News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 1806 - 1830 of 3218
O, Canada, our friendly neighbors to the north, keep your lousy weather to yourself. You and your polite people seem like such greet-you-with-warm-cookies kind of friendly — right up to the point you decide to hammer us with back-to-back, arctic-wind driven storms. What’s up with that arctic weather? Eh? I was game for the first storm. I mean, it is winter. Cold and snow are expected at some point in the season — apparently our ecology relies on it and I’ve come to terms with that. Certainly, we needed something to put a s...
We gringos were all invited to attend a double christening for a great-granddaughter and a great-grandson of Delia, the Rancho owner. In preparation, Jim and I went into town to get gifts the day before the event. We figured since we were specially invited, we should bring gifts. Unfortunately, we went with flawed information. We, separately, understood, or misunderstood as the case would be, the ages of the children to be around 8 and 10 years. We don’t know the children a...
The headline will read “Woman dies shopping for refrigerator.” Readers will be expecting to find that I was crushed by a 22 cubic foot appliance, flattened like Wile E. Coyote, but no, shopping is the silent killer. It’ll be a heart attack that gets me, maybe a stroke or an aneurysm just to shake things up a bit. My last words will be “I hate shopping,” then goodnight, Irene, I’ll drop to the floor in a resounding thud of defeat. It shouldn’t be this hard. I know what I d...
I had to decide. She’d had a reaction to the anesthetic which left symptoms similar to epilepsy. Convulsions. Starvation. A rack of bones loosely held in rags of fur. Put her down. A euphemism by any other name … death. My tears soaked her fur. I held her last breath. My Cat Ballou, playful, teasing, gentle sweet kitten-cat. That night I lay in bed, holding memory, accusations rattling around my brain cage, familiar. Why does everyone, everything I love, leave me? What is wro...
Call me a snowflake, I don’t care, but I refuse to participate in the scam called New Year’s resolutions because it is an affront to my emotional well-being. You know the drill. Along with lists of Top 10 Whatevers of the Year, along with the Best This and the Worst That recaps, we get this pressure to come up with awesome ways we are going become the new and improved version of ourselves — eat right, get more sleep, exercise more, lose weight, get a raise/...
“Sure wish I’d known 40, 50, years ago what I know today. I might have done some things differently,” I told my daughter. I was bemoaning my financial status, not for the first time, more like a recurring toothache or a grumpy relative one feels obliged to visit. “There you go again, bad-mouthing your ‘lack-of-planning’ choices. Most people work their whole lives for retirement and then never end up getting to do anything with it. When you worked, you worked hard. Then when y...
I pray you all had a great Christmas and are looking forward to a happy and heathy New Year. Over the past year, I have had the wonderful opportunity and privilege to serve as your District 14 senator. It has been a great experience for me to expand my public service from a county level to the State. Though the learning curve has been steep, I’ve enjoyed the year immensely and look forward to continuing to tackle state and local issues. During my current tenure, Senate District 14 has faced and addressed a number of o...
For years, Washington has grown in its power and wealth while hardworking Americans have struggled to make ends meet. In fact, the nation’s most affluent counties are suburbs of Washington, D.C. Taxpayer dollars have padded the pockets of D.C. for far too long — enough is enough. Just in time for Christmas, I was honored to join Congress in passing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This historic tax bill will lower rates for hardworking Montanans, boost higher wages and incentivize job creation. It will keep more than $700 mil...
Santa came early for hardworking Montanans. Republicans have kept their promise to the American people and delivered tax reform that will let you keep more of what you earn. In just a couple of months, you’ll see more of your hard-earned money in your paychecks, families will have much needed relief, and small businesses can grow, invest, and create more Montana jobs. This was long overdue — actually 31 years overdue. The last time Washington reformed the tax code, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and I had a full hea...
One-party passage of the GOP/Trump “Tax Scam” bill that pretends to aid the middle class while tilting the tax system more than ever to the benefit of the super-wealthy and corporations was the nail in the coffin of the populist charade Trump and the GOP leveraged to electoral victory in 2016. The reality in 2018 is that plutocracy once again reigns supreme under the GOP and Trump. Plutocracy is government by the wealthy. Populism is support for the concerns of ordinary people. The historical difference between Rep...
As a young high school American government teacher, I compared our system to an automobile that was useful if it could start, speed up, slow down and stop. When the people thought government needed to be more active, they elected liberal Democrats to press down on the accelerator. When people thought government’s role was getting too large and expensive, they elected Republicans to apply the brakes and slow things down. Our national debt is now $20 trillion and rising. That amounts to about $155,000 in tax liability for t...
With a notoriously poor memory for the events of my childhood and a brain that seems to make stronger, longer-lasting neural links with negative memories than happy ones, it’s nothing short of a Christmas miracle that I have so many fond memories of this holiday from my younger years. Even before the annual hunt for the perfect tree came the package from my Grandma Inez with her version of an advent calendar: a wall hanging of burlap with a green felt Christmas tree. It had t...
“I couldn’t sleep a wink last night,” it’s true. It’s silly to be lovelorn and at my age too. Oh, no. Don’t get excited. It’s not what you think. More’s the pity. I swear, I can hardly believe myself. An animal. A dumb animal. Well, not so dumb, it turns out. Saturday, the chosen day, finally arrived — Cat Ballou took an anticipated trip to the veterinarian for the essential surgery, the one to prevent an unending series of duplicates. Surgery went well. Ballou returned home c...
