On a 4-3 vote, the Montana Board of Regents voted last week to raise tuition at Montana’s flagship campuses. Regent Todd Buchanan, who opposed the increase, said it best when he told his colleagues prior to their decision that “we better prepare ourselves for one heck of a conversation in our communities because one is […]

Just like Montana families, the state of Montana has to live within its means. We have to look carefully at all expenditures we make in tough economic times. We weren’t surprised to read that Republican leaders – Sens. Bob Story, John Esp and Dan McGee – wanted to spend more money. After all, it was […]

If you’ve ever coached a kids’ baseball team, you probably remember reminding players to take the bat off of their shoulder, at least during the early going. Leaving it on your shoulder requires too much adjustment to hit a pitched ball. Most young players can’t adjust fast enough at that age. Not asking the right […]

Summer tourists began arriving in droves over Memorial Day weekend. And with them, we heard the first gripes from locals who complain that the sightseers are overcrowding our roads and a few of those same visitors (the humanity!) may opt to stay permanently. But this year, perhaps more than the previous, just as many Montanans […]

Earlier this month, Gov. Brian Schweitzer used his line item veto power to cancel several programs in House Bill 645, the Montana stimulus bill. The programs eliminated by the stroke of his pen were important to many people. One helped out first-time home buyers, one provided funds to purchase much-needed equipment for our Experiment Stations, […]

As promised last week, we’re going to discuss a few easy-to-make social media mistakes that small businesses should avoid. Mistake # 1 – Where’s the fire? This one is the easiest to commit so of course it’s one of the mistakes that can make your social media efforts far less effective – and perhaps a […]

This week I planned to write about Henry Waxman’s crazy “energy bill.” But then the news hit that the U.S. Senate passed credit card “reform” legislation by a vote of 90-5. Turns out conservative Senator Tom “Earmark Killer” Coburn of Oklahoma (R), with help from Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia), managed to weld an amendment applying […]

In the next few weeks, hundreds of Flathead Valley high school and college students will graduate. When the confetti is swept up, cake has gone stale and accolades have worn off, many of those wide-eyed former students will wonder what’s next. It’s certainly an inopportune time to be looking for a job. These students are […]

Ezra Klein, a prominent health care and political journalist-blogger, was recently interviewed by Mike Dennison, a reporter with Lee Newspaper’s Montana State Bureau. The interview addressed the hearings on health care reform being held by Sens. Max Baucus of Montana and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Baucus is the chairman and Grassley is the ranking member […]

In 1937, it all started on the side of a snow-covered hill that was less than 50 miles from the Los Angeles City Hall. My two-dollar pine skis were tied with a rope to the top of a five-foot long, two-passenger oak toboggan that I had made in my seventh-grade woodshop class. My Spalding pine […]

Last week, we talked about what social media is and why a business would want to use it. This week, let’s look at Twitter, a major social media site. Twitter is a microblogging platform. That means you can “tweet” (Twitter-speak for send a message) what amounts to very short blog posts. A tweet can be […]

The race is on for Kalispell City Council and I’m eager to see who puts his or her hat in the ring. As my colleague Dan Testa wrote last week: “Here’s an opportunity to put your money where your mouth is.” On the comment threads at flatheadbeacon.com, perhaps no government entity takes as much heat […]

It is well past time that our government went hightailing after these corporate and wealthy individuals who hide their income in off-shore accounts to avoid paying taxes. President Obama is in hot pursuit of these tax cheaters so stand back and watch the sparks fly. The president estimates that Americans are being cheated out of […]

If someone threw a party for your customers and prospects, wouldn’t you want to be there? Social media can help you do just that. You may have heard about social media and if so, I suspect you’ve wondered what it is and why you should care. If you’re more aware of social media, you may […]

The news is that Burlington Northern Santa Fe has been trying to buy property in Whitefish’s “Railway District.” Residents responded by hiring jet-setting tort attorney Cliff Edwards, who has a proven track record of chasing not only ambulances, but locomotives, too. BNSF has been hit with judgments for pollution in Havre and Livingston, which both […]