Federal Regulators Run Amok On Farm Labor

I listened on the radio to both Congressman Rehberg and Senator Tester talk about this and I read about in the Billings Gazette and the HDN about this issue.  So let me see if I got this right.  In the last year, the Feds have embarked on three separate attacks on Farmers and Ranchers.  The first was a trial balloon meant to put all farmers and ranchers on notice that the Department of Transportation feels that anyone pulling a horse trailer should hold a commercial drivers license.  Then there are these insane attempts to regulate farm dust and now we see the Department of Labor wants to ban farmers from hiring children.  Could we please stop with all this mothering from the Feds? Please?  You already tell us that we must drive with our seatbelts, we must watch what we eat, we must buy health insurance, we must only drive cars that the government deems is safe enough or efficient enough.  The list goes on and on and on and for many of us, we are sick and tired of being regulated to death.

I grew up working on a farm and ranch here in Montana and I still believe it was one of the most important experiences a kid could have to learn not only how to grow food, but also a traditional work ethic.  Those folks in New York bellowing about Wall Street could use a little hard work in my honest opinion.  Farming and ranching is a noble profession and one which is crucial to our economy, not only in Montana but for our nation as well.  Food continues to be in the top 5 exports for the U.S. whether it is wheat, beef, corn or soybeans, agriculture is by far one of the largest industries the U.S. and certainly for Montana.  Not only that, it is one of the few areas of the economy actually performing quite well, so leave it alone!

The President and all of the dwarfs running for President continue to say finding jobs is the most important issue for the upcoming election.  Duh!  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out, yet we might need one to figure our why our government continues to attack our own industries as opposed to trying to help these industries grow and employ more people.  It baffles the mind why at this stage in our economy while we continue to hemorrhage jobs, the Feds continue to find ways of destroying more jobs.

So for those keeping score, Montana has three main industries, 1) Agriculture, 2) Energy and 3) Tourism. Obama’s administration has all but attempted to destroy our energy industry by seeking to regulate coal by EPA regulations and Wyoming and North Dakota are kicking our butts on State regulations, now with these attacks on agriculture, how can any Montanan sit idly by and allow this to continue?  The bottom line is we all need to write our Congressman and our Senators and send comments to the Department of Labor telling them just how dumb this is.  Stop the nanny state right now! We are sick and tired of it.  Montana cannot afford to lose anymore jobs or we will go the way of California, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

To comment click the links below:

Sen. Max Baucus, D-MT

Sen. Jon Tester, D-MT

Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-MT

Department of Labor Regulation Comments

The White House

How much is a “Created Job” worth?

I couldn’t help but notice a couple of newspaper articles and even a letter to the editor of the HDN this weekend bemoaning the fact that there is not enough support to pass Obama’s wonderful $447 billion dollar jobs plan. Obama claims that 2 million jobs could be created or saved with his plan but is that really true? Thanks to one of our readers pointing out a website called FactCheck.Org we read a report saying that economists can only show that 288,000 jobs could either be saved or created over the next 2 years with the president’s plan.

Do the math - $447 billion divided by 288,000 jobs = $1,552,083 spent for each job saved/created. Even Jacksons far-out plan of just paying everyone that is unemployed $40,000 per year to just “do something” would employ 11,175,000 people or 38 times what the Obama plan would do. What is wrong with these alleged highly-educated economists? Even if Obama’s claim that 2 million jobs would be created was in fact true the cost would be over $223,500 for each job “created.” Don’t any of these people own a calculator to run some simple math numbers before they go on prime-time TV bragging about these wonderful plans? I only took Havre High math and I am smart enough to do the math on this one.

So what of the Republicans “better” jobs plan they have been touting. You got it! - The economists said there would be a net gain of ZERO jobs but looking on the bright side at least they were proposing spending considerably less of our tax dollars.

How about just totally forgetting “job creation plans” and taking a look at cutting some of the job killing excessive government regulations that keep the economy from moving ahead instead? That would not only cost you nothing but would actually save some money by eliminating thousands of government bureaucrat positions that do nothing more than muck up the whole job creation process

How much do you think we should spend to create each job?

