Lighten Up, Jim, It's Spring

Of all the people I know who I still see occasionally, I think Wayne Tanous is the one I’ve known the longest. Wayne and I grew up together in Hettinger. His dad and my dad were best friends. He’s a couple years older than me. Sometime back in the early 1950’s, he and I and his little brother Donnie began jumping in the back seat of whichever of our dads’ station wagons they were going hunting in on Sunday morning and traipsing along behind them in the soil bank fields around Hettinger. None of us was even old enough to carry a gun, but we loved those Sunday mornings. I think his dad’s station wagon was a white Ford “woody” and ours was a grey Pontiac about 50 yards long. Both Catholics, those men had lots of kids to haul around and the station wagons worked just fine for that—as well as for Sunday morning hunts.

The hunts were almost always on Sunday because as small town businessmen, they worked six days a week, as did most businessmen in those days. But as soon as church got out on a fall Sunday morning, we’d swap church clothes for khaki pants and shirts and head out of town. Our dads also fished together, golfed together and ice-fished together. Most of the time they’d take Wayne or Donnie or me, or all of us, with them. Later, as they got a little more secure in their businesses, they would also take Thursday afternoons off too, to participate in whichever of the seasonal outdoor activities beckoned. They worked Saturday afternoons though, because that is when the farmers came to town to shop and they were plenty busy on Saturdays. But Thursday was a slow day, I guess, and to this day, I am pretty sure Thursday is still Men’s Day at the Hettinger Golf Course.

Well, we all grew up, went away to do our Vietnam stints, came home and finished college, got married and settled down, Wayne and I in Bismarck. Donnie started to make the Navy a career, I think, and was killed in a tragic accident many years ago. Later, we both lost our wives to ovarian cancer at young ages, and have only marginally stayed in touch since then. Then both of us old duffers found Facebook, and started pages, and looked at them occasionally. He found out I was writing a blog and started reading it, and once in a while told me he thought I was a good writer. Problem is, we’re both pretty politically minded and we’re on different sides of the political spectrum. That’s never been a problem, just an interesting aside.

But my blog has gotten pretty political from time to time, and I told Lillian (AKA The Woman Of The House if you follow her occasional comments at the end of my blogs) the other day that I was writing stuff on my blog that was going to start making my Republican friends mad. Well, I guess I have. But they seem to get mad in a good natured way. One sent me an e-mail yesterday that started “Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy . . .” and he only calls me that when it is time to tell me I have gone too far, in his opinion.

But the best comment was from Wayne. It said simply “Gee! You sounded pretty harsh about just about everything . . . . Lighten up. Spring is now here.”

Ah, yes, Wayne, thank you for the reality check. You are right. Spring is here. In the spring you plant flowers and take long walks and watch sunsets and do lots of other things to make you smile. Lighten up, indeed. That is today’s agenda. Hit the “Save” button on the laptop and go for a walk. Thank you, Wayne. Advice well taken.

Now tomorrow, though . . .

Oh, in the picture up above, that’s my dad, Whitey, on the left, with Wayne’s dad, Al, on the right. And ten dead pheasants. Either it was a very good year and the limit was five each, or they borrowed a few from Wayne and I to enhance the picture. It was their last pheasant hunt together. Al had moved away to a warmer climate for his health years before, and he had come back to the prairie for one last hunt with his old buddy. They had grown old, but that day they were young again, and there was a bit of a spring in their step. It was a role reversal, Wayne and I watching a couple of kids grinning ear to ear, like they used to watch us, as the pheasants dropped in Duane Cregger's CRP field. It was a joy to behold.

Don't Shop At Scheels

I don’t know Steve Scheel, but I’ve given him a lot of my money over the years. Starting with my first pair of Gore-Tex pants I bought over at the old Scheels Hardware store in Arrowhead Plaza in Bismarck, I’ve spent many thousands of dollars at Scheels stores, on everything from kayaks to shotguns to wool socks and dog whistles. I even sent him a personal letter a couple years ago complimenting his stores on their great service and quality products. My wife and I even had a couple of those nice Scheels tee shirts you get when you make a four-figure purchase. Had. They are in the trash now (the proof is in the picture).

Well, I’ve spent my last penny at Scheels stores after that right-wing Tea Party pap he printed in Sunday’s Forum. It starts out like this: Our three North Dakota representatives in Congress have thrown fiscal responsibility out the window in favor of massive social programs and government bailouts the people of North Dakota did not want. The sad part is they know it, and yet they continue to vote against our wishes and you should be able to read the rest of it by clicking here). I guess I thought somebody who could build an empire selling outdoor gear must be a smart man. Boy was I wrong. His rant about the just-passed health care bill and everything else he believes is wrong with our country just sent me down the road to Cabela’s (which sells the same stuff, at a better price, and at least has the common grammatical sense to put an apostrophe in their name). Vote against OUR wishes, Mr. Scheel? Maybe YOUR wishes, but not mine, or a couple hundred thousand other North Dakotans, including most of the hospitals, churches, senior citizens organizations and people who will finally get the same access to health care you do.

See, I wouldn’t have minded, Mr. Scheel, if you had just written and expressed your opinion on the recently-passed health care bill. But you just grabbed a bunch of punch lines from Sarah Palin and Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh that bear absolutely no resemblance to the truth and regurgitated them, purporting to speak on behalf of North Dakotans. It was one of the most irresponsible acts by a seemingly intelligent and reasonable businessman I’ve ever seen. It was just plain stupid in places, especially the parts where you tell us what is going to happen next, as if you have the crystal ball that the best economists in the nation somehow misplaced. And it was not only stupid, it was mean and condescending.

You say the “Voters don’t understand.” Who are you to judge what the voters understand? I’m a voter, and I understand that our courageous House and Senate members, in their votes last week, just took the very first step toward making affordable health care for every one of our citizens, rich or poor, Scheels owners or Scheels customers, a basic human right. Just as almost every country in the developed world has done. We didn’t break any new ground here. We’re just catching up to the rest of the world.

And in the end, you ask us to recall North Dakota values. Mr. Scheel, the number one North Dakota value is that we don’t go around making stuff up and passing it off as fact. We tell the truth. You failed that one.

I’m not even going to start to try to clean up the mess of misinformation your letter contained. It would take too much of my time. I’m just posting that electronic link to your letter here, so my readers can go read it themselves, and then they can make their own choices about whether they want to continue to spend any money in your stores.

Oh, and I am going to post a link to this site too, which shows that you and your wife have given more than $50,000 over the last ten years to Republican U.S. House and Senate candidates and the Republican party. Must be nice to have that kind of money to throw around. Your biggest recipient this year: The always brilliant, relevant and entertaining, that favorite tea partier of yours, Michele Bachmann. Uffda.

So, Scheels shoppers, keep in mind that at least part of every dollar you spend at Scheels on fishing tackle, shotgun shells, camouflage shirts and bicycles goes to support the wacko policies of Michele Bachmann and her fellow tea partiers, who believe it is time get rid of the Farm Bill, Social Security and Medicare. And then think carefully about driving down the road to Cabela’s or Gander Mountain. That’s where my friends and I will be shopping from now on.

Turn Out The Lights,The (Teabagger) Party Is Over

It seems appropriate, somehow, that the Republican convention last weekend nominated, for the two highest offices on the ballot this year, U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, the two men who are most responsible for the largest growth in North Dakota government spending in our state’s history. Governor John Hoeven and House Majority Leader Rick Berg presided over a near doubling of tax dollar expenditures in North Dakota in the period 2001-2011. So it is appropriate we send them to Our Nation’s Capital, where North Dakotans look like pikers compared to what the folks down there do. They’ll fit right in. If they win, we don’t have to worry about them going nutso on us by joining up with those phonies Boehner and McConnell and forgetting to fight for the federal dollars we’ve been accustomed to getting from Washington to prop up our North Dakota economy. Those two like spending money. There’s no fiscal conservatism in either one of them.

