Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
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In an age where people are falling all over themselves to divulge their most personal information to the world at large through social media and where people willingly give their permission to internet search engines like Google to gather and sell their personal data it seems almost absurd to worry about the right to privacy. But the difference in giving up your privacy and having your privacy taken away is significant, and that is why it is frightening to me to see elected officials in Montana and elsewhere belittle its importance and plot to...
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 Montana House of Representatives for a few years and...
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? This raises a question, if the law is a matter of personal interpretation, who can you trust? Imperfect as it is, the American legal system...
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? Here’s why. 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 smallpox, the American troops had not. A...
Recently my home county of Sanders twice made national news, first for having the highest increase in COVID cases in the United States and more recently for a group of citizens pressuring a member of the Sanders County Board of Health into resigning because he stood up for what he was trained in and with which the crowd disagreed, namely medical science. This is the kind of publicity that most communities would not want to have because it would serve as a deterrent to the economic growth of an area. Well, that would have been the case years...
Do the Parties serve the People or Just Use Them? Do the political parties serve the people they claim to represent, or do they use the people as a tool to advance the agendas of the party power brokers? That’s kind of a chicken or the egg question I guess. It seems to me that while the parties do have basic lofty tenets about how to legislate for the greater benefit of mankind, it feels more and more those beliefs are just window dressing and that the party bosses know what they want and do their best to convince the voters that what is g...
If you ran a multi-state business and had just over one billion dollars in sales in Montana, I bet you would expect to pay something in Montana corporate taxes. And, indeed you would; you would have to dig deep down into your corporate pocket to come up with the 50 bucks to cover your tax bill. Let me repeat those figures; one billion dollars in Montana sales and 50 bucks in taxes. Oh, and for five years in a row. We are not allowed to know its name, but this is a real company. This is a true story. In a time of record highs in the stock...
As I read what used to be called the funny papers — which was actually the news section of a newspaper, not the comics — I continually wonder how people come up with viewpoints that are based on misinformation that is completely different than the facts warrant. I probably wouldn’t worry so much about it if it didn’t matter so much, but since I like being in a democracy and since voting is so important to that and since whatever passes for information influences voters, I do. I worry even more when I hear politicians complain that people...
This is the time of year when we start thinking about—well—time. If you are reading this you are wondering why time passes so quickly. Many of those who are not reading this—because they haven’t learned how to read yet—are wondering why it passes so slowly. There are students who wonder how a school year can be an eternity and a summer vacation gone in an eye-blink, and then there are some of us who must have too much time on our hands because we are actually spending some of it wondering about this. One theory I’ve heard and liked is that a y...
The Soul of a Community The Post Office in my mother’s hometown of Barlow, N.D., closed in 1965. I know this because when I visited tiny Barlow in 1972 to see if there was anyone still there who knew my mother (she left Barlow for good in 1917 when she was 14) I ran into several who had gone to school with her. In the course of a very pleasant and nostalgic evening over very weak coffee one of my hosts (we were in the parlor of the house my mother was born and raised in) showed me a letter he had saved—the last letter to have been pos...
We are a nation of immigrants who despise immigrants. Syrians and Middle East refugees are just the most recent of the indigestible bits in the melting pot that we are so fond of claiming as our great distinction among nations. And Hispanics, like the poor, we will always have with us and will probably disparage them for another few decades in addition to the disparagement of the past 150 years, give or take. In 1939, a ship bearing 900 Jewish refugees from Hitler’s genocide was turned away from American shores. We excluded Asian peoples f...
In addition to Medicare I have a very generous employer’s retiree healthcare insurance policy which covers virtually any condition or procedure I can imagine needing. Of course, to enjoy this generous plan I also pay a generous premium, so, this being only time of year you can change health plans, as several recent mailings from insurers who want my business tell me, I thought I would look into saving myself some money and began to shop around. Now I wish I hadn’t even bothered. I had assumed I could understand the difference between hea...
Recently the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) granted Montana an extension of time to conform to the “REAL ID” law passed by Congress in 2005. In a nutshell the REAL ID law demanded that state driver license and identification cards conform to federal requirements concerning information and data sharing as laid out by DHS, and that these identification documents have the approval of DHS. Only state issued identification documents that met DHS standards would be valid for entrance to Federal Buildings (I hope the Post Office was not one of...
When I was young, I used to get around by hitchhiking, whether a few miles into town to work or across the entire country and up and down both coasts. It was not the most convenient way to travel, but it was certainly the cheapest, and I, like most anybody, was willing to sacrifice convenience for low cost; in fact, I had to. I remember spending a couple of hours in a snowstorm, cold and hungry, and hoping I’d get a ride before I got hit; hours in the desert heat near Yuma, Ariz., hot and thirsty; a full night and day trying to get a ride o...
“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...
This morning, as I was doing emergency field repairs on a piece of equipment, I was cussing myself for not having taken care of the problem when I had time instead of doing it in the middle of a field in the July heat. In short, I was guilty of not doing what wise people call “preventive maintenance,” better known to my mother as, “a stitch in time saves nine.” I soon began to look at things in the broader picture, partly because I was tired of cussing myself and partly to feel smug about other people in the same boat. Then, I began to move th...
Democrats have had big losses across America this past election, and they are once again puzzled and confused because they believe that “people are voting against their own self interests.” Is it possible that Democrats themselves are not very good at understanding the self-interests of others? The Democrat’s perception of the issue is that Democrats stand for everything that Americans want and need; lower taxes on individuals, universal and inexpensive public education, social programs for the old, poor, and infirm, etc., and that the voter...
Walgreens, America’s largest drug store chain, says they are leaving the United States because our tax rate is too high. It must really be killing them, but it’s hard to know because last year they upped their CEO compensation by 13 percent, had increased 2014 third quarter earnings of 15 percent compared to a year ago, and their stock price has doubled in the last two years. Corporations are busy grousing about the high corporate tax rate in the United States. At 35 percent it sounds high, but any corporation that pays anywhere near that muc...
If national holidays have anything in common it’s that those of us who celebrate them by taking the day off don’t give much thought to the origin or meaning of the holiday. That’s true of secular holidays (never mind Religious holidays) from the Fourth of July to Memorial Day and right on through to this week’s day off, Labor Day. The first Labor Day was held in 1882 in New York City. It was proposed, depending on your source, by the Peter McGuire of the Carpenters’ Union or Matthew Maguire of the Machinists’ Union. I like the Carpenters...
A few years back I was in an old working class neighborhood of Great Falls, walking down tree-lined avenues that must have been something a few years back. But now the houses needed paint and lots of other things besides. Most of the residents seemed to have lived there for some time, and as I walked along I realized that once upon a time this had been the realization of the Great American Dream for these folks: a secure job, their own house, a pretty yard, maybe even a flower garden. Not a lot to ask out of life. Not then, anyway, and now it...
When you have hunted, hiked, worked, and snowmobiled – you name it – on Forest Service land for decades you can begin to feel as if you had an entitlement to that land. Call it the right of possession by proximity and use; but because no one knows that land like we do, or uses it like we do, we feel we should have a say in how it’s managed. Some people think Montana should have the ownership, as well, and that’s going too far. First of all, when Montana was granted statehood in 1889, we agreed to the terms of the Enabling Act passed by Congres...
