Independently owned since 1905
Independently owned since 1905
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Every once in a while, we meet people who come into our lives for a short moment, and as short as it might be, they leave a very long impression. For me, one of those fellows was a rancher from Livingston named Tom Lane. The way I met Tom was when I was in the Montana Senate and he called me up about a piece of controversial tax legislation I was carrying. To make the explanation simple, it was about Montana being able to collect income tax from out-of-state investors on land that they had sold...
Political parties manipulate the public mind in order to get their candidates elected. That’s a pretty cynical assessment, but politics is a pretty cynical game because it’s based on the acquisition of power. Individual politicians may have the best of motives, but the parties they belong to, no. The parties are like businesses, they want results. Republicans try to get results by using emotion and Democrats by using logic; very different approaches, each with often successful results, but as...
“We have met the enemy and they are us." — Pogo Possum I am reminded more and more of my belief that the single attribute that sets humans apart from other creatures is that we are the only species capable of causing our own extinction. The ways we are currently dealing with COVID and global warming may validate that belief sooner than later. It was once commonplace to distinguish humans from other species by saying humans were rational thinkers. After observing the irrationality of human thinki...
I once had a neighbor who belonged to, or at least sympathized with, a small group of people who resented being told what to do - especially by the government. To this end he and his friends refused to buy automobile liability insurance, primarily because laws passed by the state legislature required it, and they didn’t like being pushed around. Whether or not they couldn’t afford it, I don’t know, but their argument was, besides not wanting to be told what to do, that they were “resp...
Why do so many Americans get their medical advice from politicians? They don’t take their cars to politicians to fix, they don’t take a sick cat to a politician, and I will guarantee you that politicians know as much about sick cats or broken-down cars as they do about medicine. I will also tell you that the last person I would trust for medical advice is a politician, but they now seem to be the biggest players in the vaccination follies, many of them directly implying that they know more abo...
Of all the troubling issues that have surfaced in the past year, the idea of private funding of government military operations is close to the top of my list. Specifically, I am talking about a million-dollar gift from Tennessee billionaire Willis Johnson to the state of South Dakota to cover the costs of Gov. Kristi Noem sending National Guard troops to Texas to help “secure” the U.S.-Mexican border. Was Noem acting in accordance with the law in committing her troops to Texas? Yes. States are...
Remember the recount of the presidential ballots in Maricopa County, Arizona? Well apparently, they’re going to finish it in Montana at a mystery location near Bigfork. I’d like to think that it’s because in Montana we don’t need to take off our boots to count past 10, but I can’t say for sure. Anyway, the recount was initiated by the Arizona Senate — the Republican part — and they used $150,000 of their taxpayers’ money to hire a firm out of Florida named Cyber Ninjas. I must say they do spr...
“That few in public affairs act from a mere view of the good of their country, whatever they may pretend; and though their actings (sic) bring real good to their country, yet men primarily considered that their own and their country’s interests were united and so did not act from a principle of benevolence. “That fewer still, in public affairs, act with a view to the good of all mankind.” That was written in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin, and as you can see, not much has changed. Nor had much ch...
A few months back the Republican controlled Arizona State Senate ordered a recount of all 2.1 million votes cast for president and senate in Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes the city of Phoenix. The recount will not be conducted by public employees who work for the taxpayer, but by private contractors who have been given access to all election information, something that I believe has never been done before. In March, Senate President Karen Fann signed an agreement with a Florida firm...
Last week I read the transcript of a New York Times podcast with longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz. It gave me hope, not because Luntz was changing his politics, but because he was worried for the future of our country because of the divisiveness and bitterness between political factions which he, in part, has helped to fashion. That’s the good news. The bad news is that he doesn’t see a way out of it. Luntz has been very good at what he does, which is not just conducting polls on who...
Of late I have been watching wild turkeys mate. It’s not that I am particularly interested in their personal lives, but as I have been cleaning out culverts on my road, they have been practicing their intimate moments about 50 feet from me, so it’s hard to ignore. Also hard to ignore (and actually more interesting) is to watch the toms compete for the attention of their potential mates. At first, they seem to do it solo, in this case in the middle of a newly seeded pasture. Why they would str...
“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” – Chico Marx Sometimes it seems to me that everything we do in life is an attempt to solve mysteries. While that includes how a crime was committed, it also applies to things from “what is life all about”, to putting a jigsaw puzzle together, or figuring out how to do something we have not done before. We look for solutions, we look for reasons, we look for constants, we look for people who can teach us. Mostly we get things right, but not a...
A few days ago, Georgia’s Republican Governor, Brian Kemp, signed a bill that narrows the ease and ability of Georgians to vote by saying, “With Senate Bill 202, Georgia will take another step toward ensuring our elections are secure, accessible and fair.” Meanwhile in Arizona, Republican Representative John Kavanagh, the chairman of the house government and elections committee, said, more candidly and much more accurately, “everybody shouldn’t be voting.” Kavanagh went on to say, “Not everyb...
