About Town: Billings Farmers' Market drawing to a close

With the crisp evenings of fall, the shortening days, and the lengthening nights, Billings, Montana is in its glory days.

Living in Billings, one heads for the mountains as often as possible when the July and August swelter are at their worst. Same is true in December and January when the ground is bare here and you just want to be in the snow and feel the snap of cold on your face.

But it is hard to get excited about leaving town in September or October.

Some other places also hit their glory days at this time of year (San Francisco notably springs to mind,) and only they hold any attraction that would tempt one away.

A bittersweet part of it all, though, is that the Farmers' Market is drawing to a close. During these last few times, the amount of produce is staggering, as the growing season draws to its ripened close.

The street musicians aren't perhaps as energetic as earlier in the year. Not all of the downtown shops that were open earlier in the summer remain so in September.

Winter is hardly just around the corner, but the seasons are turning.

The Billings "defining element" -- AKA "Skypoint" -- starts to bring up associations of snow-covered mountains rather than crisp white sails or fluffy summer clouds.

The crowd is more subdued -- no less content or evidently happy to be there -- but does one detect a hint of melancholy?

Even the farmers' attitudes take on a different hue, and one can almost sense an impatience to get the stuff sold so fall chores and winter garden planning can get under way.

The scent of fall hunting is in the air. Peeking in the windows of Meadowlark Gallery at the paintings and prints of birds and dogs and elk and mountains helps that along.

Walking along, hunting for the perfect purchase, there is a bag of organically-grown apples. The first bite alone reveals a complex layering of flavors and scents that sums up the totality of summer -- more like a fine wine than a "mere" piece of fruit.

But one is reminded that a bottle of wine can be opened any day of the year -- but this apple, this sky, these people... all are only for this day, none other.

Time to walk home.

Bad war -- worse ending

Yesterday, MH went through the exercise of analyzing Sen. Tester's decision of how to respond to the MoveOn.org ad attacking Gen. Petraeus. It was hardly a matter of great importance -- these votes amounted to deciding how to posture in response to a posture.

The more meaty votes related to the Iraq War were votes that failed, with Sens. Baucus and Tester voting with the bulk of Democrats (the losing side of the votes) on two of the three.

The one that came closest to passing was one mandating a set amount of time out of Iraq for soldiers -- of the three, it was ironically perhaps the measure that was farthest from the authority that Congress has over military matters. If anything is the responsibility of the chain of command, it is the decision of where to assign whom, and for how long.

Failing by an even wider margin (mustering a mere 47 votes) was a measure setting timetables for withdrawal. Again, this is a matter that belongs to the chain of command -- how many troops to have in the theater of action.

Failing by the most dramatic margin of all was the Feingold amendment setting an absolute deadline for cutting off funds. Sens. Tester and Baucus voted against this measure, even though it was the only measure of the three that came closest to being within the authority of the Congress.

While Montana Headlines has opposed this war from the beginning, our position has remained that there is only one clearly legitimate means by which Congress can unilaterally end it: passing a new Iraq resolution that clearly rescinds the authorization for use of force that Congress previously gave the President.

Even that is uncharted territory, but it would give Congress clear justification for cutting off funding. Given that the vote to cut off funding lost 28 to 70, and given that no bill has been passed rescinding the earlier authorization of force, it is clear that neither party is remotely ready to exercise Congress's true authority regarding war.

What is sad about this war is that it is the result of political failures on the result of both parties: a failure of clear thinking and internal debate on the part of Republicans, and a failure of nerve on the part of Democrats fearing to be saddled with the political liability of being called weak on issues of national security.

Part of the Democrats' job was, incidentally, made more difficult because of Bill Clinton's own dirty little senseless war in the Balkans. When Clinton put the American military to work helping solidify the Muslim European toehold in the Balkans, it made it difficult to vote against use of force after Muslim terrorists directly attacked American soil.

The bottom line is that while Democrats and Republicans alike can posture on the war for political purposes, there is no end game by which either party can come out smelling pretty.

Both parties are complicit in getting us into the war, and neither party can get America quickly out of the war without leaving the Middle East and the world a more dangerous place than it was when Iraq was first invaded.

We are in a situation where even if the President and his advisers and the leadership of both parties worked in a truly bipartisan manner to end the war in a way that made for the most stability and security, America would still be hard-pressed to find a good ending for the Iraq War.

As it is, with both parties clinging to delusions that there is a way to use Iraq come up with a partisan "win," we will never have a chance to see whether we as Americans could bring the matter to a close in a way that doesn't cause harm to our country's interests and reputation.