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      ‘Tyranny’: Idaho governor repeals lieutenant’s mask mandate ban

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      The Republican governor of Idaho has repealed an executive order prohibiting mask mandates that was issued by his lieutenant governor while he was out of the state.Brad Little called Janice McGeachin’s action “an irresponsible, self-serving political stunt” and an example of the government “tyranny” she claimed to oppose.McGeachin, a Republican like Little, is a prominent pro-Trump figure in a state roiled by opposition to public health measures meant to contain the coronavirus. In March, she was present when protesters burned masks at the state capitol in Boise.Little has never issued a statewide mask mandate but he has worn a mask and encouraged others to do so. As across the US, case numbers are dropping as more Idahoans are vaccinated.McGeachin announced her own run for governor last week.Seizing her chance when Little was in Tennessee for a meeting of Republican governors on Thursday, she said her order banning mask mandates in schools and public buildings would “protect the rights and liberties of individuals and businesses”. In conflict with almost all public and scientific advice, the text of the order said masks were “ineffective mitigation measures”.In a statement on Friday, Little said he opposed mask mandates because government should not tell people what to do.“But as your governor, when it came to masks I also didn’t undermine separately elected officials who, under Idaho law, are given authorities to take measures they believe will protect the health and safety of the people they serve.“… The action that took place while I was traveling this week is not gubernatorial. The action that took place was an irresponsible, self-serving political stunt.”On Friday, McGeachin was using the nullified order in fundraising efforts.Little continued: “Taking the earliest opportunity to act solitarily on a highly politicised, polarising issue without conferring with local jurisdictions, legislators and the sitting governor is, simply put, an abuse of power.“This kind of over-the-top executive action amounts to tyranny – something we all oppose. How ironic that the action comes from a person who has groused about tyranny, executive overreach, and balance of power for months.”Adding that under McGeachin’s order there would have been no safety requirements for social workers visiting homes of at-risk individuals, at the state testing lab, or at prisons that could have been hit with coronavirus outbreaks, Little said the order conflicted with existing laws.“This is why you do your homework, lieutenant governor,” he said.Asked by a state Democrat to deliver an opinion, the office of the Idaho attorney general said McGeachin had the authority to issue the order, but it appeared to be counter to the Idaho constitution.Little and McGeachin have clashed constantly. Late last year, as Covid cases surged across the US, McGeachin appeared, holding a gun and a Bible, in a video released by the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a rightwing thinktank which opposed restrictions related to a pandemic it said “may or may not be happening”.“We recognize that all of us are by nature, free and equal, and have certain inalienable rights,” she said. “Among which are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property and pursuing happiness and securing safety.”According to Johns Hopkins University, Idaho has recorded more than 192,000 cases of Covid-19 and 2,090 deaths. The national caseload is 33.1m, the death toll close to 590,000. More

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      Idaho is going to kill 90% of the state’s wolves. That’s a tragedy – and bad policy | Kim Heacox

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      Nothing embodies wildness like wolves, our four-legged shadow, the dogs that long ago refused our campfire and today prefer freedom and risk over the soft sofa and short leash. The dogs that howl more than bark, add music to the land, and – if left alone to work their magic – make entire ecosystems healthy and whole.Witness Yellowstone, a national park reborn in the 1990s when wolves, absent for 70 years, were reintroduced. Everything changed for the better. Elk stopped standing around like feedlot cattle. They learned to run like the wind again. Streamside willows and other riparian vegetation, previously trampled by the elk, returned as well, and with it, a chorus of birds. All because of wolves.Yet in the state of Idaho, new legislation signed days ago by Governor Brad Little will allow professional hunters and trappers to use