HOW CYCLISTS AND MOTORISTS CAN PEACEFULLY COEXIST

Nowadays, with high gas prices and renewed interest in good health fitness driving more and more people out of our SUVs and onto their bicycles, we also have a constant string of news articles about conflicts between motorists and cyclists. At the same time, government officials struggle to find a balance where all legitimate users of our roadways can peacefully coexist.

Being an active cyclist, I've frequently written about this subject over the past three years. Here is a chronology of those articles. [more]

By far the most comprehensive and insightful political convention coverage this year has come from the National Journal, usually considered a thorough but boring insider's record of Beltway politics.

Now is the time to shine, though, for those reporters and editors who have been at the politics game long enough to know the ins and outs but still fresh enough to approach the coverage with energy and to do so broadly. OK. My point is this: If you're interested in what it's really like at the Republican National Convention this week -- beyond the tabloid-driven revelations about Sen. John McCain's running mate's daughter -- or if you want an honest account of what impact the news has made at the convention, go to the National Journal. [more]

Missoula Notebook

First, let me make clear that I could care less about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy vis a vis the election.

However, there are some arguments going back and forth in various places on the ‘nets, concerning the case’s relevancy to ongoing debates over so-called abstinence-only sex education, and I became curious as to just what Alaska’s policy is. [more]

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Typing one-handed sucks. I’m used to getting words onto paper (all right, bits onto a hard drive) almost as fast as I can think, so this snail-paced communication is extremely maddening. It’s like washing your car with a toothbrush. (I actually did that this summer, by the way. I’d lost a bet with Rusty. I got him back, though—I used his toothbrush.)

I was sitting in the recliner this weekend, goofing around with my cell phone, and I realized that I can probably text faster than I can type. So while my frozen egg rolls were cooking, I stretched out to full recline and wrote a novel on my phone. Here’s the prologue: [more]

Missoula Notebook

As I sifted through news reports about Palin this weekend, I seemed to find more and more evidence suggesting that — given the upside-down, Bizarro World that American political culture inhabits — Palin will not hurt McCain’s candidacy but might even help it and, indeed, might even find herself in the Oval Office one day. I’m already anticipating that Palin will “win” her debates with Joe Biden, not despite but because of a shaky grasp on the facts of foreign policy. [more]

Guest Column

Wasson Creek now flows all summer long. That’s cause for celebration because the upper section of the small creek, located near Helmville, Montana, is home to a vital population of pure-strain westslope cutthroat trout that had been cut off from the lower section by seasonal irrigation diversions. For the first time in decades, cutthroat can migrate down to Spring Creek, which eventually joins Nevada Creek, which in turn empties into the Blackfoot River above a stretch where fisheries have been in decline. Keeping water in Wasson Creek increases the likelihood that the celebrated river that, thanks to Norman Maclean and Robert Redford, runs unimpeded and unpolluted through the American imagination will continue to be inhabited by real native trout.

That Wasson Creek is free-flowing again is due to the efforts of Trout Unlimited’s Montana Water Project (MWP), which was set up ten years ago to test an unusual strategy for increasing in-stream flow—leasing private water rights. Along with the Montana Water Trust (MWT), established in 2001, the MWP believes that one of the most effective ways to resolve disputes over water use is to employ incentives—ranging from outright cash payments to providing improvements like new wells and more efficient irrigation equipment—to persuade ranchers, farmers, and other landowners to voluntarily return water to streams. Both groups specialize in developing arrangements that serve conservation ends while in no way challenging or encroaching upon private property rights, a hybrid approach that not long ago few would have thought possible, especially in the historically contentious arena of water ownership.

And although leasing has its share of critics, the results have been encouraging. [more]

Presidential Politics

Sen. John McCain's choice of obscure Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate Friday was greeted with amazement in her home state and among many political analysts. The selection is obviously a gamble and, as was surely intended, reflects McCain's maverick streak. An appealing personality, Palin will shore up McCain's support among evangelical Christians, and the fact that she is a true Westerner who hunts and fishes (and whose husband is a champion snow machine racer) could help the ticket among rural blue-collar voters, especially in the Mountain West.

Yet the argument that she will draw disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters seems fanciful; the older feminists and veteran party loyalists who formed Clinton's base are more likely to be offended by the tokenism of such a thinly-qualified woman on the ballot than inspired to vote for McCain.

Born in Sandpoint, Idaho, Palin moved to Alaska with her family as an infant, though later returned to the Gem State to attend college. She graduated from the University of Idaho with a journalism degree, though the Idaho Statesman reports that she left "light footprints" on campus, with no current faculty or staff remembering much about her. The media knows hardly anything about her either, and as James Rainy points out in the LA Times, with the press now racing to Alaska to look under every rock, "the rush to judge the governor promises absurdities from both sides of the spectrum."

New West Book Review & Interview

The Original Man: The Life and Work of Montana Architect A.J. Gibson
by Hipólito Rafael Chacón
The University of Montana Press, 164 pages, $35

A.J. Gibson is one of Montana’s most beloved and famed architects. Paradoxically, he is – at least as far as the scant written historical record goes – also its most unsung. In fact, the only biographical material related to Gibson’s life published before September's release of Rafael Chacón’s The Original Man: The Life and Work of Montana Architect A.J. Gibson, was part of a multi-volume set released in 1914.

Rafael Chacón will discuss his book at Missoula's University Congregational Church of Christ on September 14 (11:30 a.m.) and at Fact & Fiction on September 16 (7 p.m.). The book will also accompany a traveling exhibition of the same title that features architectural models, facsimiles of drawings and photographs. Organized by the Montana Museum of Art & Culture, the exhibition will be on view September 18 through October 19 at the Holter Museum of Art in Helena. [more]

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

I’m sorry, did I miss something? Michelle Obama isn’t running for office. Her husband is. The fact that the voting public’s perception of Michelle carries so much importance in Barack’s campaign is a clear symptom of this nation’s misdirected focus when it comes to electing effective leaders.

I am supporting Barack Obama because he displays the qualities that have been sorely lacking in the Oval Office for the last, oh, 45 years. Dignity. Intelligence. Cleverness. Idealism. A sense of depth, of thoughtfulness. I need my President to be smarter than I am. He’s got some good ideas, and I think he means well. I say let’s give him a shot.

I don’t give a rat’s ass who he’s married to, or if he’s even married at all. He can host an annual gay S&M bacchanal on the White House lawn for all I care, as long as he makes sure my Social Security check won’t bounce. He could snort Jerry Garcia’s ashes off Amy Winehouse’s scrawny naked ass all day long if he wanted to, as long as he brought the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq. [more]

Missoula Profiles

Chances are if you’ve bought lavender in Missoula, be it in the form of a bouquet or a spritzer or a soap, it has come from a woman most people know as “Lavender Lori.”

A petite but loud woman with long silvery blond hair and a spritely step cultivates the therapeutic crop in the picturesque Rattlesnake valley, where it grows along the driveway of the Ten Spoon Winery, creating a frame of purple.

Once she harvests the lavender, Lori Parr Campell crafts the flowers into the wands, soaps, eye pillows, aromatherapy oil and stress-reducing spritzers that Missoulians pick up to wish and wash the cares of the world away. 

In this profile, Alexia Beckerling looks at the life and work of “Lavender Lori.”