Workless in America

I wonder how these 58 workers feel about the "Wal-Mart is good for the world" argument today.

On the other hand, County Market didn't appear to have strong survival instincts. Back when we were fighting over distribution with outside rack companies, I wrote a stack of letters to grocery store and restaurant owners complaining about the way the matter was handled and seeking relief. Three businesses, including two grocery stores, contacted me immediately. County Market never responded. Not one word.

Of course, I'm just one guy. And I don't know much about the grocery business, except that margins are notoriously low, so high volume is essential. And County Market doesn't know much about me -- for all they know, I have nine kids and 36 grandkids, all breathlessly awaiting my advice on where to do their grocery shopping. Not to mention, of course, that I am the proprietor of a business that generates a few hundred thousand bucks in revenue each year and also of the wildly influential Billings Blog. So you'd think it would have been worth 37 cents (now 39 cents) to County Market to write a letter and tell me, "Tough luck, pal."

But they didn't think so, which makes me suspect that they treated a lot of other complaints the same way. And now they're closing. Not too big a surprise.

It hurts, though, when these big Outpost distribution points close. The Kit-Kat Cafe, Gibson's, the two Elmer's restaurants, Smith's -- you're talking close to a thousand papers a week right there. Some people will just pick up the paper elsewhere, of course, but not all. National chains tend to be unsympathetic to the need for a locally owned press, so as they come in, we get squeezed out.

UPDATE: Downtown Billings has been thinking about this, too.

2ND UPDATE: Comments have veered into a discussion of supermarket discount cards, so here' a link to a site that makes the case against them. I also wrote about the issue here.

3RD UPDATE: Ed at City Lights makes a good point about Good Earth Market. My wife does a lot of shopping there already, and I'm sure it will continue to get a larger share of our grocery dollar.

Forensics night

I spent Friday evening judging the forensics meet at Senior High School. This is the second time I have done this, and I was again amazed at how extraordinarily capable the contestants are: poised, courteous, well trained, just about perfectly at home with themselves and their material. Certainly, we were all much bigger dolts at my high school.

The events I judged, serious interpretation and duo interpretation, are judged primarily on delivery and not content, but I got a particular kick out of the subject material that two groups chose. One was a collection of stories and headlines from the Onion -- hilarious stuff. The other was a complete history of the United States in 10 minutes by someone whose name I didn't catch. Part of it was over the top, but it had its moments.

For instance, it said that the Civil War resulted in the largest number of deaths of soldiers named Zeke in world history. It also concluded with a quick backward history of the United States: The stock market soars to record highs in 1929, and early settlers give massive amounts of land to dispossessed Indians.

Spun out

Spun and Spinning doesn't seem to be spinning any more.

Hail or hell?

Dump the Montana state flag and song, Roger Clawson writes. He's got my vote.

Dirty rags

Our colleagues at the Northern Light in Molt are urging advertisers and stores to dump copies of two local publications, Sistah and Piece.

In its latest print edition (at this writing, apparently still not available online), the Light publishes an editorial called "Three dirty rags." The first rag is the Ravalli Republic, which draws fire for printing a potshot at Dallas Erickson.

The second is Sistah, of which the Northern Light says, "Vulgar words soil the tabloid throughout, from front to back, including headings. There are petty and malicious attention grabbers, intended as humor no doubt, and to their discredit they advertise for the abortion company, Planned Parenthood."

Of Piece, the Light writes, "Their multiple ads for Planet Lockwood should be enough to indicate the direction of the new publication. ... Article headings include: 'Ask an Exotic Dancer,' "Make Love Longer,' and 'Pick-up Lines from Hell!'" Piece also mentions Planned Parenthood, the Light notes.

The Light doesn't just criticize; it issues a call for action. Advertisers are listed for each publication, and the Light urgers readers, "If you see these papers, ask store attendants to remove them, that they shouldn't be where children can see them."

The Light also notes that there are "20 odd, free periodicals that have come out since we started business in 1992." None, however, is odder than the Light itself.

In the Outpost

Montana Quarterly is allowing me to reprint my Schweitzer piece, so it's now in the Outpost (in somewhat abbreviated form). I also review Venture Theatre's One-Act Play Festival, in my mind the theater event of the year, and Billings Studio Theatre's "Waiting for MacArthur."

O'Reilly vs. Letterman

The blogosphere has been masticating last week's "showdown" between Bill O'Reilly and David Letterman, with most of the attention focusing on Letterman's statement that about 60 percent of what O'Reilly says is "crap."

Most observers see this statement as a putdown, but I see it as a pretty accurate assessment and as fairly high praise. Few broadcast pundits manage to hit the coveted 40 percent standard of non-crap. Limbaugh runs in the 75-80 percent crap range, and Hannity has bursts of up to 90 percent crap. On many days, Michael Savage never dips below 100 percent crap. I don't listen to the liberal pundits, but anecdotal evidence suggests they don't score much better.

How many bloggers manage to keep the level of crap below 60 percent, especially when comments are unmoderated? Black Jack has made comments on this blog that have been up to 175 percent crap, a percentage obtainable only by writing comments so bad that they actually multiply in toxicity upon prolonged exposure.

Under Sturgeon's Law, 90 percent of everything is crap. Even if one applies Sturgeon's Law to Stugeon's Law, then the percentage of non-crap in the world can rarely exceed the low 20s. O'Reilly beats the average because he is thoroughly nonpartisan, occasionally funny and actually willing on occasion to change his mind in the face of contrary evidence.

On the other hand, he also is remarkably thin-skinned for a guy in his position, and he has a wildly exaggerated sense of his own importance (a common enough failing) and journalistic acumen. Letterman may be giving him a bit more credit than he deserves.

Torture, Washington style

This Washington Post editorial doesn't go quite as far as I did in my impeachment post below, but the last sentence, with its reference to "possibly further action," certainly leaves the gate open.

To bomb or not to bomb?

Christopher Hitchens weighs in on the possibility that George Bush really did want to bomb Al Jazeera, an act that would have been not only criminal but also very bad policy. Bottom line: sounds plausible to him.

UPDATE: Spun and Spinning goes a bit beserk over this posting. My offense? Conceding the possibility that Bush didn't really propose bombing Al Jazeera. Unfortunately for Tony, even the story he cites as proof says only that the document in question "suggests" that Bush may have "considered" bombing. Hitchens finds it believable, and so do I, but it ain't proof.

UPDATE: Now he's gone beserker. Of course, he has to misquote me to do it -- he substitutes "maybe" and "possibly" for "suggests" and "considered" -- but that seems to be no obstacle.

Easy, big fellow. We don't even disagree on this. All we're arguing about is the standard of proof.

Bette Bohlinger has died

Just got this news release:

(HELENA) - Bette Bohlinger, wife of Lieutenant Governor John Bohlinger, passed away this morning at St. Peter’s Hospital in Helena after a battle with acute leukemia. Bette was diagnosed the first time with acute leukemia about one year ago, she was in remission when tests revealed this past December that the cancer had returned.

“We are people of faith,” said Lieutenant Governor John Bohlinger. “My family thanks the people of Montana for all their support and we ask them to keep us in their thoughts and prayers as we go through this trying time.”

“Bette always had a smile, always had kind words for everyone, she was an amazing woman, a dear friend and a great Montanan -- she will be missed,” said Governor Brian Schweitzer. “Nancy and I are praying for John and his family.”

Bette Bohlinger recently led the charge to get Montanans signed up for the National Bone Marrow registry. Bette herself needed a donor, but more important to her was giving hope to the thousands of other people who need marrow.

Governor and Nancy Schweitzer and staff held a marrow drive last Thursday, January 5th, Bette was in attendance thanking everyone for giving hope --“I ask anyone who is willing to donate to please get on the registry. How wonderful it would be to save someone’s life,” said Bette Bohlinger.

A funeral is tentatively scheduled for Saturday in Billings. The flags will be flown at half mast at the Capitol. Governor Schweitzer’s schedule will be cancelled today.

UPDATE: (HELENA) – Services for Bette Bohlinger, wife of Lt. Governor John Bohlinger will be held in Billings on Saturday and next week in Helena.

Friday, January 13, 2006, 7:00PM
Vigil for Bette Bohlinger
Saint Patrick’s, 215 N. 31st, Billings

Saturday, January 14, 2006, 11:00AM
Funeral Mass Bette Bohlinger
Saint Patrick’s, 215 N. 31st, Billings

A memorial honoring Bette’s life will be held in Helena the week following the funeral; details are still to be determined.

Letters and cards can be sent to the Bohlinger family at the following:

Lt. Governor John Bohlinger
P.O. Box 200801
Helena, MT 59620-0801

In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that donations be made to any of the following charities, which were among Bette’s favorites.

Parmly Billings Library
Care of Sandy Raymond
510 North Broadway
Billings, MT 59101

St. John’s Lutheran Home
Care of Foundation Department
3940 Rimrock Road
Billings, MT 59102

Yellowstone Art Center
Care of Christi Niles
401 North 27th Street
Billings, MT 59101

St. Vincent’s Healthcare Foundation
1106 N 30th
Billings, MT 59101 - 0124

Billings Clinic Foundation
2917 Tenth Ave N
Billings, MT 59101

Head Start, Inc.
Care of Judy Bryngelson
615 N 19th
Billings, MT 59101

Flowers for the funeral services can be sent to Michelotti, Sawyers and Nordquist Funeral Home in Billings.

