Caught My Eye…

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Greetings! Here are the topics that caught my eye for today’s (extra-large) column:

  • Grulkowski’s Manifesto
  • Malpractice in Montana
  • Minimum Wage
  • The Southern Border
  • Oh, Nikki
  • Football Roundup
  • One More Thing

GRULKOWSKI’S MANIFESTO:

The E-City Beat blog has published a manifesto from Cascade County Commissioner Rae Grulkowski where she reflects on her first year as a commissioner.

She opens with:

As we move into a New Year in Cascade County, I will take an opportunity to reflect on 2023, a year as your newly elected Cascade County Commissioner. It has not been the experience I had hoped for. Assuming office nearly a year ago, I was unwelcome.
Having to stumble to find my own resources was a good thing in that I had to stretch my arm outside our local government offices.

Note to the commissioner – you’re still not welcome.

Of course, Grulkowski also complains about the way the chairman is elected between the three commissioners and taking the election duties from her friend, Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant.

People like Grulkowski and Merchant remind me of the dog that caught the car – they don’t know what to do next because they have no knowledge of how the local government is run. The citizens lose when people like them are elected.

Grulkowski finishes with:

In conclusion, I thank you for the opportunity to reflect on my first year in office. It is unfortunate that more time was wasted on politics than on building a strong foundation for our County government functions and processes.

Reading her extremely long manifesto reminds me that these are 5-10 minutes of bullshit that I won’t get back.

Read it for yourself HERE.

MALPRACTICE IN MONTANA:

I hope you can watch the MTN five-part series about the $250,000 medical malpractice cap in Montana. Most people do not know it exists. Thanks to Casey Conlon of MTN News, we do now.

Conlon reports:

On September 15, 2022, a Cascade County jury awarded $6 million to Joey Zahara in his medical malpractice lawsuit against a local neurologist. Defense counsel then filed a motion to have that award reduced to the constitutionally mandated cap of $250,000.

You can watch part one HERE.

MINIMUM WAGE:

Monday is the first day of 2024 – and also the first day that Montana’s minimum wage will be higher than $10 an hour. On Jan. 1, the minimum wage will rise 35 cents, from $9.95 to $10.30. (Source)

Is this a great country or what?

THE SOUTHERN BORDER:

It would be great if leaders from both sides of the political aisle would sit down and devise a plan to deal with the influx of migrants at our southern border.

There are reports that an 8,000-person caravan of migrants is making their way through Mexico to our southern border.

The New York Times reports that thousands of migrants are arriving at the border every day, trekking from the farthest reaches of the globe, from Africa to Asia to South America, driven by relentless violence, desperation and poverty.

The NYT also reported that last week, the number of apprehensions reached more than 10,000 a day — stretching the resources of the Border Patrol and overwhelming small towns on both sides of the border, where people have been funneled by smugglers consolidating new routes to evade capture by the U.S. authorities. (Source)

This is a crisis that belongs to both Democrats and Republicans. It’s time they did something besides playing politics.

OH, NIKKI:

In case you missed it, the Associated Press (AP) reported that Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was asked at a New Hampshire town hall about the reason for the Civil War, and she didn’t mention slavery in her response. She walked back her comments hours later. Asked during Wednesday night’s town hall in Berlin what she believed had caused the war — the first shots of which were fired in her home state of South Carolina — Haley talked about the role of government, replying that it involved “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do.”

After that, her opponents attacked.

I like Haley, I know she has some baggage, but look at the field of candidates for President at this time.

Check out the complete AP story HERE.

FOOTBALL ROUNDUP:

We are smack dab in the in the middle of college football bowl season with the big ones coming up this weekend and the semifinals for the National Championship being played on Monday (New Year’s Day). There are 11 bowls before the semifinals – how cool is that?

Check out the schedule HERE.

As for the NFL, we are in week 17. There’s a Saturday game this week with Detroit at Dallas. It starts at 6:15 Mountain time and it’s on ESPN/ABC.

My Chiefs are struggling, but they can win the AFC West this weekend. They need to shut up and play football. They host the Bengals this Sunday and close out the season at the Chargers.