Fact is, we’ve been making our best investments as a state by sending tax dollars to Washington. We keep hearing that we get something like a buck and a half or more back from Washington for every dollar we send there. I don’t know about you, but my 401(K) isn’t doing nearly that well. I think I’d like a piece of that action. Seems to me we ought to be sending the whole damn state budget down there, and then just sit back and wait for the returns to flow in.

The point here, though, is that the GOP convention showed that the so-called Tea Party had a pretty short-lived run here in North Dakota. Turn out the lights. That party is over. It ended with the roll call vote on the GOP nomination for Congress, where Rick Berg outpolled his “conservative” rival, Kevin Cramer, by more than two to one Saturday afternoon. That’s about the weakest showing by a supposed legitimate candidate that I can remember.

Rick and I grew up in ranch country out in Adams County and we’re familiar with the early summer ritual of branding. Branding is half the job of those neighborhood gatherings of ranchers, ranch hands and able-bodied teens. The other half is turning the bull calves into steers, the local vernacular called nut-cuttin’—the harvesting of what will be the main entrée for a Rocky Mountain Oyster fry. Well, there was some nut-cuttin’ going on Saturday in Grand Forks. When it was over, there were a bunch of conservative nuts on the floor of the Alerus Center ballroom, including those of Kevin Cramer and Paul Sorum and a whole bunch of right wingers who came there to show those big-spending party regulars what-for, and instead went home with their tails between their legs to cover up their sore spots.

That might be a little dramatic, but it’s what happened. Oh, to be sure, the Teabaggers did muster more than 200 votes against the most popular governor in America, and Cramer’s disingenuousness (last fall, he was only in the PSC race, then Dorgan dropped out and Hoeven got in and those long Hoeven coattails lured Cramer back to the Congressional race, and then he waffled again before the Congress vote Saturday and said he would accept a PSC “draft” if he lost to Berg) played a role, but for the most part, it was a mainstream Republican smackdown. Berg and Hoeven are big spenders, and are not going to be credible with the right wing of their own party. Earl Pomeroy and Tracy Potter will see to that. Once they enlist Kent Conrad’s chart-builders and put a little campaign cash together, they going to kick the crap out of any fiscal conservative talk from those two.

(Side note: Speaking of disingenuous, the Tribune wins that prize today with their front page feature interviewing five people on the street who have no clue what is in the health care bill and asking them what they thought of it. Of course, their responses were the Republican pap they’ve been hearing on Fox News, which made it look like all North Dakotans are opposed to the bill. What cheap journalism that was.)

The biggest surprise to me over the last couple weeks has been the role of Ed and Nancy Schafer. Ed’s been all over the radio bashing Dorgan, Conrad and Pomeroy, a role he seems to like (Hey, I’m still around, remember me?) and took an active role in Tea Party stuff, mostly, I think, at the behest of his former staff member Bob Harms (Ed’s nothing if not loyal). This after the fact the delegation all went to bat for him in his appointment as Secretary of Agriculture a couple years ago. And then there was Nancy up there on stage nominating Hoeven, in spite of the Tea Party’s dislike for Hoeven. What’s up with that? Those two things almost make me think Ed’s trying to get Hoeven out of the way so he can take another whack at Governor in 2012. Almost, but not quite. But he’s sure sending mixed signals.

Finally, at the end of the weekend, when most Republican Convention delegates were just arriving home, Congressional Democrats passed the most far-reaching piece of legislation since 1965, giving themselves, and all American Democrats what I believe will be the best campaign issue of the year. Health care for everybody. If the Democratic PR people can do just half as good a job of explaining what this means to the American people after the historic vote as the Republicans did trashing it before the vote, this will be a very good Democratic year. I truly believe that. I’m going to Fargo this weekend to hear one of the very best champions of health care for all Americans, Paul Begala, start that process. Here’s Begala’s early take on Sunday’s historic vote. I’m sure he will have more to say on it this weekend. You should go there just to listen.

All in all, it was a very good weekend for North Dakota Democrats. And there are going to be a whole bunch more coming up. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, turn out the lights. The Teabagger Party is over.

Enough Already

Note to ASPCA, March of Dimes, Arthritis Foundation, World Wildlife Fund, American Legion, VFW, and all other organizations who send me mailing address labels: I have enough now. You can stop sending them.

The Face Of North Dakota

Okay, here's an end-of-winter assignment for you. You have time. Five days, by the calendar, but, judging by the amount of snow in my back yard, you won't be tilling that garden for three or four weeks yet, and the storm windows don't come down until Maybasket Day, my dad used to say. So here's what I recommend: Read John P. Bluemele's "The Face Of North Dakota."

I just finished it, again. I first read it back in the 1980's when a friend of mine from Carrington said he wanted me to come spend a day visiting Hawk's Nest Ridge and Sully's Hill, and I realized how little I knew about places like that in North Dakota. I read Bluemle's Third Edition this time, which is an updated version of his Revised Edition I first read. The original work dates to 1977, and is the geologic history of North Dakota. If you want to know about eskers, concretions, cannonballs, and clinkers, or, more importantly, just why North Dakota looks like it does today, you should read this.

In language the layman can understand, Bluemle, until recently the North Dakota State Geologist, takes us through half a billion years of warming and cooling, continental drift, rivers and lakes and, most importantly in Bluemle's mind, glaciers. In his introduction he writes "The record of the glaciers, especially the record of their departure, is inscribed on the land. It is recorded in the hills, the lakes, and ponds of the Missouri Coteau; in the broad flat expanse of the Red River Valley; and in the rolling plains between. The boulders scattered across the land testify: "The glacier was here!" Perhaps the most important heritage of the Ice Age is our rich farmland, the soil that makes our crops grow so well. Once you are aware of it, the reality of the Ice Age cannot be avoided; If God had a hand, it was the glacier."

In less than 200 pages, some laboriously detailed that cry out for frequent snack breaks, but all part of a "generalized discussion . . . meant to heighten people's awareness of our natural environment and surroundings and help them understand the changes in rocks and landforms that can be seen across the state," you'll gain a new appreciation for what you'll see in your drives across North Dakota this summer.

Once you've worked through the Pleistocene and the Cryptozoic and the Cretaceous, a bit of a struggle, I admit, you get interesting and useful stuff, like Devils Lake's origins in the Cannonball and Knife Rivers, and a first discussion of the Bakken Formation before any of us had heard of it (a friend of mine sent me a note after one of my earlier blog posts that said "I thought John Hoeven discovered the Bakken;" Bluemle tells us that it was around way before that, even way back in the Bill Guy days, although "fracking" wasn't part of the terminology when this edition was written (2000), so you'll have to wait for Bluemle's 4th Edition or, I suppose, listen to a Hoeven campaign ad, to find out who gets credit for that).

And then, at the end of the maybe ten or twelve hours you've committed to reading this, you get a treat. The crusty old geologist steps outside his laboratory, past his Geological Survey staff, onto the land you realize he has come to love after all these years of studying it, and gives us an epilogue straight from his heart. I'm reprinting it here, in its entirety, even though it is a bit long, because most of you are not going to complete the assignment of getting the book (you can buy it at the North Dakota Heritage Center, or most university bookstores, or borrow it from almost any public library in North Dakota) and reading it before Spring.

"This land--the "Face of North Dakota"--is built on a deep geological inheritance, one that has been developing for eons. Any one individual can, during a lifetime, observe only small natural changes to the landscape. We will see only a brief moment, a scratch on the surface of our earth's long and dynamic history during our lifetime. Even so, if enough small events, and occasional larger ones, continue long enough, they can combine to transform the "face" of the state.

