Columns

Capping Montana’s double digit property tax increases on homeowners would seem a no-brainer issue for legislative candidates. Not so. The focus of Republicans and Democrats alike is on protecting the cash flow to government and placating moneyed special interests. The bi-partisan Revenue Interim Committee unanimously opposed Cl-121 the Cap Montana Property Tax initiative. Their members believe the legislature/lobbyist cabal is best left in charge of your money.  Their two main rationales for opposing Cl-121 are that the Montana Constitution is no place for tax policy. In fact, Article 8 Sec. 3 of the Montana Constitution mandates residential taxation at appraised value. Cl-121...

 I wanted a kayak. It was a simple request I repeated repeatedly. I talked about how we would go kayaking this summer on the lake. We’d have a blast making family memories while building our triceps and getting a tan. I communicated as clearly as I could, in English, which is the language they spe...

I had a breakthrough yesterday — and I don’t mean metaphorically. Wars rage, countless humans suffer, the rich get richer, life goes on. I still have my morning coffee. But not yesterday. What happened — about 5 a.m. — was a fleeting insight into life beyond its small certaintie...

The older people in our nursing homes have a problem. The state puts people on Medicaid and promises them services, and then doesn’t pay those who provide these services at a rate that is commensurate to the actual costs. Seventy five percent of those in our nursing home are on Medicaid and down to the...

Salty snacks? Sweet snacks? What’s your choice? I tend to gravitate towards salty. I am not alone in this preference as evidenced by the 36.89 billion-dollar-a-year savory snack industry in the US. Chief among these snacks is the humble potato chip. Scanning through any supermarket, among the plethora ...

Last weekend I dove headfirst down a deep rabbit hole. And, as those of us with rabbit hole experience can attest, once you hop in there is no going back. It started innocently enough, as most rabbit hole ventures do. I recently got a haircut and have decided to embrace my naturally wavy/curly, albeit fin...

Spring is often about the renewal of life. This “spring feeling” is even more robust as the cases of COVID-19 receded, and our lives around Lake County are moving back to their regular pace. Still, as physicians, we cannot forget what we have gone through over the last two years. We have taken ca...

A friend of mine recently lost his grandmother and came to inherit her fancy copper pots and pans. Beautiful, gleaming cookware … once he had cleaned the dust from them, as they’d hung up in her kitchen like a chandelier, unused, since the day they’d been purchased. He shared that his g...

Gray wolves in the Northern Rockies need federal protection to stave off the onslaught of measures the states have passed to kill as many as possible.         Sens. Steve Daines of Montana and Jim Risch of Idaho recently blasted U.S. Interior Sec. Deb Haaland for her opinion piece ques...

Idaho and Montana’s successful recovery of the gray wolf was a significant achievement in species conservation. In less than ten years, not only were biological recovery targets for gray wolves met, but exceeded. Unfortunately, the delisting of the wolf has been mired in politics rather than informed b...