Exec ‘Trashes’ Other Towns Wooing Micron

Bob Potter’s North Idaho chauvinism has angered residents in Butte, Mont., and Waterloo, Iowa. They don’t appreciate the Jobs Plus executive trash-talking their towns, which are vying with Kootenai County and 10 others for Micron’s Mother of All Expansion Projects. Apparently, Bob’s comment about Waterloo was printed in the Des Moines Register: “I can’t imagine Micron in Waterloo. Who would want to live there?” And he stirred up Butte by dismissing it as the FBI equivalent of Siberia for unruly agents. Explains Bob: “Sometimes people just don’t get my sense of humor.” And sometimes the truth hurts.

Fallen angel: Robert Stephen Levan’s story of personal heroism gets stranger and stranger. Levan? He’s the Spokane man who lied to his girlfriend and the Post Falls police that he valiantly had saved a woman from three rapists. Now, he has sent us a letter, purportedly from the female victim who, of course, is anonymous, thanking him for saving her life. Are you following this? Says the thankful “victim”: “He was like a guardian angel coming from out of nowhere.” And going nowhere - but jail.

Clueless on the Challis: My legislative sources say there was an odd scene Friday in the Challis National Forest in central Idaho. Seems the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had chased workers out of the Yellowjacket Mine under a court order to protect endangered salmon. (The order was rescinded later in the day.) As one of the feds was locking an access gate, he had a bright idea. Say, he asked an ousted mine boss, could I borrow your key? This would be a great place to transplant wolves. And you wonder why Idaho ranchers joke: “We’ll accept Canada’s wolves if Canada will take the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.”

Fan mail: A “faithful reader for 103 years” spotted a T-shirt at Silver Lake Mall with the inscription: “Dysfunctional by choice.” Writes she: “Perhaps judges should award one to 90 percent of their cases. I, for one, am weary of whiners (and their lawyers), or maybe it should be whiners (and their clients), who try to excuse their illegal actions by claiming they were raised in dysfunctional families.” … Best line at the annual Post Falls chamber banquet Saturday came from Republican emcee Chuck Lempesis about House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s book deal: “I don’t want anyone running Congress who’s too stupid not to take the $4 million.”

Fender-bender blues: Brad Hagadone, my ol’ Kalispell darkroom technician and joint heir to the Hagadone throne, popped up on an accident report recently. Seems he had stopped his pickup at an intersection and then, for some reason, backed into the fellow behind him. Just a fender bender. But there go the insurance rates. The bloodsuckers at my soonto-be ex-insurance company are nailing me for an extra $50 a year because of a ticket my wife received three years ago. Oh well, Brad can afford higher premiums more than I can.

Huckleberries: The Sandpoint Chamber of Commerce should watch who gets the Chevy Blazers with signs on the side advertising that city’s Winter Carnival. It’s a clever promotional gimmick for a local dealer and the carnival. But the chamber’s image wasn’t helped last week by the female Blazer driver who was tailgating, speeding and passing on icy roads en route to Sandpoint from Hope. … Seen on a van in Post Falls: “Bureaucracy is the process of turning energy into solid waste.” … FYI: Trinity Broadcasting will begin a full-time religion station locally sometime this spring (on Channel 53). … Local Nazarenes have the three B’s covered this year for their biennial missionary trip to Guatemala. With the Revs. Earl and Ron Hunter, Dr. Bill Fouche and retired Grangeville mortician Bob Hanson signed up, they’re ready to birth ‘em, baptize ‘em and bury ‘em.

Parting shot: Gracious! I support field burning (over the subdivisions that would replace the grass fields). But the Post Falls Chamber of Commerce went too far in its position statement on agriculture by describing field burning as an “environmentally clean management practice.”

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = D.F. Oliveria The Spokesman-Review