This new website, U.S. Politics Today, which bills itself as a nonpartisan news service for political professionals, includes a roundup of Montana political news.

A former Bozeman resident has put together an entire calendar of items culled from Bozeman Daily Chronicle police reports.
Sample entry: "Aug. 22: A man in a chicken suit and a man in a cow suit were reportedly wandering around a parking lot on South 11th Avenue at 12:45 a.m. The man in the cow suit was allegedly wearing an Afro wig."

OK, and one more: "Aug. 26: A caller said he took a TV to a repair shop in August. When he went to pick it up on Tuesday, the shop was gone."

Romanesko has a roundup of lame story ideas editors have pitched to reporters. For the laugh of the day, scroll down three or four items to the one that begins "Perfect answer to toilet paper inquiry."

U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., is taking a trip to Iraq with five other House members.

According to a news release: "The delegation will visit with American troops presently deployed overseas, and also meet with government leaders in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The Department of Defense has recommended that, due to security considerations, the delegation avoid disclosing specific details of the trip.

"However, Rehberg was able to disclose that the delegation will assess the progress being made in the rebuilding and stabilization efforts, including agriculture operations, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

"'This trip will provide us with a good opportunity to see first-hand the great progress our troops are making toward protecting America from terrorism by stabilizing and rebuilding these countries,' Rehberg said. 'And I especially look forward to visiting with our own soldiers deployed from Montana.'”

From the tone of the news release, it sounds like he's already completed the assessment. Here's hoping no facts get in the way of his conclusions.

For what it's worth, people who have responded to the Outpost online poll favor the Democrats' energy plan over the Republican plan.

Interesting discussion going on below about bad check writers. But bad checks are just a tiny fraction of the whole bad debt problem. Debtors who simply refuse to pay their bills rather than write bad checks to cover them are protected from public exposure by a raft of laws that don't protect bad check writers.

Until I went into business for myself, I never imagined how many people there are who just flat refuse to pay -- from a $5 classified ad to a $500 full page. They ignore letters, won't return phone calls, avoid process servers and skip court dates. And there's very little businesses can do to expose them. Obviously, it isn't just an Outpost problem: Just look at court dockets. Bad debt is what keeps the court system at work.

It's especially tough on businesses like ours that have to give credit and can't repossess advertising once it has appeared in the paper. I've been tempted to run anti-ads for deadbeats, something along the lines of "Previous claims of superior quality and service by Thus & So Inc. are hereby retracted. The Outpost regrets any inconvenience to customers who may have been misled by these claims."

Obviously, some people intend to pay their bills and just get in over their heads. Others, clearly, never intend to pay. The mystery to me is what goes on inside their heads. Morally, I have trouble seeing much distinction between someone who breaks into my store and steals cash from the till and someone who reneges on a promise to pay for services. Yet there are far more deadbeats than burglars. I wonder what accounts for the difference? Cowardice? Laziness? Or is there a moral distinction that I'm not getting?

I keep more and more "bad check writer" signs around town, with a list of offenders underneath. Why so specialized? How about a "bad person" list? My list would start with a few choice names, for reasons that are none of your business. But I guess that undercuts the whole project.

Wanna find out what MSU-Bozeman will be like in five years? Just go here.

Gary Marbut, political activist and head of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, has written a book called "Gun Laws of Montana." Advance praise comes from Secretary of State Bob Brown and University of Montana law professor Rob Natelson, among others. "On the whole, Montana's gun laws are the freest in the United States, and they thus set an example for freedom-loving people everywhere in the world," David Kopel says in the foreward.

Amazing stat: Marbut says, "We estimate that between 90% and 95% of Montana homes contain firearms, and that the average number of guns in each Montana gun-owning household is 27 (yes, you read that correctly)."

And I have only one. Does that mean somebody else out there has 53 to balance me out?

George Ochenski, over at the Missoula Independent, says that "George W. Bush broke new low ground for a president of the United States by intentionally lying to the national press about spending Thanksgiving at his Texas ranch." Pare away Ochenski's corrosive rhetoric and there's still a good question left: Does the president have a right to lie? We all sort of take it for granted that presidents do lie -- my favorite may have been the senior Bush's assertion that his nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court had nothing to do with race. It was an almost obligatory lie, and we all understood that he was lying, and no particular repercussions followed. Bush the Younger's Thanksgiving lie would seem to be even more defensible since it was for security rather than political reasons.

But can a good Christian lie with honor even under these circumstances? I doubt it. It's a bit like cursing: Sean Hannity took John Kerry to task yesterday for saying "fucked" in Rolling Stone, but Hannity was merely amused when Bush called a New York Times reporter an "asshole" back during the campaign. In my realm of Christian orthodoxy, the words carry roughly the same weight, and the onus on Bush to be behave would appear to be greater because he is so public a believer.

