News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 2046 - 2070 of 3191
Early in the session, not a lot of major business takes place on the floor of the House of Representatives. The committees are getting into full swing hearing the bills that have been introduced, and that workload will increase as legislators introduce more bills every day. Following are some of the activities in my three committee assignments. • State Administration and Veterans’ Affairs SAVA has mostly seen “clean up” bills from the Secretary of State’s Office. On Wednesday, we looked at a bill which sought to improve t...
I’ve lived most of my life in a warm place, a place so warm, a place that can get so sweltering hot, that its nickname includes the word “hot.” Hotlanta. In Hotlanta, a snow dusting, however slight, sends everyone home from the office. A few flakes turn wide highways into crawling parking lots. Those white winter flecks on southern ground clear out the bread and milk aisles and reduce grocery stores and gas stations to looking like riot scenes. And for the million or so children in the metro area, the mere whisper, the rumor...
Shortly before Christmas, men and women across Montana were notified that the road construction projects they were depending on to put presents under the tree this year would be canceled. The jobs they were depending on to provide for their families in 2017 would be lost. The construction of critical state highway projects would be delayed or defunded altogether. Our highway fund is facing an unprecedented budget shortfall, and unfortunately it’s just one small part of the budget crisis that Gov. Steve Bullock handed the 6...
My mother-in-law used to say, “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.” I think it’s an old Irish saying. It definitely sounds like something the Irish would come up with — a truism that’s somehow both positive and depressing at once. They nailed it. I wrote last week about my water issues, as in I don’t have any water flowing to my house. I could write volumes about how that affects your daily life, but I’ll just throw out a few words to prompt you to write it in your head f...
Montana’s Constitution requires state government to provide public legal defense to individuals who cannot afford their own legal counsel when they are charged with crimes involving imprisonment, facing involuntary commitment because of a mental disorder placing them or another at risk, or facing loss of parental rights. During the last four years, we served together on the Montana legislative subcommittee in charge of overseeing the budget for the Office of the State Public Defender. During this time, we became concerned r...
I call it negative inspiration. You know how you meet someone or read a story about someone amazing who has triumphed in life despite incredible tragedy. Yeah, this isn’t it. Negative inspiration is like your mom telling you to eat your broccoli because there’s starving children in Africa. Except negative inspiration is better because it’s real. I mean no disrespect to the children of Africa, starving or otherwise, but something happening to a friend or family member or neighb...
Routine. My life is routine. I don’t live on the beach, lounging beneath a palapa, tanning my skin into leather, holding a fruit-filled drink, serenaded by mariachi bands. Ha. So, I just returned from two weeks in Mazatlan where I stayed with friends in a high-rise resort hotel on the beach. I never made it to the beach palapa. I had one thoroughly enjoyable beach walk. Mostly, I visited old friends from when I lived in Mazatlan, had medical tests in preparation for cataract surgery later this month and wandered the market i...
Substance misuse and abuse is not only a national problem; it is a local problem. Substance misuse is the use of alcohol or drugs in a manner, situation, or frequency that could cause harm to the user or to those around them. Substance misuse is a major public health challenge and a priority for the nation to address. Millions of Americans are affected by substance misuse. Thousands are affected in the state of Montana and hundreds are affected in Hill County. From July 2013 through June 2014, 318 people from Hill County...
It's probably too obvious to be worth mentioning, since I do write for part of my living, but I love words. The thing is that it's not just the words themselves — like how "unite" and "untie" have the same letters but the opposite meaning (what are the odds?). Or how one letter can have all the meaning in the world — compare public health to pubic health. Or the grammar of how your panda "eats shots and leaves" or it "eats, shoots, and leaves." It's also the visual pos...
In this busy time of year — while I wait for the the first wave of crowds to run out of money and the second wave to get their gifts exchanged post-Christmas — so I can do my holiday shopping, I’ve spent some time reading the news recreationally. For fun. I know, weird, right? But this is what I learned: Epa.gov says that between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day people in the U.S. increase their household waste production by 25 percent, which is about 1 million tons extra ...
Before moving to Havre, I didn’t believe small towns existed, much less small town Christmases. It was a myth, all of it, fantasies invented and romanticized in Sherwood Anderson and Larry Watson books. Sure, I’d driven through quaint southern small towns and devoured the most delicious, succulent, fresh-smoked homemade Tennessee barbecue ever known to mankind. But the southern small towns I passed through weren’t real. For all I knew, they were part of a set, a real-life “Truman Show.” None of the people I exchanged...
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ... Yes, that Mitch McConnell ... is backing a bipartisan investigation into allegations that the Russian government tampered with American elections and maybe, just maybe, helped Donald Trump win the presidency. So can we all agree that this is a thing now? Can we all agree that hacking by a foreign power hostile to American interests isn’t politics or sour grapes from Democrats, no matter what the President-elect claims in a series of fact-free tweets? That it’s actually a grave mat...
The Universe loves irony. As proof of my wisdom in this, I give you exhibit No. 1053, the 2016 Election of the President of these United States. As pretty much everybody on Earth and in the planet’s geosynchronous, elliptical and circular orbits and still subject to its gravitational pull, knows, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump beat Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to become future 45th president of the U.S. Ironically, though Clinton won the popular vote, receiving the highest number of votes in h...
