Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/category/prairie-lights/page/8/)
Election Day used to be a lot more fun, and I’m not just talking about the choices we had at the top of the ballot. To be in a newsroom on election night in the days before the internet was an exhausting, exhilarating experience. You couldn’t just look at your phone and get instantaneous results on local, statewide and national races. (more…) Continue Reading →
Is it really still October? Starting about six weeks ago, time slowed down in a way I’d never experienced before. There were some stories I wanted to finish before Election Day, but every time I’d try to remind myself how many weeks I had until then, my first thought was wrong. (more…) Continue Reading →
If I thought it would make the slightest difference, I would urge readers of Last Best News to vote for Hillary Clinton, given the mountain of evidence that Donald Trump is completely unfit to be president. But it appears that Montana voters are going to favor Trump in any case. Fortunately, it appears just as likely that the country as a whole will reject him by a large margin. (more…) Continue Reading →
It looks like the presidential election might be over already. Thank God. But the creatures that spawned the Creature from the Reality TV Lagoon are likely to be with us for a while yet. I refer to the lords of talk radio, whose unrelenting sledgehammer attacks on conventional governance finally coughed up presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. He has been, sure enough, unconventional. Continue Reading →
I have been seriously out of touch lately. We let our subscription to the dead-tree edition of the Billings Gazette lapse a few weeks ago and haven’t renewed it because we get sticker shock every time we see how much they want to charge us for the damned thing. (more…) Continue Reading →
I was going to write a regular column this week, but I found that I did not have—to use a word that has risen to prominence lately—the correct temperament for it. I was far too serious, for one thing. The few hesitant starts I made toward a column veered off into politics, and not even the politics I know a little something about, that being local politics. (more…) Continue Reading →
In 1881, Martha Edgerton Rolfe Plassmann, the daughter of Montana’s first territorial governor, made her way down the Missouri River from Fort Benton aboard the steamboat Far West. In a detailed account of the journey, she wrote of the alarm she and other passengers felt when they learned that the Far West was to stop at Fort Buford, near present-day Williston, to pick up Sitting Bull and his band of Sioux Indians and transport them to Standing Rock Agency, south of Bismarck. (more…) Continue Reading →
The good news is that the Billings City Council intends to debate in a public meeting whether to appeal a District Court ruling in a pay dispute with the city’s police officers. The bad news is that the council will be taking advice from the city legal department, which should have been able to read the plain language in the police contract to begin with, and which foolishly prolonged a court fight over that language, all the while running up a higher and higher tab—which now stands at about $3 million. (more…) Continue Reading →
Until I got away, I didn’t realize how badly I needed to get away. It was no great shakes, as vacations go, just a Labor Day weekend in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, spent mostly on the shores of Rock Island Lake, with an easy hike to Widewater Lake on Sunday. (more…) Continue Reading →
A recent visit to Deer Lodge brought back memories of my first and last brush with Hollywood. It was early July 1980 and I was the Anaconda Bureau reporter for the Montana Standard in Butte. I had heard there was a movie being filmed at the old prison in Deer Lodge, barely 25 miles from Anaconda, so I made arrangements to drive over and visit the set. (more…) Continue Reading →
