News you can use
News you can use
Sorted by date Results 1516 - 1540 of 3221
Last Thursday Kathy, Richard, Nancie and I drove into Guadalajara for a night of highbrow music. El Teatro Santo Degollado, in the Centro Historico district where the Orquesta Filamonica performs, is a spectacular building of European architecture, a treat in itself. Are you impressed? I am. I grew up minus music, other than what I heard on the radio broadcast from Havre. Kathy, however, an avid cello player for many years, is in a different league and knows music intimately,...
It’s helpful to be at the same line of work long enough to be able to be proven wrong. I’ve been working with NAMI Montana to improve Montana’s mental illness treatment system for the past 10 years. We’ve been really active on the local, state and national levels. That amount of work has brought plenty of opportunities to be wrong and we haven’t been able to avoid them all. One of the biggest times that I was wrong was on Medicaid Expansion during the 2015 legislative session. NAMI Montana fully supported Medicaid Expansion...
This past week was transmittal week for the Legislature, which is kind of like spring break for Senators. Judy and I spent a couple days enjoying home in Chester and then came back down to Helena, as the Montana State Senate was back in Friday and Saturday. The House was out until Monday, Feb. 11. I attended a learning session in my tax committee regarding the Senate Bill 239. Sen. Jason Ellsworth’s bill would put a five-year moratorium on new taxes for companies installing new fiber optics cable in the ground. The bill c...
Twice a year, when the time change comes around, I am stunned by the amount of whining and complaining people do over one hour of sleep more or less. It’s an hour, not the end of times, you’ll survive. You’ll even adjust; it’s true. You will adjust, your pets will adjust, your kids will adjust, your bio-rythms will adjust, even your clocks will adjust given a minimum of effort on your part. It’s not like the sun stops shining, the earth stops spinning on its proper axis or the...
There’s an old saying in Montana that elk make people do stupid things. There’s a lot of truth to that saying. Whether you’re a dedicated elk hunter, a landowner with 400 head of elk on a haystack or a wildlife manager seeking to balance the needs of both interests, elk have a way of making simple issues complex, and bringing out some of our worst traits. As elk populations expand in central and eastern Montana, and as elk use private land across the state more and more as refuge from two and four legged predators, new confli...
I’ve heard stories about this elderly couple who live in El Amparo, the abandoned mining town in the mountains, ever since I moved to Etzatlan. Every Thursday this traditional couple, she in her long skirt, he in baggy white pants, both with wide sombreros, rode horses down the mountain road into town. They stayed the night with family and bought supplies at the Friday morning tianguis. Then in the afternoon, the couple would ride back to their mountain home, carrying their m...
Our first 45 days of the 66th legislative session have ended. We are in the transmittal break and catching up on emails and U.S. mail. I am going to change up my weekly report a bit. As legislators, we are scored on all of our votes. Some scores come from the parties and others come from unions, groups, PACs, or whomever wants to give us a grade, A to F. In the past, I have not looked at that and still do not. Historically, I have not voted straight line party on all votes. I see polarized partisan debates that attract media...
Psychologists have long lists of terms for what they — and we, the flawed masses — call coping or self-defense mechanisms because, in the end, we all have to do what we can to get through to happier, or less suckier, days. Like spring. I’m not a big fan of winter. Even when I used to ski, it was just something I did because I was surrounded by both snow and mountains. Ice fishing wasn’t my thing, but to be fair, fishing any time of year isn’t my thing. Snowshoeing and cross...
Winter, we are weary. Whether she gambols like a bleating lamb or roars like a lion, we welcome March after the grim days of February. Skies may still be gray but a fleeting scent in the air says winter is over and spring is here, or nearly so. Snow may fall, temps hit the low scale but spring will burst forth, even in Montana. The calendar tells us so. I’ve no complaint, I admit, here in my mountain valley in Jalisco. But friends and family live in frozen Montana and even w...
Montana is a state with a proud history of firsts. We were the first state to elect a woman to Congress: our very own Jeannette Rankin. We were also the first state in the nation to enact sweeping anti-corruption legislation in the Copper King era, after wealthy business interests in our state used their influence to buy a Senate seat. But in some measures, Montana’s first place status is not always worthy of celebration. According to a 2018 study by the Center for Disease Control, Montana ranks first in the nation for d...
Montana State University-Northern was in Helena for a legislative meet and greet. Last Monday, the folks from the university system had a presentation for a number of us Legislators from north-central Montana. We were made aware of some of the different crops that oil and fuel are being made with, i.e. camelina, mustard and flax. Currently, some very volatile products are being designed to provide fuel for drones. The idea is to find a lighter fuel source. Chancellor Greg Kegel experimented with fuel and fire while we sat in...
It’s often said that Montana is like a small town with long streets. Montanans may be separated by hundreds of miles but it’s amazing how many mutual friends you find you have after talking with someone for five minutes in this giant small town. A defining characteristic of small towns is that people care about one another and rally together in challenging times. Chances are you’ve attended at least a few community benefits to raise money for medical bills or to help a family that had some other misfortune strike. Today...
