Students deliver Christmas meals to veterans in Great Falls
In the video above, Paul Sanchez reports on students from Central Catholic High School in Great Falls, who provided all of the fixings for Christmas meals for 50 military veterans.
Montana Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy offered shifting explanations for a gunshot wound he’d sustained on his arm in a new interview on Friday — a controversy that has nagged his campaign against Sen. Jon Tester (D-Montana).
Last month, Kim Peach, a former U.S. Park Service ranger, came forward publicly and said that Sheehy accidentally shot himself with a gun on a family trip in 2015 at Glacier National Park in Montana — contradicting the former Navy SEAL’s campaign bio, which says he was “wounded in combat.”
Recently, Sheehy has claimed that he actually lied to the ranger in 2015, telling Peach that he’d accidentally shot himself, in order to conceal the fact that he may have obtained the bullet wound during a friendly-fire incident while deployed abroad.
Asked Friday if there were medical records to prove his story, Sheehy told former Fox News host Megyn Kelly there is “not an extensive medical record” from his emergency room hospital visit. He said he had “internal bleeding” after the bullet in his arm became dislodged after he fell while on a hike in the park.
“There’s not a whole lot to talk about,” Sheehy said, calling the story “a distraction.”
“So confusing,” Kelly responded during an interview with Sheehy on her SiriusXM radio program.
Sheehy has also offered contradictory explanations for who may have been responsible for the gunshot wound.
In his interview with Kelly on Friday, the 37-year-old GOP Senate hopeful suggested that he may have been shot by an Afghan ally in a friendly-fire incident. He called the environment at the time “messy” and described the challenges of operating alongside Afghan forces, saying it was “very, very common where you’d have Afghans who, either intentionally or unintentionally, would end up shooting friendly forces.”
“It was a hazardous environment when you’re dealing with actual hostile forces … but half the time, you’ve also gotta have one eyeball looking at our partner forces,” he added.
But in his 2023 memoir, Sheehy wrote he was “struck by a friendly fire ricochet bullet” by a fellow SEAL who he wanted to shield from repercussions.
“I didn’t want the teammate who had fired the shot, a total stud who went on to have a successful career as a SEAL, to be punished officially or reputationally ― by an accident that was in no way his fault,” Sheehy wrote in the book. “It wasn’t even a tough or dangerous mission; it was a milk run, just like this training flight, but it went bad quickly.”
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When the Post asked Sheehy about that passage in his book in April, he said he was not certain whether he was shot by friendly fire or by whom, describing an incident where his team came under fire at night.
“To be very clear, I don’t know where the bullet came from,” Sheehy said. “Sometimes people find that hard to believe, but in Hollywood, they make it look like [in] a gunfight everyone knows exactly what’s going on. … That’s just not how it goes down.”
Meanwhile, the ranger, Peach, told The New York Times earlier this month he was “100 percent sure [Sheehy] shot himself that day” in 2015. He recalled unloading Sheehy’s gun at the time and “finding five live rounds and the casing of one that had been fired,” as the Times reported.
Republicans have dismissed the allegation on the basis that Peach has a history of supporting Democrats.
Polls show Sheehy leading Tester in a critical race that could determine which party controls the Senate next year. The three-term incumbent senator is trying to pull off an upset in a state Donald Trump won by 16 points in the 2020 election.
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Students deliver Christmas meals to veterans in Great Falls
In the video above, Paul Sanchez reports on students from Central Catholic High School in Great Falls, who provided all of the fixings for Christmas meals for 50 military veterans.
Copyright 2024 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Gas prices have dropped again across Montana just as drivers hit the roads for one of the year’s busiest travel times.
GasBuddy.com reports average gasoline prices in the state have fallen 4.2¢ per gallon in the last week and are averaging $2.79 per gallon as of Monday.
Gas prices are 20.2¢ per gallon lower than at this time a month ago and 22.7¢ per gallon lower than a year ago.
The national average price of gasoline has risen 3.1¢ per gallon over the last week to $3.01 per gallon, which is 2.6¢ lower than a month ago.
GassBuddy.com reports the cheapest gas in Montana was at $2.56 per gallon on Sunday while the most expensive was $3.06 per gallon.
Montana’s Republican lawmakers may not be swayed by the gravity of climate crisis, but six state Supreme Court justices did not need convincing. Last Wednesday, 16 young plaintiffs won a resounding victory as those jurists upheld a historic 2023 climate decision, with only one dissenting vote among the seven justices. With climate deniers poised to roll back energy and environmental policies in Washington next year, and the U.N. climate conference (COP29) failing to resolve major international challenges, the decision was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal year of climate policy developments.
The case tackled the state’s appeal of Held v. Montana (2023), which found a provision of the Montana Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) unconstitutional. This “MEPA limitation” prohibited environmental studies demonstrating how the state’s greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global climate change. The state Supreme Court agreed with a lower-court ruling that the provision is unconstitutional because it violated the right to “a clean and healthful environment.”
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In the 2023 decision, Judge Kathy Seeley took great care to provide a detailed exploration of the climate issues and give credence to the young people’s fears for their future. While state Supreme Court justices touched on some climate issues, such as increasing global temperatures, they turned their attention to the specific question of climate change as “a serious threat to the constitutional guarantee of a clean and healthful environment in Montana.”
Significantly, the justices pointed to the state constitution’s stipulation that “the state and each person shall maintain and improve” Montana’s environment “for present and future generations.” The legislature, for its part, had the responsibility to protect what they termed the “environmental life support system” from “unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources.”
They decided that the framers of the state constitution wanted to carve out “the strongest environmental protection provision found in any state constitution” and agreed with the young plaintiffs that there is ample evidence that the climate crisis has exacerbated wildfires and affected air and water quality in the state. The jurists also noted that the framers “would [not] grant the State a free pass to pollute the Montana environment just because the rest of the world insisted on doing so.”
The single dissent from Justice Jim Rice rested largely on the standing of the young people to bring the initial lawsuit. He argued that there was “no project, no application, no decision, no permit, no enforcement of a statute” that materially affected the group. Their stories were “not legally unique” and no different from other state residents.
Gov. Greg Gianforte (R-MT) argued that the case will prompt “perpetual lawsuits” and increase energy bills for residents. He also echoed the dissenting justice’s contention that the decision was another example of judicial activism with the court “step[ping] outside of its lane” to tread on legislative prerogatives. Not surprisingly, using Held v. Montana as an entrée, Montana Republican legislative leaders—the GOP controls both chambers—have pledged to take up new curbs on the state courts when the legislature reconvenes in January.
But for now, the ruling produces a powerful precedent that citizens, no matter their age, play an important role in shielding the planet from environmental harm, and cannot be easily dismissed.
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