"North Dakota bears a signature that tells the story of the geologic forces, both visible and buried, that have shaped our state. Their bold, unmistakable inscriptions mark the surface on which we live. The face of North Dakota may be likened to a fragmented history book, one that records not only the natural events, but also the human experiences that have shaped the earth and our lives. If we read between the lines, interpret the footnotes (and piece in some of the missing pages), we can better understand the deeper, hidden layers of much older, buried landscapes and seascapes. Ancient sea floors, coral reefs, shore lines, coastal swamps, tropical river systems, melting ice sheets, and a variety of other environments have combined to produce the framework that forms our land.

"North Dakota's "face" attests strongly to its underlying geology. A change in surface terrain usually indicates a geologic change beneath the ground. Most of what we see: elevation, drainage, surface materials--even snow and rain--are the products of geologic activities. The landscape is where almost all human activity takes place. Learning to live in harmony with it is essential. If we understand its building blocks--the bedrock, glacial materials, soil, water and air--and their inherent relationships, we will be better able to protect its past and future heritage.

"We tend to think of the landscape as permanent. But our hillsides, ravines, buttes, badlands, broad rolling prairies, lake plains and flood plains are dynamic, always changing. People are sometimes a major force in hastening the changes. Humankind has, in fact, become a geologic force, as anyone knows who has watched a dam being built, or seen a road-construction crew at work. We have the technology, the equipment, the power, and the will to shape our environment--sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, sometimes purposefully, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes for the better, sometimes detrimentally.

"North Dakotans ask much from the land--and the land, in turn, challenges us. We farm the fields, drink the water, build our homes and businesses, pump the oil and gas, mine the coal and sand and gravel, bury the wastes and play in the parks. The land is the physical basis for all we are. City people depend on it and on its complex parts just as much as rural people. We all need clean water, fresh air, open space, and the chance to experience the natural marvels surrounding us.

"Yet, as we look at today's North Dakota, we should strive to appreciate yesterday and anticipate tomorrow. Our past and future are both rooted in our land, and in its ability to work for us and with us. If we understand the geological history and natural processes that shaped that land, we can apply that knowledge to conserve and renew it. As we constantly mold and remodel the face of North Dakota to suit our needs, we must also adapt to the changes we impose upon it. However we choose to treat our land--gently and with respect, or harshly and callously--we are shaping the legacy we leave our children."

A Tale Of Two Couples

The headline across the top of the front page of the Bismarck Tribune this morning reads “Legislator arrested again for domestic assault.” It was above the story about Bismarck Representative David Weiler being charged with assaulting his wife for the second time in less than a year.

The headline right underneath it reads “Husband is charged with murder.” The subhead under it says “Multiple blunt force injuries allegedly caused woman’s death.” It was above a story about a Sterling man charged in his wife’s death during an apparent argument.

The juxtaposition of those two stories is a startling way for newspaper readers to begin the weekend, as dark a start this morning as the sky outside clouded in a dense fog. It’s hard to see very far, either literally or metaphorically, when the day starts like this. It’s hard to want to. It’s one of those mornings when the instinct is just to go back to bed for a couple of hours, and get up and start over, and hope against hope things might be different when you look outside or open the paper.

There’s a woman dead in a trailer court in south Bismarck. An unemployed woman with a small child, running a little day care out of her trailer house, beaten to death, allegedly, by her unemployed husband.

Just across town, less than a mile away, in an upscale neighborhood, there’s a woman who’s still alive, but who says her husband beat her for the second time in a year. No trailer house background here, she’s a socialite, and a staff person in the state’s governor’s office, and the man accused of beating her is a once-respected businessman and state legislator.

Two more different couples you won’t find in a town like ours. But today, linked forever on the pages of a newspaper. Front page stories, jumped to page 9, under the headlines “Husband charged” and “Legislator arrested.” But for the death, the headlines and stories could have been interchanged and readers might not have even noticed. Both men had been reported in similar incidents last year. One, the legislator, was convicted when his wife pressed charges. He was slapped on the wrist and put on probation. The other was not convicted, because his wife dropped charges, an all-too-common outcome of domestic assaults.

One woman is dead this morning. The other, as she happens to drive past a funeral home while running her Saturday morning errands, might be saying “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”

The unemployed man whose wife is dead is behind bars today. The state legislator is free on bond. He claims innocence, and under our system, we must judge him so until he is convicted. To be sure, there are calls for his political head. Even his fellow legislator from District 30, Bob Stenehjem, the Senate Majority Leader, says “It’s probably in the best interests of everyone involved for Dave to resign.”

I’m troubled, though, by the comments of Governor Hoeven, the employer of Mrs.Weiler, who says, according to the Associated Press, that Rep. Weiler should resign if he is convicted of a second assault charge. It’s like saying you get one free wife beating in North Dakota before you really get punished. Better, Governor, to have not said anything.

I don’t agree with the Governor that Rep. Weiler should resign if he is convicted a second time. I think he should have resigned after being convicted ONCE. Perhaps if Governor Hoeven and Senator Stenehjem had called for Rep. Weiler’s resignation last year, perhaps if he had been forced to resign instead of simply being put on probation, perhaps if he had been REALLY punished for what he did, he might have learned from his mistake. And there might not have been a headline in the paper this morning that said “Legislator arrested again for domestic assault.”

AGAIN.

There are some things you just don’t do, no matter who you are. Beating your wife is one of them. Not once. Not twice. Not ever. Because, sometimes, when you do that, you end up with that awful other headline above your story: “Husband is charged with murder.”

Bell Lake and Bullion Butte

When I was a young man living in Dickinson in the early 1970’s, a friend of mine and I used to occasionally take a drive north of Medora to a place we called the Bell Lake Wilderness (the locals called it the Bell Lake Pasture). We’d drive a little ways off the West River Road onto a two-track trail that led to a little draw with some ash and cottonwood trees alongside Bell Lake Creek. We’d throw our sleeping bags, mostly of the Boy Scouts era, on the ground (no tents or air mattresses for hardy young twenty-somethings) on a quiet summer night and fall asleep under the stars. In the morning, we’d make some coffee on an old white gas Coleman stove, eat a handful of Baker Boy donuts, and take off across the prairie for a long day’s hike.

The Bell Lake Wilderness was about a township full of short grass prairie, part of the publicly owned Little Missouri National Grasslands. There were no roads through it, except a couple of two-tracks used by ranchers who had grazing leases, and not many fences. Open range, mostly, as I recall.

Today, if you drive up West River Road west of the Elkhorn Ranch Site, you’ll see a sign that says “Bell Lake Oil Field,” and you can turn off on any number of bright red scoria roads leading to oil well sites, and storage and pumping stations.

The Bell Lake Wilderness is gone, as are most of the other public land roadless areas in North Dakota. The RARE II study completed in 1979 (Remember that? I still have a copy!) identified 265,000 acres of that public land that were being managed as roadless areas in the Little Missouri National Grasslands—about half of what existed when I first started going there in the early 1970’s. Today there are only about 40,000 of those acres left that the Forest Service still manages as "Suitable for Wilderness." The Forest Service has leased the rest to private companies who have gone in and developed the minerals, building a vast network of roads to connect oil wells and storage facilities with the outside world, and creating a noisy, dusty, thirsty landscape that most of us who went there thirty years ago hardly recognize. Uffda.