Minimum wage

I've always said it would be a mistake for Montana to raise its minimum wage unless the whole country went along. This study suggests that I am wrong. But then I'm skeptical of the source.

UPDATE: Left in the West disagrees with me, sort of.

2ND UPDATE: More states are exceeding the federal minimum wage than I thought.

3RD UPDATE: Just got a news release from Jon Tester endorsing the initiative to raise Montana's minimum wage to $6.15 an hour.

Another blogger

Adam Graham, whose interesting run-in with Donald Cyphers I wrote about here, is finishing the first year at his blog.

OK by us

A nonscientific sampling of Laurel residents appears to be OK with having Wal-Mart come to town.

Meanwhile, Evelyn Pyburn blames federal regulations for the success of big box stores.

I'm always reluctant to mention this, for fear some federal bureaucrat will come along and point out all the paperwork I haven't been doing, but my own eight years running a business hasn't proved terribly burdensome in terms of paperwork. No doubt it's worse for some businesses.

But I always wonder if the burden of regulation isn't a bit exaggerated, especially for tiny businesses that are exempt from some of the more burdensome requirements.

Farming green

I'm hearing quite a few comments on this week's Outpost cover story, a detailed look at the prospects for organic farming in Montana that we picked up from High Plains News. It's 4,000 words, but well worth the time and effort to read it. If nothing else, you should click over there to read the first reader comment at the bottom of the story.

Looking up

This is a grim time of year in the news business. Retailers, recovering from the Christmas push, pull in their horns. The Butte Weekly, our colleagues up the interstate, published an eight-page edition this week. That's tiny. We're struggling to keep the Outpost at 28 pages this month.

So it's a bit of a comfort to note that both the Outpost website and this blog had record months in December, both in terms of visits and hits. Thanks for your support (and, in a couple of cases, your hostility).

Beating by sandal

I'm getting around to reading "New West Reader," which Jim Larson reviewed in the Outpost Christmas book issue.

I haven't read enough to draw any conclusions, but I was struck by a sentence in the introduction by Philip Connors, a University of Montana graduate who edited the volume. Writing about conflicts between ranchers and environmentalists, he says, "There remain bars where to wear a pair of sandals is to invite a beating."

He's writing specifically of the Gila Wilderness, but he obviously envisions the entire American West between California and the Rocky Mountains. And I'm skeptical about his assertion. But I don't believe that I have worn a pair of sandals since I was 3 years old, so I'm obviously not in the best position to know.

So I put it to any sandal-wearing, beer-swilling readers out there: Have you ever been beaten, or credibly threatened with a beating, in any bar in the West?

Master's of naught

Where do you suppose these folks got the idea that a master's degree with no classwork, no contact with the instructor, no exams and no thesis would be worth something in the marketplace?

And, more to the point, how many kids have they taught that notion?

UPDATE: I just got an e-mail offering a degree program that sounds similar to the one these teachers took advantage of. The subject line: "Is your skills about to expired?"

Moby Dick

This should be fun. The Outpost is the media sponsor for a couple of events a year at the Alberta Bair Theater. This year, we sponsored Dervish and were scheduled to sponsor a production of "Cyrano."

"Cyrano de Bergerac" is probably my favorite of all non-Shakespearean plays. So I was disappointed when I got a call last week telling me that the show had been canceled. The cast, it seems, couldn't get visas. But my attitude changed when I learned what would replace it: a three-person production by a German theater company of "Moby Dick."

The list of things I like better than "Cyrano" is mighty short, but one of the things on that list is "Moby Dick." And someone (perhaps Gary Svee) already has observed that this production is bound to be brilliant because a failed three-person production of "Moby Dick" would be so awful that no one would ever try to do it twice.

It's on May 24. Keep a sharp eye.

Just wondering

So I would like to take off early today (by my standards) to watch the Rose Bowl. I look in The Gazette and see that the game starts at 6 p.m.

What does that tell me about when the game actually starts? I think it means that it starts no earlier than 6 p.m. Based on actual experience with televised start times, the actual start could be anywhere from 6:05 p.m. to 7 p.m., depending on the quantity of pregame foofarah the network decides to air.

So how do I avoid the foofarah and still see the game? Has anybody figured out how to tell when a televised football game actually starts? Or is it like rock concerts and speed limits, a sort of minimal guideline that you can never really pin down until the band starts to play or the cop pulls you over?

UPDATE: In this case, 6 p.m. actually meant approximately 6:25 p.m. Who knew?

2ND UPDATE: Some commenters note that the game was worth the wait. Certainly true. It was a terrific game, justifying every inch of hype, and, as an old college football beat writer, count me among those who find college football more interesting in every way than the stereotyped pro game. But why does every bowl game have to last four hours? Four hours! I could have gone to see "King Kong" and still caught the last quarter.

3RD UPDATE: A commenter says that waiting through the pregame show was worth it to hear Keith Jackson. I'm one of Jackson's admirers, but it seemed to me last night that he has slipped a notch or two since the last time I heard him (which may have been a few years; I don't watch much football any more). He seemed confused about what was going on more often than I have ever heard him, including expressing apparent surprise at one point that no time had elapsed during an extra-point attempt. It wasn't an embarrassing performance, but it didn't seem up to his standard. Jackson is one of the all-time greats, but I couldn't help but wonder how close he is to hanging it up.

Impeachment?

My comments below on impeachment degenerated into an incredibly inane thread that I would advise any newcomers to avoid. Rich seemed to want to argue about my position, but he was unwilling, or unable, to articulate any actual arguments. My efforts to draw him out were in vain. I suspect that I couldn't have pried Rich's point out of him with an MRI, truth serum, a lie detector and a full autopsy. So skip it.

But I hope no one goes away from this thinking that the whole debate about torture and prisoner abuse is just some liberal plot to discredit Bush. The evidence is quite abundant, and if you haven't seen any of it, you really do need to start reading Andrew Sullivan (who, by the way, was a hawk on the Iraq war).

I won't try to reduplicate his work, but let me just throw one quote at you from Ian Fishback. He is the 82nd Airborne Division captain who went public with a letter to Sen. McCain urging passage of the McCain Amendment in order to set clear standards for the conduct of American soldiers. Sullivan calls him an American hero.

In a Human Rights Watch report, Capt. Fishback said he had witnessed violations of the Geneva Conventions that nevertheless appeared to be U.S. policy. He concluded:

If you draw a hard line and you say “Don’t do anything bad to prisoners,” ... then, yeah, that is an easy line to draw, but when you start drawing shades of gray and you start stripping prisoners, or you start making prisoners do humiliating things and then you tell a soldier to draw the line somewhere, then ... things are going to get out of hand because everyone is going to draw the line at a different place.

... It’s unjust to hold only lower-ranking soldiers accountable for something that is so clearly, at a minimum, an officer corps problem, and probably a combination with the executive branch of government ... . [B]y trying to claim that it was “rogue elements” we seriously hinder our ability to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

That makes such great good sense that it's a shame it hasn't penetrated up the chain of command.

Targeting Baucus

The National Pro-Life Alliance is targeting Max Baucus and 12 other U.S. senators with a $585,000 ad campaign aimed at pressuring him to support Samuel Alito's confirmation on the Supreme Court. A news release cites the senator's "long history of siding with abortion extremists," including a vote against banning partial birth abortions. "Without grassroots pressure from pro-life constituents," Executive Director Mary King says, "he will be just as unwilling to confirm any Supreme Court nominee who refuses to submit to the radical pro-abortion lobby."

My own position is that I intend to criticize Baucus no matter what he does. If he votes for Alito, he's caving in to pressure from right-wing ideologues. If he votes against Alito, he's in the grip of the left-wing extremists that have taken over his party.

There's only one way out: Harriet Meyers.

Schweitzer fans

The Daily Kos is still lovin' Brian Schweitzer.

On with the "I" word

Tony, near the end of a long post, isn't happy with me for failing to call for Bush's impeachment. It's true; I haven't, although I did print this column, which did call for impeachment if it is determined that Bush broke the law.

I'm still not certain whether he did break the law. I'm not a lawyer, nor a FISA expert, and I don't have time to read all of the relevant commentary. It still seems probable that he broke the law, but I think it's pointless even to consider impeachment as long as there is a reasonable contrary case to be made.

On the other hand, I find this quite disturbing. The president's position on torture now appears to be:

1. We don't torture people.

2. The torture we don't do is legal.

3. If Congress makes torture illegal, the torture we don't do will continue.

Now that, damn it, is an impeachable offense. A president who violates a fundamental American principle of how we treat others, then lies about it, then thumbs his nose at Congress for trying to stop him, belongs in prison. Preferably Abu Ghraib.

And now, two by-the-ways:

1. If you haven't been reading Andrew Sullivan on torture, you ought to start. I've never been a Sullivan fan, but he is indispensable on this topic.

2. I should make it clear that when I said earlier that the Outpost doesn't deal much with national issues, I was referring strictly to the dead-tree edition. What happens on the blog is a different matter.

