Independently owned since 1905
Independently owned since 1905
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I started out to write about this being a good time of year to be helpful to others and that began to sound so preachy and goody-two-shoes that I thought that maybe I should just thank some people who helped me when I needed it. I first came to Montana in 1969 and had the opportunity to move here five years later. Lots of people say that it was the scenery that compelled them here. For me it was the people. The folks I met in my visits to Central Montana were friendly, kind and generous. The...
There was a time that some look back at wistfully when politics was not so mean, and people of different parties mostly got along. That began changing in the late 1970s when a young candidate for Congress told a group of college Republicans in Atlanta what was wrong with the Republican Party: “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” He then went on to say, “One of the great weaknesses of the Republican party is we recruit middle-...
This is the story — correct that — legend, of a man named Les Webber who ranched and caroused in and around the town of Plains, Montana. When you are leaving Plains, headed to Missoula, you might notice on the right a weathered billboard with a narrow protective roof over it in front of a large Town Pump store. The fact that it is still there at all is, I was told, thanks to the intervention of a longtime sheriff’s deputy who convinced the contractor building the new Town Pump to leave it becau...
I am writing this column before the election, and you are reading it after the election, and here’s my prediction; the losers will be unhappy, and the winners will be happy. I also predict that there will be at least one winner somewhere, who will not take yes for an answer and will demand an investigation into supposed irregularities in their own election for the sake of principle. And I further predict that such a person will have won by a sizable margin because nobody but a fool would want t...
How would you feel if you found that you and your water rights were the victim of a “Fraudulently derived, overreaching, unconstitutional water compact”? Pretty heated, I would guess, and rightly so if that were the case. The compact I am referring to is the Flathead Water Compact between the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation (CSKT), the State of Montana and the United States. Even though the compact is now law, there are many in Western Montana who think it...
I had a neighbor once who spent several days in the county jail because he wouldn’t make his mortgage payments. He felt he had a constitutional right to not pay them because the money wasn’t backed by gold. There’s a longer story there, of course, and he wasn’t in jail because he didn’t pay the mortgage but because of an ensuing confrontation with a SWAT team when they came to enforce his eviction notice. People get up in arms because of laws they believe are unconstitutional that they thin...
I’ve got to hand it to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for sharing the wealth of the immigrant crisis with Massachusetts, I’m just not sure what to hand him. A couple of weeks ago DeSantis had a couple of planeloads of asylum-seeking legal immigrants from Venezuela shipped from a San Antonio, Texas, immigrant shelter to exclusive Martha’s Vinyard island off the Massachusetts coast. Border states like Texas and Arizona shouldn’t have to be the only ones to bear the costs of humanitarian aid to immi...
Irate Americans are arming themselves and heading to library board meetings to defend children against evil by insisting that the library remove books that offend society. Notice I did not say trying to defend their own children, they mean to defend the children of people they do not know. Listen, they are going about it all wrong. If I wanted to keep my kids from reading a book the last thing I would tell them is that they can’t read it. I spent a lot of time as a kid under the covers with a f...
The story of America is the story of the individual and the protection of the individual from government, from the powerful, from those who “know better” than we do. Our country was shaped by those who knew the feeling of powerlessness in the face of an oppressive government. Who, as individuals even banding together in common cause against the British government and ruled by a king with near dictatorial powers, felt helpless to control their own destinies. So they resolved that, after we bec...
Of all the horrors Republicans see in the Democrats’ grossly misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” the biggest bogeyman is that the Internal Revenue Service is going to get funding to hire new employees to boost their auditing efforts. Tax auditing, in case you don’t know, is a multifaceted approach to taxpayer compliance; some involve simple individual returns, but the complexity skyrockets when it comes to corporate and millionaire’s returns. Mike Crapo, a Senator from Idaho, complains...
On election day, assuming you can still bring yourself to vote, you go down to the polls, or more likely, the mailbox and look at the selection of candidates for various offices. Some are OK, some are not, so you pick your favorite and then you come to a race where both candidates are, in your opinion, bums. Your choice is to choose the lesser of the bums, write in Mickey Mouse, or skip it entirely. But whatever you do, you don’t really get to say “these two people are bums.” I think there...
Behold state Representative Brad Tschida bringing national attention to Montana by announcing that a woman’s uterus serves no real purpose for a woman, that it is a “sanctuary” for the pre-born. Sort of a condo leased out to a fertilized human egg. I’m not sure what Tschida’s stand is on ovaries and fallopian tubes and the other plumbing that contribute in one way or another to the creation of a human life, but if we view a uterus as a sort of freeloading body organ on standby until it is cal...
