Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
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One of the great motion pictures of all time was the 1939 Academy Award blockbuster directed by the legendary Frank Capra called Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The movie was based on an unpublished manuscript by Lewis R. Foster with the title, “The Gentleman from Montana.” Columbia pictures offered the leading role to Montana actor Gary Cooper who turned it down, so the Mr. Smith character was accepted by the young up-and-coming actor, Jimmy Stewart. The plot is that the naïve and idealistic Jefferson Smith, a popular boys camp counselor, is app...
With the unrelenting talk about election fraud, I’ve decided now to clear my conscience and disclose that I voted twice for President in 1996. No, it wasn’t an act of voter fraud. As a delegate to the Republican convention that year, I voted to nominate Bob Dole as the Republican candidate. I voted for him again at my polling place in Whitefish in the general election. Colin Powell, who I felt could have been a great and unifying President, was my first choice that year, but I was more than comfortable with Dole. My primary reason for that was...
Pregnancies and human life are older than recorded time, and so, it follows, are abortions. The procedures by which abortions have been conducted, however, have only very recently in human history been recognized in law and made safe by regulations. In 1973, the Roe v Wade decision declared abortion a constitutional right within certain health related restrictions, and all states have been bound to safely implement that decision for nearly half a century. In Montana, however, the legalization of abortion became an issue two years before the...
As a young high school American government teacher, I compared our system to an automobile that was useful if it could start, speed up, slow down and stop. When the people thought government needed to be more active, they elected liberal Democrats to press down on the accelerator. When people thought government’s role was getting too large and expensive, they elected Republicans to apply the brakes and slow things down. Our national debt is now $20 trillion and rising. That amounts to about $155,000 in tax liability for the average family of f...
“It [is] more a duty [of an Attorney General] to save an innocent than to convict a guilty man.” We know we do not live in a perfect world where only the guilty are convicted and the wrongly accused go free, but prosecutors can sometimes seem more interested in winning convictions than in remembering these words of Thomas Jefferson. Kimberly Nees was 17 years old in 1979 when she was brutally beaten to death near the town of Poplar. Barry Beach, also 17, was one of several classmates who were interviewed in her murder. No charges were bro...
As many as 2,000 temporary high-paying blue-collar jobs will be created in Montana if the U.S. government approves the much publicized Keystone XL pipeline. More than twice as many similar private-sector construction jobs, however, will result from state government approval of the "Build Montana" program proposed by Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock and sponsored in the legislature by Republican Rep. Jeff Welborn of Dillon. The Montana proposal includes badly-needed improvements in infrastructure in Montana's end of the Bakken energy development,...
The symbol that means Montana is the buffalo bulls head crafted by cowboy artist Charlie Russell. This year marks the sesquicentennial of Russell's birth. He would have been 150 on March 19. By all accounts, Charlie was as his adopted son Jack described him,“kind and gentle.” Charlie's wife Nancy, described as“money minded,” kept Charlie on task in his creative work, and was a hard bargainer in marketing it. This contrast is illustrated by a legend handed down in Montana's Mackay family extending back to the 1912 sale of a painting to family...
The venerable Barry Goldwater warned that,“Unlimited campaign spending eats at the heart of the democratic process. It feeds the growth of special interest groups created solely to channel money into political campaigns. It creates an impression that every candidate is bought and owned by the biggest givers. And it causes elected officials to devote more time to raising money than to their public duties.” Goldwater's foresight was right. Congress will be in session only 123 days this year. They'll have a lot more time, on the public dime, to...
With the departure of Senator Baucus from the Senate, Montana’s longest serving statewide elected official is Ed Smith. Never heard of him? Well, we have elected him Clerk of our Supreme Court five times. Ed served as Chief Clerk of the Montana House of Representatives three legislative sessions and was then appointed by the legendary House Speaker, Tip O’Neill, to be Chief Bill Clerk of the United States House of Representatives. He has also served as President of the National Conference of Appellate Court Clerks. His is a remarkable rec...
In politics, timing is everything and that certainly appears to be the case with Lt. Gov. John Walsh and Congressman Steve Daines. A year from no one of them will likely be a U.S. senator, something unimaginable a year ago. Then no one imagined Sen. Max Baucus would announce his retirement, let alone that he would resign his seat before the end of his term so he could move to China of all things. Baucus will become ambassador to China at a challenging time, and we wish him well. The major beneficiary of Baucus’decision to retire was freshman D...
Rather than viewing the recent slight uptick in the economy and leveling off in the national debt as a harbinger of a positive future, John Snow believes it is diverting national attention from the debt crises that continues to pose a mortal threat to out country. Snow, who served as U.S. secretary of the Treasury from 2003 to 2006, delivered a lecture sponsored by the Burton K. Wheeler Center earlier this month on the campus of Montana State University in Bozeman. The lecture hall was filled to capacity. I wish all Montanans– in fact, all A...
I first met Max Baucus in 1973 when he entered the Montana House of Representatives as a freshman member from Missoula. His seat was at the back of the chamber near bright and articulate Dorothy Bradley of Bozeman, the previous session's only woman and future Democratic candidate for governor. I got to know him well because we served together on the Judiciary Committee. We learned that we had the same birthday, and began a warm forty-year friendship. One evening, late in the session, I entered the House chamber to pick up some things from my...
