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Investigations for the sake of investigations
The United States House of Representatives will be doing exhaustive (and exhausting) investigating into many things like Hunter Biden, Jill Biden, President Joe Biden, and Major Biden (the Biden’s dog, which has an anger management issue). They will also be conducting major investigations into how an enormous amount of money given to the states to […]
Democracy wears a sweatshirt
When Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of the United States Congress, commentator Tucker Carlson was outraged. “As far as we know, no one’s ever addressed the United States Congress in a sweatshirt before, but they love him much more than they love you,” he fumed. This from a man who promotes “testicle […]
It’s the time to remember those who aren’t around to celebrate anymore
I started out to write about this being a good time of year to be helpful to others and that began to sound so preachy and goody-two-shoes that I thought that maybe I should just thank some people who helped me when I needed it. I first came to Montana in 1969 and had the […]
Is it time for politeness to make a comeback in politics?
There was a time that some look back at wistfully when politics was not so mean, and people of different parties mostly got along. That began changing in the late 1970s when a young candidate for Congress told a group of College Republicans in Atlanta what was wrong with the Republican Party: “One of the […]
Les Webber: A champion forever enshrined on a Montana billboard
This is the story—correct that—legend, of a man named Les Webber who ranched and caroused in and around the town of Plains, Montana. When you are leaving Plains, headed to Missoula, you might notice on the right a weathered billboard with a narrow protective roof over it in front of a large Town Pump store. […]
Laws and the constitution are not a choose-your-own adventure
I had a neighbor once who spent several days in the county jail because he wouldn’t make his mortgage payments. He felt he had a constitutional right to not pay them because the money wasn’t backed by gold. There’s a longer story there, of course, and he wasn’t in jail because he didn’t pay the […]
Pity the poor immigrant
I’ve got to hand it to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for sharing the wealth of the immigrant crisis with Massachusetts, I’m just not sure what to hand him. A couple of weeks ago DeSantis had a couple of planeloads of asylum-seeking legal immigrants from Venezuela shipped from a San Antonio, Texas immigrant shelter to exclusive […]
Don’t send a librarian to do a parent’s job
Irate Americans are arming themselves and heading to library board meetings to defend children against evil by insisting that the library remove books that offend society. Notice I did not say trying to defend their own children, they mean to defend the children of people they do not know. Listen, they are going about it […]
America’s history of warring religious factions began before the country was founded
The story of America is the story of the individual and the protection of the individual from government, from the powerful, from those who “know better” than we do. Our country was shaped by those who knew the feeling of powerlessness in the face of an oppressive government. Who, as individuals even banding together in […]
Tax cheats need to learn patriotism
Of all the horrors Republicans see in the Democrats’ grossly misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” the biggest bogeyman is that the Internal Revenue Service is going to get funding to hire new employees to boost their auditing efforts. Tax auditing, in case you don’t know, is a multifaceted approach to taxpayer compliance; some involve simple individual […]
Give Montanans the right to choose ‘None of the Above’
On Election Day, assuming you can still bring yourself to vote, you go down to the polls, or more likely, the mailbox and look at the selection of candidates for various offices. Some are OK, some are not, so you pick your favorite and then you come to a race where both candidates are, in […]
Brad Tschida’s anatomy lesson
Behold state Rep. Brad Tschida bringing national attention to Montana by announcing that a woman’s uterus serves no real purpose for a woman, that it is a “sanctuary” for the pre-born. Sort of a condo leased out to a fertilized human egg. I’m not sure what Tschida’s stand is on ovaries and fallopian tubes and […]