Comes now an organization called the Badlands Conservation Alliance (BCA), a small North Dakota-based grass roots organization (full disclosure—my wife is the founder, and I am a member) with a big idea: to save a few small areas still existing as mostly roadless areas, as North Dakota Wilderness. I use a capital W on Wilderness here because we have so little of it in North Dakota, it needs some calling attention to. If you go to BCA’s website and click on the little box in the bottom left hand corner of the home page, you can download a brochure that explains the entire proposal (and you can also become a member for just a few bucks and help their cause).

Theirs is a modest proposal. It would classify those 40,000 acres, plus another 11,500 in the Lone Butte area, where there are no private mineral leases, and 5,000 over in the Sheyenne National Grasslands, as Wilderness. It would be called The Prairie Legacy Wilderness.

Wilderness designation would allow almost all existing uses to continue, but it would not allow any more roads or wells, and it would not allow anyone except the ranchers who lease those acres to drive on the existing two-track trails. The rest of us would just ride horses or hike in these areas. The parcels are small enough that if you take a good long day-hike through each of them, you can see much of the landscape, and get a pretty good sense of why we should save them as Wilderness. I know. I've done it. And seen the Golden Eagle and Prairie Falcon nests and the Prairie Fringed Orchids that are going to disappear one day, soon, if we do not preserve these areas.

There are a million acres of Little Missouri National Grasslands. This proposal would set aside just 5 per cent of them as permanent native prairie. Ninety-five percent--950,000 of those acres--would remain open to oil development under this proposal. The last time I was up on Bullion Butte there was a 4-wheeler rally going on. Under this proposal, they'd have to ride their 4-wheelers on that 950,000 acres that are not off limits to motorized vehicles. That ought to be enough room. That’s a pretty reasonable proposal, don’t you think?

Despite its vast areas of wide open spaces, North Dakota has surprisingly little Wilderness area now—about 40,000 acres, divided among the Chase Lake and Lostwood National Wildlife Refuges and Theodore Roosevelt National Park. (If you click on any of those links, you’ll go to great day trip planning sites.)

So why am I writing about this proposal? Well, just last month, South Dakota U.S. Senator Tim Johnson announced that he would introduce a bill in Congress this year to designate between 40,000 and 50,000 acres of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland east of Rapid City, South Dakota, as Wilderness. An area similar to our own Little Missouri National Grasslands here in North Dakota. So some of us think the timing is right to initiate this effort in North Dakota too.

I hope BCA is successful. I hope we get our North Dakota Senators to introduce a bill too. If you want to help, send me an e-mail. Or e-mail Jan Swenson, BCA’s executive director, and ask her how you can help. Or just go ahead and contact your Senators or Congressmen. This takes an Act of Congress. Somebody has to sponsor it. It’s a reasonable proposal. One of them should be willing to get the ball rolling. It’s time to get this done.

It’s too late for Bell Lake. But not for Bullion Butte.

Don Hoak

Okay, here’s a true story about the beauty of living long enough to be a part of the technological revolution of the 21st century. Read: Facebook.

Last week, Lillian became Facebook Friends with a mutual friend of ours from our separate earlier lives, Rick Watson. In a note to her, he mentioned an old story I had recounted to him years and years ago, that goes like this.

It was 1960, I was 12, living in a big old house in Hettinger, North Dakota, a house that sat on four city lots which used up about half a block. The house was on one of the lots, and the lot beside it to the west had a big old cottonwood tree in which we had built a tree house. Behind that was the lot with the barn on it, and next to that was the neighborhood baseball field. It was the best place a father could ever give a son to grow up on. Thank you, Dad.

On the other end of the block was the Reinke house, home to my best friend for a couple of summers, Max Reinke. Max and I hung out a lot. There were two houses in between us, the Beaumonts and the Stedjes. The Stedje boys, David and Philip, were older than us, the Beaumont kids, Mark and Ron, younger, so we didn’t play with them much, although I think they did join in the regular baseball games. There were a lot of boys around my age in our neighborhood then– within one block of our house lived Meisners, Petersons, Erdmans, Ladwigs, Clements and Marions – enough boys (no girls allowed) that we could usually get up a game with five or six players on a team, and we had some good games.

We also collected baseball cards—remember them? A penny a card, and a stick of bubble gum in each one. Nickel packs had six cards, with just one stick of gum, although it was bigger than the penny sticks. If you were a serious collector—and Max and I, as a team, were serious—you tried for every card. If, by World Series time, you had every single card, which would be more than 500 with all the players and coaches, all-star and team picture cards and checklists, you’d be the envy of every kid in town. It took every penny of our measly allowances—which meant we had to forsake Milk Duds and Will’s Sunflower Seeds—to end up with all the cards. The cards were issued throughout the summer in series, so as each new series came out, you tried to get every card in that series. You often got duplicates, so from time to time you’d set up trading sessions with other collectors who had a duplicate of a card you didn’t have. That went on all summer. Each year, it seemed, for some mysterious reason, there’d be a shortage of one or two particular cards. In 1960, in Hettinger, one of the missing cards was Don Hoak, third baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates (who went on to win the World Series that fall on Bill Mazeroski's home run in the bottom of the 9th inning in the 7th game of the Series).

That summer, for the first time ever, Max and I managed to get every card as the season neared an end, except for one—Don Hoak. Then, one day shortly before school started (note to the North Dakota High School Activities and School Board Associations: It started after Labor Day back then, and we turned out all right), Max and I got Don Hoak, the last card in our collection for the year. We were sitting out in our yard, looking through our cards, gloating over Don Hoak to anyone who came by, when Philip Stedje came walking over. He was a collector, and did not have Don Hoak. Philip was also a “big kid,” a couple years older, and taller and heavier than us. We flouted it just a bit too much, Philip got very mad, grabbed it out of my hand, and RIPPED IT IN HALF! I don’t think we cried, but we were certainly in shock as he left. I think we scotch taped it back together as best we could and put it in its proper spot with the rest of the Pirates, but it certainly spoiled our amazing achievement of getting all the cards. It almost never happened in Hettinger, and it took a little bit of the glow off. Our complete collection now had one ripped card in it.

Still, we had done it. Now, because we were co-owners of this collection, we had the problem of determining who was going to possess it. Long discussions ensued, and we came up with the perfect solution: We boxed it, wrapped it in plastic, dug a hole, and buried it in the side yard of our house, just east and a little south of the tree house. I can pretty much still see the location in my mind’s eye. It was going to be our own personal time capsule, a treasure to be dug up after many years and maybe provide a fortune for our older years.

And then, like all kids, we moved on. Our family actually bought a house in the north part of town and moved. Max and I drifted apart. Philip went away, to Concordia, I think—his family was very important in the Lutheran Church. I graduated from high school a year or so before Max did, went off to Dickinson State College. Max turned out to be a pretty good athlete and I think went to UND, and then became a basketball coach. The cards, as best I knew, remained buried and forgotten. I think Max went and dug them up, though, some years later. Seems to me one of his brothers told me that at a Hettinger reunion.

But back to Facebook. Rick had asked Lillian to ask me about the baseball cards in a Facebook note. I got curious and went and looked on Facebook for Max. Sure enough, there he was. He has a skeleton of a page. I requested that he become my Facebook Friend this morning. No response yet. Then I wondered about his big brother, Rod, so I typed in his name. Yep, there he was, too. I requested he become my Friend. And then I glanced at Rod's list of Friends, and guess who was right at the top: Philip Stedje! So I asked him to become my Friend too.

Now I’ll wait to see if I get any response from the Reinke homes or the Stedje home. I hope so. I think Philip at least owes me a glass of wine for that dirty thing he did 50 years ago this summer. And Max—well, he might just owe me for half the value of those baseball cards. I’m retired now, just like we dreamed of 50 years ago. I could use the money.

