Nooney Delinquent
Montana lawmaker Bill Nooney has been fined more than $3400
for failing to pay his taxes on time. By Bill Vaughn

Like a lot of Montanans, GOP politician Bill Nooney owns a house and pays taxes on it. But unlike most homeowners, he refuses to pay his taxes on time. Since 1995 the freshman representative of House District 100—home of Dark Acres—has been fined $1018.63 in penalties and $2390.55 in interest for making late tax payments on a home he owns at 3000 Saint Thomas Drive in the Miller Creek area of Missoula, Montana. Over the last 13 years Nooney was delinquent 18 out of 25 times in paying his semi-annual tax bill. For a detailed look at his tax records check out the Missoula County Property Information System.

Although the Saint Thomas Drive house is Nooney’s primary residence, it doesn’t lie within the boundaries of House Disctrict 100. It’s in House District 96. Montana’s weird residence laws allow Nooney to represent us, even though he doesn’t live among us. 

The Missoula County Treasurer levies penalties every year against numerous delinquent taxpayers. Sometime people just forget, a spokesperson told me, or sometimes their mortgage company screws up and fails to make the payment from a property owner’s escrow account. But the recurring failure of Rep. Nooney to pay his taxes on time raises questions about his fiscal competence, which the Republicans claim as something like a genetic gift.

And more importantly, it demonstrates his profound contempt for local government. This is odd, because Nooney is a member of the House Local Government Committee. Still, while Nooney has repeatedly stated his belief that government should be sliced, he's consistently given it more money than it demanded. [may 14]

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The following are incidents dealt with by various law enforcement agencies in Missoula County, Montana, from 6 am May 16 to 6 am May 17, 2008. If you’d like to know who got booked into the Missoula County Detention Facility during the same period go to:

http://www.co.missoula.mt.us/publicjailroster/

The jail roster sometimes takes a little while to load, especially on those busy Date Nights 1, 2 and 3, but if you're trying to find out stuff about your neighbors it's worth the wait.

MC051608-69 5/16/2008 7:55:48 AM OTHER HAZARD
MCSO
4095 SOUTH AVE W
Responding Unit(s): 458
A45 ERRAND COMPLETED

MC051608-67 5/16/2008 7:51:30 AM EXTRA PATROL
MCSO
28000 BONITA STATION RD
Responding Unit(s): 473
A45 ERRAND COMPLETED

MC051608-70 5/16/2008 7:56:09 AM EXTRA PATROL
MCSO
30000 BEAVERTAIL RD
Responding Unit(s): 473
A45 ERRAND COMPLETED

MC051608-66 5/16/2008 7:50:06 AM EXTRA PATROL
MCSO
2835 S 3RD ST W
Responding Unit(s): 458
A45 ERRAND COMPLETED

MC051608-58 5/16/2008 6:34:45 AM ASSAULT/HANDS,FEET, AGGRAVATED MPD
100 VAN BUREN ST
Responding Unit(s): C770
A9 REPORT, AT LOCATION   [read the rest of the report]

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The Art of the Feud
In these neighborhood pas de deux the challenge is finding the right government agency to get back at the guy across the road. By Bill Vaughn

If Thomas Jefferson had time-traveled to our rural neighborhood he never would have written that small landowners will forge the spine of democracy. Because here in the Squalor Zone—that redneck netherworld of “manufactured homes” and distressed pickups that encircles Western towns like the puffy flesh around an infection—it’s one against all and all against one.

Soon after we moved into our ten-acre plot of Montana floodplain the opening salvos were fired in what would become a civil war raging across two decades and multiple fronts. First, we discovered that the Smiths (not their real name) had installed a gate in the barbed wire separating our place from theirs so they could traipse around in our forest on their nags. Then we found the bloated carcass of a doe gut-shot with an arrow in a copse of hawthorns not far from a steel archery stand these yahoos had installed in one of our Ponderosas. I nailed the gate shut, pulled down the tree stand, and tacked No Trespassing signs on the border.

One winter morning Mr. Smith blew these signs to smithereens with a shotgun fired from his snowmobile. So when the Smiths decided to sell half their place, presumably to pay down their liquor bills, I acquired an aerial photo that showed the five acres in question under water during the most recent flood, and sent it to the real estate agent.

Meanwhile, my wife, Kitty, had entered a barrel race that paid prize money to the fastest times in three divisions. After her horse stumbled at the third barrel, and her time dropped her into first place in the second level, another neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, complained to the event’s organizer that Kitty had won $300 only because she pulled up her horse so she could win the lower division.

We pondered the dialectic of retribution analyzed so poignantly by Sonny in The Godfather: “They hit us so we hit ’em back.” Soon we were presented with a convenient revenge. [read more] [may 5]
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Notes from Dark Acres By Bill Vaughn

Community group endorses Willis Curdy. Grass Valley Neighbors, an organization of voters living in rural residential neighborhoods around Montana's House District 100, has endorsed Democrat Willis Curdy in his bid to replace the odious right-wing Republican Representative, Bill Nooney, on November 4.

Curdy taught government and history at Missoula County high schools for thirty years, and worked for forty summers as a wildland firefighter. Also a pilot, he served as the Chair of the Missoula Rural Fire District Board of Trustees and the Big Flat Irrigation District.

He will face retired Forest service manager Gary Brown in the June 3 Democratic primary. On the GOP side, Nooney is unopposed. Curdy pledges to increase funding for Montana's K-12 school and the University system. In the 2007 Legislature Nooney voted consistently against giving money to education.

One of the concerns of Grass Valley Neighbors, an organization to which Dark Acres belongs, is local control over the siting of gravel pits, asphalt plants and cement factories. In the 2007 Legislature Nooney voted for HB557, which would have stripped Montana's County Commissioners of this power. This pernicious bit of corporate welfare died in the Senate, but, like all zombies, will no doubt live again. Curdy pledges that he will “work to give county commissioners the authority to gather public input and have decision-making power regarding siting of new gravel pits.” [april 30]

Fatalities surge. A Montana soldier is one of the latest U.S. fatalities in Iraq. According to the Defense Department, Captain Andrew. R. Pearson, 32, of Billings died April 30 in Baghdad from wounds suffered when his vehicle was blown up by an improvised explosive device.

Since the March 20, 2003 U.S. invasion began 4078 American soldiers and military civilians have reportedly died in Iraq, 1080 more people than were killed in the 9/11 attacks. 102 of the U.S. fatalities were women. 23 Montanans have been killed and 224 wounded in this imperialist war, which has lasted longer than World War Two (icasualties.org). It's estimated that at least 83,521 Iraqi civilians have been killed by violent means (iraqbodycount.net). Finally, 212 journalists and media assistants have been killed since the beginning of “hostilities.” [may 17]

Fish wrappers lose money. Lee Enterprises, which owns five daily newspapers in Montana, reported that it lost $4.45 million, or 10 cents a share, in the quarter that ended March 31. The company said a year ago that in the first quarter of 2007 it earned $11.9 million, or 26 cents a share. As a consequence of the announcement Lee's stock dipped at the closing bell on May 16 to $7.11 per share, down considerably from its 52-week high of $26.16. Some analysts blame the nosedive on the bloated and unrealistic price Lee paid for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper. [may 17]

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Mirage
Sometimes the here and now
gets mixed up with the there and then. By Bill Vaughn

It must be a cow, this stubborn thing hiding in a tangle of scrub. At least that’s what I figured was causing my mare’s wild eyes and racing pulse. As we walked our horses down to surround all but the thicket’s lowest side, Kitty, my wife, took the left flank, and Jerry Hamel, owner of this ranch, the right. You’d think three mounted people would be force enough to convince an ordinary heifer to flee. Especially since she could see that the other strays we’d extracted along this ridge were leaving her behind as they plodded toward a holding pen at the intersection of two fence lines below us in a meadow. But after we hollered and whistled and flapped our coils of rope nothing happened. A magpie yelled back, then flew away in a huff.

With a click I urged Timer forward, expecting the same enthusiasm for the work she’d shown all day. Instead, she scotched. Then scotched again. After another of these lateral moves at the line of scrimmage I stopped pushing. Whatever was lurking inside these junipers and chokecherries, it wasn’t a cow.