helicopters, snowmobiles, ATVs, night vision equipment, snares and other means to kill roughly 90% of the state’s wolves, knocking them down from an estimated 1,500 to 150. A group of retired state, federal and tribal wildlife managers wrote to Little asking him to veto the wolf kill bill, saying statewide livestock losses to wolves have been under 1% for cattle and 3% for sheep. The group further noted that the overall elk population has actually increased since wolves were reintroduced into Idaho more than two decades ago. It made no difference.Why exterminate the wolves? To make the country safe for cattle and sheep; more productive for deer, elk, caribou and moose. To better fill hunters’ freezers with winter meat. To sell the pelts.But there’s something more. Something nobody talks about.“The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination,” wrote the nature writer Barry Lopez in Of Wolves and Men. “It takes your stare and turns it back on you.”Maybe the wolf, freer than you or I will ever be, reminds us too much of our own self-domestication. That in a rush to create a stable environment, we’ve put ourselves in stables, and that paradox haunts people who see wolves as something to be feared, hated, destroyed.America’s demonization and slaughter of wolves has been going on for centuries – fed by myths, fairytales, Disney films and more – and continues today, full throttle from Wisconsin to Idaho to Alaska. This is our true forever war – the war on Nature, specifically on wildness and its sinister poster child. The wolf could be out there right now, sneaking under the barbed wire, stalking our profits.In November 2020, the Trump administration, as part of its rollback of environmental regulations, ordered the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list. Western ranchers and farmers were pleased; wildlife advocates called the decision “willful ignorance”. EcoWatch reported that the de-listing occurred “despite the enduring precarity of wolf populations throughout much of the country. According to the most recent USFWS data, there are only 108 wolves in Washington state, 158 in Oregon, and 15 in California, while wolves are ‘functionally extinct’ in Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.”“Wisconsin’s brutal wolf hunt in late February generated outrage – and for good reason,” Jodi Habush Sinykin, an environmental attorney, and Donald Waller, an ecologist and conservation biologist, wrote in the Washington Post. “Throngs of unlicensed hunters joined those with licenses with packs of dogs, snowmobiles and GPS technology. The wolves stood no chance. This unprecedented hunt took place during the breeding season, killing pregnant females and disrupting family packs at a time critical to pup survival. A full accounting of the hunt’s biological toll is impossible, as the state declined to inspect carcasses.”Who are we, as a species? Are we global gardeners, or might we be good guardians as well?As for Alaska: if you want to see a wolf this summer, skip Denali national park, where the Toklat pack – Alaska’s most famous wolf pack, studied since the late 1930s – has been decimated by hunters and trappers who bait the animals just outside park boundaries. The legendary wildlife biologist Adolph Murie, who studied the Toklat pack for three years and teased apart more than 1,700 scat samples, came to a stunning conclusion: wolves that prey on caribou and Dall sheep primarily take the old or infirm. In effect, they create strong prey populations. Wolves are nature’s chisel and lathe.And wolf attacks on humans are so rare as to be statistically non-existent.Over the past half-century, wildlife around the world has dropped 68%. The human race, together with our livestock, now accounts for more than 95% of all mammal biomass on Earth. Everything else – from whales to wolves to lions, tigers and bears – adds up to only 4.2%. And that percentage continues to fall.Knowing that, who are we, as a species? Are we global gardeners who manage everything – plant and animal – as crops on a sustained yield basis, where wildlife is game and wolves are pests? Or might we be good guardians as well, caretakers who regard others beyond ourselves as capable of love; of celebrating their young and mourning their dead?While writing Of Wolves and Men in the late 1970s, Barry Lopez raised two hybrid red wolves, Prairie and River, an experience that he said gave him “a fundamental joy”. He concluded: “I learned from River that I was a human being and that he was a wolf and that we were different. I valued him as a creature, but he did not have to be what I imagined he was. It is with this freedom from dogma, I think, that the meaning of the words ‘the celebration of life’ becomes clear.”