Recently, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, used his power to forego the traditional abbreviated process of introducing a bill in the Senate and substitute the long version; in this case to introduce President Biden’s COVID relief bill. Johnson’s motion required the Senate clerks to read the 628 page bill aloud to the Senators, who rapidly vacated the premises for the next 10 hours while the bill was being read. By having the text of the bill read aloud, Johnson took up hou...
The soul of democracy is the ability of individuals to have a say in their own future, embodied in the right to vote. The spirit of a democracy is to expand the participation of citizens in elections so that every citizen of that democracy is not only eligible, but able to cast that vote. That expansion has not been easy or trouble free, and it has not been without opposition and bloodshed. It is the duty of those who run elections to ensure that the integrity of an individual’s vote is p...
Offered as a respite from current events. Eddie Mulick was the first person I met when I moved to Trout Creek, and that was largely because he owned, what his matchbooks proclaimed was, “The Wayside Bar--finest bar in Trout Creek.” It was also the only bar. Those days I did custom haying in the summer and I had been working George Casteel’s field right across the river. George was a story in himself, an old single-jack gold miner whose cabin floor was liberally littered with rocks of ore and c...
Every word has a definition. You can look that up in a dictionary and call that definition the gospel truth. But many words also have emotions attached to them which are harder to define because they are unique to the individual that feels them. Everybody knows what “patriotism” is. It’s love of country. But just as everyone has their own definition of love they also have their own emotional definition of patriotism. For some it is storming the United States Capitol, for others it is peace...
The Capitol has been trashed by bThe Capitol has been trashed by big boys and girls who should have known better. It is hard to take a bearded, bare-chested man with cow horns on his head seriously, let alone as an adult, but he and others broke windows, beat up cops (killing one, wounding others), had one of their own shot by police and trampled another one of their own to death. This was not just a riot, it was an insurrection. It has resulted in 70 of them being charged with criminal...
Whatever grudging respect I had for U.S. Senator Steve Daines has been obliterated by his stunt of joining 11 other Republican senators to question the validity of the 2020 presidential election. His motives mystify me, but his action chills me. Trump, I at least understand. He wants to be president no matter what reality has dictated. Many Americans believe that the election was rigged against Trump. Not surprisingly, they are all Trump voters. And why do they believe the election was rigged?...
Mitch McConnell’s rationale on appointing Supreme Court Justices in the last year of a president’s term just isn’t rational. In 2016 he refused to hold hearings on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, claiming that the nomination should be made by the winner of the coming presidential election, which certainly wasn’t going to be Obama. In 2020 he pushed for the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice a month before the election. He didn’t make the argument he made in 2016 because the...
Political courage on the Republican side of the political spectrum seems to be blooming in state legislatures and the offices of state and local election officials, but it is scarce in Congress. It’s hard to tell the big boss he is wrong and harder still if it’s a message so unwelcome that he won’t and can’t hear it. But in Georgia’s 2020 election, which Biden won, the Republican Secretary of State and his elections staff have been unwavering in defending the running and the results of the elect...
It seems that almost anybody watching someone work believes they can do the job as well or better than the person who is actually doing it, especially if the person watching has never done it before. When I hired on at the brickyard in Lewistown in 1974, the boss pointed to a group of workmen taking wet brick off a conveyor belt and stacking them on small railcars which were then pushed into the kiln for firing. This was called “hacking brick.” “Can you do that?” he asked. “Any fool could do...
With the passage in Montana of I-190 we have joined California, Washington, Oregon and a few other “liberal” states in making the purchase and use of marijuana jail time free. It has been about 100 years since its use became a social stigma, then illegal in the United States. Marijuana use was blamed for everything from mild insanity to the insatiable urge to massacre hundreds of people at one time. How could something that was once in common use become so bad and then good again? I’d like...
We are living in a tumultuous time, and my bet is it will become even more tumultuous after the election. Whoever wins, the supporters of the losing candidate will be angry. There is talk of not accepting the results of the election, something that has never happened in our history. The Right is worried about retribution from the Left, win or lose, and the Left fears vigilante “justice” from the self-appointed “guardians of freedom” of the Right. It could be a mess. It doesn’t have to be, but a...
Now that the election season is full upon us, I, like you, have had my mailbox jammed full with large and glossy pieces of light cardboard informing me about the merits and flaws of the various candidates. While I am glad that the post office is making money off of politicians instead of having politicians trying to de-fund the post office, I have been concerned to learn many things about the candidates that I could not have imagined just a month or two ago. This is especially disconcerting...