By the way (for Ed's benefit, all use of BTW has been suspended) Kerry was featured on "Unfinished Symphony," a superb documentary about Vietnam Veterans Against the War that aired on one of the independent film channels last night. Too bad that younger Kerry isn't running for president: He was eloquent, thoughtful, sincere. The compromises of political life must have worn him down, just as they wear down the president.

Ken Miller, the Republican gubernatorial candidate from Laurel, says in a news release that one of his first acts of Governor would be an executive order requiring that no further roads on state public lands will be closed without a review by the governor's office.

"In addition Ken Miller said that he would request from Federal Land managers that the Governor be given the opportunity to review all planned road closures on Federal Lands and notification when a road is closed. 'Faceless Bureaucrats in D.C. may want to close our roads, but as Governor I'll fight to keep them open,' Miller said."

A fellow Democratic senator says "shame, shame, shame" on Max Baucus for caving in to demands by pharmaceutical companies that the government be prohibited from negotiating lower drug prices for senior citizens. Thanks to Jackie Corr for the link.

This is a couple of days late, but I haven't seen it elsewhere: Gubernatorial candidate Pat Davison has written a letter to opponent and Secretary of State Bob Brown criticizing him for running TV ads that he says blur the line between political ads and public service announcements.

"I am requesting that you immediately terminate the use of taxpayer dollars for advertising promoting you and your candidacy for Governor and that you reimburse the taxpayers from your campaign for the funds that have already been spent on this advertising campaign," Davison wrote.

Anybody seen the ads? I haven't, but apparently they are about provisions of the Help America Vote Act. A similar ad ran in newspapers statewide, including the Outpost. According to Davison, Brown is spending $24,000 in state money on the ads, including $10,000 at KTVQ in Billings.

Provisions of the new act include a requirement that voters identify themselves at the polls. That's probably all Brown intended to do in the ads: Show us his I.D.

The Montana GOP E-brief is remarkably candid about the true purpose of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act: "The legislation is a step in the right direction toward increasing the timber industry’s ability to harvest off of federal land by limiting legal abuse from environmental groups."

When President Bush signed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act into law on Wednesday, a news release said that Rep. Denny Rehberg called the "landmark legislation a 'literal breath of fresh air.'" That may be the only fresh air this bill generates.

My brother the English teacher collects what he call "literallies" from student papers and newspapers and occasionally sends them along to me. My two favorites, of those I recall, were one about the battleship gun crew that "literally stuck to its guns" and one about two track stars who raced down the homestretch "literally joined at the hip." Naturally, I sent my brother a personal favorite from the Gazette by a letter writer who said a public official who had "literally been caught with his proverbial pants down."

Shouldn't proverbs wear suspenders?

This Helena letter writer accuses Hillary Clinton of treason for comments she made during her visit to Iraq.

If I were still a soldier, I can't imagine a circumstance under which I would want my elected representatives to express anything other than their honest opinions about the situation troops were in. Those folks overseas aren't children, and they aren't just soldiers. They also are citizens and voters. They not only should be up on the public debate, they should be helping to shape it.

Besides, as one TV commentator pointed out, soldiers in Iraq aren't exactly marching across the Russian steppes with Napoleon. They are watching cable news and reading newspapers. A senator who told the troops one thing and the folks back home something else would be quickly exposed as a fraud.

By the way, I couldn't find any other source for the quote the letter writer used that claimed the U.S. would lose the war. Even Hillary's harshest web critics didn't fire off that particular piece of ammunition. Probably, it's a dud.

Sorry to have been out of touch. Nothing has been holding me back but a typical, life-altering, small-business crisis at The Outpost. But I can't let Joseph Perkins' column, which ran in today's Gazette, pass without comment. Once again, Perkins has provided clear and convincing evidence that he is the dumbest nationally syndicated columnist in the business today.

He starts this way:

'War," wrote John Stuart Mill, one of the 19th century's greatest thinkers, "is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
"The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight," Mill continued, "is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
That brings to mind the anti-war crowd – those stumping for the Democratic presidential nomination, those opining on the nation's liberal editorial pages, and those protesting on the streets of the nation's capital and other cities throughout the fair land.
They are, in Mill's words, miserable creatures. They think nothing is worth war, not even the mass murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow countrymen (and women and children) on Sept. 11, 2001.

But what those in the "anti-war" crowd, including Democratic presidential candidates, who supported the war in Afghanistan but opposed the war in Iraq? Can they have fallen so rapidly into a "decayed and degraded state"?

They have nothing for which they are willing to fight, not even to prevent a madman like Saddam Hussein from developing or acquiring chemical, biological or nuclear weapons with which he could one day threaten the United States or her allies.