The Electoral College meets this Monday in what will be the final step in Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency. But it will also be the last chance for #NeverTrump dead-enders to keep Trump out of the White House. And now, the anti-Trump effort has been given new fuel by allegations of Russian attempts to interfere with the presidential election. Trump won 306 electoral votes. There are 306 electors, actual people, who are expected to vote for him next Monday in Electoral College meetings in state capitals across...
’Tis the season to be jolly! From now until New Year’s Day, the merriment typically continues unabated. Between the gift-giving and spiked eggnog, some folks set aside a few moments so the reason for the season can be considered. Chances are that Jesus Christ and, more generally, the Christian tradition enter the equation. Wandering minds should instead focus on the Prophet Zoroaster and his religion. It is, after all, the grandfather of Christendom. Zoroastrianism is perhaps the smallest major religion in America, but do...
Believe me, I understand if you’re ambivalent or even disdainful of the religious aspects of Christmas. I understand why you couldn’t care less which festive cups Starbucks uses, why you’d just as soon your grandchild be a dancing snowflake as an adoring shepherd, why “Season’s greetings” resonates just as well as “Merry Christmas” with you, why you’d rather hear “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” than Handel’s “Messiah.” Maybe pompous ivory tower professors have lectured you that “everyone knows” the New Testament was written hun...
Back in 1969, by a whopping vote of 339 – 70, Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives united to pass legislation to do away with the electoral college. A companion bill, co-sponsored by Montana Sen. Mike Mansfield and supported by President Nixon carried the Senate by a strong vote of 53 – 34. That, though, was short of the 2/3 majority necessary to pass the proposal on to the states for ratification as is required for amendments to the Constitution. What drew the two parties together was the ele...
Seventh grade. 1957. I don’t know why I went to our first junior high dance. I couldn’t dance, not even a two-step. Didn’t know how. We were all “expected” to go and most of us showed up. For me, the experience felt like I imagined showing up for the guillotine. I knew more about Marie Antoinette than I knew about the waltz. The dance was held in “the pit” at the old grade school. The pit had a gym floor, a raised walk around area, and perhaps once was used for little guys’ phys ed. At that time, the pit was most often used...
The nation’s newspapers are struggling mightily to find columnists who are willing to write nice things about Donald Trump. That’s according to a report in the Washington Post, indicating that the regular stable of conservative pundits — from George Will to David Brooks — isn’t delivering enough pro-Trump op-eds. As it happens, I was just finishing a column praising the president-elect when the Post’s story came out. Even before taking office, Donald Trump is sending a powerful signal to the nearly 63 million Americans w...
A major threat to liberty is the assault on the right to discuss political issues, seek out alternative information sources, and promote dissenting ideas and causes such as non-interventionism in foreign and domestic affairs. If this ongoing assault on free speech succeeds, then all of our liberties are endangered. One of the most common assaults on the First Amendment is the attempt to force public policy organizations to disclose their donors. Regardless of the intent of these laws, the effect is to subject supporters of...
As president, Donald Trump could be undone by untruths. He ran a successful campaign laced with lies, but he cannot run the country that way. Finding workable solutions to policy problems requires a common understanding of what the problems actually are. Facts, not fabrications, fuel the governing process. News reporters and fact-checkers tried aggressively to call out Trump’s falsehoods during the campaign, but those efforts made little impact on his true believers. The new president’s former adviser Corey Lewandowski pra...
I grew up with Saturday Night Live. When it debuted in 1975, I was a high school freshman and looked a little bit like Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella, with her eyeglasses and unkempt hair. For that reason alone, she endeared herself to me. The other day I thought of Emily when I heard that my alma mater, Villanova University, had tabled an investigation into an alleged “hate crime.” According to news reports, a black female student complained that she was knocked down by a group of white men chanting “Trump, Trump, Trump” as th...
The Hill County Park Board is establishing a Finance and Planning Committee. This committee will be a permanent committee of the board that will develop recommendations, advise the Park Board and support the park manager concerning financial and planning matters primarily for Beaver Creek Park, but will include all county parks. Beaver Creek Park is self-sustaining — not supported by tax dollars — and the park can only spend what it raises, therefore it is important to have good financial plans and management. The com...
HEART’S CONTENT, Newfoundland and Labrador — Of all the landmarks of high tech, including the Menlo Park lab where Thomas Edison perfected a marketable incandescent light bulb, the Palo Alto garage where Hewlett-Packard’s audio oscillator was developed, the Harvard dormitory where Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook, none is as unlikely as the ragged shoreline of this remote fishing village, where 150 years ago the Old World and the New were connected by an underwater trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. Here, in a tiny marit...
There’s been talk among some conservatives and Republicans that Democrats are plotting to “Bork” the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions to be attorney general. That’s not right. What Democrats really hope to do is to “Ashcroft” the man soon-to-be Minority Leader Charles Schumer likes to call “my good friend from Alabama.” Sessions’ supporters have expected it from the moment President-elect Trump made the Alabama senator his first Cabinet pick. Sixteen years ago, John Ashcroft was a Republican senator nominated by a Re...
