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Kids Count 2009

Every year, the Annie E. Casey Foundation supports an amazingly comprehensive and important look at the well-being of the nation’s children, taking into account, state-by-state, the factors that help or hinder children’s welfare. The foundation’s “Kids Counts” reports look at leading indicators like poverty rates, the availability of daycare, school performance, the number of children without health insurance, median household incomes, obesity rates, and neighborhood safety, and then rank the states to show which are doing the best (and worst) jobs.

So how does Montana add up? As in most years, there’s reason to celebrate—and to worry.

Guest Opinion

Many of us will be afield this fall spending time in our favorite hunting and fishing spots. We will be enjoying the tradition of these field sports so important to our lives. But as you head out to the fields, rivers and streams we want you to be aware of an important tool for conservation of those areas we find near and dear to our hearts.

The United States Congress this fall will have a unique opportunity to secure full and dedicated funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the principal source of federal dollars for protecting land in America’s national parks, forests, and other public landscapes and ensuring recreational opportunities for Americans in every state in the nation.

Since 1977, this fund has been authorized at $900 million per year. Most of the funds come from off-shore oil and gas leases, and are to be used for the purchase, from willing sellers, of land with outstanding natural, recreation, scenic, and other attributes, and for the development of outdoor recreation lands and facilities at the state and local level.

Montana Wolf Hunt

A half-hour after sunset tonight, Montana’s first official wolf hunt—arguably the most controversial hunting season in recent history—will be over. Montana’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks department announced the shut-down after reports came in that 72 wolves had been killed as of Sunday evening, meaning that hunters were fast closing in on the state quota of 75 wolves, according to the Billings Gazette.

LAND BUY

The Bureau of Land Management announced on Monday it is buying a key piece of private land in the midst of southwest Colorado’s Canyon of the Ancients National Monument believed to hold hundreds of undocumented prehistoric sites.

The purchase is of one of seven deals to buy 5,026 acres of private inholdings of conservation land within or next to public land in Colorado, Montana and Nevada.

Essay: A week in our national town

Washington, D.C. is a town where an arcane government and a logical street grid are muddled by overlap and diagonal lines. But the reverent preservation and displays of America’s history have a clear and tangible path.

In a town where the ghosts of American history wait for you to discover them, your hosts are cabdrivers, waiters, and doormen from Eritrea, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Somalia. They are a twenty-year wave of immigrants just as the Irish, Italians, and Eastern Europeans who are the backbone of the Eastern seaboard were at the turn of the 20th century, and by working as hard as their role models they remind you why America exists.

In a place where federal buildings are so baffling that in looking for the “Anteroom” you run across a door marked “Not the Anteroom” you can still simply have your bag scanned and then walk straight to your congressman’s office and state your plea.

Politicos have been trying to figure out just where the Republican Party plans to get the surge for its resurgence. The Republicans have done their damndest to shed independent and Libertarian voters since 2001, ‘and what do they aim to replace them with?’ I ask you. Do the Neoconservatives represent a large enough voting bloc to give them control of the White House and Congress?

New West Book Review

Thanks to television shows such as Dora the Explorer, Maya and Miguel, and the trusty Sesame Street, many kids growing up in English-speaking homes can count to ten and say hello in Spanish. Cinco Puntos Press, based in El Paso, specializes in literature that straddles the U.S./Mexico border, and publishes a number of bilingual books for children that will help kids who are interested in Spanish take their language study further.

El Paso-based writer Benjamin Alire Sáenz‘s The Dog Who Loved Tortillas (36 pages, $17.95), with vibrant clay illustrations by Geronimo Garcia, will be a hit with any kid who has ever begged his parents for a dog.  In this story, told in Spanish and English with a clay squiggle dividing the two texts on the same page, Little Diego Domínguez (who previously appeared in A Gift from Papá Diego) and his big sister Gabriela simultaneously hit upon the idea that they should get a dog.  When they ask their parents for a dog a piece, the parents say they can have a dog, but only if they share. (As a mom, I was sort of rooting for the parents to demand more from Diego and Gabriela: fifty whine-free days and nights, cleaning, scullery work.)

Gabriela and Diego agree, secretly thinking, “But it will be more mine.” They adopt a puppy from the humane society, and work hard housebreaking him.  Diego discovers that the puppy, Sofie, will perform tasks in exchange for bites of tortilla.  Sofie becomes well known around the neighborhood as the tortilla-loving dog.  But one morning Diego discovers Sofie “barely moving,” and Mr. Domínguez says, “Her nose is dry and hot.  It’s supposed to be cold and wet.” A trip to the vet is on order.  Uh oh, I thought, maybe dogs aren’t supposed to eat tortillas? 

Political Commentary: Heath Haussamen

So in September, State Auditor Hector Balderas publicly shamed 87 government agencies in New Mexico by releasing to the media a list of agencies that hadn’t submitted annual and compliance audits to the state as required by law.

It was the first time the auditor publicly released such a list, and dozens of agencies responded by immediately turning in late audits or at least calling Balderas’ office to make arrangements to get their audits done.

But 34 agencies didn’t even bother to respond, though they’re required by law to submit annual audits. (Check out the list of the 34 agencies, courtesy of The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Kate Nash.) Balderas has basically no recourse to get those agencies to comply with a state law that is designed to help ensure those agencies aren’t rife with fraud, waste and abuse.

Boom and Bust

Like the residential real estate bubble, the commercial real estate boom of 2003-2007 was fed by cheap money and lax lending standards. Institutional investors such as hedge funds and insurance companies - strangely blind to the possibility that real estate values could decline - had an insatiable appetite for any loan that had a decent interest rate and was backed by real estate. When the rosy projections on cash-flow for apartment complexes, office buildings, shopping malls and resort hotels were revealed to be pipe-dreams when the market turned, the carnage began - and it’s likely to continue for a while, according to a recent report from the Urban Land Institute and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Truck Crash Fallout

At a public meeting following the October crash of a tractor-trailer along the east shore of Flathead Lake, Montana Department of Transportation Director Jim Lynch told the audience a community effort to increase safe driving along Highway 35 would ultimately be more effective than attempts to restrict truck traffic along the roadway.

The forum, held at the Best Western Grand Oak Hotel, was a chance for public dialogue after a truck carrying wood chips veered off the road near Finley Point Oct. 20, crashing and injuring the driver. This most recent crash stoked the concerns of east shore residents, occurring about a year-and-a-half after a truck crash in nearly the same spot dumped 6,400 gallons of gasoline, forcing five families out of their homes and costing millions to clean up.

Two other trucks have crashed in the area over the last several years, each time underscoring the complaints of many east shore residents that MT 35 is simply too narrow, residential and close to Flathead Lake to allow such heavy freight. The trucking industry, however, has long argued that the east shore route from Polson to the cities of the Flathead is shorter and flatter than taking U.S. Highway 93 along the west shore, saving fuel and time. 

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