After the primary election, my email box lit up with moaning and groaning about Democratic “cross-over” voting

Last week I went on an East Side writing trip, to the front of the mountains between Rogers Pass and Swift Dam.

Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) has been a festering Montana issue since last spring. Late in 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not strip away existing Medicaid funding from states that did not accept funding for Obamacare Medicaid expansion.

The Obamacare expanded Medicaid program allows all citizens earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level – about $32,000 for a family of four – to choose to join those Montanans already on Medicaid.

There’s been scads of Republicans speaking evil of fellow Republicans lately. Why?

Simply put, some Republicans like to play pattycake with Democrats. Other Republicans don’t play pattycake, they play hardball.

Matters came to a head in the 2013 Legislature, when senior moderates were denied leadership slots by the conservative/Tea Party wing. The resulting hurt feelings worked out well – for Montana Democrats.

On April 8, news hit that Gov. Steve Bullock nominated 5.1 million acres of Montana’s national forests for “expedited forest management,” including logging under a new program included in the long-bickered-over Farm Bill. The Montana Wood Products Association said happy things, in stereo with bipartisan praise from all three of Montana’s Congresscritters, while the usual Green litigants snarled and moaned.

Handsprings and cartwheels, right? Um, not yet.

Were you hoping the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) water compact fiasco would simmer down? Well, take a look at the lawsuit the CSKT filed at the end of February – it’s an amazing document.

In a nutshell, the CSKT, represented by four tribal attorneys and experienced tribal-law advocate James Goetz of Bozeman, asked new U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen for an injunction prohibiting any state district or water court from settling, or adjudicating, any tribal water rights dispute.

In case you missed it, Feb. 19 was the Tea Party’s fifth birthday. The usual pundits had plenty to say about how the Tea Party movement is fading fast, doomed. No it’s not – but the Tea Party needs to focus on what really matters, and darn quick.

The movement began in 2009 after MSNBC financial talker Rick Santelli belted out an epic Chicago trading-floor rant about the mortgage bailout provisions in the $800 billion “stimulus.” Obama’s stimulus, of course, was hot on the heels of Bush’s “Troubled Asset Relief Program” that rescued Wall Street’s boneheads from their own folly (on our grandkids’ nickel) – just more insult on top of injury.

It’s been several years since I last griped about my fellow Northwest Montana “drivers.” Remember, I told you about that poll that had far more than half of all drivers rating themselves “above average?” Well, we’re certainly above average here in the Flathead – in crashes and fatalities. That’s shameful, doubly so because despite engineering […]

I must be getting old, because now I’m starting to see things come full circle. Around 1980, after the Trans-Alaska Pipeline began pumping, a Northern Tier Pipeline was proposed. NTP was to be laid from Port Angeles, Wash., to, I think, Clearbrook, Minn., where it would hook into the eastern petroleum pipeline system. I immediately […]

Montana’s stupid campaign finance laws are a pet peeve of mine, and should be one of yours. Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a column (Nader’s Montana Raiders) about two rather clever political operatives, Jonathan Motl of Helena and C.B. Pearson of Missoula, who have spent decades using ballot initiatives to game Montana’s campaign […]

New Year’s always brings guilty thoughts of resolutions we can’t keep. This time, I’m trying reverse psychology: I resolve to get older, uglier and meaner. Of course, all of us have resolutions we’d like others to make, and I’m no exception. Here’s a suggested resolution for our traffic engineering people: Please, think things through before […]

Well, Montana’s Reserved Water Rights Compact Commission finally issued its agreed-upon “Report on the Proposed Water Rights Compact” between Montana and the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes (CSKT). Shortly after, Lake County commissioners declared their neutrality on the Compact, a giant step back from their 2002 position that “state jurisdiction of water rights must be maintained for […]

I should love Obamacare. I had Hodgkin’s disease when I was 16, the cure paid for by Uncle Sam’s Air Force. Normal life resumed, and I picked up two bad vices, skiing and motorcycles. Since I’m not real graceful, off to the friendly insurance agency I went. And the next. This was in the prehistoric […]

I was going to go off on a tear about the ACLU, singing, Hanukkah, statues, retail-establishment customer-service greeting protocols – nah. Just have yourself an awesome Merry Christmas, okay? And a prosperous, healthy, felicitous Happy New Year while we’re at it. OK, now that the warm fuzzies are out of the way, here’s some more […]

By now, most of us have mowed through our leftovers, but a fair number of central Montanans are still choking on theirs. Whether or not you noticed, several years’ worth of squabble over re-districting Montana’s state legislative seats after the 2010 U.S. Census officially ended last February. Unlike most states, which leave re-districting to shamelessly […]