House Representatives are Working Themselves to Death in Washington

Anyone catch the article in USA Today with the headline "House Democrats say GOP wants too many days off"?

It seems the house Republicans have turned in a calendar that only has the house in session about one out of every three days for next year or 109 days total. Let me think about that a minute. 5 days per week x 52 weeks is 260 days per year which is what the rest of us work minus holidays and vacations. Now of course our house representatives are certainly supposed to spend a few days at work in their own home states so this 109 day number is certainly skewed as to how many days our representatives actually do work. Leave it to the lazy old Republicans to try to get out of work but when you look back to when the Democrats controlled the house in 2008 they worked a whooping 119 days or a full 10 days more that the Republicans now propose.

• Republicans calander - $175,000 annual salary divided by 109 days = $1,605.50 per day
• Democrat calendar - $175,000 annual salary divided by 119 days = $1,470.58 per day
• My Calendar - $30,000 annual salary divided by 260 days = $115.38 per day plus all the donated overtime I can endure. And for this I say a prayer of thanks everyday as I am bringing home an above average salary for Montana.

I hate to even point out this fact to these disenchanted House Democrats but those of us back home in the real world think both the Republicans and Democrats in Washington have done too little for too much for too long.

Award Winning "News" Paper Reporters in Havre

The Havre Daily “News” never fails to make me shake my head in wonder. Take the above the fold article in tonight’s paper for instance. The headline reads “Dow vs. Kaul in closely watched Ward 3 race”. At first blush it looks like another award winning article like we have become accustomed to from the professional and investigative journalists at the HDN. It has some questions and what we would assume to be the factual reporting of answers from the candidates. There is even a nice picture of incumbent councilman Kaul in his shiny black cowboy hat and a picture of Dow with no hat (and no hair either for that matter)

Who?  Me?

First I really don’t know how closely this race is being watched. There are only a few more than 900 people in all of Havre that are even eligible to vote for either candidate. Assuming a higher than normal turnout because of the mail-in ballot I would guess that the return would run around half of the ballots being actually voted so in reality 226 people could very well determine the outcome of this election. That is why it is so important for people in Ward 3 to actually take the time to return a voted ballot.

After the cutesy first paragraph trying to compare this local council race to the presidential election investigative reporter Zach White writes that;

“Kaul has served two terms already, first getting elected in the 2003 council election. He has served as the chair of the city’s Safety Committee and advocated for the expansion of the hours at the port of entry at Wild Horse.”

It wasn’t long after the newspaper hit the stands that the Corrector started receiving e-mails from folks “correcting” some of the facts. Early this afternoon one of our readers wrote in an e-mail to us that;

“The Chamber of Commerce has had a committee that has pushed for the expansion of the Wild Horse Port to 24-hour status for several years and I can empathically state that Bob Kaul is not a part of our committee. What Bob Kaul has done is start a separate group along with Bob Sivertson, Jim Treperenus and others of like ilk that have muddled the whole process by only asking for expansion of port hours to 18 hours which would do nothing for what we are trying to accomplish which is make Wild Horse a commercial 24 hour crossing. Bob Kaul’s group has hindered our work to make this a commercial crossing where people can import and export the same as they do at Sweet Grass.”

Later tonight we also received two more e-mails stating that Kaul’s tenure reported in the HDN was also false. One reader even went so far as to say he posted a comment on the online Havre Daily “News” pointing out that fact and his comment was never posted but miraculously the copy of the online version of the paper was changed to correct the unreliable reporting. This reader also went on to say that he then posted the following on the HDN face book page and his comment was also quickly removed by the newspaper

“The errors in this article are unbelievable. Kaul hasn’t served on the council since 2003 as he said in this interview. He ran for office in 2005 against Kaftan and was beat handily. He filed for the seat again in 2007 and only got the council position because absolutely no one can against him. No one has ever ever elected him to anything. Why would we elect him again when he doesn’t even know how many years he has been on the council? Either dementia is setting in or the newspaper again screwed up the facts”

