Summer 2009

Here's a great Josh Ritter song along with a bunch of pictures from throughout the summer. I think Ritter is from Idaho, McCall maybe.

Overnighting in ID

There are beautiful places all over the country, but not many quite like this, and only forty minutes from town, accessed by a road that cuts under dramatic ten thousand foot peaks. Our Portland friends got a taste of the little known wilderness of Idaho's Smoky Mountains their first night in town. We made good on the fair weather. If we had waited till Sat. we would have been packing up in a cool drizzle. And we all know how that feels.

This was my second trip to the Norton Lakes and it turned out to be the perfect distance. A five mile loop with under 2000 feet of elevation gain. I did overlook the fact that at 9000 feet there would be considerable huffing and puffing for Portlanders living at sea level. Nothing PBR couldn't fix.


Gotta love beer camping! Mark carried the bag of empties the remaining miles out of the mountains, clanging around like a frightened tourist wearing bear bells. He smelled like a lush.

Fighting Alarmism

In less than a year, Barack Obama has transmogrified from the very face of hope to a villainous orator of the twentieth century brand. Or has he? If you keep up with the news, Obama has seemingly been sinking into a moral snake pit. His health care reform threatens to kill our elderly and plunge the country into a socialist quagmire. His address to America's children has parents pulling their kids from school lest they arrive off the bus with glazed eyes and a copy of the Manifesto. The same zeal that fueled the pro-Obama mania has turned against itself. It's not his policies or plans that are hurting him now but rather the same media that exalted him in the first place.

The conservative right was probably surprised those first tea party antics garnered any attention at all. When the news networks picked it up, it appeared a grassroots reaction to Obama's policies had swept the nation. In reality, the ultra conservative wing that had yet to get on Fox, suddenly found itself with an audience. Glenn Beck and Rush were on the verge of calling for revolution and even Greta couldn't keep back an odd grin. Embellishment and repetition is still the formula for success. From WMD's to health care, it gets results. "Death-panel" is now a household term. The "liberal media" is taking the bait and conservative pundits keep dishing it out. How many parents in this country, and not those leaning so far to the right they could slap hands with Mussolini, are really keeping their children home from school today? Is there really a nation full of people so sure of Obama's plan to surreptisously indoctrinate their children that they would take off a day of work for it? It's ludicrous to even think the President, in this alarmist climate, would stray from the "be cool stay in school" message.

I know people are worried about health care, especially if you mention the government in the same sentence. And while the town hall template is purely democratic, it proved a call to arms for every outspoken yahoo in the country. With the smoke still clearing, a few yelling Americans looked like a tidal wave of change was bearing down on us. A nationwide grassroots movement against big spending turned out to be a few angry secessionists. And while Cheney is still out there lobbying for torture, Obama's speech to school children was more about quieting allegations that he was Saruman the Black. It's shameful the media has been sucked into the ring of non-news. By giving time to such nonsense we've pulled further and further from the source of the dialogue - our system is broken. Obama replied to months worth of garbage in his speech to the AFL-CIO last night, asking of all those spinning lies about health care - "what are you gonna do? What's your plan?"