Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/page/64/)
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.
Remember the good old days when we worried that the government was going to invade our privacy? Remember many years ago your Social Security card said right on it, “Not to be used for purposes of identification?”
We were worried about an attack from the wrong quarter—at least for a while—because the real assault on privacy came from the private sector. Continue Reading →
Montana outfitters and guides have allied with historians and tribal leaders to demand protection of the Upper Missouri River Breaks and other national monuments that hold cultural, scientific and historical value.
Timed to coincide with the late June meeting of the Western Governors Association in Whitefish, the effort comes in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting 24 national monuments for possible downsizing or elimination. Continue Reading →
The Carpenter family is once again expanding its business adventures in Billings with the addition of Black Dog Coffee House. The coffee shop will officially open to the public on Friday, June 30.
It is nestled in with The Joy of Living gift shop and Sanctuary Spa and Salon, the other Carpenter family businesses, located on 24th Street West a couple of blocks north of Grand Avenue. Continue Reading →
WYOLA — It’s 9 a.m., the start of the day in Dorcella Plain Bull’s fourth-grade classroom at Wyola School. A drumbeat is playing over the PA and all of Plain Bull’s students are standing up and singing the Wyola district song, singing in the Apsaalooke language of the Crow Indians. They sing it every morning before reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
Each of the six districts of the Crow Nation has its own song. The Wyola district song was written in the early 1960s by the father of Levi Yellowmule, the school’s athletic director. The song references “the Narrows,” a place north of the school, said to be the narrowest part of the Little Bighorn Valley. Continue Reading →
On Pure Wow, a website I’d never seen before, I came across a list naming the best bookstore in every state in the union. The winner in Montana? The Montana Valley Book Store in Alberton, just off I-90 about 30 miles west of Missoula. The store was described like this:
“It doesn’t get any more charming than a lovingly tended book collection, run by a mother and son, out of a turn-of-the century former butcher shop in a tiny railroad town (population: 420).” I won’t argue with that. Continue Reading →
Before her mother’s death in 1995, Angelica Osborne knew only a few things about her mother’s life in World War II-era Germany, before she married an American soldier and came to the United States.
She knew that her mother, Margit Chinkes, had spent time in two Nazi concentration camps as a teenager. Her mother had also talked about how she might have died of starvation if the commander of one camp, whose office she cleaned, had not left her a slice of bread in his desk drawer every day. Continue Reading →
As a business leader, I’m a firm believer that everyone deserves access to quality, affordable health care. A healthier population helps curb health care costs, so employers like myself can continue providing health benefits to our employees.
That’s why I was proud to support Montana’s bipartisan efforts to increase access to health coverage through Medicaid in 2015, and why I now urge the U.S. Senate to take a more deliberate consideration of health care reform. Continue Reading →
CROW AGENCY — Crow Native Days got off to a good start on a beautiful summer solstice morning Wednesday, with several hundred people attending a prayer breakfast in the Crow Tribe’s multipurpose building.
The morning got even better when representatives of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway presented a $75,000 check to the tribe—with a promise of another $75,000 to come—toward the building of a new dance arbor. Continue Reading →
