Catastrophic cuts are in the offing for Medicaid, the nation’s largest single source of health coverage, serving primarily low-income Americans. But catastrophe is not inevitable.
There’s a small wooden cabin at the top of Northwest Peak, a few miles from Montana’s borders with Idaho and Canada, and Chuck Manning, 79, believes lookouts like this one deserve a second chance at being useful.
Even though one in five Americans is estimated to suffer from mental health illness, talk about mental health in the rural West remains muted. I’d like to talk about it this Thanksgiving because I’m grateful I got the help I needed after a long-fought problem: I’m bipolar and I’m being treated for it.
Imagine a best-selling, 900-page novel using “a sad, bewildered nothing of a river” as its centerpiece, connecting the earth’s geologic origin and dinosaur age to 1970s rural Colorado.
President-elect Donald Trump’s first term was a disaster for America’s public lands. While the prospects for his second term are even more bleak, Westerners across the political spectrum — even those who voted for Trump — stand ready to oppose attempts to sell off America’s public lands to the highest bidder.
Donald Trump thinks the world of tariffs. “Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,” Trump said in September at a town hall event in Michigan. On another occasion he said “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the English language. Hmm. And he really has had a love affair with tariffs. After all, they mark his entry into national politics. Back in the mid-1980s, his one big gripe was the trade deficit with Japan. Then China became the target, and while president, Trump kept raising tariffs with China in the belief China would bend a knee and surrender. It didn’t, and Biden has been stuck in a tariff war ever since.
As I watched Donald Trump arrive at an astounding victory on election night, I was struck by his strong turnout in both rural and urban parts of the country. But I couldn’t stop thinking: Do voters understand what Trump’s sweep means for the price of eggs, housing and cars?
While everyone’s attention was on the fate of the presidential election, a countdown began at 11 p.m. PDT on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, when the U.S. Air Force test-launched an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a dummy hydrogen bomb on the tip from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The missile crossed the Pacific Ocean and, 22 minutes, later crashed into the Marshall Islands. The U.S. Air Force does this several times a year. The launches are always at night while Americans are sleeping.
Four years ago, I wrote a letter to family and friends asking them to vote for a return to decency, to vote for Joe Biden. Our leaders should represent what is best in us and conduct themselves in a way that reflects the values we teach our children. Donald Trump, a dishonest narcissist and philanderer never met that standard. This disqualified him from leading our nation. My concerns were justified when, on Jan. 6, 2021, he violated his solemn oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
I was driving on Montana’s Highway 89 just as fall began showing up at one of my favorite spots for walking, a turn onto a two-lane country road. If you don’t know about busy Highway 89, it travels north from Yellowstone National Park to Glacier National Park, a 400-mile haul.