Corraling Kralj

I've been lax about letting Larry Kralj use this space to insult and demean other visitors here. Frankly, I find his stuff so painful to read that I skip nearly all of it, and I have been letting things get by that shouldn't. This is my house, and people who comment here are my guests. When one of those guests becomes rude and abusive, it's my job to stop him.

Fair warning, Larry: From now on, any post you write that personally attacks another commenter will be immediately deleted. Any post you write that makes fun of someone else's name (including Cornhole and Racicrotch) will be deleted. I won't have it anymore.

Furthermore, any post that contains multiple exclamation points at the end of a sentence and pointless all-caps will be deleted. That's not because those things are offensive in themselves, but because I don't intend to wade through that kind of garbage to find out what you really are saying. I have a high tolerance for bad writing -- I've even managed to get paid for quite a few years to read bad writing -- but I'm not going to read phony exclamation points and all-caps for free. Out it goes.

Larry was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the Outpost, and that has lulled me into cutting him a lot of slack. But the slack is all used up now.

UPDATE: Dave Budge is fed up with Larry, too.

Tussing vs. Volek

Attorney Tom Singer's 11-page report to the Billings City Council about potential litigation with Mayor-elect Ron Tussing was on my fax machine this morning. You can find the Gazette story, with a link to the full report, here.

The report agrees in essential points with my own analysis here (skeptics who said I didn't know what I was talking about can ease their guilty consciences by donating to PayPal on the Outpost site). And the Gazette didn't have to take legal action to see my analysis. Key points:

1. Tussing probably is a city employee for purposes of the agreement.

2. Pursuing litigation probably isn't such a hot idea.

3. The city's key concern is acting City Administrator Tina Volek, who might reasonably have expected the agreement to protect her from working with Tussing again. Money quote: "The Mayor, as presiding officer of the Council, generally participates in the annual performance review of the City Administrator. ... Were Mr. Tussing to participate in such a review and disparage Ms. Volek's performance in any way, she might allege his disparagement of her was related 'to matters at issue that led to' the settlement agreement, or in retaliation for her role in those matters. Based on such an allegation, she could assert a claim for breach of the agreement against Mr. Tussing, the City, or both."

Bottom line: "Whether it is possible or practical to exclude the Mayor from supervising and interacting closely with the Acting City Administrator is a question I cannot answer. I have no way of predicting whether Ms. Volek will ask that a barrier be erected, or if she would assert claims against the City or Mr. Tussing. The answers depend on what issues arise, and how people handle themselves over the next four years. It is possible to imagine may things that could go wrong, and our imaginations are never as wild as what reality dishes out. A year ago, no one foresaw the situation that exists today."

UPDATE: Matt Singer agrees with me.

Morrison, Tester and who?

Paul Richards, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, says in a news release that he is staging an informational picket this afternoon at the Lee Newspapers State Bureau in Helena. Richards is unhappy about this poll, which he says left him out altogether.

“My hat is in the ring despite what you might read in some newspapers,” Richards says. “It is the voters’ job, not the reporter’s job to decide which candidates are favored and which are not.”

I think he's got a legitimate gripe. Richards isn't going to win this thing, but he certainly has a chance to focus the discussion in places where the big party candidates may not want to go. But he may never get a chance.

Too bad for all of us. The political insiders only want to hear about the horse race; the voters want to hear what the choices are.

UPDATE: Lee's response is here, with Mike Dennison cashing in on the rare opportunity to interview Chuck Johnson.

No child gets ahead

This Washington Post op-ed indicates that my biggest fear about the No Child Left Behind Act is coming true. When this phrase used to just show up in teachers' professional journals, I snickered at it. As I argued then, in a world where no child is left behind, no child gets ahead.

Then NCLB became official government policy -- in every state, no matter what. Leave it to the federal government to take public schools that already are struggling and find a way to make them worse. (Thanks to Kevin Drum for the link.)

UPDATE: Intelligent Discontent disagrees.

The Iraq solution

The Rolling Stone is running with Gov. Brian Schweitzer's plan for Iraq.

Wal-Mart in review

I went to see the screening of "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" and reviewed it here. Meanwhile, Wal-Mart appears to have its sights on Laurel.

Why worry?

On the other hand, I was disappointed to hear Dave Berg repeat this tired argument Thursday about warrantless wiretapping: If you're not doing anything wrong, why worry about it?

Wulfgar deals with that question here. To which I add only: I think I remember Stalin making the exact same argument in about 1947.

Nothing intelligent about this design

Judge Andrew Napolitano was the guest host on Bill O'Reilly's "Radio Factor" Thursday, and he was a delight to hear. He is unfailingly courteous, but he also is no-nonsense and direct on point. In this case, he was blasting the Bush administration over misuse of the National Security Agency, but he was, if anything, even more critical of Congress for failing to reject the Patriot Act. Fun stuff.

He also was critical of the judge who ruled against intelligent design. He kept asking callers, Why aren't evolutionists willing to argue about competing theories? I didn't hear anyone make the obvious point: Because intelligent design doesn't provide anything to argue about.

Intelligent design is the Sherlock Holmes of scientific theories. Holmes said: When all other possibilities have been eliminated, then the possibility that remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Intelligent design says that all theories that attempt to explain the origins of life by examining what we can see, taste, touch, hear and see must inevitably fail. Life is too complex and improbable to have come about without intervention by some higher intelligence. So as long as intelligent design advocates can shoot holes in other theories, their theory remains the one possibility that hasn't been eliminated.

But shooting holes in existing theories does not amount to offering an alternative theory. And figuring out life is far more complicated than narrowing a short list of suspects or possible points of entry. When Copernicus shot down the Ptolemaic system, he didn't just point out the defects in the system, he offered an alternative that explained the facts better. And his theory has held up under testing thousands of times in hundreds of different ways.

When intelligent design is able to do what Copernicus did, then it deserves a place in science class.

King Kong vs. King Kong

Two movies on my all-time Top 10 list were made in 1933: "Duck Soup" and "King Kong." We'll probably never have another "Duck Soup" ("Dr. Strangelove" may be as close as we will get, but not even Peter Sellers could play Harpo Marx); however, Peter Jackson has taken a heck of a crack at bringing Kong to a modern audience.

The new version is in part an homage and in part an attempt to improve upon and resolve some of the weaknesses of the original. The original's special effects hold up amazingly well after all of these years, but Jackson has topped them, especially with Kong's lifelike facial expressions. The movie's added length doesn't make the story drag, but it does undercut the elegance of the original's three-act structure, cleanly broken into segments before the island, the nightmare of the island, and the cruelty of the New York sequence.

The movie also pushes the relationship betweeen the ape and the girl to another level, both gaining and losing something in the process. What's lost is some of Kong's purity, which makes him such a potent symbol of everything that seemed to be going wrong in 1933. As Plenty Coups said of grizzly bears, Kong is always "in his right mind," never too tired or too lazy or too timid or too indecisive to do exactly what the occasion requires.

He does battle against a world that neither he nor many of the people living in it could quite understand: a nation of rich resources but mired in depression; a newly coined world power but reluctant to assume the role; a nation founded on free enterprise but increasingly drawn to socialism and communism; an economy built on agriculture in which farmers were abandoning farms by the thousands.

Kong's death is not merely spectacle but public sacrifice. He is brought down by airpower and machine guns, potent symbols for people living just 15 years after World War I had shown how those weapons could overturn everything they thought they knew about the glory of war.

None of that would have worked if the characters or filmmakers had ever shown the slightest indication that they knew what they were up to. They play it for thrills and even throw out a false clue in the "beauty and the beast" motif, relying on Fay Wray's endless fear and repulsion for the beast to show how lost Kong's world really was to contemporary Americans.

For Jackson, playing the story that naively wasn't an option. He lays on the thrills in triplicate but essentially contorts the primitive power of the original into a story about interpersonal relationships. His Kong is noble but too accessible. The ape as mensch just doesn't play.

Time to impeach?

Over at Spun and Spinning, Tony is calling on The Outpost to editorialize in favor of impeaching Bush for illegally spying on Americans. It's a topic well worthy of opinionating, but I'm not ready to lead the charge for impeachment. Here's why:

1. What Bush did probably was illegal, but it isn't yet 100 percent clear. The Volokh Conspiracy has the best discussion I've seen so far about that question. I don't favor impeachment when even marginally defensible legal stances are available.

2. I'm generally against impeachment and recall votes. Nixon is the only exception I can think of and that only because his offenses were so clear and pervasive and cut so close to the heart of what this country ought to be about. As a rule, I think voters have a right to the candidate they elected, even if most of them eventually conclude they made a poor choice.

3. The Outpost doesn't take many stands on national issues. That isn't because those issues aren't important, but because we have no special access to information or knowledge about what happens at the national level. Our opinions are no more useful than those of anyone else who follows the national news in a half-assed sort of way.

Having said all that, I still find what the president did inexcusable. If he wanted expanded authorization for domestic spying, he should have asked Congress to give it to him. He shouldn't have just taken it.

Police vs. animal shelter

This interesting piece by Evelyn Pyburn appeared both on the Big Sky Business Journal's website and in the Yellowstone County News. I can't quite decide what to make of it, but it deserves a close look.