      Kim Heacox is the author of many books, including The Only Kayak, a memoir, and Jimmy Bluefeather, a novel, both winners of the National Outdoor Book Award. He lives in Alaska More

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      in US Politics

      Intensity of Idaho childcare battle shows rise in extremism, post-Trump

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      There is $6m from Donald Trump’s administration sitting on the table in Idaho, and trying to pick it up has caused an extraordinary uproar.In the months since a Republican house of representatives member first brought the grant for early childhood education to the legislature for a vote, far-right opponents have insisted, despite evidence and assurances proving otherwise, that the grant would be used to “indoctrinate” children five and under, and turn them into social justice activists.Supporters of the grant include the state’s two Republican senators and its business lobby, but the most vocal opponents have pitched it as a “battle for the soul of America”.The real battle, however, appears to be against the influence of fringe voices in Idaho politics. Though seemingly an obscure battle, the intensity of the fight in the state and the blood-curdling language used by its opponents reveals much about American politics in the post-Trump era.It is a place where conspiracy theories run amok and where even some Republican legislators are at a loss how to combat the extremism of many of their supporters, who have concluded that grant money for educating young children represents a dire threat to their way of life.Mike Satz, executive director of a new effort to combat extremism in Idaho, the Idaho 97 Project, said: “The politics have really started devolving and the extremists have really started taking control of the Republican party in the state, and now the policies are not for the people – conservative or liberal or whatever the ideology is.”When it comes to the early childhood grant, the people who would be affected by it are watching and waiting to see if the money will be available to improve access to care – a typical family in the state spends 25% of its annual income on care for an infant and a four-year-old.A vote in the house on whether or not to accept the money is expected any day. The house initially rejected the funds in early March, but the state senate approved an amended version of the bill by one vote earlier this month.Supporters have flooded local news with opinion pieces clarifying misconceptions about the grant and explaining exactly how the money would be used, but they face a mountain of misinformation coming from some rightwing lawmakers and the libertarian group Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF).The Republican representative Charlie Shepherd provided an insight into this last week, when he told the Idaho Press that he approves of the amended version of the bill after voting against it in March.Shepherd said that his earlier concerns about “indoctrination” had been addressed, but his constituents were not aware of that change. “And if I cannot educate them on what the bill actually does in time. At this point it’s almost political suicide for me to support the bill,” he confessed.The amended version of the bill includes language that specifies that the appropriated money “shall not be used to dictate curricula for use by local collaboratives”. That was also true before, but the additional language makes it legally binding.The executive director of one Idaho collaborative which could receive some of the funds, Andrew Mentzer, said the money would be beneficial for expanding childcare capacity and to help existing providers stay afloat in Valley County, a scenic, rural region in the west central part of the state.“We lost two childcare facilities in the past 15 months in our area and that put about 50 families in a pretty bad position, during a pandemic, with regard to how and when they can go to work,” said Mentzer, executive director of the West Central Mountains Economic Development Council.“A lot of the families ended up with situations where they had to cut hours or had a parent who couldn’t go to work, and that’s food on the table at the end of the day for the individual families.”Already, the community is short 400 childcare slots. “Those are 400 kids whose parents can’t go to work,” Mentzer said.The people stirring the potThe grant money would be distributed to local collaboratives like Mentzer’s by the not-for-profit Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children (Idaho AEYC). This group is separate from its national affiliate, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), a professional membership organization for people who work in education and childcare.But opponents to the bill see a conspiracy between the two groups.Their concern is that the NAEYC promotes anti-bias education and mentions critical race theory on its website and the Idaho AEYC partners with a local group, the Idaho Commission for Libraries (ICfL), that has received a grant unrelated to the early childhood money to diversify libraries. Many grant opponents have taken issue with resources for diverse books that the NAEYC and ICfL link to on their sites, though providing diverse books is not mandated by the early childhood grant.When the Guardian called the Republican representative Lance Clow he was working on a document to educate his fellow legislators about what the grant actually seeks to do: provide local collaboratives with money to best address early childhood needs in their community.Clow knows the ins and outs of the grant better than most: he is chairman of the house education committee and was involved with the first funding round used to assess the needs for early childhood education and childcare in the state.