Up and running

We got our servers changed over yesterday, so your old links to the Outpost website should now work again. However, e-mail appears to have been down for a while during the changeover, so if you sent any e-mail to me or the Outpost in the last couple of days, better resend.

Waiting for 358

I had precisely this thought when I was typing the very same phrase while writing this story Wednesday morning. I thought I should try for some fresher way of saying this. Then I thought:

1. It's 6 a.m.

2. I have been working for 20 hours.

3. It's the Fourth of July.

4. I promised the printer the paper would be shipped to Bozeman by 7:30 a.m.

5. If I stay with the code, everyone will know what I am talking about. If I break new ground, I will have to explain what I mean.

6. Who am I to stand in the way of history?

Doomed to repeat

Dave Budge has an interesting post about the importance of history. For some reason, the comments on his site are almost impossibly hard to read, so I will make my own brief comment here:

Sean Hannity's "Man on the Street" interviews this week included an interview with a kindergarten teacher who identified:

1. World War I as the war that won America's independence.

2. Abraham Lincoln as the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Abandon hope.

Fair is fair

The Outpost editor gets a bit long-winded. But I agree with almost every word.

God bless baseball

We spent a classic Fourth of July. For the first seven hours, I exercised my First Amendment right to publish a newspaper. Then I slept for a few hours, and slowly jogged myself awake by watching the Cubs play the Nationals and then watching an exercise in the best of America: an angry documentary called "Who Killed the Electric Car?" that blasted oil companies, car companies and the government in roughly equal measure.

Then we went to the baseball game, sitting near the top, just at the edge of the roof with enough shade and breeze to fend off the summer heat. It was a fine day and a good game, although the local boys didn't show much offense. We finished off the day by watching "1776," a favorite Fourth of July pleasure.

My only gripe was the decision at the ballgame to replace the usual seventh-inning stretch playing of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" with Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A."

People weren't sure how to act. Some treated it like the National Anthem, removing their hats and holding their hands over their hearts. I stood, of course, since it was the seventh-inning stretch, but, sorry, I'm not taking my hat off for Lee Greenwood.

It isn't that I don't much like songs that tell God what to do. I have pretty well gotten over my fundamentalist background, which preached that using God's name to promote secular purposes, even love of country, borders on blasphemy. And it isn't because Greenwood says "ain't." I'm no purist about such matters, but he doesn't sound like the sort of person who drops "ain't" in casual conversation. Why would he adopt it when he's aspiring to a certain grandeur of expression? Is he striving for the common touch, or does he just have a tin ear?

The only reason I really objected was that Greenwood replaced a song that already is one of America's finest patriotic works. Not only does it celebrate America's greatest game ("Take Me Out to the Ballgame") but it also pays homage to most of the best of America:

* Unity ("Take me out to the crowd"),

* Consumerism ("Buy me some"),

* American cuisine ("peanuts and crackerjack"),

* Liberty ("I don't care if I never get back"),

* Freedom of speech ("Let me root, root, root")

* Loyalty ("for the home team")

* Empathy ("If they don't win it's a shame"),

* Pragmatism ("For it's one, two, three strikes you're out") and

* Respect for tradition ("at the old ball game").

Don't tell me that "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" isn't patriotic enough for the Fourth of July. No song describes America better.

Amnesty

Apparently, amnesty is OK for some people.

UPDATE: A commenter suggests I go look at Bill Clinton's pardons. I won't because I don't care about Bill Clinton's pardons, but this is certainly of interest. And so is this. The only president since FDR to commute fewer sentences than George W. Bush was his daddy.

Hall of Fame

Interesting question raised here: Does Craig Biggio belong in the Hall of Fame? Such questions used to be easy for me. If a batter gets 3,000 hits or 500 home runs, or if a a pitcher gets 300 wins, he's in. Biggio is closing in on 3,000 hits, but even a Biggio fan like me has a hard time seeing him in the Hall. As the article notes, the old rules don't quite apply.

UPDATE: The revived What's Right in Montana already is being taken over by lying trolls, which is sad because Eric deserves better. But he's got to lay down the law over there or his blog will be destroyed again.

So I won't comment there, but Eric does bring up an always interesting debate: Should Pete Rose be in the Hall of Fame?

Here I break my usual rules and say no. Rose certainly has the numbers to be there, and I generally don't think what players do off the field should influence their election to the Hall. If it did, then as Kirk Dooley notes in comments below, Ty Cobb would never have made it.

But while Rose's gambling happened off the field, it affected what happened on the field, and he was very much in the game when it all happened. It was way outside the boundaries, and he has earned permanent punishment.

Perhaps even more interesting is the question of what to do with the steroid athletes, especially those who never admit it and against whom it can never be proved. That's a tough call, and I don't have the energy tonight to make it. Game called.

1,000

I'm almost to ...

999

... my 1,000th post. ...

998

... If I try really hard ...

997

... I just might make it.