While I waited for something to happen an autumn breeze began hissing through the crowns of the Ponderosas. North across the National Bison Range and the Flathead Indian Reservation a higher wind was shredding a few bright clouds against the rocky tops of the Mission Mountains, a row of dinosaur teeth already gleaming with snow. [read more]

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Dump Nooney
In 2007 Bill Nooney voted against education, labor, conservation, and local control of Montana’s rural neighborhoods. Plus, he voted to ruin my life. By Bill Vaughn

Like the race for the White House, the election in Montana’s House District 100—home of Dark Acres—features two promising Democratic candidates running in the June 3 primary for the pleasure of whipping a very bad Republican candidate on November 4. Although I haven’t been in a voting booth in years, I’m going to enjoy casting a ballot again.  

GOP fat cat Bill Nooney spent a ton of money narrowly winning his seat in the Montana Legislature two years ago by promising that unlike his Republican primary opponent he was a moderate who’d work with both sides of the aisle. “I don’t have my own banner that I’ll be carrying or my own agenda,” Nooney told the local daily newspaper. “I’m going to represent the people of District 100.” Then he gushed about how he wasn’t a fan of partisan politics. “I have a collaborative work style. I believe if you don’t work together you don’t get things done.”

But when the smoke cleared after the fractious 2007 Legislature, Nooney was given failing grades for his rabid partisan record by the AFL-CIO, the Audubon Society, the Montana Conservation Voters, the Montana Education Association, and the Montana Environmental Information Center, among other groups. His votes established him as a stooge for the radical right wing that holds sway over the GOP in the Treasure State. One measure of his compliance with their marching orders was the fact that he wasn’t included on the list of a dozen “socialist” House Republicans circulated by the ultra-right Bozeman representative, Roger Koopman, who figured Herr Nooney did just fine his freshman term.

One of the standard-bearers of the GOP right was Michael Lang, former majority leader in the House, whose infamous, obscenity-laced tirade against Montana Governor Schweitzer was widely broadcast by NBC all over America, and has been viewed on YouTube more than 31,000 times. (To see the video click here)

In an email to me, Nooney defended Lang, whose voting record is almost identical to that of his own. “The content of [Lang’s] comments are true,” Nooney wrote. “I am proud to stand next to him.”

Here are some highlights from Nooney’s brief and shabby career as a lawmaker:

Education
Although his profile says he’s the father of five kids, Nooney was ranked in the bottom third of 100 legislators for his votes on bills considered priorities by the Montana Education Association. The most important of this legislation was HB2, which provides money for secondary education, higher education, corrections, health and human services, and general government. This was the bill the Republicans spent the regular session railroading, the bill whose failure to pass forced lawmakers to return to Helena for an expensive special session.

Nooney was one of 13 Republicans invited to the famous “log cabin meeting” held between the regular and special sessions to meet with the governor’s staff and hammer out compromises. However, as political activist Pete Talbot reported, Nooney “went, he negotiated, then he voted against the compromise budget package (HB2).” Nooney also voted in the minority against funding full-time kindergarten in Montana, a head start now enjoyed by thousands of Montana kids.

Labor
Because the Nooney clan owns a string of non-union quicky-marts you’d expect him to be hostile to organized labor. And he is. The AFL-CIO gave him marks of 55 out of 100. For example, he voted against increasing unemployment benefits. He voted against allowing people to register to vote on the day of an election. And he voted for HB492, which would have figured tips into the minimum wage. Because workers can’t count on tips as part of their income, nor does Montana expect them to, the measure would have deprived thousands of already underpaid workers a decent wage. Luckily, the bill was killed very dead. In his 2006 campaign Nooney said his to-do list included working to provide good-paying jobs for young people.

Of course, this is the same Bill Nooney who promised Lolo residents that he would get a traffic light installed at the intersection of Highway 93 and Mormon Creek Road south of Lolo. There’s still no light there, and people still sport bumper stickers that say “Pray For Me. I Drive 93.”

Conservation
Although it was signed into law by the governor, Nooney voted against HB37, a bill that would have authorized Montana to control weeds on state trust land if the jerks who lease that land refuse to do the job. HB343 would have paid $150,000 in state funds to a Wyoming law firm to sue the Federal government on behalf of an outfit called Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd. This anti-wildlife group wanted to force the government to remove wolves from the endangered species list, which, in fact, the Feds were already in the process of doing. Nooney, who likes to harp about reducing government spending, voted for this stupid and wasteful bill, which died the death it deserved.

Also, Nooney voted against HB415, which authorizes local governments to require developers to set aside parkland for minor subdivisions. Like most of the common sense ideas Nooney voted against, this one was signed into law by the governor. Nooney cast yes votes for HB763, which would have allowed the disposal of radioactive waste in Montana, and for HB383, which would have allowed industry to dump coal bed methane water into the Tongue River.

Local Government
The main reason I want Nooney thrown out of office is because he voted for HB557. This scheme, which the Missoula County Attorney’s Office called “pernicious,” would have stripped Montana’s County Commissioners of the power to regulate where gravel pits, asphalt plants and cement factories could be sited. Nooney was the only one of eight Missoula County representatives to vote for this cynical piece of corporate welfare.

HB557 was written by the Montana Contractor’s Association after Riverside Contracting, one of its corporate members, failed to coerce the Missoula County Commissioners into rezoning a parcel of land on the Trout Meadows Ranch downstream from the city—and next door to Dark Acres. Riverside yearned to build a massive industrial park there that would ruin our rural residential neighborhood with at least a decade of air and water pollution, noise, and massive dump trucks clogging narrow country lanes. The values of our properties would plummet.

This land belongs to a local grocer, attempted real estate developer, and failed GOP candidate for Missoula County Commissioner named Jim Edwards. But people in HD100 organized against Riverside and Edwards. A petition with more than 2,000 names was submitted to the Commissioners, who ruled in December, 2006 against the scheme.

Nooney knew full well what was at stake, and voted for the bill anyway. Of course, he’d taken campaign money from the Montana Contractor’s Association (and the Montana Petroleum Association, as well). Although HB557 passed the House by a narrow margin, it died a lingering death in a Senate committee dominated by Missoula lawmakers.

After the Legislature adjourned I sent Nooney this message: “What do have to say in your defense after voting for HB557 against the wishes of the majority of your constituents?  Did you push the wrong button? Did you misunderstand the bill?”

Here was his reply: “You seem to be looking at the dark side of HB557. As I remember Edwards was not allowed to continue with his idea based on a county commissioner actions. Is that correct?”

Huh?

In another email to me Nooney responded again to charges that he ignored the wishes of his constituents. “Let me ask you a few questions,” he wrote back. “Do you believe that government should grow bigger or be reduced? Do you believe in individual property rights as is stated in our constitution? Why do you think that Mr. Edwards did not get his deal done? Do you think that the fact that the bill was tabled stopped Mr. Edwards or was it some other factor? Do you think that this bill would have affected others in Montana and not just your situation? What is your definition [of] ‘reasonably condition’? What do you think this part of the bill means ‘as defined by the board of county commissioners?’”

Huh?

Like lots of Republicans, Nooney is fond of pontificating about the venality of “big government.” But what he really means is that he wants to strip local governments of their minimal power over corporations so corporations can prey on people who have no one except their local governments to defend them. In the case of HB557 Nooney believes the property rights of big landowners and contracting firms are more important than the property rights of the neighbors such as Dark Acres, where everything we own is tied up in our house and our ten acres of land.

But not everyone thinks Nooney’s job performance sucks. He was awarded an A+ by Montana Family Action, a marginal organization of religious extremists based in Laurel, Montana, that refuses to reveal the size of its membership. Among the eight bills they supported, only one of which became law, was HB597, a measure to toughen obscenity laws (although unconstitutional, maybe it would have put the muzzle on Mike Lang). HB312, the so-called “Parental Bill of Rights” would have made parents, and not the state’s schools, responsible for the education of children. And HB403 would have coerced the government into “recognizing” that human life begins at conception. (Nooney and the religious right like to complain about the intervention of government into the private affairs of citizens, unless it’s telling women what to do with their bodies, or couples what to do in the bedroom.) 

So in the end what did Bill Nooney think about his freshman term in the Montana Legislature? “I lose money being here,” he wrote me. “Maybe you should try it sometime.” [april 22]..................................................................................................................................

