Slate's Bruce Reed informs of a stunning development in my former home state of Idaho:

State Sen. [and District 1 congressional candidate] Bill Sali, whom fellow Republicans describe with two words—"fricking" and "idiot"—has 39 percent; Democratic businessman Larry Grant is at 37 percent. In 2004, the district voted 68 percent for Bush.

The same poll also shows the Republican candidate for governor, retiring Rep. Butch Otter, in a dead heat with Democrat Jerry Brady, who lost by 15 points when he ran for governor in 2002. Otter and Brady are in a statistical tie in a state where one county voted for Bush 9-1.

Idaho is the second most solidly Republican state in the country, right after Utah. Bush nearly got 70% of the vote in the state in both 2000 and 2004 and in both elections the Democratic nominee won only a single county. According to a (Democratic) state rep I talked to, over 2/3 of the legislature is Republican. Republicans hold all but one statewide office and (at least right now) both senate and congressional seats.

And somehow even here Republicans have managed to screw it up. Stunning.

On a sidenote, Idaho has been mentioned as a state that is increasingly competitive because Republicans have abandoned their libertarian roots. It's worth noting that Butch Otter, the candidate struggling to become governor, was one of very few Republicans to vote against the Patriot Act.

When there isn't much to talk about, there's always the weather.

They said that it might snow. I can only give them half-credit because saying it may or may not snow is going to be right 100% of the time.

They said that if it did snow, that it would not accumulate.

Five inches of snow on my car this morning = no credit.

I was commenting at work that this may be my last Idaho snow. They said that I shouldn't bet on it. I clarified that I meant that it could be the last major dump. They said that I shouldn't bet on it.

I am officially in violation of Idaho law. The law states that if you have studded tires you have to take them off the road by April 15th. I meant to over the weekend but I forgot. Never have I been so rewarded for breaking the law. I think I might break the law a bit longer -- maybe until May.

One year ago today I arrived in Idaho, safe and sound. It was raining then, but not snowing.

Even the rain in April is a pretty big deal. We've had a whopping two inches of precipitation this month -- usually it's 2/3 or so. They're saying that the drought they've been having up here may finally be at an end.

Figures that it would be so as I plan to leave.

There's a lake in Blackfoot (halfway between hometown Pocatello and worktown Idaho Falls) that has a lake that they only fill with water a couple months of the year. It was about three months in 2004 but only six weeks or so last year. I'm really hoping they fill it soon.

Having lived in Houston for as long as I did, I never thought that rain and filled bodies of water would be such a big deal.

The Idaho State Journal's worthless education "news" writer is at it again. Last time around he ominously suggested that the business community and colleges wanted higher standards in the maths and sciences because they stood to financially benefit (because, after all, high tech employers and colleges have no other interest in an educated population coming out of high school).

This time around the subject is expanding the charter schools, which Boyd is pretty transparently skeptical of.
The number of paragraphs dedicated to voicing some concerns about the program: 11
The number of paragraphs dedicated to either defending the above skepticism, defending the expansion, or supporting it: 3

The number of quotes from charter schools administrators: 3
The number of charter school administrator quotes that support of the expansion: 1
The number of charter school administrator quotes that promote skepticism of the expansion: 2

The one quote supportive of the expansion: "I struggle to understand the criticism about accountability," [Pocatello charter school administrator Martha Martin] said.

And just for the heck of it, I will point out a statistic that the article doesn't mention:
Number of parents forced to send their kids to these "unaccountable" charter schools: 0

To be blunt, I don't know a great deal about the state of Idaho's charter schools. They may be gawd-awful and worthy of the skepticism heaped on them. But I find it interesting that according to educationists, a school that's accountable only to parents (who can pull their kids out at any time) is de facto less worthy than one that's not accountable to parents (who can't pull their kids out) at all but is accountable to school district administrators.

So apparently when the temperature gets down to zero, and then it gets colder, the temperature reflects this by having the numerical values go up again except with a "-" in front of it. This morning it was apparently minus-sign-nine degrees in Pocatello and minus-sign-twelve in Idaho Falls.

You know how sometimes it's not as hot or cold as the temperature suggests? Yeah, this was not so much one of those times. It felt like my hand was going to freeze off just during the five minutes it took to scrape my windshield of that pesky cold, translucent film that seems to appear when it gets cold and precipitates.

Even the smokers around the office are going to forego their habit today. One said that he didn't even smoke on his drive to work because that would have required opening the window up a crack.