UPDATE: Via e-mail, Sarah Grau sends along some pertinent thoughts:

The most important point I want to make is: the Billings Police Foundation is NOT the Billings Police Department, nor is it the City of Billings.

The BPF is a 501c3 public charity established in 1999, recieved its IRS
ruling in 2001 (I think) You could check at guidestar.org

In my opinion, a small group of city employees (present and former)
started their own little company a few years ago and operated it on city
time, with city employees, at a city address and with city
publications. Their mission was to "provide assistance for programs and
equipment not included in the city budget." But they did so, by the
examples provided in the article:

1. Depositing checks that were not made payable to them

2. Telling donors the Shelter could not take their
donations, please reissue the check payable to the BPF

I would go further and opine: any revenues they've ever received belong
to the city, since they were sought after...on city time, by city
employees, at a city address and via city publications.

I would hope our State's Attorney General is interested in practices 1
and 2 listed above.

I understand that Deanna Anthony admitted the BPF only has 2 Board
members. On the last form 990 they filed, they listed 10, I believe.
This fact speaks volumes: did the other 8 bail? If so, why? With only
2 board members is the BPF in violation of its own bylaws? If so, the
state's SOS should be interested, as would the IRS.

Finally, why care? Because it was taxpayer money. They were an
unnecessary vehicle as operated. The city gets money, why would we give
it away to someone we would then have to ask for it back from?

Governmental bodies can accept donations.

The BPF is not accountable to taxpayers, it is not the city.

Gone with the Wendy's

I guess this is good news. But then I read this (courtesy of Jackie Corr) and wonder, once again, what sort of monuments we are creating for ourselves.

Reader's paradise

The most compelling part of this story was the last paragraph:

During his suspension, Granger has been reading six to eight hours a day, absorbing books that will enrich his knowledge of his specialty areas of classical music and public affairs. He recently finished a 1,200-page biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt and has been reading reviews of recent classical music releases.

Man alive. Where does a fellow apply to get suspended?

Gone to war

Some people found this speech remarkable for the president's admission that a thing or two might have gone wrong in Iraq. I found it remarkable, and depressing, because of this quote: "As President, I'm responsible for the decision to go into Iraq."

Why remarkable? Because no one else seems to be even a little bit concerned that the president so blithely confounds the express intention of the Founding Fathers, who labored to craft a Constitution that would deny to any single person the power to take this nation into war.

The founders' intentions could not have been more express. Their logic could not have been sounder. Yet to even suggest that we should now follow their wishes is to step into tinfoil hat land. Some argue that Congress authorized the war when it passed a resolution deferring to the president. It authorized no such thing. It simply abdicated its constitutional responsbility.

Under the founders' scheme of government, no president, and no human being, could ever stand before Americans and claim responsibility for starting a war. That the founders' wishes have been so ignored and neglected over the last 50 years has been the greatest challenge to democratic rule this country has ever faced.

Give me liberty

We watched most of "King Arthur" on TV the other night and were once again struck by the universal tendency to recast heroes of the ancient past as forerunners of Patrick Henry. I got the feeling that Arthur would have been less comfortable at the Round Table than sitting around with the Founding Fathers drafting the Bill of Rights. Even the abysmal "Alexander" recast the conquering general as another civil libertarian yearning to breathe free.

I don't pretend that I know what Arthur was really like, but I suspect that Monty Python got closer to the truth than this movie: a rousing combination of duty to God, divine right, chivalry, ego, valor and superstition. Arthur, I suspect, would have been as dumbfounded by the Magna Carta as by a jumbo jet. Every time a peasant showed up in the movie, I was tempted to shout, "Come and see the violence inherent in the system."

Modern movies do a great job of capturing the feel and look of the old days, but they don't even try to get inside the heads of those characters. They just recast them all with a powderhorn and musket, spouting good old American values.

I can't help but wonder whether our inability to imagine people who truly don't think the way we do hasn't led us into an ill-considered war or two.

Winding down

Just about done with school. I got my Rocky grades in on Tuesday, after having to spend a few hours tracking down a plagiarism case. It was a good reminder why I would have been a lousy detective. Once the thrill of the chase is over, I just felt dragged down by it all. I already know too many things I don't want to know. Why learn one more?

Now I just have to grade my German finals and get those grades in by Wednesday. Then in the spring, I'll be teaching two German courses at MSU-Billings, and I have a whole month to get ready for it. Maybe I'll get it done right this time.

In the meantime, I'm compiling a list of the most common errors students make in writing (English, not German). I'll add to it as they come to me, but here are a few, in no particular order:

1. Comma splices. Not quite universal but very, very common.

2. Leaving out the comma after the year in a complete date. Almost every student will write, "I was born Jan. 1, 1980 in Billings" instead of "I was born Jan. 1, 1980, in Billings." It's so universal an error that obviously their high school and junior high teachers didn't know the rule either.

3. Pronoun agreement. Nearly universal. "Their" has become the default pronoun for all purposes, regardless of gender and number.

4. Use of "then" for "than." Odd, but quite common.

5. "Affect" vs. "effect." Wrong more often than not.

6. Punctuation outside quotation marks. Students put commas and periods outside quotation marks far more often than they would if they were just guessing. Somewhere along the line, they’re being taught to do it the wrong way.

Leukemia

Doctors have again found acute leukemia in Bette Bohlinger, a Billings resident and wife of Lt. Gov. John Bohlinger. The disease had been in remission. A news release today that a bone marrow donor is being sought.

For information, contact Eileen Damone, Montana's contact for the National Marrow Donor Program at eileend@inbc2.org

Bauer vs. Tussing

I don't have much to add to this wacky situation, other than to note that it came just as I was concluding that Mayor Ron Tussing really will be a city employee. That's a point I had decided earlier to leave to the lawyers, but I can play lawyer, too.

I came to the conclusion by the process of elimination. I can think of only four reasons why the city would write a check to anyone:

1. The person has a claim against the city, due to some tort or contractual obligation. Not the case here.

2. The person is a vendor who sells a product to the city. Not the case here.

3. The person is an independent contractor who is paid to provide a specific service to the city. Don't jump on this train too fast. Independent contractor status is governed by state and federal law. The requirements are strict, and I don't think there is any way an elected official could qualify.

4. The person is an employee. Sounds right to me. The fact that Tussing didn't go through the normal application process strikes me as irrelevant in terms of his employee status (although it may be relevant to the question of whether he breached his agreement). But I would argue that he did go through a standard application process, called a primary and an election, before becoming an employee entitled to receive paychecks and other benefits from the city.

Does this mean that he should have to quit or pay back the money? Not necessarily. I still think that the key questions don't concern what would hold up in court. Rather, they are:

1. What did both parties think they were agreeing to? Good faith is more important in this case than legal precision.

2. Has the city honored its obligation to protect Tina Volek from having to work with Tussing again? I still think that question outweighs the sentiments of voters. In my mind, the whole dispute evaporates if she is adequately protected.

3. Does the city has a fiduciary obligation to pursue the recovery of taxpayers' money if an agreement has been breached? Generally, yes. But this is strictly a dollar and cents question. This case is unlikely to set a meaningful precedent; I mean, what are the odds? And the cost of recovery could easily equal or exceed the dollars at stake.

Wal-Mart on the big screen

In response to my earlier question about a Billings showing of "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price," I am reliably informed that a public showing will take place at 7 p.m. Dec. 19 at the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship, 2032 Central Ave.

Now in print

The issue of Montana Quarterly with my Brian Schweitzer story is now out (sorry, not available on the web). And the check is in the bank.

And this week's Outpost has my thoughts on the 12th anniversary of the menorah incident. It turned into one of those 5 a.m. stories, so I'm not sure how well it captures what I really wanted to say (and I don't have the courage yet to look). But I do recommend reading the comments on the topic below from Roxanne Kent, who was the lyricist for "Paper Candles." She expresses what a lot of people seemed to be trying to say at the play, and she may have put it better than I did. At any rate, it's a good counterpoint to some of the more cynical comments on that thread.

Thomas vs. Hitchens

While Cal Thomas thinks planting propaganda in Iraqi newspapers is just peachy (most penetrating insight: "Lippmann was possibly being sarcastic"), Christopher Hitchens thinks heads should roll.

My opinion? Start sharpening the ax.

Side note: Why has the report, cited by Hitchens, that Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera drawn so little attention? If true, wouldn't that be an impeachable offense? And if it's not impeachable, why not?

Burns me up

U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns places great value on my advice and opinions. Or so he says in a letter that showed up at my house last week.

He values my opinions so much that he asked me to fill out a three-page survey detailing my views to help him verify that he shares the majority view in Montana on key issues. Among the questions, none of which I'm making up:

"Did you support the President's decision to oust the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq?"

"Are you angry with how the United Nations and so-called 'allies' like France and Germany have undermined our efforts in Iraq and the war on terror?"

"Does it anger you that the courts are more and more ruling against our religious liberties and traditional values and institutions?"

"Has the time come to ease unneeded and counter-productive government regulations and restrictions on agriculture?"

OK, so the senator really isn't interested in my opinion. He's interested in my wallet. As the four-page accompanying letter notes, he hopes to use the survey to "contrast the Democrats' liberal 'values' with our own commonsense Montana values."