Notes from the Squalor Zone. By Bill Vaughn
Big Bird. In the April 25 Science magazine a team of molecular biologists report that they've established a positive link between modern birds and Tyrannosaurus rex. Although scientists have believed for some years that birds evolved from dinosaurs, this is the first verifiable organic evidence of the connection, which the team says falls in the 90 percent range of probability. The samples of protein which were analyzed had been drawn from the unmineralized remains of collogen in the leg bone of specimen MOR 1125, a T rex unearthed in the Hell Creek Formation of Montana's Missouri Breaks by Jack Horner, Montana State University's world-famous paleontologist. [april 25]

China-free products. If you’re like us and refuse to buy stuff that’s made in mainland China, you know how long your shopping trips can last. Why boycott this weird hybrid country with its capitalist body and its communist brain? Well, first it was poisoned pet food that killed as many as 7000 American dogs. Then it was poisoned toothpaste that showed up in state-run hospitals around the South. Then it was children’s toys degraded with lead-based paint. Then it was revealed that a surprising percentage of the air pollution in the L.A. Basin drifts in from America’s trading partner across the sea. The fact is, when it comes to the U.S. consumer, the Chicoms flat out do not care.

So we read labels, and check the fine print to see where things are made. But sometimes verboten goods enter Dark Acres anyway. For example, after our family Christmas drawing I got a battery-powered pepper grinder from my sister-in-law, a red-white-and-blue Republican patriot who knows I like hot stuff. After you fill the reservoir with peppercorns and push a button a light goes on so you can aim the thing better at your food, and then out pours tons of fresh ground pepper.

That’s the theory, anyway. The thing worked great for a week, then it broke. I took it apart, discovering many tiny parts inside both plastic and metal, glued the fractured part and put the thing back together. It rained pepper for another week, then it broke again. I fixed it. Last night it broke for the last time. That’s because I’ve packed up this piece of Chinese-made shit and returned it with a harsh note to the manufacturer, an American company in Everett, Washington called Norpro.

In theory the Norpro grinder is a great kitchen gadget. But manufacturing it in a country that doesn’t care whether it works or not is a mistake. 

A note: While pondering the stupidity of giving away American jobs to the Chinese you might like to see a short film called Hahahaamerica. [april 7, updated april 21]

About face. Speaking of China, on April 6 we watched CBS reporter Lesley Stahl's interview with the head of the China Investment Coporation, Gao Xiqing, who said his company has $200 billion set aside for the purposes of buying up shares of American corporations. While that statement was bothersome enough, what really caught our attention was the transformation of Stahl's face from one scene to the next.

This 60 Minutes interview was apprently conducted in stages over time, and during those lapses Stahl had clearly taken some meetings with Mr. Botox. While it's only over-the-hill Boomers like us who watch this one-hour parade of geriatrics, the episode is a reminder to young television workers that if you ignore continuity, even in the Great Wasteland's short form, you will distract your audience, and eventually lose it.  [april 7]

The Hypocrite. On April 4 John McCain was greeted with a round of boos from the crowd gathered under the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. McCain, weirdly, showed up for the observance in order to court the black vote. I say weird, because the peculiar Senator of from Arizona voted againt the legislation that resulted in the creation of the January holiday marking King's birthday.

More than 6 million signatures were gathered on a petition to Congress by supporters of the observance, the largest such citizen's initiative in history. In opposing a King holiday McCain joined such dinosaurs as Jesse Helms, who believed that the civil rights leader's opposition to the Vietnam War proved he was a Communist.  [april 5] 

Come Fly With Me. Surfacing all around the Web are breathless reports of how John McCain lost five expensive U.S. military aircraft in his brief and undistinguished career as a Navy pilot.

His first plane dove into Corpus Christi Bay in 1958 while he was practicing landings. Number two plowed into the Mediterranean, and number three went down while he was flying a Navy trainer solo to Philadelphia from an Army-Navy football game. Number Four was the fighter jet hit in 1967 with a misfired rocket while McCain was waiting for orders to take off from the deck of the U.S.S. Foresstal. The fires and explosions that followed killed 134 men and nearly sunk the carrier.

McCain’s most notorious crash happened three months later after the North Vietnamese hit his A-4 Skyhawk with a surface-to-air missile. McCain ejected from the plane, breaking both arms and a leg, then parachuted into Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi.

While we certainly wouldn’t climb into any airplane with McCain at the controls, we also wonder how safe we’d be living in a whole country piloted by this reckless, war-loving hothead.  [april 1] 

Purloined Code. Patrick Beeson, a web designer who developed the online edition of the Roanoke Times, reports in a blog he wrote in January that the designers of the online edition of the Missoula, Montana Missoulian, blatantly  stole his work. We emailed Jim McGowan, the Missoulian’s online manager, asking if this accusation was true, but an automated response said he would be “out of the office” until April 3. We then emailed his assistant, Tia Jensen, but as of this posting haven’t received a reply.

If you’d like to see if there’s any merit to Beeson’s charges do what we did, and compare the home page of missoulian.com to that of roanoke.com. The look, which we think is cluttered and way too busy in both cases, is nonetheless strikingly similar. [april 1]

Enchiladas bite back. On Good Friday we sat down to watch the NCAA men's basketball tournament over a lunch of home-made enchiladas. After the first bite we realized that something was wrong, and it wasn't just Bill's teams. The food contained a gritty foreign substance with the consistency of sand. Our first thought was that a fiend had injected ground glass into one of the ingredients.

But after a few moments, we decided we weren't going to die right away, and set about taste-testing the tortillas (no), the beans (no), and the cheese (no). Then we discovered the culprit: the Las Palmas Enchilada Sauce, a medium-hot green chili concoction we've eaten for years without incident save occasional heartburn. This 19-ounce can, which we bought in Missoula, Montana at the Albertson's Northgate, was swimming with some tiny dark objects that indeed looked like sand.

First we emailed the manufacturer, B&G Foods in New Jersey. Then we called the FDA. Both the company and the Feds are on the case. A spokesman for B&G says it's likely that the pepper seeds in the sauce weren't ground fine enough. After we submit a sample of the degraded sauce for inspection everyone will know more. [march 27]

Writing comedy is like any other sport—if you don’t practice you get rusty. For example, take one of the bits on the March 18 episode of the Daily Show. After all the tawdry revelations of sexual excesses committed by governors recently, the writers—recently on strike—decided to poke fun at governors who have not been caught spending $80,000 a year on hookers or who have not been outed as players in bisexual ménages à trois. First up was the governor of Montana. “It’s been revealed,” host Jon Stewart said, “that Brian Schweitzer gets his rocks off by rubbing against farmers at county fairs.” [march 25]

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Dust to Dust
What I think about when I think about the Church isn’t the opulence of the Vatican but the ruins of St. Peter’s. By Bill Vaughn

Hysterical girls screeching, grown men swooning, TV announcers reduced to reverent babble spoken in whispers. No, the mania isn’t about Tiger Woods at The Masters, or Barack Obama giving a stump speech. It’s the fucking Pope, for Chrissake, driving around in the Popemobile, handing out little crackers!

This is the same Pope—Benedict XVI—who was a Hitler Youth, a soldier in a Nazi anti-aircraft brigade ordered to shoot down U.S. aircraft, a deserter who ran away when the Allies marched into Germany, and a prisoner who spent the balance of World War Two in an American POW camp. Plus, yes, this is the same Pope who rules over a vast corporation that ignored the extermination of six million Jews, and whose employees have an unwholesome appetite for little boys.

However much my head knows these things my heart refuses to listen. That’s due to the fact that I'm in the world at all because in 1866 the Jesuits at St. Peter’s Mission in Montana saved my great-grandfather from freezing to death. Thereafter a lifelong friend and champion of the Fathers, Thomas Moran built the church at St. Peter’s you see below. My grandfather was born at S. Peter’s, and so was my mother. I can still hear the Latin Mass. I can smell the incense.

But St. Peter’s was an evil place, as well. At the end of the Indian Wars the Jesuits swooped in to snatch Blackfeet girls and boys from their devastated clans. The Fathers, mostly Italian, along with their Ursuline nun allies, erected two huge boarding “schools” to house these children, built from quarried blocks of native rock called shonkinite that was so adamant they must have figured these buildings would last forever.

