News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 985 - 1009 of 3218
Around 7 percent of Montanans are Native Americans, yet Indigenous people account for 26 percent of the missing persons cases in our state. Addressing the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons must be a priority for all leaders and communities throughout Big Sky Country, and as both a state senator and a member of the Northern Cheyenne, I’ve made it a top priority. Unfortunately, it can be extremely difficult to locate missing Indigenous people due to the vast, rural expanses of Montana and the jurisdictional b...
A friend of mine told me something so amazing, I had to look it up to see if it was true. In 1960, a series of experiments were done with flatworms in which a bunch of flatworms were taught where to find food. This was news all on its own, as the flatworm is not a species known for its scholastic aptitude. But that wasn’t the interesting part. It got interesting when the educated flatworms were ground up and fed to flatworms who had no idea where the food was and, miraculously...
What a great week! Judy and I hosted our daughter's twins, grandsons Bauer and Brant, at the house. They were both pages at the Senate for Week 3, along with the Evans brothers from Helena. All four boys are football players and 4-H members, so they had much in common, to the point the page director mixed up the families. This week was to be 4-H week for legislators and local 4-H'ers, we have shared an annual breakfast the last two sessions. This year was virtual and felt...
Like so many Montanans, I grew up with a rifle in one hand and a shotgun in the other. I converted my love of shooting into a 25-year career in the firearms industry. I helped build an iconic international gun company. I sold millions of guns. I’ve won awards, even been a finalist for the “Firearms Industry Person of the Year,” which is the industry’s highest honor. It’s an award that has also been bestowed on firearms royalty like Charlton Heston and Bill Ruger. I’ve got a long history with guns, but I never forgot the...
Because I think being up-to-date in the news also means reading the “Odd News” articles, I occasionally get a sense that human and animals lead parallel lives, or maybe we are influenced by the same forces in the universe. I don’t know, but the correlations seem uncanny sometimes. Humans have been increasingly aggressive and recently erupted into serious attacks, with bloodshed, at the Capitol building, the political home of our national lawmakers. Well, get this, people in a...
With the holidays behind us and a new year in front of us, now is an appropriate time to reflect on the very unusual year we all just experienced and consider what 2021 might look like. Importantly, while we know we can’t control a good amount of what we’ll be dealing with in the new year, focusing on what we can have an influence on will help us contribute positively to the communities in which we live and work. During the Christmas season, it was a pleasure to shop locally and discuss with small business owners how the hol...
When one thinks it can’t get worse, it can. And it does. This coming Feb. 20 would have been my son’s sixth sobriety birthday. I considered a thousand different ways of talking about this and each one led to, “Just vomit it out.” In “Looking Out My Backdoor,” I write about what is pertinent in my life. And I vowed to be honest with myself and honest with you. My son, Ben, this man who is super-intelligent with a computer mind, this man with such a big heart that, a year ago,...
I don’t remember exactly when I took to living in stretch pants full time. The process was gradual, I’m sure of that. I started out wearing a pair of bell-bottom stretch pants when I was writing. I didn’t actually live in them; they were part of my writing costume and they were comfy. But as the pandemic wore on, I noticed the legs of my stretch pants were getting longer and longer until, one day, I saw they were covering my feet, and it was not a very respectable look. “I ne...
This has been a week with lots of requests for my opinion on various current political matters. First, my thought about what happened in Washington, D.C. All I can say is what a travesty. The next question has to do with the legators’ safety at the Montana State Capitol. I have discussed this in prior articles, but it bears repeating. Personal and family safety has been an issue for me since my days in the Army. I worked security in the military and some training just sticks with you. Yes, I am concerned, not only for s...
Politicians, by nature, are calculators, oddsmakers, bettors, bookies. They bet on winning and losing all the time. Montana Sen. Steve Daines bet on President Trump. But following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Daines changed his wager. That day, a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol, erected a gallows, killed a U.S. Capitol policeman, and searched like terrorists for lawmakers, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence. They threatened to stop Congress from doing its constitutional duty to...
The overwhelming number of videos about the D.C. protest-turned-siege of the U.S. Capitol didn’t make me think of my grandpa until I saw an entirely unrelated video that seemed to complete the picture, like a Venn diagram with the American flag in the center. I’ve written about Grandpa before, a gentleman with a warm heart, a quick humor and strong ethics. The son of immigrants, one Irish and one German born on the boat over to the U.S., Grandpa loved life, so loved many thi...
Jim from Missouri, funny how we label people, isn’t it, was talking with me the other day, distanced and masked, when, in an idle comment, I mentioned that I miss summer sausage, a treat that ordinarily I wouldn’t give thought to since if I had a hankering, in my previous lives, I could go to the grocery and buy a chunk. Or a friend might gift me a chunk of deer sausage after a successful hunt. Our spicy chorizo sausage is easily obtainable here in Jalisco, and like els...
Dax stared at me in disbelief. I am the Treat Lady, and I had no treats. It was inexplicable. Dax is one of my regular customers. He is a young black dog with a lot of energy. His sister, Zia, is a little older and has the uncanny ability to find me with or without her owner anywhere in the vicinity. On this particular day, Dax was with his owner on a run and he was beside himself to suddenly encounter the Treat Lady, without even the help of his resourceful sister. Dax was ov...