My husband doesn’t like beets. I do like beets. This is, I'll admit, inconsequential and the beet-thing obviously hasn’t been a deal breaker in this marriage or much of a “thing” at all (and you know what I mean by “thing” if you’re married). However, there’s always room for escalation, though, right? I like fresh-boiled beets, canned beets, pickled beets. John hates them all, especially pickled beets. I even like commercially canned and pickled beets. John hates those the...
Jim phoned, “Would you like to go to El Amparo? John and Carol are coming. Be ready in half an hour.” I’ve been wanting to go see the ghost town of El Amparo for three years. Beginning in the early 1500s, the mines were a rich source of gold and silver. From boom town Etzatlan, miners trudged over the mountains to work and brought back refined minerals through our town to Guadalajara to Spain. In the heyday of El Amparo, historians and local stories confirm that the minin...
Want to fix the high costs of medical provisions and the inherent shortcomings of the Veterans Administration, Public Health Service, military health program, Medicaid, Medicare, Indian Health Service, and Federal Employees Health Benefits? Think collective bargaining — the strength of 325 million customers, paying directly to providers of medical care rather than to insurance companies, and doctors freed up to provide care without a thought of pre-existing conditions or financial limitations of private coverage. Forget about...
The highlight of my week was that the Montana Association of Counties was in Helena for their annual meeting. Every session, county representatives come to Helena for their conference. I visited with commissioners, from both my district and some districts I had worked with in the past. Many hearings with bills that affect counties are scheduled the week MACo is in town. It gives the county folks the opportunity to weigh-in on whether to support the bill in question, which may benefit or hinder a county. I did have two...
Ian Hammond, which sounds like an actual name and not a user name, started as a joke an online petition to sell Montana to Canada for $1 trillion to help pay down the U.S. debt, arguing that: “We have too much debt and Montana is useless. Just tell them it has beavers or something.” As of 11:30 p.m. Thursday the petition had just under 5,000 signers. This is not any kind of real petition with aspirations of getting legislation changes on a ballot. It’s just a whimsical suggest...
For a decade or more, our Montana Legislature has grappled with the increasing need to renovate both Romney Hall on the Montana State University campus in Bozeman and the Montana Historical Society museum facility in Helena. A compelling case has been made for both these projects, but they have repeatedly come up just short of final approval in the complicated legislative process. Romney Hall is a great and imposing old structure constructed in 1922 during the administration of Warren G. Harding. There is nothing wrong with...
When our Rancho gardener comes in the morning, Leo often asks me, “Sondrita, how is your wonderful retired life?” “Yes,” I say. We laugh. We both understand my meaning. “Yes, wonderful.” Wonderful, beyond any plan I might have dreamed. But, each day is filled with distractions. Take today, for instance. I get up, make my bed, drink two mugs of coffee, strong and hot, the way I like it. Order. Precision. On my mind is a vague desire to bake cookies. Oatmeal. Chocolate o...
I’ve been enjoying the recent patch of typical sub-zero Montana winter weather. The colder the snow, the easier it is to shovel. It was lucky that Rocky Creek was frozen over when 39 train cars derailed last week, dumping over 4000 pounds of coal into it, or the whole Gallatin watershed could have been contaminated. When the 49 runaway train cars came down Mullen pass and exploded the cold weather in Helena in 1989 was both a blessing and a curse. At minus 25, the water that firefighters used to attempt to extinguish the f...
This week was a wild one with a couple of committee meeting running over 3 ½ hours, needing to be cut short, and then finished at the next meeting. In my Energy Committee, bills that were closely related, often called companion bills, came to the committee. The first bill was designed to develop a policy for Montana to control greenhouse gas emissions. The idea is to set a standard that would ramp up until the year 2050 and eventually make Montana carbon-free. Or, as I understand what is being said, agriculture as we know it...
When I was in high school we lived in a house that had a metal-covered gambrel roof — aka barn roof — with a shallow slope from the peak to the first angle and a steeper slope to the eve which was actually an 8-foot deep porch roof that was at a very shallow slope You could say it was built like a ski jump. The easy slope at the top to get your legs under you and your direction lined out, then a steep section to build some great speed, and finally the jump that shoots the ski...
Yes, I know, the song says “don’t worry, be happy” and I reversed the order. Which comes first, chicken or egg, or does it matter and who cares? What I noticed is that when I am happy, I tend not to worry. However, it is within the realm of possibilities that worry is a vastly underrated activity. Consider this. Almost without fail, the things I worry about never come to fruition. When bad things happen, it invariably is something of which I never thought to worry. If worry...
We finished up the month of January and the fourth week of the 66th legislative session. This week, one of the things we worked on in Tax Committee was extending the qualified endowment tax credit program. This tax credit has been in place for a number of years and had a sunset that needed to be extended. In our Education Committee a bill was presented that is designed to make a college student aware of the risks and consequences of student loans. It asks the university system to counsel the students on the loan and such...
While the whole country is debating the mary jane, ganja, dank, 420 issue of legalizing marijuana, I’m obsessing over weed of the noxious list kind. I know. I wrote about noxious weeds sometime in the last year or two. I swear I had every intention to consider it a spent topic, to ignore my single-minded obsession with the idea that weeds are my mortal enemy, y’know, just let the obsessive compulsiveness go. But no. Blame my day job. Call my boss. I had to interview the cou...
