News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 1754 - 1778 of 3210
I waited for my friend — a combat veteran of the First Gulf War — at a restaurant. As I sat there, my Twitter feed was lighting up with news of Dana Loesch of the National Rifle Association who had put all of us lyin’ journalists on notice that our time was up. The practitioners of the First Amendment were being strongarmed by those who love the Second Amendment even more. And as someone who cherishes the First Amendment, I support her right to freedom of speech. I also have a message for Loesch and her NRA zealots: Right...
Congressman Gianforte is proposing two bills in Congress that amount to the largest reversal of public lands protection in Montana’s history. From the Upper Missouri River Breaks to the most remote corner of the Bitterroot Mountains, Gianforte seeks to open the door for mineral, oil, and gas exploration in 28 wild and remote places where many Montana families now hike, hunt, float, fish, and camp. Our lone congressman is not only assaulting public lands, he’s also assaulting public process and our way of life. Taken as a who...
I support all the students in Montana and across the country who are voicing their concerns about gun violence. The walkouts and March for Our Lives deserve our respect and recognition. We should be embarrassed that teenagers are showing the courage it takes to stand up to groups like the National Rifle Association and demand policies that prevent gun violence in our schools. We need to ask ourselves, how many innocent lives are lost before we do something meaningful? Have shootings at schools become normal, acceptable? When...
In 2018, we are at a crossroads for women’s rights and reproductive health. Who we select in the election for the U.S. House will have immense consequences for women in Montana and across the country. We have been here before. Forty-six years ago this very month, I was serving my first term in the Montana House of Representatives. I was a 23 year-old political rookie — the only woman in the chamber — with a head full of issues affecting our beautiful state that I thought needed addressing. At the top of that list was women...
This is another election year and my heart would be filled with a sense of dread and foreboding sauteed in a tangy brine of bored cynicism, if it weren’t for a few bright spots of hope. Hope for hijinks, pratfalls and a little bit of “what the what is that about?” already forming. Elvis Presley is alive and well in Arkansas, of all places, and looking for his magic moment in the Arkansas State House. The Associated Press reported Feb. 27 that Elvis D. Presley, who is a professional impersonator of famous rock crooner Elvis...
I feel sad. This morning I made a list of things I wanted to buy in Etzatlan. Since I don’t have a car, I rely on taxi service or a friend or one of the workers here on the ranch to take me around. I had asked Leo, my gardening helper, to “bring your car and let’s go have breakfast at Dona Mary’s before we shop.” It’s been easy for me to swing into the Mexican way of eating. Early morning coffee with a small snack, fruit or a biscuit. Mid-morning, a breakfast meal, somet...
Hiding under the labels of “conservative,” “Republican” and “federalism,” Broadwater County Attorney Corey Swanson attempts to justify his support for the CSKT Compact in a column in the Havre Daily March 2, 2018, and carried in the Helena Independent a few days later. Swanson’s taunting of conservatives who oppose the compact as being opposed to federalism is misplaced. The compact does not embrace federalism; it embraces federalization — or federal control of the waters of western Montana! Most conservatives,...
The following is my personal opinion and not that of Montana State University-Northern nor any of its other employees. Reference to letter to editor Feb. 28 which presents itself as a “challenge” to Professor John Snider but is actually a fact-free, logically challenged personal attack on the man. The Feb. 28 letter claims Snider has never written anything positive about Northern in HDN. A quick look at the archives shows that this is the first of many false claims the letter makes. For a comprehensive list of Snider’s many...
I’m calling it a quirk, but if I were hard-pressed to be honest about it, I’d have to admit that it’s a failing or a weakness or a glitch, even, in my brain. I suffer from homophonia. That’s not a word. I just made it up. I started with a real word, though: homophone, which describes how words can sound the same, or nearly the same, but be spelled differently and have completely different meanings. I occasionally mix up my homophones, usually when I’m tired or in a hurry, and...
Seniors will be watching closely as Congress engages in ongoing federal budget and policy deliberations in the coming months. At AARP, we will continue to monitor any proposed changes to Medicare, Medicaid (including long-term care benefits), Social Security, and other programs that so many of us, our children and grandchildren rely on to maintain the our health and dignity. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as Food Stamps) can be a critical piece of that equation for many Montana seniors....
Several of us here on Rancho Esperanza begin our days with Qi Gong, a Chinese energy-movement routine; good for balance, stretching and breathing. Breathing is a good thing. We have learned the form, Soaring Crane. Most of us are in our seventh decade. Samantha, our teacher, goes through each of the five separate movements with grace and beauty. We do the best we can. I would say I look more like a Crippled Crane. But I keep going. It makes me feel good. The last few weeks...
“I cried … I was praying to God … I didn’t want to die … I want to live to be old like you.” Guns and kids are tragically intertwined today in America. It shouldn’t be so, but it is. From Columbine to Sandy Hook to Parkdale and dozens more, our minds are haunted by the image of innocent young bodies brutally shattered and shredded by the effects of high-powered military weaponry. Public schools and kids. We could talk about colleges, or churches, or places of entertainment, but public schools are where this epidemic of g...