The Montana Budget & Policy Center is a nonprofit organization providing research and analysis on budget, tax, and economic issues. Imagine someone gave you a million dollars and told you to spend $1,000 every day and come back when you ran out of money. You would return in less than three years. If someone then gave you a billion dollars and you spent $1,000 each day, it would take you 2,740 years before it was gone. That’s how much money the 2021 Montana Legislature is already proposing to cut from the state budget to p...
With plenty of opportunities lately to participate in one of my favorite self-health activities — stress eating — I was prompted to do some research on one of my go-to stress foods — Oreo cookies — after reading an Associated Press article about how Oreos are going where no culinary adventurist has thought to take them before. Nor should they have thought of this: McDonald’s fast food restaurants in China have reinvented the hamburger by replacing the burger with two slice...
Bob T, a long-time friend from my past, used to compare life to a battery. In order for it to work, life must have both positive and negative poles. I, of course, wanted only the positive, the easy, the serene. Ha! Wantin’ ain’t gettin’. On my patio I have a vine that I potted some three years ago, a vine, but more branch than leaf. I don’t know why I’ve kept it; it is not a bit pretty, but rangy and the leaves fall off leaving naked brown stems. In the cold of this morning,...
My 2021 calendar is hanging from the closet door. Every year I’ve lived in this house, I’ve gotten a cloth calendar, hung from a dowel. My mother’s mother always had a cloth calendar hanging in the farmhouse kitchen. As soon as the year was over, the calendar would be conscripted into use, usually to cover cinnamon rolls as they rose, to keep them moist until they were large enough to put into the oven. Arriving at the farmhouse and seeing “1963” covering a pile of soon-to-b...
As any parent knows, time is more often measured by the milestones of our children than our own lives. When I first entered this office as Montana’s 24th governor, the sounds of young children laughing and playing rang through our household. While those sounds have since turned into silent eyerolls and embarrassment at my dad jokes as my children have turned into teenagers, they are still a constant reminder of the humbling privilege I’ve had to protect and advance the state that gave me the opportunity to go from del...
This week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is a strange time, a time when every day feels like Sunday. This morning, I made a big mistake. I checked the temperature. At 10:00 it was 42! That means in the coldest hour of the early morning, it was near freezing. How can that be? It didn’t feel that cold when I walked out to my bodega. I wasn’t cold until I looked at the thermometer on the outer wall. My ceramic heater is swiveling back and forth, the setting on Hi. I’m n...
Now, after a year, the numbers have become numbing. We can’t blame the media, who were simply doing their job by reporting facts, but as thousands became hundreds of thousands it became impossible to maintain a sense of scale. What exactly do 300,000 dead Americans look like? For a few naïve months, rural Montana managed to convince itself that nothing about those horrific numbers applied to us. We were one of those enviable white spots on the map of the country that showed few if any COVID cases. Engaging in the same ki...
The annual build-up of anticipation for New Year’s Day is, I think, the clearest proof of mankind’s eternal, stalwart and irrational optimistic nature. How many times have we said it or heard it: “Ugh, 2020 has been the worst. I can’t wait until it’s over.” As if, at the stroke of midnight heralding in Jan. 1, 2021, we will pass through a portal into a modern realm that’s as happy as a nuclear family in a 1950s sitcom, or maybe we’ll skip-jump into a brighter timeline in the...
A fellow I know was grousing about the past year. His birthday was coming up and he felt, once again, that this year failed to meet his expectations. He was unhappy with the year, unhappy with himself, unhappy with the fact that he’d even allowed himself to hope that 2020, of all years, was going to be better than the previous ones. “My caring isn’t going to make any difference in how things work out,” he told me. “When I step back to accept that reality, maybe I’ll stop...
The phone rings. I grab my mask with one hand and the phone with the other. “Merry Christmas.” My new habit. Masking has become automatic. Before I leave the house I grab a mask, even if I’m going to the clothesline, expecting to see not one other person. I go masked. Just in case. I’m locked and loaded. In the holsters on the belt around my waist, a spray bottle of disinfectant rides on one hip and extra masks, gloves and a tape measure for distance — OK, the tape measure i...
Holidays are complicated. Have you ever tried to make one up on your own? Sure it’s easy to say “That (fill in the blank) is so awesome, everybody should celebrate it as a holiday.” Or “Every day is a holiday if you have the right attitude (insert three exclamation points here).” That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a bonafide, paid day off, happy, happy, joyful day of celebration which every person on the planet can participate in wholeheartedly...
Whatever you think about Christmas, I think you would have to agree we need one this year. Everyone I know seems determined to do as much Christmas as it is possible to do. My pastor announced at the beginning of Advent that we were going to have 26 consecutive Zoom Advent services. “We’re having 15 minutes of Advent reflections EVERY night!” she announced. “Surely she means every week,” most of the congregation thought. “EVERY night!” she repeated for clarification...
