Every little once in a while I am reminded that laws are created to protect us from ourselves, or more particularly from our faulty memories, or from forgetting history. For instance, years ago we...

I give an unapologetic sigh of relief that the Legislature’s attempts to send harmful—in my view—amendments to the Montana Constitution to the voters are in trouble. Before that became appar...

You will hear people say that we need to protect our “institutions” in America. What on earth does that mean? In a nutshell, an institution is words, an idea, not anything you can touch or feel, excep...

The state of Connecticut is thinking of exonerating people it convicted of witchcraft in the mid-1600s. They would be following the lead of noble Massachusetts which a year ago exonerated the last of...

In a Montana Viewpoint© article a month ago called “Marketing Anger”, I wrote about the prevalence of anger as an economic force as well as a political force, saying: ”There is also the economic aspec...

A friend of mine once told me how he had become a drunk. After taking his first drink he said, “I began to feel so good, so happy, so powerful that I wanted to feel—even better!” Substitute polit...

I watch people driving down the highways in $80,000 pickups towing $200,000 campers (which are bigger than a lot of people’s homes, but then, so are some of the pickups) and then a boat is being t...

The United States House of Representatives will be doing exhaustive (and exhausting) investigating into many things like Hunter Biden, Jill Biden, President Biden, and Major Biden (the Biden’s dog, w...

When Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of the United States Congress, commentator Tucker Carlson was outraged, purely outraged. “As far as we know, no one’s ever add...

I started out to write about this being a good time of year to be helpful to others and that began to sound so preachy and goody-two-shoes that I thought that maybe I should just thank some people...

There was a time that some look back at wistfully when politics was not so mean, and people of different parties mostly got along. That began changing in the late 1970s when a young candidate for...

This is the story — correct that — legend, of a man named Les Webber who ranched and caroused in and around the town of Plains, Montana. When you are leaving Plains, headed to Missoula, you might not...

I am writing this column before the election, and you are reading it after the election, and here’s my prediction; the losers will be unhappy, and the winners will be happy. I also predict that t...

How would you feel if you found that you and your water rights were the victim of a “Fraudulently derived, overreaching, unconstitutional water compact”? Pretty heated, I would guess, and rightly so...

I had a neighbor once who spent several days in the county jail because he wouldn’t make his mortgage payments. He felt he had a constitutional right to not pay them because the money wasn’t bac...

I’ve got to hand it to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for sharing the wealth of the immigrant crisis with Massachusetts, I’m just not sure what to hand him. A couple of weeks ago DeSantis had a couple...

Irate Americans are arming themselves and heading to library board meetings to defend children against evil by insisting that the library remove books that offend society. Notice I did not say trying...

The story of America is the story of the individual and the protection of the individual from government, from the powerful, from those who “know better” than we do. Our country was shaped by tho...

Of all the horrors Republicans see in the Democrats’ grossly misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act,” the biggest bogeyman is that the Internal Revenue Service is going to get funding to hire new emplo...

On election day, assuming you can still bring yourself to vote, you go down to the polls, or more likely, the mailbox and look at the selection of candidates for various offices. Some are OK, some...

Behold state Representative Brad Tschida bringing national attention to Montana by announcing that a woman’s uterus serves no real purpose for a woman, that it is a “sanctuary” for the pre-b...

Whenever I hear someone talk about how honest they are, I instinctively put my hands in my pockets to see that everything that should be there is still there. So, pardon me my skepticism when I read...

Inflation has settled in for the American consumer and it’s nowhere more obvious than at the gas pump. Not so coincidentally, the only ones who are able to stay ahead of inflation are those companies...

As if Americans weren’t divided enough, the recent leak of the Supreme Court’s apparent decision on the fate of Roe v. Wade has added even more fuel to the fire, burning whatever political bri...

In San Francisco and other cities there is a big homeless issue. It is due to many factors both economic and drug related, but in this most liberal city solutions such as building high density...