Behold the mighty comma — arguably the most common of punctuation marks, though oft misused, misunderstood and misplaced, and subject to roughly a bajillion rules — and one comma, or rather lack of a comma, just got its day in court. Oakhurst Dairy in Portland, Maine, just settled in court to pay $5 million in back pay to its delivery drivers because of the way a state law is punctuated — and because at least five of the company’s drivers are big nerds. Here’s the deal, Maine...
In 2015, the Montana Legislature ratified the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) Water Compact with Montana, which settled all water rights claimed by the CSKT under the 1855 Hellgate Treaty. This was the culmination of a multi-year negotiation process between Montana’s Reserved Water Rights Compact Commission and the CSKT. The final step in the implementation of the CSKT Compact is ratification by the United States Congress. The federal ratification debate has inevitably turned political, and now many of the a...
One of the best things about Montana is that we always step up and help each other when our communities are in need. We roll up our sleeves, set aside our differences, and help one another. The creator always humbles us and reminds us that one of our greatest assets is each other. Last summer, people from across the state stepped up to help our agricultural communities when some farmers and ranchers suffered crop and livestock losses due to fire and drought. It reminded us that we are a big state with a big heart. That is...
Can you believe it? My third spring in Etzatlan? And, my third year fighting with a squirrel. Truth to tell, there might be more than one, but the one I see seems to have the same face and the same cheeky attitude. My first year, when the surround of my casita was all dirt, she burrowed beneath the east corner to build a nest for birthing babies. Squirrels are cute. Cute when they are “over there.” When underfoot, I tend to view her as a rodent with longer hair. Imagine a nest of rodents making comfort under MY house, mak...
Montana’s farms and ranches are an essential part of our state’s economy. They also provide important habitat for wildlife and, often, public access for hunting and other recreation. Working lands support big game, upland birds and waterfowl, as well as numerous nongame species. That abundance didn’t happen by chance. For decades, Montana hunters and landowners have worked together to restore and manage the public’s wildlife on private habitat. Hunters and landowners don’t always agree, but our cooperation has given Montana t...
Nature is all around us, and sometimes it’s a little too much in-your-face. A Cooper’s hawk in upstate New York is helping one city with its pigeon problem, but not everyone is appreciative. A red-eyed, crow-sized raptor, the Cooper’s hawk normally feasts on birds like pigeons and mourning doves, which are often found in urban and suburban areas — so now the hawks are, too. NYup.com reports that a bank in Dewitt, New York, had a Cooper’s hawk move into the area in the first...
Thomas Jefferson favored amending the Constitution by “taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.” He also favored a requirement that taxes would have to be sufficient for each generation to pay its own debts. Managing debt has always been a fundamental problem of American Democracy. In the early 1990’s there was a widespread movement to amend the constitution through a “convention of the states” to require that in balancing the budget, the federal government could not do so by passing on “unfunded...
First serving: soup. When I hug friends goodbye, friends whom I see once a year or less frequently, I go into a three-day funk. My life feels like metaphorical soup, seasoned with a dollop of melancholy and a pinch of abandonment. The day after Jerry and Lola left, I came the closest to a panic attack that I’ve been since the ’80s. Jerry and Lola are innocent. All they did was go home to Idaho. My friends, whom I love, were tasty ingredients in my soup. I’d been six weeks...
Partisanship has taken hold of our political lives from Washington to right here in Northwest Montana. Despite all the political ill will, there appears to be one issue that Republicans and Democrats can agree on — promoting local economic growth through our nation’s community banks. At a time of political polarization, it was encouraging to learn that the Senate Banking Committee recently accomplished something rare: passing a bill developed by Republicans and Democrats on a bipartisan basis. Designed to tailor fin...
A federal budget reflects our values and vision for America. President Trump’s FY19 budget, released last Monday, abandons our long-held values of caring for our neighbors, helping people during hard times, and the belief that no one in this country should go hungry. Instead, the budget presents a vision in which struggling families face more and more obstacles just to get by, weakening the very programs that provide stability and opportunity in our communities. The proposals included in the president’s budget would dra...
Clearly, building the wall on our southern border is high on President Trump’s agenda, and it should be. There has been a lot of controversy and political rhetoric over expense, feasibility, etc. Often the rhetoric turns to marginalizing the President and his supporters as xenophobes, racists, or worse. Whether the wall is meant to be a real, physical barrier or a combination of electronic tools and boots on the ground, border security is of paramount importance to the continuation of the United States of America as we k...
Washington, D.C., is broken. Our representatives choose time and again to bend to the interests of lobbyists and corporate donors at our expense. I have spent my entire career as a consumer protection advocate, fighting for people who have been bullied and harmed by big banks and powerful corporations. I am running for U.S. House of Representatives to fight for all Montanans the same way that I have fought for my clients. Shortly after I announced my campaign, 58 innocent concertgoers were murdered in Las Vegas. Hundreds...
When I was elected to Congress, the people of Montana sent a clear message: they wanted more jobs and less government. But the bloated budget deal passed by Congress last week is the very definition of more government. As Montana’s voice in the U.S. Senate, I’ve been fighting for positive reforms that rein in Washington’s out-of-control spending and regulations that threaten more jobs and bigger paychecks for Montanans. And we’ve had success — in the past year alone, Congress has cut red tape, put qualified judges on the be...
