An activity that many Montanans engage in on a daily basis is still legal! You may continue to talk on your cell phone while driving down those long, empty roads that characterize most of Montana.

The Senate killed it 32-17.

This blog has discussed the bill before and I must say I hope we played a small part in defeating this egregious assault on liberty.

The Governor’s Office has put up a web page:Montana Recovery.

[The purpose of] …this site is to allow all Montanans to follow how we are reinvesting and rebuilding Montana with funding from the Recovery and Reinvestment Act. An estimated 11,000 jobs will be created or saved and the majority of Montanans will see tax relief.
…
Total investment in Montana – AT LEAST $626,000,000

The site is informative, full of tables and graphs explaining how the proposed money will be spent. My hope is that this site transitions to one that tracks this money; it could provide accountability and evaluation for this enormous amount of taxpayer money.

Via the Huffington Post:

A Montana judge has ruled that doctor-assisted suicides are legal in the state, a decision likely to be appealed as the state argues that the Legislature, not the court, should decide whether terminally ill patients have the right to take their own life.

Judge Dorothy McCarter issued the ruling late Friday in the case of a Billings man with terminal cancer, who had sued the state with four physicians that treat terminally ill patients and a nonprofit patients’ rights group.

“The Montana constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity, taken together, encompass the right of a competent terminally (ill) patient to die with dignity,” McCarter said in the ruling.

It also said that those patients had the right to obtain self-administered medications to hasten death if they find their suffering to be unbearable, and that physicians can prescribe such medication without fear of prosecution.

“The patient’s right to die with dignity includes protection of the patient’s physician from liability under the state’s homicide statutes,” the judge wrote.

Attorney General Mike McGrath said Saturday that attorneys in his office would discuss the ruling next week and expected the state will appeal the ruling.

The state attorney general’s office had argued that intentionally taking a life was illegal, and that the issue was the responsibility of the state Legislature.

Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Anders had argued the state has no evaluation process, safeguards or regulations to provide guidance or oversight for doctor-assisted suicide. The state also said it was premature to declare constitutional rights for a competent, terminally ill patient because the terms “competent” or “terminally ill” had yet to be defined.

The ruling noted that doctors are often asked to “determine the competency of their patients for the purposes of guardianship and other legal proceedings.”

McCarter’s ruling makes Montana the third state after Oregon and Washington to allow doctor-assisted suicides. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that terminally ill patients have no constitutional right to doctor-assisted suicide but did nothing to prevent states from legalizing the process.

Thanks to the excellent posts by our writers and by the graciousness of Craig over at mtpolitics, we’re now part of the Dextra Feed!

You may have noticed the feed before on our website under the section “other blogs” over on the right.

Thanks again for all your hard work!

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