A Party In Canada

Okay, there are a lot of interesting stories at the Olympics. Lillian is an Olympic junkie (she's turning to the sports page first in the morning, if you, her friends, can imagine that), and has turned me into one as well. It was pretty easy. The Americans beat the Canadians in hockey for the first time in 50 years this week. If the fairy tale ending continues, they will play again Sunday for the gold. But I have this deep seated fear we have awakened a sleeping giant . . .

Lindsey Vonn turned out to be a prima donna. Julia Mancuso was my hero until she went into a giant pout after Vonn ruined her chances at another medal the other day. Apolo Ohno is just too cool, but I hate the way he hangs back in the crowd for the first few laps. Scares the crap out of me every time. Oh, ye of little faith. (By the way, everyone is asking about his mother, after the TV cameras repeatedly show only his father in the stands. The stories about her are mysterious--she apparently disappeared when he was just a young boy. I think I know. She dropped the "h" and ran off with John Lennon.) The red-headed snow boarder is unbelievable. Smart, composed, rich, unflappable. Who ever thought someone who dresses like that could be an American hero?

Then there's the Norwegian men's curling team. And their pants. Now, I'm going to admit a couple biases here. First, I like curling as an Olympic sport because it provides an opportunity for people shaped like me to be Olympic "athletes." Second, because of my Norwegian heritage, the Norwegians are the second team I root for in the Olympics. When there's no American in contention, I look for the Norwegians. I share in their joy that the Danes have not won a single medal so far in this Olympics, while as of today, the U.S. has 32 and Norway 19. Even Latvia has two, but none for the Danes. There is a God.

But for curling, the Norwegians showed up in these kind of argyle red, white and blue checked pants. Nobody's seen anything like that before. John Daly is calling for the name of their haberdasher. Click here for a look.

But the best story of all is the Canadian Women's Hockey Team. They earned capital letters because of what they did last night. No, it's not that they won the gold medal. It's for the party they had afterwards. Now, most teams would have gone to the shower, cleaned up, gotten dressed, and headed back to the hotel for a great celebration. Not the Canadians. They broke out the beer and the cigars right there on the ice. Got shit-faced and took the Zamboni for a little ride. Yeeeehaaawww. We won the gold. Let's party!



Now the IOC says they want to investigate and punish. C'mon, IOC, they were just acting like, well, like Canadians. And it IS THEIR COUNTRY, after all. They're throwing a party for the world. Leave them be. I mean, is there anyone among us who wouldn't like to take a Zamboni for a ride?

So let's move on. To Apolo finally getting a gold medal tonight, and Zach Parise and his teammates winning a gold medal on Sunday. The Olympics. God, they're great.

Happy Endings

A couple of weeks ago I started to tell the story of the Hettinger nursing home, a story with a pretty happy ending. Here’s a little synopsis. Last September, the North Dakota Health Department responded to a complaint that an elderly resident had died, choking on some food during a meal. That led to an inspection which found multiple problems with care at the home. The home was not shut down, but was told they would not be allowed to admit any more residents until they cleared up their problems.

A Bismarck Tribune reporter got wind of it and did a long story, which ran at the top of page one. The reporter struggled between sensationalism and empathy. For the most part, empathy won out, but the result was a real black eye for the nursing home. And it scared the shit out of people who had relatives in the home. At least one actually moved out, to a different nursing home.

My mother had been a resident there from January 2005 until last September. When she moved there in 2005 she told her kids she wanted to live there because Hettinger was her home town and her friends were there. She told her kids she could do most things for herself, which was good, because there was almost always a pretty severe shortage of help. She said that when she was no longer able to do that, and required more intensive nursing care, she would probably move to a nursing home in Bismarck, where she would have access to better care. When that time came, last spring, she changed her mind, decided she wanted to stay there. She was hopeful that the new owners, West River Health Services, the local nonprofit which took over from the for-profit corporation that had run the place into the ground, would increase the staffing, and she would be okay there. She remained there until she died in September of natural causes.

Staffing problems were chronic during the entire time my mother lived there. Nurses traveled from as far away as Devils Lake and Minot just to maintain minimal staff. The problem: there simply aren’t very many nurses living in Hettinger, or Mott, or Lemmon, or Bowman, or in any small town in North Dakota these days. Contract nurses from afar had to be brought in, at outrageous costs—if indeed any could be found. Likewise, there was a shortage of CNA’s to assist them. My mother told us often of staff working double and triple shifts just to make sure there was someone available to help the residents.

During my many trips there in the last nearly five years, I met many of the staff. They were caring and professional, friendly and helpful, but often under-trained in geriatric medicine, overworked, and probably underpaid. All were young enough to be my mother’s children, and she was like an adopted grandmother to many of the younger staff. They treated her as they would treat their own mother or grandmother. We were grateful for that.

Perhaps some mistakes were made. Perhaps the doctors and board members and staff who run West River were too ambitious in thinking that they could provide quality end-of-life care for the elderly in their community. Perhaps they should have given up, sent those old folks in need of skilled care off to Dickinson or Bismarck or Rapid City where there was adequate staff available. Instead, they tried to keep providing this service right there in their small town. I say, God bless them for that.

As my mother neared the end of her life, she was saddened by the problems the nursing home was experiencing. My mother was a nurse, and for much of her career was Director of Nursing at that very nursing home. She knew what it was like to have adequate and trained staff. Hettinger was a bigger town then, and there were enough nurses, and aides, as they called them then, to provide good quality care. And she could see how difficult it had become there to care for the residents with inadequate staff levels.

But she was overjoyed and optimistic when the new owners took over, because West River Health Services in Hettinger is one of the single greatest success stories of rural medicine in America. With more than a dozen doctors providing care for a rural geographic area about the size of Rhode Island, they just completed a multi-million dollar upgrade of their hospital, and there are dreams on the drawing board of replacing the nearly 50-year-old nursing home with a new facility. I hope they succeed. I hope they can find the staff. I hope people will move there and work there and enjoy the quality of life a small town can provide.

Here’s the recent good news. In December, the Health Department went back to the Hettinger nursing home and found out that the home had resolved all 31 of the citations for substandard care they had received in September. ALL 31! They have been given the green light to begin re-admitting new residents. I’m going to drive down there one of these days and thank the staff, especially Susie and Barb, again, for all they did for my mother. I know they had a rough fall. I know they kept on caring for their residents as they worked to correct the problems. The newspaper said West River Health Services had invested an additional $350,000 in staffing since the citations were issued. I don’t know how they did that, but good for them!

Still, this is a way bigger story than just the problems of one nursing home in rural North Dakota. It is the story of the depopulation of the prairie. There will probably be more like it. Because if no one with skilled nursing experience lives in rural North Dakota, there will come a day when there are no more small town nursing homes. And then small town residents will have to drive far to see their elderly parents, and they’ll see them weekly or monthly, instead of daily. That will be sad.

Postscript: I remain in awe of that bunch of medical professionals in Hettinger. I was just reading my Pheasants Forever magazine, a slick, glossy, full-color publication which comes monthly from that organization. It has a section that carries ads for hunting equipment, hunting dogs, hunting preserves, hunting vacations, and all things upland game hunting. Pheasant hunters all over the country read it and patronize those advertisers. And right in the middle of that section is an ad placed by West River Health Services of Hettinger, North Dakota: Physicians Wanted. If you’re a doctor and like to hunt, call us, and come out to Hettinger for a visit. Great place to live and raise a family and enjoy the outdoors. Jim Long, administrator at West River, tells me they got a couple of responses, but haven’t yet recruited a new doctor. But they hope to. And I bet they will.

A Gonzo Anniversary

Five years ago today, Hunter S. Thompson put a pistol to his head and blew his brains out. I was, and remain, a Hunter Thompson fan. I have, and have read, all his books, plus others about him.

