Last Word

Of oil refineries and national parks

October 19th, 2016

By Jim Fuglie

jimfuglie920@gmail.com

I’m calling it “The Great Meridian Energy Smokestack Scam.”

Meridian Energy Group is a California-based oil refining company which has proposed to build an oil refinery in western North Dakota. The company has received zoning approval from local government and has submitted applications for groundwater and air quality permits to the State of North Dakota. State agencies which issue those permits have the applications under consideration. There.…

Joe McCarthy didn’t run for President…until now.

October 5th, 2016

“if he (Senator Joseph McCarthy) was anything at all in the realm of ideas, principles, doctrines, he was a species of nihilist; he was an essentially destructive force, a revolutionist without any revolutionary vision, a rebel without a cause.” – Richard Rovere

“…there is a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoiac;…the clinical paranoid sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed…

Socialism and the North Dakota genius

September 28th, 2016

“[In England] the liberty of the individual is still believed in,…But this has nothing to do with economic liberty, the right to exploit others for profit. It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.” -George Orwell, 1941

”The farmers in North Dakota were not attracted to socialism, since each person wanted to own his own farm. However, when the [Nonpartisan]…

Pipelines leak

September 28th, 2016

By Jim Fuglie

jimfuglie920@gmail.com

One hot summer day when I was a kid growing up in Hettinger, in southwest North Dakota, my dad loaded his family into his brand new 1959 Pontiac station wagon—still, I think, the longest car I’ve ever ridden in—and took us to the Champions Ride Rodeo at the Home on the Range for Boys near Sentinel Butte, N.D., on the west edge of the North Dakota Bad Lands.

On the way, we went to the Burning Coal Vein, northwest of Amidon, where we kids got to see,…

Strengthening families

September 14th, 2016

By Eliot Glassheim

press@eliot4nd.com

It's said that families are the building blocks of our society. But too often, politicians pay lip service to families without working for common sense solutions that actually strengthen families.

Whether they are heads of households or partners in supporting families, women in North Dakota, on average, are paid 71 cents for every dollar earned by men for the same work.

This means over a lifetime, women are cheated out of over half a million dollars in…

Food for thought

September 14th, 2016

By J. Earl Miller

jearl@hpr1.com

For the last few years we have seen a change in the restaurant and bar industry in our cities. I am a veteran of the industry starting as a dishwasher when I was 14 and retired from the industry as a manager over 10 years ago.

It was a long road working through the ranks of the kitchen, which ended at a front of the house position. I learned from some of the best in the industry and some of my fondest memories working are from that time -- our crew always…

A slow boat to nowhere

August 24th, 2016

By Tom Bixby

tom@hpr1.com

On April 22, 2004, a Brazilian ship full of soybeans arrived in the Chinese port of Xiamen. It was not allowed to unload its cargo.

AQSIQ is a ministerial administrative organ directly under the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, in charge of import-export food safety. AQSIQ inspectors said there were “poisonous red seeds” mixed in with the soybeans, and that any shipment with even one red seed in it, that is, one individual bean infected with…

Portland to the prairie: returning to my roots

July 27th, 2016

By Tessa Torgeson

Home is a tangled web at the core of all of our stories -- that beautiful ugly mess that we try to escape, sometimes denying the way that it shapes and morphs us. As we mature we realize that home is more than a dot on a map. Like it or not, home is a place that we will one day return to, although each of our pilgrimages veer in different directions. Home can haunt us, but it can also heal us.

I grew up landlocked smack dab in the heartland of Bismarck, North Dakota. I…

Soggy tea bags vs. concrete jobs

July 27th, 2016

“…by 1934 money was moving out through PWA [The Public Works Administration] into the hands of contractors, manufacturers, engineers, laborers, truckers, carpenters, architects, and deep into the arteries of the economy.” – James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, 1956

“Forty-seven percent of self-identified Democrats describe themselves as economic and social liberals, according to a Gallup poll released last June (2016). That's up from 39 percent in 2008 and…

That is not who we are

July 20th, 2016

By Anonymous

As we all click click click on our computers or phones, protected by the shield of the illuminated screen, we find ourselves obsessively reading manifestos in favor of political, economical and societal change. Sometimes we even muster up the courage to post a statement ourselves. It satisfies us; we find ourselves full with the feeling of altruism.

This virtual reality has us convinced that we are each advocates for every social issue, every minority, every Constitutional…