On to more important things...

I wouldn't trade this beautiful piece of land for anything, but one of the downsides of having the ancestral homestead be across the border in South Dakota is that I have to apply as a nonresident for the privilege of hunting deer on my own land, competing with everyone else in the country who wants to come to this corner of the state to hunt (there seem to be more every year.)

This year I actually drew a tag, and was thus obligated (yup, absolutely no choice in the matter) to block off an entire week of my schedule in this, the busiest time of my work year. No choice but to come out here to immerse myself in a ritual in which I haven't participated for 30 years. When I put it in writing like that, the only thing that springs to mind is "what was I thinking?" But of course, when one is young, one always thinks that there will be plenty of time for all of that in the future, putting it off one year, and then another, and another... Part of the whole deceptively simple concept of delayed gratification. During the two decades of exile, i.e. education and military service, there was also the small problem of not having the time, the money, or both, to carve out a full week to make the long journey home during a time of uncertain weather and travel conditions, so I will be gentle with myself.

And indeed, with the snowstorm that hit this part of the world over the past weekend, the trip was delayed by a couple of days, and I was tempted to despair, but fought it by getting my last guitar adjusted and set up (Art at Hanson's does a beautiful job of such things), then spending hours on Saturday playing Grieg and Bach on the piano, then bluegrass and Celtic music on guitar, finishing off with learning more on my new mandolin. Ran a lot of necessary errands and got caught up on some sleep as well.

Leaving the Billings abode in the capable hands and watchful eyes of my college-age son, who couldn't get away from school to join me, the beloved and I hit the road Monday morning. There were a few white-knuckle moments on I-94, but for the most part the roads had been cleared, and we pulled up to the house as a red winter sunset was glowing behind the buttes on the western horizon.

Getting the week off to a good start, after dinner I tuned in, courtesy of the wonders of DSL, which have reached even these remote parts, to the first full Boston Celtics game I've been able to watch this year -- a satisfying win over the Chicago Bulls (they don't have Derrick Rose back, but we don't have Avery Bradley, either, so no asterisk by this one.)

Tuesday morning comes early but I am up before dawn, with a bewildered Ginny (see puppy photo of the same, above) not able to understand why the good master is donning outdoor gear and readying a firearm while she is being left behind. From the road in the previous evening's dusk, I had seen a group of whitetails (mule deer are scarce in recent years around here) disappear over a ridge heading for CRP we planted last year on the easternmost part of the ranch, so I had decided my hunt would start there. My brother is still trying to fill his tag up near Hettinger, ND where he lives, so I will be hunting alone today.

As I drive slowly along a high ridge south of the home place, getting ready to head several miles east to get to my destination -- a rocky outcropping near the far northeastern corner of the ranch from which I will be able to glass the fields below -- I catch a fleeting glimpse of a buck and doe on the horizon to the south, heading toward an area where there is another expanse of freshly planted CRP. I change plans midstream and turn that direction, sending an email by my smartphone to the beloved telling her where I am going. There is at best a 50% chance that it will go through given the spotty coverage out here, but I know I will be parking where she will see the truck if she heads east to look for me later in the day should I become incapacitated from a twisted knee, a heart attack, or simple old age.

I pull to a stop before I reach the final rise, and am relieved to turn off NPR news (the only time I listen to National Progressive Radio is when I am driving around in the old farm truck -- no XM radio, and I'm not always in the mood for the local AM stations.)

The sky is still overcast in the morning twilight. The expansive view to the south across the broad South Grand River valley takes my breath away, as it has all my life, and the long range of Ponderosa pine-clad rimrocks called the Slim Buttes (the farthest east unit of Custer National Forest) dimly anchor the southwest horizon.

Those Slim Buttes were always one of the visual constants of my life growing up here, always seeming to beckon me to come further west where there would be more of the same. I of course eventually did, as soon as I could, with me now living in the shadows of different Ponderosa pine-clad rimrocks.

I sling my binoculars (old friends for many years that feel just right) over my neck and my new (to me) .30-06 over my right shoulder. A gun-dealer friend found it for me when I told him I needed a different all-purpose rifle. I had sighted it in on my last trip here, and found it to be a most pleasing firearm to handle. Like musical instruments, guns either just feel right in one's hands or they don't. The .270 I bought when I first moved back to this corner of the world never really did. I grew up shooting my dad's .243 (now in the possession of my brother, who is the real hunter of the family), but had devoured enough Jack O'Connor tales in Outdoor Life growing up that I just knew I wanted a .270 when I "grew up." There may still be a .270 out there that's right for me, but the one I owned never felt right in my hands. Today, I have the spring in my step that only a rifle and scope that feel just right can give. Growing up, deer hunts had always been a one-shot affair for me, and I have a good feeling about today.

Crossing the rise, I see the heads of a couple of does bedded down on the western end of the expanse of thick CRP. I stop and glass them patiently, and one of them looks back at me, unsure if I have spotted her. I angle to the east a little as the light steals up little by little over the horizon to my right. Take a few steps, my feet crunching in the snow. Glass everything around me for a few minutes. Take a few more steps, glass slowly again -- nothing worse than missing something right in front of you. The quiet is beautiful.

Finally, bingo -- on the far eastern edge of the CRP I spot a couple of dark dots. I turn my glasses that direction and see that it is a buck and a doe. Then a second buck comes tentatively from the south toward them. I know I need to take a long hike and come up through the draws and coulees in what we call the south pasture. Changing course, I skirt west around the two bedded does, still glassing them to see if a buck is hidden nearby. They finally bolt toward the east -- it's just the two of them. The air is cold, but the sun is starting to burn off the overcast as I hike briskly along the western edge of the CRP and through the gate into the south pasture where I can disappear down a draw where the distant deer can't see me. I can move quickly now.

When I get far enough that I want to take another look, I crawl to the top of a ridge onto some rocks where I know I will have a view of the part of the CRP field where I had seen the two bucks. I lie there and glass them for about ten minutes, seeing if they are moving. The two bucks never actually lock horns, but the dominant one (neither is particularly large) keeps the other at bay, and is making overtures to the doe, who plays it coy. I could watch this for hours, but I need to keep moving.

I crawl slowly backward until I know I will be out of sight, and hike down the draw. Where it forks, I can see up the draw and spot a couple of does, but no buck. They must be moving. To keep out of sight I will have to hike still further south, cross a low part of the ridgeline into the next draw, and hike back north along it to reach the southern corner of the CRP, which is laid out in a big L shape.

This will be more tricky, since the final rise is a gentle one. I drop to hands and knees to crawl forward, still stopping every few feet to glass 360 degrees around me. Coming across from a neighbor's land comes another buck -- not huge, but bigger than the ones I had been glassing. I wait and watch as he makes his way toward a dugout that is in an otherwise dry creek just over onto our land. There is not going to be any way to stalk him, though -- no cover. I crawl forward on my belly a little further, and as I rise to my elbows to glass again, there is now a small fork-horn buck and a doe right at the edge of the CRP field.

Decision time. I have a clean shot, but I want to see if the larger buck will start making his way over toward us. Instead, the two deer I am watching see him and bolt in his direction. The three of them rapidly disappear across the southeast pasture, and I see them circling north. I will have to get back to my truck and get to another vantage from which to glass fields near the center of the ranch where they have probably headed, and I start my hike back to the truck. My knee is doing OK, but for how long, I wonder?

I am walk in a small, rough corner of native grassland that is enclosed with the CRP fields, glassing as I go, eyeing a group of four does that are roughly in the center of the brushy fields. As I cross a small rocky ridge, I see three deer directly ahead of me -- a doe and two small bucks -- and drop to the ground to look them over with my binoculars.

Too late... they have spotted me, and start moving rapidly up to the top of the high ridge above them. As they cross it, though, I see the back of the last one turning east. Decision time again. I decide to try to intercept them and get a better look, crossing the fence and deliberately walking east on a diagonal, figuring they will wheel around to the south. I begin to cross a swelling rise, and just like that, I am staring at a buck and a doe on the other side of a shallow draw. They can see only my head and shoulders at this point. All of us freeze -- I slowly raise my glasses with my left hand while holding my rifle in my right. Small buck -- a 3-pointer by western count, beautiful little animal, though.

