOP, conservatives, moderates and progressives (sic)." Nobody but a liberal would use such a word as "progressives," it having gone out of fashion with Franklin D. Roosevelt. So much for his label.
Still, Ayre just might luck out given the liberal bias of 90 percent of the media. Take Sam Lang, political reporter of the Press-Tribune, who, by the way, isn't always liberal, but who wrote recently of conservative ex-legislator Gene Winchester, newly elected Ada County GOP chairman: "(Winchester and Tom Stivers former GOP speaker of the House of Representatives and others) attempted to force their religious and moral precepts on the general populace through the legislative process."
I say bang, bang, tilt, tilt and red light with sirens screaming! Why? If one compares conservatives Winchester, Stivers and Co. with the Democrat legislators now holding office as Republicans and their agenda of humanism, statism and more government, the record is quite the opposite as per Lang.
Lang labels Winchester: "angry, tipping and tearing, extremist, moral supremist and a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force." Thank goodness, Sam included which Air Force. Otherwise one might think it was the Red Chinese Air Force. But then we are assured, via the Chinese press, that there were no assassinations even in Tiananmen Square.
Still, one wonders if that included character assassinations?
President Bush Didn't Do Nothing
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 2, 1989
There are so many bad things in the best of us and so many good things in the worst of us that it ill-behooves the rest of us to let the "moderates" lie about it. So let's rejoice and restore real balance with some roses and razzberries.
Razzberries for our left-wing Congress which spends $50 million to nail Reagan conservative-patriot Ollie North and lets former U.S. speaker of the House of Representatives, Jim Wright, go free. Well, the big Texas liberal didn't go entirely free. His forced resignation because of ethics violations cost the taxpayers dearly. According to the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Wright will get about $7,000 per month pension for life. That, dear friends, is per month, not per year. Per month!
North's $22,000 per year military retirement has already been stopped pending outcome of his current persecution. You read correctly - persecution. Not prosecution. All the while the flag-wavers of America mouth of about a few snot-nose goofballs burning the flag. A pretty safe protect, I'd say.
Oh yes, almost forgot. Fort Worthless Jim (Wright) also will receive an expense budget of approximately $100,000 per year for secretaries, office affairs - at your expense. One guesses that's to help arrange the influence peddling facet of his "forced" retirement.
Roses for President George Bush, late of the White House rose garden brigade. No wimp he, this great white leader of the free world will not do nothing about the recent Red Chinese slaughter of thousands of their own unarmed students. No, he will be doing something. Bush declared, "We will stop shipping them any more guns." And the Chinese communists thereby just may be sent reeling. Egad.
Thus, one supposes, the Bush public relations firm will counter: "Well, at least he (Bush) didn't do nothing."
Razzberries for Bush's U.S. Department of State. Following Ronald Reagan's (or, who knows, maybe Nancy Reagan's) lead, these bureaucrat goofballs are not doing nothing about the asinine practice of racial discrimination in South Africa. No sir! They are doing their damndest to bankrupt that little anti-communist country. Just think - the Chinese commies machine-gun thousands of unarmed student protesters. Bush stops their arms shipments. Wow!
South Africa, on the other hand, discriminates against blacks in an almost totally non-violent way. And we (the U.S. government) respond with the biggest "weapon" in our economic arsenal, short of war - boycott!
Now then, apartheid is bad news, bad theory and bad practice. Even the establishment government admits it and has slowly been changing. Too slow, it's true. But how to administer millions of their tribesmen and tribal chiefs in a one-man, one-vote jungle-like setting? Still, we destroy jobs for blacks in South Africa with our zeal and force American companies, which have steadily raised blacks' standard of living, by the way, to sell out for 10 cents on the dollar. Japanese and German companies are gleeful buyers. Egad! What a double-standard we have.
Roses for Tom Moore, Caldwell assistant superintendent of schools, speaking to about 150 graduate students at Boise State University last week. Moore asked for a show of hands of those students who favored socialized medicine - with no choice of a doctor.
Nobody wanted it. "Well," said Moore, "then how can you be such strong advocates of socialized education with parents and students having no choice of teachers?"
But a better query might have been to ask just how a free enterprise capitalist system can be preserved, not to mention be taught, in a socialized school system?
In any event, Moore, who was for a time director of the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives (CSMA) in Caldwell, most assuredly did expose the BSU graduate students to the great Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman's ideas. His book Free to Choose extols the free market and the capitalist philosophy.
Moore said the sovereignty of the individual is a prime concept, "unfortunately the whole philosophy of freedom, capitalism and private ownership is usually missing to you students and the short time alloted here prevents me from explaining how it works."
Roses again for this innovative, dedicated and gutsy educator who, unlike many (not all) of his colleagues, thinks a competitive government school system needn't be an oxymoron.
Which Flag do You Really Worship?
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 9, 1989
"Come on now," said the judge, "when did you stop beating your wife?" Today's court says: "Don't you flag-wavers believe in free speech?"
One doesn't need to be an intellectual giant to see that the outcome of a controversy depends greatly upon how the question is phrased. Thus the current flap about the flag burning question leaves a lot up in the air.
So I'd like to propose a series of questions which seem to have been mostly glossed over. With America's recent self-appraisal in the flag-burning "rush to judgment" some reflection might help.
Does the flag represent our country or our government? In other words, I love my country but I don't love my government. Unless and until this is made clear how can we make a fair judgement for a good and proper understanding?
While this writer has no time for those snot-nosed hippie types, some of whom used to sew the flag on the seat of their pants, they did have a point. Their effort seemed designed to say "up yours" to the government that was sending men to Vietnam to fight a no-win war.
If the hippies, draft dodgers, pacifists, left-wing agitators and the college professors to whom they had been listening for decades were right, even for the wrong reasons, those of us who tend to be a bit red-neck and anti-communist could have joined in. We might have forced a reappraisal of the stupid, no-win, flag-burning dilemma in Vietnam and on campus.
It has been observed that the domino theory was obsolete and didn't work. But did anyone think to ask the dominoes of Southeast Asia? Now that many have fallen - we still don't ask. We just wave our flag.
Maybe the flower children had a point. Indeed maybe they still do., e.g., what sense does it make to spend $300 billion per year for our defense against the communists and at the same time send them food and technology? But even worse, we send them war-making machinery. We even finance this crap. Is this what the flag stands for?
In 1964 it was announced that Stanford University, whose budget exceeds that of the entire state of Idaho, received 52 percent of its income from the government. The fact that many professors there virtually led the left-wing idea crusades, not to mention anti-ROTC demonstrations at other universities, should have sent a message. What message?
That the subject matter and attitudes encouraged, if not taught, on campus including being soft on marijuana and other drugs should be fought seriously. It continues even today - so do the government subsidies. Is this what our flag stands for? Nobody asks.
Many say the government is asking for this stupid protest behavior because the only way to get their attention has been to burn their flag. In other words the majority isn't silent - the government is deaf! Thus the flag gets it in the shorts. But it gets attention.
If there are too many students committing suicide maybe it's because they don't have any absolute values or don't know what to believe in. Maybe they need to be told what our flag stands for by somebody other than the burners. Or, do we ourselves know enough to explain it to students? Would a constitutional amendment help? Doubtful!
There are those who say that the flag stands for patriotism. Does that mean: "My country - right or wrong?" I hope not! But nobody asks. Still, we rush to judgement.
If the flag wavers, and I consider myself a red-hot one of those, think the flag should be honored come hell or high water does said honor include Congress whose wild spending spree continues to suck the blood of future children? The flag flies over this, too - legally.
Does our flag, to which the majority seem to be demanding allegiance and honor via the police, stand for such as a government lottery so all can hope to get something for nothing? Don't laugh. This is what your country is all about. A private lottery is illegal. A government one is OK. Egad!
Former Congressman George Hansen, a conservative, went to jail for far less an infraction of a "law" than former Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, a liberal. Double standard? Of course. And getting more rotten every season. My country? Or, my flag?
Even worse is Judge Gesell's sentencing Oliver North to a $150,000 fine and 1,200 hours of community service. Fort Worthless Jim Wright, ex-congressman and liberal, goes free with an $84,000 per year pension. Having wrapped themselves both in the flag - which does the flag symbolize?
How could President Bush's constitutional amendment against desecrating the flag possibly cover up such desecration as Congress' lack of respect for the American peoples' intelligence? Why? By trying to make their vote secret for a raise in pay.
Bush is probably sincere in his "flag waving" effort, but what scares me is his "education waving."
Both raise more questions than they put to rest.
Liberal Nose in the GOP Tent
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 16, 1989
Permit me to begin with a sort of disclaimer so that the casual reader may not think this writer is a typical utopian dreamer. Are labels silly? Or can we survive without them?
What follows is meant to be an open message to the Idaho State Republican Party leadership in general and its state chairman, Randy Ayre, in particular. It is well-intentioned and although admittedly somewhat controversial - that is what politics is all about.
But controversy is exactly what Ayre wants to avoid. At least if his party's candidates have to stand up and be counted as either for or against something. Read: GOPers still can't out-liberal the liberals.
Comes now the state's number one contest, the highest office in the state, i.e., governor. It is now held by liberal Democrat Cecil Andrus, an affable, dedicated, hardball (where philosophy is concerned) partisan politician. Some would contest his label "liberal," but not where the litmus test is real - Supreme Court appointments.
Andrus recently appointed virtually the most liberal lawyer in the state to Idaho's highest tribunal. Byron Johnson was formerly the chief legal counsel for the state's most powerful and, by the way, most politically liberal labor union. That union is the Idaho Education Association (IEA).Idaho's court is already one of the country's most liberal.
Still, one supposes, Andrus is fairly honest about his partisanship if not his liberalism (depending upon how one defines these super-important labels). But one cannot say the same for Ayre.
Now then, labels are oft-times decried by politicoes, especially the liberal ones, for labels draw principles which in turn draw sharp edges, which cut. These "cuts" draw political blood. Politicians don't like blood. Unless it's someone else's. So they do all they can to avoid said labels. It follows then, unfortunately, they also avoid principles. It's easier to avoid outright lying.
So it is dishonest. It is intellectually dishonest, but they do it anyway, thus leaving themselves at the mercy of the political media. Always an irascible pack of power brokers, the media love it. That way they can, if they so choose, tear the politician's limp-wristed statements to shreds. Unfortunately, 95 percent of the media is also liberal, hence they seldom "tear up" the candidates they agree with.
A case in point is Associated Press correspondent Quane Kenyon (another liberal) who interviewed Ayre late in June telling us that the latter was "canvassing the state trying to name certain the party has the best possible candidate to run against Andrus." He went on to note Ayre favored Peter Johnson, late of Boise's non-conservative, big-business crowd. But Ayre said Johnson hadn't agreed to run - yet.
Remember now, Ayre is the fellow who refused to say publicly there's plenty of room in the GOP for liberals. He used, instead of the "L" word, the label of "progressive." Now then, everybody who knows inside politics knows Ayre is a liberal. I have no problem with that. I do have a problem with a GOP liberal leader who knows damn good and well that his state already has a very strong leader who is contending now to run against Andrus for governor.
But that "strong contender" is a conservative Republican. More, she's attractive, successful, sharp, experienced, responsible, a gutsy leader in the state Senate. She's state Sen. Rachel Gilbert of Boise.
I said Gilbert, a successful real estate broker, is attractive. She is! But evidently not to Ayre who is a liberal. I also said I have no problem with that. But I do have a problem when they won't or don't admit it.
Why don't they admit it? Easy. If they did it'd put everybody on guard. Ayre would have to answer for his "canvassing" around the state for a "strong" liberal candidate. The primary contest choice is none of the state chairman's danged business. At least that's the claim the party functionaries have made for decades, i.e., they don't take sides (so they say) before the general election. In other words they lie. At least they mislead.
Ayre says he's reaching for "well-respected people who have been very successful." Well, bless Bess. One guesses only the rich need apply. Egad! Ayre should apologize to Gilbert. Now! And in public! And over and over again. Oh well, when has a Boise Cascade politico ever pushed for the bonafide conservative label? It'd be understandably hard for Ayre to brag on Gilbert the outspoken conservative.
But she would be a fine candidate for Idaho GOPers. She would be, that is, if it weren't for these closet liberals like Ayre.
Herself seven years a professional school teacher, Gilbert admits and articulates well the conservative cause - believe that one or not - but she's got an unfair task.
