Independently owned since 1905
Independently owned since 1905
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Laws in several states have criminalized criticizing American history, even when that history contains criminal acts. It is sort of like putting a happy face on American history. Look, I love my country, warts and all. I love it because, since her inception, she has offered the promise of hope, a promise of a better life for her citizens, a new way of treating citizens. She still offers that promise and, in fits and starts, fulfills those hopes, but to imagine that you can have a great nation, i...
I just read an editorial called “Let's end the property tax blame game” by Kendall Cotton in which he begins by blaming local governments for property tax increases, echoing Governor Gianforte’s attack on greedy county governments. For their part, Democrats are saying that the Gianforte administration ignored the advice of the DOR to implement a revenue neutral tax rate. That’s the rate at which the state would have received the same amount of money after reappraisal as it had before. It was...
Four times in my life, after I have been working a job for months or years, I have had a small revelation that says to me, “Hey, I know what I’m doing, and I am doing it well!” It only came once per job, but it’s enough. The first time occurred when I was a donut maker in an all-night donut shop in San Francisco. A group of Hell’s Angels had just come into the shop and were later joined by the Oakland Outlaws. (This was not a high-class place.) A fight broke out which I hadn’t noticed bec...
Earlier today I thought I would study up on Critical Race Theory—which I have to admit I know little about—but I made a typo in my search query and I entered “critical rage theory” by mistake. The search didn’t find anything, but based on that result I realized that I had this concept all to myself and could define it as I pleased. This event came within half an hour of my having to install a new LED light bulb to replace an old incandescent bulb that had burnt out. It was one of those new...
Well, the local elections are over in Montana, and I’m sure there will be some controversial results, even if there are not any. I mean, it just seems that somebody’s got to find fault with something even if it’s imaginary. I’ve been thinking about this column for over a year, ever since the Montana Election Integrity Project (MEIP) came out with their “canvass” of 4,347 Montana voters to show how screwed up our elections are. (Go to mtelectionintegrity.org/canvas) It’s taken me that long to...
When I was 45, I went to my family’s second reunion. The first reunion was for my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary and I was five years old for that one, so at an average of forty years between reunions you might gather that we were not a particularly close-knit family, and you would be right. But at the second reunion I realized that I was related to some people well worth knowing so I made an effort to keep in touch, particularly with my father’s younger brother, John, and I went to see...
On a table in the front hallway to my house is a photograph of two men who look like they are enjoying each other's company. It's not obvious in the picture, but they are reclined on a short two-step stairway that leads to the rostrum of the Montana House of Representatives. For such an august place they are perhaps being disrespectful of the decorum that such places should engender. On the left in the picture is a much younger version of myself in my second legislative session. On the right is...
Last Sunday, September 17, was the anniversary of the signing of the United States Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787. I want to think of those giants of history, the founders of America, brave, wise, not perfect, but good, who compromised, not their principles, but their desires, in order to bring together a nation that has served as a shining example to the world of what can be accomplished for the benefit of humankind. I want to think of them, but what keeps intruding on my thoughts are sev...
In the 1970s you didn’t see many new pickups in Trout Creek, and when you did you knew who it belonged to. Now you don’t see many old pickups and when you do you also know whose they are. So times have changed, the parking lots in front of two of the bars and all of the stores are paved, and the single telephone booth that sat in the middle of a puddle in the middle of the mud parking area in front of the café is long gone and so is the café, as well as the puddle. You can’t stop change,...
I don’t know where to turn. Yesterday I saw a public display of what I am sure is gender related wrongness and think I need to report it, I just don’t know what government agency to call. Understand, I don’t really want to rat out the suspect involved, I just want to protect myself from being turned in for not performing my mandatory civic duty of turning someone in for something that I think other people think is wrong. If that sounds confusing the way I say it, well, I admit, I am confu...
President Biden is asking Congress for $24 billion to support Ukraine. There will be a fight over this request, I am sure, and the reasons will be we are spending too much money, period, and if we are going to spend too much money let’s spend it on America. I offer one reason for supporting Ukraine: Putin. Like most despots, Putin has some—to be polite—mental health issues. OK, he’s nuts, but he’s a nut with nuclear weapons and needs to be dealt with in the strongest way possible, short of...
(A French finance minister of long ago compared collecting taxes to plucking a live goose. The object was to get the greatest amount of feathers with the least amount of hiss. Dogs growl, geese hiss.) Because of the biennial reappraisal of residential property most Montanans are faced with huge increases in the values of their homes and the Montana Department of Revenue has done its best to get our attention. They got our attention by sending us a bill. Well, not actually a bill, they sent us...
About once a year I deal with an outfit out of Boise called General Gear or tractorparts.com. I use them when I need parts to repair my crawler tractor which is almost as old as I am and a damn sight better looking. It’s a 1952 Allis Chalmers HD 6B which has served me well over the 45 years I’ve owned it both as a machine and an education. So, when I need parts I go to General Gear. Miracle of miracles they have new parts for my machine. They also seem to have a philosophical bent which inc...