Then they set about doing what the Church did so well in America: oppressing Indians by silencing their languages, destroying their economies and coopting their religions, the same acts of repression the Church carried out against the pagans of Ireland, where my great-grandfather was born. Numerous archives have preserved photographs of Blackfeet girls slaving away at sewing machines, boys dressed up in white vestments, forced to bear the perverse religious iconography of the Church. Of course, the Blackfeet had built a thriving nomadic economy many thousands of years before the oppressors showed up, created a complex language, and practiced a profound, moment-by-moment faith that was more like breathing than praying.

St. Peter’s got the ending it deserved. After fires destroyed both of the big stone buildings in the early 20th Century, the Vatican eliminated its financial support, and the Mission fell into abandon and ruin. Although I regret the passing of my family, and admire their frontier courage, I’m always cheered when I look at pictures of the prairie taking back what the Church had stolen. [april 17]



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The State of the Union, a pictorial essay

[posted march 18, 2008]
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Crawl
It's dog-eat-dog in Zooland's aprés-ski bar scene. By Bill Vaughn

None of the hard cases playing Hold ‘Em in the Oxford’s back room emerged to watch, but the drunk women thrashing around on the floor had captured the imagination of everyone else in the bar. As the fighters choked each other and yanked on hair a toothless relic in a ruined Stetson bet a fat man selling newspapers from a canvas bag that the blonde would win. Suddenly, the cops arrived to separate the combatants, who were now, in police parlance, “Persons to be Removed.”

Although Missoula, Montana has morphed from a rough railroad and timber town into a hip and gentrified university city, neither the Ox nor the other half-dozen old working-class bars downtown have done thing one to make themselves après-ski. That’s why getting hammered in these dives is the logical yin to the yang of a day on the slopes.  

When you jump off the lift at Snow Bowl north of town, the sun blazes against a cobalt sky and an antiseptic breeze drives any residual moral or psychic smudges from your soul. All day it will be the glowing heart, the mannered companionship, the sport. When you look below the groomed trails, Missoula has vanished, smothered under a pillow of heavy fog that can linger a week, inversions turning western Montana into an apparition of Glacial Lake Missoula, a vast Ice Age sea 2000 feet deep. Just as then, random peaks thrust through the chilled grey skin of this soup, like volcanoes in the Aleutians.

Still, it’s when you’ve had your fill of good clean fun it’s this underworld that beckons. So first, head through the miasma to the Missoula Club to coat your stomach with a gazillion-calorie chocolate shake followed by a double hot-pepper cheeseburger washed down with drafts of Bayern, the fabulous local suds. Obey the bartender and shovel your peanut shells on the floor. Note that the surface of the bar has been furrowed by generations of fretful drunks nervously rubbing it with the edge of coins, as if this act could get them more.

Then it’s off to Red’s for shots of Lewis and Clark vodka. Tonight there’ll be no driving. But since the joints are all within convenient walking distance of one another it’s no problema. Next, head toward the freight yards and spend some cocoon time inside the Silver Dollar. Then on to Al and Vic’s. As the evening wanes stagger to the Union Club for a martini and a blurry game of pool, while eyeing a woman at the bar eyeing you.

At Charley B’s it’s a nightcap with a mystery writer who’s a Missoula fixture as much as a legend. As you toast his fading health you notice that the right side of his cowboy clothes are matted with black dog hair. Is it a clue?

Finally, end your crawl at the Oxford with chili and the night’s last beer. Before mad cow, you could order brains and eggs and the counterman would yell to the cook “He needs ‘em!”

Indeed.

[posted march 12, 2008]

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Denny, hand me the cattle prod, won't you?
Bush, who flat out do not care, vetoes a bill banning torture. By Bill Vaughn

On Dec. 14 the U.S. House of Representatives voted 122 to 199 to forbid Federal agencies such as the CIA from employing certain forms of torture to extract “confessions” from “terrorists.” The practices mentioned in the bill included water-boarding, which is forbidden by the United Nations. Montana's lone Congressman, Republican Dennis Rehberg, voted against the bill.

On Feb. 13, Montana Democratic Senators Jon Tester and Max Baucus voted for the bill, which passed the Senate 51-45, and was sent to the Oval Office. On March 8 the Businessman's Family Values President vetoed the bill, sending a message to countries practicing torture that the U.S. is now officially no better than they are.

Does Congressman Rehberg enjoy inflicting pain on others? After sitting through one of his speeches, you might prefer having your face flooded with water or your nipples pinched with pliers.  [posted march 8, 2008]

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Montana gets a C+
A Pew report says the Legislature is responsible
for the mediocre grade. By Bill Vaughn

In its March 3 report card issued on how these united states manage their budgets, infrastructure, staffs, and information, the Pew Center on the States gave Montana a C+, the grade you get in high school for just showing up. Utah, Virginia and Washington got an A-. New Hampshire got the worst grade, a D+. The national average was a B-, according to the report.

Here's a synopsis of Pew's analysis of the Treasure State's government: “You’d think that a projected surplus of $1 billion—about half of the state’s entire budget—would make for an even-keeled budget process. Not in Montana, where revenue forecasts exceeded planned expenditures by that much in 2007. The state’s budget processes themselves aren’t particularly troublesome. But term limits have made the Montana legislature a hothouse, as dozens of new lawmakers, untutored in the ways of fiscal negotiation, debated their way last year into the most tempestuous budget sessions in memory.”

The culprits in this debacle were, of course, the Republicans. In the waning hours of the 2007 Legislature their leader in the House, Mike Lange, issued a notorious, obscenity-laced tirade against Governor Brian Schweitzer. A video of this tawdry spectacle has been viewed more than 31,000 times on You Tube, which advises viewers to keep small children out of the room.

Although Republicans fired Lange from his position, he's mustered the self-deluded audacity to throw his hat in the ring against Montana Democrat Max Baucus, recently rated the 6th most powerful U.S. Senator. Let's see, Lange thinks Montanans will replace a progressive and life-long advocate for the state with a reactionary, extremist, foul-mouthed pipefitter. Hmm.

Although Republican lawmaker Bill Nooney, a rookie representing House District 100 (home of Dark Acres), claimed during the 2006 campaign that he had a “collaborative work style,” he turned out to be a GOP toady, consistently voting the way Mike Lange told him to. As a consequence, the Montana Conservation Voters rated Nooney's performance one of the worst of 100. With unimaginative, family-values dorks such as Nooney in the Legislature it's little wonder that Pew couldn't find anything about Montana's government that wasn't mediocre.

[posted march 4, 2008]

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Dodging bullets
Fires in the sky make every day seem a little bit sweeter. By Bill Vaughn

People from Washington to Montana reported seeing a huge blue fireball light up the sky at around 6:30 am on February 19. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the streak of light was a meteor, which apprently caused no damage when it hit the middle of nowhere near State Route 26 in Adams County, Washington, about 20 miles south of Ritzville. The Adams County Sheriff's Department said that although deputies have been dispatched to look for the impact site, nothing has been found so far, and that the only reports of the light show to local officials have come from the media, not residents. To see a brief video of the incident click here.

Although spectacular and spooky, celestial fireworks like this one are not uncommon. They've been recorded on stone, tapestry and paper for thousands of years. It's only a matter of time until a piece of the space junk that causes these pyrotechnics wipes us out, a fate we've worked so hard to earn.

My most memorable fireball sighting was on the afternoon of August 10, 1972, a calm, clear and hot day—a dog day, a perfect day to fish. For me, it would turn out to be the crowning day of a memorable year.

First, I’d been caught up in the drugs, high drama and copious sex of the antiwar movement. Then, maybe as punishment, the army drafted me. However, a couple days before I was supposed to report to Fort Lewis, Washington, for boot camp I was informed that my government didn’t want to use me for cannon fodder after all because Richard Nixon had decided to turn over the war to the Vietnamese. My reaction to this official caprice was to immediately drop out of the University of Montana, which I had attended indifferently for four years—or was it five?—only because my enrollment there shielded me from the draft.

I was working for the last underground newspaper in America, and couldn’t afford a truck. So my fishing trips were less expeditionary than those of most anglers. I was living with two other wastrels in a shabby rented house on the banks of Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana, a short distance from this sweet, cold stream’s confluence with the Clark Fork River. So there was lots of good fishing literally a stone’s throw away.

