Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/category/prairie-lights/page/17/)
If you haven’t read it yet, don’t miss Paul Cartwright’s guest editorial in the Friday edition of the Billings Gazette. The former Helena city commissioner deftly explains what’s wrong with Montana’s liquor licensing quota system, and he lays out several options for finally doing something to seriously reform it. (more…) Continue Reading →
Today is the first birthday of Last Best News, launched on Feb. 1, 2014. I’d like to shoot off fireworks from the Rims, buy everyone in Eastern Montana a drink or maybe have one of those airplanes pulling a banner fly across the state for a few days, but I’ve got a bunch of stories to write, so probably not. (more…) Continue Reading →
When I first saw the subject line on the Billings Gazette website—“Retrospective: Closed Billings bars”—I was prepared to be unimpressed. I didn’t want to be a sucker nipping at “click bait,” those tantalizing packages the Gazette has been running on a regular basis in hopes of generating a lot of Web traffic with a minimum of work. (more…) Continue Reading →
When I was in high school in Minnesota in the 1970s, Mr. Manion, my friend’s father, used to brag about how he sent a portion of every paycheck to a strongly religious overseas terrorist organization. Oddly enough, the only other thing I remember hearing him brag about was having met Sen. Joe McCarthy, the serial fabulist and anti-Communist crusader from Wisconsin. (“Kiss the hand that shook the hand,” Mr. Manion liked to say.) (more…) Continue Reading →
I’ve covered some clueless public officials in my 35-year newspaper career, but I never had the pleasure of covering anyone so wonderfully out of touch as Kirby Delauter. If you haven’t heard of him, that shouldn’t be too surprising. He is a councilman for Frederick County, Maryland, a position that is not normally a springboard to national recognition. (more…) Continue Reading →
I doubt we could see all the way to Wibaux from Bismarck, N.D., but I like to think of the magnificent red sunset as our last glimpse of Montana for a week or so. My middle daughter, who was driving, saw the sunset out her rear-view mirror late Friday afternoon, and so of course we had to stop and get some photos. She didn’t see it through the rear window because the only patch of glass visible among our vacation baggage, our supply dump, was about as big as a credit card. (more…) Continue Reading →
As the New Year dawned a year ago this week, most people in Montana were already sick and tired of winter, of endless days of bitter cold and snowstorms that raged with Arctic intensity. Billings was hit particularly hard. At one point in mid-February the snow was so deep that only the top seven floors of the First Interstate Building were visible. (more…) Continue Reading →
A week ago today, Billings Gazette editor Darrell Ehrlick opened his Sunday column with the words, “This is one of those thing that hurts to write.”
If it’s any consolation, Darrell, it was also painful to read. (more…) Continue Reading →
A friend with a long habit of hanging onto curious artifacts recently gave me the banner reproduced on top of this column, clipped from the Sept. 5, 1992, edition of the Billings Gazette. I happened to be playing tennis that morning, a Saturday, at Pioneer Park, when a Gazette truck pulled up alongside the newspaper rack just off the sidewalk. The driver jumped out and began removing the papers from the rack. (more…) Continue Reading →
Having looked at all 1,482 bills that have been proposed for the 2015 Montana Legislature, as of Saturday, I’m pretty sure my two favorite pieces of legislation are the work of one man, Sen. Jim Keane, D-Butte. One would “provide for the feral hog prevention act” and the other would “assess a fee for PowerPoint presentation.” (more…) Continue Reading →
