Sanders County Ledger - Your Best Source For Sanders County News

I could write about coronavirus about which I know little, or politics about which I know too much, or the weather about which you know as much as I do, but they are all depressing topics so I am...

It was in 1991, I think, when I was a member of the Montana House of Representatives, there was a bill to outlaw capital punishment. One of the proponents made a very thought-provoking argument for th...

“As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be m...

Well, it has come to this; President Trump has been impeached by the House of Representatives and this week the trial is taking place that will determine whether he stays on as president or leaves in...

As you know, the impartiality of decisions and observations of members of the U.S. intelligence agencies, such as the FBI, have been questioned because members of those agencies have privately...

A Washington state representative, Matt Shea, a Republican representing Spokane Valley, has been accused of acts of domestic terrorism by an independent investigative report commissioned by the...

How can two different people have totally opposite opinions on the same thing? Well, it’s pretty easy, as we can see in the impeachment hearings going on in Congress. You are not going to be able t...

There was once a colorful character named Bat O’Callahan who lived near my home town of Trout Creek, Montana. He and his wife Jessie worked on the Silver Creek Ranch in Riley, Oregon, in the 1950s. J...

Of all the petty annoyances in life, few things seem to set people to fuming and fussing more than having to adjust their lives to the change from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time and...

The worst thing about a Congressional closed-door hearing is that the opposition does not get any press when they posture and pontificate on the unfairness of whatever. The best thing about...

Maybe the most interesting thing about Columbus’s “discovery” of America was that he thought he had landed in India, which was where he was headed when he began his trip in 1492. The Italian explo...

“Why do men fight who were born to be brothers?” was the question posed by Confederate General James Longstreet after the American Civil War. During that war, the day after Confederate General Rob...

It was fascinating last week to watch as British legislators did what American legislators would be wise to do; stand up for principle. Boris Johnson had just become the British Prime Minister. Known...

“Any company that has a union probably deserves one.” “We didn’t need a union, Millar took care of us.” It seems almost a universal truth that we forget the reasons that caused great changes i...

Years ago, when I was on the board of directors of my local hospital, I attended a seminar on the duties and responsibilities of a board member. One speaker pointed out that the board member’s l...

When a large company decides to expand or move its headquarters it takes many factors into consideration; the labor market, transportation, the “amenities,” which means that there are things that mak...

A crowd chants “send her back” referring to a United States congresswoman. They reason that because she is an immigrant and she criticizes the status quo, she is un-American. If those are the two crit...

Representative Justin Amash, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, may be the most principled man in American politics. Unfortunately, he is most likely going to wind up in the ash bin of principled...

An inflammatory statement by an Oregon state senator has encouraged a militia organization to insert itself in a situation where they are neither needed nor wanted. This is of importance to Montanans...

Ideological purity and consistency of opinion over time are two standards to which many Americans want to hold their political candidates. People want to elect candidates who think about things the...

There is concern among many conservatives about the “liberal bias” of the “mainstream media” which refers to the more widely circulated print and electronic media. If you substituted the word “establ...

I suppose I shouldn’t be any more surprised than most taxpaying Americans to discover that I paid more in income taxes in 2018 than the behemoth retailer Amazon.com; but then I didn’t have a net pro...

In the early 1990s I was at a county fair when an elderly fellow — a WW II veteran and a Democrat — rushed up to me and said, “Jim, come here, you’ve got to see this!” and he hurried me to a militar...

It was January 1991. I was a second term legislator who, for a reason I can’t remember, wanted to take on a leadership role and sought and won the position of running the first meeting of the House De...

I was thinking this morning of the shrill sounds, threats and recriminations coming out of our nation’s capital. For some reason, perhaps because of the contrast, it reminded me of a meeting that o...