My best friend at the time, a Jewish communist from Baltimore named Harmon Henkin, was an accomplished fly fisherman who would publish several highly regarded books about the subject. Just the night before, he’d walked into the house bearing an enormous brown trout he’d caught at the mouth of the Rattlesnake on some bristly little fly he’d invented, and tied himself. You might ask, how big was this trout? And I would answer: We found the stub of a cigar in its stomach.

When I saw this lunker my heart sank. That’s because all summer long I’d been feeding Wonder Bread and grasshoppers to a wild brown trout that looked very much like this behemoth. My Moby Dick emerged every afternoon from under the little East Front Street bridge to take my treats, as trusting as a park squirrel. Watching Henkin drive off in his Volvo to share this feast with his wife, I felt vaguely cheated. 

But the next afternoon, when I went down to the creek with a crust of bread and tossed it in, my fish darted from under the bridge, and took the offering with a vicious slap of water. It was now or never, I thought.

I went back to my room and retrieved the springy little fly rod I’d picked up for a few dollars second-hand. Then, thinking again, I put it away and grabbed a spin-casting pole instead, leveling with myself about my ability to cast a fly precisely where I wanted it to go. I found a small, single hook, tied it to the line and weighted the line with a bit of lead shot.

In the bramble of weeds that passed as our garden I caught an enormous grasshopper, and impaled it on the hook. Then, after slowly edging toward the creek, I saw that the fish, facing upstream in the fast, cool current, was still waiting for another treat. Maybe the water was distorting his size, like a magnifying glass, but he seemed even bigger than Henkin’s fish. I was giddy now, anxious for the trout dinner that would earn me monster points with my roomies. I might even invite a girl I was trying to impress to this dinner. But more than that, I wanted Henkin to see what I’d caught. 

The grasshopper landed with a little splash and quickly drifted downstream toward the exact spot where Moby Dick was lurking.

Then the heavens exploded.

I grew up around Air Force bases and I've heard sonic booms many times. But nothing as deep and as resounding as this one. In an instant the fish ran back under the bridge. He was permanently spooked. I’d never see him again.

The great hunk of rock, glowing and hissing and trailing smoke, passed directly over my head, from south to north, and sailed out of sight behind Mount Jumbo.

Gaping at the place where it had gone I wondered: What just happened here? Am I hallucinating? Was this an illusion, some kicking-in of a random bit of mescaline or LSD that had lodged in a remote back alley of my brain?

But as I would learn, the thing I had seen was real.

Thousands of people from Utah to Canada had witnessed what would be called The Great Daylight Fireball of 1972. There were hundreds of pictures taken of the thing, and a pair of home movies, and it was tracked using infrared sensors aboard an Air Force satellite.

Scientists inferring from the temperature of the ball and its 900-mile trajectory from Utah to Alberta calculated that it passed over Montana at an altitude of less than 35 miles, was between ten and thirty feet in diameter, and weighed at least 4,000 tons, big enough to obliterate a Denver-sized city with a force equal to Little Boy and Fat Man, the uranium and plutonium bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because no trace of the beast has ever been found, and because no sonic booms were heard as it sailed across Canada, astrophysicists now believe its low angle of descent allowed it to skip off the earth’s atmosphere like a flat stone on a still lake. One scientist predicted that the fireball would return in 1997, but no one saw it.

In 1972 the earth dodged a bullet. My fish dodged a bullet. And I dodged two bullets. From then on just standing by a stream would always seem a little bit like winning a prize.

[posted february 19, 2008, and updated just after Martini time]

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Wasted Days and Wasted Nights
The hasty retreat of Mitt Romney demonstrates again
that Montana Republicans just don't have a clue. By Bill Vaughn

The announcement on Feb. 7 that Willard Romney is exiting stage right from the GOP presidential race is good news for John McCain, the war monger, but bad news for Montana's Party of Family Values. Republican hacks such as House District 100Representative Bill Nooney, who gave Romney lots of money ("Dear Diary." Nooney scribbled in tears upon hearing the news, "Blackness! Emptiness! Nothing to live for!")

And they also awarded Romney, the weird Mormon and Ken Doll Bobblehead, all 25 of the state's delegates to the GOP convention. Add this to the failure of the state GOP to push forward little of its ludicrous right-wing businessman's agenda at the 2007 Legislature, and a picture emerges of backwater hayseeds who are simply out of touch, and out to lunch.

[posted 7 february 2007]


Dark Acres dogs: Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Corgi, and Clara, the Border collie.


Dog Stories
Of working dogs and running dogs. By Bill Vaughn

Smackdown. In our redneck backwater the dogs wander around at will across hundreds of acres of fields and forests and compounds bristling with snowmobiles and ruined  pickups and mobile homes that look like they’ve been pushed from cargo planes. A couple of years ago after we tired of retrieving Clara, our Border Collie, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, our Corgi, from these various venues we decided to add another layer of containment to our fences—steel webbing three feet high. Our next door neighbor followed suit so she could keep watch on Cricket, her loopy Australian Shepard, and for awhile a sort of peace descended on our mutually held twenty-five acres of flood plain.

Meanwhile Possum, a sweet-tempered mongrel who lives across our dead-end county road, was begatting several litters. Her owners found homes for all of these pups save one, a weirdly beautiful, anti-social female named Ryley. Mom and daughter became best friends and soon shared a great love of chasing cars. But what they like even more than the spinning tire is the imperial rush they feel when they stand in the road so cars can’t pass. Drivers don’t seem to understand that if they just keep going the dogs will move aside. Instead, people stop and wait, or they get out to scream and throw things. These hissy fits only amuse the dogs, whose enthusiasm for anarchy is boundless.

Then Ryley discovered the smackdown, a high-speed chase around the perimeter of Dark Acres that drives our dogs insane. For hours the domestic dogs and the foreigners run on opposite sides of the wire, yapping with a ferocity that sends flocks of birds wheeling away in alarm.

The seeing eye. A while back we were discussing Border collies with a photographer we’d just met, praising their intelligence and perseverance, trading stories about things we’d seen these consummate working dogs do with sheep: like walk across the backs of a flock to get to the other side. We told our new acquaintance about how our ten-year-old collie, Clara, runs to our forest every evening at our command to drive our three horses the 300 yards from their river pastures back to their pens for the night.

Then the photographer told us about a friend of hers in Virginia who married a Swedish woman, and for several years has been dividing his time between Richmond and Stockholm. Because he adores his Border collie he wanted to take her with him on the long flight to Europe. But Swedish law requires that foreign pets be placed in quarantine before they can be allowed into the country.

The man despaired. But then he had an epiphany.

On his first flight with the dog Swedish customs officials waived them through, and he was soon setting up house with his bride. That’s because the man had discovered how fast Border collies learn. So he trained her to pretend she was his seeing eye dog.

[posted 4 february 2008]

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The Bridges of Missoula County
The next time you're tooling around Zooland
there are three river crossings you may want to avoid. By Bill Vaughn

Investigative reporter Bill Dedman of msnbc.com lists a trio of outmoded or decaying spans in a recent story about the state of bridge inspections in the U.S. (click here for the whole story).

1. MacClay Bridge. Built in 1935, this 346-foot steel-truss span is a fave summer hangout for high school kids tying to cool off and hook up. Surrounded by nice little beaches and deep pools that accommodate the 30-foot plunge into the Bitterroot River from its one-lane deck, Maclay nonetheless is described as “basically intolerable requiring high priority of replacement.” Owned by the county, it was last inspected in November of 2005. A true lover’s leap.

2. The bridge on Boy Scout Road that crosses the Clearwater River a mile west of the village of Seeley Lake was built in 1967 of a type of steel construction listed as stringer/beam and girder. 100 feet long, it was last inspected in July, 2005. Like MacClay, it’s described as “requiring a high priority of replacement.” According to the msnbc.com report, 305 vehicles pass over the span every day.

3. Three miles south of Clearwater Junction is an ancient steel truss called Clearwater Bridge. Built in 1907, this 216-foot long span crosses the Blackfoot River on Sunset Hill Road. Any one of the 238 drivers who use the bridge every day could be the span’s last customer. It was inspected in November of 2005, and is described in the report as “structurally deficient.” [posted 3 february 08]

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I Marched With Willard Romney
Romney's Montana bagman, Bill Nooney, hopes the Presidential campaign will help voters forget what he did during the 2007 Legislature.  By Bill Vaughn


Zooland’s Republicans were all lathered up after Willard Mitt Romney’s announcement that wife Ann would lead a pep rally for hubby in the Garden City Feb. 1, just ahead of the Montana Republican caucus Feb. 5.

