Category: Law, Government, Politics

Count Bighorn Sheep as another casualty of North Dakota’s oil boom. The North Dakota Game and Fish Department has moved what’s left of a herd of Bighorn Sheep away from heavily traveled U.S. Highway 85 in the North Dakota Bad Lands to protect them from the heavy truck traffic on the highway. The move comes … Continue reading Watch Out For The Bighorns

When you take a nearly 12,000 mile driving trip, you get a lot of time to think. Lillian and I did that this winter, and we learned a lot about the country we live in. But we learned something else about ourselves: We’re both pretty comfortable in our own skin. And because of that, we … Continue reading Where Are The Big Ideas?

Okay, I promised myself I would do a wrapup on our winter trip, to look back on when we get old, and remember all the thing we could do when we were young. I’ll have to say, first of all, that it was surely the best winter of my life, simply because of the overwhelming … Continue reading From My Cold, Dead Wrist

There’s talk in the Legislature about getting us new license plates. We’ve had the same one for 20 years, so it’s natural someone in the Legislative or Executive branch of state government would be getting antsy about getting new ones. We’ve never gone so long without changing plates before. In the early days of automobile … Continue reading Two Sentinels

Okay, Day 32 on our quest to stay warm this winter under the guise of seeing national parks, dead presidents’ graves, and dead authors’ houses. We’ve seen a bunch of each of them, and with another 30 days, at least, to go, we’re going to see a bunch more. For the record, right now we … Continue reading Dead Authors, National Parks and Biscuits

Well, 12 days on the road with spouse Lillian, approaching 3,000 miles on the odometer, and we find ourselves in the lap of luxury at the Inn at The Biltmore in Asheville, NC, built and managed by the descendants of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who endowed Vanderbilt University, where Lillian did her graduate work. It hasn’t always … Continue reading North Carolina, So Far . . .

With apologies to Meriwether Lewis: “Our vessel consists of a Subaru Outback. This little vehicle, although not quite so respectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook, is still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs; and I dare to say with quite as much anxiety for … Continue reading We Proceed On

This just in (Fortune magazine October 1948, page 29): "Barring a major political miracle, Governor Thomas E. Dewey will be elected the thirty-fourth President of the United States in November. Such is the overwhelming evidence of Elmo Roper’s fifth pre-election Survey in recent months, the last that will appear this year in Fortune.             "So … Continue reading And The Winner Is . . .

I didn’t read about this in the Bismarck Tribune. I didn’t see it on KXMB or KFYR’s 6 o’clock news, and I didn’t hear it on Joel Heitkamp’s News and Views radio show. Apparently it wasn’t very big news here. But I just knew that there was a story out there, and I couldn’t get … Continue reading Getting The Lead Out

Here's an e-mail that was in my inbox this morning: Friends,             As a long-time Bismarck resident and asthma patient, I know the importance of clean air and clean water when it comes to one’s health.             That’s why I’m worried about Montana-Dakota Utilities’ Heskett coal-fired power plant, right across the Missouri River from Bismarck … Continue reading Closing Down A Power Plant?