Archives Index, 2019, February
28 February 2019 — 0811 mst
Anti-vaccination movement is dangerous and selfish
First published 31 January 2015
Growing up in the Fifties, I noticed classmates disappearing for weeks and months. Steel braces supported the withered legs of many who returned. Some never returned. All had contracted polio, the devastating disease that put Franklin Roosevelt in a wheelchair.
26 February 2019 — 0521 mst
Raw milk legalization bill fails as 49 Republican
legislators embrace science based public health policy
Rep. Walt Sales attempt to legalize some sales of raw milk in Montana failed when the MT House rejected HB-490 yesterday, 35–65. That was a surprise, as was the distribution of votes.
Democrats favored the bill 26–16. But only nine Republicans supported the bill while 49 opposed it.
Two Flathead representatives, Democrat Dave Fern and Republican Frank Garner, voted for the bill. Democrat Zac Perry voted against the bill, as did Republicans Matt Regier, Carl Glimm, John Fuller, David Dunn, Mark Noland, Derek Skees, and Polson based Greg Hertz (his district is part of SD-6, which includes southwest Kalispell).
25 February 2019 — 1309 mst
Why are these Democratic legislators rejecting science based
public health policy and supporting raw milk legalization?
House Bill 490, introduced by Rep. Walt Sales (R-Manhatten, HD-69). It would legalize certain sales of raw milk in Montana, and is scheduled for its second reading in the MT House this afternoon. The bill itself admits that raw (unpasteurized) milk is not a healthy fluid:
Section 1. (12) A warning placard must be posted in a conspicuous place on a licensee’s premises. The warning placard must be at least 1 foot by 2 feet and must state in large, clear print: “Research has found raw milk from cows, goats, and sheep can transmit life-threatening bacterial infections. Physicians advise elderly and immunocompromised individuals, pregnant women, infants, and children to consume only pasteurized milk, cheese, and other milk products.” [Highlighting added by FM.]
That subsection is both accurate in what it says, and dishonest by omission.
23 February 2019 — 0214 mst
Farewell beloved cordless drill
Cordless power tools are among humankind’s noblest inventions. With them, do-it-yourselfers can make mistakes, and butcher wood, faster and farther from the electrical grid than ever before. I’ve owned several over the years — and now I own another.
It’s not that I’m to cordless drills as Imelda Marcos was to shoes. It’s that rechargeable batteries last years, but eventually refuse to take a charge — and by the time they go flat as stale beer, replacement batteries are no longer available.
That was my situation earlier this week when my small but powerful enough 12-volt Ryobi drill, which fit my hand perfectly, started losing steam…
21 February 2019 — 1617 mst
Few phrases lift a red flag higher than “good ole boy”
An aunt who lived in Arkansas bristled whenever one of her family’s menfolk heaped high praise on a “good ole boy,” a class of southerner she considered more lowdown than grifters, white trash, and convicts. Were she still alive, the Washington Post’s report of the tainted election in North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District would not surprise her, and her assessments of Leslie McCrae Dowless, and possibly Mark Harris, probably would set asbestos afire.
20 February 2019 — 0748 mst
The Old Men and the Presidency
Bernie Sanders, now 77 years old, is running for President again. Although hale, he’s not immortal. On average, a man his age (born 8 September 1941) can expect to live another ten years, according to the online life expectancy calculator at Social Security’s website. As he enters his eighties, the probability of being weakened by various infirmities, such as cognitive decline, increases significantly.
19 February 2019 — 0704 mst
Deep Elem Blues, Dirt Farmer style
Levon Helm’s Dirt Farmer Quartet performing the Deep Elem Blues in 2011, with Larry Campbell singing lead and playing lead guitar. Campbell, a master instrumentalist, plays a wicked hoe down fiddle.
18 February 2019 — 1743 mst
President Trump’s net approval rating in Montana
remains above water (but only by a nose)
Preface. Happy Washington’s Birthday, everyone. One of our nation’s most enduring beliefs is that after six-year-old George chopped down his father’s cherry tree, he forthrightly confessed to his misdeed, telling his father “I cannot tell a lie.” It’s a wonderful story, and probably a myth concocted by Parson Mason Locke Weems as a character building story with considerable moral clout. Weems did not address the wisdom of giving a six-year-old a hatchet.
The subject of my post today, President Donald Trump, undoubtedly would have chopped down his father’s cherry tree, then shamelessly asserted that the hatchet was wielded by Mexicans who were in our nation illegally, having crossed the border in the Sonoran Desert smuggling drugs. Unlike Washington, Trump can tell a lie, does tell lies, and wouldn’t know the truth if it shook him by the hand. One can only wonder how Pastor Weems, were he alive today, would try to spin a morality tale about our Mendacitor in Chief, whose winning the Presidency proves that not being able to tell the truth doesn’t prevent a man from succeeding in life.
14 February 2019 — 1138 mst
Opposition to Indigenous Peoples’ Day is not proof of racism
Growing up in northern Minnesota, where many Scandinavians settled, there was not, I learned, unanimous support for the proposition that Christopher Columbus discovered America. Some believed that distinction belonged to a Viking. Eric the Red and Leif Erickson were the names I recall as most frequently mentioned. Officially, of course, we celebrated Columbus Day, a tradition, according to the Smithsonian, dating back to 1792:
The first documented observance of Columbus Day in the United States took place in New York City in 1792, on the 300th anniversary of Columbus’s landfall in the Western Hemisphere. The holiday originated as an annual celebration of Italian–American heritage in San Francisco in 1869. In 1934, at the request of the Knights of Columbus and New York City’s Italian community, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared the first national observance of Columbus Day. President Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress made October 12 a national holiday in 1937. In 1972 President Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making the official date of the holiday the second Monday in October.