Whatever Democrat opposes him, he said, will espouse "the same leftist values of Harry Reid, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ted Kennedy." Indeed, the letter uses the phrase "liberal Democrat" at least 10 times. And it tells stretchers: John Morrison, Burns says, "is a trial attorney whose industry, and the medical malpractice suits it champions, have had more to do with the rising cost of health care than any other one factor!" Jon Tester, Burns says, "has consistently aligned himself with the far left during his tenure in the State Senate." The far left? Who could that possibly be? Possibly the "Hollywood and New York elite who have always resented the western values and traditions" that Burns upholds.

He sums up, "And the cold, hard fact of the matter is, unless I have your maximum political AND financial support right-here-and-now in the fall of 2005 ... I may not be ready for the firestorm we fully expect the liberal Democrats to soon unleash against me across all of Big Sky Country."

A scary thought indeed.

Still not in our town

I spent a fair part of Saturday seeing "Paper Candles," the new play about the Billings menorah incident of 1993; then sitting through a discussion about it; then watching "Not in Our Town," the documentary that aired on PBS about the whole thing; then viewing excerpts from related documentaries; then a second discussion about all of that.

I'm assembling my thoughts for next week's Outpost, and I don't know how it will turn out. But I was especially struck by something Venture Theatre's artistic director, Mace Archer, said after the play. He said that the menorah story functions as a metaphor, and people have trouble dealing with the metaphors in their own lives. I can't recall specifically whether he said this next bit, but it seemed to follow from what he did say: Art is a way of helping people incorporate metaphor into their lives, and helps build the mythology that makes up the fundamental truths about who we are and how we live. Anyway, that's how my thoughts were running, and, as usual, Mace said it much more eloquently, and he's smarter and better looking, too, which is why I hate and despise him.

And all that about metaphor and mythology is a bit high flown, and I will try to bring it closer to earth for the paper. As I watched the play, I did find myself wishing, somehow, that the facts were further in the past, so that they would stop intruding on what really was a parable. In some ways, it may be that the people who have the most trouble grasping the significance of the parable are the people right here who lived through it all.

In the meantime, I'd be interested in hearing any metaphors, or myths, any reader here might have to add.

R.I.P.

Bill Higham, 55, a good friend of The Outpost and a good citizen, has died. Services will be Dec. 17.

He had a fatal illness, apparently, for some time. I didn't know that because I had neither seen nor heard from him since he left First Citizens Bank a year or so ago. Others who knew him said they had tried to reach him and he hadn't responded.

He had served on the MetraPark board, was a member of the Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Committee and was active in NILE and in some Republican political campaigns. On Fridays in the early days of The Outpost, we used to meet at Pauly's (earlier Vinnie's, later a couple of Mexican food restaurants, the Eleven: 11 and Creole's) for drinks with Bill and Denny Rehberg.

First Citizens Bank was on my delivery route in those days, and Bill always subscribed, even though he could have picked one up by walking a few yards. I delivered his paper personally to his desk -- the only publisher-to-subscriber, one-on-one service we offered -- and we would talk about the paper and the news. Every year or so, I would hit him up to renew his subscription.

The paper was, of course, too liberal for his tastes, but he read it faithfully. I promised him once that if The Outpost ever became a huge success, I would become a rich Republican, too. Another failed promise, so far at least.

He was a heck of a guy, loyal, reliable and concerned, at least when I knew him. I don't know exactly what wrong, and I guess I never will.

Serious stuff

The post below may have been trivial, but this is serious stuff. This BYU prof argues that the way the buildings collapsed on 9-11 is much more explicable in terms of physics if one presumes that the collapse was caused by explosives, not by crashing airplanes.

I know, it sounds crazy to me, too, and I've dismissed most of this kind of stuff out of hand. But while I don't have the physics to evaluate the merits of this guy's position, his fundamental point seems hard to argue with: The theory that explosives caused the collapses is testable and falsifiable, so why not test it? He calls for the release of 6,899 photographs and more than 300 hours of video footage for review by an international, cross-disciplinary research team that would consider all options.

To his credit, he avoids speculation about who would have planted any such explosives or why.

UPDATE: Here's one pretty thorough argument against his theory. Other responses I read fell predictably into liberal and conservative camps. Why a purely scientific question should become a political football illustrates pretty well how poisonous the national climate for debate is.

Raving loonies, revisited

I've been a good boy lately about staying out of discussions on blogs run by people who buy their hats a size too small. But this one sucked me in.

Warning: You have to wade through a long, self-congratulatory post about bloggers doing journalism (Look! I have e-mail! Look! I can use a telephone!) before getting to the nub, which appears to be the writer's belief that exercising news judgment is in itself a violation of the journalist's obligation to be neutral and objective. I couldn't quite believe what I seemed to be reading and said so in the comments.

In his response, the writer pointed out, quite sensibly, that I am a dipwit, snotty, lame-assed, whining, wussy, loudmouthed pustule, lying, agenda-driven, pathethic loser of a jackass who operates a socialist cesspool of a blog.

True enough, as far as it goes, but is he serious when he links news judgment to Nazi propaganda? Apparently he's trying to be. Pretty sad.

What was I thinking?

For a day or two, I have been mulling over comments to my "Newspapers today and tomorrow" post asking what goals I had for The Outpost when I started. I don't think I can answer that in 30 words.

For starters, I anticipated that by now we would be a much more vigorous and stronger independent voice. I've always thought that a weekly with just a couple of reporters could drum a daily on a regular basis. So much energy at a daily is dissipated in the sheer dailiness of it -- the endless meetings to cover, cops and courts, sports agate, photos to take, pages to lay out, the holidays and vacations -- that it seemed reasonable to believe that while we could never be as comprehensive as the daily, we could break stories, anticipate stories and write stories that hit closer to home just about every week.

I thought we would be able to link up with other weeklies in the state to create a truly independent statewide source of news. For example, we might have been able to share a Capitol reporter, go in together on investigative projects of statewide dimensions, and so on. We might even have a built a statewide advertising network to give customers powerful alternatives to the behemoths.

Instead, we're all struggling. Even the Missoula Independent, the gold standard among Montana alternatives, has managed to survive only because it has found buyers at crucial times who could cover the ongoing losses of its early years.

The rest of us, undercapitalized and understaffed, fight a Catch-22: We can't attract advertisers without readers, we can't attract readers without stories, we can't pay for stories without advertisers. We tried to break out of that trap in 2003 with the insertion of a shopper inside the Outpost, but while the experiment temporarily greatly boosted revenues, it was not a money maker and it alienated many readers who just wanted a newspaper.

So now I still can't afford two reporters; I can't even afford me. So I'm holding down three part-time jobs while also trying to publish a weekly with editorial expenses as close to zero as possible. And it shows. It's a trap from which we have been unable to devise an escape.

Why hasn't it worked better? I would need 30,000 words to empty my mind on that topic. Obviously, newspapers are hurting as an industry; our timing may have just been bad. Obviously, I've made my share of mistakes. Obviously, this is a tough town; I've never believed that a conventional alternative could make it here, but finding the right niche has been a difficult challenge. Obviously, Lee Enterprises has taken some hard shots at us at crucial points.

We have had a great deal of vital support from loyal readers and that has kept us going. But getting the larger public to see that their interests are ultimately best served when they have access to thriving Montana-based alternatives to the corporate behemoths has been the most difficult part of this venture.

Got Wal-Mart?

I've seen references to showings of the new documentary "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices" in Great Falls and in Helena (scroll to penultimate item). But I haven't heard of any showings here. Has anyone?

Newspapers today and tomorrow

If you read this, then read this, you'll have a pretty good overview of the state of Montana journalism today (thanks, as usual, to Jackie Corr).

Serendipitous

We got to talking yesterday about dictionaries, and I speculated that most of my writing students never look into a hardcover dictionary. If they can't get it through spell check or an online dictionary, I guessed, they look at most in a portable paperback. An unabridged Webster's Third sits on its own table in the writing lab, but I can't recall having ever seen a student peek into it.

Of course, it's the first place I look when I'm even mildly uncertain about a word. It isn't just that I consider it authoritative but that nearly every journey produces a happy accident or two. Just the other day, I ran across "knapsack problem" and "floccinaucinihilipilification" (a word, the dictionary informs us, used primarily as an example of one of the longest words in the language).

The web has its happy accidents, too, and maybe the students aren't missing much. But when I get papers, as I have recently, that use "threw out" for "throughout" or "per trade" for "portrayed," then I think that a few hours poring over the unabridged might not be a bad investment.

UPDATE: In the comments below, Larry Kralj mentions a letter to the Oupost that appeared in the Aug. 14, 2003, issue. Those interested can find it here.

Election update update

A few posts down, under Election Update, I said that a story Ron Selden and I wrote about alleged police wrongdoing was too old to be on the web. I was wrong. I just found it on Google while looking for something else. That means Tussing's response is probably floating out there somewhere in cyberspace, too, but I couldn't reel it in.

Early and often

The deadline is nigh for voting on Wulfar's Montana web awards.

Of course, I'm boycotting because he had no category for best weekly-sponsored site by a blogger of Texas extraction with at least three part-time jobs.