She not only must overcome "conservative" Logan Lanham's Idaho Power and Albertson's stores' Jerry Rudd whose companies gave Andrus the credibility he needed to win last time. But now she must do it with a "liberal" knife in her back.
Craig Panel Missed the Obvious
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 23, 1989
One of the truly brilliant Frenchmen of the 18th century was Voltaire. He said something about Idaho Congressman Larry Craig's recent conference on health care held in Boise. So:
Roses for Voltaire (not Craig) who said, "A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady." The word malady, of course, is a disorder, or an unwholesome condition.
America has both a great many laws and a great many physicians. The trouble with Craig's recent high level, all day conference July 17 which was well attended and had many experts was that they ignored the obvious. So:
Razzberries for Craig whose sincerity and good intentions are, in my opinion, beyond question. I say "in my opinion" because one attendee who asked to remain anonymous told me that Craig was merely trying to stroke the medical establishment in order to get re-elected. I doubt that. But my razzberry is for the conservative politician not having outspoken, articulate representatives of private, free market delivery systems of health-care medicine.
Not once during the entire day did any of Craig's experts utter the trigger-word of the whole profession - socialized medicine. Without a premise properly stated, agreed to, understood and referred to throughout, no conference of well-meaning experts could possibly succeed. They didn't. They tried. They were sincere. But they didn't cut it.
Roses for Craig who tried. But he failed. Craig is no lover of government programs, generally speaking, but Monday's effort fell far short of explaining why government cannot do anything, anything, anything - save wage war and inflate the currency. Absent, too, was any reference at all about the effect of government's money-inflation on medical and health-care. (This may explain the above attendee's opinion of Craig's "stroking" for the next election.)
Roses for Dr. William Hssiao of Harvard and Mike Gwartney of Boise Cascade, both of whom did make some effort, if with very little success, to challenge the socialized medical establishment and its mentality. Other panelists and speakers also made less challenging observations, but most were on how to make socialism work,i.e., make it more efficient. This is, of course, an oxymoron. But, much like the legendary pigeon in the upper structure of the huge hotel convention hall during the psychiatrists conference - nobody wanted to be first to mention the obvious.
Roses for ex-congressman from Idaho, Orville Hansen, owner of the private enterprise Columbia Institute which "coordinated" Craig's event. It is reported Hansen, whose income is said to have leaped to six figures after ex-Congressman George Hansen defeated him for Idaho's 2nd Congressional District, puts on these types of conferences all over the country. It's just too bad the left-leaning Orville, in all likelihood, didn't know of any free market private purveyors of medical health care to suggest for such an occasion. Or, perhaps, wouldn't admit it if her did.
Roses for U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Dr. William Sullivan, the star of Craig's conference.
This writer asked the personable, knowledgeable, outgoing, gracious Cabinet secretary, himself a black man from Atlanta, Ga., why a conference such as this one shouldn't include such experts as Dr. S. Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute and Walter Williams of George Mason University?
Sowell and Williams are two of the nation's brightest black sociologists (they are more particularly libertarian economists but in context of a conference like this one they exude first class sociology.)
Sullivan's eyes lit up at my question: "Why no reason at all. They'd be fine contributors to a meeting like this. They are both top flight scholars and are making excellent commentaries on today's public policy."
Razzberries, again for Craig, a fine, sincere man whose dedication to public affairs I think is without question. But if he "forgets" to articulate and promote idea spokesmen such as the likes of Williams and Sowell, well, we're in a damn dismal, deep, blue socialistic ooze.
Roses to James Dale Davidson of the National Taxpayers Union and fellow booster (with Craig) of the Constitutional Convention to Balance the Budget. In his pathbreaking book The Squeeze, Davidson says (in part) on health care:
"Doctors as a group have become transcendental capitalists, employing the rules made by government to create a claim upon the income of others. It is these rules, more than any other factor, that account for the skyrocketing costs of (health care) medicine. The rules separate the patient from his own hurt."
Libertarian doctors, whose research is much more frank and bold than Republicans, could well have cured the intellectual constipation of both Craig's patients and his practitioners - as well as his party's.
Amazing, the U.N. Does Something Right
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 30, 1989
What is this outfit called Amway, and why are all these people saying so many wonderful, and terrible, things about it?
Well, according to the Wall Street Journal Amway just offered $2.1 billion for all the common stock outstanding of Avon Products, Inc.
"In their letter," said the Journal, "Messrs. Van Andel and Richard DeVos told Avon they could finance the takeover with Amway's own financial resources and bank debt." So we can safely assume the "new kid" on the industrial block has not only made its name a household word, but now is in the big-time industrial game of corporate takeovers. One difference, however, is the direct marketing company apparently wants Avon in order to make more products for its growing empire.
Too many of the typical takeovers we've seen are said to be paper transactions, mostly for the purposes of creaming the cream and dumping the crippled remains of the raided company onto the market for the financial vultures.
While Amway doesn't disclose all its affairs, since it is a closely held company, most of its success comes from producing, selling and distributing products people use and consume rather than simply being money-changers in the "temple" of Well Street.
Comes now the United Nation's Environmental Programme's Award for Excellence which has been presented to Amway for the latter's regard for environmental concerns.
According to the company's announcement: "... before Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency, environmental awareness and terms such as 'ecology,' 'biodegradable,' and 'greenhouse effect' were (only) the domain of scientists and an elite corps of 'nature lovers.'"
This was the prevailing climate for environmental awareness in 1959 when DeVos and Van Andel founded Amway. They began building a reputation as the environmentally concerned company that on June 5, 1989, received the United Nations Environmental Programme's Award for Excellence. They explained:
"In 1989, Amway (also) sponsored ICEWALK, the international expedition to the North Pole, as well as the related student expedition consisting of 22 high-school-age youths from 15 countries. ICEWALK was undertaken to focus the world's attention on the environment and dramatize the need for international cooperation in protecting our planet.
"Van Andel and DeVos started Amway from the basements of their homes in Ada, Mich., by selling one product: Liquid Organic Cleaner (L.O.C.) which always has contained only biodegradable cleaning agents, and no phosphates, solvents or caustic materials."
The Amway company claims that all surfactants used in their cleaning products today are biodegradable, which has only recently become popular in the general media dialogues about pollution. This is important since only the "negative" so often seems to be noteworthy when a company's products are discussed - especially on TV.
All of which leads this writer to say hats off to the U.N. whose modus operandi, for these many years, has been almost totally anti-everything; i.e., anti-capitalist, anti-business, anti-individualist, anti-private ownership, even anti-USA. But almost never by the way anti-communist.
Well, this time, believe it or not, the U.N. picked out a capitalist corporation, albeit not by that label, to salute for doing something right. I am no big booster for much of the U.N.'s negative pronouncements over the past near half-century, but I want to note this welcome exception. So three cheers for the U.N.'s award for voluntary excellence - in private enterprise. Shazam!
For those who didn't know it, Amway sells several hundred items "from soap to satellite dishes" as it likes to put it - through a worldwide network of about 1 million independent salespeople called distributors. "It is best known," says the Journal, for an almost evangelical approach to selling household products, with a theme that embraces free enterprise and the opportunities of individual entrepreneurship."
A rare and innovative company, Amway, whose "1 million independent salespeople," along with their Dutch founders, seem destined to convince us: "The average man is both better informed and less corruptible when buying in the marketplace than when voting in political elections."
A New Developer to Compete With
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 6, 1989
Sometimes the roses don't "smell" good enough and don't "sound" bad enough, but for now anyway - here are some:
Roses for the Nampa School Board which seems to have a new appreciation of entrepreneurship and free enterprise. It seems they have built themselves a brand new big elementary school out south of Nampa just off Greenhurst Road. Just what they need with more than 40 acres of bare land nearby isn't clear, but they're hell bent for room.
Razzberries for that same school board, however. They have another eight acres or so, nearby, with which they are virtually in the property development business. By the additional investment of a considerable, if undisclosed, sum of money they are reported soon to have residential subdivison lots to sell on the open market. The county records show their plat with 10 residential lots and room for more. What gives here, anyway?
Just because Gov. Cecil Andrus got capitalist entrepreneur J.R. Simplot, reportedly the wealthiest man in Idaho, to endorse the government lottery does not say government schools should follow suit and somehow get in business. But the fact remains they are in business.
Razzberries, then, for Prosecuting Attorney Richard Harris, Canyon County's chief legal "enforcer," whose duty (in part) is (1) to keep the peace, (2) to keep the private sector from playing government and (3) to keep the government bureaus such as, in this case, schools, from doing business. As a matter of fact the Idaho state law is quite explicit that schools are not to be in the real estate and housing development business. There seems little doubt the letter of the law is being broken, not to mention the spirit.
Razzberries to the news media to whom the Legend Sleepy Hollow seems to have become a fact rather than a legend. Having conducted a long, hard and vigorous campaign for a government lottery (a private one is illegal, thus making gambling a state monopoly just like government schools) the media might be laying low, in waiting. Who knows (?) perhaps the Press-Tribune, if it is to be consistent with its past unflagging support for getting the government in business, can soon be expected to begin a campaign of "unflagging" support for government schools getting in the subdivision business - ho, ho, ho.
Roses for government schools all across America who have achieved virtually the same status as the Sacred Cows in India. Having put the students "on relief" from the 3 R's (readin', writin' and 'rithmetic) maybe teaching them "subdivision" will herald a return to arithmetic.
Of course, some fine teachers, too, feel frustrated that non-government schools and home schooling seem to have made such great gains in response to widespread dissatisfaction with state monopoly schools. But these dedicated pedagogues are almost hopelessly caught up in the web of enforcing the letter of the law.
Roses for industrialist Jack Simplot, another dedicated person not altogether unlike the above mentioned teachers who love "education." The quotes are around the term for two reasons: (1) Because Jack, as he's affectionately called, succeeded - in spades - with only an eighth grade education and (2) because education these days has too often become confused with schooling. A big difference. Many people who know full well that too many teachers and most college professors (not all) hate the capitalistic guts of tycoons such as Simplot. But they send their kids to suffer four years of that insufferable ultra-liberal stuff thinking said children will somehow get a sort of "license" to get a cushy job. Something for nothing, it's sometimes called.
But too often too many kids get, instead, nothing for something. The "nothing" is oft-times a hatred for rich people like Simplot. And that is too bad. Really too bad. Most of Jack's wealth came from having produced a lot of things people wanted, were willing to pay for and at a cheap price. Hooray for him - in spades.
It's just too bad he seems to feel a bit guilty about his great wealth, i.e., he tends to award much of his philanthropy to people who love more government. It's called socialism, and it ain't going away.
Roses, then for a nice guy, Jack Simplot, who fights poverty by producing jobs, i.e., producing something for something. It's called capitalism. And it certainly is going away - in the schools. So:
Razzberries for the successful and wealthy Jack-the-giant who came on TV recently applauding the greatest something-for-nothing (SFN) game of all. I mean the government's lottery. It's far worse than the other drug - LSD. Shame on him.
Getting Too Old? Take My Test
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 13, 1989
Every once in a while someone says to me, "Gosh, it's heck to get old -isn't it?" And I'm usually prone to add: "Do not fret, my friend, about growing old, for many are denied the privilege."
Probably more has been written and spoken about the subject of age than almost any that comes to mind. In fact, even the state government in all its infinite wisdom now has a Department on Aging. Various names are used to label such government bureaus, but many are more for getting votes for their political protagonists than raising the standard of living for old people. But it's a good subject to talk about.
As proof of the interest in extending life, the histories of known or supposed super centenarians (over 100) have been cited again and again down through the centuries. In the Bible, for instance, Methuselah is stated to have lived 969 years.
"The classic example," says the encyclopedia," is Thomas Parr, said to have lived for 152 years, who was shown off to King Charles I as a great curiosity and who was considered worthy of burial in Westminster Abbey.
"In recent years ... a Columbian Indian, Javier Pereira, came to the United States for examination in 1956. He claimed to be 167 years old in that year. The only possible verdict (was) "certainly very old," since there is no method of measuring chronological age in adults. (He died two years later.)
Well, certainly the average lifespan has increased dramatically in the past several decades thus bringing to the attention of some astute observers that folks may have need these days of some inexpensive way to tell just when they have a problem determining "chronological age in adults."