Right now, it looks like the Baltimore Ravens are the best team in the NFL. They play Miami this week.

ONE MORE THING:

This is the last column for 2023. Thank you for being a loyal reader. I wish you a Happy New Year!

As they say, “If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise,” then I will be back in 2024.

## HAPPY NEW YEAR ##

7 thoughts on “Caught My Eye…”

  1. Interesting how indulgent the county is with the kooks. I went to all the commission meetings when the slaughter plant was first proposed. We barely got to speak and were shut down by law enforcement if we strayed into sensitive territory that the commission didn’t want to discuss. We were unable to ask any questions of the board even though there was much information that they were hiding from the public. Eventually their reluctance to allow public comment got them sued, because it was quite obvious they were lying to the public.

    Yet the kooks are allowed endless time to personally berate the commissioners. I don’t get it.

    https://dailymontanan.com/2023/12/31/cascade-county-meeting-was-a-demonstration-of-un-american-values/

  2. Rae Grulkowski:

    In a masterpiece of brilliant timing, one of Cascade County’s leading MAGAs squeaks out a steaming pile of what Adam Kinzinger described in the comment item posted Wednesday as “The whining, weak, brittle, fragile, delicate, feeble, puny, victim mentality of the MAGA movement.”

    There were people from the Cascade County Republican Central Committee privately urging others not to vote for Grulkowski prior to the Republican primary in 2022, because allegedly she was/is a difficult person who was/is very difficult to work with. Those warnings seem so spot on now. Perhaps the problems in Cascade County government are not really “everyone else”.

    But you do have to give Rae credit for complaining “Cascade County Commissioners chose instead to air animosity in public” in her own public airing of her own animosity. Nice touch.

    Nikki Haley:

    For someone who grew up in South Carolina, she comes off as willfully ignorant of South Carolina’s 1860 declaration of secession. That states explicitly that it was all about slavery and northern hostility to it. The link below also has tabs to the statements from Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas. They too are explicit: slavery, slavery, slavery.

    So who are we to believe, the contemporary words of the very people who started the Civil War by firing on Ft. Sumter just a few months later, or dissembling revisionists like Haley and her ilk trying to rewrite history 160 years later? Pretty sure Nikki is counting on her intended audience never bothering to look up facts for themselves, though. Trump has demonstrated facts don’t matter to the MAGA base.

    https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/active_learning/explorations/south_secede/south_secede_georgia.cfm

  3. The article never mentioned the short lived Zahara Valley Golf Course in Joeys’ biography. Now that was a story.

    Happy New Year

      • A millionaire friend of Joey’s bought the Gannon ranch golf course and put Joey in as manager. He named the course after himself.
        . He ran the previous superintendent off and hired his family and relatives to care for the course. It went tits up in a couple of years. The man he ran off went to work for Emerald Greens and now is the owner of the re-named Hickory Swings
        There is a lot more to the story but just know he’s not the sympathetic character KRTV made him out to be.

  4. Well, if Grulkowski gets voted out, she can open her new business, Rae’s fine whine and caterer for pity parties! That is truly the dumbest and most bizarre thing I have ever read from an elected official. Hopeful the county’s health plan includes mental health services! But seriously, I wonder how we ever survived this long without Rae’s bon mots of wisdom! I would love to critique this letter paragraph by paragraph, but what’s the point? It’s pure comedy gold as is! And pure MAGA! Hard to believe that someone could write that much and say nothing. Its almost as if Rae’s only idea for economic development is to provide the county with an unlimited fuel source from old Buffalo dung! It’s a masterpiece!

    https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=749273413923877&set=a.102317501952808&__cft__%5B0%5D=AZV7RWpz3BAuGE8leJu1FEro5LL-lFawgyYA0cs8cvcCXPGnIxI6ul4Ps48AkfPU09yG_aEM37ZLw-PEydamtIKOctS86zlS3IxC3226Im0wN0zu56Dk3IyBmS_mIf8x22tAXqwgjSxG-dYN1rdX-7glsS84Hu9Q823PKuVj64Ms5w&__tn__=EH-R

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