We celebrate America on this Fourth of July because we are a great nation with great dreams, great ability and great heart. None should feel this more than Montanans, who cherish the notions that “all men is common folk,” (as an old poem has it), that a person’s word is their bond, and that it doesn’t matter who you are as long as you pull your own weight. A place where, when your house burns down, people you don’t even know show up to help you out. We are big hearted, tough and kind. And we do...
So far there are about a dozen Republican candidates wanting to be President of the United States of America and most of them are as incensed over the legal threats facing Donald Trump as only a scheming hypocrite can be. The two notable exceptions are former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has significant issues with believability himself, and Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas, who actually appears to be a decent man. They are not running against Trump, no, no, no. They are...
America could almost balance the budget if we collected the taxes that billionaires and big business cheat us out of. Currently the deficit for the 2023 fiscal year (October 2022 to today) is $924,522,922,800 (figure courtesy of the U. S. Treasury). Just by numerical coincidence the head of the IRS said that in 2022 the nation lost a shade over that amount in unpaid taxes from the big earners. That’s a trillion bucks that the IRS hasn’t collected because it hasn’t had the people to catch the t...
I hadn’t seen Joe Hanson for a few years. Mutual friends were saying that I should get over to Alberton to see him because — you know — he’s getting up there in years. Aren’t we all, I thought. And I also thought how much more I would miss friends who die without seeing them beforehand. So, I drove over to Alberton to see Joe, the several times former mayor of the former bustling railroad town. The story of how I met Joe is pretty remarkable, at least to me. I was campaigning for the Montana S...
A couple of months ago former Republican Governor Marc Racicot was labelled a RINO and formally drummed out of the Montana Republican Party, this in the face of the fact that he was responsible for the election of President George W. Bush and was also a former Chair of the national Republican Party. Where had he gone wrong? (For those who still don’t know, RINO means Republican In Name Only and the Democratic equivalent is DINO.) In the mid-1990s I organized a small, politically diverse group o...
Every little once in a while I am reminded that laws are created to protect us from ourselves, or more particularly from our faulty memories, or from forgetting history. For instance, years ago we didn’t have environmental protection laws because we didn’t need them. We were happy, at that time, to not eat fish we caught in Montana’s rivers because we knew that the high lead and arsenic content of those fish meant jobs, and we were happy to sacrifice our own selfish desires so that people could...
I give an unapologetic sigh of relief that the Legislature’s attempts to send harmful—in my view—amendments to the Montana Constitution to the voters are in trouble. Before that became apparent, however, an opinion from former University of Montana law professor Rob Natelson made the editorial rounds. He made three criticisms of the Constitutional Convention of 1972 which are interesting to me. The first “…the decision to sit delegates alphabetically impeded the ability of the conservat...
You will hear people say that we need to protect our “institutions” in America. What on earth does that mean? In a nutshell, an institution is words, an idea, not anything you can touch or feel, except with the mind and heart. It is like the cement that holds the bricks of a building together. The Montana Constitution is just such an institution, and it is under stress at the moment. I recently listened to former governor Marc Racicot talk about a constitution as a social contract describing how...
The state of Connecticut is thinking of exonerating people it convicted of witchcraft in the mid-1600s. They would be following the lead of noble Massachusetts which a year ago exonerated the last of those former human beings that they, too, hanged for witchcraft. I am sure the wrongly accused will be grateful. Still dead, of course, but grateful. In the witch trials of the 1600s it didn’t take a lot of people to accuse someone of being a witch. In one case a 12-year-old girl accused a local w...
In a Montana Viewpoint© article a month ago called “Marketing Anger”, I wrote about the prevalence of anger as an economic force as well as a political force, saying: ”There is also the economic aspect of anger such as increasing a show’s TV ratings and market share, not to mention increasing the salaries of individual anger merchants.” I was engaging in speculation, I have to admit, but that speculation now seems to have some teeth, as a document filed in a defamation lawsuit against Fox News N...
A friend of mine once told me how he had become a drunk. After taking his first drink he said, “I began to feel so good, so happy, so powerful that I wanted to feel—even better!” Substitute political power for drink. It is even more intoxicating, and like drink you can never get enough of it. But unlike drink, which is basically limitless, political power is limited by the desires of other people to have power, and often they get in each other’s way and fight over who gets to have the most po...
I watch people driving down the highways in $80,000 pickups towing $200,000 campers (which are bigger than a lot of people’s homes, but then, so are some of the pickups) and then a boat is being towed behind the camper, and not to forget the miscellaneous means of propulsion strapped here and there. And attached to this caravan of maybe a half a million bucks of toys is a license plate that reads “Don’t Tread On Me.” Which I like as a statement but from all appearances these folks don’t s...