So in the interest of gerontology for moderns who couldn't afford the skyrocketing cost of a price-inflated higher education degree - I am submitting herewith a kind of short course in how to tell when you're getting old. I may apply to the federal government for a grant (they give away millions for a damn site less, don't they?) in order to make this common sense "short-course" in gerontology 101 available to the pee-pull. So here it is:
You're growing older when (1) Everything hurts and what doesn't hurt doesn't work; (2) the gleam in your eyes is from the sun on your bifocals; (3) you feel like the morning after and you haven't been anywhere; (4) your little black book contains only names ending in M.D.; (5) you get winded playing chess; (6) your children begin to look middle-aged; (7) you finally reach the top of the ladder, and find it leaning against the wrong wall.
(8) You join a health club and don't go; (9) you begin to outlive enthusiasm; (10) you decide to procrastinate, but then never get around to it; (11) your mind makes contracts your body can't meed; (12) a dripping faucet causes an uncontrollable bladder urge; (13) you know all the answers, but nobody asks you the questions; (14) you look forward to a dull evening; (15) you walk with your head held high trying to get used to your bifocals; (16) you turn out the lights for economic rather than romantic reasons.
(17) You discover your get up and go has already got up and went; (18) you sit in a rocking chair and can't get it going; (19) your knees buckle and your belt won't; (20) you regret all those mistakes resisting temptation; (21) you're 17 around the neck, 42 around the waist and 96 around the golf course; (22) you stop looking forward to birthdays; (23) you dial a number but when they answer you forgot who you called.
You may, but not necessarily, be getting old when: (24) After painting the town red, you have to take a long rest before applying a second coat; (25) dialing long distance wears you out; (26) you're startled the first time you are addressed as an old-timer; (27) you remember today, that yesterday was your wedding anniversary; (28) you just can't stand people who are intolerant; (29) the best part of your day is over when the alarm clock goes off; (30) you're burning the midnight oil after 9 p.m.; (31) your back goes out more than you do; (32) a fortune teller offers to read your face; (34) your pacemaker makes the garage door go up when you watch a pretty girl go by: (35) the little gray haired lady you helped across the street is your wife; (36) you sink your teeth into a steak and they stay there.
So, gentle reader, have fun. Have fun - before the government's Department of Aging decides to manipulate that, too.
Hay Rotarians! Profit Is Not a Dirty Word
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 20, 1989
Time was when God, motherhood, apple pie and the flag reigned supreme.
But now "God" has pretty well been legislated out of the classroom, formally at least. Motherhood has been relegated to the back seat (no pun) by the population control gang; apple pie got a kick in the groin by CBS-TV's hysteria-mongering program 60-Minutes when they attacked the apple spray ALAR. And the flag? Well, you know, the hippies and a few malcontents have convinced the Supreme Court it's not very bad even to burn it.
Comes now Rotary International, the worldwide service club whose motto is (or has been) "He profits most who serves the best." A fine slogan, I always thought, during the quarter century or so I've been a member in good standing (at least standing good enough not to get kicked out - so far.)
Rotary, of course, means different things to different people. But generally their members donate lots of money to all sorts of good causes, not the least of which is good fellowship. Yet the 160 or so countries, the citizens of which enjoy the blessings of these Rotary Clubs, are not exactly in complete agreement as to where this largesse comes from.
Take it from me, gentle reader, there is lots of it, too. Donations include, but are not limited to, money for sports and electronic scoreboards in such local event centers as Caldwell's O'Connor Field House to a worldwide crusade buying enough polio vaccine to eradicate the dreaded disease from every country's citizens.
A pretty impressive undertaking, I think you'll agree, and these are only a few of many worthwhile efforts Rotarians are up to every year all round the world. All these fine efforts to do good, and believe me, they are many and costly, are financed out of the club members' profit, hence the slogan of long years' high standing and understandable respect, if not reverence.
"He profits most ...," then would seem destined to be chiseled, so to speak, in stone and forever. But, sad to say, it is not so. Even though most any fool could plainly see "profit" comes in many ways including, certainly, psychic profits. But we are here concerned more with the financial variety of profit inasmuch as the money is from whence cometh all. And it's all voluntary, too.
Let's hasten to add we don't want to put down the many hours of dedicated and hard work the members contribute to their clubs, but most of this is to make money (read, profit) with which to pay for their projects.
Comes now Dr. William Forney a retired medical doctor of Boise who is district governor of this Rotary area. A nice man. He told us last week that Rotary International's convention at Seoul, Korea, voted to drop the word profit from their famous slogan because "to some of the countries the word was offensive." Well, poor babies. One assumes these were communist countries who objected, though I'm not 100 percent sure. But whosoever they were, it is sad indeed to see America's principles taken so lightly.
Now then, Rotary is a non-profit organization, but anyone who can count, and even many who cannot, know full well that nothing happens until somebody sells something. Furthermore, if they don't sell it at a profit, damn few if any of these fine charitable efforts, local and worldwide, can succeed.
Why then does the prejudice against profit persist? It's not exactly a new phenomenon, you know. Well, we might better have asked why the prejudice against the whole profit (and loss) system for that's what America is all about. It is the "steam" that drives the USA's engine of producing. Maybe our own convictions are weak, however.
The late, great R.G. LeTourneau, builder of huge machines that moved the face of the earth for the benefit of masses said, "Men can have what men produce. They cannot have what they don't produce." (Except, he should have added, by politics.) Apparently the well-meaning Rotary "wheels" at Seoul had never heard of LeTourneau's wheels.
They could have consulted Robert Ringer, too, author of the best-selling Restoring the American Dream which was so enthusiastically endorsed by former Secretary of the Treasury William Simon. Ringer sums up the profit flap thusly:
"This was the ultimate in logic twisting. Profits, the thing that makes the whole American way of life possible - INCLUDING "free" handouts through government functions - were being termed a "catastrophe." Perhaps Mr. Kahn (the government's chief inflation fighter) will be happy when Atlas finally shrugs and says, "You're right, profits are evil. I'm not going to waste my time earning them anymore. I quit."
After the profit seekers quit - then - where does Rotary International turn to raise money for their no doubt sincere do-good functions? At that point the ball game is over.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says that profit is NOT a dirty word, but I guess they haven't talked to enough Rotary Clubs lately.
Letter Is Coff-Man-Bites-Dog Newsworthy
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 27, 1989
Of all the institutions in America there exists perhaps two whose intellectual dishonesty tends to reach astronomical proportions above (or below) all the rest. They are (1) the academics, i.e., in the colleges and universities and (2) the news media.
It goes without saying this does not include every last professor or each newsperson, but the generality is so overwhelming as to almost never require qualifying exceptions.
Virtually never do the academics nor the media play the role of whistle-blower for their own professional pals. This is an important point because both the media and the academics hold themselves out as purveyors of purity and truth - wherever it may lead, at least as near as humans can ascertain the truth.
Thus when academicians, for example, claim they are open, which so frequently is not the case, it is often tantamount to a policeman on the take. A college trained journalist sensitive to conservative values tends to be a contradiction.
Comes now a beautiful exception. Well, if not beautiful himself, which I am first to admit, at least his act of whistle-blowing is far and away more than a little noteworthy. Even attractive.
Early this summer Rick Coffman, managing editor of the Idaho Press-Tribune, read an editorial in Editor & Publisher (E&), his profession's major trade journal. He hit the ceiling, at last.
E&P is a nationally circulated, respected and widely read publication. The editorial decried in typically liberal, tear jerking, self-righteous, omnipotent, complaining fashion the practice of labeling. Liberals do this all the time. Their philosophy or, lack of it, almost dictates that they avoid the explicit definition of anything, anything, anything. Why?
Well, if it's clearly defined they are limited to the particular convention about which the subject matter circulates. Anything traditional, including the definition of words - limits. That's why liberals tend to hate tradition, i.e., conservatives.
E&P's editorial severely criticized the newsletter 'Media Watch' for labeling various persons, groups and publications as liberal or conservative. Here, almost word for word, is Coffman's path-breaking letter to the editor of E&P. It is "man-bites-dog" newsworthy:
"(Your) editorial, as we are wont to do in this profession, comes to the defense of the media against such labeling by any group. Fair enough - but not far enough.
"Having been in the newspaper business for nearly 20 years, I have seen labeling but not by 'Media Watch." Take a look at just about any political piece by the Associated Press, United Press International, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, NBC News, CBS News, etc., and you'll find labeling: extreme, arch, ultra, far.
"Interesting too. The prefixes fall just in front of the word 'conservative' and are used to describe persons such as Barry Goldwater, Jesse Helms, Ronald Reagan, William Bennett and so forth." (He might well have added our own Steve Symms.)
"Never have I seen Mario Cuomo, Ted Kennedy, George McGovern, Alan Cranston and their political look-alikes referred to as an extreme-liberal, arch-liberal, far left-liberal, or ultra-liberal.
"I don't like this labeling thing any better than you do. But I can understand where 'Media Watch' is coming from. Often there is a prefix of some sort preceding 'conservative.' If the national media won't prefix 'liberal' then publications like 'Media Watch' will step in to fill the void.
"We in the media created the forum for a 'Media Watch.' It is hypocritical to criticize that publication without making mention of who started all this - us."
The above letter was signed: Rick Coffman, Managing Editor, Idaho Press-Tribune, and was subsequently published in E&P's early August issue. Believe it or not, my friends, it actually happened. More followed, much more, including a critical letter to Coffman from ultra-liberal Ted Kennedy's ex-press secretary, so stay tuned.
Meantime, don't tell this writer that letters-to-the-editor are not worth their weight in gold. Coffman, too, regardless of what some of us have suspected - until now, at least - may be worth his own weight in the same metal.
Seein' Double? You're in Caldwell
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 3, 1989
This little essay, while of great importance especially to Caldwell, will probably fail its noble purpose. You can decide for yourself, of course, but I'm hell-bent to try it anyway. So here goes:
Our fair city has seen better days, economically speaking at least, and although there are many neat and desirable things to which we can attest as to why we love Caldwell, empty buildings are a bit depressing and much of our main streets are not a great inspiration to behold.
One might ask, so what? Well, it is hard to keep a small city strong and culturally viable, not to mention financially sound, if and unless it is growing. Indeed, one might well say that cities either grow or die. Rarely do they stay the same. And, too, it is seldom hard to conceal this fact, if it is a fact, when one just drives around the town and looks carefully at the empty stores and office space as well as at how or whether they are maintained.
Maybe it's true that a problem well-stated is half solved. It is certainly true that we can only scratch the surface here, but the longest journey begins with the first step, so if it works maybe I'll follow up with step number two later on.
Some years ago I wrote a five-column series on downtown Caldwell's wealth and woes, but it's hard to say if any beneficial discussions emanated therefrom. Let's hope they at least put into words what needed to be said and had been thought about by some, albeit too silently.
What brings this to mind just now is the brand new street signs recently painted on the pavement in blue on Logan Street between the beautiful homes of Bill and Patsy Lodge, on the south, and Bob and Gloria Franklin, on the north. The foot-high stenciled letters say, "Take pride in Caldwell." They don't say why we should, mind you, they merely direct us to take it. Maybe the person(s) responsible for said stenciled signs (oh yes, I'm told it was at the direction of our young mayor) think Caldwellites merely forget to "take" pride. Similar signs also appear elsewhere in the city.
It's hard to say what motivated his signs, of course. But one is reminded of another time when the media quoted the same mayor as demanding "respect" from the City Council members and, one assumes, he meant to include others as well, whereupon this writer suggested in this space that political leaders won respect, having shown the way be example. They did not "demand" it, unless they had a gun.
Let me hasten to add, that while hizzoner has not subsequently taken my wonderful and timely suggestion to heart, his suggestion to "take pride" in our city is no doubt sincere. In typical Madison Avenue (New York) sales pitch language, however, he seems to say "sell the sizzle, not the steak." But this implies a very real and obviously sizzling steak. Where is our "steak"?
Well, I don't quite know. But I do know where some of the city's sizzles are, at least some of the loudest sounding ones. They, too, are stenciled on the Caldwell pavement in huge, six-foot tall white letters. They say: "ONLY" on 10th Avenue at Blaine Street, on 10th Avenue at Chicago Street. Then, "STOP AHEAD" on 5th Avenue at Cleveland; "SCHOOL XING" on Montana Avenue, between Willow and Locust, and on 16th Avenue at Everett Street.
