The Bugle editorial board has ferreted out another grievous misuse of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars through sneaky budgetary earmarks. The Independent-Observer over in Conrad reveals “Pondera County will receive $2,500 in federal funds to supplement and expand emergency food and shelter programs.” Yep, that’s right now Congress is giving up your tax dollars to “private nonprofit” organizations (which we all know is code for “Commie Bastards”) and all they have to do to get on the dole is prove that they can deliver emergency food and shelter. More Liberal do-gooders getting rich from the public trough.

Don’t miss the City Council, Executive Committee meeting next Tuesday at the Java Hut at 11 am.

Breakfast Special at the Mid-Town Cafe: This week, Belgian waffles with Mona’s special chokecherry jam. Ummmm, boy.

Okay, so here’s one for ya. The Char-Koosta News reports on the closing of the closing of the Camas Prairie School after seventy years. So, yeah, it was only a matter of time and they were down to three students this year but you have to admit that it brings a bit of a tear. I know most of you have been by the old dilapidated school out there between Hot Springs and Perma and wondered how they could keep it going out in the Lake Missoula outwash. Coming down off Merkle Hill and out across the flats, the old school is the only real landmark in the valley.

I hope they do come up with a good use for the building. It would really be sad to see it just crumble over the years. It will be just another of those old landmarks that are spread all over Montana. One of those places that set you to wondering as you whiz by at seventy miles per on your way to someplace important. What a joyful place to hold community gatherings. Now the three students are off to the hectic life in the big cities of Hot Springs and Ronan.

One of the current students described it like this:

“Do you know what’s going to happen? That school is going to shut down forever,” says Reefus, who is one of three of the last students to attend the school. “I went to that school my whole life and now I’m going to Ronan. It’s going to be a little bit scary because Ronan has so many kids and it’s only been us three.”

Scary Indeed. Take heart Reefus, we’ll all miss it even those of us to whom it was just a passing landmark.

Congratulations to Andy Hammond for sniffing out another leftist. He’s really got a nose for it. Although he calls this a “lefty blog” and while I must admit to strong “progressive” leanings, I never intended this blog to be another smear campaign against republitoons, there are plenty of those already, and really they are just too easy a target. I had intended to cover issues of interest to Northwest Montana without regard for political rubbish. Andy, Rush, and Operation KKKaos just pushed my buttons, as was their intention, and I got off on a tangent. This blog will never really be about twisting the nipples of the republicons and it will probably never be up to date and urbane since I also have a real life, but hopefully the issues will be real.

So, thanks Andy for the bit of puffery and I now head back into the aether to resume my inconspicuous piece of cyberspace.

The state of Montana wants to ban electronic billboards along our roadways. Evidently the current law isn’t specific enough.

http://www.flatheadbeacon.com

These are those fancy gadgets that change message every few seconds.  The kind you see behind home plate during baseball games. State law already bans “advertising signs that flash, move or use intermittent lights along state roadways.”

Advertisers say that the current rules don’t pertain to the new technology.  Let’s see, they use LED lights. The messages changes intermittently.  Hmmm… yeah, I think we need to make that more clear in the law. I already have enough crap to block my views of the mountains, I don’t need a “new technology” to block out more and at the same time burn up my precious megawatts.

By the way. I did like the picture of Rush on his website in his new Operation Chaos uniform. It does, however, bring to mind some unsettling comparisons.

You have to love those republicans. They are always good for a laugh. Rush Limbaugh and a second string blogger from Missoula have opened Operation Chaos in Montana. As I see it, the plan is to try to get the largest Democratic turnout in history by having republicans switch sides and vote for Clinton in the June primary.

I can understand Limbaugh’s motive. He wants to sell more junk on his website and usually does that by conning the gullible. However, those Montana republicans who support this effort are going to be in for somewhat of a shock when they chose the Democratic ballot to vote Hillary and then look further down the ballot and see only Democratic names for state and local offices. They will be in somewhat of a quandary. Now they will either have to not vote in the other races or try to pick a candidate they know nothing about while over on the GOP side their opponents are voting in folks they disagree with.

