![]() ![]() “However, I believe the action is in the best interest of the state of Idaho,” he said. He was a good politician because he was a good person.”īatt told the Spokesman-Review at the time that he didn’t relish butting heads with friends. “He lost some friends in agriculture over that, but he stood his ground because he knew it was the right thing to do. ![]() “He was swimming upstream with a strong current against him,” Ysursa said. Many farmers and ranchers, and Batt’s political allies in the Legislature, resisted the change. For 79 years, agriculture had been the only major industry in Idaho exempt from workers’ compensation requirements, until Batt’s 1996 bill repealed the exemptions. “He was just tight.”īatt’s rigor for conservatism was matched by his support for human rights. “The guy was the epitome of conservatism in the old-fashioned sense,” said Clark, who served as GOP chairman while Batt was governor. Batt always returned the checks, which totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars.ĮAST IDAHO GOVERNS | Stories about former governors from eastern Idaho Department of Agriculture, said Batt’s farming business consistently qualified for federal subsidies rewarding conservation measures. Trent Clark, who formerly directed an income support program for the U.S. “He didn’t like waste - wasted words, wasted money, wasted lives,” Popkey said. While debating policy, he gave short speeches. Following the agreement, Batt faced a recall effort, and a ballot initiative sought to repeal it, but the deal remains in effect.Īn onion farmer from Wilder, Batt was a devout fiscal conservative who cut state jobs during his gubernatorial tenure. “His ability to cut through the crap and get a solution that was, in his eyes, best for the people was unmatched,” Dan Popkey, a longtime journalist who covered Batt’s political career, told the Statesman by phone.īatt’s first-of-its-kind nuclear waste agreement allowed temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel in Idaho if the federal government agreed to expedite treatment and permanently remove waste over the next 40 years. ![]() Popkey writes about these emotional eddies with such thrilling detachment you'll wonder why you ever worried about love at all.' Jenny Offill, author of Dept.And across nearly four decades in office, from the Legislature to lieutenant governor to governor, Batt built a reputation as a deal-maker who compromised with political friend and foe. 'A pleasingly unsentimental novel about attraction and repulsion and the fluid line between the two. Sizzling with enigmatic desire, Miranda Popkey's debut novel is a seductive exploration of life as a woman in the modern world, of the stories we tell ourselves and of the things we reveal only to strangers. The novel unfurls through a series of conversations - in private with friends, late at night at parties with acquaintances, with strangers in hotel rooms, in moments of revelation, shame, cynicism, envy and intimacy. ![]() What is the shape of a life? Is it the things that happen to us? Or is it the stories we tell about the things that happen to us?įrom the coast of the Adriatic to the salt spray of Santa Barbara, the narrator of Topics of Conversation maps out her life through two decades of bad relationships, motherhood, crisis and consolation. ![]()
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