News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 785 - 809 of 3212
I pen this letter upon return from a 1,700-mile journey to communities across the state and numerous hours of phone and online communications these past two weeks with administrators in Montana’s public schools. The purpose of that travel and communications was to get a sense from our school leaders about the opening of the 2021-22 school year in our schools and communities all across the state. What I learned is that each community’s education team has joyously opened school with students returning with the energy and enthus...
Dear Montana, In my work as a primary care Physician Assistant I regularly advocate to all patients that they get the COVID-19 vaccine. One question I am regularly asked: “The C19 vaccine was rushed, how do I know it’s safe?” I think medicine in general struggles to explain complex subjects in a media environment where only sound-bites are heard and only a few characters on are read. Nuance and long explanation are difficult. So I want to be clear with my patients in my community: The COVID-19 vaccines are incredibly safe...
If you aren’t cynical before you get into the news business, you will be soon after. And just when I think I’m too cynical to ever be surprised by the news again, along comes a news article that just lights up my brain like a bottle rocket. I know you were expecting to see the headline and a little news summary here after that opening paragraph. Normally you would, like the ol’ one-two punch, but I have to pull that second punch and tell you that the headline and the whole...
Some days, I feel like I’m living in Dali’s famous painting with timepieces slumped and limp and empty. Except with differences. My “painting” would have the clock hands clutching at the wall in futile attempt to stay put. “What do you mean, we are well into September? August began yesterday, don’t you know?” What do I have to show for a month gone by? I mean, I haven’t accomplished anything. We are supposed to, aren’t we? We are told that, aren’t we? In my self-imposed lif...
We are reaching that point in remodeling where we seriously question whether we will ever be done. After we finally found a plumber, we thought our worries were over and progress began briskly. Our plumber had a delightful and exceptionally competent young fellow from Kenya, named Meshach, doing the tiling. We were all set for him to begin on Thursday morning, but he did not arrive. This seemed rather out of character, but we weren’t too concerned. Then he failed to show on F...
From railroaders to farm workers, rural and city, hills to the flats, and irrigated lands vs dryland farming, I continue to be in awe of the diversity we see throughout Montana Senate District 14. Ever so evident in the ag community experience this year. Harvest has been finished for over a month in the east and south parts of the district. The northwest area of the district is currently in full harvest mode. It seems the east and south were a couple of weeks ahead and the northwest is about that much behind on average. Of...
The fall of the Afghan government and the return of the Taliban has left policymakers and the public grasping for answers and apportioning blame. The deaths of 13 U.S. servicemen and -women and 170 Afghans at the Kabul Airport punctuate this tragic state of affairs. Many ask how the Afghan government, after an injection of $89 billion over 20 years, could collapse so quickly. Critical to this debate is Montana’s support for our veterans — as well as the Afghan people. We tend to assign failure to anyone who easily con...
Buying hay for my horses this year felt like a cross between the opening moments of the New York Stock exchange in a bull market and gift shopping on Black Friday — and just a skosh, or maybe even a smidge, like negotiating a nefarious black market deal. Every hay-for-sale ad or online post, as if the starting bell was ringing in the opening of the stock exchange, sent a mad crush of humans into the fray. (For anyone born later than the movie “Trading Places,” the trading floor was like a mosh pit for money rather than music....
I suppose it’s my own fault. I should have known when the toilet tank innards up and died and bled water all over the floor. But no, I had nary a clue. Then a few days later I remained blissfully unaware when my washing machine puddled all over the bodega floor. Turned out a crack eroded in the tub which had to be replaced. I should have caught on that something was afoot more than the simple mechanical obvious. The appropriate specialist doctors came out and applied the a...
Montanans personal income grew 20 percent year-over-year, housing prices are up more than 30 percent and the number of job postings in the state were 62 percent higher in July than in February 2021. It really is a recession experience like no other. What does it mean for Montana’s economy, the businesses that support it and Montanans? Bureau of Business and Economic Research Director Patrick Barkey boiled down and explained the data for the Montana Chamber Foundation’s mid-year economic update this summer. Workforce shortages...
I met my former mother-in-law, “Mama Lou,” and my former father-in-law, “Poppo,” when I was not yet 20 years old. I hitched a ride to meet them, terrified because I’d spoken to my future mother-in-law on the phone and she sounded exactly like Lauren Bacall. I arrived at their home in Wisconsin and my future father-in-law threw open the door and said, “You must be Carrie! Can I get you a drink?” In the more than 20 years that followed, I never felt anything less than welcome...
Our old friend the law of unintended consequences says that actions of people always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended, but basically, it’s just a fancy way of saying “oops.” Like the law of gravity is an explanation used in the science of physics, the law of unintended consequences comes from the social sciences, such as economics and politics (which are frequent bedfellows, though that does not matter for our purposes here today — I’m just sayin’). Historian...
