Them On Us October 31, 2007

Thursday, November 01, 2007

By Jake Nichols

The KX News team in Minot, N.D., ran a short television piece that began with the well-coiffed announcer anchor saying, “People in Teton County, Wyoming, don’t seem to be getting the message about keeping garbage and food away from bears.”

Those were actually the words of wildlife managers in the Jackson Hole area who had to put down a tenth black bear that was caught breaking and entering Moran homes for food  last week. Conflicts with bears totaled 150 over the past five years in JH. This year alone there have been well over 175 reported conflicts.

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Sen. John Barrasso’s Wyoming Range Legacy Act of 2007 has made fans of the sportsmen and tourism industry. Wyoming’s Tribune-Eagle rounded up the favorable comments that included Sportsmen for the Wyoming Range’s Tom Reed, who said, “It’s really fantastic.”

“It preserves a product that is vital to what we have to market and sell,” Diane Shober, director of Wyoming Travel and Tourism, added. “It will contribute to the long-term enhanced value of Wyoming’s tourism product.”

Even Bruce Hinchey, executive director of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, said he was a fan of the bill. He pointed out that the bill still would allow some existing leases to be developed and would enable companies to take part in buyback programs if they wanted. “We understand there are areas the Senator and others feel need to be protected for scenic values,” he said. “We will continue to work with him and companies will do the same.”

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Jessica Salvi is wowing them down in Texas.

Jackson residents will recall the JHHS student from the level of fame she achieved playing high school sports. Salvi was a basketball standout and soccer phenom. She played on the women’s hockey team and snowboarded when she could. She also was the first girl to score a point in all of Wyoming football when she booted an extra point through the uprights at the Willie T. Mac in Jackson.

Currently, the multi-talented athlete is the Miners’ outstanding senior goal keeper at UTEP.

“Jessica has been great,” Coach Kevin Cross told the El Paso Times. “When she is on, she is about the best. She makes saves nobody else can make.”

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Jackson is becoming the holy place of Wyoming Jews. With an already growing contingency of Jewish worshippers, word out of Brooklyn, N.Y., is that Chabad-Lubavitch is planning the first ever Chabad emissary in Wyoming. Rabbi Zalman and Raizy Mendelsohn will soon be settling in Jackson to serve the state’s small Jewish population as well as an estimated 3,000 Jewish tourists who travel through the Jackson Hole area. Wyoming was one of only four states to not be represented by Chabad-Lubavitch.

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September unemployment numbers are out and Teton County remains an easy place to find work. Adjusting for seasonal jobs and taking into account that school has started back up, the county’s unemployment is a miniscule 1.5 percent. Sublette led all 23 counties with a 1.1 percent of its labor force out of work. The gainfully employed business editor, Tom Mast, of the Casper Star-Tribune carried the news.

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Ed Leamer didn’t let the pretty Jackson Hole scenery get to him when he was here for the big Federal Reserve retreat this past summer. Leamer’s treatise on the state of the nation’s economy was glum, according to the RGE Monitor and International Herald Tribune.

The Ph.D is a Professor in Economics & Statistics at UCLA and a big shot in economic forecasting. He said six of the last eight housing recessions have ended up in economy-wide recessions, and the current housing woes look to be the worst yet.
David Rosenberg, the chief U.S. economist for Merrill Lynch put it simply: “A miracle is needed to avoid recession.”

Fed Governor Frederic Mishkin, speaking at the Fed symposium on Sept. 1, estimated that a 20 percent drop in housing prices by the end of 2008 could cause the economy to shrink as much as 1.5 percent within three years.

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The Daily Record out of Ellensburg, Wash., ran an uplifting story on one of the few drug and alcohol addicts who eventually fought his way to sober living. “Shane” started drinking beer at age 4. He graduated to marijuana and cocaine by the sixth grade while living over the hill in Idaho.

When he turned 17, the high school dropout robbed a JH ski resort with some friends and was sent to prison. “The judge scared me,” he said. “He wasn’t very much impressed with us Idaho boys. I almost got sent to prison. It opened my eyes to where I was headed and what I was doing.”

Shane has had his ups and downs, but has since completed a 12-step program and has been clean for four years now.

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Lynn Cheney kicks the can down memory lane in her new book, “Blue Skies, No Fences.” In it, she recalls the carefree days in downtown Casper during the 1940s and ’50s when the kids could be playing outside and no one had to worry about them. She also recounts meeting Dick in Natrona High School. Montana TV news stations aired the segment.
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Them On Us October 31, 2007 | Planet JH News Article: General News

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