While it is true that the Corrector has taken the paper to task in the past these “tips” we were receiving just seemed too far-fetched to be true so we did a little investigating of our own and these assertions all appear to be true. The online HDN article is indeed different than the print article in the newspaper lying here on my desk. I wonder what else is inaccurate in this article? I guess I could give reporter Zack White some leniency here as he has only been in Havre a short time and wouldn’t have the historical election knowledge to know something was amiss but from where did he glean these misrepresentations of the facts? As near as we can determine candidate Kaul told him these things in the interview. Is Kaul trying to pull something over on his constituents or is he really suffering from dementia as our reader asserts and doesn't even know when he was first seated on the council?

We at the Corrector have made no secret that we think councilman Kaul has got to go and we are allowed that liberty as we are an opinion driven blog but is the actual “News” paper now resorting to twisting the facts to assure that Kaul is reelected? It would sure appear so.

A big THANK YOU to those that took the time to send us these corrections. Don’t forget that we love to receive your tips and information at - havredailycorrector@gmail.com  and if you live in Ward 3 PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t forget to vote

Another View on the Megaloads

The following guest editorial written by Cary Hegreberg and Spook Stang was submitted to the Corrector. Cary Hegreberg is the executive director of the Montana Contractors’ Association and Barry “Spook” Stang is the executive vice-president of the Motor Carriers of Montana

Megaload suit harms Montana

The Missoula County Commissioners and the National Wildlife Federation made a big political statement with their lawsuit to halt construction modules from being transported on Montana highways en route to the Kearl oil sands in Alberta. Now that the litigation has about run its course, let’s evaluate exactly what they accomplished.

When it’s all said and done, the modules will all still make it to their destination where they will be used to process Canadian oil sands. However, the lawsuit has caused at least some of the loads to be taken over an alternate route at a much greater expense. The alternate-route modules are dismantled in Lewiston, Idaho, at about half a million dollars each, and reconfigured into smaller, more numerous loads and transported over a longer distance.

With more loads to transport farther, the project as a whole will now consume additional diesel fuel. Not to mention the additional energy used to tear down and reconstruct the modules.

Without question, the Missoula County and Wildlife Federation lawsuit forced Imperial Oil to unnecessarily consume a vast quantity of additional fossil fuel and electricity.

But the suit brought by Missoula commissioners and the Wildlife Federation didn’t just waste fuel and energy, it also squandered economic opportunity and cost jobs. The loads being hauled over alternate routes means that highway construction, traffic control, and public safety work that would have been done by Montana workers has now disappeared.

By some estimates, Montana lost $33 million in economic activity as a result of the ill-advised suit, including scores of potential jobs.

The original, preferred route blocked by Missoula County and the Wildlife Federation would have taken these loads through dozens of small Montana towns. Local businesses along the route had been expecting an economic boost from the project. That’s diminished now too.

In fact, the Montana Department of Transportation estimated the total amount of economic activity resulting from the megaloads project would be $67 million in Montana—that figure includes the construction activity and commerce created in small towns. The more of these loads that travel over the alternate route, the less economic activity happens in Montana.

But perhaps the worst outcome of the Missoula County and Wildlife Federation lawsuit is that a new precedent has been set. We now live in a state where any municipality can apparently stop commerce on taxpayer-owned, state highways by simply going to court if any type of permit is involved.

So what exactly was the lawsuit meant to accomplish?

The loads will still get to their destination—only at higher cost, with more energy used, with fewer Montanans employed, and with a tremendous amount of economic activity lost.

The county commissioners joined the lawsuit under the guise of protecting Missoula County residents. But it’s curious that similar energy-related megaload projects transported by Conoco Phillips and Weyerhaeuser did not draw litigation from Missoula County and the Wildlife Federation.

It appears the lawsuit was intended to make a bold political statement about “global warming,” and nothing else. After adding to air pollution and costing as much as $67 million in jobs and economic activity for Montana, Missoula County residents might question their Commissioners, and Wildlife Federation members might wonder what their so-called sportsmen’s advocacy group is really up to.

