Opinion

Old things are often valued.  An old house is called mid-century modern. Old cheese is aged. Old furniture is antique. Old dishes are Depression glass. Old cars are classic. And we all know wine only gets better with age.  But old people? They are just old (Or seniors, at best.) So why do we attribute favorable terms to old things, but not people?  The word itself is pretty simple. Just three letters. One syllable. A vowel and two consonants. It can’t get any easier than that, can it? But, old is so much more than a three-letter word. The older you get, the more you realize: old is a concept. It defies definition because its definition changes with ...

Passing family farms and ranches on to the next generation is challenging, and future changes to federal inheritance tax could make this process even more difficult and expensive. Many Montana producers have had to deal with paying the “death tax” for a business that is simply being passed down t...

Editor, I’m writing this letter to the casinos our Salish and Kootenai Tribes own and operate and concerns their strategies - ways casinos operate. I noticed some unusual conditions about winning and days conducted especially on holidays or any given event. More have won out of state than locals of ...

My journey through grief has been a public one, laid out for you here on these pages. Many of you have walked with me through the healing process, and for that I’m thankful. It’s funny (in a not so funny way) the things that help us heal. For me, much of the healing process has been lead by cr...

As the 69th Montana Legislature gears up to meet this winter, lawmakers are spending time thinking about policies they believe will make the state better. The Montana Transparency Project believes one straightforward option is a law standardizing fees for Right-to-Know requests. While we’ve been ass...

In recent opinion pieces, Evan Barrett, a longtime Democratic consultant, and Mike Jopek, a former Democratic legislator, have repeatedly provided their “simple solution” to our high property taxes in Montana: just lower the residential property tax rate to 0.76%. If it truly was that simple, bot...

Editor, This letter expresses my personal opinion and explanation of where we are as a nation today. This has nothing to do with politics. I know many others feel and express this same view. It all has to do with human nature and how Donald Trump’s negative human nature aspects have enlivened oth...

There are three words many of us agonize over. I know I spent much of my lifetime doing so. They are words with great meaning and connotations and one shouldn’t take them lightly. “I love you.”  It’s an easy sentence to utter out loud. Eight letters in total. Three simple s...

Thanksgiving is a day of gratitude, but it’s also so much more, not the least of which is food. Oh my goodness, is there food! It is the start of the food season, also known as the holidays, where eating is akin to breathing and a variety of homemade cookies somehow become a staple in everyone&rsquo...

Montana’s 130,563 small businesses make up 99.3% of all Montana businesses. These small businesses are the heartbeat of our communities; they drive innovation, create jobs, and provide economic stability in towns and rural areas across Montana. As we enter the holiday season, the U.S. Small Business Ad...