Decision time again. There is the old question hunters ask themselves: "if it ends up that this is the only clean shot I get all week, will I regret not taking it?" Young bucks make better eating than old bucks, and I've never been a trophy fiend. Ginny will be glad if I make short work of the deer season and take her out after pheasants and partridge every day for the rest of the week, and she needs the field work. My knee is still good, but for how long? It is a clean shot of less than 100 yards -- I detest long-distance sniping. On the other hand, when will I draw a tag again? Should I spend the week patiently hunting a trophy? On the other hand I've spent a lot of time roaming across the ranch this summer and fall, and haven't seen a single trophy buck all year -- not this year (of course.)

All of this flies through my mind in perhaps 3-5 seconds as I lower the glasses slowly and raise the rifle gently, wrapping my left arm in the sling for extra stability -- one of those maneuvers that kinesthetic memory brings back unconsciously. Perhaps he will bolt and make the decision for me.

It is an off-hand shot, whereas I usually prefer a supine shot, or at least a braced kneeling or sitting position. But my hands are surprisingly unmoving and steady. The crosshairs settle on his front shoulder in case he bolts forward just as I pull the trigger. Slow breath out... gentle squeeze of the right hand. I hear the boom of the rifle as though I were hearing it faintly in a dream-state, and I almost feel the impacting thud of the bullet as it strikes the deer more than I hear it. He drops instantly and doesn't move. The doe flees to the south. A clean stalk, one clean shot, the hunt over by 8 AM. The overcast haze has returned without my noticing it.

Some things you don't forget. I sign the tag, cut out the date, and attach it to the back lower leg. I move his head uphill and pull out my Buck knife. I handle him gently and respectfully, just like I remember my dad doing -- not just with deer, but with any animal I ever saw him handle, living or dead. I had already slit his throat and windpipe quickly and let him bleed out -- he hasn't reacted to my approach, but I've heard about guys getting nasty surprises when they start to open the belly cavity only to be rewarded by a merely stunned and very much alive deer kicking them in the shoulders when stimulated by the pain of the incision. Besides, I want to be absolutely sure he is dead before I do what I have to do.

I open his hindquarters and place a foot on each leg. I slit open the belly and the steam rises into the air. I think of Han Solo in "The Empire Strikes back" killing the tauntaun and warming Luke Skywalker in its warm belly while he sets up a bivouac to try to survive the freezing night that is falling on the planet Hoth. But only for a split second, and then I'm back, very much on this planet, very much here. I may be in a time long, long ago, though.

I work quickly, and all of the internal attachments fall away beneath the sharp blade of my knife. Rule one -- work deliberately and don't cut yourself. Belly contents, lungs, heart... I reach up high to sever the trachea, and end by cutting around the rectum, freeing it up so I can pull it out from above. A better hunter than I would save the heart, liver, and kidneys to eat, but I leave them as a gift for the coyotes, who will enjoy them more than I would.

Time now for the couple miles back to the truck. I walk back up the ridge across the corner of the southeast pasture where my hunt ended. I reach the north edge of the CRP, and there are now at least a dozen deer that have gathered in its center. They move away from me and are too distant to see well with the naked eye, but somehow seem to know that I am no longer a danger. I have left my rifle and binoculars at the kill site, so I can't look closely at them. Just as well -- I don't see anything that looks like a monster buck among them, but I'd really rather not know at this point.

I reach the truck, drink some water, turn over the engine and turn off NPR. I want to be completely alone and in silence at this point.

I have to drive through the large central pasture. It has the highest hills and ridges on the place, and I pass the 9-foot tall cairn (or "stone-Johnny") that has stood there for more than a century now, ever since an open-range sheep-herder built it back in the day. I have to circle around to get to the southeast pasture, and finally reach the site. I am able to back down into the draw and up toward the deer. I put on the emergency brake, drop the tailgate. Now for the hard part -- I've never loaded a deer into a truck by myself before. Will I need to go get the beloved for some assistance? No. I lift his head and shoulders onto the tailgate and pin it into place with my right arms, then reach down with my left hand to grab the hind hooves and do an explosive leglift (just like doing a deadlift with barbells), and the deer is in the back.

I'm back in the yard of the home place by 9:30, washing the blood out of the bed of the truck and rinsing some blood and stray hairs from the body cavity while the beloved looks on with interest (very new for her.)

Any bloodied clothing (gloves, bibs, gaiters) goes into the washing machine and I set it running. I clean my knife at the utility sink, unload the rifle (including the single expended shell that is still in the chamber), and after cleaning myself up, I sit down to devour the freshly baked cornbread that the beloved has just removed from the oven. My knee is starting to hurt, and I knew that my split-second decision to pull the trigger was the right one. It really was a beautiful hunt, the way I like to do it -- all on foot; spot, stalk, trying to think like a deer, all very quiet until there is that single sure shot that ends the killing part of the hunt.

After a little rest, a drive to the meat-packing plant in town to process the game and to pick up a few supplies. In the evening, I build a stout fire in the wood-burning stove as the beloved and I sit and read in the living room. Later, I pull out my guitar and play until I am content. We step outside before bed to look at the stars, and Orion is brilliant in the east, Cassiopeia is brilliant at the zenith, and the bright wanderer of the sky tonight is Jupiter.

Wednesday now belongs to Ginny, a day which is winding to a close as I finish writing this. We hunted a different large CRP field today -- very thick and wild, filled with pheasants that were even wilder, usually exploding into the air long before we could make an approach. I didn't get out until afternoon, so the scent was harder for Ginny to lock onto, but she got several beautiful points. The best ones were, of course, on hens, and Ginny looked at me, wondering why I wasn't shooting -- game laws are not part of their natural instinct. Still, there was a rooster breast for me to saute at dinner, and we had had a glorious day in the field, seeing birds everywhere, even if most were out of range. We've had a couple of short hunts this fall, but nothing like today, where she had a veritable feast of bird-scent for her birdy nose. Ginny is sleeping the happiest sleep she has had in months, having spent a long afternoon doing what she was born to do. Every time I do something (vocationally or avocationally) that I feel I was born to do, I have a tendency to think of her. And every time the weather turns crisp in the fall, she knows it is her time -- looking at me nearly every day with a cocked head that says, "don't you know what time of year it is, dear master?" It grieves me that there are some who own these fine animals (she is a Wirehaired Pointing Griffon) and don't hunt with them. It's like owning a Border Collie in a city where it can never see a sheep. Just wrong.

To make the perfect end to the day, after dinner I watched the Celtics win a close one over the Jazz while the beloved read her novel and periodically looked up to comment on a good play (she has become a Celtics convert, sound in judgement as she is.) It was a good day, filled with things of the highest importance, and when, as Ginny and I drove to the place where we planned to hunt, I heard The One speaking unctuously on NPR about the need to raise taxes and about how it was perfectly natural that he knew nothing of a months-long investigation by his FBI of the head of his CIA until the day after his re-election, I felt no anger, no despair, no anxiety.

Acceptance is the nicest phase of grief. Or maybe being immersed in important things simply allowed me to transcend for a time the grief I have felt at the recent rude reminder that the America I knew is gone for good. For this moment at least, I am back in the Old America of my childhood, aided by being in the home of my childhood, the house my grandfather built more than a century ago and in which my father was born. I am a mile from the one-room country school in which I was educated for 8 years, and where -- for the first 4 years anyway -- we bowed our heads to pray before eating the lunches our mothers had packed.

I look up at the bookshelves above me to see the great classics on one shelf, a set of the writings of the ancient Fathers of the Church on another, a 1950's era encyclopedia on another, a large part of my extensive collection of books on gardening, ranching, farming, and assorted agricultural topics on yet another. Across the room is a large bookshelf with a full collection of National Geographic magazines dating uninterruptedly back to 1960 and sporadically back to the 1930s. Most family members randomly explore their pages on nearly every visit -- it's a tradition.

Time first, though, to read a few more pages in Victor Davis Hanson's The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization -- a book I have been reading at on nearly every visit here for the last half-dozen years. I've almost completed it, but almost don't want to, since it has become a familiar friend. Unfortunately, the ending of the story is not a happy one, since the agrarian ideal of the yeoman farmer eventually disappeared in ancient Greece, just as it is disappearing here. The plant that grew from the roots was a good one, though -- a western civilization that is our heritage. On days like today, I believe that the agrarian roots of our own American civilization will somehow survive and give life of some sort to our country for many years to come, even after the way of life of those who built it is destroyed, and indeed despised by its new masters.

