Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Two warm and breezy days produced enough snowmelt to bring the North Fork and Middle Fork up to twice their median discharge. The outflow at Hungry Horse Dam was chopped by approximately 50 percent. Still, the mainstem Flathead's discharge at Columbia Falls is at 29,800 cfs. That will fall overnight, but the river is within 2.5 feet of its flood stage of 13 feet and the snowpack is heavy. If you live in low lying areas, keep one eye on the water, your other eye on the forecast, and make sure your written evacuation checklist is current. Flathead Memo has consolidated links to Flathead streamflow gaging stations on a special page.
Democratic U.S. House hopeful John Lewis is the featured speaker at tonight's spring dinner for the Flathead Democrats. He's the best Democratic candidate for the U.S. House since Nancy Keenan in 2000, and possibly the best since Pat Williams retired. His immediate problem is his primary opponent, John Driscoll, a rogue Democrat who supports the budget of Republican Paul Ryan.
Montana's Democratic Party has formally endorsed Lewis, and rightly so. It should also formally condemn Driscoll.
Chicago is a Democratic city with a de facto Republican mayor, argues Kathleen Grier at The Baffler:
…One gets the strong impression of a man cryogenically frozen in the year 1995, a man who hasn’t learned a thing since. Take, for example, his recent Washington Post op-ed, which opposes universal pre-K (“Universal mediocrity cannot be our goal,” he writes). Or read this recent Financial Times interview with the man, in which—I kid you not—he blathers on about the virtues of “midnight basketball.”
Most tellingly of all, consider the fact that literally one of his best buddies—a man he vacations with, in fact—is Illinois’s Republican gubernatorial candidate and centimillionaire venture capitalist Bruce Rauner, a Scott Walker type who’s running on a platform of making Illinois a right-to-work state. (Rauner charmingly refers to AFSCME, the public employee union, as “Af-scam-ee.”)