I never met him. But I met someone who did, not so long ago. Senator George McGovern was in Dickinson a few years ago, and I got invited to have breakfast with him and some other western North Dakota Democrats. McGovern and Thompson were well-acquainted, of course through Hunter’s coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign, chronicled in his book “Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail ’72.”

After the book was published, Thompson sent McGovern an inscribed copy, of course, and McGovern wrote a letter thanking him for the book. The letter was reprinted in Doug Brinkley’s second volume of Hunter’s letters, published in 2000, “Fear and Loathing in America.”

So I took the Brinkley book along to breakfast with Senator McGovern, and had him autograph it just below his letter, on page 558. McGovern got a big kick out of it, and said kind words about Hunter.

In fact, McGovern, just a few months earlier, had written a tribute to Thompson in which he pointed out that one of the photos in Thompson’s book was of himself and Thompson with the spoof caption “Pictured above is George McGovern urging Dr. Hunter S. Thompson to accept the vice presidential nomination.”

McGovern wrote in his tribute, published just days after Thompson’s death, in the Los Angeles Times (and headlined “Gonzo But Not Forgotten”) “In retrospect, I wish I had. Perhaps then Hunter and I might both still be alive and well instead of dead and wounded, respectively.”

Five years ago today, Hunter Thomson left this note beside his typewriter:

No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt.

And pulled the trigger.

Hunter once wrote “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone . . . but they’ve always worked for me.”

Lift a glass for Hunter S. Thompson tonight. He made our world a little more bearable.

Love The Nordic Combined, Though

I don’t get luge. Grown men put on skin tight outfits, lie down on their backs on a plastic sled that weighs 7 pounds, and hang on for a 90 mile per hour ride down an icy chute. I can see that as a thriller at Disneyland, but it just doesn’t seem like an “Olympic sport” to me.

Here’s the thing. There doesn’t seem to be much of a variable in this sport. Let’s look at the numbers. Felix Loch of Germany won the gold medal. His fastest run down the course was 48.161 seconds. His slowest of his four runs was 48.402 seconds. That is a difference of .234 seconds. That’s two hundred and thirty four one-thousandths of a second. Man, that is consistency. In reality, the human eye can’t see much difference. Only, I suppose, an electric eye trigger at the start and the finish could measure that difference. But for all intents and purposes, he made all four runs down the course in same amount of time.

I looked at other numbers. In the second of the four runs, for example, the difference between the lst place finisher and the 25th place finisher was just over nine-tenths of a second. Finishers two through twenty four were all less than nine tenths of a second apart.

That means one of two things. The 25 best lugers in the world are all about exactly equally good. Can that be possible? Or is it just that anyone can get on one of those sleds and cruise down there at about the same speed as the guy who won the Olympic gold medal. Certainly we learned that the 25th best luger in the world is only nine tenths of a second worse than the very best luger in the world. I actually heard one of the NBC commentators yesterday say this of the winner, Loch: “He has a commanding lead—almost three tenths of a second.”

The point is, when three tenths of a second is a commanding lead, and a sport’s winner and losers have to be measure in thousandths of a second, there is no apparent difference between them. There’s not much of a human element involved. It’s about coating a tunnel with ice and putting a plastic sled on it. I guess the reward is for being brave enough to fly down that tunnel at 90 mph. I don’t think much of that kind of a sport.

I used to careen down Water Tower Hill in Hettinger on my Radio Flyer sled at about ten miles per hour, I’d say, and that was plenty fast for me. But at least my sled had a steering mechanism, and I was facing forward so I could see where I was going, so I had some control—there was a variable involved. Just laying down on my back and letting the sled go where it wants to seems pretty exciting to me, I guess, and a little dangerous, but not a sport of Olympic caliber.

Quote of the Day

“I timidly like Hoeven, but cannot support him enough for a vote in November. He is too progressive for me.”

That’s from a letter to the editor I saw in some newspaper over the weekend. Forget Governor Hoeven, and the politics here, and take a trip with me far back into the Dark Ages, when we did not have to worry about our leaders being progressive. And when we were not ashamed to tell the whole world we were afraid of progress. Today, just coincidentally, is the birthday (1564) of Galileo Galilei, who became the most famous public defender of Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism—the theory that the sun, not the earth, might be the center of the universe. Scary thought. Don’t tell that letter writer.

Good-bye Bill

We lost an old Badlands cowboy this week. Bill Dixon was ninety-something and lived an interesting life. Bill ran the ranch just across the road from the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. One of the things he did to support his ranching habit was run a little canoe outfitting service on the Little Missouri. Not a real lucrative business, given the infrequency of canoeable water on the Little Missouri, but I think he probably did it partly for the opportunity to meet people.

Bill was crusty, and funny, and didn't get to see a lot of people out there in the Badlands, so he loved the company of an occasional canoer who needed a lift. My canoe trip gang and I hired Bill a couple of times to ferry us to a put-in or take-out spot on the river. The last time was quite a few years ago, and we had paddled from somewhere south of the North Unit into his ranch, and he was giving us a ride back to where we had left the cars. Two memorable pieces of the conversation with Bill on that drive come to mind.

Bill was thoughtful, and he was a man of few words. He chose them carefully. We were talking about fishing on that drive, for some reason, someone asked Bill what his favorite fish was. Bill didn't hesitate. "Well, once you've eaten orange roughy, it's pretty hard to eat anything else."

We exploded in laughter over that response from a grizzled old Badlands rancher.

And then as we're driving down this terrible Badlands gravel road, on a hot day, with this big cloud of dust billowing behind his pickup, all of a sudden we were driving on pavement. The road was paved for about a quarter of a mile before we approached a ranch alongside the road, and then for another quarter of a mile after we passed it.

"Bill, what's up with this paved road?" someone asked.

"Oil," Bill responded, "makes things possible."

So long, Bill. Hope they're serving orange roughy up there.

Kings X!

That’s what we used to holler when we were just about to be caught and become “It” in the game of Tag, back when we were kids. You too? “King’s X! I need to tie my shoe!”

I never intended this blog to be “tagged” as a political blog. It just turned out there was a lot of politics going around when I started writing on it, and it drifted that way. Retirement is about doing something different every day, I’ve decided. So from now on, I’m going to try to write a couple of days a week about what I see going on around me. A little boring for some of my political junkie friends, I’m afraid, but I’ll try to throw a little red meat out once in a while. Meanwhile . . . “Kings X” from politics . . .

Two very good things happened in my world this week. First, I got to see Camelot on the stage at the Bismarck Civic Center. Second, the North Dakota Health Department gave the Hettinger Nursing Home a “clean bill of health” and the wonderful staff there is back in the business of taking care of people instead of dancing around in a regulatory never-never land. More on that later. First, Camelot.

My, it was wonderful. Lillian will tell you I am a sucker for vintage musicals. West Side Story. My Fair Lady. The Sound of Music. Paint Your Wagon. Oklahoma. The Music Man. And for old movie theme songs. When we’d go into movie rental stores (in the days before Netflix) she’d steer me away from the classical movie section because she shuddered and put a lot of distance between us when I’d launch into “Moon River” in a very loud voice every time I spotted “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” on the shelf.

But Camelot stands alone. Partly because of the story of King Arthur and his round table, a story of idealism and innocence and innocence lost. And partly because of the wonderful song lyrics, especially this, from the title, song:

A law was made a distant moon ago here:
July and August cannot be too hot.
And there's a legal limit to the snow here
In Camelot.
The winter is forbidden till December
And exits March the second on the dot.
By order, summer lingers through September
In Camelot.

The rain may never fall till after sundown.
By eight, the morning fog must disappear.
The snow may never slush upon the hillside.
By nine p.m. the moonlight must appear.
In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.