In short, on days like today, I have hope. And that's a good place to stop.

Land confiscation by Feds continues in northeastern Montana

I was saddened to read on Aaron Flint’s blog the details behind the sale of 150,000 acres of land of the former Etchart Ranch to the American Prairie Preserve.

The Etchart Ranch has been a Montana institution going back nearly to statehood and was long one of the largest livestock concerns in the state.

The story behind this sale is pretty simple -- the federal government has continued to ratchet down the ability of private ranchers to use the historic public land leases associated with their property. The price of land purchased has always reflected the value of those leases, meaning that deeded land with attached lease land has inflated prices.

Those leases would seem to have been traditionally secure under the Taylor Grazing Act in the 1930’s -- a piece of legislation that is very clear that traditional grazing rights cannot be taken away, nor could non-grazing interests bid against grazers in an attempt to take land out of grazing circulation. Those grazing allotments were required to follow traditional leasing patterns, which generally meant leasing public land that was “attached to” deeded adjacent private land.

This latter was always a source of frustration to environmentalist groups, who wanted to go in and outbid grazers in order to get livestock off public lands. This would have amounted to a confiscation of private property, since the value of the grazing allotments was built into the value of the deeded land. Apparently one of the things that happened to change things on the CMR Wildlife Refuge is that the 9th Circuit Court (i.e. the "9th Circus" based out of San Francisco) removed the CMR from being under the strictures of the Taylor Grazing Act, and placed it under a later act dealing with wildlife refuges.

Public lands ranchers have increasingly been caught between a rock and a hard place, but a “life-line” was thrown to them by the Clinton administration to help ease the pain of the obvious end that was in sight. Permission was given for private conservation groups to pay full market-rate prices for allotments and leases, allowing ranchers to recoup the full value of their investment, and it is this loophole (or a similar one) that the current owners of this particular 150,000 acre spread have taken advantage of. The final piece is that these more recent regulations allow new owners to "retire" grazing allotments and leases.

In the past, this was not allowable, and perhaps in some situations still is not. Traditionally, if an environmentalist was to buy private land with an attached lease or grazing allotments, they couldn't just not use the lease, since their right to the lease or allotment depended on their putting the land to the intended "meaningful use." In other words, a landowner could put his deeded land to whatever use he wanted -- but with regard to attached leases and allotments, it was "use it or lose it." In the hypothetical case of the environmentalist who bought deeded land but didn't use his grazing rights on attached public lands, another neighbor would have the right to bid for that lease since he would be putting it to the intended "meaningful use."

No matter. The handwriting on the wall is clear. The Federal government means to drive ranching off public lands. Ranchers can either take advantage of these opportunities to have conservation groups pay true fair market value -- or they can hold out indefinitely until they lose everything. My own small ranch has no public land leases, but there is quite a bit of Forest Service land in my part of South Dakota on which grazing takes place. These are my neighbors and friends. The rage that must be going through the public-lands ranching community right now is something that I can’t imagine. I know I would find it hard to bear if it were my family heritage on the chopping block.

Be prepared for more of the same. The agenda is ultimately to move working people off their land to make room for buffalo. Out-of-staters can thus have another theme park to visit for one week a year.

Conflict between farmers and fiscal conservatives is overblown

There has long been a tension over farm subsidies within the conservative world. On the one hand, subsidizing anything is contrary to most conservative principles about how markets work -- or should work. On the other hand, farmers and ranchers tend to be generally very conservative in their politics -- and a pretty reliable Republican voting bloc.

Those who make their living in agriculture understand that the most important voice they have is in their U.S. Senators, since each state, no matter how sparsely populated, gets the same two votes. Farm state Senators have consistently been the difference-makers when it comes to providing government support for agriculture, sometimes in way that is healthy for the industry and the nation -- and sometimes not (think boondoggle corn ethanol subsidies.) Their elections often depend on how they are viewed by the farmers and ranchers in their states, a situation that isn't true in states with large urban populations. It isn't that there is an absence of agriculture going on in places like New York and Illinois -- far from it. It's just that the numbers of voters who have a connection to agriculture are a drop in the bucket compared to the immense urban populations found in those states.

The story, however, isn't as simple as fiscal absolutists in the Republican Party would like to make it. Farmers benefit from subsidies, but the ultimate beneficiaries are the food-buying public. For decades, the U.S. government has pursued "cheap food" policies and subsidies were a part of that, as were "get big or get out" policies that favored industrialized farming. Additionally, the entire financial and pricing structure of agriculture has developed around such subsidies. I've yet to meet a farmer or rancher who benefits from some sort of government assistance who hasn't said he would prefer to get that money in the form of higher commodity prices or lower operating costs. But subsidies can't be eliminated precipitously without massive disruptions for farmers and ranchers -- especially smaller operations that can't absorb sudden changes in the status quo.

In addition, the benefits are hardly distributed equally. Some agricultural products receive massive subsidies, while other receive none. Traditionally, agricultural subsidies are based on the scale of production, which means that a very small number of extremely large corporate operations receive the lion's share of government checks.

Tom Lutey's recent Gazette article thus does point up conflicts that do exist, but it is highly doubtful whether this internecine warfare will lead to any lasting political effects, no matter how much some would love for this to be so. While it probably wasn't Lutey's intent, at points his article reads like a cowboy boot-wearing Big Sky version of What's the Matter with Kansas?.

One hopes that debate over the "the farm bill" will lead to more fairness in how subsidies are distributed, eliminating some of the worst offenders in past farm bills. (The amount of the subsidies for corn, for instance, is mind-boggling.)

Besides cheap food policies, other things that need to be taken into consideration are subsidies provided by competitor nations to their farmers -- some subsidies in the U.S. are simply aimed at leveling the playing field. Since having a reliable and adequate source of food is a matter of vital national concern -- even national security -- this is a legitimate role for the government (although it would make more sense if tariffs on imports were the method used to level the playing field rather than subsidies -- another hot topic for another time.)

We suspect that any hopes Democrats have of exploiting any disagreement between conservatives in agriculture and conservatives elsewhere will prove ephemeral. If anything has been shown over the decades, it is that people vote for a broad variety of reasons, and naked economic interest is rarely the deciding point, especially for conservatives. The modern Democratic Party may be good at borrowing money and writing out checks to purchase voting blocs, but for the most part it has become an increasingly alien entity to rural America -- urban, coastal, secular, and hostile to an old-fashioned sense of America.

It is an America that we have all lost, no matter where we live, but while the modern Democratic Party embraces with glee the loss it helped to create, rural and small-town America tends to have a sense of sadness and nostalgia at the loss, and no farm subsidy payment is ever going to make up for it.

* * * * *

Full disclosure: I receive a small direct government payment for some wheat fields that I have. I also have land in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) for which I receive government payments. That program has allowed me -- like my father before me -- to put marginal farm ground back into native grasses.

What’s fair in death -- and in death taxes? (Hint: check with Governor Schweitzer and Senator Tester)

We all know that the only sure things in life are death and taxes, but that doesn’t mean that anyone stops trying to find loopholes to avoid both.

In an interesting op-ed in the Kalispell Daily Interlake, the editors take a cane to Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer for his expressing sympathy for the fate of Ron Smith, on death row for the murder of two young Native American men in 1982. According to the editorial, the governor may use his power as governor in these waning months of his administration to reduce Smith’s penalty to life in prison (Smith originally sought the death penalty for himself but has subsequently had second thoughts.)

The editors conclude:

The governor was quoted as saying in the Associated Press story last week that he keeps “coming back to this question of what is fair” and said “I don’t know what is fair.”

If that is really true, then the governor isn’t in any position to make a judgment of this importance. And if he finally does come to realize what is fair, then Ron Smith will have to accept his fate at the executioner’s hand just the way he forced Thomas Running Rabbit Jr. and Harvey Mad Man Jr. to accept theirs.

They have a compelling point -- by any reasonable standard, someone who willfully deprives another of his life has forfeited any right to his own. The state may choose not to deprive him of it, but he can’t claim to have a “right” to live. Pretty much the entirety of the human experience would seem to agree with this viewpoint. The Christian tradition in the West introduced concepts of mercy and forgiveness to what had been a much harsher punitive landscape, but it has always acknowledged the right of civil authority to use the death penalty, even while it has urged restraint in its use.