Good enough

From the Montana GOP E-Brief: "Today, the Montana Democratic Party is attacking Senator Conrad Burns on his vote to support Montana’s Law Enforcement through half-truths and omissions."

If half-truths and omissions are good enough for Burns, they ought to be good enough for Democrats!

Tina vs. Tussing

Newly elected Billings City Council member Joy Stevens is catching a lot of heat here for her Outpost column suggesting that Tussing's employment contract go before a judge. Some of the criticism is misplaced.

One thing some critics overlook is that the police chief's severance agreement was designed in part to protect Kristoff Bauer and Tina Volek from retaliation. Bauer's a dead issue now, but Volek isn't, and if the contract does in fact provide her some legal protection, then the council is obliged to demand that the contract be honored. That's true, I think, no matter what the public wants. You can't sign off on a deal to protect an employee's interests, then ignore it because you decide you don't want to be bothered.

The larger issue of whether Tussing is an employee I will leave to the lawyers. But as I understand it, Tussing has said that he agreed to the deal only because he understood that he could still run for office. If he's telling the truth -- and I have no reason to suspect that he isn't -- then why didn't the city understand that? It's not like Tussing was going to come back and apply to be landfill supervisor. Why wouldn't it have occurred to the city's lawyers to include the one provision most likely to blunt any threat to Bauer's and Volek's future employment?

On the other hand, I don't think much of a deal that would pay an employee a clearly merited severance only if he promised to sacrifice his right to seek public office. That has a definite odor. Could that be why the contract didn't specifically address that issue? Maybe the city hoped to dodge a bullet. Hello, bullet.

Hogwash

Evelyn Pyburn has a good piece on her efforts to get the Big Sky Economic Development Corp. to hold its meetings in public. The EDC is a branch of the Big Sky Economic Development Authority, which is taxpayer supported.

Attorney Tom Towe gave the EDC an opinion holding that it was a private organization required to meet in public only when matters involving public funds are discussed. Helena attorney Mike Malloy gave this succinct appraisal of Towe's position: "Hogwash."

Give til it hurts

You can now support The Outpost (and this blog) through Paypal over at the Outpost website. Just scroll down the right-hand side. Not that we're poor or anything, but it would be nice to be able to afford to give up a job or two.

Cobb Field

The new (and slow-loading) Cobb Field Feasibility Study is up here. Comments can be sent to park planner Mark Jarvis at jarvism@ci.billings.mt.us.

End times

Before the election I meant to post a contest asking for predictions on the headline that the Montana News Association would use to describe the result if Tussing won. What a letdown: The headine was "Final election results."

I was going to bet on "Satan rules city."

Election update

Mary Jo Fox gets a few things wrong in comments below.

For one, she suggests that my decision to play the City Council results on Page 3 indicated pro-Garver bias. Nonsense. Regular readers know that we typically play election results on Page 2 or 3. There's a simple explanation: Tuesday is Outpost production night, so I don't have time during elections to do more than gather bare results. By the time the paper comes out on Thursday, I figure that everybody who is even a little interested knows the bare results. So I play them inside. It's utterly unrelated to who wins or loses.

For another, she still seems to be under the illusion that my early pick of Al Garver to win the mayor's race indicated a pro-Garver bias. This is just weird. I picked George Bush to win the Montana vote for president in both 2000 and 2004. Does that mean I wanted him to win? Uh, no.

Third, she still can't figure out why I objected to a question she posed at a mayoral forum I moderated. I swore I wouldn't write about this anymore, but let me add just this bit of perspective: To me the question resembled the flier attacking Garver in the final days of the campaign. It wasn't that the issues raised in the flier were illegitimate; it was that they were late, inflammatory and likely to backfire. I think that kind of stuff undermines democracy, and it irritates me.

Finally, she suggests that Ron Tussing's problems with The Outpost relate only to my woefully inaccurate prediction. Actually, his problems with us go back a good deal further, at least to an October 1999 story that detailed allegations of improper police conduct (sorry, too far back for a link, but I'll send you a copy for 50 cents plus $1 shipping and handling). The allegations were aired at two public meetings about police behavior, and we reported them at length. If memory serves, no one else covered the meetings.

The chief and I had a heated discussion about the story, and he wrote a detailed response, which we printed in full the following week. I didn't really blame him for being angry for several reasons:

1. I wish we had done more reporting to try to nail down the allegations better. But when people are alleging that authorities are acting improperly, to what authority can one turn to validate their claims? Still, if I could edit the story again, I would do it differently.

2. I like it when a boss stands up for his people. I wish I knew a few more who did.

3. His written response gave me a strange epiphany. It began, "The Outpost has apparently digressed from its efforts to become an alternate news source to becoming an alternate reality source." It was a good line, which I have often quoted. He went on to say many less kind things. That week was a lousy one in terms of revenue for The Outpost, and on publication day, it occurred to me that there I was, out delivering papers for 10 or 12 hours, all for no money, just so I could let the police chief tell the citizens of Billings what an irresponsible jerk I was. I can't imagine that any business but a newspaper would do such a thing, except under court order.

While the specific allegations we reported may have gone nowhere, allegations that the police department doesn't handle complaints adquately were recently reiterated by Montana People's Action and sustained in the Reiter report.

Still, we've never questioned Tussing's competence or intelligence, and we were seriously considering endorsing him this year until he talked us out of it. The man can hold a grudge. Which is why I've wondered whether he was the right guy to be mayor, a position that demands diplomacy, tact and a long fuse. Maybe he will do fine. Until I know for sure, I'll stay out of shoving distance.

Veterans Day 2005

I almost took Friday off. Classes at MSU-Billings were out for Veterans Day, and I've always wanted a Veterans Day off sometime before I died. It's been 32 years, so I thought I'd better grab one while I could. Until now, it's always seemed like the real reason I served my country was so bankers and post office workers could get another day off in November.

It wasn't quite a full day off. I graded some papers, washed dishes and straightened the house. But I didn't go the office or check e-mail, and I did watch a Marx Brothers movie, play some bridge, stretch out in the hot tub and cook a rice casserole with Andouille sausage. Mighty tasty.

Mike Royko was the first pundit I knew of who argued that veterans should always get Veterans Day off, and I have taken up the call from time to time. Consider my own case, not because I'm especially deserving but because I am about as undeserving as veterans come. Few people had easier duty than I did: Fifty-six weeks learning German in lovely Monterey, Calif., short stints in Missouri and Texas, then a year and change working four day shifts and drinking beer and Jaegermeister on the East German border. I had it made.

Still, it was three years of my misspent life, mostly in an atmosphere uncongenial to a guy who hates wearing uniforms and taking orders. If I live to be 80, and were to get every Veterans Day off, I would still get back less than two months of my 36-month enlistment. Is that too much to ask? And if it's not too much for me to ask, then why not for the millions of guys who actually paid a heavy price in service of their country? Aren't they as worthy as bankers?

Apologia

So here I am, acting as Al Garver's apologist again.

As I've said before, I had no horse in this race, and I doubt that it will much matter in the long run who won. But the worst thing about this troubling election was that so many people let Garver's religion influence their thinking. I heard from an amazing number of people who thought Garver was out to lead the city down the road to conservative Christianity.

Trouble is, I heard the guy speak on a number of occasions, interviewed him at some length and talked to him quite a few other times. I never once heard even the slightest hint that theocracy was anywhere in his political ideology. It was a slur, pure and simple, as far as I could tell.

Someone told me that a lot of people were saying they would leave town if Garver were elected. "Good," I said. "Good riddance."

Fitness for office should not be judged on the basis of religious affiliation. It isn't constitutional, and it isn't right.

I never heard Tussing suggest anything about Garver's religion, by the way, so I'm not blaming him. And while I'm not terribly happy about having a mayor who dislikes my newspaper, I can live with that. All things considered, it's better to have a feud with a mayor than with a police chief.

An election worth having

Wulfgar is conducting a poll on Montana websites.

Trashing Garver

The GOP E-brief, put out by the Republican Central Committee, traces the anti-Garver hit piece to the Big Sky Democrats. The E-brief says, "We're still gathering evidence to build this case, but there is much to suggest that the organization responsible for the defamatory campaign flier and the illegal auto-dial messages is none other than Barrett Kaiser's Big Sky Democrats."

The E-brief goes on to urge voters to cast their ballots for Al Garver. So now the race has become a surrogate for both political parties. Nice.

UPDATE: The Big Sky Democrats respond.

UPDATE UPDATE: More on the tactics of the Big Sky Democrats from the Washington Post (scroll to the bottom of the page, while murmuring thanks to Jackie Corr).

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: Garver is offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to the prosecution of those responsible for stealing his campaign signs. "I just hope the voters can see who the good guy is in all this mess,” he said in a news release.

Come again no more

Hard times at Lee Enterprises.

Garver catching up?

My delivery tour of Billings on Thursday seemed to show that Al Garver had cut heavily into the mayoral race sign gap. This week he seemed to have as many, and possibly more, signs up than Tussing, and many of them were in better locations.

I should note that my opinions about sign coverage aren't as useful as they used to be. I used to deliver 140 Outpost stops over about 10 hours, from the far end of Lockwood and the Heights to Shiloh Road. Nobody in Yellowstone County saw more political signs than I did.