Those lyrics include one of my favorite phrases: “happily-ever-aftering.” I’ve never heard it used anywhere else. Using that phrase as a verb is magical to me. It’s what we should be doing. We should be about happily-ever-aftering all the time. The world would be a better place if we spent more time happily-ever-aftering.

Camelot, of course, also calls to mind President John F. Kennedy, whose name will be forever linked to it. The story goes that shortly after Kennedy’s death, the author Theodore H. White, who wrote The Making of the President—1960, (as opposed to the other, British, T.H. White who wrote The Once and Future King, the semi-historical novel on which Camelot, the musical, is based-there’s a bit of irony) was interviewing President Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline, for a story in Life Magazine, and she told him that President Kennedy, before he went to sleep at night, loved to play records, and the song he loved the most was from Camelot, the title song, and the lines he loved to hear were

“Don't let it be forgot,
That once there was a spot,
For one brief shining moment
That was known as Camelot.”

Mrs. Kennedy told White that there’ll be great presidents in the future, but there’ll never be another Camelot—this was Camelot.

That article appeared in Life Magazine just a couple of weeks after the President’s assassination, and it forever attached the word “Camelot” to the Kennedy administration. One brief shining moment, indeed. Far too brief. Like Arthurian England, America lost its innocence on that November day in 1963, and sadly, I fear, we shall never get it back.

Happily-ever-after stories just don’t get told much any more. But there is one this week, right here in western North Dakota. It’s the story of the Hettinger Nursing Home. And I’ll tell it next time I sit down at my computer to write.

P.S. If you’d like to hear Richard Burton in his original Broadway role as King Arthur sing Camelot, click here. Go ahead. It will make your day brighter. It worked for me.


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You Could Look It Up

Well, the Tea Party movement got some fame over the weekend. Payin’ Sarah Palin a hundred grand paid off for them. But now there’s this weird controversy over the word “teabagger,’ that I haven’t been able to understand. Apparently at the urging of Fox News, people started using teabags as a symbol of this protest movement. Hanging a teabag from their mirror in their car, or from the visor of their baseball cap. And the phrase “teabagger” was born. Or at least that’s what I thought. But then some of these participants started objecting to the label, saying it was derogatory. Had to do with some strange sexual practice.

“Derogatory? What’s up with that?” I thought. “Have I been living in a cave, or what? I’ve never heard of that.”

Well, I wanted to find out if I was the only person left in America who didn’t know what that was about. So I called my friend Tom. Tom’s a man of the world. He knows stuff. Nope, he’d never heard of it either.

So I Googled it. Uh oh. Blush. I found the definition of it at a website called Urban Dictionary. You can look at it your self by clicking here. Warning: This is mostly an “R” rated site. I’d skip over Definition # 1 and go right to Definitions #2 if I were you. #2 is worth looking at. And then skip the rest. Too much information.

Frankly, I guess I thought using the phrase teabagger for the people who were part of these parties was a good name. I mean, it’s much easier to say than Tea-Partiers, or Right Wing Malcontents. And catchy too.

I didn’t know about that other weird meaning that those Tea Party participants are objecting to. Which got me to thinking: How did THEY know?

Well, enough about that. I have some other stuff I wanted to share with you today, some things I read, or saw, or heard lately, that I liked. Some serious. Some not so much.

“I thought he was more fiscally cautious than he needed to be (and) unreasonably afraid of disasters that might occur in the future. I think North Dakota would be better off if he had voted with me at least 10 percent more frequently.”

--Representative Eliot Glassheim, a Democrat, commenting on the retirement of fellow Grand Forks Representative Ken Svedjan, a Republican

“They're not knowin’ what are we gonna do if we don't have Tea Party support"

--Sarah Palin in her speech to the Tea Party Saturday night. And no, I have no idea what she was talking about.

“ . . . unknown state Senator wins U.S. Senate seat in shocking upset.”

--State Senator Tracy Potter, in his announcement speech for the U.S. Senate, quoting the headline from the recent Massachusetts election, and commenting on what the North Dakota headline might be on November 3, 2010

“Don’t walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close. Let’s find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people. Let’s get it done. Let’s get it done . . . To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills.”

--President Barack Obama in his State of the Union speech

“The thing is, most of the time when you're coming pretty close to doing it with a girl, she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don't. I can't help it. You never really know whether they want you to stop or whether they're just scared as hell, or whether they're just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame'll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping. The trouble is, I get to feeling sorry for them.

--Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye,” whose author J.D. Salinger died last week. Did Salinger capture teenage angst, or what?

“A man died and entered heaven. On his first walk about his new abode he noticed several men fettered in ball and chain. His inquiry of a passer-by brought the reply. ‘They were from Leeds, North Dakota, and if they weren’t chained they’d go back.’”

--1950 edition of the WPA Guide to North Dakota

"The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them (our troops) home.”

--Congressman and decorated Vietnam veteran John Murtha, November 17, 2005. Murtha died Monday. The troops are still in Iraq.

Two Friends And A Possibility

A couple of my friends are in the news this morning, both regarding their careers. And there’s a third guy in the news that could just be a possibility. Here’s this morning’s news.

Purdon
Tim Purdon, it appears, is going be the United States Attorney for North Dakota. We’ll be in good hands. I’ve watched Tim since he first came to Bismarck as a young attorney. He’s good. He’s one of the two best criminal defense lawyers in town, maybe in the state (I’ll let each lawyer reading this decide if you’re the other one).

This will be a new role for Tim. He’s been defending people who were (just ask him--he’ll tell you) wrongfully charged with a crime (or charged for the wrong crime, based on the number of plea agreements he’s gotten). Now he’s going to be putting them away. Lucky for him, I say, that he won’t be taking on Tim Purdon in court.

Potter
My other friend in the news today is North Dakota State Senator Tracy Potter. Tracy and I have been friends for a long, long time. We’ve been good friends since that first round of golf we played together back in the spring of 1981 at Lincoln Park Golf Course in Grand Forks. We were both unemployed at the time, the victims of the Reagan landslide which knocked the Art Link Administration out of office in 1980. Tracy and I had been young public servants, he in the North Dakota Insurance Department, I in the North Dakota Department of Agriculture, and the newly elected Republican bosses of those departments decided they did not need our services for the next four years. So we went golfing, and then found new jobs, hung around, did some more public service in the George Sinner Administration, and then got old and moved onto careers in the private sector. We’re still golf mates. After about 600 rounds or so, I think I’m up two strokes on him.

Tracy, I guess, is going to run for the United States Senate this year, abandoning his State Senate seat in Bismarck. I say “I guess” because I haven’t talked to him for a week or so—I think he was afraid to call me for fear I’d talk him out of this. I wouldn’t have, of course. When we did talk about it two weeks ago, I said “Tracy, it’s a bad idea, but sometimes you’ve got to just say ‘What the f**k?’ Why not?”

I mean, lightning can strike. If your name is not on the ballot, you are not going to get the job. So I say, today, Tracy, “Good for you.” I want to be on the team. If you win, I do not want to go to Washington to work for you, but I promise I’ll keep an eye on things back here and let you know what is going on. And I’ll make the tee times (although I would like to play Congressional Country Club some time).

For the record, Tracy will be a good candidate, and a better Senator. Based on life experience, he’s at least as qualified for the job as Gov. Hoeven, maybe even better qualified. I hope he ends up being the candidate. I hope he wins.

Possibility?
I noticed in the paper yesterday there is a fourth Republican candidate to challenge Earl Pomeroy for the U.S. House seat. His name is J.D. Donaghe, and there’s nothing really remarkable about him, except for this: According to the Minot Daily News, he holds an “honorary degree in bible theology.” Huh?