Imagine this. You wake up Christmas morning and there it is — the biggest gift under the tree has your name on it. Yes, yours. You grab it, place it in front of you, and without even needing to unwrap it, you instinctually know this is going to be the greatest gift you’ve ever received. Moved by this unfamiliar, yet heartwarming feeling, you set in on the task in front of you. Side by side, you carefully peel back the wrapping paper, slowly revealing what’s inside. Vast and rugged, but beautiful and snowy, you begin to see t...
Clinical Assistant Professor in family medicine at Memorial University of Newfoundland Dr. Kyle Sue recently published an article in British Medical Journal that The Guardian described as a “wry” scientific look at how men experience cold and flu virus symptoms worse than women do. Yes, a guy named Sue was looking to prove that “man flu” is a thing. In a not entirely thorough treatise based on some scientific studies and some not-so-scientific stuff, Sue proposes in part that men feel worse when they’re sick because they are...
Hunting, fishing and wildlife are important to Montanans. These are the reasons many of us live here, and tourism and outdoor recreation are now the state’s largest economic driver. Support for these values helped make Steve Bullock a blue governor in a red state, and politicians took notice. No matter what their ultimate intentions, Greg Gianforte and Ryan Zinke both took pains to portray themselves as allies of Montana sportsmen. So did Sen. Steve Daines. Their performance in Washington has proven otherwise. Now Daines h...
The same Arctic cold that swept down through the southwest and snowed on Houston brought to Jalisco, inland Mexico, our own cold snap, minus snow, just short of freezing. At the same time, the fires of southern California created winds that pushed clouds our way to hold the frigid air close to the ground. I can cope with an ordinary cold winter day. By 10:30 to 11 a.m., the sun has warmed the air, the ground, and my body — and my house. By afternoon, I’m togged out for sum...
As Christmas comes around the corner, we are reminded that Montana really is just a small town with very long streets. Our Montana way of life, neighbors helping neighbors, was on full display this year as we dealt with one of the worst wildfire seasons in recent memory. On a personal note, I’d like to say thank you again to all the firefighters and volunteers, including those who contained the fire on my family’s ranch near Glendive while I was away serving as your State Auditor in Helena. Whether it’s fighting fires in th...
The Republican Party is in the D.C. driver’s seat, having majorities in both House and Senate, along with having the presidency, with all of its institutional strength, and the vice president to break tie votes in the Senate. Such singular dominance over procedure provides the opportunity for excess. We’ve seen it time and again at the federal and the state level. Extreme political positions become the norm when there are no checks within the system. When one side of the political spectrum can make things happen with imp...
Congress has the unenviable job of deciding who wins big and who will be hurt by tax reform. One decision that should be easy for lawmakers is to retain the tax tool that has resulted in the development of more than 7,000 affordable homes, access to homeownership for 42,000 Montana families, and $2.87 billion in financing of critical projects for rural Montana hospitals. Private Activity Bonds are responsible for the public-private partnerships that have allowed us to invest in Montana communities over the last 40 years....
Remember when perfectly groomed, makeup-wearing men in stylish clothes looked like women but somehow claimed they were men — not just pretty males, but actual men — and the world called them metrosexual? Which still didn’t sound manly, by the way, but people in the style industry didn’t understand the difference so it was OK — for far too long. Then one day some fashion-forward style guru saw a guy who looked like a useful man and said, “Ohmigawd, I can do that. I can make th...
In 1977, President Carter signed a law that required the U.S. Forest Service to study 973,000 acres in Montana to determine if they were suitable for wilderness. The findings were to be reported in five years and Congress was to take action afterward. The Forest Service completed the study and determined that several of the study areas in Montana were not suitable for wilderness in its final plan. Thirty-five years later, we’re still waiting for D.C. to get its job done and release the study areas. I’ve introduced the Pro...
I live a charmed life. Now and then I’m aware of how magical is my life. Most of the time I don’t pay attention. Other rare days, snakes slither in Paradise. Take recently. A friend once told me that when a person started chewing on table legs, the cause was always money, job or love life. Two weeks ago I chose “money” as the topic for my Writers’ Group. I set the timer for 10 minutes. I don’t remember what I wrote. It’s not important. I felt a need to share with my friends the reason I chose that topic. I had too much negati...
As most Montanans are aware, the Montana Legislature just met in a special session to face some fiscal challenges associated with the lack of revenue and paying the firefighting bill. I have had the privilege of serving for almost 18 years and have been through several special sessions. This session, like all others faced many moving pieces to come with solutions that work for Montana. There is one particular issue I would like to bring to your attention and offer some perspective that seems to be lacking. This issue is...
Sure I joke about Canada, give them a little friendly ribbing about how polite they are, but I realize it’s in their constitution that they have to be kind to everyone, so imagine my surprise this week to see Canadians being so hateful to Americans. And by hateful I mean that someone compiled, printed up and is now selling a little calendar called “Justin Trudeau, My Canadian Boyfriend.” And by calendar I mean a collection of 12 GQ-like photos showcasing the Canadian prime...
