News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 1369 - 1393 of 3210
I’m not much into Them and They or Us and We, but the struggle between Them and Us and They and We has been growing in the last decade. I heard it in town last week, a conversation about Them. The conversation, which did not include me, by its volume did not exclude me either. It filled the room with talk of They and Them as opposed to Us and We, and about how a grown man, one of Us, might become one of Them by virtue of proximity to too many of Them. The problem with Them i...
What could be more important than how we care for our children? Pragmatists recognize that how we treat our children today in their dependency will shape how they treat us tomorrow in our old age. People of faith recognize all God’s children are just that — created in the Creator’s image. High-minded folks appreciate our most worthy charge as a society is to care well for all our children. Followers of Christ, observe, Jesus fed the hungry and taught us to do the same. While we may come at caring for children from different s...
One day last week Leo asked, “Had breakfast yet?” I grabbed my bag and we headed to the gordita place. I’m certain there are a hundred gordita places in Etzatlan. This one is on the man street; that’s what I call it. Block after block of repair shops, tire and tool stores, that kind of thing. Man stuff, man street. These aren’t stores like we are used to seeing. Might be five or six a block, open fronts, no signage. Might be more workers than tools. I sat in a plastic c...
Peter was up before anyone else - as he often is. My husband, Peter, gets up early in order to have enough time to brood before busybodies like me expect him to engage in cheerful conversation. But this morning we were staying at my parents' cabin and there was a glitch in the plans. The coffee jar was empty. Obviously, a person can't brood without coffee. Peter quietly opened one cupboard after another. No coffee. My parents are great planners so there was no chance they...
Rural Montana is facing some pressing challenges. We must provide quality medical care for an aging population, so our seniors can enjoy healthy, vibrant lives in the communities they've always called home. And we need to create more jobs for the next generation of rural Montanans, so they have the opportunity to live in our great state. These two objectives both require enhancements to our health care system, but we need to implement these enhancements in a way that will not...
The president has frequently repeated the NRA talking point that more extensive background checks on gun sales would not have prevented the recent rash of mass murders. Maybe so. It's hard to accurately see what lurks in a murderer's mind. The NRA, and therefore Trump, are skeptical about "red flag" laws, arguing that such laws are based on supposition and hearsay, and could result in the government wrongfully confiscating someone's property. Probably true. Both Trump and the...
Respecting the voice of the people is an essential electoral element to a functioning democracy. Since the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th Century, primary elections have been a vehicle empowering everyday U.S. citizens in the selection of party nominees for office. People-oriented primary elections reduce the influence of the powerful, the vested interests and political insiders. It was no surprise to see that the powerful within the National Republican Party have...
The internet is full of farm animals that have gone wild in the past two weeks, and I’m not talking about Youtube videos of farm cats being all crazy cute and stuff. I am talking about the livestock participating in shenanigans that could get someone’s eye poked out. In no particular order, we have: 14 goats and sheep, all employees of a Virginia landscaping business who walked off the job sometime late Monday night or early Tuesday morning. The four-legged work crew was sup...
With small Montana communities, especially in the eastern part of the state, struggling to sustain themselves, we don’t need the state government to make their struggle harder. Unfortunately, that is exactly what the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks did in 2007 when it limited archery elk permits in hunting districts within the Missouri River Breaks. In February 2008, the FWP Commission voted to adopt this motion and set the archery draw quota to 65 percent of the “historical permits.” This action, by law, reduc...
I have turned into my father and I don’t like it. When I lived in Washington, I used to almost dread Dad’s phone calls because they too frequently meant that somebody we knew, in the family or in the neighborhood, had died. Every day I open the Havre Daily Homepage, ostensibly to see what is going on in my old neighborhood. But a not-so-teeny part of me can’t wait to scan down to the obituaries. I am always relieved when there are no names I recognize. Just this week, out o...
I told my husband, Peter, that our marriage was like stew — and that’s a good thing. This is a second marriage for both Peter and me. We were both married for a long time and then divorced for quite a while. We dated other people and realized how tricky the whole process of finding a new partner was, after habits had been set and preferences settled. When I met Peter, I was ready … I think. I had healed and spent time on my own and figured out who I was — single and over 50...
Once upon a time in Montana we all would’ve been swimming with the fishes, but times change. The ice ages melt. The inland sea recedes. The Missouri River settles into a drainage 60 miles south. And the Milk River is left to meander through a gumbo valley that cuts through a high plains gumbo desert. This is modern times and everyone lives happily ever after. The End. You can’t see it, but I’m wiping away tears of laughter right now. Don’t feel left out, they’re not happy tea...
Used to be, if I had a serious deadline, I would work all day, work all night, work until the project was finished, ready to deliver. Ah, well, that was then. “Used to be” is like paint, it covers a multitude of sins. Nowadays, in what the “boys” here call “my wonderful retired life,” and it is, mostly, I parse out my day in bits and pieces. Perhaps like today, hang laundry, rest, generally with a book in hand, make the bed, rest, sweep floor, rest, work on project, re...
