Last Word

​Thank you, Richard Nixon and the EPA

April 5th, 2017

A thousand trucks a day. That’s what Billings County Commission Chairman Jim Arthaud bragged to the Dickinson Press one day, a number of years ago, when he was asked how many vehicles would use a new bridge over the Little Missouri River north of Medora.

A lot of water has flowed beneath that proposed bridge since 2012, the last time the public was invited to consider a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the project. He might lower that estimate by a few hundred today.

As I…

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​James Comey: Trump tracker

March 29th, 2017

“The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary…From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.” - George Orwell

“I can only live in two different forms: as a mind in the…

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​The Pro-Life Challenge

March 22nd, 2017

“There is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to you to be free in life, all else being beyond your power; that is to recognize and profess the truth.” – Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You

This is an open letter to Roxane Salonen and the people protesting outside the women’s clinic, who want to shut down Planned Parenthood, and otherwise identify as “pro-life”: I know you feel very emotional about this. Some people think that most abortion foes…

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New Little Missouri bridge site selected–and no one’s going to be happy

March 22nd, 2017

The engineering firm drafting the Environmental Impact Statement for Billings County’s request to put a new bridge across the Little Missouri River north of Medora has determined the best place to put the bridge is just 17 miles north of Medora, about a third of the way—as the crow flies—between the two current bridges near Medora and Watford City.

Billings County wants to build the bridge “to provide the public with a centrally accessible, safe, efficient, and reliable link between…

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I’m crashing your (balloon release) party

March 15th, 2017

A sea of bright balloons floats against the backdrop of the infinite prairie sky, blotting out the clouds and sun. This is a poetically picturesque scene soon gracing Fargo’s skies.

Gigi’s Playhouse, a Fargo nonprofit that provides services for people with Down Syndrome, is planning their second annual balloon release fundraiser for World Down Syndrome Day, held on March 21st because Down Syndrome is caused by triplication of the 21st chromosome.

Releasing balloons into the air…

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​Coffee with Congressman Kevin Cramer: dispatches from the town hall meeting

March 1st, 2017

People showed up hours early to get a good seat to meet North Dakota's sole representative for a town hall session on February 23rd, but many constituents were forced to the back of the room when Cramer's publicist, who had arrived even earlier, reserved prime seating for Cramer lackeys and sycophants like the hate-group Concerned Women of America, or to perennial ratings-loser Chris Berg and the skeletal remains of Scott Hennen.

Berg seemed particularly pleased with the turnout. I…

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Putin and Trump: two sides of the same coin

February 22nd, 2017

“The most complete and happy victory is this; to compel one’s enemy to give up his purpose, while suffering no harm oneself.” -Belisarius

“I view the United States of these last years of the twentieth century as essentially a tragic country, endowed with magnificent natural resources which it is rapidly wasting and exhausting, and with an intellectual and artistic intelligentsia of great talent and originality. For this intelligentsia the dominant political forces of the country…

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​Bullion Butte wins another one

February 15th, 2017

There was a big dust-up about 5 years ago over the North Dakota State Land Board’s decision to offer, for lease, the right to drill for oil on the west side of one of southwest North Dakota’s major landmarks, Bullion Butte. The butte and some of the acreage around it are mostly owned by the U.S. Forest Service, and the area has been off limits to development since about 1977, and closed to even access by vehicles since 2001, when the Forest Service set it aside as one of five…

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Dispatches from the United Against HB1427 rally

February 8th, 2017

The simplest description of HB1427 is this metaphor: imagine a dog p*ssing on the Constitution in front of your war-hero grandfather. Hundreds of people showed up to a rally in Fargo on Groundhog Day to rightfully oppose that concept.

People of many creeds and colors, tongues and towns showed up for this rally against this bad bill. Everyone had their reasons: family, business, solidarity. A map of pins showing attendees' ancestry filled every inhabited continent quickly.

Ostensibly…

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Before I was a feminist

February 1st, 2017

What was I before I was a feminist, before I even knew what that word meant?

I was a proud daddy’s girl

In my mind, it meant that I was strong, independent and wild. I could be clever enough to figure out problems with my own two hands and ask the question ‘why.’ It allowed me to minimalize my mother's contributions, because what a mother gives is the right of her child, but what a father gives is a gift. These were never things my parents said, but what I learned from society.

I was…

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