As I wrote some years ago, I personally oppose the death penalty for a number of reasons, but in keeping with that Christian tradition, I also believe strongly that the civil authority is not acting immorally when it decides that it is necessary. Most importantly, the power of pardon should not be used to keep the death penalty from being implemented -- if you want to remove the death penalty from the list of punishments available to Montana’s juries and judges, use the legislative process, not a stroke of a governor's pen.

The right of kings to grant pardons and to commute sentences is as old as civil society. It is a part of that set of Burkean “prescriptions and prejudices” -- i.e. traditions that have developed over centuries to meet a society’s needs. That royal privilege of granting pardons has carried through into Anglo-American traditions of common law and constitutional law, and is exercised by our heads of state -- the President and the 50 state governors.

While we might disagree with particular pardons by presidents and governors, it is an important safety valve for any humane society to have one man (I use the word in its inclusive sense) holding the power to correct miscarriages of justice that slip through our system of laws and courts -- a system that is the best the world has seen and yet is imperfect because we humans are imperfect.

Was there a miscarriage of justice in this particular case? That is the question the governor must ask himself after examining all of the evidence. How Governor Schweitzer exercises the royal privilege he holds lies on his conscience, and his alone.

* * * * *

And now for taxes -- specifically death taxes. We read that Senator Jon Tester has belatedly co-sponsored a stand-alone bill to exempt farmers and ranchers from the massive increase in estate taxes that will kick in once he and Senator Baucus and the rest of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate allow the Bush tax cuts to expire.

We will leave aside discussion of an obvious question: why should a family farm or ranch be protected from having the state confiscate its assets upon the owner’s death, while other kinds of family businesses are beneath Sen. Tester’s notice?

Moving on, though, this is of course a naked act of self-preservation by Sen. Tester in a rural state like Montana. It might even seem laudable, but really, it doesn’t reflect well on Tester at all.

Montana Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Hanson nailed the issue on the head when he said the following:

"I hope it passes because it’s what needs to be done,” Hanson said. “But if it needs to be done, why wasn’t it in the first bill?"

Indeed. It isn’t like it was some state secret that President Obama intended to let the Bush tax cuts expire, and that Montana farmers and ranchers would find their land in jeopardy as a result. As a U.S. Senator from a rural state (and one who trumpets his farming credentials far and wide, no less), Tester should have been all over this from the start -- which was four years ago, when Obama was elected President. We’re only hearing about this now?

By all rights, as a self-proclaimed advocate for agriculture and “the only farmer in the U.S. Senate," Tester should have been providing leadership, both working behind the scenes and publicly using his bully pulpit, to make sure it would never come to this point -- where at the 11th hour, a quick-fix stand-alone bill has to be rushed into consideration to keep farmers and ranchers from having their family land devastated by confiscatory estate taxes.

It’s only been 6 years, but it seems that Sen. Tester has already been in Washington too long.

From the bookshelf: Words Made Fresh: Essays on Literature and Culture, by Larry Woiwode

Something I neglected to mention when I reviewed a Larry Woiwode memoir last week is that the most recent of his many literary awards was presented to him in Billings last year, when he received the Emeritus Award at the High Plains Book Awards ceremonies. This week I want to mention his most recent book, Words Made Fresh: Essays on Literature and Culture. This slim but dense volume is a first for Woiwode -- a collection of formal essays on literature and writing. An alternative subtitle might have been borrowed from Hank Williams, Jr., however: “A Country Boy Can Survive,” as will be clear from what follows.

This book is a welcome addition to the library of anyone who enjoys Woiwode’s works and reflects an aspect of Woiwode’s life that hasn’t been accessible to most readers -- namely, Woiwode the teacher and critic. Like many serious novelists, Woiwode has, whether through choice or necessity or both, done repeated stints as a teacher: at the university level, as a lecturer at conferences, and as an essayist.

As mentioned in the review of A Step From Death, Woiwode has written thoughtfully in his memoirs about his approach to writing, but he has always touched on the subject indirectly in the course of talking about his life. In Words Made Fresh, Woiwode the essayist expounds directly and without a veil -- on writing, writers, literary criticism, and education.

The first essay is the oldest -- a piece on guns written for Esquire in the mid 1970s. It is a period piece in that it reflects a certain depressing, even pungent, 1970s ambience. It is also a personal period piece, since it comes from a particular time in Woiwode’s life that seems a bit foreign to those who got to know him later on. In quality, it is certainly worthy of the writer of What I’m Going to Do, I Think (a book in which a gun features prominently) and it has been previously collected in a number of anthologies. Still, as one cautiously steps through its sometimes heavy existential fogs, one can’t help but think that Woiwode may have chosen to lead off his book with this particular essay partly as a way of showing the reader, “So, here is where I started. Perhaps you can now better appreciate the much better place I am about to take you next.” As a side note, it is hard today, when the 2nd Amendment battles have largely been settled (for now) in both political parties, to realize what a shocking piece this would have been in the era of Jimmy Carter: a respectable cutting-edge writer living in New York City and confessing to a lifetime fascination with firearms.

The country boy theme continues with Woiwode’s essay on the farmer/poet/essayist Wendell Berry, who has long been a favorite at Montana Headlines. It is is a sheer delight. While each has been making his way in quite different topography (Wendell Berry farming in the hills of Kentucky, Woiwode on the high plains of western North Dakota), both inhabit the same world. They are, in a sense, moral and cultural neighbors. Berry’s prose is the very picture of clarity and economy, and yet Woiwode is able to boil down his insights even further into sentences that convey the essence of Berry's work while also suggesting the vistas that await the reader. Woiwode wisely concentrates on Berry’s essays, since these are the place to start if one wants to grasp the richness of this writer who is, first and foremost, busy with living on his land with a woman who loves him, working to turn a financial profit from his family acreage using organic, even preindustrial techniques.

Berry's writing, rather than a source of profit to support a farming hobby, feels like the abundant fruit of that life. Reading a Berry essay (or even more acutely, a Berry poem), feels like being at a community gathering where songs are sung, stories are told, and photos are passed around. The day’s work has been done, and it is time to light the fires, tune the instruments, gather around the person telling the history of the place, and let the magic begin on a winter’s night.

Woiwode captures the essence of Berry a number of times in this essay but never better than this:

Certain passages and paragraphs have the power to lift you into stretches of contemplation and personal reassessment – those periods when you seem to be staring out a window but are really assessing the realignment your consciousness is taking on. Berry’s books are that well built and keep revealing new dimensions.

Indeed. Continuing on with another country boy, Woiwode devotes two essays to the criticism and fiction of John Gardner. I first encountered Gardner many years ago when I bought a well-worn copy of his magesterial On Moral Fiction, after which I was never able to read a novel the same way again (and happily so.) Woiwode’s respect for Gardner’s powerful and provocative criticism is clear, and it is well-deserved, since there is really no-one quite like him. Of course, Gardner’s rural background doesn’t hurt:

Gardner was a farm boy, unabashedly so, and usually lived in a rural setting with his family and a menagerie of animals. [ ] As a critic, Gardner kept his square, strong farmer’s hand firmly on the pulse of American fiction, and you either waited for or feared his reviews and assessments of writers and writing – his manifestos, as they were seen by some, diatribes and hallucinations by others.

In Woiwode’s lengthy multi-part essay on John Updike (also greatly admired by Woiwode), things might get a bit involved for someone not familiar with the full sweep of Updike’s oeuvre (I am not), especially when he discusses religious matters and the relationship between Updike’s devout Christianity and his writing. Nevertheless, one finishes the essay motivated to buy and read a pile of Updike’s novels.

Elsewhere, essays touch on subjects as diverse as Bob Dylan, Shakespeare, and education. Again the country boy theme continues in various forms: Dylan in obvious ways, education in talking about his experiences with home-schooled children (including his own), and Shakespeare in the freshest ways possible:

Lore and court records have him returning home at least once a year, and it’s likely he went back to check on the lamb crop each spring (along with perhaps cattle, maybe swine) and to oversee the seeding of his barley and wheat, and he would want to be present in late summer or early fall for harvest.

He seems to have known from the start that Stratford (farming populace and handcraft merchants) was the source of its accomplishments, and he paid it homage, dying in New House only blocks from where he was born, leaving a healthy largesse to Stratford’s poor. Only a person who was nurtured by and nurtured the earth over its diurnal and seasonal changes could have written his plays -- rural boy that he was, farmer or farming-inclined son of a rural tradesman and farmer.