Whenever I hear someone talk about how honest they are, I instinctively put my hands in my pockets to see that everything that should be there is still there. So, pardon me my skepticism when I read this blurb from a large accounting firm’s website: “Our Global Code of Conduct is a clear set of standards for our business conduct. It provides the ethical and behavioral framework on which we base our decisions every day.” Or this one: “… we hold ourselves to the highest moral and ethical s...
Inflation has settled in for the American consumer and it’s nowhere more obvious than at the gas pump. Not so coincidentally, the only ones who are able to stay ahead of inflation are those companies which are causing the inflation itself, the oil companies whose profits have skyrocketed at the expense of the American consumer. It’s not just the price of gas. Since virtually everything produced in America uses some kind of petroleum product in its manufacture, not to mention the fuel to get thei...
As if Americans weren’t divided enough, the recent leak of the Supreme Court’s apparent decision on the fate of Roe v. Wade has added even more fuel to the fire, burning whatever political bridges remain among us. Briefly, it appears that the Supreme Court will overturn the decision that ensured that women would have a legal right to get an abortion and that state laws could not restrict. Now, it appears that those restrictions previously outlawed will be allowed. That pleases some people and...
In San Francisco and other cities there is a big homeless issue. It is due to many factors both economic and drug related, but in this most liberal city solutions such as building high density housing are rejected because those neighborhoods fear that the projects would, take your pick: increase crime, lower property values, ruin the neighborhood. Living in tents on the sidewalk is common, but not throughout the city because it is restricted in “sensitive” areas which seem to be those areas whe...
In 1999 I traveled to China as a member of a bipartisan group of state legislators belonging to an international educational program. One of my most memorable moments was a visit to a school for the children of migrant workers in Shanghai. Unlike in America at the time, the migrant workers in China came from the country to work in the electronics factories in the cities and the government had set up schools for their children. After watching these kids of age seven through 11 learn English in...
I have been writing this article in my head for the past week, and now that Ukraine has been invaded and perhaps by now, conquered, my thoughts remain the same, and they are that the level of dissent in the United States of America plays directly into the hands of the leaders of Russia and China and so threatens the freedoms of Americans in the future. Russia and China have entered into a mutual aid pact that has as a major goal the lessening of America’s power in the world. Putin and Xi J...
Courage is a virtue that we Americans value in our culture. An act of courage transcends ideology, it is a personal characteristic that belongs to the individual or group and to call it bravery without thought of personal consequences is as good a definition as any. We award medals for it. It is the soldier who risks his life to save those of others just as much as it is the passerby who jumps into rushing waters to save a drowning child. It is a strictly personal quality, and we recognize a...
It is 10 a.m. on January 21, 1991, when Montana State Senator Eleanor Vaughn (D-Libby) calls the joint meeting of House and Senate State Administration Committees to order and Senator Harry Fritz rises to present, for the third consecutive legislative session – 1987, 1989, and now, 1991 – a bill to create a paid state holiday honoring the legacy of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. It has been a national holiday since 1986, and Montana is one of the two remaining states that has yet to cre...
You can learn a lot by listening to what someone has to say, especially if you disagree with them. I’m not talking about learning only about what issue they might be talking about. I mean that you can learn a lot about the person you’re listening to. You learn to respect them as a person, and I think it goes the other way, too, that they learn to respect you. My awakening about the benefits of listening came around 1993 when I returned a phone call to an irate constituent. I had been in the Mon...
This is a story about a close friend who died and the wonderful message that he sent his dearest companion, Gael, with the help of some very caring, nameless people who took care of him alive, and then not alive. By rights Patrick should have become like the smalltime hoods he grew up with, but he also grew up with a couple of friends whose interests in music and art guided him in a different direction and he chose the path of a thinker and of a self-taught artist. Now, art is a subjective...
Does the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse, who was accused of murdering two men and wounding another at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, broaden the way for Americans to take the law into their own hands? Can individual Americans, by claiming that they felt their life was in danger, become judge, jury, and executioner and not worry unduly about the consequences? If the law is a matter of personal interpretation, who can you trust? Imperfect as it is, the American legal system at least spells out...
Many people who are opposed to mandatory Covid vaccinations hold themselves out to be patriots and call those in favor of mandates traitors. Pretty powerful words and it raises an interesting point as far as American history is concerned, namely, would these patriots of today consider George Washington a patriot or a traitor? In 1777, Washington issued a mandate that his soldiers had to be vaccinated against smallpox, then known as variola. While British troops had built up an immunity to...
Mike Lindell is the CEO of My Pillow company and a leading advocate for rooting out election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. He has had much more success in attracting people to his point of view than he has had in finding evidence to support it. His claim is that Chinese hackers were able to inflate Biden’s votes by 8.4% nationwide. He stated that the Idaho election results in all 44 counties were electronically manipulated to increase Biden’s votes, but since seven of Idaho’s count...