11 February 2019 — 1454 mst
Should Montana be in the same time zone as Alabama?
A Great Falls Republican, Rep. Lola Sheldon-Galloway (HD-22), wants to put that question to Montana’s voters on 3 November 2020. She’s introduced HB-430, a legislative referendum that, if approved by the voters, and then by the U.S. Department of Transportation or Congress, would transfer Montana from the Mountain to the Central Time Zone.
Update, 12 February. HB-430 will be heard by the MT House’s state administration committee on 19 February beginning at 0900 in Room 455.
The effect would be year-long Daylight Saving Time. Every Montanan would be guaranteed an extra hour of daylight in the evening or late afternoon, and forever spared the indignity of having to reset clocks twice a year. On Christmas Eve, 1800 PST in Seattle would be 2000 CST in Kalispell, 380 crow miles due east, and 2000 CST in Birmingham, another 1,700 or so crow miles to the southeast. At the northern Idaho-Montana border, the time zone would jump from Pacific to Central.
10 February 2019 — 1949 mst
Is Amy Klobuchar Minnesota Not-So-Nice?
Speaking at a cold Minneapolis, MN, river park as snow fell, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a centrist Democrat, and former prosecutor and corporate lawyer, today announced she’s running for President. The Minnesota Post has outstanding coverage of the event and the candidate, whose speech contained flashes of eloquence as well as cliches about building bridges.
She’s not riding high in the polls. Hamline University political scientist David Schultz, writing in the MN Post, predicts she’ll face “enormous obstacles:”
9 February 2019 — 2325 mst
Elizabeth Warren kicks off her campaign for President
from the site of the legendary Bread and Roses Strike
No surprise here. At 2018’s end, the Democrat from Massachusetts announced she’d formed an exploratory committee. Today, in Lawrence, MA, an ethnically diverse erstwhile textile town whose population peaked in 1920, she made her candidacy official (campaign website) at Everett Mills, the former cotton mill where Robert Frost once worked and the legendary IWW led Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 occurred. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, RFK’s grandson, introduced her. That powerful endorsement reminds one that eleven years ago, Sen. Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton.
According to Politico, she came out swinging:
6 February 2019 — 1109 mst
Trump and Abrams spoke at a tenth grade level
I didn’t watch the speeches live, but I did download and read the transcripts (as prepared for delivery), and watched a delayed broadcast of Abrams’ speech. Trump’s address contained 5,190 words, 297 sentences, and was written at a 9.9 Flesch-Kincaid grade level. Abrams’ response employed 1,530 words, 86 sentences, and was written at a 9.7 Flesch-Kincaid grade level. That’s an appropriate reading ease level for a speech directed primarily at voting age adults.
5 February 2019 — 1402 mst
Flathead Memo is standing down today
FM’s editor and janitor is attending to personal exigencies today. As part of a strategy for keeping his blood pressure down, he will not be watching the live broadcast of the State of the Union spectacle tonight, or the Democrats’ response to it, but will review the transcripts of the events, may watch videos of the speeches later tonight, and probably will post some analysis tomorrow.
4 February 2019 — 1656 mst
Only five Republicans voted against granting
a minority a legislative veto on tax increases
Today the MT House voted 53–46 to approve HB-148, Rep. Forrest Mandeville’s bill to require a two-thirds majority in each legislative chamber to increase a tax or to create a new tax. But only a simple majority would be required for lowering a tax.
No Democrat voted for the bill. Five Republicans voted against it:
4 February 2019 — 0318 mst
Stacy Abrams, Francis Fukuyama, and identity politics
Stacy Abrams, who lost Georgia’s gubernatorial election last year, will deliver the Democratic Party’s response to President Trump’s state of the union address tomorrow night. Some Democrats see her as a candidate who could beat Republican Sen. David Perdue, who is up for re-election in 2020. That may be why she’s getting the response gig.
Perhaps she’ll do well, but most SOTU responses fall flat. The last effective Democratic response was delivered in 2007 by Jim Webb, who had just been elected to the Senate from Virginia. A well regarded novelist and writer, he reportedly tore up the string of cliches speech the Democratic National Committee drafted for him and instead wrote his own remarks.
2 February 2019 — 1104 mst
Like Al Franken, Ralph Northam is getting
the bum’s rush from his fellow Democrats
Updated. It doesn’t take much to whip Democrats into a political lynch mob these days. Al Franken (D-MN) was hounded out of the U.S. Senate after he was accused of sexual harassment, and before his case was heard by the Senate’s ethics committee.
Now it’s Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s turn. As reported by the Washington Post and other news sources, Northam’s page in his medical school’s yearbook from 1984 displays a photograph of someone in blackface, and someone wearing a Klu Klux Klan robe and hood. The initial consensus was that one person in the photograph is Northam, although this afternoon he disputed that, while admitting that he appeared in blackface during a Michael Jackson lookalike contest. Democrats are demanding that he resign immediately.
1 February 2019 — 1652 mst
HB-86 approved by MT House, but opposition
doubled from second to third readings
It’s an old script. Up for re-election, or running for a higher office, politicians, especially prosecutors, attorney generals, and county sheriffs, declare war on vices such as prostitution, vagrancy, drug addiction (which I consider a disease, not a vice), and panhandling.
That’s Montana Attorney General Tim Fox’s campaign script for his run for governor in 2020. His vice of choice? “Substance abuse,” a catch all term that includes drug addiction. His choice of tool to forge his reputation as a life saving crusader is House Bill 86, which would handcuff physicians by prohibiting them from writing first time prescriptions for acute pain for more than seven days for “opioid-naive” patients.