Woiwode is an unapologetic Christian, although he doesn’t wear it on his sleeve. He isn’t a “Christian writer,” but rather a writer who decades ago turned to a life of Christian faith. There is a difference -- a difference that Woiwode saw in Updike as well. To Woiwode, there is no place for a pulpit in a novel, whether that pulpit is Christian or atheistic. What matters is being faithful and honest in one’s work -- the rest will take care of itself. As he notes in the opening essay:

It’s life here we’re responsible for, in its minutest detail. We should expect to give an account, according to a teaching of Jesus, for every idle word that comes out of our mouths. That’s a weighty responsibility for a writer.

The Montana Wolf Trap

Update: The Montana FWP Commission approved the new regulations as proposed in a unanimous vote (one member abstained for reasons that weren’t given). They are to be commended for not bowing to pressure from a vocal minority.

One important item that deserves attention is found at the end of the article, where a member of the Montana Trapping Association warned about the importance of proper training and education. As the thoughts below indicate, exempting wolves from trapping on the basis of it being “barbaric” would be harmful to trapping in general in Montana.

At the same time, this is not a place for inexperienced amateurs to decide to give wolf-trapping a whirl. Trapping is a skill and an art that one must be taught. Poor trapping practices on the part of wolf trappers could also harm trapping in Montana, and we don’t need that.

___________________

Where would Montana politics be without a little lupine-driven controversy? According to an article in this week’s Billings Gazette, the proposed guidelines for this year’s wolf season have generated 6500 comments, compared to last year’s 1500. Driving the added interest this year is that trapping has been added to the wolf control arsenal.

In spite of the fact that Montana hunters were unable to reach last year’s quota of 220 wolf kills, and in spite of the fact that Montana’s wolf population has more than doubled in the last 7 years, there are still those who are protesting the hunts as “too extreme.” According to an article some time back in the Billings Gazette, some of those at a public meeting on wolf hunting and trapping believe that all trapping is “inhumane and uncivilized,” while the more recent Gazette article notes that opponents called trapping “cruel and morally wrong." Commenters at the public meeting also protested that Montana wolf trappers would only have to check their traps every 48 hours, whereas government trappers reportedly check theirs at least once a day.

Perhaps they would do well to review state furbearer regulations, in which 48 hours monitoring is the standard for all trapping in Montana -- why would the regulations for trapping wolves be any different from that used for trapping mink or bobcats? Furthermore, government trappers can carry on their business without regard to cost, since they are on salary. Almost certainly, if the protesters would like to pay private Montana trappers to check their traps twice as often as currently required, they would likely be more than happy to oblige. Perhaps those at the meeting would like to start a foundation and contribute their own money?

It goes without saying that trapping seems uncivilized to many in today’s urbanized world, but given that it has probably been practiced in every civilization since the time that word became a concept, we would point out that what is “civilized” is a relative concept, something any good multiculturalist would understand. Some of the same people who consider trapping barbaric probably also consider aborting humans to be a normal part of civilized life, just as it once was during a pre-Christian Roman civilization. One can be quite certain that not too far in the future, there will be civilized folks who look at the tics and spasms of 21st century first world behavior and wonder what on earth we were thinking and doing about this or that.

My father, like others who grew up during the Great Depression, was dirt poor. He loved music and wanted badly to buy a guitar, and there weren't many ways for a kid to earn money. So he trapped skunks, which were in plentiful supply and for which there was a market. It was worth dealing with the smell to trap and skin them, earning two bits a piece for each pelt, as I recall. He finally got enough money together that he could buy a cheap mail-order guitar -- the same one on which I learned to play my first chords, and which still hangs on the wall at the ranch.

While it is now about 35 years ago, I also remember trapping (for me, it was red fox) while a kid to make some spare cash myself, using the money to buy my first shotgun. Trapping was a part of rural life, just as it is for many trappers in Montana today. If there was such a thing as a license, I never heard of anyone ever getting one. Anything we trapped on the high plains was by law a predator or a varmint, so I doubt anyone would have cared.

I met a girl a few years ago who earned spending money by trapping along the Yellowstone River in Eastern Montana. At some point, I realized that I was probably one of the few “city-folk” she had met who understood the pride she took in having learned to trap from her father, just as I had learned from mine. I understood the pride she took in her work and in the degree of self-sufficiency she earned from selling the fur. It was only when I spoke of my own youthful trapping days that she started to open up and talk about it, and I saw her face light up as she talked animatedly about her love of tramping through the woods along the river, checking her trap line.

I also realized how long it had been since I myself had talked to someone to whom I could confess my secret past life as a (short-lived and not particularly skilled) amateur trapper, let alone someone who would understand that particular call of the wild (think Swiftwater.) I have no interest in trapping today and frankly I am now citified enough that unlike a 10 or 12 year-old me, I would now probably get a little queasy at the sight of an animal in a trap I had set, but I wouldn’t want to deny the experience or the income to anyone. Certainly I utterly reject the idea that trapping livestock predators is barbaric and unacceptable.

We are unlikely to see wolf supporters offer to pay the expenses of civilian trappers for checking traps daily, and even if they did, such offers would likely end up the same as promises by environmentalist groups to reimburse stockmen for livestock losses due to wolf predation. Those quickly vanished into the thin air of empty promises, as we knew they would once the wolf proponents got what they wanted. Back in the old days, such things were given a much simpler name: lies.

A little honesty would be appreciated on these matters, but we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for it. The agenda is not that the opponents are fine with traps checked every 24 hours but scandalized with those checked every 48. It isn’t that it is fine with them to have 100 wolves harvested but not 200. The point is rather to throw up every possible roadblock to the control of wolf populations. If Montana is able to come up with a hunting and trapping plan that will actually keep wolf numbers down to a reasonable, self-sustaining population level with wolves that are largely restricted to wilderness areas, that would be a terrible blow to what wolf proponents seem actually to want, which is an ever-expanding population of wolves with an ever-expanding range.

Many of us who opposed wolf reintroduction did so not because we had any desire to see wolves go extinct (which given the Alaskan and Canadian populations wasn’t going to happen anyway) but because we knew that regardless of promises, wolf proponents would fight tooth and nail against controlling wolf numbers and against the right of ranchers to protect their livestock and to be made whole for their losses. We have not been wrong.

Wolves have proven themselves to be very resilient and aggressive, which comes as no surprise to the descendants of those who originally spent decades working to eliminate them as threats to their livestock and the civilization that livestock represented. What is becoming clear is that even with hunting seasons set as they were last year, wolf numbers are going to continue to grow rapidly. The numbers of wolves allowed to be harvested is already below what is needed to keep populations static -- hampering hunting and trapping to a degree that quotas can’t be filled will only make the situation worse.

While there are probably ranchers who want wolves completely eradicated from Montana, I haven’t met any. It is, truth to be told, kind of nice to have wolves in our wild places again. What is desirable, however, is for wolf numbers to be kept to a minimum and in wilderness areas. Achieving such goals requires flexibility in hunting and trapping, and this week’s Gazette article notes that Idaho has done a much better job at this than has Montana, although the FWP seems to be making a good faith effort to come up with guidelines that will result in a larger wolf harvest. Aggressive hunting combined with freeing up ranchers to shoot wolves on sight would make it more likely that packs will stay in wilderness areas and that they will associate populated areas with danger. Speaking of aggressive hunting, legalize wolf-hunting with Borzoi or Irish Wolfhounds, anyone?

Those who want ranchers to have the ability to protect their livestock effectively from predation and those who want elk hunting to remain a Montana tradition need to be prepared for this struggle to continue. If wolf populations and the range they cover continue to grow in spite of new hunting and trapping regulations, as we suspect they will, Montana’s wolf quota will need to increase significantly, and regulations will again need to be adjusted to make sure those quotas are met. The FWP is having another meeting Thursday, July 12, so now is the time to make one’s voice heard.

Montanans need to understand that opposition to trapping wolves is at this point just a surrogate for opposing the control of wolf numbers. If the FWP is pressured into dropping the trapping provisions, furthermore, there is no logical reason why all trapping in Montana won’t be on the chopping block next. It’s sort of a wolf trap... trap.

From the bookshelf: A Step From Death by Larry Woiwode

It's Friday, and time for a book review.