The giddiest of these Family Values types was Bill Nooney, the far-right Representative for Montana’s House District 100, and the only Republican member of Zooland’s sizable delegation to the state legislature. That’s because a while back Nooney got himself anointed a Romney money-raiser in Montana in order to paint himself as a national player so his constituents would forget how often he tried to screw them in the 2007 Legislature.

(“Dear Diary,” he scribbled, “Can’t sleep a wink! Should I wear my dark suit, or my other dark suit? OMG, does my butt look fat? Should I tell my Katrina story again?”)

Although GOP faithful then learned that Mrs. Romney had cancelled her trip because of health reasons and was sending one of her sons instead, Nooney was still upbeat. (“Hey, it’s still a Romney!” he gushed to Diary.)

Romney and Nooney are a good fit. Well, no, not like ebony and ivory, more like ivory, and then a whole lot more ivory. Romney used inherited wealth to make a serious fortune swooping down on distressed businesses with leveraged buy-outs that screwed the unions whose workers built these companies, then selling them for a quick profit. Plus, he didn’t have to pay squat in taxes on the income due to a Republican-sponsored loophole.

Like Romney, Nooney grew up privileged with plenty of cash from a family petroleum business. After “retiring” from oil and a string of non-union quickie-marts Nooney now operates a “financial” company in Zooland called “Investment Enterprises,” which apparently buys and sells commercial properties.

Both politicos have attempted to breed the rest of us out of existence by siring five brats apiece. Romney said his only regret in life is that he didn't make even more little Romneys.

Both guys are members of a weird religious cult—Mormonism, a Scientology-like hallucination whose narrative underpinnings start off like a joke: “A guy goes into the woods and finds some gold tablets.” Nooney used to be a member of one of those other cults, the one that believes a prophet named Jesus was born to a woman who never had sex. According to the story this Jesus was executed, and then reincarnated as a guy who's looking down from heaven to see if we're being naughty or nice.

And both of these politicos have a good sense of what voters what to hear. The Romney who won the governorship of liberal Massachusetts is not the same Romney who’s running for President of conservative America. His positions on gun control, immigration and stem-cell research, for example, are now what you’d expect from a right-wing religious zealot. Gay rights? Abortion? His “views” depend on whatever campaign he’s waging.

And Romney openly lies. He claimed famously, for example, on the Dec. 16, 2007 Meet The Press, that his daddy, who was governor of Michigan, marched with Martin Luther King. Oops! Not true. When pressed relentlessly by reporters afterwards, Willard faced them with a shit-eating grin and said: “I've tried to be as accurate as I can be. If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of—in the sense I've described. I'm an English literature major. When we say I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn't necessarily mean you were there.”

Huh? Patriots? World Series?

Nooney, during the 2007 legislative campaign in Montana, told a local newspaper how moderate and compromising would be his tenure in Helena. “I don't have my own banner that I'll be carrying or my own agenda,” he claimed. “I'm going to represent the people of District 100.” He also claimed not to be a fan of partisan politics.  “I have a collaborative work style.  I believe if you don't work together you don't get things done.”

But once in office Nooney consistently voted the way he was told to vote by the Republican majority in the Montana House, which serves at the pleasure of the business class. For example, he voted for HB557, a bill that would strip county commissioners of the power to protect rural residential neighborhoods from gravel pits and asphalt plants.

HB557 was lobbied against relentlessly by working-class home-owners in Nooney’s district; it died the death it richly deserved in a Senate committee dominated by Democrats from Missoula.

Super Tuesday in Big Sky County is a winner-take-all affair for the GOP. That means the losers take nothing. But even if Romney forfeits Montana, his bagman, Bill Nooney, will still be able to seize something from the day.

“Dear Diary," he wrote. “I’ve so arrived!”

[posted 1 february 08, and expanded 3 february 2008]

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Way Down in the Hole
While The Wire captures the last throes of a great American newspaper, Lee Enterprises lies about its fleet of mediocre ones.  By Bill Vaughn

When I was a kid I kept a family-sized mayonnaise jar under my bed into which I sometimes deposited live bugs. I did this so I could watch one species devour the others. It was usually the daddy long-legs that kicked butt. Occasionally the red ants rose up to seize the day. But I was the only guy in the room having any fun.

In The Wire, HBO’s bleak and much-lauded dramatic series set in Baltimore, creator David Simon has dropped cops, politicians, and drugsters onto the mean streets of Crabtown for the same reason—for the schadenfreude. Like most of the low life in America’s used-up, down-and-out old cities—your Detroits, Clevelands, and Oaklands—none of these players prosper. The drug gangs are better-organized than the cops, but the cops have bigger guns, and the politicians have shelter from the storm.

What’s different about this fifth and ultimate season of The Wire is the introduction of a new species—newspaper workers from the Baltimore Sun. We’re soon reminded that the daily press is faring no better than any other urban institution. While Baltimore’s municipal coffers are running dry, the school system has become nothing but a detention facility, and unions and corporations alike are thoroughly corrupt, the Sun’s spreadsheets lay in ruin. Circulation is falling as young readers abandon newsprint for their news, and ad revenues have been stolen by the Internet. As the physical dimensions of the Sun shrink so does its ambition. Many stories just don’t get told. Young reporters are laid off, and the contracts of senior reporters are bought out. As the paper offers less, readers need it less—a classic cycle of decline that may result in H. L. Menken’s paper flying in smaller and smaller circles till it disappears up its own ass.

But as Jonathan Weil reports at bloomberg.com, American newspapers are sometimes self-destructing because their owners are stupid. Take Lee Enterprises, for example, the media conglomerate that owns five daily newspapers in Montana. In June of 2005 Lee paid almost $1.5 billion in cash for Pulitzer, Inc., the 14-newspaper fleet named, of course, for Joseph Pulitzer. The flagship is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. As Weil says, “For Lee shareholders, it’s been one of the worst deals in the industry’s history.”

Lee’s stock has declined 63 percent in the last year as revenues and circulation at these and its other 54 papers plummet. At the end of trading on Jan. 11, Lee’s stock stood at $11.10 per share, down from a 52-week high of $35.65. Buying lottery tickets would be no more silly a business plan than buying Lee stock.

However, Weil says Lee’s financial statements continue to portray a robust enterprise. Lee “showed a book value, or assets minus liabilities, of $1.09 billion as of Sept. 30. That's about twice the company's current market value and included $2.44 billion of so-called goodwill and other intangibles, which represented 75 percent of the company's total assets.”

In other words, Lee is lying about its fortunes. As Weil concludes: “Whatever the future of newspapers may be, the investing public has little faith in the accuracy of these companies’ financial statements. That’s a sad commentary for an industry whose mission is to keep other institutions honest.”

We know that Lee papers such as the Missoulian have no interest in keeping the county’s institutions honest. Hard questions are rarely asked because doing so requires expensive investigative homework, and the risk of cutting yourself off from a source.

Anyway, we’ll be watching The Wire avidly all season to enjoy the carnage. We wonder: If a cop shoots a drug dealer and there’s no paper to record the hit does that mean it never happened?
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Iconic Stand-Off, by Paul Driscoll

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Fool on the Hill
Aaron Brill’s dream of real skiing turned into Silverton Mountain. By Bill Vaughn

When its double chairlift cranked up in January of 2001, Silverton Mountain in the San Juan Range became Colorado’s first new ski area in decades. But it was never intended as a family destination, unless you, your granny and your sucklings are advanced or expert snowriders who can negotiate ungroomed slopes of 25 to 60 degrees, hazards that aren’t marked, a base elevation of 10,250 feet, and such minimal apre-sport amenities as a night in a yurt.

Because at Silverton, extremism in the pursuit of forward motion is no vice. This retro, no-frills strategy was the brainchild of a lanky 35-year-old Berkeley, California native named Aaron Brill, who’d had it up to here with the bland, gentrified experience offered by the golfers and real estate tycoons who developed most ski resorts. Brill figured that the only way he was going to get the kind of tasty, over-the-top sport he loved was to build his own facility.