Oh well, let’s welcome all the new Dems aboard. Hope they put up lots of yard signs for Democrats. Maybe they will want to get out and do some door-to-door work for our candidates as well.

Gov. Brian Schweitzer has named Greg Pape to succeed Sandra Alcosser as the Montana Poet Laureate. Alcosser was the first state poet laureate under the law signed in 1995. She served a two year term. Pape is from Stevensville and Alcosser was from Florence. Okay, enough with Bitterroot poets! (kidding) Pape is a creative writing prof at UM and has been widely published. He is the recipient of the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award. His latest collection is “American Flamingo”.

Alcosser has this praise for her successor; “You want to be the poet’s friend, because he makes you cry and laugh, to share his shadow and nuanced eye as he bends above a small spider that walks inside the snow track of a deer—within the shadow of the poet, that spider pauses. In the manner of James Wright and Horace before him, Greg Pape celebrates the delicate and daily exchange living beings make with each other. This is a beautifully compassionate book.”

I can’t believe it took this long for Montana to get around to honoring our long tradition of wonderful poets. Okay, enough talk, here is a short sample of the poetry of Greg Pape.

From “Album”

My son has built a tent-cabin
in the front room and invited the dog.

He has constructed an imaginary machine,
with an invisible lever, for catching the fog.

Fallen clouds drifting through the valley
along the river bottom, up and over the lines

and folds and contours of the hills, coulees
and benches, combed by cottonwoods and pines,

breaking softly against the windows
like thought or breath, then passing on,

flowing, opaque body of air, and we are both
caught up in this elemental conversation

of house and fog. The fog got in the house,
he says. I am catching it with this.

(Poem: from “Album” by Greg Pape, from American Flamingo.
© Southern Illinois University Press.)

We here in Button Valley have started a little blog to talk about all things Montana. We want to talk with our friends about all the important and not-so-important things that are happening in Montana. We hope you’ll join us.

On Aug. 6, the EPA administrator and Max Baucus (must be an election year) visited Libby and attended the latest in a seemingly endless string of asbestos hearings. In the early fifties the owners of the Zonolite mine did tests showing that their miners had cancers and asbestosis caused by the toxic materials they were mining. EPA has spent the last seven years cleaning up Libby. Nobody can say whether the cleanup has done any good and that same nobody claims no knowledge about the asbestos spread around the entire country by W.R. Grace from the Libby mine including the World Trade Center. In the meantime, the number of little white crosses continues to grow and the victims continue to be ignored. Max continues to demand answers just like every other politician who has visited Libby in the last twenty years and yet nothing ever gets done but we can count on a lot of smiling faces waving to the crowds in Libby every time there is another election.

Read the latest story in the Missoula Independent

I see by John Halbert in the Miles City Star that we seem to be in an active rattlesnake season. Seems the little buggers don’t like hot weather much more than the rest of us and it’s got them kinda on the prod. Well, it’s not like Miles City is a big tourist draw this time of year, but maybe if we could steer a few of those pilgrims out that way we could thin the ranks a bit for the rest of the state. Guess that’s why they have the Bucking Horse Sale earlier in the year before the locals fully wake up.

“Heat got you restless? Maybe a little cranky and irritable? The weather is likely having the same effect on nearby rattlesnakes.
So far this season, four people have been treated for prairie rattlesnake bites at Holy Rosary Healthcare, according to Chief Nursing Officer Trina Jellison.
The snake-bite patient flow was such that for a brief time, there was only enough antivenom on hand to get a patient started and then transferred, Jellison said.
“Now we’re right back where we should be,” she added. The hospital’s normal complement is 20 vials of antivenom, enough to treat one large adult or two medium-sized adults”