I am overdue on paying tribute to some of the great writers who live in this region, and given some of my Monday preoccupations, it is perhaps appropriate that I choose first a writer who was born and raised in North Dakota, and who returned to live in the western high plains of that state after having made his name in the New York literary world. I speak, of course, of Larry Woiwode.

I first came across Woiwode's name in a dusty pile of magazines in a little room where I was doing some tedious research work to make spare cash while a starving student. Always looking for something to read, during a break I picked up a cultural magazine I hadn't heard of before and read an article in which Woiwode was briefly mentioned. Something about the reference intrigued me, and I ordered up a couple of his books on interlibrary loan at the local public library (does anybody even do that anymore? I ordered them by the pile back then, since I couldn't afford even to buy many used books and since the stores available to me so often didn’t have the books I was looking for.)

In any event, I took one look at the thickness of his masterpiece, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, and decided that I needed to save it for a bit later. I saw in a biographical note that he had settled on a small farm/ranch near Mott, ND and thought this a bit odd, even though the southwestern corner is that state’s most habitable part. Didn’t big writers settle in places like Aspen or Livingston if they chose to come west? I figured it was one of those whimsical things that some artistes tend to do and that it wouldn’t last. The joke was on me – by the time I read that bit about Woiwode, he had already been back in North Dakota for nearly a decade, and he has now been living and writing there for 35 years.

The first thing of his that I read was his brilliant first novel What I’m Going to Do, I Think, which I read in a single sitting. His defining work, however, is still his second novel, Beyond the Bedroom Wall, for which the often overused phrases of “achingly beautiful” and “heart-rending” really do apply... and then some. I actually had to stop reading when I saw its painful denouement looming on the horizon and was only able to return to finish the book years later.

While fiction remains at the center of Woiwode’s identity as a writer, he has in recent years turned to a series of memoirs that have been every bit as captivating as his novels. He started with Acts, which, while ostensibly a reflection on the Biblical book of the same name, was interwoven with personal reflections – spiritual and literary – that seemed to be an initial exploration of the genre. Then, there was the wonderful What I Think I Did: A Season of Survival in Two Acts, in which Woiwode recounts life on his farm during the historically harsh 1997 winter, using it as the structure around which he delves deeper into personal musings on his life and writing.

His most recent memoir, A Step From Death, had been sitting on my shelves for a few years, marinating, as do so many books, until just the right time to read it arrived, which it recently did. This memoir uses as its taking-off point Woiwode’s encounter with the power take-off (PTO) of a baler he was running (guess which one came out more unscathed) and is written in the voice of Woiwode talking to his son.

Woiwode’s writings are haunted by memories and dreams, sometimes jumbled together in a seeming disorder that masks the granite structure that holds them together, and A Step From Death is no exception. As with his earlier memoirs, Woiwode writes as if caught in a great spiral, coming round again and again to the same people and themes, but each time touching down a little closer to the center of what it is he wants us to understand. He writes, for instance, of his relationship with his long-time editor at the New Yorker, William Maxwell, who was friend and mentor to a young Woiwode making his way in New York. We learn much about Maxwell in What I Think I Did and even more in this memoir, now discovering that part of Maxwell’s instinctive affinity for Woiwode was the fact that both had lost their mothers at the same young age. Being haunted by similar ghosts and having had to navigate without the North Star that is one’s mother, Maxwell was perhaps uniquely able to guide Woiwode as he found his voice and his story.

Woiwode’s long string of New Yorker stories and his two most important novels -- Beyond the Bedroom Wall and Born Brothers -- tell the story of multiple generations of the fictional Neumiller family, which is rooted in Woiwode’s own memories. A Step From Death now introduces us more closely to some of the people who inspired his fiction. Particularly moving to me was his recounting of a visit to the remote Minnesota farm where his maternal grandparents lived:

Water for drinking and cooking and bathing and poultry and livestock – a dozen cows and a team of horses Grandpa uses to cultivate the acreage he breaks after clearing the jack pine – every glass or bucket of water is pumped by hand at a hand pump from a hand-dug well. The primitive nature of the place enhances my affection for it, in my quest to resurrect the primal scene, although it isn’t until I’m out of college that I realize I grew up in an earlier century and carry a heritage nobody younger can know, no American will, not anymore, and here I first sense words embedded as deep as muscles go, along with their roots in an earlier language, an intuition of this trembling in me as my grandmother reaches out and puts her hand over my head.

How does she know to do this?

The history of a family begins with a woman, to condense Cather, and the pressure of her hand produces generations behind her, as if I’m a boy they recognize from a dream, mingling with us in a room smelling of lefse, that Norwegian potato tortilla she rolls thin as a thumbnail, the scent of fresh bread a bass note, and then in a crush of air she hurries to the piano and she and my mother sing hymns in the house whose only locus is the Minnesota woods.

Woiwode’s observations are particularly poignant for me, since I have also come to the realization that the world in which I grew up – the one-room country school, the preternatural silence that only remoteness can give, the smell of tilled soil and ripened hay, the sound of the wind and the feel of a stirrup against one’s boot, the gatherings where the old songs were still sung – while once a common American experience, this is now one that few people one encounters know anything about, and the ones who do know tend to be decades closer to death than oneself, yielding the prospect of a dotage in which many of one’s memories will be unshared.

About that silence, though. How about another passage from the book?

Late one night (after first moving back to North Dakota), realizing I could follow every car and truck on the highway five miles off, my hearing reached so far I felt a backwash as my ears twitched and throbbed to open wide. I couldn’t sleep for the silence. Out the bedroom window our tree rows looked frozen under a fall moon. Farther off, two miles if I could fly true as a crow, the pole light of a neighbor glowed, and in the wind rocked and sparkled like a distant star. A dove sounded its mourning notes, ah ooo --- hoo-hoo-hoooo, and then a pack of coyotes started up their operatic prelude, yodeling from a distant hill, their chorus answered by barks and yips from far fields, and with the natural world carrying on its concourse I slipped into sleep as if listening to Mozart.

Woven through the book are literary reminiscences that will delight anyone who loves writing (whether reading it or indulging the vice personally.) We catch glimpses of Woiwode agonizing during his long nights (when at his most productive, he tended to work through the night, going to sleep when the rest of the household was rising) over getting his prose just right, and having read his novels, we believe it. And there are insights into what he aims for:

My work attunes me to the versatility of words. I like language that’s allusive but solid enough to allow comic somersaults within its gravity, while meaning radiates from its premises to wider realms.

For a Montana reader, of interest is a young Jim Harrison, accompanied by an equally young and larger than life Tom McGuane, appearing at the doorstep of a cabin in the Michigan woods where an even younger Woiwode was living with his wife and daughter, trying desperately to keep writing through the emotional overwash that came after the publication of his first novel. In McGuane’s “My galleys came a while back. Isn’t it great to be a real writer!” one already gets a glimpse of a man enthusiastic about a certain kind of literary life, one who would later have to deal with accusations (perhaps from the jealous) that he was better at being a Hemingway-like literary celebrity than at writing.

Ultimately, however, A Step From Death revolves around the things most important to Woiwode – his faith and his family – their priority proven by repeated decisions to choose both over his writing career when those forks in the road appeared before him. Not content with recounting just the one brush with death-dealing farm equipment, he weaves into the memoir a family’s lifetime of experiences with nearly losing life and limb (we all have more than we like to remember – and the more rural one’s existence, the more we have.) Each reveals a little more about the preciousness of this short time that we do have with the ones we love, and each brings us, if we are willing, to contemplate the death that we will all eventually face one final time.

And this, Woiwode explains, is a part of why we are so often drawn to memories – both our own and those of others. Writing in the book to his son, he says:

...every forward inclination, even a life-enhancing one, is another step toward death. And if you feel I keep stepping further from the present, yes, I do. The past is my secure sector of existence – everything I’ve been through, no matter how trying it may have been, is over. It’s death that lies ahead…

Morbid? Actually not. Using another overworked phrase, it would be hard to imagine more “life-affirming” writing than Woiwode’s, including this book. For those who have journeyed with Woiwode over the years, A Step From Death allows us to walk with him for a time as with an old friend. And for those who haven’t, it is an accessible book that displays the range of his talents as a writer and that will likely leave those readers wanting more.

Wall Street Journal: Sen Jon Tester "asleep at the switch" and "needs to go?”