August has been a slow month as far as politics goes. Some jockeying for who is going to run for what office, is interesting to watch. But it is a busy time for the agricultural folks. The crops have been better than expected, the cooler spring and summer may have been the reason. Many areas received hail and a number of fires have been reported in the harvest fields. Some farmers are finished but many are still cutting, so be on the lookout for equipment. I have not been involved in a great deal of harvest, only moving a tru...
They say that blessings come in disguise. If so, my blessings are poorly disguised. They show up wearing false noses and funny eyeglasses and are instantly recognizable unless I am being completely thick-headed — and it is astonishing how often I am. I had a really bad year a few years back when I lost my husband and my job and my home in rapid succession. All of this happened while I was living in Nigeria (which was not great to begin with). I realized immediately that this w...
As a pro-life Montanan, mother of six (biological and adoptive), I am frustrated with the Susan B. Anthony List Candidate Fund’s endorsement of Greg Gianforte for governor of Montana. He is currently running against two pro-life candidates in the Republican primary, one of which is my husband, Dr. Albert D. Olszewski, state senator. Dr. Olszewski has sponsored and articulately carried multiple pro-life bills through three legislative sessions. In 2015 he drafted and carried HB 479 “Montana’s Unborn Child Pain and Suffe...
We had that weird dry spring, so I scheduled a week off to get some work done outside — I even booked a rental tractor to help with the work — and then the skies opened up and it rained all that week. I canceled the tractor, but kept the vacation, which turned out to be a good move on my part. I slept all that week and kind of stared at the walls as if I’d had a chemical lobotomy. Apparently, I needed a little down time. But not this week. I am on vacation from the offic...
Today I bring you the banal, the mundane, my trite self-discovery in household hints. Soap-pads Ohso Special. Also known as SOS or, in Español, “fibra metalica.” Can you believe I could not find any of those soap-embedded, finely-shredded wirey scrub pads that I think of as SOS pads, no matter the brand? Not anywhere in town. I am a proponent of shopping locally. Though my town is small, I generally find whatever I need in a store right around the corner. Fruterias and abor...
I was not popular in high school. Everyone says this. I now realize that no one — not even the most popular person in high school — self-identifies as popular. Lately I’ve been getting a lot of Facebook friend requests from people I scarcely knew in high school. I have a 40th class reunion coming up next year and I’ve been getting friend requests from people who, I am quite sure, would not have recognized me walking down the hall in high school. In their defense, I was par...
I don’t know what you’ve heard about Greenland, but it’s a strong, independent, saucy country that don’t take no nonsense off of any countries, even Denmark, which it is married to but not necessarily living with. If you know what I mean. Archaeologists have found prehistoric evidence that different Inuit cultures have inhabited Greenland starting in about 2500 B.C., but life was not easy there on the largest non-continental island on the planet. If you recall from almost...
My backyard pulls me out of the house. I take a book with me, as always, but cannot focus when surrounded by such magical glory. This is the same yard, the same beauty, the same powerful stillness around me day after day after day. What makes it feel different today? I don’t know. Maybe something about the quality of light in August. Already the sun slants winter-wise across the sky. Perhaps it illuminates more detail, each edge of leaf, each bird wing, each petal of b...
I spent the last couple weeks visiting my parents. I’ve been lucky in the parent department. It’s fashionable to recall some pivotal incident that occurred when we were eight and extrapolate how every difficulty experienced in our life since is a result. But I’ve never seen any truth to this in my own life. I was really happy when I was 8 — and I give my parents full credit. My life is very different from my parents’ life. Still, they have always been supportive and have alwa...
Homeowners know that when a leaky roof is spotted, it’s important to act quickly to find and fix the leak. If left unattended, that slow drip overhead can turn into a ceiling that collapses — costing far more to repair and threatening the integrity of the entire home. The same should be true for our public buildings such as schools, city halls, police stations and tribal government buildings. But the reality is that many of Montana’s aging public facilities are far behind in keeping up with routine maintenance, and the resul...
Don’t be fooled by the current Washington rhetoric about “reforming” the pharmaceutical industry. Most recently, Sen. Chuck Grassley has been promoting his bill which would place inflation-based caps on Medicare drug prices. There are also proposals to eliminate “middlemen” and increase transparency in pricing. While these things would be an improvement, they don’t address the fundamental problem of a drug industry gone wild. Thanks to our system for granting patents for new drugs, these companies are given a virtual mon...
I was going to start this column with the eye-catching phrase: I am tired of being a woman. But that’s not true. I’m just tired of all the falderal around the status of womanhood as a whole. Are we objects like doormats or arm candy? Are we being reviled, or are we being too sensitive? Are we being paid less than men; or is it the same amount in some financial mathematics form of “separate but equal,” making that discrepancy true; or is it less because we deserve it? Are fem...