Why do I make big mention of these signs? Unfortunately these huge signs on heavily trafficked Caldwell streets appear to be for folks with double-vision. As you know, pavement painted signs wear thin, but leave a very visible half-line image for a long, long time.
So then, what do the mayor's paint crews do? Well, per instructions from higher up, no doubt, they move their giant wooden stencils onto the same general area as the old painted sign - six inches offset (some even one foot off) and then stencil-paint a new sign not quite on top of the old one. Looks terrible. Go look for yourself. You'll think you're seeing double. Why? Well, you will be! Egad!
Our mayor's "Take pride in Caldwell" signs should remind us of another politician, ex-President Gerald Ford. His WIN button (Whip Inflation Now) crusade was silly, poorly thought out and superficial in the extreme. Still, one supposes it was sincere.
But then I guess all politicians are sincere. Well, aren't they? Even so, the suspicion lingers that maybe the late, great Irish poet Oscar Wilde had it figured when he observed: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."
Unfortunately, the poet failed to tell us whether it would be "fatal" to the sinceree or the sinceror (i.e., the politician or the voter.)
Bush Could Be Sincere ... But Wrong
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 10, 1989
On the matter of President Bush's war on drugs much is being said and written. But most of it reminds this writer of one of our main staples which we were fed in the U.S. Army mess (no pun) of WW II. It was called SOS.
While there were more colorful and sometimes much more accurate definitions by the soldiers, SOS generally meant "same old stuff." It was sliced beef or ham mixed with a big gob of gravy and slopped upon a slice of bread. Each mealtime it was served to us, especially during basic training. And some GI was sure to loudly exclaim with his nose clamped shut in despair, "Yuk, here come more of that SOS!" It was easy to make, and they served it over and over and over.
President Bush's "SOS" on his first nationwide speech to the citizens was a surprise to no one as was his obvious sincerity and his contempt for the evil drugs. Even U.S. Sen. Joe Biden, who gave the Democrats' "equal-time" TV rebuttal to the nation, accorded the president credit for being sincere. Biden, in his typical socialist sincerity, said only that Bush didn't propose spending enough money to fight the big bad evil of drugs.
But drugs are not evil. Let me repeat that. Drugs are not evil. People are often motivated to do evil things when taking heroine, crack, cocaine, alcohol, tobacco and a growing list of crap, especially when they take them internally in excessive quantities. Best not to take them at all, of course.
But remember! Drugs are not evil - people are evil - and stupid, and hateful, and loving and intelligent and even, sometimes, wise. They are also compassionate and caring and fat and slim and silly and clever and sharp and dull, etc., etc.
And, I'm sad to say, people are evil, too, sometimes, especially when they are on drugs and even sometimes when they are stone sober or simply "stoned" on substances of whatever description.
Now then, Bush is a nice man, so don't let us get our noses out of joint, folks. But he proposed only more jails, more cops, more prisons, more judges, more laws (soon we may have a law forcing us to salute our beautiful flag), more education, etc. More of everything; $8 billion more. And if Biden and the more socialist politicians have their way it will soon be $80 billion more.
Good goshamighty, my friends, can't Bush remember the sage who told us so well: "All the government can do is to wage war and inflate the currency"? This is no joke. It will be the same with drugs, too. Here's why:
Last spring the Daily News Digest said: "... 15 years ago the Office of Management and Budget was asked how many federal regulatory agencies were then in operation ... no one knew. But there are at least 13 million federal bureaucrats and snoopers charged with the task of regulating the activities of Americans ... (not including) the vast array of federal advisors - nearly 2,000 consulting advisory commissions, nearly 2,000 additional 'outside' advisory bodies, and about 1,500 'inter-agency' committees that advise the bureaucracy."
Let me expand on that:
The Federal Register in which the bureaucrats publish each of their new executive decrees has increased nearly eight-fold in just two decades. In 1960 it was 9,562 pages thick. That's just for one year, mind you; 20 years later it had expanded to 74,120 pages. And both Bush and Biden expect everyone to "obey the law?"
Jumpin' catfish! Nobody will even know what the so-called law says - not to mention what parts of it make any sense. But Bush and Biden want still more government. Should we bless their hearts? I doubt it. Here's why:
At the outset of prohibition in the 1920s, here is how Billy Sunday, the noted evangelist and crusader against Demon Rum, greeted the "drug war" of the day. It was called Prohibition:
"The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent." Billy, too, was sincere - and wrong.
In an open letter to drug Czar Bill Bennett in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 7) Dr. Milton Friedman, the Nobel Laureate, addressed Bush's drug war thusly: "In Oliver Cromwell's eloquent words, 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken' about the course you and President Bush urge us to adopt to fight drugs."
Yes, both Bush and Biden are indeed, sincere. No doubt Bill Bennett, too, is sincere.
In Bush's speech, however, the great economist Milton Friedman, author of the best selling book, Free To Choose, didn't even get his sincere ideas for legalizing drugs up to bat. So, about all that leaves us with is:
SOS (two puns intended.)
Openness on Campus Not So Open
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 17, 1989
Caldwell's College of Idaho brings a lot of money to town. That is to say the people who support the college do, i.e., the tycoons of business and industry, the professional and private people, the alumni and the students.
Not only do the gifts bring money into our fair city, but the students' living expenses and entertainment add substantial sums to each year's economic and cultural weal of a widespread area.
The visiting artists and entertainers performing at the college from time to time also add to the economy through their spending for food, lodging, etc. All add to a long list, too long to enumerate here. Suffice it to say that enterprises, free, private and governmental, all profit, if one may use that perfectly useful, if much maligned and misunderstood word, by virtue of the institution's being located in our city. Many more things could be said about the state's oldest institution of higher learning, most of them fine and high-minded.
Comes now the Newcomen Society of the United States based in Exton, Pa., apparently a privately financed, non-profit (always there is that altruistic cop-out of a term) foundation-like corporation. The society is about to confer upon the C of I an honor of some proportion or other for "contribution" to free enterprise. Whatever one thinks about today's colleges and universities, and one can say some nice things, supporting "free enterprise" isn't generally an example. That, by the way, is a whopping understatement.
Now, let's take a little closer look at the nice form letter invitation recently mailed out to supporters and prospective supporters of the C of I by the Newcomens: "... to support, promote and interpret our Free Enterprise System by recognizing achievement of American business and the society it serves." That seems to be the major punchline of their statement of purpose. Of course, in this case, it includes the C of I whose free enterprise honor will be celebrated by a banquet in Boise in a few weeks.
OK then, how does one go about trying to determine the free enterprise and philosophical bent of a college or university? They all claim the pursuit of something called "excellence" - without definition, of course. They assert something called "independence" and "quality," also without much definition. However, these euphemisms convey precious little information to anyone but the superficially concerned.
The C of I labels itself as a liberal arts college and, if truly practiced, this is indeed a great asset. But judging from a third of a century of observing the C of I one must use the term "liberal" with the word "imagination" in order to find institutional "support" (Newcomen's word) for the term "free enterprise" anytime in the C of I's modern-day history.
All of which is not to question the college's right to teach whatever philosophy it likes, or to decry anything it doesn't like. It is to question public acceptance of an honor the substance for which is, well, obscure, to say the most. Free enterprise philosophy at the C of I has for years been an oxymoron.
Two possible exceptions could come to mind:
(1) The organizing in 1982 of the J.A. Albertson School of Business, a fine addition to the C of I and one which has brought a multi-million dollar infusion of lifeblood into the struggling institution. But it is an addition the philosophy of which, if indeed there by one, per se, is quite limited. Furthermore, as is all too typical on college campuses, the business school was not greatly appreciated by the politically liberal professors who constitute the liberal arts college itself.
Exception No. (2): The C of I trustees' unanimous vote in 1983 to lease to the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives (CSMA) an old collapsing house for an office on the edge of the campus. Moving from Boise to the C of I later in 1983, and with the enthusiastic endorsement of the college's then president Arthur DeRosier, the center paid for a spectacular restoration of said dilapidated old house at a cost of just under $40,000.
CSMA's statement of purpose, however, was much more forthright in support of "free enterprise" than either the Albertson School or the Newcomen Society's. So much so, in fact, that the C of I faculty in a straw vote taken prior to the seven-year lease's approval voted 5 in favor and 37 against even having the center on the campus. So much for openness.
Possibly in sympathy with that day's faculty, possibly in fear of maybe having to share credit for an anticipated Newcomen Society's future "free enterprise" award, then chairman of the C of I's board of trustees, Robert Hendren, unsuccessfully but bitterly opposed the CSMA lease. Mind you, that was before the restoration was even begun.
Six years later, and now president of the college, Hendren is still opposed. He is banishing CSMA from the campus. Says he needs the room.
Egad, that's enough hot air to fuel forever the late Thomas Newcomen's original steam engine, which the society says he invented back in the early 18th century.
Federal Waste Cut by Amazing Grace
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 24, 1989
"No matter what else you think about congressmen and senators they understand one thing: survival.
"Survival to a congressman means only one thing: Getting re-elected.
"If enough voters demand something they'll do it tomorrow! Already, $110 billion has been saved, according to official government figures, directly from the implementation of some of our recommendations."
So says J. Peter Grace who headed up the colorful Grace Commission which President Reagan requested to recommend ways to reduce or eliminate waste in the federal government. It followed somewhat the old Hoover Commission started back in the presidential days of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. Hoover's group did some good, but soon ran out of gas as interest dwindled among the well-meaning businessmen and ex-politicians, few of whom had very much moral support from the public.
Grace is president and owner of the giant W.R. Grace & Co. which owns vast numbers of businesses all over the world including a large steamship line, 740 restaurants and many other companies of various size and description, so he knows waste and wisdom when he sees them.
But it isn't so much the man's money and brains which has so far made the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control even the partial success that it's been these past few years. Rather it has been his zeal for efficiency and production along with his colorful style and manner of attacking big problems. In fact one would look long and hard to find another candid and gutsy tycoon like him the whole country.
Grace says the commission came up with a "detailed plan on how to cut $424 billion in wasteful spending over three years." Think of it. This plan could almost eliminate the entire federal deficit.
Let me repeat that. We now have a workable plan to nearly eliminate the deficit before it undermines and destroys our economy. And, for what it's worth, the Grace plan is without raising taxes or painful cuts in social programs or defense - believe it or not.
And I believe it. Why? Well, I met and visited with this bright and hard driving, number-crunching tycoon three or four years ago while I was doing some work for several weeks for Sen. Steve Symms in his office in Insane City, D.C. Although I doubted then if Grace's big team could make much of a dent in the bureaucracy I did think that if anyone could do it he just might make some headway.
In fact, as a direct result of that visit with Symms and myself Grace came to Caldwell and gave a great speech outlining his project to "make government efficient." His speech drew almost 900 enthusiastic listeners to the College of Idaho's Jewett Auditorium and was sponsored there by the Center for Study of Market Alternatives (CSMA).
But part of what CSMA's spokesmen feared would likely kill Grace's hope for a big success was explained by Grace himself. "I made other sallies at the government's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) asking logical questions like, 'How many social programs does the government sponsor?' The answer was 110 to 130.
"One of our staff visited a bookstore soon after that and came across a revealing volume called How to Get Yours in Fat City. In the appendix, 300 government social programs were featured. We took this interesting information back to our OMB sources, but they were unimpressed.
"We conducted our own research and dug up a total of 963 social programs. They are all formularized in Congress and many of them are called 'entitlements.' Keep that word 'entitlement' in mind because, if you're not getting anything, you're a sucker - you're 'entitled' to a lot of these programs.
"You can enroll in 17 of them simultaneously and draw 160 percent of the minimum wage." He also said (in his Caldwell speech): "Congress is a bunch of clowns."
If President George Bush sincerely wants "no more taxes" - let him read Grace's lips.
It would frighten the heck out of the Republicans, most of whom are merely hell-bent for re-election "survival," and might well put the big-spending liberal Democrats clear out of business.
A Plague Upon Both Their Houses ...
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 1, 1989
On the matter of the flap between the Nampa School District administration officials and school teachers there seems to have been some bad oversights. More heat than light.
For example, the teachers claimed to be about ready to strike for more salary and/or benefits. The latter term, by the way, is nothing but a substitute for the word salary, but these teachers are mostly sincere and, to a greater or lesser degree, competent.
