When I sat down at my computer this morning, deciding to write on my blog, these were the first words that greeted me:
WELCOME BACK, JIM. WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
Hmmm, I thought. What’s that about? Then I looked at the last headline at the top of the screen. It said “Trump bizzarrely claims he hired Doug Burgum for Cabinet Post after seeing his wife on a horse.” And the date was January 30, 2026. Wow, I missed the whole month of February. I don’t remember ever missing a whole month before. Of course, it was a short month, but still . . . Sorry, readers. I hope you missed me.
But the weather was so nice in February I just went walking around my neighborhood day after day, up and down the hills of Highland Acres. A couple of times I said to Lillian “Our next house is going to be in south Bismarck, in the flood plain, where there are no hills.”
Our house sits at the top of one of the highest hills in west Bismarck, so no matter which direction I walk when I leave the house, I have to come back up the hill to get home. I told her some day she’s going to find me face down in the middle of the street, half a block from home, on my last failed attempt to get up the hill. Still, though, if I have to go, sometime, somewhere, that will be a pretty good place.
But anyway, to quote my old friend Mike Jacobs, today let’s deal with “matters at hand.” That would be politics and the Bad Lands, generally the two things that are the focus of this blog.
Let’s start with politics.
Tonight I’m going to go to the opening banquet of the 2026 North Dakota Democratic-NPL State Convention. It’s being held up on a hill higher than my house, at one of the buildings at Bismarck State College, which is the venue for this year’s convention. Kind of funny place to hold a political convention, I thought when I first read about it, but then I remembered the 1984 State Convention in the Minot Dome on the campus of Minot State University, and that one turned out all right. As a result of the endorsements made there, Democrats elected Byron Dorgan to Congress, George Sinner and his running mate Ruth Meiers to the Governor’s office, Nick Spaeth as Attorney General, Bob Hanson as State Treasurer, Earl Pomeroy as Insurance Commissioner, and Byron Knutson almost beat longtime Secretary of State Ben Meier, which really would have been something. Ben had been there so long that the joke going around was that “secretaryofstatebenmeier” was one word.
So we’ll see. The banquet speaker tonight is a fellow named Ron Harris, who I’d never heard of until I got an e-mail from state headquarters that said Harris is the Democratic National Committee’s Midwest Region President, who has served as Minnesota State Campaign Director for Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential race and as Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Minneapolis. Well.
But he should have an interesting story to tell. The e-mail said Harris” has been on the front lines of responding to the chaos of heavily armed, masked federal agents in Minnesota and has organized Democrats across the state in local, statewide, and federal elections.”
The other keynote speaker at the convention, on Saturday afternoon, will be Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, under whose leadership Denver “has achieved historic reductions in street homelessness, enhanced public safety, expanded affordable housing, and invested in revitalizing its downtown.” Well, again.
Now I’ve been at State Democratic-NPL Conventions featuring speeches by Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Al Gore, but I’m willing to give these guys a chance . . .
But what I’m most worried about is that as of noon today, the Democrats have almost no lineup to run against the Republican incumbents in the State Capitol Building. There are three running for Congress against Julie Fedorchak (more about her later)—Trygve Hammer, who ran against her last time, longtime activist and former legislator Vern Thompson, and a nurse from Jamestown, Helene Neville, who has a great story to tell. She’s run before. Not for political office, but all across the United States. In fact, she’s run the entire perimeter of the country, about 9,000 miles, after surviving cancer five times.
But after that, other than an educator from Grand Forks named Tracy Foss, who’s seeking the party’s letter of support for the nonpartisan office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, there are no announced candidates for the other offices on the ballot this year: Attorney General, Agriculture Commissioner, Tax Commissioner, Secretary of State, and two Public Service Commission seats.
Ouch. We’re gonna be scrambling Saturday to fill those slots. I expect some of them will be what Byron Dorgan used to call “moat fillers.” When they storm the castle, some poor bastard has to fill the moat, Byron used to say. Byron knows the role. He was the sacrificial lamb against Congressman Mark Andrews in 1974, early in his political career, although he ran a respectable race, losing by only about 25,000 votes. It was the last election he ever lost.
I’ll report with a view from behind the scenes after the convention. And I’ll get to the Bad Lands next week too. There’s some really bad stuff going on in Washington, some really bad threats to our Bad Lands, at the hands of our Congressional delegation. A good start to staving off some of those threats would be for Trygve, Vern or Helene (I just wish she’d drop that last “e”) to send Julie back to North Dakota for good.
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