My route is much more restricted now -- I don't enter the Heights at all, for instance, or go west of 24th Street West -- so I don't get a complete picture. But that's how it looked to me. Perhaps someone else can offer a more comprehensive view.

This whole race continues to puzzle me. Here we have two intelligent, articulate guys, both well informed about city government and both saying mostly the right things, running for a job that probably requires only a small fraction of the skills they have. So why don't I feel better about these choices? And why do so many people I talk to feel the same way?

Puzzled

So the Gazette gives me just enough Sudoku puzzles to get me mildly addicted, then it cuts back to "very easy" and "easy" puzzles with the occasional "medium" thrown in.

The medium puzzles are OK; it takes 15 or 20 minutes for me to do one, and that's about all the time I can spare anyway. But the others are at connect-the-dots level.

What's the Gazoo trying to do: Drive readers to an alternative publication that could provide a more challenging puzzle?

Garver-Tussing again

Just for the record: If someone at the mayoral forum I moderated had asked, "Do you think it's ethical for candidates to encourage their supporters to make donations that violate campaign laws?," I would have thought that was a dumb question, too.

Done and done

Finished my big freelance piece on Brian Schweitzer last night and shipped it off in the e-mail. Hallelujah. It'll be out in December, I think.

Getting the piece done was tough sledding with my schedule, but enjoyable all the same. I wish I could afford to write for a living.

Sub-Standard

From the indispensable Jackie Corr comes word that Matt Vincent, formerly of the Montana Standard's Rat Pack column, has quit the Standard and started a new column for our Butte colleagues, the Butte Weekly. The popular Rat Pack, so Vincent tells us, was canceled by the Standard in part because a couple of advertisers objected to an item. Vincent writes:

Congratulations to those two pompous advertisers and a spineless publisher - you sure showed us. And The Standard also showed everyone that core principles like freedom of the press and censorship are debatable if it means being potentially unpopular or unprofitable in the eyes of a few crybaby advertisers - in this case ones that don't even spend enough money to worry about losing.

Vincent goes on to allege that Standard Editor Gerry O'Brien removed citizen commentary opposing the cancellation from the Standard's website and that the Standard has failed to run some letters to the editor defending the column.

Opinions get more expensive every day.

Readers' choice

Reasonable people can disagree, and so can unreasonable ones. So I would never find fault with the Gazette's Readers' Choice awards. After all, we were told that the response was "wonderful," which must mean that at least somebody responded.

But in all seriousness: Applebee's for Best All-Around Restaurant? Wendy's for Best Hamburger? Let's set aside the possibility that either of these establishments could have won a plurality of votes in these categories. Does even one person seriously think that Applebee's is the best restaurant in Billings? Or what it would say about the state of Billings cuisine if it were?

And I can't imagine that even Wendy's thinks it makes the best hamburgers in town. Heck, Applebee's makes better hamburgers.

Come on, Applebee's and Wendy's fans. If you are out there, make your case.

Never apologize

When we called up City Council candidates this week in a last-minute attempt to round up some political ads, Ron Tussing turned us down. His reason: He said that I am “an apologist” for Al Garver.

I can’t think of anything I wrote in The Outpost that would deserve that label, and I assume he wasn’t referring to this. So it must have to this, in which I labeled a loaded question posed by a Tussing supporter as a “cheap shot” and “dumb.”

Since Tussing ran a couple of 2-by-4 ads before the primary, and since we charge a flat $10 per column inch for political ads, my comment may have cost me $160 or so. That makes it the most expensive opinion in the history of the Montana blogosphere, I’m guessing. Can anybody top it?

I’m working on a freelance piece that, with luck, may pay me 20 cents a word. My three-word “apology” for Garver may have cost me $53.33 a word. If Larry Kralj had to pay those kind of rates each times he gives offense, he would be bankrupt after a paragraph or two.

I wrote the offending lines about 13 hours into a 22-hour day. If I had been a little less tired, I might have been more circumspect. But after considerable reflection and discussion, I haven’t found a reason to doubt my initial judgment about the question. It was dumb. And, since the bill already has been paid: dumb, dumb, dumb.

At any rate, this development has put a serious crimp into the profitability of this blog. The latest P&L:

Expenses
Hosting $0
Compensation to author $0
Total $0

Revenues
Gross income $0
Intemperate opinion penalty ($160)
Total ($160)

Total net income: ($160).

As usual, my business plan appears to have some holes in it.

The oddest thing is that Tussing seems to think I have something against him and his campaign. Nothing could be further from the truth. I need him in the public eye. Until he came along, I was Donald Cyphers’ public enemy No. 1.

Heck, I probably should apologize. But then Garver might pull his ads. I don’t think I can afford any more apologies.

Hockey time

As it happens, I have a fairly substantial number of free hockey tickets for tonight's and Saturday's games. If you want any, please send me an e-mail at editor@billingsnews.com and you're welcome to them.

Sell dirt cheap

The cheapest housing market in Montana? Right here in Billings (thanks to Ed Ulledalen for the link).

Buying local

Heard a radio ad the other day for a fairly prominent Billings business urging residents to buy from Montana-owned stores. Bravo for that.

The thing that rankled was that we have been trying for eight years to get that particular business to buy an ad in this Montana-owned newspaper. Not one nickel has come our way. Maybe the owners should listen to their own ads.

Garver-Tussing update

My entry on the debate Tuesday between Al Garver and Ron Tussing spurred quite a bit of discussion below, much of it on the question of whether Garver improperly funneled campaign funds through his consulting business. I asked Garver about it yesterday, and he said that he incurred some expenses, including printing and miscellanenous items, before his campaign fund had been properly set up. He charged those expenses to his consulting business, then reimbursed the business when his campaign was up and going.

He said he submitted an invoice of the expenses to the commissioner of political practice when he filed his campaign report. That, he said, is why the commissioner dismissed a complaint filed against him without even bothering to notify him: There was simply no problem.

The conversation took place too late in the day for me to verify his account with the office of political practice, but that's his story.

In Tune?

The all-time roster of Tuney Award winners for the best in Billings music is located here. I'm not a huge music fan, but I found the list pretty interesting in not quite definable ways.

I also enjoyed the Tuney Award celebration itself, especially the soulful and rustic performance by the Smoothgrass Boys. Afterward, a few fancy-pants modernists (who shall go here unnamed) complained that the Boys weren't exactly in tune. Harumph.

I grew up in steeped in old-timey gospel music. Give me a few minutes, and I could sing you the first verse of at least 100 gospel songs, without getting a single measure in tune. That ain't the point.

My father, the itinerant preacher, hauled us kids to meetings in South Texas churches so rural that even locals hadn't heard of them: Ezzell, Nursery, Fordtran, Bazette, Prairie Point. The notion that singing should be in tune was not only foreign but mildly suspect, unAmerican and possibly even ungodly. My church permitted no instrumental music, and I remember serious theological disputes over whether the use of a pitch pipe to get the congregants in tune violated the will of the Lord. The pitch pipe backers won out, leading directly to the breakdown of the family, pornography and George W. Bush.

In my later youth, a friend and I shared a Sunday pulpit in Fordtran, Texas, halfway between Victoria and Halletsville. One Sunday after church, we decided to take a ride through the community of Fordtran itself, up the road from the church. We drove around aimlessly for a half-hour or so, then pulled up by a boy in bluejeans who was standing all alone on a road bounded by barbed-wire fences and flat, treeless pasture stretching as far as the eye could see.

"Where's Fordtran?" we asked.

"You're in it," he said.

But when Wesley Stevens led the singing on Sunday mornings, his powerful voice blasted through the open windows and echoed among the pecan trees. We grabbed our songbooks and just held on. And when the whole Stevens clan gathered on Sunday afternoons for a full-fledged singing, the sheer musicality of it was the talk of Victoria County. But was everybody always and exactly in tune, following some dictatorial priniciple laid down in hymnal law? What are you, some kind of communist?

My friend Tony Rohne put it best, years later and in a different context, during choir practice for the Methodist church.

"Those notes," he said, "those notes are just guidelines."

Free at last

A couple of minutes after the Astros hauled in the final fly ball last night to win their first-ever trip to the World Series, my phone rang. I didn't have to check caller ID to know who was calling: It was my brother, checking in from Texas, about the team we began following in 1965, when I was 14 and he was 13.

"It's been 40 years," he said. "Forty years. And now I have seen the Promised Land."

The Astros haunted us for decades. We began listening on the radio when the Astrodome opened, getting hooked while spending spring nights on cots on the screen porch as the Astros played a series of exhibition games against the New York Yankees, then still starring Mickey Mantle.

It wasn't just the baseball. We grew up out in the country in South Texas, and the Astros opened a window on a world that we could only imagine: We followed an ongoing storyline -- mostly futile, sometimes absurd -- night after night, city after city, to St. Louis, San Francisco, New York, Chicago. On West Coast swings, when games started about the time we had to go to bed, we would fall asleep with the radio turned down low in the dark. I remember lying half asleep one night in extra innings as Willie Mays, then still in his prime, fouled off pitch after pitch, waiting for just the right one before driving the ball out of the park to end the game.