However, so are the administrators and school board members sincere and competent. By the way, only the former get paid.
Nonetheless, the school board members cannot be said to get nothing. They get a bad time from almost everybody, including, but not limited to, teachers, officials, taxpayers and even, some of the kids.
Well, if both sides are all so sincere, then, and both relatively competent, why all the fuss? Especially, why, when each side claims great gobs of gushing, sincere concern for the children's welfare, does the Idaho Education Association (IEA) insist on threatening to hold little children hostage by calling for a strike, i.e., if their wage claims are not met?
Nampa School District Superintendent Dr. Stephen Youngerman last Tuesday indicated at the Nampa Rotary Club what he thought about the teachers' union demands. In no uncertain terms he said the teachers were not all that underpaid, especially for a 180-day employment period.
Youngerman's more or less passionate remarks in a kind of ad hoc stump speech at his club drew "blood" from the teachers after some Rotary member blew the whistle on the superintendent's one-sided short story. While he did not say his ideas were wrong, Youngerman apologized publicly saying to the effect that he shouldn't have erupted with quote so much gusto at the teachers or, perhaps, at their union's demands.
So, so much for a little intemperance. Certainly there is enough of it to go around. What, then, are we to do to end this power struggle which is exactly what it is, you know? Both side's non-market power struggle.
A plague on both their houses. Both sides overlook the obvious. It should be obvious in any case, but it isn't. What seems forever to be swept under the rug is freedom of choice. That is to say, freedom for parents together with their children as to just where and how their progeny will be educated.
Much could be said about choice in education, in fact two economics professors came out publicly a few years ago for precisely that, i.e., "choice in education." In their individual capacities they asked, further, for the state of Idaho to give up its monopoly in education and abandon its compulsory attendance laws. What happened? The "fit" hit the shan. How?
Well, the box, Boise State University (BSU) President John Keiser and Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Jerry Evans "conspired" to shut the mouths of BSU professors. This was done summarily and with gusto, dispatch and utter disregard and contempt for the two professors' freedom of speech and non-establishment ideas.
The event barely got into the media, but it was soon hushed up inasmuch as the professors did not want to lose their jobs. No public protest, nor expression of moral support was heard from either Youngerman, the Nampa School Board or, worst of all, not a peep from the IEA. The latter is, unfortunately, terribly selective upon whom they lavish their luxury of freedom of expression. Neither do they often extend it to the non-government sector. Raw political power seems to be their religion.
This, my friends, is why I said, "a plague upon both their houses." Youngerman, who frequently disagrees with me on educational freedom but is otherwise a nice fellow, should not have had to apologize for his little "burst of sincerity" at the Rotary Club. But he should welcome and publicly support other people's freedom to do likewise, especially in his profession - government schools. The school board members in Nampa are terribly biased, as well, toward competition with the school monopoly. So much for sincerity.
And then there is a most scandalous aspect of the whole crisis in education. It is the almost total silence on the issue by politicians. This includes the legislators who feed the alligator (IEA has a stronger lobby even than the AFL-CIO) hoping he won't eat them 'til last. But the shame includes Idaho's famous threesome: McClure, Symms and Craig at the leadership level.
Well, it is said "silence is golden," but it is often yellow, too. Fortunately our threesome is not yellow, but they are awfully, awfully silent on government schools, i.e,. they fear the awesome power of both the IEA and the NEA but some public dialogue on the free market is long overdue.
So let's hear it - threesome - for some freedom of choice, for some kids. And maybe some courageous teachers will get the message and lead us all out of the swamp.
Noriega Making U.S. Look Foolish
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 8, 1989
There is an old proverb to the effect that horse sense is not necessarily reserved for horses. Well, one begins to wonder. If the proverb has not been repealed or broken by the administration of President George Bush, then it has surely been bent almost double.
A routine stop of a Panamanian freighter by a U.S. Coast Guard cutter in the Gulf of Mexico Monday led to the largest maritime seizure of cocaine in history.
The Coast Guard has so far confiscated nearly 6 tons of cocaine from the cargo ship Zedom Sea, stopped by the Cushing, a 110-foot cutter, just 450 miles south of Mobile, Ala.
According to the Washington Times on Thursday, the Coast Guard commander said, "The cocaine was in large cargo containers. Three containers have not yet been searched, and the total amount of cocaine found could increase."
Along with other Coast Guard busts last week near Puerto Rico and a huge raid in Los Angeles that netted 20 tons (You got it? That's 40,000 pounds) the recent seizure has caused drug enforcement experts to rethink the amount of cocaine headed for America from Colombia.
It doesn't take an intellectual giant to see that this is the tip of an iceberg.
There is a veritable flood of hard drugs entering the U.S. from Colombia, Panama and elsewhere. Still, nobody insists on asking why the gawdawful demand - at least in any depth.
Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega has been indicted as a conspirator with the Medellin drug cartel which is charged with shipping as much as 80 percent of the drugs entering the U.S.
And now the above mentioned Coast Guard commander said, "The (Zedom Sea) seizure was a cold hit. We didn't have any intelligence on the vessel."
See what I mean? A lucky accident, but an accident nevertheless. Where's the horse sense?
With Noriega under U.S. indictment as a drug pusher and still in office in Panama after being legally voted out of office, America, the grand paper tiger, stops the Panamanian drug freighter Zedom Sea - by accident.
Writing about the all-too-apparent guilt trip of the Bush administration in particular and the Washington beltway mentality in general, columnist Georgie Anne Geyer pretty well summed it up:
"Eventually, if the United States is serious about cleaning up Panama or losing the canal to the drug world, a new defense force will also need to be constituted. Meanwhile, it would be nice if someone here in Washington thought discernedly about what 'intervention' and 'non-intervention' mean in this world, in which the stage is left to the worst players to intervene."
She highlighted that, wonderfully I thought, noting: "It would be nice, (too) if there was some intelligent definition of our real 'interests' and a determination to follow them and it would even be nice if someone thought or cared about Panama and the Panamanians instead of only how righteous we are for doing nothing."
Still and all, horse sense to the contrary not withstanding, I can readily admit that Insane City, D.C., does have one understandable element of reality. My visit to the city last week exposed me to it. And, you guessed it, the great Washington Times did it again.
Their editorial page cartoon showed Bush standing in all his regal and presidential splendor, tall, immaculately well-dressed, in well-tailored double-breasted coat and narrow-legged trousers. He is standing with his hands upon his hips in a school-mom type of stance, a look of disgust upon his face.
Trotting away from the president was a small dog whose head and face was unmistakably that of Noriega. The little dog had just piddled on the leg of the disgruntled United States commander in chief. The cartoon's caption quoted Bush:
"Now cut that out!"
Egad! 'Getting It in the End'
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 22, 1989
Having just been dismissed from the hospital after being operated on for a somewhat blushing (if unmentionable) condition gives extra special significance to the matter of this week's roses and razzberries. So:
Roses to my enemies' honesty. They are convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that my "getting it in the end," especially since it's so understandably painful - serves me right.
Razzberries to my friends whose rather macabre sense of humor, almost to the man (the ladies, bless their hearts, were much kinder) took great delight in making great jokes at my predicament particularly because they knew it was so painful. Well, that isn't exactly true. One supposes it may have had more to do with operation's anatomical location. Or, more particularly, because it's successful outcome has to do with my "perfect" condition afterward - as in the commonly expressed wisecrack: "He (or she) is a perfect blank blank."
Razzberries for conservatives, in general, (not quite 100%) who are said to be defined as those people who come down out of the hills after the battle and shoot their wounded. Presumably this is to prove they care. Well, I must admit that "our side" could surely do with a little caring increase in our sense of humor, but I guess I just wonder why it has to be at my expense.
Roses for one of the nicer, or at least more modest, get-well cards I got (this one from a lady, of course) was from Councilwoman Pat Mallea. Though humorous, it, too, had a cryptic message. The front page said, "Hey, glad to hear you're in the hospital." Egad! Then with baited breath, and at least one raised eyebrow, I opened up to the inside page where it explained:
"Instead of in jail, where they said you were." Well, that's the first time I ever heard from Pat and I even doubt it was because she is presently running for re-election to the city council, a post she has held for several years. Still, I can relate to Pat. She too, has a certain abundance of political enemies in town, and, like this writer, she's abrupt, tends to be ascorbic, speaks her mind - even when she's wrong. Still, she's often intelligent, and cares about Caldwell. Her ace-in-the-hole is the female vote.
Razzberries for Mallea, however, who could have done even more to assuage my above mentioned pain and suffering if she had taken to heart a recent column I wrote about our fair city's traffic signs so poorly painted on the pavement in a dozen or so places around Caldwell. These signs are six or eight feet and painted in special long-wearing white paint, but they understandably must be repainted from time to time. City crews do this with a wooden stencil placed over the old letters. However, all to often the re-stencil is misplaced six inches to one foot off. This makes many drivers think they must have double-vision when they drive by, since the old letters are usually quite visible for a long time after the new letters are painted. (authorities say it might be causing "monumental myopia," a semi-contagious disease, rampant in Caldwell, heretofore thought by some to be contaminating our city's water supply.)
The signs say "SCHOOL XING", "STOP AHEAD" etc., several places around town, but two dumb examples will suffice: (1) on 16th Avenue near Everett and (2) on 5th Avenue near Albertson's. I pointed this out months and months ago, but so far no attempt to clean up the double-vision mess. "Take pride in Caldwell"? Okay Councilwoman, but take the mayor for a ride soon and show him the asinine double-vision scar on Caldwell's prideful public face. We know you love Caldwell Pat, but for gosh sakes - if love has to be blind must it also be deaf and dumb, too?
Roses for the West Valley Medical Center in Caldwell whose nice nurses seem not only content to do their daily and nightly (some nights seem terribly long) chores with dispatch and competency, but actually to sometimes flinch a little, too, when their patient's pain is apparent. They not only care, but they put out extra effort on their own when it is oh-so-welcome and when they are oh-so-busy.
Until you're better paid, then, ladies - thanks a truck load for being so nice to me during my stay. Meantime, Pat Mallea's welcome get-well card to the contrary notwithstanding, I think I'd rather have spent the week in your hospital than in her jail.
And, speaking of jail - that is exactly where I would be if the Press-Tribune printed here what my other flamboyant, opportunistic and sometimes conservative friends actually wrote on their "get well" cards.
Conclusion? With friends like conservatives and libertarians plus a sprinkling of media members - who needs a hemorroidectomy?
Shame, Shame on John Pilote
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 29, 1989
The Idaho State GOP office in Boise has a sign on the door saying "Nobody home." I jest. There is no sign - really. But there is "nobody home" just the same. Why? Not enough roses, and too many:
Razzberries for Randy Ayre of Boise Cascade. He is the fearless leader for Idaho's Republican Party, as state chairman. The liberal Ayre (he prefers the word "progressive" but a rose by any other name is still ...) is a reminder that George Orwell's double-speak is with us yet. Fact is the whole GOP state office has resigned. Rumor is they couldn't stand to see the Grand Old (conservative) Party pushed, cajoled, nudged and shoved into the too-danged liberal camp so perfectly epitomized by what the state's other 43 counties are wont to call "Ada County's wimps of Boise." How can this be? Here's a clue:
Roses to Tom Bethell, one of the nation's best conservative libertarian writers whose pungent pen often gets him erroneously accused of being negative. For example, Bethell write last year: "This spring I was the after-dinner speaker at a convention held by one of the two main GOP clubs in California. Pat Robertson, still in the race, was the main luncheon speaker. Perhaps a hundred Robertson supporters had shown up. The word was they were trying to take control of the club.
"They failed - there weren't enough of them. But it was interesting to note the discreet indignation of the party regulars; it was obvious that they regarded the Republican Party as THEIR party - outsiders not welcome. If the event was any guide, the GOP is still stuck with the problem that those who run it would rather lose the election than lose control of the party."
Do you suppose this type of mentality pervades the Idaho Republican Party, too? Well, my friends, I can tell you that it does. From first-hand experience I can tell you it is the modus operandi of both conservative and liberal GOP party regulars. What everyone thinks of Randy Ayre's liberalism, this part of the snobbishness of "his" party is not his fault.
