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Brace for impact
The Supreme Court’s decision to abandon 50 years of judicial precedent on a woman’s constitutional right to abortion is sending gigantic shock waves across the nation and through the legal system. Add that to the absolutely damning evidence of Donald Trump’s treasonous attempt to overthrow American democracy in a planned and executed coup. Combined, these judicial and […]
Climate change: The new abnormal
Humans have a tendency to believe everything will be pretty much the same in the future as it has been in the past. No surprise since generally speaking that was pretty true in the past and while things changed, they did not change so radically or with such severe consequences as they are now. Scientists, […]
Trump’s failed coup: The truth finally comes out
The nation and its citizens have been assailed by lies, distortions, and outright fictions since the polls closed on Election Day 2020. We have been told the election was stolen, that ballot boxes were stuffed, that voting machines were corrupted, and that the candidate who lost by 7 million votes didn’t actually lose. But now, […]
America fleeced at the gas pump (again)
There’s an old and very hard-hearted line that “if God didn’t want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep.” It’s in the classic movie “The Magnificent Seven” and is uttered by the Mexican bandito chief whose gang robs a poor peasant village. God probably doesn’t have much to do with gas prices these days, but […]
When it comes to public lands, more use doesn’t necessarily equal conservation
Memorial Day weekend is generally considered the start of the “summer season” in most of the U.S. Finally warm enough to get out in nature and do the zillion things people do for outdoor recreation. But it’s worth wondering, as the crowds swell, whether the diverse “great outdoors” can take the ever-mounting pressures on what […]
The Colstrip calamity: They got the gold, we get the shaft
Once again Montanans get to re-experience the all too well-known disaster of a major corporation operating an industrial facility, producing prodigious amounts of toxic and hazardous waste, and then declaring bankruptcy. After hundreds of millions of dollars in publicly funded cleanups at abandoned mines and industrial sites, one might wonder “When will our politicians learn […]
So much for that Republican governance
Montanans got a good dose of the good, the bad, and the ugly this week in both politics and policy. Some of our politicians’ actions are simply unbelievable in their sheer idiocy while others are just downright vicious. But like a beam of sunlight breaking through storm clouds, there’s also some good news — which […]
Alito’s opinion shows America’s misguided priorities
The tremors from the early leak of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s brutal opinion attacking the long-settled right of women to determine if and when to end a pregnancy are shaking the nation like an earthquake. After four long years of Trump’s widespread denigration of women, we now bear further denigration by his judicial appointees. […]
Montana’s drought means that we are toast
One of Gov. Ted Schwinden’s favorite excuses for his failure to prepare Montana for the state’s disastrous droughts in the 1980s was: “Montana is a ‘next year’ state.” It means that even though our rivers dried up, fish died, crops withered, and as he infamously put it, “the whole damn state’s on fire,” we should […]
Why is climate change a partisan issue?
These days, protecting the very systems that enable life on Earth has inexplicably become a partisan issue. But why would that be? We all need clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, clean soil in which to grow food and a functioning, life-supporting climate. Without those essentials, life as we know it is imperiled […]
Montana is now a pot state, not a coal one — so tell our federal delegation
For years now we have heard Jon Tester and Steve Daines declare themselves “coal state senators” whenever they so willingly vote against measures to reduce or tax the use of coal and its planet-killing pollution. But as recently released data show, the state and local tax revenue and number of jobs created by Montana’s legalization […]
Gianforte betrays his constitutional and public trust responsibilities
Montanans were justifiably shocked when the news broke last week that Gov. Greg Gianforte stopped the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks from enforcing its instream flow water rights on the nationally famous Smith River as well as the Shields River. Thanks to the “right to know” provision in Montana’s Constitution reporters were able to […]