He and his significant other, Jenny Ader, 34, were living in Bozeman, Montana in 1992 when they began poring over topo maps of mountains in the West. They’d been scrimping and saving for years when they bought up a bunch of mining claims and leases on several hundred acres of private slope with access to huge tracts of public land seven miles from the fading Victorian mining town of Silverton, which was built in the crater of a volcano.

First, they jumped through loops to secure the permits they needed. Then they shelled out $20,000 to California’s Mammoth Mountain for a used chairlift with fifteen towers and two terminals. When this hardware arrived they installed it themselves with a crew of six.

Although Brill and Ader have finally secured the permits they need to build a base lodge, all they can offer now is a steel structure resembling a weather station that was towed to the site. The restrooms are actually outhouses. They rent gear to skiers out of an old school bus, and retrieve skiers who opt for runs that don’t lead back to the lift with a UPS truck that serves as their shuttle vehicle. But no one seems to care. After all, the annual snowfall is 400 inches, making wide-based powder skiis called “fatties” de rigueur.

Back during Silverton’s construction I called Aaron Brill and asked him what the hell he was thinking.

Q. What were you doing when this brainstorm struck?
A. Skiing in New Zealand. They have these small club fields there, with a rope tow, which are a cross between a country club and a neighborhood park, run by volunteers who just want to ski and party. It’s an old concept, really.
Q. What’s been your biggest challenge?
A. The physical demands of 100-hour workweeks. We didn’t want to build a road up the mountain so we had to hike for two hours to get to the top. We’re digging the holes for the towers by hand, ten feet deep, in hard, wet clay. Plus, we’ve had to drill and blast solid rock from all but four of the holes.
Q. Are you lugging concrete for the towers up the mountain as well?
A. The concrete will be premixed, delivered by chopper, and poured all at once.
Q. How much will Silverton Mountain cost when it’s finished?
A. Less than a nice condo at Vail. When you cut out the $250,000 snow groomer, the million dollar base lodge, and the two million dollar snow-maker, you don’t need much to concentrate on the essentials. We limited cutting trees to the path of the lift, and are committed to planting two trees for every one cut, so some money is also going into that.
Q. Do you also have any investors yet?
A. We’ve sold twenty $5000 lifetime passes 
Q. What do you foresee as your biggest operating expense?
A. Avalanche control. We’ll use hand-thrown bombs in some areas. And in others we’ll use avalanche forecasting from helicopter, which will determine if it’s feasible to go out on a certain slope on a given day. This is why you have to pass the certification process, which is a written test to make sure you have some snow sense and can handle the slopes. Plus, you’ll have to show your avalanche beacon, probe pole, and shovel.
Q. The ski industry reports that sales have flatlined. When you finish building Silverton Mountain who will come?
A. I think we’re going to grab people who have said, “I get no respect at ski areas. So screw them. I’m a backcountry skier now.” And because we want to make the powder last we’re only going to let in 475 skiers and boarders a day.
Q. Do you think you’ll ever get bored owning your own hill?
A. The mountains here are really big. From the top of the lift [at 12,247 feet] you can hike essentially forever to find new places to ski.

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Bill Nooney wants a gravel pit for every family
He voted for a bill that would restrict the power of Montana’s county commissioners to protect residential neighborhoods from dirty industry. By Bill Vaughn

Like the assassin who attends the funeral, far-right Republican politician Bill Nooney was among the 150 people crammed into Montana’s Lolo Community Center on Dec. 4. While most everyone else was there to ask questions about a heavy industrial scheme just outside town that will ruin their lives unless the government steps in to prevent it, Nooney—their representative to the Montana House and a fat cat who lives in a McMansion fifteen miles away—showed up for reasons we can only assume were perverse.

The emergency meeting was called by the Lolo Community Council on behalf of people living in a residential area bordering a 113-acre pasture slated to become a gargantuan gravel pit, asphalt plant and cement factory. The pasture is owned by a real estate developer who leased the land to a Missoula road-construction company called JTL, which recently won a $3.6 million contract to repave the eight miles of Highway 93 between Missoula and Lolo.

The Lolo community is well aware of the havoc these sorts of noisy, dirty operations can wreak on air and water quality, public safety, and peace of mind. A similar scheme in 2006 proposed for the Trout Meadows Ranch downstream from Missoula (and next to Dark Acres) was nixed by Missoula County’s three commissioners, who denied the owner the zoning change that would also destroy the value of the properties surrounding the ranch. In that situation the road-construction outfit was Riverside Contracting.

Both Riverside and JTL are dues-paying members of the Montana Contractor’s Association. The MCA's response to Riverside’s failure was House Bill 557, a cynical and baldly self-serving attempt to strip county commissioners of their power to protect residential neighborhoods from gravel pits and cement and asphalt plants. The anti-democratic and legally dubious measure was passed by the House, thanks to Bill Nooney, but died in a Senate committee, thanks to Missoula Democratic Senators Greg Lind and Dave Wanzenried.

Bill Nooney, who was the only member of the Missoula delegation to vote for HB557, despite widespread opposition to the Trout Meadows scheme, took campaign finance money from the Montana Contractors Association.

Although the Lolo property isn’t zoned, a legal fact that frees the owner of the necessity to get a zoning change before proceeding, the Board of Commissioners has the power to interim zone the land and force JTL to put their scheme to a vote anyway.

Nooney, whose record in the 2007 Montana Legislature was ranked among the worst of 100 by the Montana Conservation Voters, likes to pontificate about reducing the role of government in the affairs of citizens. What Nooney means is that he wants to strip local governments of their power over corporations so corporations can prey on people who have no one except their local governments to defend them.

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J-School Ate My Brain
Five years of college, down the drain. By Bill Vaughn

In a November 29 interview with a website called campusprogress.com, Rolling Stone political writer Matt Taibbi considered journalism and the schools that teach it. “If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option,” Taibbi said. “The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days.”

Writing a couple years ago for the New York Press, Taibbi said that a career in journalism is like “shoveling coal for Satan,” a far less dignified way to make a living than working in a tampon factory. He also observed that journalists are nothing more than “professional space-fillers,” hacks plugging the holes between the ads.

While I have no idea why anyone in the first years of the 21st Century would pay good money for tuition to journalism school, I went there in the 1960s for a very solid reason: to dodge the draft. The experience was mildly entertaining. And it was no more demanding or educational than the three or four hours a day I spent smoking hash and playing Risk with my fraternity brothers. My opinion of  J-School “education” was reaffirmed when I taught publication design there for a couple of years in the 1990s. I was horrified to learn that not only did they still offer a degree in journalism, they offered a graduate degree, as well. Twice the anesthesia at twice the price.

First, the curriculum at the University of Montana J-school was, and continues to be, a snap. Maybe not quite as easy as business administration, say, or music, but it only takes a couple minutes to figure out how to write a lead, and then a few more to make sure your worthless story addresses a reader’s marginal interest in who, what, why, when, where and how.

I knew that the only result of “studying” vapid “disciplines” such as advertising and magazine writing would be access to the people at Lee Enterprises who provided abysmal dead-end newspaper jobs (I worked for the Missoulian for two nights on the sports desk before getting fired for spending one of those nights writing, instead, the obituary of a hermit who had lived with goats.)

But J-school was better than getting shot at by vicious little communists. Plus, the co-eds were cute and perky and always had plenty of cigarettes. And writing near-libelous editorials for the student daily, the Kaimin, afforded me the luxurious entertainment of savaging people who aren’t expecting an attack, like ROTC colonels. That’s when I learned that what your audience really wants to see you do is heave bags of shit at someone.

As for Taibbi, he entertained me during the 2006 election by calling former Montana Republican Senator Conrad Burns “a mean-spirited dipshit,” and a “craven moron” who sucked up for years to lobbyists such as Jack Abramoff with the robust ass-kissing zeal of Hillary Clinton working a blue-plate fundraiser. Splat! And here’s Taibbi’s physical description of “Old Yeller,” a moniker Burns earned with a string of stupid, racist, sexist outbursts: “Up close, the senator looks like little more than a big exhausted lump—like a sack of potatoes with a mushy, half-caved-in pineapple on top.” Fwop!