Still, this is a huge barrier to Ayre or anyone else being able to get young people to join the Republican Party and take active part. Young folks are idealistic, hence must see something besides the typical herd-mentality and tribalism in order to get and hold their interest. In other words, the worn-out "party of principle" is not enough. The principle must be clear, meaningful, deeply felt and visible for young people to see fit to be politically active today. And, speaking of principle:
Razzberries for Caldwell mayoral candidate John Pilote and his denunciation in last Wednesday's Press-Tribune of the Caldwell Concerned Citizens (CCC) committee. Pilote is no doubt sincere about the dull-witted and apparently aimless drift of his hometown, especially downtown. But so are the CCC's sincere. Most of them are the cream of the town's merchants and their concerns are not, repeat not, an attempt to gain some special advantage by urging and helping someone they see as qualified to run for mayor and City Council. They should have done it long ago.
In point of fact, there was almost no one well-known in the community willing to run for mayor and the three City Council seats which were up for grabs. Therefore the CCCers met informally to try to fill said vacancies with qualified candidates. Of course, it is usual for aspiring office-seekers to find a fault when running for political office, otherwise why would anyone vote for the particular candidate over his or her competitor?
But for Pilote to suggest, at least by innuendo as he did in his public criticism, that the CCCers are out for special privilege as they sought to support and enlist a slate of candidates for city office is, well, disingenuous at best. At worst, it is excessively opportunistic if not downright intellectually dishonest. For shame!
This writer knows, however, that this is how the typical game is often played, hence I for one will give Pilote one more chance. But his kind of contentiousness, like that often attributed to Councilwoman Pat Mallea, no matter how sincere she may be, and I think she probably is, is definitely not the stuff of which today's Caldwell is in dire need. We need concern ourselves more with what is right in our city rather than who is right.
Razzberies for the Idaho Statesman's Oct. 26 story on "thrifts." Ben Franklin Savings and Loan Association's big bad news financial troubles, and they are substantial indeed, took 140 lines of a total 142 in the entire story. They devoted the remaining two lines to tell all about the good news thrifts based in Idaho - all of which exceeded the legal standard. Two lines! Egad. No wonder the S&L hysteria.
Maybe the Bible thumpers have a point, i.e., if it's good news you want - you may have to dust off your Bible. You can find some there.
Start Spreading Caldwell's Good News
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 5, 1989
William Cullen Bryant, writing in The Newspaper Press, said something about the current and on-going debate concerning good news vs. bad news in the media: "The press is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread."
Well, it's still true today. But few are those who ask just why the news media seem so hell-bent to banter abaout the bad news when there is so much good news all around us. An exception is the venerable Paul Harvey who manages to give us each day our daily "bad," but manages to mix with it a big applause for some good (news) in each one of his broadcasts.
But bad news - sells. People eat it up. It sells newspapers, yes, but more than that it sells ego. People love to pass judgment and good news seldom affords us as much satisfaction in that regard. But I thought I'd try Bryant's analogy and pour some good "grain" into Caldwell's "mill" and see what happens.
So here goes. See if you like it and if you do, try "selling" it to your friends and acquaintances. You might well come up with some better items of good news for our "mill." I had some help with many points but some just came to me as I wrote them down. Write yours down too, if you like, and mail them to me. I'd like that. Caldwell, then, is:
(1) On the main line of the UP railroad and Interstate I-84 with easy access to north and south highways and the major artery to Nevada and California entertainment and market centers.
(2) An above average public school system including a pretty good small liberal arts College of Idaho. Some important caveats could, and probably should, be listed - such as the difficulty there of learning very much about capitalism. But this list is to "accentuate the positive," so we'll skip those.
(3) Caldwell is the county seat in the center of one of the most productive agricultural areas in the entire U.S.
(4) While the downtown's appearance and vacancies leave much to be desired there are more commercial power hookups today than at any time in the city's history. Businesses have just moved to the outskirts.
(5) Total bank deposits are in excess of $234 million as of Jan. 1, 1989, and former Mayor Bob Pasley tells me that that is up from about $155 million when he took office in 1974.
(6) Has a fine private hospital, West Valley Medical (WVMC), with 150 beds and a trainload of special equipment and lots of nice nurses, too. They boast 21 medical doctors and 15 dentists. While the dentists and at least four chiropractors don't need a hospital - it's there if they want to recommend it.
(7) There are five nursing homes which mean a lot to families unable to care for their aging parents at home as well as to the older folks themselves.
(8) The city has two more lawyers than it has doctors for a total of 23 which may dismay some, but if one needs a good lawyer to draw up a contract or a will then one tends to rest much easier and more securely and thus may have less need for one in a lawsuit.
(9) Two neat amenities of which Caldwell can boast are its municipal golf courses. One nine-holer almost downtown and another nearly as beautiful 18-holer at Purple Sage only a few miles away. Purple Sage has a great, brand new and larger clubhouse accommodating pros and amateurs from all over the valley.
(10) Several park systems and a greenbelt on the edge of town. The latter boasts two or three miles of a 6-foot wide paved pathway for those who walk, jog or ride bicycles. The parks provide ballplayers with play areas and picnickers with grass aplenty for a population much larger as we continue to grow. In one of these parks is a huge, almost new swimming pool that may even accommodate Olympic swimmers, though I'm not exactly sure. Last time I looked there was also a neat "weenie golf" links.
(11) One is constrained to mention, a plethora of fine businesses, some old, some new. But there are so many let's save these real life-savers for later, especially since we tend to take them so for granted. Sad to say. Still, we can at least mention the largest potato and french fry plant in the whole world (at least Simplot is the best, if not also the largest) feeding most of MacDonald's multi-billion-hamburger eaters; the world's largest sweet corn seed producers, Crookham Seed Co., and the venerable Caxton Printers, which kept the libertarian ethic alive way back when almost no publisher would touch it. It is now a popular and pathbreaking philosophy. It was Caxton's who in later years launches the spectacular multi-color picture book with their famous edition, Steen's Mountain. Other publishers have rushed to follow their lead.
Gee whiz, we are just beginning to accentuate the positive and already we're up to:
(12) The new industrial airport boasts a 4,700-ft. long jet-length runway, hangars, shops, a cafe, beautiful ranch style administration building and;
(13) a first class World War II airplane museum.
Gosh, I'm out of space already. But stay tuned. Next week I'll have more "gooder" positives on Caldwell.
Meantime, don't vote Tuesday. It will only encourage the politicians.
Smeed's Praise of Caldwell - Part II
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 12, 1989
The Farmer's Almanac definition of inflation is unique if not spectacular. The 19898 edition says: "Inflation is the price we pay for those government benefits everybody thought were free."
But not all the benefits of living and doing business, in Caldwell at least, come from the "government." The Almanac, of course, was referring to the federal government which tends to pay for nearly all their money schemes with the U.S. Treasury's printing presses.
Caldwell has never had a money printing press, so many of our citizens, both individuals and groups, have over the years got busy and put together a plethora of pleasant things. These things add up to be a sort of genuine "song" to accentuate the positive if we just remember to "whistle while we work" and encourage each other's efforts to expand our city's vital economic base.
Last week in this column we wound up with 13 items of "good news" about Caldwell before running out of space, so let's add a few more today. Who knows, maybe the mood will catch on with the slate of newly elected City Council members and a brand new mayor. Congratulations to them all, by the way, and a hearty thank you with good cheer to the outgoing members for their dedication and efforts to make our city's problems into pluses. So:
With understandable apologies for omitting Caldwell's multitude of businesses and professions, from whence cometh virtually all of our ability to pay the bills, now let's add to last week's list some more Caldwell amenities in no particular order of their importance:
(14) Just outside our city limits is some of the best pheasant and upland-game hunting anywhere - from America's sea to shining sea. And perhaps five miles or so away is Lake Lowell, the irrigation reservoir which when it was first built with horse-drawn equipment early in the 1900s was the largest man-made water storage in the U.S. The Deer Flat game refuge hosts ducks and geese in the tens of thousands. If your friends would rather fish, swim, sail or motorboat they can do that, too, weather permitting, of course.
(15) A little farther away is the Owyhee Reservoir, a big fishing and recreation area around which are prime spots for rock hounds.
And speaking of rocks, let us not forget (16) Caldwell has one of the absolute top gem collections in the world. It is the gift of the late fishing-tackle magnate, Glen L. Evans, a nearly lifetime resident of our city. The entire collection is ensconced at the College of Idaho's beautiful and modern Boone Science Hall. You can look at the collection in an hour, but you cannot "see" it all, properly, in that short span of time.
(17) Our fair city has 41 churches, believe it or not. Now then, if your friends cannot find a church that exactly suits your religious taste among all the 41, don't despair. Some fine a supplemental religious or even a kind of spiritual experience (I'm not kidding) as they browse through the above-mentioned Evans gem and rock collection. By that I mean, if one can look at all that miraculous, astonishing, spectacular and magnificent natural beauty - then come up with the conclusion all this wonder came from a big accidental bang "theory" (of evolution) he (or she) may need a psychiatrist more than a preacher.
And (18) speaking of medical doctors, of which there are 43 actively on the Caldwell hospital's medical staff and more than 70 on a direct consulting basis, two of these I'm told are indeed first-class psychiatrists. So, if our fine large array of preachers should feel the urge they just may take their respective flocks to visit the Evans natural science gem display one of these Sundays. It could be a "supplemental" boost to nearly everybody's religion.
Admittedly this writer may be way over his head in the religion arena, but the above is meant in the most sincere way. And it just might work.
One supposes the atheists could (and do) find good bases for living in Caldwell, too, and I'm sure they would be welcome at the C of I's gem display as well. Who knows, maybe having seen the light, i.e., the miracles obvious in the Evans "rock of ages" collection, some of our 41 churches just might open up their hearts and pews to them with joy and forgiveness. I jest, of course, but with church membership on the decline they probably would welcome the new business, even from the atheists.
Gosh, we're about out of space - again - for these goodies we sometimes forget are in Caldwell - and we've just scratched the surface. Another day we'll wax eloquent about the best drinking water in the country and on and on including maybe, even, some "government benefits" we thought were free.
Just remember, folks, not very much happens in anybody's town until somebody sells something - for profit.
'60s Speech Still Meaningful today
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 19, 1989
Something seminal happened at the College of Idaho way back in 1964 and it's still meaningful today. It took place during the presidential campaign that year when then U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, the country's most popular conservative, was running for the nation's top spot.
It wasn't that our liberal college was for the conservative Goldwater (a contradiction in terms at the C of I in those days, too.) It was that the GOP was using a room on campus in which Dr. Walter Judd, one of the country's super-bright and most articulate congressman of that era, was campaigning for the re-election of Idaho's U.S. Sen. Len Jordan.
Seldom does Idaho get treated with rare political genius such as Judd's. Fortunately this writer had the good sense to have the Minnesota congressman's speech taped and later transcribed and printed for wider distribution. Most of his talk is remarkably pertinent today, especially the part about something that is big in today's news - the shameful Berlin Wall. Here's part of what Judd said. Just remember, this was 25 years ago and prior to the slaughter of untold millions of people:
"But there have to be some deeds not just conciliatory words. And the fact is there is not one thread of evidence of any slightest change in the announced communist intention to impose their will upon the world. Well, you might say: What would be some deeds that would indicate a justification for a shift ..." (to a more conciliatory U.S. policy.)
"There's a lot of things Mr. Khruschev could do if he really wants ... to go along with (his) friendly words. One of them would be, for example, to take down the Berlin Wall. He built it. He can take it down. It would not lead to war to take it down, it would change the whole climate and prospects of peace in Europe in an hour.
"But he doesn't take it down. He talks about peaceful co-existence, relaxation of tension, disarmament. He's used the same phrases Stalin did before him, and Lenin did before Stalin for 45 years. But not yet has there been a single deed.
"Another would be to let the people of Eastern Europe vote. They are not savages out of the jungle. They are highly civilized people with longer histories of competent management of their affairs than we ourselves have."
It is an interesting aside to note many Americans tend to think of all foreign countries as intellectually backward and illiterate. However, Leonard Peikoff documented in his pathbreaking book, Ominous Parallels, the fact that it was Germany's highly influential intellectual establishment that laid the groundwork in pre-World War II years for the modern world's launch into statism. It gave rise to Adolph Hitler's Third Reich mentality. These same kinds of intellectuals holding high places in today's American colleges and universities, says Peikoff, are paving pathways ominously parallel to those laid in the intellectual groundwork of leftist and utopian idea-mongers and philosophers of pre-World War II Germany.