Consider this to be as though you accidentally tuned into the cooking channel. The difference is that I’ll tell you about the mistakes I made along the way. When Uncle Lee retired from being a fireman in Indianapolis, he and Aunt Joanne bought an Airstream trailer in which they spent every winter, lolling in the Florida Keys. This was back when cars were built as sturdily as ocean liners and were almost as big. I picture my aunt and uncle rolling down the highway, in the t...
With enough passion, hard work, and in my case, a little luck, opportunities come about which just can’t be turned down—I’m writing this because today is my last day with Havre Daily News. While I have enjoyed getting the chance to diversify my work beyond sports with Havre Daily, I also freelance because sports are what I love. Now, I will get to mesh my childhood passions. I’m moving on to cover the incredibly unconventional worlds of professional wrestling and combat...
My husband, Peter, and I have matching folding chairs. Every Thursday evening this summer, we have attended the outdoor concert held in a local park. The music is usually good, but the food trucks are undeniably the center of the experience. Our favorite is the “Tot Boss” that sells tasty, hot tater tots out the window of the truck. Peter and I bring our own chairs. We get comfortable in our folding chairs, eat our tater tots, listen to the music, and watch the people and dog...
James W. "Jim" Murry, top Montana labor leader and friend, passed away last October. On the 29th of August, his memory is being celebrated at a Memorial Service at Tizer Botanic Gardens, just outside of Jefferson City. In the period of Montana history from 1965 to 1990, when Montana dramatically changed from being a corporate colony to a citizen-oriented state, nobody played a larger role in that progressive period than Jim Murry. He stood astride those 25 years like a...
It was a pleasure visiting Beaver Creek Park earlier this year and having the opportunity to meet many personally involved with decisions regarding beaver. The public meeting with three experts regarding beaver was helpful, insightful, and consistent with our knowledge and observations. We appreciate, Commissioner Chair Mark Peterson, arranging to have them speak. As decisions again approach for beaver in Beaver Creek Park, we do hope the points and advice presented will be heeded. Since the stream was simplified, beaver are...
“It is water, in every form and at every scale, that saturates the mind. All the water that will ever be is, right now.” — National Geographic, October 1993 Here in north-central Montana this year, we are celebrating every rare tenth of an inch of rain wrung from the sky, not enough to fill our waterways or make dry grasslands green, maybe only enough really to grow mosquitoes to any degree. But in County Kerry, Ireland, which has thus far in 2021 received almost 34 inche...
After all my bragging about all the lovely rain we’ve been having, day after day after day, this past week we’ve been dry as a desiccated bone in the desert. I’ve been floored with a couple wet exceptions. Saturday morning I woke up with puddles on my bathroom floor, around the toilet. Easy to figure out where that water was dripping, from tank to tile. Josue, our resident plumber, electrician, fix-all man, is still in California. Leo looked at the tank and, wisely, said...
“I’m tired of living in exile!” my husband, Peter, exclaimed as, for the second day in a row, we packed up everything we would need to be out of our home long enough for the floor to dry. Michael, the floor sander, is in our apartment now, buffing the penultimate coat of polyurethane while Peter is moaning about his exile status. We have evacuated to the party room in the condominium while we wait to have a floor we can walk on again. There is internet and a refri...
Sometime a brain makes more out of something than is really there. Or maybe it’s just me. We had a little dog yard-slash-pen thing we built out of 5-foot tall welded wire fencing across the 14-foot gap between our little shop and our house. Our yard proper, the people yard if you will, is bigger than this pen, though. We have a simple one-strand electric fence that runs around both of the buildings and the beautiful, large, old cottonwood tree that provides a canopy over t...
As Montana families are preparing to send children back to school, we are confronting the uncomfortable fact that the COVID-19 pandemic is not over, much as all of us dearly wish it were. Late spring brought big reductions in COVID-19 case rates from the circulating alpha variant. But what we’re dealing with now, the delta variant, behaves differently. It is two to three times as contagious and may also cause more severe illness in young people. In states with low immunization rates, we are once again seeing overflowing h...
I received my COVID-19 shots last winter when people were standing in line for them. I’ve been increasingly mystified by the vaccine resistance since then. The whole country seemed to be behind “Operation Warp Speed” as the Trump administration raced to get approval of a vaccine. Over 100 million people have now been vaccinated. Without question the stuff works, preventing deaths and serious illness. As a result, small businesses, especially in the struggling restaurant and hospitality industries, have been rescued from...
The renovations to our new home continue. We didn’t expect to be refinishing the floor. But when we tore up the flooring that was buckling and warping in the summer humidity, we discovered the original parquet, spattered with paint, underneath. A man named Michael showed up with the biggest floor sander I have ever seen, looked disapprovingly at the paint sprayed all over the parquet, and declared that it should sand clean without a problem. My husband, Peter, told Michael h...
This past four-and-a-half years representing Senate District 14 has been an honor that I hope to continue. Judy and I have talked at great length about the commitment involved in serving one more term in the Senate. Having had encouragement from many of you and feeling that I continue to have a positive impact at the Legislature for north-central Montana, I’ve decided to commit to run for the Senate seat. With the upcoming redistricting, which will not affect this election, I will be filing after the first of the year. At t...