“I don’t know if I would call myself an advocate, but I’ve been in the middle of it, and I don’t see the issues that have been raised,” Clow said.He is sympathetic to his fellow Republicans’ concerns about critical race theory – he thinks some of its tenets are divisive – and last week voted for a bill that bans it from schools. He said the Idaho AEYC made a mistake in mentioning the national group on its website, something that provided material for the grant’s opponents, even though it was not actually connected to the money’s use.“This is a conservative state, and local control, the family, the parents … there is a big emphasis on protecting their rights and allowing those kind of freedoms and the focus of this grant unfortunately has drifted into a concern with the national association,” he said.He is not sure how receptive his colleagues will be to his attempts to clarify misinformation about the grant. He has noticed a difference in politicians: some will go out, speak to people and have a dialogue. Others show up to the statehouse, tell people about evils that must be stopped and stir the pot, he said.Another force stirring the pot is IFF, which continues to oppose the grant. Its advocacy arm, Idaho Freedom Action, created form letters for voters to send to representatives this month asking them to vote against the bill, warning it is “a battle for the soul of America”.“Senate bill 1193 would allow this radical group to teach toddlers and pre-school children to hate America,” the suggested letter reads. In response to interview requests from the Guardian, the IFF said it had a policy of not speaking to the media.One of the most vocal opponents to the bill, the Republican representative Priscilla Giddings, has in recent weeks appeared in “Woke Story Time” videos for IFF where she reads diverse books, even though they are not required by the grant.Giddings said in an email to the Guardian she still planned to vote against the money because it would be used to advocate for critical race theory. When asked to provide evidence of this, she said: “I have lots of evidence that I will discuss during debate when it comes up for a floor vote.”‘People don’t want Idaho run by an armed mob’Lori Fascilla, the executive director of the non-profit Giraffe Laugh Learning Centers, said she was “shocked by the lack of understanding in the statehouse of how important the childcare industry is to our state’s economy”.Writing in the Idaho Statesman, Fascilla explained how the pandemic has seen 200 childcare providers in Idaho close since September, a problem reflected nationally: one in six childcare jobs has been lost across the country since the pandemic started.“Our industry was already fragile before the pandemic and even more so now,” Fascilla wrote. “If it collapses, then so will our economy.”The fear-based tactics influencing legislation in Idaho including and beyond the early childhood grant has prompted broader concerns about what is happening in the statehouse.Earlier this month, the Idaho Statesman’s opinion editor, Scott McIntosh, published a reported two-part series titled: “Why even Republicans are calling this the ‘worst session ever’ for Idaho ‘legislature.” This series and other local media are littered with quotes from Idahoans including Republicans and business leaders concerned about the damage extremism is having on the state.A co-founder of the Idaho 97 Project, Emily Walton, said she was moved to help create the group when a local health board had to cancel their vote on a Covid-19 public health order in December because anti-mask protesters had gathered outside the homes of some of the board members, including one commissioner whose children were home alone.Months earlier in August, protesters against coronavirus restrictions shoved their way into the entry of the state capitol building and shattered a glass door, a small-scale preview of what was to come at the US Capitol on 6 January.The Idaho 97 project’s name is a play on the Three Percenters – a rightwing militia group. “I believe that there are more moderate people in Idaho who don’t want things run by an armed mob, and that’s why we started,” Walton said.The armed mob description is literal. Walton and other Idaho 97 members described how it had become common for individuals armed with assault rifles and dressed in fatigues to patrol the streets in Boise.And at least four House Republicans have ties to extremist, anti-government militia movements including the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, according to the Idaho Statesman. One of these representatives, Chad Christensen, lists the Oath Keepers and the John Birch Society, also an anti-government extremist movement, as organizations he is a part of in his official legislative biography. All four voted against the early childhood grant.Elizabeth Neumann worked in the Trump administration as an assistant secretary of homeland security for counter-terrorism and threat reduction. She resigned in April 2020 and has spoken about how the Trump administration ignored the threat of domestic extremism.A lifelong Republican, Neumann is co-director of the Republican Accountability Project, which seeks to uphold democracy and hold those Republicans who attempted to overturn the 2020 election accountable.Neumann said the uproar over childcare in Idaho was indicative of the times, where issues quickly become a part of the “constant outrage cycle” driven by far-right figures like Tucker Carlson and networks like One America News Network.