But Judd, the brilliant medical doctor-turned political-leader, went on to make his own parallels even clearer. Remember now, this was 1964:
"For example, look at East and West Germany, same people on both sides of the line. The West Germans vote, manage ... extremely competently. Why not let the East Germans vote? This would be a deed ... Another would be to stop using Cuba as a base for subversion of our hemisphere. That's what it's being used for.
"This is not a charge by a right-wing extremist. This was documented by the Organization of American States (OAS) a few months ago. The training in Cuba of communist agents from Latin American countries, arming them, transporting them, landing them in Venezuela and other countries to overthrow them."
It's still going on today. This in spite of what left-wing liberal apologists say such as our own well-meaning Erwin Schweibert. He (they) still cannot see even one single enemy of freedom on the left. Egad.
Well, folks, Judd had a lot more to say, all of it of interest back then. Most of it just as pertinent today - unfortunately.
But some changes are real. Even a few communist good deeds are appearing. Some, no doubt, we are witnessing right now especially in East Germany, Berlin, Poland, Hungary and, yes, even in the U.S.S.R.
All of us rejoice in this, of course. But let's not be so perennially dumb or naive the next 25 years as our forever liberal justifiers have urged us to be for the past 25 years. It might be fatal.
Why? Well, given the advice the communists are getting from U.S. politicians to open up their borders, allow a market economy, honor private property and freedom of religion, come up with sound money backed by gold (yes, two U.S. government officials even suggested this), honest elections, less government, more private entrepreneurship, capitalism, fewer and less arrogant bureaucrats, etc., etc., somebody just might discover - too late - that these ideals are no longer understood in America.
Thanks to our own intellectuals right here at home.
Perestroika, Glasnot Slow at C of I
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 26, 1989
If you think that perestroika and glasnost are in the process of rehabilitating the Soviet Union, but not America, you may be right. Here's why:
Razzberries for America's bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. "Our" State Department, for many decades a red hot bastion of left-leaning liberals, recommended against giving political asylum to a Vietnamese man who escaped from his homeland by lashing himself to the rudder housing of a tanker for two days in monsoon seas. Fortunately the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) ignored the U.S. State Department and gave him asylum anyway.
Roses for America's only non-liberal major daily newspaper, the Washington Times whose Nov. 2, 1989, editorial brings to us the above asinine story of our State Departments myopia. Incidentally, Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor-in-chief of the Washington Times denies the frequently heard allegation that his paper is conservative. He explains that it is merely that their paper is not knee-jerk liberal as are most papers. Therefore to some the Times just seems to be conservative by comparison.
Razzberries to the liberals, especially those power houses in the media. They gush over Mr. Gorbachev as though he were George Washington of the whole Soviet Bloc. Well, perhaps he is due to a tremendous sum of credits, although he's still shipping arms to Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Cuba and raising particular hell in other ways. Still the suspicion is more that the liberals just loath the obvious, namely, that it is Ronald Reagan to whom most of the credit must go for selling the rhetoric of freedom around the world. The liberals all too typically would rather give their plaudits to a left-winger than to a right. So:
Roses to then President Ronald Reagan who in the summer of 1987 stood in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and under the cameras of worldwide television (and after having called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" - remember?) exclaimed:
"General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this (Brandenburg) gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
And for reasons best known to themselves, the liberals still hate Reagan's political guts. Egad. I must hasten to admit that Reagan sullied an almost brilliant career by abandoning two of his most loyal servants, Lt. Col. Oliver North and Admiral John Poindexter, in his anti-communist crusade.
But that isn't why the liberals hate the Gipper's guts. They want to win - if they want to win against collectivism at all - with their own form of collectivism, the liberal Democrat party.
Razzberries for most of the college and university professors all across the land. Even the conservative ones (there are a few. 10 per cent, maybe) lack the visibility perhaps the guts, to make their ideas and opinions heard and understood. But lack of zeal to protest is not so much a part of the liberal side of the professorial set. At least at the College of Idaho they are not. How so?
Well, at a recent $50 per plate gathering in Boise hosted by the C of I to receive an honor of some sort from the Newcomen Society, a Pennsylvania based group honoring organizations that support "... free enterprise and the business community it serves" something happened. Since the Newcomen Society is partly designed to honor an English inventor, a toast is customarily offered on these occasions to the Queen of England. As a gesture, no doubt, to the host country of the honoree being so feted, a toast was likewise offered by industrialist J.R. Simplot to the President of the United States.
Now then, George Bush is of course a Republican as well as our "reigning" president. Like it or not, Bush is also seen by many as a kind of conservative. Be this as it may the huge crowd attending the gala event all stood to honor the toast to the Queen. But when the toast to America's Chief of State (Bush) was offered, two C of I professors chose to remain seated, i.e., obviously to protest honoring the GOP president.
This writer doesn't know why the two C of I professors "dissented"; neither do I have the slightest idea what their names were. But this brings to mind a similar occasion exactly 10 years ago when two other unnamed C of I professors dissented by remaining seated at a Chamber of Commerce dinner in Caldwell. All others in attendance customarily rose to honor U.S. Sen. Jim McClure, the conservative GOP speaker of the evening.
My column a decade ago chronicled that story, too. But it was not to protest the professor's protest. I wanted to note C of I's not having equally "dedicated and visible" teachers on the other side.
That column, by the way, was appropriately headlined: "C of I professors' protest all too typical."
Monday's Vote Not Just About Roads
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 3, 1989
Early last week a candidate forum was held in the Canyon County Courthouse. It was a mild disaster.
It was for the Canyon County Highway District commissioner election to be held Monday. Three of these men administer an annual budget, we are told, of approximately $1.5 million. Two will be elected.
The best factor of the evening was that only 20 persons attended. It would have been twice as good if only half as many had shown up. Why? Because even more confusion was added to an already thoroughly confused group of entirely sincere and concerned citizens.
This applies to both audience and candidates as well who are, for the most part, interested in county road. To a largely rural community like ours, most of these are farm-to-market roads, thus of critical if not monumental importance to our economy. For some strange reason, however, Caldwell's story has been for many years a kind of Western version of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow when it comes to farm-to-market roads.
But the coming election is not exactly about more or better rural roads, however important all candidates agree that that is.
What is mostly at issue is an ideological question. Or, said another way, it is a philosophical question which flounders on or about something loosely referred to as efficiency. Shakespeare would have said it was a political forum "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
But that would not be entirely accurate. The election forum for county highway commissioners does not signify nothing. It said (1) that perfectly sincere, hardworking private citizen-politicians can promote statism without even realizing it and (2) that equally intelligent citizens challenging the incumbent commissioners can challenge without the public having any idea just what the fuss is all about.
The three incumbent commissioners think the private construction and paving contractors all refuse to give adequate competitive bids for construction and repair of the county's roads and bridges including crushing the huge supplies of gravel with which the county builds and maintains their own roads.
With virtually no bidding from private contractors the county highway folks still needed crushed gravel in big quantities, so they bought a rockcrusher a few years ago for about $250,000. This way they didn't have to depend on the private contractors. The latter were oft-times too greedy, said the commissioners, and tended to rip off the people's highway district.
The Canyon Highway District and, by the way, the Nampa Highway District, when measured in terms of assets, are bigger construction "companies" than the several private companies in the county. Nevertheless the commissioners who don't want the taxpayers to get ripped off by non-competitive bids are, in my humble opinion, completely sincere. Wrong, surely, yet sincere.
But the Associated General Contractors (AGC) still smells a rat. It claims the highway district is breaking the law by purchasing a $250,000 rockcrusher. The law says public entities must not go into debt to purchase anything, including rockcrushers, so they "lease-purchased" it. The district justifies by saying it saves the taxpayer big bucks by operating its own construction "company" and, besides, they didn't buy the huge rockcrusher - they leased it. Tut tut.
So the AGC and its members struck! They set out two years ago to remove what they saw as a growing cancer of socialism and urged election competition for high commissioners of Canyon County. They were only partially successful last election. Monday there's another chance.
Incumbents Ralph Little and Virgil Isaacson are up for re-election. Greg Johnson and Henry Busse want those jobs in order to push, as far as possible, the county road "company" into the arena of private competitive enterprise. The AGC will no doubt applaud their efforts.
There's more to the story. Truckloads more. But Ayn Rand said it best in her CAPITALISM the UNKNOWN IDEAL: "Since the elections of 1966 (there's been talk) about the country's swing to the right.
"There was only a swing against the left (if by right we mean capitalism - and by left statism.)
"Without a firm, consistent IDEOLOGICAL program and leadership,k the people's desperate protest will be dissipated in the blind alleys of the same statism that they are opposing.
"It is futile to fight AGAINST, if one does not know what one is fighting FOR. A merely negative trend or movement cannot win and, historically, has never won: it leads nowhere ... no communication, let alone agreement, is possible.
"It is not the unity (nor efficiency) but intellectual coherence that a country needs.
"The task of defining ideas (the primacy of ideas) and goals is not the province of politicians and is not accomplished at election time: elections are merely consequences. The task belongs to the intellectuals."
Still, the suspicious lingers: as between today's intellectuals and today's politicians - it may be a Catch-22.
Delivering Roses Getting To Be Habit
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 10, 1989
It was so much fun writing of several pluses in our community that a couple more columns will have to be done someday so I can use up the many positive items my research turned up.
But there were a lot of other things left out, positive things, such as businesses we tend to take for granted and individuals we not only take for granted but maybe don't know about. So here's a few:
Roses for one of the more colorful postmen of our fair city whose efficient service and cheerful and peppy demeanor many of us have come to take for granted. As you may know, his name is Jack Raymond, but what you may not know is that this native Idahoan has been with the U.S. Postal Service for almost a quarter of a century; 24 years, in fact.
"Colorful" not only refers to his manner but his orthodox uniform postman's hat typical of his occupation. Not so typical is the decoration with which this young man adorns said hat at Christmastime. Each year his customers on his route can expect to be entertained and pleased by a great big wreath-like band of seasonal holly garnished with maybe a bright red bow or sprig of mistletoe. A community that has faithful and competent citizen-employees for so many years in a row can't be all bad.
Raymond is also a city councilman whose modus operandi includes what he apparently thinks of as his "discovery" of ancient populism, but he tries hard to be a good citizen. Still, I'm trying to be positive, today, so I'll lay off the politicians for now. But stay tuned!
Roses for the famous Summers Office Supply's Archie Stradley. Not only has this neat little guy been associated with one employer for 42 years (believe it or not) in a row; not only is he one of the best in his business; not only does Archie know almost everybody who is anybody (and some who are not) in Canyon County; not only does he know - and know how to tell - more humorous jokes than anyone; this great little man has played Santa Claus each year for, well, it seems like forever. More than a decade anyway.
Stradley has brought more cheer, laughs and tears of gratitude to more little folk, and maybe even more big folks, at Christmastime in the person of St. Nick himself than anybody you ever met.
Caldwell is mighty lucky to have talent and dedication such as Archie's not to mention that ol' loveable curmudgeon-capitalist who's kept their doors open downtown for almost 47 years, Les Summers himself. A city or town can't be far behind a shady spot in heaven with people like this. I sometimes wonder if we appreciate 'em enough.
Well Archie had a severe heart attack several months ago. But, lucky us, he's mostly recovered. I'll bet you a wooden nickel that he'll be out there as Santa Claus again this month, slower maybe, but with the same smile and same "ho ho ho" - to the profit and the richness of the whole darned community.
Roses, too, for small businessman George Randall whose one-man "Gyp-Joint" has been selling newspapers, magazines, trinkets, gifts and sundries of great variety on the corner of Blaine and Kimball every day since the mid-1960s. George's cerebral palsy, though surely one of the most severe in the country, doesn't daunt his bright and smiling attitude half as much as others 1,000 times less handicapped.
Caldwellites Frank Payne, Roger Sayre, Les Summers and a few others financed and built Randall's "Gyp Joint" to he could support himself as an entrepreneur par excellence. He paid them back, by the way, but he very much appreciates those other good neighbor-type friends who shave him, feed and help with the numerous daily personal chores needed for George to keep in business.
Stop in and buy a gift or gimmick from him this month. He'll tell you about it on his alphabet "talk" board - just be patient as he takes a little time to communicate.
