Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913
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A while ago I wrote about companies that include sexual overtones in their ads. One such ad was for a popular candy. Since then I’ve been asked how to contact a company who uses this type of ad and register an opinion. You can usually find an 800 number on the product's packaging. There will also be a physical address as well as a website address. So you have three options to send in your opinion: call the company, send them a letter, or submit your message on their website. Never underestimate the power of one person. On Sunday, I attended a...
An apt description of the Equal Opportunity Employment Act would be “a policy or program providing 'advantages' for people of a minority group with the aim of creating a racially equal society through preferential access to employment, education, health care, welfare” and etc. The EOE was the birth of this thing called “proportional hiring” which mandated that 25 percent of a business’s employees must be of a minority where applicable. I really can’t see the “equalness” in the EOE. Now, here’s where the United States started changing to allow s...
In response to Mary Honrud’s Part II of “Are They Willing” in the Nov. 4 Courier. Numbers!! I love them!! Especially when one can really get behind what they are really saying. Let’s get to a big one. 1,060,000. That’s one million sixty thousand. That’s approximately how many abortions occurred in the U.S. in 2011, the last year we have records for from the Guttmacher Institute. (Guttmacher was started as a semi-autonomous division of Planned Parenthood, so I don’t believe I’m cherry picking sites that are on my side of the issue, rather t...
Our legislators have worked hard to make it increasingly difficult for any woman to get an abortion. I seriously doubt anyone is using abortion as a form of birth control at this time. And obtaining an abortion is not a cheap solution. In four states (Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming) there is only one clinic serving the entire state. (This information comes from Bloomberg, in Vanishing Abortion Clinics in the U.S., Sept. 14, 2015.) So the woman seeking to end her pregnancy faces the expense of traveling to the clinic as...
The pro-lifers claim those unwanted children could be adopted by others. That’s also not easy to arrange, either by the mother-to-be, nor by those looking to adopt. Here in Montana, lawyers must be involved, and we all know how cheaply they work. If the birth mother is under the age of 18, she must have her own lawyer. She cannot sign a relinquishment and consent to adopt order until at least 72 hours after giving birth. She must also undergo at least three hours of counseling by the Department of Health and Human Services, or the adoption a...
Cherry Creek & Milk River Levee System is a vital piece of the city’s infrastructure system that is not only critical to the welfare and safety of our community but also bogged down in federal regulation. An array of complex issues and opinions as to the solutions necessary to keep the levee system in compliance and meeting the needs of the community keep the levee system at the forefront of the city’s attention. The southernmost portion of the city of Glasgow borders the Milk River and Cherry Creek waterways and the associated flood pla...
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...
By the time the sun set on Dec. 28, 1983, it had started to sink in that my family and I were homeless. We had found shelter with my husband’s parents. The reason we were homeless was because we’d lost our house and everything we had in it, other than the clothes on our backs, to fire. The morning after the fire my husband said, “I just realized we don’t even own a comb so we can comb our hair.” Basic needs. A comb, a toothbrush, a change of clothing, a washcloth and towel, shampoo, soap. Thanks to the generosity of our community, we soon foun...
One out of every 10 Montanans is a veteran, which makes Montana home to more veterans per capita than almost any other state in the nation. It is one of my greatest honors to serve Montana’s veterans in Congress. Every one of these men and women have an incredible story to tell from their service – stories that are also part of our nation’s history and our heritage. That’s why the Veterans History Project is so important. My team in Montana is helping to spread awareness of the American Folklife Center’s Veterans History Project across th...
Last Saturday, as I was walking to the Nashua School to watch the volleyball games, one of my grandsons met me. He walked beside me for a few moments, then took off skipping. He returned to my side, still skipping. I smiled as I observed his energy. I mentioned I used to enjoy skipping. He replied, “I like to skip. And if I skip fast enough and take the biggest steps I can, I feel like I’m flying. Skipping is fun.” This same grandson is on the JAM basketball team for Nashua. The JAM team and junior high basketball team were in Opheim on Frida...
I have been mulling over my thoughts on the topic of abortion rights in the United States. I was never in the forefront of the fight to gain this right, but I silently cheered on my sisters who worked towards this gain for a woman’s control of her own body, and therefore her ability to lead her life as she wanted. There are many reasons a woman might choose to not become a mother. And those reasons may vary greatly at different stages of her life. Some remain constant throughout the years she is fertile. I strongly feel that if a woman does not...
Do you remember the days of manual transmissions, or ever further back, to a crank-starting vehicle? I was thinking of earlier days, when children often spent the day in the field with Mom and Dad. Daycare consisted of the children riding in whatever vehicle or machinery was being used at the time, or maybe they had a “spot” for play nearby. Of course leaving children in a vehicle has always been a safety issue, but back in those days there wasn’t much chance the little ones were going to get the car/pickup started and moving. I am sure the lit...