“Right now what we see in a lot of conservative or Republican circles is very fear-based,” Neumann said. “So you can almost take out the issues and in six months it will be something else and that’s because on the right, especially as a minority party at this point, they are being told that their values are not appreciated, they are no longer wanted, that they are being ostracized and cancelled.” More

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      in Elections

      State Capitols ‘on High Alert,’ Fearing More Violence

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutliveLatest UpdatesInside the SiegeInauguration SecurityNotable ArrestsIncitement to Riot?AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyState Capitols ‘on High Alert,’ Fearing More ViolenceOfficials around the country are bracing for any spillover from last week’s violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. State legislatures already have become targets for protesters in recent days.A member of the Georgia State Patrol SWAT team looked on outside the Georgia State Capitol after the opening day of the legislative session on Monday in Atlanta.Credit…Brynn Anderson/Associated PressNeil MacFarquhar and Jan. 11, 2021Updated 8:22 p.m. ETIt was opening day of the 2021 legislative session, and the perimeter of the Georgia State Capitol on Monday was bristling with state police officers in full camouflage gear, most of them carrying tactical rifles.On the other side of the country, in Olympia, Wash., dozens of National Guard troops in riot gear and shields formed a phalanx behind a temporary fence. Facing them in the pouring rain was a small group of demonstrators, some also wearing military fatigues and carrying weapons. “Honor your oath!” they shouted. “Fight for freedom every day!”And in Idaho, Ammon Bundy, an antigovernment activist who once led his supporters in the occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, showed up outside the statehouse in Boise with members of his organization carrying “wanted” posters for Gov. Brad Little and others on charges of “treason” and “sedition.”“At a time of uncertainty, we need our neighbors to stand next to and continue the war that is raging within this country,” Mr. Bundy’s group declared in a message to followers.State capitals across the country are bracing for a spillover from last week’s violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, with state legislatures already becoming targets for protesters in the tense days around the inauguration of the incoming president, Joseph R. Biden Jr.Gone is a large measure of the bonhomie that usually accompanies the annual start of the legislative season, replaced by marked unease over the possibility of armed attacks and gaps in security around statehouses that have long prided themselves on being open to constituents.“Between Covid and the idea that there are people who are armed and making threats and are serious, it was definitely not your normal beginning of session,” said Senator Jennifer A. Jordan, a Democratic legislator in Georgia who watched the police officers assembled outside the State Capitol in Atlanta on Monday from her office window. “Usually folks are happy, talking to each other, and it did not have that feel.”Dozens of state capitals will be on alert in the coming days, following calls among a mix of antigovernment organizations for actions in all 50 states on Jan. 17. Some of them come from far-right organizations that harbor a broad antigovernment agenda and have already been protesting state Covid-19 lockdowns since last spring. The F.B.I. this week sent a warning to local law enforcement agencies about the potential for armed protests in all 50 state capitals.In a video news conference on Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said that “everybody is on high alert” for protests in Sacramento in the days ahead.The National Guard would be deployed as needed, he said, and the California Highway Patrol, responsible for protecting the Capitol, was also on the lookout for any budding violence. “I can assure you we have a heightened, heightened level of security,” he said.In Michigan, the state police said they had beefed up their presence around the State Capitol in Lansing and would continue that way for weeks. The commission that oversees the Statehouse voted on Monday to ban the open carry of firearms inside the building, a move Democratic lawmakers had been demanding since last year, when armed protesters challenging government Covid-19 lockdowns stormed the building.Two of those involved in the protests were later arrested in what the authorities said was a plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial.Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, took to Twitter to warn the public away from the Statehouse, saying it was not safe.Images from the Wisconsin state legislature in Madison showed large sheets of plywood being readied to cover the ground-floor windows. In St. Paul, Minn., the Statehouse has been surrounded by a chicken-wire fence since early last summer, when social justice protests erupted over the killing of George Floyd in neighboring Minneapolis.Workers boarded up the Wisconsin State Capitol building in Madison on Monday.Credit…Todd Richmond/Associated PressPatricia Torres Ray, a Democratic state senator, said the barrier had served to protect the building and the legislators, but concerns remained about possible gaps, such as the system of underground tunnels that link many public buildings in Minnesota to allow people to avoid walking outdoors in the winter.Gov. Jay Inslee in Washington ordered extra security after an armed crowd of Trump supporters breached the fence at the governor’s mansion last week while he was at home. State troopers intervened to disperse the crowd.In Texas, Representative Briscoe Cain, a conservative Republican from the Houston suburb of Deer Park, said that the legislature in Austin was likely protected by the fact that so many lawmakers carry firearms.“I have a pistol on my hip as we speak,” Mr. Cain said in a telephone interview on Monday. “I hope they’re never necessary, but I think it’s why they will never be necessary.”The Texas Legislature, dominated by Republicans, meets every two years and was scheduled to begin its 140-day session at noon on Tuesday.There may be efforts to reduce the presence of guns in the Capitol, Mr. Cain said, but he predicted that they would be doomed to failure given widespread support for the Second Amendment.In Missouri, Dave Schatz, the Republican president of the State Senate, said hundreds of lawmakers had gathered on Monday on the Statehouse lawn in Jefferson City for the swearing-in of Gov. Mike Parson and other top officials. Although security was tight, with the roads around the building closed, the presence of police and other security officers was normal for the day, Mr. Schatz said, and no fellow legislators had buttonholed him so far about increased security.“We are far removed from the events that occurred in D.C.,” he said.In Nevada, a Republican leader in Nye County posted a letter on Friday that likened recent protests of the election results across the country to the American Revolution, declaring: “The next 12 days will be something to tell the grandchildren! It’s 1776 all over again!”The letter — written by Chris Zimmerman, the chairman of the Nye County Republican Central Committee — prompted a rebuke over the weekend from Representative Steven Horsford, a Democrat who represents the county.Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri and his wife, Teresa Parson, waved outside the State Capitol in Jefferson City, escorted by members of the Missouri Highway Patrol during the governor’s inauguration celebration.Credit…Jeff Roberson/Associated PressNext door in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, Democratic officials sent out a public safety alert on Sunday about potential violence across the state, warning, “Over the past 48 hours, the online activity on social media has escalated to the point that we must take these threats seriously.”While most of the protests announced so far are expected to focus on state capitals, law enforcement and other officials in various cities have said they believe that other government buildings could also be targeted.Federal authorities said on Monday that they had arrested and charged one man, Cody Melby, with shooting several bullets into the federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., on Friday night. Mr. Melby had also been arrested a couple of days earlier when, the police said, he tried to enter the State Capitol in Salem with a firearm.Some of those protesting in Oregon and Washington said they were opposed to state lockdown rules that prevent the public from being present when government decisions are being made.James Harris, 22, who lives in eastern Washington State, said he went to the Capitol in Olympia on Monday to push for residents to be full participants in their state’s response to Covid-19. He said he was against being forced to wear masks and to social distance; the lockdowns are “hurting people,” he said.Mr. Harris is a truck driver, but he said the virus control measures had prevented him from being able to work since March.Georgia already has seen trouble in recent days. At the same time that protesters were swarming into the U.S. Capitol in Washington last week, armed Trump supporters appeared outside the statehouse in Georgia. Law enforcement officers escorted to safety the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who had refused President Trump’s attempts to depict the presidential election as fraudulent.Senator Jordan noted that many of the security measures being put in place, including the construction of a tall iron fence around the Capitol building, were actually decided on during last summer’s social justice demonstrations, when protesters surrounded many government buildings.Now, she said, the threat is coming from the other end of the political spectrum.“These people are clearly serious, they are armed, they are dangerous,” Ms. Jordan said, “and from what we saw last week, they really don’t care who they are trying to take out.”Contributing reporting were More