Independently owned since 1905
Independently owned since 1905
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Remember the “scenery tax”? We used to joke that it was the tax we paid in the form of low incomes for living in a place as remote and beautiful as Montana. Well, now we are paying higher property tax because our scenery has become a marketable commodity for the people who have been buying up our state. Scenery is a real factor in the increase in home values and property taxes. But how do you value something like location? The market is a pretty good way to do that. Buyers value scenery and are...
It is 2011, and the Association of State Democratic Chairs is having one of its quarterly meetings. Chuck Herz, Chair of the Wyoming Democratic Party, raises his hand to be recognized and rises to speak: “There is one important minority that the Democratic Party is ignoring,” he says, “the white working man.” This statement is received with uncomfortable silence until the next speaker stands up and the subject is changed. Chuck was not a white working man, Yale educated and a former executi...
Sometimes we run into people who have mental health problems that are difficult for family members or society to deal with. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is one of them. Here are parts of an article from Good Housekeeping magazine on the subject. Perhaps you may know of or have even voted for someone with this disorder. (Disclosure: I once earned money by selling Good Housekeeping magazine subscriptions door-to-door.) source: https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/relation...
I bought my first Deuce and a Quarter in 1990 from Gail Lewis who was the clean-up man at the LP mill in Trout Creek. “Deuce and a Quarter” was the nickname for the Buick Electra 225, as in two twenty-five—the deuce and a quarter. It was 225 inches long and this 1970 four-door hardtop had the biggest stock engine made up to that time, a massive 455 cubic inch eight-cylinder engine. It was fast, but thirsty. “It’ll pass anything but a gas station” was the word. The 25-gallon fuel tank was ba...
I just got a flier in the mail from the Montana Republican Party asking me to vote “no” on CI-126, that’s the ballot initiative to allow a primary election where the top four vote getters advance to the general election. Instead of Montana voters having to vote a Republican, Democratic, Green, or Libertarian party ballot in the primary election, all candidates of those parties would be listed on the same, unified, ballot. I think it’s a good idea, and, thanks for asking, I’ll tell you why. I wa...
President Franklin D. Roosevelt must have known just how today’s Montana Republican leadership feels. Full of important ideas for rebuilding America in the wake of the Great Depression, Roosevelt was stymied by the Supreme Court which ruled that many of his grand plans were unconstitutional. He decided that the most effective means toward having his way was to change the only branch of government that stood against him, and the plan he devised was to expand the number of justices on the court a...
I am looking at a copy of a Sunday cartoon that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of January 14, 1900. It is called “Woman’s Craze for Animal Pets Versus Babies — what we might expect in the 20th Century”. There are a series of cartoons of stylishly dressed ladies of that bygone and hypothetically happy era walking and cuddling various pets in various years; in 1901, it is a monkey, 1902, a leopard, 1903, a hippopotamus with a blue ribbon tied around its tail, 1904, an alligator on a le...
Mass deportation sounds like a pretty good deal to some people I know, but then they would like a sort of retroactive date going back to about 1620 when the native American lack of resolve on immigration wound up dooming them as a people. Remember the stories of Massasoit and Samoset, bigwigs of the Wampanoag tribe teaching the greenhorn Europeans how to plant corn and other crops so the Pilgrims could survive. Pretty good of them. But you see how it turned out for them later—bad immigration p...
I’m sure it is just a coincidence that Montana homeowners’ property tax bills come out just a couple of weeks before the election. Coincidence or not, it’s a good reminder for taxpayers to take a closer look at the person who wants their vote. We need no reminders that last year’s property tax bills were a real eye opener, and that this year’s will present more of the same awakening. That’s in spite of the governor’s largess in offering a $675 property tax rebate for taxes paid in 2022 and anot...
Several years ago I paid a visit to the Mayor of Flaxville, Montana. Her honor was not only the CEO of Flaxville, she was also the Chair of the Democratic Party in Daniels County, which was the main reason for my visit in my capacity as the State Chair of the whole shebang—the Montana Democratic Party. That’s just to explain why I was there and that’s all the politics this article will contain. So, I’m in Flaxville at a pancake breakfast put on by some organization for some good cause. Flaxville...
I asked a friend of mine if he had ever known a man named Bat O’Callahan who lived in Trout Creek years ago and was married to my good friend Jessie O’Callahan. Whether that marriage ended because Bat left town or died I never did know, but since Jessie had remembered him so fondly I thought he must have been a good man. “Yeah, I remember him,” my friend said. “He used to drive home from the bar, pull off the highway onto Swamp Creek Road, turn off his car right there in the middle of the inter...
My favorite father-in-law (yes, there has been more than one) once told me that if I ever went fishing make sure that I took two ministers with me. So, I took the bait. “Why is that, Dick?” And he reeled me in. “Because if you take only one, he’ll drink all the beer.” Besides being just a joke of dubious quality, the more I thought about it the more wisdom I saw in it. It’s easy to succumb to temptation if nobody’s watching, but if there is someone else there, well, people behave a little bett...
