[Vision2020] Candidate brings common sense to [insert your city here]

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (February 2, 2014) Spokesman-Review.

-----------------------------------

Huckleberries: Candidate brings common sense to (insert your city here)
A Coeur d’Alene businessman named Toby Schindelbeck appears to be the latest out-of-state transplant set to make his political mark on Kootenai County.

Schindelbeck, who ran unsuccessfully for City Council in Chico, Calif., two years ago, is about to announce his candidacy for House District 4A. That’s the seat currently held by state Rep. Luke Malek, R-Coeur d’Alene.

Malek tweaked the noses of the tin gods who pull the puppet strings of Kootenai County GOP politics by voting for the state-run health exchange option for Obamacare. Sure enough, Schindelbeck took aim at that vote immediately in his campaign literature on hisToby4Idaho.com website.

You may not have heard of Schindelbeck, who is touted as “a principled conservative leader” on his website, because he’s new to Coeur d’Alene. In 2012, he ran unsuccessfully for the Chico City Council, finishing seventh of 11, because he was angry about a road reconfiguration in front of his business.

There’s nothing wrong with a recent California transplant running for the Legislature. But there was something wrong with the banner that Schindelbeck had at the top of his campaign site until Huckleberries Online pointed it out Thursday: “Toby Schindelbeck: Common sense for Chico.” Ouch!

When NRA speaks …
Columnist David Bond of the Wallace Street Journal has deep NRA roots. Yet, he sees the lunacy in the Idaho Legislature’s flirtation with allowing guns on Idaho college campuses.

In a recent column, he wrote: “When you walk on to a university campus, you’ve done so with their permission. You’ve established your admission credentials, they have invited you to attend and partake of their schooling and even their housing. Nobody sent you, at gunpoint, onto that campus. You are there of your own volition and you agree to play by their rules.”

It’ll be interesting to see how many North Idaho GOP legislators are willing to buck the all-powerful NRA during a GOPrimary season and reject this nonsense.

Huckleberries
In the “What Goes Around Comes Around” Dept.: It’s nice to see my old S-R colleague Taryn Thompson newspapering again. Facebooks she: “After 12 years, I am back in the newsroom at the Coeur d’Alene Press and even sitting at my old desk.” In other words, you can go home again … Gov. Butch Otter may not think that Idaho has a reputation for being an anti-gay state, but 71 percent of my blog readers do … I’d be more impressed with the Legislature’s desire to make March 4 into a state holiday if it was a paid one … Noting a photo of Lt. Gov. candidate Jim Chmelik posted on Huckleberries Online after Chmelik’s visit to Coeur d’Alene last week, a wag responded: “He’s running for state office and yet the guy looks like he cuts his own hair using some contraption hooked up to a vacuum cleaner.” Tough crowd … When told of a dead spot for cellphone usage along Interstate 90 near Osburn, in the Silver Valley, an ISP officer responded Friday: “Yet we can put a man on the moon.”

Parting shot
Tongue firmly cheeked, Boise State prof Greg Hampikian asked in a New York Times op-ed last week when will it be OK for him to shoot a student.

His real target is GOP radicals in the Idaho Legislature forcing Idaho colleges to open campus to gun toters. (Yes, Virginia, we have stepped through the Looking Glass.) Writes Hampikian: “I assume that if a student shoots first, I am allowed to empty my clip; but given the velocity of firearms, and my aging reflexes, I’d like to be proactive. For example, if I am working out a long equation on the board and several students try to correct me using their laser sights, am I allowed to fire a warning shot?”

It gets better from there. Google it.

-----------------------------------

Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"There's room at the top they are telling you still.
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill."

- John Lennon
  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20140302/57b7e418/attachment-0001.html>