Last Word

There’s a little blue-collar resort community at the top of the Van Hook Arm of Lake Sakakawea, a couple hundred trailers and cabins and a bait shop, a small RV park, and a boat ramp.

This spring, an oil company named Slawson Exploration moved in beside the resort, and with its huge machinery, began clearing a 25 acre site at the top of the boat ramp, which will be home to what now looks like an 8-well oil pad. The site is just a few hundred yards from the park and the homes in the…

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“Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.” – Edmund Burke

“The history of the twentieth century has taught us that people who are rendered permanently superfluous are eventually condemned to segregated precincts of the living dead or are exterminated outright.”

– Richard Rubenstein

“To the Nazi economists goes the credit for working out a system of living on their debts. They realized the implications of the well-known fact that a dishonest debtor has all the advantage over…

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A few months ago I wrote about the long, strange saga of Jason Halek, the fellow who dumped 800,000 gallons of poisonous oilfield brine down an abandoned oil well south of Dickinson. Back in April of this year, he pleaded guilty to three felony violations of the U.S Safe Drinking Water Act for those crimes he committed in late 2012 and early 2013.

Jason was scheduled to be sentenced to 24-30 months in a federal prison on July 31.

Well, July 31 has come and gone, and no sentencing yet.…

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Of all the sleazy companies to show up in North Dakota’s oil patch in the nearly ten years since the Bakken Boom began, the sleaziest of them all has to be Meridian Energy, the company proposing to build an oil refinery called the Davis Refinery just three miles from Theodore Roosevelt National Park. I wrote about them a few months ago. Here’s an update.

Normally, when a company wants to build a large energy plant, like a refinery, it applies for a siting permit from the North Dakota…

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For the last 50 years or so, there have been just five places where you can drive your car across a bridge over the Little Missouri State Scenic River: In Marmarth on U.S. Highway 12, on Pacific Avenue in the city of Medora, on I-94 just north of Medora (two bridges, one going each way), on U.S. Highway 85 south of Watford City (the Long-X Bridge) and on ND Highway 22 north of Killdeer (the Lost Bridge).

The Billings County Commissioners have made news for the last ten years trying to…

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When I moved to this community 23 years ago from Dallas, Texas, I knew I would have much to learn. I was coming to a part of my country that was completely different from what I had known when it came to geography, climate, and ethnicity. What I did not expect was how much I would learn from people who immigrated here from much farther away and from a wide variety of cultures.

My education in what “we the people” truly means began only after I became a teacher. Prior to then, I did…

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“…the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” – Milan Kundera

“It may seem kind of bleak to say that the future of our planet rests in large part on the consciences of Republican politicians. But it kind of does, at least right now. The thing is, like me, many of my colleagues have grandchildren. And grandchildren can be a powerful motivator, even if they don’t have a Super PAC.”

– Senator Al Franken (D-MN)

It is difficult to have the…

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The river lost most of its scenic protection in June, when Gov. Doug Burgum reversed course and joined the members of his State Water Commission in opening the entire river to industrial water development.

In May, Burgum declared upstream areas of the state’s only official State Scenic River—the areas surrounding the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park—off limits to industrial water use, and told State Engineer Garland Erbele to “immediately review, modify and make…

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The North Dakota Department of Health has called “Bullsh*t!” on Meridian Energy’s application to construct its Davis Oil Refinery three miles from Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

In fact, in a strongly-worded letter to Meridian, Terry O’Clair, Director of the Division of Air Quality, says he has actually stopped the review of the application until Meridian sends the Department information to prove the numbers are accurate that they use to justify building so close to a national…

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With the recent passage of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) by the U.S. House of Representatives, it is important to have an honest and truthful discussion regarding what the AHCA is and what it is not.

But before we get into that, what does the health insurance marketplace look like in North Dakota?

There are a few different areas in which North Dakotans currently receive their health coverage – an employer, the government (Medicare, Medicaid or the VA) or the individual…

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