Boise Weekly Vol. 19 Issue 13 by Boise Weekly

STAFF PICKS PUBLIC EYE QUICK GUIDE TO PUBLIC EYE Best Gun-In-Your-Mouth Moment Rex Rammell Calls for Obama Tags 10 Best Purple Politician Rep. Walt Minnick

Best Hope You Went Last Year Because You Ain’t Going This Year Idaho Wolf Hunt 10 Best Reason to Bust into the Piggy Bank Foothills Land Deal

Best Reason to Learn New Math Education Funding

Best You Can Keep Her Laura Silsby in Haiti

Best Reason to Get Scales Sound Money Legislation

Best Persistence U.S. 2010 Census

Best One-Way Track Boise Streetcar

Best Flip Flop Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter vs. Idaho Public Television 12 Best Term-Coinage Sarah Palin’s Made-up Vocab

Best Point A to B Parkcenter Bridge

Best Love Letter Otter Woos Northwest Businesses

Best Reason to Buy Stock in Guardrail Manufacturers Conoco’s Highway 12 Trip

Best Doh! Texting and Driving

Best Idea to Balance Eagle’s Budget Piss Off the Mayor So He Quits and Don’t Hire a Replacement 14 Best Panties in a Twist Beat Butch Underoos

Best Excuse for the Munchies Brian Cronin’s Hemp Ice Cream

Best Thing to do with the Boise Hole Move it to Avimor to Live With Other Half-Built, Half-Failed Projects 14 Best Shit-Show Vaughn Ward

Best I Saw the Sign and It Opened Up My Eyes Tea Party Rally Signage

BEST GUN-IN-YOUR-MOUTH MOMENT

BEST HOPE YOU WENT LAST YEAR BECAUSE YOU AIN’T GOING THIS YEAR

Perennial candidate Rex Rammell is no stranger to controversy, nor does he shy away from a quality publicity event, but he may have bitten off more than he could chew back in April. During a GOP fundraiser in Eastern Idaho, Rammell—who was running for governor at the time—joked about issuing Obama Tags after chiding Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter for not buying the ﬁrst wolf tag issued in the state. Rammell quickly issued a clariﬁcation but that only dug a deeper hole. He stated that everyone should have known he was joking because Idaho doesn’t have jurisdiction over hunting seasons in Washington, D.C. One group we’re sure didn’t get the joke was the Secret Service. They tend to take threats on the president’s life pretty seriously.

OK, you win. This is us putting up the literar y white ﬂag. We give up. We’ve spent decades writing about the wolf issue: people love them, people hate them; they need to be protected, they need to be hunted; they’re on the endangered species list, now they’re not. Oops, they’re back on … and they’re off again … on again … hold it, off again. We’ve had it. We’re throwing in the towel and never writing about wolves again. Of course, that statement will last about as long as it takes someone to ﬁle an appeal to get them back on/off the list—we forget which.

REX RAMMELL CALLS FOR OBAMA TAGS

BEST PURPLE POLITICIAN

REP. WALT MINNICK

Idaho’s junior representative has become the purple elephant of the political scene; neither party knows quite how to handle him. He’s a Democrat who is willing to cross the aisle, so the far left Democrats are not quite sure if they want to claim him. But he’s a Democrat, therefore the far right Republicans want to hang him out to dry. But he’s making it awful hard for both sides. If he would just stop standing in the middle and putting logic above party politics, it would make things a whole lot clearer.

10 | BEST OF BOISE: STAFF PICKS | SEPTEMBER 22–28, 2010 | BOISEweekly

IDAHO WOLF HUNT

BEST REASON TO BUST INTO THE PIGGY BANK

FOOTHILLS LAND DEAL

If you’re going to drop $4.1 million on a land deal, we can’t think of many better deals than the one the City of Boise inked with the former developers of the proposed Cliffs development in East Boise to secure more than 700 acres of Foothills land for conservation. Now, instead of a massive housing development in a sensitive wildlife area, Hammer Flats will be remain open space. We give that one a “yee” and a “haw.”