Apparently I don't have to worry about snow because they tell me that when it gets this cold it doesn't really snow. I guess that's a good thing. Also a good thing is that I will get to step all over the ice again when it starts getting a little warmer. I like the cracking sound it makes (when my foot is hitting the ice, not my butt when I slip and fall).

Even now at the height of coldidity, if you stand outside for a few minutes, you will almost certainly hear the sound of ice cracking somewhere. If you stand outside for a few minutes, you're nuts.

Some guy was washing his car at the gas station where I filled up this morning. First, I was surprised that the water even worked. There was a column of ice on the wall where the water coming out of the leaky hose had frozen. Second, I'm not sure whether he was actually wanting to clean is car from dirt or get the ice off. I can't help but believe that either would be a mistake.

My car's CD player doesn't like the cold weather. So for the first ten minutes of my drive I have to listen to the radio. Do you know how inconvenient a time of year it is for this to become part of my routine? I would have to endure 2.5 Christmas songs or so, were it not for the fact that I just find a station playing commercials and leave it there.

Human beings were not meant to live this way.

Renegade Utahn Maddox fires a salvo against Taterland.

Not only is Idaho a ho-hum state, Idahoans (their word, not mine) are gullible. Idaho was named in 1860 by George M. Willing, a mining lobbyist who pulled the name out of his ass (look it up). He picked the name "idaho" and told congress that it was a Shoshone Indian word that meant "Gem of the Mountains." Most westerners in the United States are completely devoid of any cultural heritage, so it has always been popular out here to latch onto American Indian monikers. When people finally caught on that "Idaho" was a made up name, it was too late. The name caught on and the morons who live there have called themselves "Idahoans" ever since.

I propose that we give Idaho back to the British, since that's who we got it from in the first place. I don't think it'll be too much of a problem because there aren't a lot of people in Idaho. According to the 2004 Census report, Idaho's population is 1,393,262. Just for comparison, there are 1,970,000 cows in Idaho. New rule: if your state has more cows than people, you don't get to be a state anymore.

I actually consider Utahns to be worse drivers than Idahoans. Utah and Idaho tend to have little use for one another. I guess it's like a Wisconsin/Minnesota thing where it's a too-alike thing rather than a too-different one. Utah is majority Mormon and in Idaho they are a plurality - a majority in eastern Idaho, with which Utah gets the most exposure. Utah is the most conservative Republican state in the country, Idaho is #2. But few of the people up here - including Mormons - seem to care much for Utah and the feeling among Utahns seem to be similar about Idaho.

Of course, Maddox is completely non-representative of Utah In fact, you coulda knocked me over with a feather when I discovered that was his base of operations, though it does partly explain his bitterness.

His history of the name of Idaho is a bit off, though, from what I understand. It was Colorado that was taken in by the scam. Colorado was originally slated to be named Idaho after a made-up Indian word. Shortly before it became a state, it was discovered that it wasn't a real word and they went back to the name of Colorado. In the meantime, though, there was a ferry that was named Idaho after the proposed name of Colorado. The ferry lead to what is current day Idaho and so people who went from Colorado to the unnamed land did so by the Idaho and began to use that as the name of the unnamed land. And this time it stuck.

And he should lay off Idaho's potatoes. They are that good up here.

The movie Napoleon Dynamite made Preston, Idaho, famous as a quaint mountain town a little out-of-step with the times. Preston, an hour or two south of Pocatello, has recently become famous - or perhaps infamous is more appropriate - in its own right due to official misconduct.

A couple months ago, Preston's Police Cheif Scott Shaw plead guilty to misuse of public money and perjury:

Count Six charged Shaw with misuse of public money by accepting and depositing into his own account a City of Preston check in the amount of $882. According to the complaint, the money was for tuition and per diem to attend the FBI Command College, and Shaw did not attend or attempt to attend the training.

Count Seven accused Shaw of perjury during a deposition in a civil lawsuit Shaw brought against the City of Preston. According to the complaint, Shaw falsely stated under oath that he had kept the $882 in his desk to be used as “buy” money.

As part of a plea agreement, the Attorney General’s Office dismissed the remaining five counts. Those counts alleged unlawful activity by Shaw in obtaining, serving and processing a search warrant at the Preston residence of Bart Pitcher. Pitcher was convicted and sentenced to prison as a result of the unlawful search.

Pitcher's conviction was overturned and he's now suing just about everybody in sight, including Shaw and former Preston Mayor Heusser, who was apparently Pitcher's parole officer:

Pitcher was allegedly coerced into pleading guilty to meth possession and trafficking charges as well as forfeiting property, including his home, vehicles, a trailer, two dragsters, a motorcycle and more.