Notice how rapidly the threat recedes into the future. By this standard of waging war, we could invade Switzerland.

Those in the anti-war crowd perfunctorily profess their support for American military personnel fighting on their unworthy behalf in Iraq. Yet, they derive a certain perverse satisfaction, it seems, with every fresh news report of a truck bombing, a helicopter crash, a suicide attack.

Just this morning driving to work I heard a report of another American soldier dead. I am a card-carrying member of this anti-war crowd, but I felt no satisfaction, perverse or otherwise. Just sad, and a bit angry.

The United States suffered more than 58,000 fatalities in Vietnam, some 47,369 of which were combat-related. That's nearly 1,500 percent more fatalities than the United States has suffered in Iraq.

And it took only 10 years! Let's see, 81 American soldiers died in Iraq in November. At that rate, it'll take 59 years to catch up.

The reality is, more Americans have been killed in Los Angeles alone this year than have been killed in Iraq.

Of course, millions of people live in Los Angeles. We have about 130,000 troops in Iraq. A more useful comparison would be to imagine that 441 murders had taken place in Yellowstone County since last spring. That would be considered a nightmarish disaster -- and those are the odds our troops are up against. Casualties are remarkably low by combat standards, but Iraq ain't LA.

The opposition to the war in Iraq is less about principle – on the parts of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, the liberal opinion page writers, the anti-war street protesters – than it is about politics. For the politicos and journalistas and activists who were bitter about the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, who have never stopped hating George W. Bush, are the same miserable creatures who are so loudly decrying the postwar campaign in Iraq.

It's always helpful when a guy like Perkins lets us know what we really think. I would have sworn it was about principle. What about those of us who think the 2000 election was just the luck of the draw and who have never gotten around to even starting to hate George Bush? How miserable are we?

They almost don't care if the postwar reconstruction in Iraq fails, if Saddam returns to power, if the Iraqi people are once again subject to his genocidal rule, so long as they can play the Iraq card against Bush.

They almost don't care? Translation: They do care.

Indeed, just last week, a secret strategy memo, prepared by Democratic staff on the supposedly nonpartisan Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, suggested that Democrats ought to launch an investigation of the White House next year to have maximum impact on the presidential election.

The memo is here. Judge for yourself.

Then there are the Bush-hating opinion writers – and they know who they are – who insinuate that the commander in chief has somehow lost the peace in Iraq because he supposedly neglected to consider an "exit strategy."

Notice that Perkins doesn't suggest that there actually was, or is, an exit strategy. He just objects to the notion that there might not have been one. Our nation's stumbles in the early days of the post-World War II occupation are often cited in defense of what's happening now in Iraq. But the situations are wildly different. Nobody on Dec. 6, 1941, was thinking about an exit strategy in Berlin. On March 18, 2003, with the war on Iraq imminent -- and discretionary -- and with military victory a foregone conclusion, post-war strategy should have been the top priority.

The opponents of the Iraq war, the knee-jerk critics of the postwar reconstruction, reveal the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling of which Mill wrote nearly two centuries ago.
Their opposition, their criticism is fueled not so much by reason, but by hatred – toward their president or toward their country.

And what fuels Perkins? It sure ain't reason.

Subject line on the e-mail I will have the most difficulty not reading this week: "European girls really know how to f"

Secretary of State Bob Brown has responded to rumors that Rob Natelson may be planning to run for governor again, getting into lobbying or launching a policy institute. (For more on Natelson's plans, see Brad Molnar's column in the Dec. 4 Outpost -- not yet available in stores).

Brown said he welcomed Natelson's participation in any capacity. "What would a race for governor be like without Rob Natelson?" Brown said in a news release. Natelson ran against Marc Racicot in 1996 and against Judy Martz in 2000.

Brown disputed a recent claim attributed to Natelson that Brown "has already called for tax increases." Brown said he declined to take a no-new-taxes pledge, which is a different animal. But Brown did say here that he would support a small tax increase to raise teachers' pay.

For what it's worth, Natelson's and Martz's appearances on Yellowstone Public Radio's "Home Ground" before the 2000 primary constituted one of the most lopsided political exchanges I've ever heard. He smoked her on the issues, but, of course couldn't get elected. I still don't think he can, although I have a lot of respect for Natelson. He's the real deal, a genuine conservative who probably isn't well enough plugged into the political machinery to get past a primary.

Molnar, another real-deal conservative, raises an interesting question: If Natelson doesn't run, who will get his base? Beats me. I can't see it going to Brown or Davison, and it's not clear yet whether Miller or Keating can raise enough money to make a serious run. It didn't seem outlandish to me that some of Natelson's base could go to Schweitzer, if Schweitzer can dodge the big-spender label that follows Democrats around.

Subject line on the e-mail I am least likely to read this week: "There is 'Life After Hair Color.'"