It’s Wednesday -- time for a little Montana politics:

Sen. John Tester recently waxed eloquent to the editorial board of the Billings Gazette about the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and its role in the MF Global scandal. MF Global went bust, losing $1.6 billion of OPM (other people’s money,) including money owed to a lot of Montana farmers and ranchers, who are understandably not amused.

Sen. Tester, who is up for re-election this year, was quick to demand that heads roll at the CFTC:

“CFTC was asleep at the switch. They were in the building when all that stuff went on, too. Maybe Gary Gensler needs to go,” Tester said.

He also had instructions for law enforcement officials:

“From what I know about the issue, it’s pretty straight-forward. People need to go to jail over it,” Tester said.

The Gazette article not only faithfully reported Tester’s professed outrage, it even copied his verbage -- verbatim -- later in the story: "Gensler has been accused of being asleep at the switch while accounts that should have been regulated were drained by MF Global.” What? Experienced journalists can’t think of a new metaphor for “asleep at the switch?” Not even “asleep at the wheel,” or “sleeping on the job,” or something? And as a question for Sen. Tester, is the switch that the CFTC was asleep at really “in the building?” Isn’t this a railroad metaphor?

Yes, yes, we are being nit-picky, churlish even, especially since Tom Lutey is a good reporter. But our sniping is in the service of a greater cause. While we might not be surprised at Sen. Tester mixing metaphors, it is more than a little embarrassing that the Gazette simply regurgitated Tester’s points and language without asking any deeper questions. For that, we need the Wall Street Journal, which pointed out some inconvenient truths regarding Sen. Tester’s rhetoric, starting with the fact that Sen Tester supported and voted for the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill:

...Dodd-Frank vastly expanded the power of the CFTC. Lawmakers gave Mr. Gensler virtually everything he asked for and, according to Capitol Hill staff, even allowed the CFTC chairman to help write key provisions of the bill.

We would point out that those were Democratic lawmakers who passed Dodd-Frank on a nearly party-line vote in 2010 (two moderate Republicans from New England states voted for it.)

The WSJ article quite rightly points out (obliquely) that this futures trading scandal could raise the same issues about Sen. Tester -- i.e. was he “asleep at the switch,” and does he “need to go,” given that he and his party created the monster?

Indeed. It gets a bit old to have Montana’s Democratic Senators toeing the line set by guys like Sen. Dodd of Connecticut and Rep. Frank of Massachusetts for 4-5 years, only to have them busily obfuscate their records come election season in Montana. It gets even older to have our Montana press not asking hard questions, leaving it to a paper from New York City to point out the obvious. It’s not like Sen. Tester’s vote on Dodd-Frank was a state secret.

Actually, take a look at that last link again -- really, do... Maybe the Gazette wishes that particular column were a state secret. The 2010 Gazette description of Dodd-Frank has to be one of the longest and most overwrought descriptions of a bill in a “roll call” column we have ever seen in that paper. In fact, it reads like a Democratic Party press release, truth to be told. This was supposed to be objective “hard news?” We will only quote one passage -- again, go to the link for the full Gazette “news report” on Dodd-Frank:

Voting 60 for and 39 against, the Senate on July 15 sent President Obama a bill (HR4173) to enact strict financial regulations and consumer protections intended to improve the odds against further catastrophic breakdowns of the U.S. economy. Reversing decades of financial deregulation in Washington,... the bill addresses many of the reckless or illegal business practices and hands-off governmental policies that led to the investment-bank failures, taxpayer bailouts, savings evaporations, mortgage foreclosures, retirement cancellations and persistently high unemployment that define the ongoing Great Recession...

(Final question: has the recent financial crisis really been officially termed the “Great Recession,” with capitalization and everything, in the official newspaper stylebooks? Jus’ askin’...)

The governor: "Take responsibility when you're wrong..."

The governor's new ad is out, and it is a pretty good one. It is straight from the current Democratic playbook -- the governor on the back of a horse, bawling calves in the background, etc.

The ad is all about symbolism, which is a big part of what an effective television ad is about. Just ask Barack Obama, who has been schooled by the McCain camp on that front recently with an effective, hilarious, mocking viral ad campaign that conveys the sense that Obama is an empty suit with nothing much behind the high-flown messianic rhetoric and worshipful fan-base.

But one should be careful, when massaging the symbolism, not to say inconvenient things that can bite you with sharp-toothed facts, and the governor did just that, when he said that he had "learned as a rancher" a list of good American, apple-pie things that included "taking responsibility when you're wrong."

The irony is that in at least one high-profile example to be found in the real world, the governor continues to refuse to take responsibility for breaking the law by doing Public Service Announcements (PSA's) -- using public funds to produce and distribute them -- while a declared candidate for public office.

There isn't much debate over whether the governor broke both the spirit and the letter of the law that he himself signed. The Democratic legislator who wrote the bill has confirmed that the Republican interpretation (i.e. the plain as the nose on your face interpretation) is what he intended. In other words, the law was intended to prevent public officials from doing exactly what the governor did with his "Ag Month" PSA's -- in this case, the governor even had the chutzpah to include his "Montana is on the Move" official campaign slogan in the "public service" announcement.

Ongoing coverage is on YouTube for those who want to listen to all the details of the special hearings now ongoing. One thing is clear -- the governor is refusing to accept responsibility for something he and his employees did that was wrong. As we have noted before, it would have been simple for the governor to say -- oops, we goofed and weren't watching the calendar closely enough. The matter would have blown over in days. It is precisely the governor's intransigence in admitting a relatively minor mistake that has turned this into much bigger matter of whether the governor considers himself to be accountable before the law or not.

We again note that the governor has made no more such PSA's -- if he were so certain that the intent of the legislation was not to ban the activity, why isn't he continuing to "serve the people of Montana" by making lots more PSA's?

We would also note that as Sec. State Brad Johnson told us in his Montana Headlines interview, it is perfectly possible for a government department to put out PSA's without using the name, face, or voice of the person in the department who is running for office.

The governor could have had the head of the Dept. of Agriculture or a volunteer announcer do the ads, could have left out the governor's campaign slogan "Montana is on the Move," and everyone would have been happy and unquestionably within the law.

If Sec. State Brad Johnson has no problems understanding and following the law -- and still manages to do the part of his job that requires putting out necessary PSA's -- why is is so difficult for the governor to do so?

The joke goes that one of the most dangerous places to be standing in Montana is between this governor and a television camera. Now, we have to add a radio microphone to the list of danger spots, it would appear.

Charles Johnson on the Dem convention

For some entertaining reading, try this week's "Horse Sense" column by Lee reporter Charles Johnson. As always, it is an understated piece of art, just telling the facts without any commentary -- often more damning to the officious, the sneaky, and the silly than is the editorializing that passes for journalism in much of the main-stream media today.

We read about Democratic Congressional candidate John Driscoll saying "You're looking at a guy that will absolutely end coal burning. I'd shut it down in a heartbeat" and suggesting that there are other uses for the coal. Sure. But how many parents still put coal in the Christmas stockings of their naughty children? The market may be limited for uses that don't involve burning it. It didn't go well with the lip-service that other Democrats, such as the governor, were trying to pay to the coal industry. At least Driscoll is honest about his obstructionism.

We have the chairman of the Montana Democratic Party -- Dennis McDonald -- a California trial lawyer who moved to Montana and bought some cows. Perhaps whoever sold him the cows had a sense of humor, and threw in a gigantic cowboy hat with the deal, just to see if McDonald would wear it. And he does, everywhere he goes.

Without commentary and with a straight face, Johnson reports that McDonald made bold to ridicule "pretend cowboys" in the Republican party, comparing them unfavorably with our Democratic governor, "the real cowboy, the third-generation cattle producer from Geyser." McDonald singled out Denny Rehberg (a "goat-herder") and Taylor Brown (a "disk jockey for the Northern Ag Network.) Did someone forget, by the way, to tell McDonald that this is not a good year for Democrats to be making fun of goat herders? Maybe he didn't get the memo -- but we suspect he will, since a certain Presidential campaign seems not to have a sense of humor.

Last we checked, Denny Rehberg is at least as much a rancher as McDonald is, and he grew up in an Montana agricultural family. Taylor Brown was working cattle on the family ranch in Montana at an age when McDonald was probably goofing off in California. Taylor was working to serve the Montana ag community when McDonald was making a living by filing lawsuits in California (and pocketing more than a third of the plaintiffs' awards.)