Brutal Winter Predicted

I heard some reports that there were some flurries of snow north of us today and was reminded that winter could be upon us any day. The Northern Ag Network had the following weather map posted on their website that is not showing much hope for a milder winter than we experienced last year. They also said that AccuWeather.com predicts another brutal winter thanks to La Niña. Take a minute to visit the Northern Ag Network website for a very informative story about why the weather forecasters think we are in for a long cold winter.

I better get down a buy a new snow shovel so I am ready. I wonder if the city and county have budgeted a little extra for plowing this year?

One and an Out of State Bunch against the Majority

Clear back in 1953 the Whitefish chapter of the Knights of Columbus leased a patch of Forest Service ground measuring 25 feet by 25 feet for the purpose of erecting a statue of Jesus as a memorial to World War II veterans. According to the Missoulian one lone person started complaining about the statue being offensive to Atheists and others with no religious beliefs. A Wisconsin based group called Freedom from Religion got involved in the fray and has succeeded in getting the Forest Service to cancel the permit that has allowed this display for over 5 decades.

Without even considering the merits of the historical value of this statue to local residents what I find offensive is that one bellyaching person and a non-local out of state organization can dictate what we can and can’t do here in Montana. No matter what your religious beliefs or lack thereof just what does this historical landmark hurt?

It would seem that with the state of our nation today we would have more important things to worry about. Read the article over in the Missoulian and give us your opinion.

Chalk One up for the Believers of Reincarnation

I found this kind of disturbing.  Apparently we haven’t learned much in the last 4 decades.

Out with the Old -------- In with the New

I have received my official ballot to vote for this year’s city candidates. Sadly there is not much to vote on in my ward. One unopposed council candidate and the city judge

If you recall the only ward with a contested council race is in Ward 3 where incumbent Bob Kaul is being challenged by Rick Dow, a man with some actual intelligence. What a refreshing change that will be for the council to actually have a person that will think before he speaks.  Ward 3 voters do need to do their part and actually mail in their ballots with a check mark by Rick Dow's name to dramatically increase the collective IQ of the Havre City Council

Don’t forget to mail in your ballot if you live in Ward 3 ----------- The future of Havre depends on you!

Time to say Night-Night Jon-Boy

Here’s one sure to delight all you liberals that like to throw up the name Koch Brothers when trying to put down any conservative thinker. You beloved Senator Jon “No Earmarks Ever” Tester was busy condemning any businesses that have any dealings what so ever with Iran only a week or so ago and of course he was doing like all good disciples of diversionary tactics do and was uttering the name “Koch Brothers” every other syllable. Come to find out according to the Weekly Standard poor misguided Jon-Boy had gleaned his facts from a mostly fabricated story that ran in the Bloomberg Reports that quoted a former disenchanted Koch employee who had made up many of the “facts”

The 2006 champion of cleaning up the K-Street “culture of corruption” even went so far as posting the following on his website.

"Iran’s attempt to kill a foreign diplomat here on U.S. soil elevates the Iranian threat to a new level,” Tester said. “It ought to be clear that no responsible and patriotic American business should be dealing with Iran in any way. And the U.S. government needs to be doing everything it can to pressure these companies and put the squeeze on Iran.”

In a sad turn of events for Jon-boy this week it was learned the Koch industries haven’t been doing any business with Iran but Lo and Behold our own Senator Jon “No-Ear marks Ever Tester has in fact received numerous campaign contributions from people that do in fact have connections with Iran. I guess those silly old Koch Brothers forgot to send Jon some protection money for his campaign racketeering but the rest wheelbarrowed the campaign cash straight to the guy that vowed to clean up this "culture of corruption"

So much for being “responsible and patriotic” eh Jon. You are either one gigantic hypocrite or you are just way too far in over your head with this senate gig. Either way you have had your time in history and it is time to go back to your weed patch of a farm

Night Night Jon-Boy