First they came for our health care...

by: Jay Stevens

Mon Sep 21, 2009 at 11:30:37 AM MST

From "The American Future," by Simon Schama:

In the report "written at a gallop" and delivered in fifty-five days, [Montgomery C] Meigs declared it a scandal that "the nation's most honored citizens" had to suffer through the heat and dust of a Washington summer, slaking their thirst only with dangerously corrupted water. The rememdy would doubtless be ambitious and therefore expensive, but Congress should think loftily when it came to the good of the commonweal for "water should be as free as air and always supplied by government."

Montgomery Meigs was the Quartermaster General during the Civil War. This excerpt deals with Meigs' proposal to build an aqueduct for Washington DC. The plan was adopted and Meigs supervised the project, which began in 1853. The aqueduct is still standing today.

Discuss. And feel free to make your own comparisons to health care, disparagement of the recent and - as Meigs would no doubt see it - destructive tendency to privatize public functions. And make no doubt of it - they want our water, too!

Time for some "sacred groves"

by: Jay Stevens

Fri Jul 31, 2009 at 14:31:35 PM MST

So what led to the downfall of the Maya? Whether it was the gods' displeasure or not, the answer came from the heavens.
"When you clear all the forests, it changes the hydrologic cycle," says Lentz. "The world is like a flat surface with all the trees acting as sponges on it. The trees absorb the water. Without the trees, there is no buffer to stop the water from runoff. That causes soil erosion, which then chokes the rivers and streams. With no trees, you lose water retention in the soil or aquifers so the ground dries up and then there is less transpiration, so therefore less rainfall as well."

In addition to using the trees as timber, the Maya also burned the trees, adding carbon to the air in the form of carbon dioxide. Trees remove carbon dioxide from the air and return oxygen in its place, thus cleaning and purifying the air.

"Forests provide many benefits to society," says Lentz. "The Maya forests provided timber, fuel, food, fiber and medicine in addition to the ecosystem services of cleansing the air and water. Just as forests provided essential resources for the ancient Maya, the same is true for our civilization today."

(H/T Metafilter.)

Hilarious: Rightwing Tries to Claim Mantle of Thomas Paine

by: Matt Singer

Mon Apr 13, 2009 at 09:39:31 AM MST

So, um, yeah, new rightwing hero.

Memo to Glenn Beck: read a book. Might I suggest Mike Lux's The Progressive Revolution? (Lux, by the way, will be visiting Montana in late May to talk about this book, including, I hope, why the idea of a conservative Tom Paine is so hilarious.)

Update -- More hilarious, MT Pundit muses on how the media will completely ignore these events in the same post where he embeds a video from FoxNews essentially giving free promotion for the whole AstroTurf operation.

The modern conservative movement is a group of people who won a million dollars in the lottery and spend all their time complaining about taxes.

Montana History Saturday

by: Anna

Sat Jun 21, 2008 at 12:09:46 PM MST

At any rate, while researching this week, I found a very sweet photo of a newly arrived English war bride and her husband on the front page of the April 5, 1946 edition of the Great Falls Tribune.

(The picture is sort of big, so I'll continue below...)

Neiwert on "Liberal Fascism"

by: Jay Stevens

Sun Jan 13, 2008 at 22:10:45 PM MST

Here is some free advice for liberals who don't care much for Jonah Goldberg or his (bestselling) new volume: Either confine yourself to dismissive snark, of the sort perfected by my colleague Matt, or buckle down and actually read the damn thing.

Of course, the premise is patently ludicrous, and shouldn't have earned a publisher, let alone an audience, but, hey, fair enough.

David Neiwert:

Liberal Fascism is like a number of other recent attempts at historical revisionism by popular right-wing pundits -- including, notably, Michelle Malkin's attempt to justify the Japanese-American internment in her book In Defense of Internment, and Ann Coulter's attempt to rehabilitate McCarthy's reputation in her book Treason -- in that it employs the same historical methodology used by Holocaust deniers and other right-wing revanchists: namely, it selects a narrow band of often unrepresentative facts, distorts their meaning, and simultaneously elides and ignores whole mountains of contravening evidence and broader context. These are simply theses in search of support, not anything like serious history.