A healthy disregard of powerful government is nothing new. The United States Constitution set up the American system of government, stating what the three branches of government could do; but there was a serious objection to the Constitution being ratified by the states. It did not say what the government could NOT do, and many states were unhappy about that. Addressing this dilemma, agreement was reached that once the Constitution was ratified and the government of the United States properly...
A few years ago I was talking with a man who raised an interesting question: “There’s only one God, why do we need so many different churches?” I let that one slide right by because I like to limit my controversial discussions to politics, for better or worse. But I was curious as to why he belonged to the church he did and not another one of the some 200 Christian denominations in America. I didn’t raise that point, either. Religion is a serious topic in America and has been ever since the Pil...
I don’t know when the Merriam turkey was introduced to Western Montana, but it was and they have prospered. I can vouch for it. In the 1980s and 90s I broke out about 65 acres of timberland into cropland and I planted a lot of oats to “tame the soil”. I put up a lot of the oats as hay and word spread fast in turkey-dom. In short-order my haystacks began to look like the rear end of a threshing machine because the turkeys scratched the bales to get at the oat kernels and popped all the strin...
The furor over immigration is an issue that won’t go away – can’t go away – because once it does it will no longer provide political ammunition for Republicans to use against the Democratic Party. The easiest way for Republicans to win politically on that issue is to propose solutions that – at least to Democrats – defy logic and are unrealistic. Why? Because Democrats are suckers for logic and reject solutions that don’t make sense “logically”. Years of failure by Democrats to deal with thei...
After having unloaded all my farm equipment from the railcar that had brought it from my late father’s farm back east and knowing that I had come to the right part of the world when Dude and Shorty, who had helped me unload it, looked at the wheels on my hay wagon and pronounced them “high-speed” because they actually had ball bearings instead of old-fashioned babbitt bearings, I felt accepted by my new neighbors. A person with less class than Shorty and Dude might have rightly said, “What...
By now most Montana homeowners and business owners have gotten a new and unexpected tax bill from their county treasurers. Here’s why. Due in equal parts to Covid and to the TV series “Yellowstone,” Montana real estate became a hot item and the value of Montana property was bid way up in the process. Out-of-state buyers were calling up Montana realtors and buying homes and acreage sight unseen and paying for properties worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with their credit cards. This incre...
“Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely,” said conservative activist Jack Posobiec at the February 2024 meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). To which Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor said, “Amen.” (The New Republic, Feb. 23, 2024) Well, maybe they were just kidding, but let’s pretend they weren’t. After all, America is the birthplace of modern democracy, and we’ve got a lot invested in it. There was the Revolutionary War in which a bu...
The ability to have a say in government by voting is the bedrock principle of democracy. Because of that, every vote should be of equal value and carry the same weight. That is true for every political office in the United States except for the office of the Presidency where some people’s votes carry more weight than others depending on which state they vote in. Within the boundaries of a statewide or regional office all votes are equal. They are tallied up and the person with the most votes w...
I wrote the following article 9 years ago, on February 23, 2015. Some of the terminology is outdated, but the thoughts are not. My father and his brother, younger by 20 years, were both ardent Republicans. They came from rural poverty, worked hard, and became successful, each in his own fashion. Along the way, they got an education in public schools, went to taxpayer supported land grant colleges and worked for the privilege of an education. In the summer, after the farm work at home was done,...
Remember the Biblical story of the Judgment of Solomon (I Kings 3:16-28)? That’s the one where two prostitutes, living together, have babies three days apart. On waking one morning one of the women finds that her baby has died and places her dead infant next to the other woman who is still asleep and takes the other woman’s live baby as her own. Wanting her live baby back, the woman asks that King Solomon make things right. Solomon listens to the women, each of them claiming that she is the chi...
I am reading a history of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and their role together in the creation of America. It depresses me greatly. It depresses me because of the stark contrast with the caliber of people we now elect to office. The Senate recently created a bi-partisan bill to address the border issue. It was spearheaded by one of its most conservative members, James Lankford of Oklahoma. It addressed issues of great concern to Republicans and did not address issues of great concern...
I had been eyeballing a piece of property in Trout Creek for about a year. It was cheap enough, I had the money, why not? So, I bought it. It was what around here people generously call a stump farm—stripped of timber, and in this particular case, filled with two-foot-deep ruts from logging equipment. A strip of land that could only generously be called a road led a half-mile to the property from the county road. When the seller’s son heard his mother was putting it up for sale, he and a fri...
As I write this, it is Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We have holidays to celebrate great people and great accomplishments. As time passes the great people seem to become even greater, but the magnitude of the great deeds, having been accomplished, seems to shrink as time passes, memories fade, and the participants die. As great as Martin Luther King was, there are so many others who made sacrifices of time and life whose names and deeds should also be celebrated on this day. There are...