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CHAPTER ONE  Although Lyndon Augustus Zackheim believed with the seamless confidence of an old and deep faith that American veeks suck, he ignored the Mercedes SLK, the tasty little Beamer and the Saab 9-5 Sedan with that awesome turbocharged V-6, and headed straight for the odious one-ton Jimmy that had creamed a Windstar at the intersection of Heritage Lane and Yankee Doodle Road.   MORE

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Necessity is the surrogate father of invention
A couple of new applications from the U.S. Patent office. By Bill Vaughn

Because everyone is applying for patents these days—and they’re easier than ever to get—we decided a while back to see if we could get one for ourselves. Our invention is the Amazing and Versatile Food Suit, a garment we’ve been working on for years. Because the pockets of the Food Suit can be packed with hot and cold foods—and kept hot or cold for




hours—the bladders can be filled with beer and other beverages, and the self-contained plumbing system can be outfitted to provide instant urinary relief, once you’re parked in your seat at, say, a baseball double-header, you don’t have to get up till the last pitch, unless you want to stand for the seventh-inning stretches.

Our first application for this invention several years ago was rejected because we didn’t explain it properly to the government. So we hired a San Diego law firm that specializes in intellectual properties. The patent they filed on our behalf is, as they say, pending.

Meanwhile, our interest in patents has revealed a couple of interesting new inventions:

Mafia board game. A couple of wanna-be wiseguys,  David Ruggiero and Paul Todaro, have designed a game that pits players against in each other in an underworld struggle for power carried out across the five boroughs of New York City. Players are issued money, then they throw dice to determine their progress around the board. When they land on certain squares they draw cards that issue orders. For example, if the player named Vinny wanted to buy a deli, say, and another player wouldn’t sell it, and then Vinny draws a certain card, and it says such and such, he could, you know, whack the guy. Another card, we presume, allows you a certain number of no-show jobs for your people, the skim off a strip club, a waste collection franchise or maybe the proceeds from the sale of stolen credit cards. The object is to gain power and money and prestige as you rise through the ranks of This Thing of Ours from nobody to associate, to soldier, to capo, to underboss and finally, to the big olive, the Godfather.

Easily accessible database of movie extras. It’s a time-consuming hassle for talent agencies to provide those throngs of people who appear in the background of commercials, videos, TV shows and movies. You know, those voiceless crowds who make what we're seeing appear real.

It works like this: a casting director asks agencies for certain types of persons, then the agency picks from its list of clients, and sends mug shots and physical descriptions to the casting director. Only when the director is ready to put something on film are the extras called in. If one of these bodies is suddenly unavailable, the process must begin again.

Now an inventor named Richard Urrea has come up with a method of compiling a database of extras that’s available instantly from a server, and is updated constantly. Say you want a triplet of albino dwarves for a sci fi caper flick. Who do you call? No one. You log into the server with a password, keyboard “dwarf,” and bingo: Huey, Dewy and Louey from Big Earl’s Talent Agency at your service.

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J-School Ate My Brain Redux
Attention journalism students: Read this before you shell out more bucks for classes you probably don't need. Here's the notorious slam by Michael Lewis
in the April 19, 1993 New Republic.

As you walk through the front door of Columbia School of Journalism, the first thing you see is this paragraph, cast on a bronze plaque:

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together, an able, disinterested public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it can preserve that public virtue without which popular govenment is a sham and a mockery. A cyncial, mercenary, demogogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”

The four sentences are about as close to the intellectual origins of the American journalism school as you can get. They are taken from an article by Joseph Pulitzer in the May 1904 issue of the North American Review, the only serious defense he offered of his plan to fund the first journalism school at Columbia. He argued that his school would “raise journalism to the rank of a learned profession” and create a “class feeling among journalists.” He predicted— wrongly, as it turned out—that “before the century closes schools of journalism will be generally accepted as a feature of specialized higher education, like schools of law or of medicine,” and that the elites of Columbia would band together to cast out “the black sheep” from the profession.

According to his biographer, W. A. Swanberg, the idea of a school of journalism first dawned on Pulitzer in 1892, while he was confined to a dark room, suffering from asthma, insomnia, exhaustion, diabetes, manic-depression and failing eyesight. By the time he actually composed his thoughts for the North American Review, his bed chart included rheumatism, dyspepsia, catarrh anda bad case of shame for the Spanish atrocities in Cuba deliverately invented by his repoters to goose the circulation of his newspapers. His wife, a few of hiscolleagues and the trustees of Harvard and Columbia, who initially declined the $2 million sack dangled before them, suspected that he was not quite in his right mind. A New York newspaper editor named Horace White suggested that one might as well set up a graduate school in swimming. It took Pulitzer more than a decade to persuade Columbia to accept his money. Even then, the critics’main question was never really answered: What would they teach at the Columbia Journalism School? A few weeks ago I went to find out.

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Forward Motion
Pounding steel with Jesse James, American badass. By Bill Vaughn

While most of us are bracing for the shit to hit the fan, Jesse James is roaring into the future 140 miles an hour on a $100,000 motorcycle he built with his own hands. America’s first celebrity welder, his linebacker’s six-two, 220-pound frame painted with elaborate tattoos, James has become a heroic figure venerated by legions of shade tree mechanics, motor sport freaks, teenagers chafing to hit the road, and gearheads who live to pound steel into stuff that goes fast.

Any one of these guys can recite the salient points of the biography: James, 38, a working- class, self-made multi-millionaire and former juvenile delinquent, founded West Coast Choppers in 1992 in a pal’s garage in his home town of Long Beach, California. Though everyone told him he couldn’t make a living at what had become his passion, he grew the shop into the world’s most famous fabricator of custom motorcycles, acclaimed as industrial works of art, a major status symbol for people cool enough, in The Welder’s opinion, to own such machines.

He’s the star of five seasons of Monster Garage, the Discovery Channel’s huge hit pulling in up to 9.8 million viewers every week. The show features James and crew Frankensteining perfectly good vehicles, transforming, for example, a Corvette into a mud racer, a Rolls into a Port-a-Potty pumper, and a Ford Bronco into a rock crawler. He’s competed in Figure Eight racing at the Indianapolis Speedrome, and piloted a Trophy Truck at the brutal Baja 1000 off-road marathon. And, yeah, he’s named after his great-great-grandfather’s cousin, that bad man from Missouri who robbed banks and shot people.

James, a former bodyguard for Metallica and Madonna, sports tats that include a shoulder-blade-to-shoulder-blade hundred-dollar Benjamin in a bed of flames, and one on the palm of his right hand that says “Pay up sucker,” a keepsake from the days when he built bikes for tightwads, one of whom only made good with cash after James broke his arm (and then drove the deadbeat to the emergency room.)

In December of 2005 he traveled on his own dime to a compound near Baghdad to sweat alongside a team of army mechanics racing the clock to turn a gutted HumVee into a dragster that does wheelies. As time ran out on James’ gritty USO-inspired morale-builder, a thousand soldiers cheered and waved “Jesse For President” signs. In the spring 0f 2006 they watched as the Military Channel aired the documentary James’ production company filmed of the event, cheering again as a garage scene cut to one of The Welder joyously firing a .762 machine gun from a helicopter.

Even biker badasses know that he’s married to actress Sandra Bullock, and that he’s nothing if not business savvy. In addition to West Coast Choppers, he owns a restaurant in Long Beach named Cisco’s, after his beloved pit bull. A send-up of a 1950s-malt shop, Cisco’s features Kobe beef burgers, organic produce, and reduced-fat burritos. He’s licensed the iron cross WCC logo, and he sells his own line of clothing at tony stores such as Nordstrom.

What even his ardent fans may not know, however, is that West Coast Choppers gives money to a homeless shelter in Long Beach, where 4500 people live on the streets, so that 58 lucky men and women can sleep once in a while under a roof. Neighboring business owners send him snotty emails complaining about his aid to the street trash they believe are smudging this multicultural city’s efforts to reinvent itself as a tourist destination.

And what some may find ever harder to believe is that instead of glorifying his days as a teen hood, James is deeply ashamed of them. His malicious mischief as a teen cost him a chance to play Big College football, but the jail time did serve him—or rather, he’s seen to it that it did. It was a slap upside the head that still drives him to create and achieve and accomplish something every day. To steer other teens away from the trouble that almost ruined his life, he’s developing a foundation to teach Long Beach kids the industrial arts that were his salvation.

But now all you bad boys and girls ought to grab onto something to brace your wicked selves, because this is going to sting: Jesse James lives with Chihuahuas and writes poetry.

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