Oh, and his position on health care. Here’s part of his platform (excerpts):

The National Health Care Act
• Effective January 15th 2011, all Medicare, Medicaid and Veteran Administration health care benefits shall be replaced by The National Health Care Program.

• All citizens of the United States of America shall be afforded full and complete unfettered access to The National Health Care Program.

• All legal temporary guest workers shall have the same access to the National Health Care Program as naturalized citizens.

• Temporary visitors to the United States of America shall not be denied emergency or preventive care by any medical facility but shall be fully responsible for payment of services rendered.

• All National Health Care Program recipients shall have the full and exclusive “Right to Choose” the health care service provider or facility that will best fulfill the needs of the individual without regard to location.

• The National Health Care Program shall provide the following list of health care benefits to any and all citizens of the United States of America without regard to age, sex, race, religion, color, creed, origin, location or medical condition:
• Primary Care
• Prenatal Care
• Preventative Care
• Testing and Diagnostics
• Non Elective Surgeries
• Emergency Services
• Hospital Stay
• In Home Health Care
• Hospice Care

• Effective January 15th 2011, any and all health care providers operating within the United States of America shall submit any and all invoices for services rendered to the Social Security Administration office located within their respective county of operation.

• Effective January 15th 2011, any and all invoices submitted to the Social Security Administration county offices for health care services rendered shall be paid in full within 15 days of receipt.

Huh, again. It’s on his website. Check it out. http://www.freedomin2010.com/Health_Care_Reform.html.

I think I’m for him. We could even be friends. I can live with the honorary degree.

What's It Take To Be A Republican?

A friend of mine sent me an e-mail that gives our Governor, John Hoeven, credit (rightfully so, it appears) for having influenced the Republican National Committee at its winter meeting in Hawaii last week.

The RNC adopted a resolution that urges party leadership to “carefully screen the record and statements of all candidates who profess to be Republicans” and to determine “that they wholeheartedly support the core principles” of the Republican platform.

That could only be a reaction, my friend says, to our Governor’s announcement that he is running for the U.S. Senate, after national blogs last week printed stories about his conversion from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party (credit my friend Chad Nodland over at northdecoder.com for starting that bandwagon).

Well, I was curious as to how they were going to do this, so I decided to do some research, and it is amazing what you can find on the Internet these days. If you Google enough word combinations, enough times, you can find anything. I found the test that the RNC is going to give to its candidates to check their purity. Here it is.

2010 REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE PURITY TEST

1. Who are you most likely to vote for in the 2012 presidential election?

A. Barack Obama

B. Ralph Nader

C. Sarah Palin

2. Who’s the best television political analyst in America?

A. Keith Olbermann

B. Ed Schultz

C. Sarah Palin

3. What do you see as the most important political issue of 2010?

A. Bringing health care to 40 million Americans

B. Putting 20 million Americans back to work

C. Making sure Sarah Palin stays in the public eye as she prepares for 2012

4. Who is the most popular former governor in the United States?

A. Rod Blagojevich

B. Bill Janklow

C. Sarah Palin

5. Despite public opinion polls, who was the most popular governor in the United States in 2008? (careful here, Gov. Hoeven-watch your ego)

A. John Hoeven

B. Rod Blagojevich

C. Sarah Palin

6. What state had the most far-sighted Governor in 2009?

A. John Hoeven (he could see Canada from his place)

B. Rod Blagojevich (he could see the Illinois state pen from his place)

C. Sarah Palin (she could see Russia from her place)

7. Who would you prefer to see host Saturday Night Live?

A. Paul McCartney

B. Tina Fey

C. Sarah Palin

8. Whose eyeglasses started a national fashion trend in 2008?

A. Theodore Roosevelt

B. Ben Franklin

C. Sarah Palin

9. What would you say would be your perfect vacation?

A. Two weeks in January on a beach in Hawaii

B. An all expenses paid 30 day trip around the world

C. Salmon fishing for a couple hours in hip waders with Sarah Palin

10. If you could bring someone into your state to endorse you and help you with your 2010 campaign, who would it be?

A. God

B. Taylor Swift

C. Sarah Palin

Answers: C.

Scoring:

10 correct: You’re on the ballot, the RNC and Tea Party checks are in the mail.

8-9 correct: There’s some hope for you. You’re eligible for a 10-day Tea Party “workshop” to get your mind right.

0-7 correct: Call the DNC and see if they have any candidate openings.

Random Thoughts On A Cold Morning

Having it Both Ways

I’m trying so darn hard not to be a partisan on this blog, but geez, there are some things that just tick me off. One of them is what was said by Governor Hoeven in the paper this morning, commenting on the President’s speech Wednesday night. Our Governor was critical of a 21 per cent budget increase in some federal programs. Well, people who live in glass houses . . . I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but I seem to recall at least two recent North Dakota Legislative sessions where Governor Hoeven’s budget proposal was at least 25 per cent higher than the previous biennium. You won’t find me among the critics of those budgets, because much of the increase was for much needed new funds for education. You will find me among the critics of hypocrisy and pandering now that the Governor is a candidate for higher (?) office and needs to swing way to the right to keep his party’s activist base happy. But then, I think Curly and his friends have good memories too.

Cousins, But We Ain’t Kissin’

Okay, so now we learn (it’s true, you can look it up on the Internet) that President Barack Obama and newly elected Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts are related. Yep, they are actually 10^th cousins. They are both descended from one Richard Singletary, who died in 1687 at age 102. Uffda. Let me tell you, though, that stretching out distant cousin relationships doesn’t reveal much about family similarities. I’ll give you an example of how far apart relationships like that can go. I have a second cousin named Margaret. Her grandmother and my grandmother were half-sisters. My great grandfather was widowed at a young age and remarried. He had daughters with each of his wives. They were the grandmothers of Margaret and I. Margaret and I don’t have much in common though, other than a mutual interest in politics. We hardly know each other, even though we both live here in Bismarck. Margaret ran for political office once, and I didn’t vote for her. She will be running for the North Dakota Senate again this year, against one of my best friends, Tracy Potter. No offense, Cousin Margaret (Mrs. Sitte), but blood is not thicker than politics. Tracy will get my vote again. (I think Margaret and I once had an agreement not to tell anyone we were related, but one of us broke it long ago. Now the whole world knows. Uffda again.)

Friends, Not Cousins

Speaking of voting, I’m ticked off at a couple of my friends too. Three of them, actually. And all three are running for Congress in North Dakota. There’s been a lot of criticism coming from the right directed at my friend Earl Pomeroy the past couple of weeks. My friend Kevin Cramer (God, I hope he’s still my friend a year from today) and my friend Rick Berg (Rick’s from Hettinger, and I’m from Hettinger, and Hettinger has never had a Congressman, and he’s going to cause me a lot of heartburn on Election Day if he is the Republican candidate) have both accused Earl of walking in lockstep with Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in Congress. Y’know, guys, this goes both ways. EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN in the U.S. Senate voted in lockstep with Mitch McConnell on the major pieces of legislation last year. And EVERY SINGLE REPUBLICAN in the House of Representatives voted in lockstep with . . . aw, darn it, I can’t even think of the House Minority Leader’s name (that’s how insignificant a player he is), and I’m not going to waste time looking it up. Now, if Rick or Kevin gets to Washington, that’s exactly what they are going to have to do. So just don’t pay any attention to that kind of criticism this year. As for Earl, I hope he quits talking like a weenie on health care. He voted for the House bill. He should vote for the Senate bill (see Monday’s blog post). And then fix it.

Totally Unrelated

And speaking of friends and cousins, today’s paper also says state wildlife officials say there are more coyotes in western North Dakota, and with the increase has come a jump in the number of coyotes with mange. Nah, I’m not going there.