Roses for Dick Van Slyke and his nice wife, Mary Ann, whose house and yard at 2021 E. Cleveland Blvd. put many barber shops and beauty parlors to shame. Why? Well drive by sometime, especially in the summer, and you'll see a manicured hedge, bushes and shrubs always with a fresh haircut around a nice home kept so neat and trim as to make you proud you live in Caldwell.
While not all his close neighbors seem to cooperate (one yard nearby looks like a disaster are) the assessor or City Hall should give the Van Slykes a rebate on next year's taxes. On top of all this their yard boasts a permanent flag pole. They fly the American flag. They're proud.
Caldwell should be, too.
Be Wary U.S., Cold War Not Over Yet
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 17, 1989
What do you really think about what's going on in East Germany, Ralph, and do you think the Soviet dictator Gorbachev is for real? Is the cold war really over? Many people are wondering.
No, my friends, the cold war is not over. Not by a long shot. But something big is happening. Real big! And some of it just has to be both positive and even genuine on the part of many of the forces in the Communist Bloc countries. Just let us hope and pray that what we are being told by our left-leaning news media is for the right reasons and will have the proper outcome for all concerned.
There are some big-ticket items, however, that give prudent and caring folks pause lest we forget to keep our powder dry and get caught with our pants down. Since our own news media is so often strangely sympathetic to communist ideologies let's examine some information the nightly news big shots tend to downplay, if indeed they deign to tell us at all. For instance:
America's General John Gavin, chief military commander of NATO said Soviet weaponry "makes us shiver." He says the Red have opted for quality, instead of quantity and are producing new types of weapons. This was reported by Reuters wire service Nov. 21, 1989. That's mighty current folks, and remember the Associated Press wire service is the one and only we get here-abouts.
The Daily News Digest reported some time ago that the dreaded KGB announced the abolition of the Fifth Directorate, which had the task of "combating enemy ideological subversion." It turns out that the department was replaced by the Directorate for the Defense of the Soviet Constitutional System, which does the same thing. This bit of news came from Insight magazine Nov. 27 and is unlikely to be seen in Time, Newsweek or the other left-leaning establishment weeklies.
Hungary, in its rush toward capitalism, has scheduled as many as 60 new privatizations for the next year or so, including the post office. However, most current deals are on hold as lower=level hard liners (read, communists) have put up stumbling blocks. This item was in the Wall Street Journal Nov. 17, but did you ever notice Tom Brokaw's or Ted Koppel's hearts bleeding about it on the nightly TV? Of course not. Wonder why.
Just the week before, the WSJ reported Poland's Ministry of Privatization, charged with selling off the 90 percent of the Polish economy that is state owned, has: four full-time workers, one phone line, one typewriter and two computers. Not exactly a rush to the right, eh?
That same country's Prime Minister Mazowiecki met with Gorbachev and assured him that the USSR can count on the solid partnership of Poland. Reuter reported this Nov. 25. That's pretty current too, but it's not likely we'll hear from ABC's Sam Donaldson or Associated Press's Quane Kenyon of Idaho warning us not to be too complacent.
In Afghanistan the Soviet-backed Kabul government holds more than 3,000 political prisoners and those awaiting trial "are kept like animals in small cells or rooms," says a U.N. report. This according to Reuters last month. Thank heaven for Reuters.
More than 300 Soviet trucks, buses, and military vehicles, including 200 tanks, arrived in Kabul less than three weeks ago. Thank the "conservative" Washington Times for this one. 'Betcha the liberal Washington Post didn't report it at all.
You'll note I used quotation marks around the term "conservative" in describing the Washington Times above. Well, Arnaud de Borchgrave, internationally known newsman and editor of the Times, told me his is not a conservative paper. He just reports the facts, hence the liberals, perhaps understandably, just think the paper is conservative.
As an interesting aside, like the Christian Science Monitor, de Borchgrave's paper is owned by members of a specific church. His are Unification Church members which he insists do not tell him what to publish. Insight magazine, which de Borchgrave heads up, is owned by the same people and is in my opinion by far the best non-liberal weekly news magazine in America, if not the world.
Back to perestroika, glasnost, Gorbachev and whether or not socialism has lost to capitalism as "reported" almost daily by America's media elite.
And last but not least we're indebted to Reuters for telling us Nov. 16 that Gorbachev, with his empire crumbling around him, reaffirmed his faith in the socialist (communist) system and rejected any alternatives as daydreams. In a treatise covering 2.5 pages of the Communist Party daily PRAVDA, Gorbachev rejected any other course to a progressive and civilized society, saying the transient nature of capitalism had been proven and with it the necessity of moving on to a new state of social development, which he described as Marxism.
Yet, we may be indebted to our left-leaning TV media and at least the Red Chinese commies, after all.
They showed us that the tide of freedom can still be turned back - remember Beijing and the Communist army's slaughter of 2,000 students at Tiananmen Square.
Forrey Draft May Zing Bedfellows
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 24, 1989
What follows is about an event that will probably send he whole Idaho education establishment up the wall along with its witch doctors, soothsayers, medicine men and their utopian-dreamer comrades.
Why? Well, the above list of zealots is led almost entirely by the Idaho Education Association (IEA), a rubber stamp of the knee-jerk liberal National Education Association (NEA), and these special interest people hate with great gusto anything individualistic.
Especially does the IEA hate competition, particularly when they do not control the contest "rules" of which, by the way, they are fanatically jealous.
Comes now the event: A regular columnist of the Lewiston Morning Tribune (LMT) is in the process of launching a statewide effort to draft Nampa's Robert Forrey for governor. Forrey, you may remember, held office for some years as an enterprising GOP Idaho state representative where he also took a keen interest in government schools and non-government schools. While acknowledging the controversial nature of Forrey's stewardship of his office, former state senator Phil Batt (no right-winger he) called the Nampa representative "one of the best informed members of the entire state legislature."
What sends the left-leaning school establishment up the wall is not so much that Forrey tends to be critical of government schools, which he is, but more particularly that he praises non-government schools. In other words the IEA, for example, finds it no problem at all defending their many "straw men" whom they claim are against education, thus against kids.
Their real problem is how to protect their power base. Theirs is the most powerful labor union in Idaho, much more so than the AFL-CIO, thus someone who knows what they are for are thus a very real threat.
The LMT columnist who suggested they draft-Bob Forrey effort in his Dec. 9 column is no ordinary flak columnist. For whatever it is worth, an entrepreneur-business man, headmaster of a successful 300-student private elementary school in Moscow, and a part-time instructor at the University of Idaho. His column identifies him with the single word: "minister," which he is, and an absolutely delightful one at that. An intelligent one with a sense of humor, a sense of religion (rare these days) handsome and, more often than not, with a touch of class.
After listening to a recent gathering of Idaho GOP gubernatorial hopefuls he was not irritated, perhaps, but almost without any enthusiasm at all. Here is part of what Wilson reasoned:
"All (candidates) seemed to think it possible to win through Andrus-bashing, which is capitol F Folly.
"Unlike the other three current candidates (Forrey) has a constituency all over the state of Idaho... because he works for what he believes (in or out of office), whether or not what he does is popular with the grand Poobahs of liberalism. He is a man of conservative principle, and not a man of expedience."
Wilson was not alone in the draft-Forrey bombshell. Michael Nadreau, a columnist writing in the Moscow newspaper who is president of the North Idaho Private Education Association also urged support to draft the controversial Forrey. But what makes Nadreau's a bit of a "bombshell" is that he is also a member of the Latah County Republican Central Committee. Said he:
"What we need is someone we can ger behind and ger excited about supporting. I propose we all send (Bob Forrey) a $25 check and ask him to run.
"Mr. Forrey has been traveling around the state the past few years helping start new home school groups and encouraging private educators." (This writer is astounded at the magnitude of the home school movement in Idaho.)
Now get this, my friends, all this from only two columns in December and one letter to the editor. And now guess what? The LMT's liberal editor, Bill Hall, and his columnist, Jim Fisher, are having mini-heart attacks. Already they are attacking the draft-Forrey effort as a "joke."
But somebody not likely to see it as a joke is GOP state superintendent of public instruction, Jerry Evans. This nice man tends to see himself not only as his title suggests, i.e. to supervise "public instruction," but to plan it and command it, then in effect to oppose those simple parents (bless their hearts) who want to assume some personal responsibility for schooling their own children.
Maybe, just maybe, the draft Forrey effort will send a message to Andrus, Evans, the liberal news media and the liberal GOP.
Oh well, bed fellows, I always say, make strange politics.
Some Advice for Sen. Symms
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 31, 1989
Here is a bit of an overview of 1989 in the form of an open letter. It's to my friend and long-time political conservative comrade, who is also presently 1/100th of the entire U.S. Senate.
Steve Symms of Caldwell is still easily the hottest political property in the Idaho state GOP and, perceived or not, has been such for several years.
Still, not everybody loves this native Idahoan's anti-communist political philosophy. There are those wobbly supporters of his who for reasons best known only to themselves wonder if he can win once more should he decide to run next term.
My suggestion to you, Steve, is not to pay much attention to the snobs, superficial gossip mongers, political hangers-on and ideologues without ideas. Most of them have only a small notion about why they voted for you in the first place. Social status often accounts for as much as anything since no one in the whole state has tried harder, not always successfully by the way, to make it plain as to what you stood for and would push your colleagues for whatever you could. This has caused you and many of your supporters no small amount of problems. But they are not particularly well understood problems.
From your first Idaho headquarters in Caldwell located at Farm City in 1972 you said you were going to "Take a bite out of government." Well, you've tried. But the liberal news media never quite agreed anybody should actually reduce government, not to mention why.
You were a little like Barry Goldwater who in 1964 was so forthright many media folks thought he was being devious. He wasn't, of course, but that's all they could think of to explain his unusual candor.
Probably no candidate in the history of the state of Idaho has been so articulate in the tradition of limited government and individualism as outlined by Thomas Jefferson as you have been. But as for an offensive team to pursue this, you haven't had much help. Oh, you passed up a few opportunities, even been wrong-headed a few times, but nobody can be all things to all people. The political winds that blow make it all but impossible to be consistent especially when a hostile media would be asked to explain what you meant. Worse yet, both government and non-government schools do little to help matters in showing the prudence and propriety in limiting government on the one hand and getting elected on the other.
If you can be faulted for any one central theme during your almost 20 years in office I suppose it is that you have been slow to point this out. I mean the not-so-obvious conflict between educators, 80 percent of whom are liberal to left leaning Democrats, and the real world of capitalism and free private enterprise.
Now then, Steve, if you and your Republican comrades are to accomplish anything in the forseeable future, whether or not your pal U.S. Sen. Jim McClure decides to run again, you both should consider changing from an essentially defensive and conservative Republican posture to one with a politically understandable offense.
Here is my admittedly oversimplified suggestion for a 1990's thrust: You simply must find a better constituency for a more principled philosophical offense. Perhaps the only alternative left (no pun) is to enlist the good offices of an important but conservative minority segment of America's churches.
Not unlike the national Republicans and the state of Idaho GOPers, the churches today are also starved for a non-collectivist leadership.
True, it would take some guts and some brains, even entail some risk, but you personally might well be the perfect person to furnish the leadership so badly needed.
Professor Walter Williams of George Mason University puts it this way: "Through most of its history in the (U.S.) the church has recognized the morality of capitalism, private property rights, voluntary exchange and the dispersion of power that results from limited government."
"In recent years (however) church leadership has become increasingly hostile to basic principles of capitalism. Church leaders in their well intended effort to pursue what they see as divine mandate; ignore the strong ethical dimensions of capitalism. The National Conference of Catholic Bishop's (NCCB) 'Pastoral Letter On Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy' and the Presbyterian's 'Christian Faith and Economic Justice,' (1985) are excellent examples of increasing hostility to our form of social organization - capitalism.
"The Bishop's Letter and the Presbyterian Church's Document ... constitute an attack on the primary institution that serves to ensure personal liberty - private property rights.
"Whether this is the intent of the church is an unanswered question, but to accomplish the stated goals of both (churches) documents requires that we in fact significantly alter or destroy private property rights."
As a black man this super-bright economist and social critic, Williams, keenly perceives where America's church desperately needs an American perestroika and for capitalism - and the minorities.
A similar condition exists in the GOP. So why don't you grab McClure by the nape of the neck, lead the churches' moral minority into the Republican Party and make him help you launch an offense - for capitalism.
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The Pragmatic Side of Principle in Pursuit of Public Policy
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