Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/page/129/)
I was planning to ride off into the sunset today, but if I may appropriate an observation by Benjamin Franklin, it looks as though I might be heading in the direction of the rising sun.
In the week since I announced that Last Best News would cease publication today, I have heard so many expressions of interest in reviving it in some shape or form, with or without my continued involvement, that it appears likely that this independent online newspaper will live on.
Last weekend at Second Edition Books, a great used-book store in Uptown Butte, I purchased a copy of “The Vigilantes of Montana” by Prof. Thomas J. Dimsdale.
It’s an odd softcover edition, published in 1937 by McKee Printing Co. in Butte, with a cartoon-like illustration on the front cover. I was glad to have found such an unusual edition of a Montana classic. Continue Reading →
We’re off to Texas to settle my mother-in-law’s estate and to catch up with family. Anyone who has ever visited South Texas in July would understand why we wound up in Montana: Here we have relentless summer heat—a daily hundred degrees of heat, with humidity to match. Continue Reading →
Billings Police Chief Rich St. John and longtime activist Eran Thompson agree on one thing: Billings needs more cops.
They both see true community policing, which gives cops a chance to interact in a meaningful way with the people they serve, as the best way to close the divisions separating communities and police departments across the country. And good community policing takes more cops on the street than Billings has. Continue Reading →
America’s elected legislators could get a lot done if the political parties just got out of the way.
Over the past few decades certain politicians, political parties and independent political groups have planted and nurtured the trees of ideological hatred, and the American public harvests that bitter fruit. This is not doing anyone any good and it is time for it to stop. Continue Reading →
It turns out that stupid-people tricks in Yellowstone National Park—you know, people petting bison, taking selfies with bears, walking on thermal features—are not strictly a modern phenomenon.
As Mike Stark makes plain in his new book, “Wrecked in Yellowstone,” things were even worse in the earliest days of the world’s first national park. Continue Reading →
Tuesday night, our democratic principles took a blow in Red Lodge.
In an overflowing City Council meeting, the vacant mayoral position and future direction of our city was decided by five city councilmen despite the requests of our citizens to hold a special election allowing us to decide who will serve us as mayor. Continue Reading →
In one of the best scenes in the 1932 Marx Brothers movie “Horse Feathers,” Harpo Marx plays a dog catcher accosted by a cop for blocking traffic while stopping for lunch.
The cop pulls out a notepad and begins writing Harpo a ticket. Continue Reading →