This is part two about an email I have received several times over the past seven or so years. It’s been circling the Internet since 2005 and just won’t go down the drain. Until now, I have simply deleted it. This time I didn’t and this two-part story is attributed to that fact. It has its good points and bad points to be sure, but this year I simply had to point out to you the bad after having been recently chastised severely for not researching some of my columns. As the chastiser pointed out in his/her tirade, “Your readers deserve to know...
James Walling, you certainly deserve credit for a series of articles that have been well done on the APR and bison and have brought up some questions that it seems they cannot even answer. I believe that your approach of letting both sides have input on this reintroduction of bison question is the first time that larger NGOs have not smothered us with propaganda that supports just their side. You have proven to be a very insightful editor, and I, for one, appreciate the fairness of your reporting and thorough investigation of items that are so...
As I was reading Virgil Vaupel's review, Think Before You Donate, the false viral email that comes around each holiday season, I had to feel my pulse to see if I had died and Virgil was channeling me from the beyond, or whether he had hacked into my computer. Especially when he ended with, "One would almost think that my friend Horace wrote that scalding review!!" I had written almost the same review two years before, even siting the same sources to fact-check it before replying to the sender and exposing the lies about the prominent charities...
Folks, it’s that time of year again when charities from all over the world will be pulling on your heart strings to send them money. Some of these charities are legitimate and worthy of your donation. Some are not. For the past few years I have received an e-mail about this time of year with the subject “Think Before You Donate.” It’s one of those e-mails that rise up out of cyberspace now and again. No one knows who wrote the original. I’m sure you have been the recipient of some of these urban legend e-mails. This particular one lists fiv...
It seems to me that there is a lot more name-calling and mud-slinging done in politics, or at least more people seem to agree with the names being thrown about. Both parties are equally guilty. On one side you have 'cReepublicans' and on the other side you have 'libtards.' (There are a lot of other terms being used as well.) Talk show hosts and TV personalities are also prone to this. Anyone who has watched Bill O’Reilly has heard him denigrating ‘pinheads,' while Rush Limbaugh goes after ‘feminazis.' Who could support anyone so desig...
I’d been experiencing increasing pain in my right leg and decided I needed to find out what was causing it. So for most of the past month I’ve been in Billings for medical tests and consultations that resulted in the total replacement of my right hip. On Sept. 23, Dr. Robert Schultz informed me that the only choice I had to get rid of the pain and lethargic feeling I was having was to totally replace my right hip. I was released from the hospital on Sept. 28, and returned home the following day. I returned to Billings to have the staples rem...
Dr. Mirich, We Need You Three years ago, my daughter injured her knee and needed emergency surgery. It was a very hard time as she wasn’t immediately diagnosed. Fortunately she was able to get in to see Dr. Mirich and got the surgery she needed, thanks to this outstanding doctor. I have often thought how extremely fortunate we were to have him here locally, and would try to visualize the nightmare it would have been if we would have had to go to Billings. I know he is and has been such a blessing to this community and our story is by far not t...
Mary Honrud’s common sense commentary, “A Return To Founding Values,” provided a valuable reminder of the efforts of the framers of the Constitution to specifically avoid the repressiveness associated with creating any kind of religious nation, “Christian Nation” or otherwise. She effectively demonstrated that they understood that no religion has a lock on the truth so they drafted the religion clauses in the First Amendment to ensure freedom of belief, and therefore tolerance of diversity. I’m not a liberal, nor a conservative, (or atheist...
I am a rock enthusiast of sorts. I like flat rocks and character rocks, and my sense of character may be entirely different from anyone else. This interest in rocks brings to mind the many hours that farmers have spent clearing ground of rocks in order to till the ground. I am sure there are some who remember rocks being removed from areas using a team of horses pulling a sled-type thing, which was called a “stone boat.” Imagine the backbreaking work this was, and I am pretty sure it involved the whole family. As you travel the highways or rur...
This week, the Lifestyles page (8A) features an intensely personal account of the life and writing struggles of one of my favorite Montana writers, Jenny Siler (aka Alex Carr). She and I have some history that’s worth mentioning. Many years ago (I don’t care to admit just how many), I read Siler’s debut effort Easy Money, a blisteringly straightforward thriller featuring a strong female lead that earned the following praise from Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times Book Review: “Once in a blue moon, a new writer speaks up in a voice that ge...
The concept of "innocent until proven guilty” is one of the touchstones of our legal system. We are not to lock people away in jail/prison simply upon supposition and innuendo. They must be proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. However, there are many in the media who thrive and gain great financial and personal advantages by trying people in the public forum. These people seem to delight in pillorying those they’ve deemed guilty of some crime without the benefit of ever seeing any evidence of culpability. They are not imp...
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...
Each year in the United States, there are an average of 7,100 weather related vehicle fatalities, accounting for 24 percent of all vehicle fatalities. This is more than all other weather related deaths combined. Winter storms also claim dozens of lives in non-vehicle related accidents, and cause hundreds of millions in damages and resources to handle the snow event. In Montana, cold weather exposure and automobile accidents are the main causes of winter weather related deaths. Now is the time to make sure you are ready for winter weather....