To sheep, perchance to dream

Headline of the week.

Lange announces

I'll have more later on the Outpost website about Mike Lange's announcement this morning for the U.S. Senate against Max Baucus. Brief highlights:

1. He said he has zero money but expects to start raising campaign funds when the new reporting period opens on Sunday.

2. He works four 10-hour shifts a week as a pipefitter, so he will have three days a week to campaign. Plus, he said, his employer gave him four months off during the session and is likely to be willing to give him more time.

3. On Iraq: "Americans have had enough of it." He called for securing Iraq's borders and seeking international help to restore and maintain order.

4. He called for reforms of NAFTA and other trade agreements and of the No Child Left Behind act.

5. His best answer, I thought, was on the question of how he can get by the notoriety he acquired during the legislative session. He didn't sound very sorry for what he said about Gov. Brian Schweitzer, but he continued to express regret for the words he used to say them. He called his tirade a "mulligan," one that Republicans will forgive him but one that cannot be repeated.

To speak or not to speak

Interesting post at Electric City Weblog on whether the Great Falls City Commission can legally order someone removed for exceeding the three-minute time limit for public comments.

The issue may be even larger than the post indicates. At a free information seminar I attended with John Shontz, who used to be the lawyer for the Montana Newspaper Association, he raised doubts that any speaker time limit is permissible in Montana, given the state's guarantees of the public's right to participate in making decisions.

If somebody pushed it, city council meetings might come to resemble the old Crow Tribal Council meetings, where people spoke for as long as they felt moved to do so.

Lange for Senate

Mike Lange has called a press conference for tomorrow morning to announce his run for Congress.

The link

The link seems to be down to the new Outpost website. Here it is.

There is some good stuff in this week's issue, including Clawson's column about John Bohlinger, some good stories by T.J. Gilles on the housing situation in Billings and Paul Driscoll's sharp new cartoon. Give it a look.

Stubborn Cal

It could be that an argument can be made against allowing consumers, rather than cable companies, to decide what channels should be allowed into their homes, but Cal Thomas can't seem to think of one.

I mulled over his attempts at an argument this morning while reading the Gazette as I nodded off to sleep after putting another Outpost to bed. That's a harsh rule of journalism: The paper always goes to bed before the editor does. So I was about 80 percent asleep while trying to decipher his column, but his arguments appear to be these:

1. If people could choose which channels to subscribe to, they would have to make hard decisions. Cable providers should protect them from those decisions.

2. If people could make their own cable choices, they would actually have less freedom to choose than if the choices were restricted to a limited menu offered by the cable companies.

3. A la carte cable options would be bad for business because people might not make the choices that businesses want them to make.

4. Most American households don't have children under age 18. It isn't clear to me what this has to do with anything, but it seems to be important to Cal.

5. If people could choose their own channels, they might choose not to subscribe to Fox News or religious networks. Then what would the world come to?

6. People would have to pay as much to get the 20 channels they wanted as they now do to get 150 channels they never watch. So I could get, say, the English language version of Al Jazeera, a couple of German stations, a sports channel or two, C-SPAN and a few movie channels for the same price as I now pay to get the Shopping Network and a hundred or so variations on old history documentaries, recycled sitcoms and tips on cooking and home renovations. That would be awful.

7. The whole thing is a plot by the government to control our lives and limit our information choices. How allowing people to make their own choices expands the power of government is another one of those sweet mysteries, penetrable to Cal Thomas but cloaked in mist for the rest of us.

My kind of place

I have heard several people who have never visited 12th Planet say, "It's not my kind of place." That's sort of how I felt, but as a highly trained professional journalist, I try not to let my biases influence my perceptions, so I have steadfastly withheld judgment.

Last night I actually went into 12th Planet for the first time, thanks to an invitation from Connoisseur Media, which was celebrating its first anniversary in Billings. It was fairly impressive: colorful lights, multi-media screens, a three-level layout with bar and stage. A bit classy for the likes of me, but there's no reason why I shouldn't step up in class in my old age.

So I wandered over to the bar to cash in one of my free drink tickets for a beer. By my count, the bar had 18 beer spigots. Fifteen of them were for Bud or Bud Light. One was for Miller Lite, one for Coors Light and one lonely tap for Blue Moon.

I thought, "This is not my kind of place."

Promotional bust

The 5:01 blog says that last weekend's Crash Boom Bang concert apparently was a bust. Some commenters blame poor promotion, a motion I second. I heard about it only in passing and spent half an hour late last Tuesday on the internet trying to track down information. I found only a tiny, nearly unreadable, copy of a poster on a MySpace site. And the internet, apparently, is the only place the concert was promoted.

It continues to amaze me how clueless some concert promoters are. You'd think that anybody who has ever even stood within 25 feet of Tim Goodridge would know better.

Defunding Cheney

The proposal to strip funding from Dick Cheney's office may be a political gimmick, but the graphic makes it all worthwhile.