Columns

By Frank Szollosi, Dick Dolan, Noah Marion and Whitney Tawney
Guest Columnists

Lawmakers in Helena will soon have a chance to grow Montana’s future prosperity, and respect the will of Montana voters, by using a promising new revenue source to expand public access and outdoor opportunity.

Last week America crossed a terrible threshold — 4,000 people killed in a day by the coronavirus.  Nationally, new COVID-19 cases since January 1 are now between 2 and 3 million.  We’re approaching 400,000 deaths nationally from the nearly 23 million who have been infected.  Since you started reading this column, one or two more Americans have died because currently an American dies of the virus every 20 seconds.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has risen to the challenge of making one of the Supreme Court’s worst precedents worse. On Friday, however, the Supreme Court will consider whether to hear the case the 9th Circuit botched.

It concerns whether Jim and Cliff Courtney have a right to run a boat service on a lake in Washington state, or whether the brothers have only such rights as the state government acknowledges. The case implicates a decision the Supreme Court made 148 years ago, and that it made worse with a decision 83 years ago.

Now, after a year, the numbers have become numbing. We can’t blame the media, who were simply doing their job by reporting facts, but as thousands became hundreds of thousands it became impossible to maintain a sense of scale. What exactly do 300,000 dead Americans look like?