But of course, the real irony (which Johnson leaves out on the table, unspoken, for everyone to contemplate) is the idea of Dennis McDonald being some sort of arbiter of who is and isn't a "real cowboy."

Moving on from fake cowboys like Dennis McDonald, there were other goodies, like McDonald citing Linda McCulloch's presence on a powder-puff football team as a job qualification for Secretary of State. And the governor making sure that the governor's office staff turned out for the convention to boost its meager attendance. And the fact that few Democratic state legislators bothered to show up.

Perhaps most amusing was the fact that Democratic AG Mike McGrath, who is running for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, sanctimoniously said that it "violated the judicial ethics code for judicial candidates to attend political party conventions." His opponent, Ron Waterman (also a Democrat,) showed up and spoke at the Democratic convention, just as he had at the Republican convention (where he was warmly received, by the way.)

The amusement comes from the fact that the McGrath campaign had a huge banner sign up for him at the Democratic convention. Funny thing -- McGrath didn't have any presence at the Republican convention. It seems that Ron Waterman is the only one who is in a position to treat this non-partisan Supreme Court race with the dignity and, well, non-partisanship that it deserves.

Stockgrowers on brucellosis: is the Board of Livestock really listening?

The MSGA describes the mood of its members as "uneasy," and it seems that it should be. That organization had seemingly staved off the governor's push toward a "split-state" approach to dealing with the brucellosis problem that looms over Montana cattlemen because of the reservoir of that disease in bison in Yellowstone Park. Or at least until the latest "listening session" with the Board of Livestock.

Last fall, the governor seemed to have publicly (in none too good a temper) thrown in the towel on his split-state proposal -- which could also be known as a "split the Stockgrowers" proposal." Not that we blame the governor for wanting to do the agricultural equivalent of union-busting when it comes to an organization that, while itself non-partisan, tends to be supported by Republicans.

It seems, however, that the executive branch may just have been lying low. At the time when the split-state proposal got voted down, the vote was nearly unanimous. Nearly, we say, because one BOL member, Stan Boone, stuck with the governor in spite of the overwhelming testimony that Montana ranchers opposed split-state status.

Boone, as attentive MH leaders will recall, was the member that the governor pushed onto the board in the teeth of opposition from the legislature and over the objections of nearly all of the brand inspectors in the state of Montana. For those who weren't reading MH back then, here's a place to start -- follow the links.

The governor knew he what he was getting when he pushed through Boone over so many objections -- a loyal rubber-stamp. Now again at this latest "listening session," Boone came through for the governor by reviving the specter of split-state status:

"Just to clarify, split-state status is not off the table, it is still an option," stated Stan Boone, a BOL cattle representative from Ingomar.

The MSGA has made no secret of the programs that it thinks will best address the problem, and continues to wait for the Board of Livestock and the governor to be a help rather than a foil for the livestock industry in accomplishing the important task of maintaining Montana's brucellosis-free status. This should not be an issue that provokes partisanship, given the importance of the cattle industry in Montana, but it seems that this is an executive branch that is always looking for a partisan advantage.

We look forward to a Governor Roy Brown, who will work with a united ranching community, rather than working to divide them.

Always nice to be reminded that bi-coastals see Montana as their wolf park

Five Congressmen from east and left coasts are trying to block removing wolves from the endangered species list.

Naturally, they are all from states where wolves really are endangered, while none of them are from states like ours where they are not.

We are all for wolf re-introduction into the Congressional districts of these 5 good Congressmen: Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.Va.; Rep. George Miller, D-Calif.; Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash.; Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, R-Md.; and Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J.

Montana ranchers and hunters would probably even be willing to pay shipping costs -- all we need are destination addresses.

Sunday roundup and branding, the Gazette, and beyond...

Image Courtesy of www.old-picture.com

Liferope to the Stockgrowers?: The governor now has said that he isn't going to pursue a split-state solution to the brucellosis problem. Given the fact that the Board of Livestock that he has stacked over the last few years bowed to reality and voted overwhelmingly, as we discussed last week, to reject that "solution," this is a good idea.

He is still pretty unhappy that he was out-maneuvered by the Stockgrowers Association:

"We threw them a life rope," he said. "They said 'We don't want any life ropes.' That's what their position is."

Right. That's exactly what they said. We appreciate the governor trying so manfully to see the other point of view.

Errol Rice of the Stockgrowers Association was more measured in how he described the plan he and the Association opposed:

Rice said he didn't see the proposal as a lifeline, but rather as a step backward.

Now, the Board of Livestock needs to get after the job of putting pressure on the federal government to clean up the reservoir of infection in Yellowstone National Park.

The AP article states that "...another livestock group, the Montana Cattlemen's Association, had urged that Schweitzer's idea be pursued."

Well, yes, but as we have noted before, the governor, alone among major Democratic politicians in the state, has seemed to make a point of snubbing the Stockgrowers, failing to attend their last convention. And there is reason to wonder if the leadership of the MCA right now might be less interested in the cattle industry and its members than in supporting the Democratic party.

Sarpy Sam recently commented anecdotally about many MCA rank-and-file members he knows opposing the split-state plan. To be fair, the Stockgrowers probably had some members who were open to the split-state plan, but in our own informal survey of MSA members we know, we haven't encountered any.

That didn't take long, did it?: We stated yesterday that with Bill Kennedy dropping out of the House race, the Democratic party has a deep enough bench that we wouldn't need to worry about whether they would rapidly put someone into his place to run against Rep. Rehberg.

The ink was barely dry on Kennedy's letter to his supporters announcing his withdrawal from the race before state legislator Dave Wanzenried of Missoula was being discussed as a likely replacement -- along with other names.

One thing that none of the names discussed have, so far, is a Yellowstone County connection.

Kennedy did bring to the table the fact that he has won two county-wide races for County Commissioner in Yellowstone County, and thus might have been able to cut somewhat into the vote in Rehberg's hometown. He wouldn't have cut into it much, but if something unexpected happened to make the race a close one, it might have played a role.

Incendiary indeed, but she very much has a point: When the 4&20 BB post title calling Rep. Rick Jore a "panty sniffer" came up on the lefty blogwire, it got ignored around the MH office out of general principle. But when time came to make a comment on Rep. Rick Jore's proposed ballot initiative to declare personhood starting at fertilization, we thought we'd take a look.

Lo and behold, some of the very points we were going to make about that initiative had been written already -- albeit from, shall we say, a slightly different perspective.

Let us be clear -- MH is unapologetically pro-life or anti-abortion or whatever you want to call it. The Judaeo-Christian tradition, for those who want to follow it, has long been clear that abortion is wrong, and Western law has reflected the moral view of that tradition regarding abortion since the Roman Empire was Christianized.

Yes, abortion has always been practiced, but so has murder and theft, but that is no reason to take laws against such things off the books. It is a very recent legal phenomenon for abortion to be legal under any and all circumstances.

But the reality is that Rep. Jore's initiative, because of its wording and lack of exceptions, is vulnerable for precisely the reasons the 4&20 BB post points out. We make no claims to being developmental biologists around here, but as best we understand it, in certain circumstances, even "standard" birth-control pills can work by preventing implantation -- in other words, while BCP's usually work by preventing ovulation, sometimes ovulation can still happen, but even if it does, and even if fertilization takes place, the uterine environment is such that implantation can't take place.

Strictly speaking, a BCP can, therefore, act as an abortifacient -- and this isn't just talking about the "morning-after pill" or intentional oral abortifacients. Granted, this is not the intent of a BCP, and for most this would be a crucial distinction that would make them morally acceptable where procedures or agents that intend to destroy an embryo or fetus are not.

Still, the bottom line is that given the widespread use and acceptance of BCP's among most Montanans who oppose abortion, this could work against what Jore is trying to do, and it could do so on one of two levels.

One level would be a head-on campaign against the measure by abortion supporters by portraying it as a measure that would outlaw BCP's -- a sure-fire way to have it be defeated soundly.

Another approach would be to let it pass -- and then immediately file suit to have it struck down in the courts on the grounds that it would deny access to oral contraceptives.

In either case, wasted effort, distraction, and a political loss.

Jore would be better advised to propose an initiative similar to that proposed in neighboring South Dakota, specifically banning abortion procedures (and possibly intentional oral abortifacients,) and making specific exceptions for the life and physical health of the mother, etc.

No matter how one looks at it, this Jore ballot initiative has "fatally flawed" written all over it.