Finally seeing the team live was an experience I recall more clearly than any game I have ever seen since. That game was against the Cardinals, too, and the Astros won it, 4-3, when Bob Aspromonte hit a line drive single that split the third-base line with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 10th.

When the Astros finally were on the verge of making the playoffs for the first time, in 1980, they went into LA with a two-game lead on the Dodgers and three to play. The Astros lost the first two, and my phone rang after the final out of the second game. It wasn't my brother but a sportswriting buddy, whose first words were, "This is the suicide hotline. We had a message to call here." But the Astros won that third game (the headline in the Los Angeles Times: "Astros win first prize, two days in Philadelphia; Dodgers win second, winter in LA") and played the best post-season series ever against the Phillies, but the World Series remained elusive.

I tried to swear off the Astros over the years. It was always a lousy match, the Astros with their fake grass and Hawaiian luau jerseys and exploding scoreboard and me railing against aluminum bats and calling for a constitutional amendment to outlaw the designated hitter rule. I tried to adopt the Rangers and the Rockies, but nothing took. For me, it was the Astros or nobody.

And now they're in the World Series. I have seen the Promised Land.

Debate update

I'm just back from the moderating the mayoral debate sponsored by the Descro Neighborhood Task Force. With only two candidates, we experimented with a more interactive format than in most debates. Panelists Jim Van Arsdale and Royal Johnson took turns asking questions in four-minute blocks, which allowed follow-up questions on key issues and made for some interesting exchanges. Don't ask me what anybody actually said: I was too busy monitoring the second hand on my wristwatch.

Johnson asked some questions along these lines, and I was relieved to hear that both candidates seemed to have as much trouble sorting this issue out as I do.

But my impression was that Tussing did somewhat better overall than he did in the six-candidate primary debate. The longer format allowed more of his in-depth knowledge to surface, and his sense of humor showed through (before the debate, he suggested that he and Garver should just give each other's answers, since both had heard them often enough before). The format also forced him to answer some pretty tough questions about his agreement not to work for the city and his probable relations with city staff, and he answered those questions fully and without flinching.

Garver doesn't quite have Tussing's natural ease in front of a crowd, but he did OK, too, and he defended himself well from a cheapshot question posed from the audience by Mary Jo Fox, who essentially accused him of using his consulting business as a front to pump campaign funds into his own pocket. Pretty dumb.

So what difference does it make who wins? Not much, probably. More laughs with Tussing, no doubt, and possibly more public confrontations. That makes good copy. Garver might work harder and push more initiatives and projects -- maybe good, maybe not. Frankly, I'm still not sure how I will vote. Where's Bovee when you need him?

Pot, meet Kettle

From the latest Montana Republican Party e-mail: "Just look at what the Democrats’ tactics have been to this point. Lie, slander, throw mud, and attempt character assassination. That’s all they can do!"

Council update

The meeting with the Billings City Council this evening went about as expected. All the media representatives in attendance (Steve Prosinski and Kristi Angel, Gazette; Blair Martin, KULR-8; Jon Stepanek, Q2) pretty much saw eye to eye: Nobody wanted a media advisory council, and nobody really wanted to negotiate with the city on how to resolve open records disputes.

As presented at the meeting, the city's idea didn't sound quite as bad as in the letter. Apparently, Bozeman has adopted some kind of deal with the media (presumably, the Chronicle) so that disagreements about what is public go directly to district judges without a lot of legal formalities and briefs. The city says this would save money and time.

Perhaps that's so, on certain types of open records requests. But I think we all hoped to hear the city say that it has simply been wrong to fight some of the requests it has fought, and we didn't hear that. In any case, no media organization can make a deal that's binding on others, and even if we all agreed, any member of the public could still challenge the agreement, so I'm not sure what the agreement would solve when substantive legal issues were in dispute.

So I don't know that anything was settled. Vince Ruegamer said that if we don't like the city's ideas for improving things then we should come up with our own. But I agree with what Stepanek said afterward: A bit of an adversarial relationship is not a bad thing, and the existing system works OK, so long as everybody just tries to follow the law.

Q2's attorney, Bill Conner, wondered afterward why Cyphers wasn't there. Probably ought interviewing Tussing, he figured.

Damned to hell

I saw in City Lights that Ed Kemmick got a note from Marvella Orchard along with a copy of the Northern Light. I got a copy of the Northern Light in the mail the other day, too, but I couldn't find a note. Just now, as I was cleaning off my desk, there it was.

Marvella Orchard wrote: "I have read your personal attacks against Mr. Donald Cyphers and your bad words about the Montana News Association. You tried through unethical business tactics to destroy both Mr. Cyphers and Mrs. Kathleen Plumb of the Northern Light. Yet, as you can see, while you are declining, God is blessing and increasing their business and their influence."

I don't know what I did to "destroy" Ms. Plumb. Nothing that I can recall. And it beats me why Cyphers gets a pass for ripping people off while God punishes me for pointing it out.

Maybe I've spent too many Sunday mornings at St. Mattress.

Fighting privacy

Mayor Chuck Tooley has invited me to a workshop Monday on city-media relations. His letter proposes (with some paraphrasing):

1. That when the media request information that may jeopardize individual privacy, all parties will agree to seek and abide by a judge's ruling.

2. The City Council won't act on any such matter until the judge has ruled.

3. The council wants to create a committee of members of the media to review requests that the city considers burdensome and then make recommendations.

These might be matters worthy of serious consideration, but since I have my blogging hat on, I'll just dash off a few leather-headed opinions.

1. I don't want to have anything to do with this. I want the city to grant all legal requests and deny the rest. It's my job to protect privacy when warranted when I decide what to publish, but it's not my job to help the city control access to information.

2. If I were to serve on the committee the mayor has proposed, my recommendation in every case would be that the city comply promptly and fully with both the letter and spirit of the law. Since I'm not the city's legal adviser, my advice would never go beyond that.

3. It doesn't really matter to me whether requests to the city for information are made in good faith or bad, with pure motives or corrupt, in service of the greater good or not. My only concern is whether the requests are legal. If they are, then the information ought to be released.

4. I can't afford lawyers. If the city improperly denies me information, I want to be compensated.

One for Tussing

I don't have a Ron Tussing banner on my blog, but I still think he comes out the big winner in this exchange. Al Garver sounds both petty and naive, a deadly combination in a prospective leader. And Tussing's response was dead on: "It's not my job to give Al Garver ideas."

I'm not backing off from my prediction that Garver will win this, but I'm also not doubling up any bets.

Rack update update update update

My latest piece on the rack situation is here. But actually there has been a later development since I wrote that. It looks as if we will be allowed to leave our papers on Albertsons racks without signing a contract. That's not the same as being free, and it doesn't mean that we can't get kicked off, but it feels like a victory, no matter how small.

Rack update update update

I've finally written my long overdue update to our rack distribution problems. But do you think I will let you read it for free here? No, you'll have to wait until Thursday and read it for free in The Outpost. Short summary: It ain't over yet.

News from Bizarro World

Here's a marriage made in -- well, maybe not exactly heaven -- but somewhere south of there. The Northern Light, a monthly based in Molt, and the Montana News Association, an online publication based in Never Never Land, have joined forces.

The latest issue of the Northern Light includes a letter from MNA Editor Donald Cyphers welcoming Light Editor Kathleen Plumb as an MNA member. He writes, "The Montana News Association, together with our many state, national and International media partnerships, pray for your success in Christ and that you will be abundantly blessed with His direction, protection and peace." Ms. Plumb adds, "May God bless our efforts."

God may stay out of this one. Cyphers, despite his Christian orientation has -- how shall I put it? -- some integrity management issues (see, for example, here, here, here and here.

Plumb, despite her Christian orientation, has -- how shall I put it? -- some reality management issues. See, for example, here and my response here.

So this ought to be interesting. I just hope nobody gets hurt. At least, I hope Ms. Plumb doesn't get hurt. But here's the bright side: The Northern Light's latest issue reprints an MNA piece about Ron Tussing that refers to Ed Kemmick's "lack of any semblance of logic" and his "irresponsible cavalier attitude." Ed's overjoyed response is here.

Doggone it

The last comment on the Tussing Tussle thread below is pretty doggone hilarious. Well, it may not be the last comment by the time you get there, but you'll know you found it when you start chuckling.

And speaking of doggone, Brian Schweitzer dropped a "doggone" into a radio interview with national talk show host Glenn Beck last week. Gov. Schweitzer's discussion of coal liquefaction on Thursday just about charmed the pants off Beck, who was particularly struck by Schweitzer's "doggone" terminology and used it half-a-dozen times in the next 5 or 10 minutes.

After the interview, when the conservative Beck's sidekick reminded him that he wasn't supposed to like Democrats, Beck said, "Well, doggone it, I want to like him."

It all struck me as especially funny because I had just interviewed Schweitzer for an hour, finishing up not more than five minutes before the (apparently pretaped) show aired. I have a freelance story in the works about the governor.

Naturally, I used my interview to get a dig in at the governor -- after he took a dig at me for my lacksadaisical blogging habits. When he asked how The Outpost was doing, I told him it had been a tough year. A year ago in October, I told him, was the best month The Outpost ever had.

"Then you got elected," I said, "and everything went to hell."

Which actually is true. Not that I'm saying the two are connected.