He loved Silas. Then she kicked the tar out of him.
A tale of heartbreakin’ and asskickin’
Posted inGoat
Interior design at the Interior Department
When U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar of Colorado takes office later this month as Secretary of the Department of Interior, he’ll have one plush “executive washroom.” According to the Washington Post, outgoing Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne recently spent $235,000 of our tax money on a new bathroom for the fifth-floor office. The renovation included a new […]
Posted inGoat
Ex-HCN board member named Idaho lt. guv
Brad Little is a widely respected third-generation Idaho rancher, working livestock and crops. He’s taken a leadership role in many ag and business groups. He’s also a longtime Republican legislator, now serving as a state senator and Majority Caucus Chairman. He’s involved in efforts to resolve livestock grazing and timber management controversies on public lands, […]
Posted inGoat
Reflections on “Methow homecoming”
Christopher Solomon’s essay (Methow homecoming, 12-8-08 edition) struck a heart chord with me. Like Solomon I escaped from the East Coast with a master’s degree (mine was more useful; it came with a teaching credential) and went looking for a home in the West. And like Solomon and Rick Bass whom he quotes my wanderings […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Parking is primo in Vail
Ah, Vail, where big money still gets spent on a crucial item like a parking space. The Vail Daily says a treasured spot within Vail’s heated indoor Founders Garage is now on offer for $500,000. “Parking is going up in Vail,” said Buzz Schleper, the spot’s owner. “There’s always somebody out there who has money […]
Posted inGoat
EPA botched perchlorate analysis, report says
The Environmental Protection Agency apparently erred in its analysis of the potential human health impacts of perchlorate, according to a draft report by the agency’s inspector general. Perchlorate is a major element of rocket fuel that has contaminated drinking water in dozens of states. The chemical acts in concert with a handful of other chemicals […]
Posted inWotr
The wild we take for granted
Recently I was obligated to serve as a course official for a cross-country meet, which is a fancy way of saying that I got to spend a morning standing out in the drizzle on a golf course, waving young runners past. I was stationed at the end of a path that led through a grove […]
Posted inArticles
Video: Humor in a world gone mad
Travis Kelly creates cartoons in order to stay sane
Posted inGoat
Another public lands giveaway?
Energy companies will be able to drill 18,000 new natural gas wells on 1.5 million federal acres in southeastern Montana’s remote Powder River Basin over the next 20 years, thanks an amendment to the area’s Resource Management Plan released by the Bureau of Land Management in the waning days of the Bush administration. The basin, […]
Posted inWotr
Hunting is the ultimate do-it-yourself experience
Garden-raised vegetables are probably the tastiest, and eating food raised from seeds you planted yourself always gives a deep sense of satisfaction. But nothing beats hunting for connecting you to the land. I came to this conclusion recently. Over most of my life, I equated hunting with killing, even though I was raised in Montana, […]
Posted inGoat
Another Colorado senate race
We just finished one U.S. Senate race in Colorado, and now we face another. In the 2008 election, Democrat Mark Udall handily defeated Republican Bob Schaffer by a 52-43 margin to replace retiring Republican Wayne Allard. But on Dec. 17, president-elect Barack Obama named Colorado’s other U.S. senator, Ken Salazar, as his choice for secretary […]
Posted inGoat
File under Unintended Consequences
Tamarisk, a feathery green Eurasian shrub with pink flowers, was brought to the West a century ago to control erosion. It quickly became a pest along desert rivers from California to Colorado, sucking up water and choking out native willows and cottonwood. To get rid of it, federal agencies use herbicides, backhoes and chainsaws. But […]
Posted inGoat
U.S.-Mexico border arrests sharply down in 2008
Mexico-U.S. border arrests have fluctuated widely in the past 30-plus years, from 675,000 in 1976 to 1.7 million in the mid-1980s, down to a million in the late-’80s, back up to 1.6 million in 2000. In 2008, the Border Patrol caught 705,000 people trying to enter the U.S. illegally, down 44 percent from 2006. Officials […]
Posted inWotr
Obama picks a moderate
It’s not surprising that Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity and Jon Marvel of the Western Watersheds Project are disappointed in Barack Obama’s choice for Interior secretary, Colorado Democratic Sen. Ken Salazar. The two activists have tapped the federal courts for the last two decades in their efforts to stop overgrazing, logging and […]
Posted inWotr
The only thing we have to fear …
Maybe because Christmas and the New Year are traditional times for celebrating a sense of community, it’s also a good time to acknowledge some of the rough patches in the rural Shangri-La where I live: the growing demands at the local food bank, dissension in the town of Joseph, Ore., over our governance, the 23 […]
Posted inDecember 22, 2008: What a mess
Life during wartime
Refresh, RefreshBenjamin Percy256 pages, softcover: $15.Graywolf Press, 2007. In Refresh, Refresh, his second collection of short stories, Benjamin Percy examines the fallout of the Iraq war on the people at home. Set on Oregon’s high plateau, these tales are shaped by the tension between the banal and the bizarre. The collection’s eponymous knockout story describes […]
Posted inWotr
You better watch out, that’s for sure
I’m as sentimental about Christmas as the next guy, but after years of listening to the holiday carols and Christmas standards, I find some troubling messages embedded in those songs. At the heart of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, for instance, is a small herd of really nasty reindeer. The song was written by an advertising […]
Posted inGoat
Dreaming of an oily (and gassy) Christmas
Check out this scorching Mother Jones blog post from HCN freelancer Keith Kloor. Keith talked to a senior BLM official about the Bush administration’s energy free-for-all in Utah: Also see Keith’s HCN stories about more Utah shenanigans from the BLM, Dust on the Rocks and (Un)clearing the Air. And these other articles: Trashing the earth, […]