“Shaw wanted to keep the motorcycle as a trophy,” the document says. Officer Greg Balue allegedly used one of Pitcher's vehicles as his own.

Pitcher was told if he refused, racketeering, rape and federal firearm violations would be filed against him. The home and business of Shaw's ex-wife were also confiscated after Shaw threatened her with unfounded charges.

“Approximately $10,000 was deposited into the Franklin County Drug Endowment Fund from the sale of property seized from (Pitcher and his family),” the complaint says. “Shaw believed that the assets forfeited in Bart's case would ultimately yield approximately $750,000, with which he wanted to build a new police station.”

An investigation by Attorney General Lawrence Wasden's office resulted in Pitcher's conviction being set aside and much of the confiscated property returned. It is also the basis for the civil suit.

It basically alleges that Pitcher was recruited to be an informant to get out of a jam. When Pitcher wanted out to get a handle on his drug problem, the city turned their dogs on Pitcher with some charges that appear to be trumped up. Shaw was sentenced last week and apparently Heusser has just been indicted for misuse of funds. It does not paint a pretty picture.

Pocatello Creek Road, one of the more consequential roads on the east side of Pocatello and the connection between Eel's place and the freeway, is next on the city's hitlist of repairs for the second year in a row.

They've been putting up ominous signs over the last week. Ominous and a bit ambiguous. It says "Construction to start 6/6" and "find alternate routes," but didn't say explicitly whether or not the entire road would close. It's one of the only roads in town I don't think that they could close entirely, though they could deter most traffic through an unholy mess of longwinded detours.

But on Friday they set up the orange cones on the side of the road, presumably so that yesterday morning they could take them out to the road and do whatever they were going to do, whether it be closure-and-detour or one-laning it. Since it's a road that I travel frequently and there's no parallel road available for easy detour (civil engineers take note, this is what happens when Interstates don't have access roads!), their presence was an ominous sign all weekend long. They were like an invading army lining up. They posed no threat where they were, but the problem was that you knew they wouldn't stay there.

It reminded me a bit of the end of the Star Wars Episode Two. The clones, up to that point, had saved the Jedi (and others) from death at the hands of the droids. Yoda and others had worked with them before. They obviously posed no particular threat at that point-in-time. Though, of course, you knew that the clone troopers (along with later drafted human recruits, of course) would eventually become the storm troopers that plagued Luke and Leia and all.

That same ominous feeling.

The cones invaded yesterday and as near as I can tell they're just knocking it down to one lane each way, which is perfectly fine. Coinciding with the lifting of school zone speed limits, it's actually pretty much a wash.

Assuming, of course, that the cones stay at their stations.

[ominous music here]

Forbes came out with their "Best Places for Business and Careers" for 2005. Houston came in 13th among large cities, behind only Austin, Atlanta, and Phoenix among true metropolii. Disturbingly, Boise, Idaho came in first. In the section for smaller towns, Pocatello actually came in 11th. Idaho Falls, the equally towned small city where I work, didn't make the list. That actually makes me question the methodology somewhat. If Pocatello is so great for business, and Idaho Falls isn't, then why are all the jobs up here in Idaho Falls?

My first thought was that they were lumping the two together, but the population given (77k) doesn't represent that (Poky and IF each have roughly 50k, not counting suburbs).

Very odd.

[via HCT]

You know, if Pocatello could look year-round like it looks right now, I wouldn't be able to afford to live hear because it would be too expensive. The grass is green, some of the lakes that drained out last summer and fall are refilling. The mountains may not be calcified, but I can life with that.

Linus has joked about the two seasons up here: Winter & Construction. Right now we're moving past the White Season and fast into the Orange Season.

The most amazing thing to me about the construction up here is how quickly they dismantle roads and put them back together. In Houston, they started construction on an intersection near an apartment a couple months after I moved in. Eighteen months later when I moved out they were still working on it.

Since they only get a few months of the year to work on the roads here, they tend to go all out. Whereas the aforementioned intersection remained open the whole time, here entire roads are closed for weeks at a time. Last year Main Street was closed for at least three months. The businesses languished and one or two it seems went under.

Right now the main drag (4th/5th/Yellowstone Ave., where my apartment is) is detoured at the main East-West street in town. It's an odd feeling to be getting in your car and not knowing how you're going to get where you're going, as the detours (and their locations) seem to change on a daily basis as they screech everything to a grinding halt to get it all done as quickly as possible and reopened so they can bring some other part of town to a grinding halt before White Season starts again.