There is no Combat! blog today, due to the vagaries of events. While I continge, how about you read this fine report from the New Yorker on student activism at Oberlin, where good intentions intersect in peculiar ways. Meet back here tomorrow to talk about how Montana’s whole campaign finance system got torpedoed. I know you can’t get enough Montana.

Would you look at the time? The clock in my home office says its four o’clock, and I still haven’t written Combat! blog. Meanwhile, recent photos of PJ O’Rourke say it’s 2016. If you haven’t kept up with my favorite writer from when I was 12, you missed him growing old. We all have, I suppose. The man who wrote an essay titled How to Drive Fast On Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink has become the other kind of conservative. He sometimes writes about church. But old lion O’Rourke is also more sensible than young coke maniac O’Rourke, and he has endorsed Hillary Clinton—reluctantly, on a quiz show, but endorsed nonetheless. The great question of 2016—do Republicans hate Hillary more than they fear Donald Trump?—creeps one step closer to being answered.

 

 

You wouldn’t believe how much work I did this week. I’m like that song where the lady says “work” over and over, except instead of being in the club and the waiting room at the tire store and my neighbor’s yard, I’m at home, doing work. Last night, though, I slipped away from my desk to do stand-up comedy at the Union club. There someone claimed that a study found the drivers of Missoula, Montana to be the worst in America. “Aha!” I said, suddenly feeling less crazy. I had assumed that I convinced myself Missoula drivers were unsusually bad through cognitive errors and my own unpleasant character. Here was the possibility of concrete evidence. It turns out that Montana, not Missoula, has the worst drivers in America, according to what was surely a rigorous study conducted by a car insurance company. But Montanans agree that Missoula drivers are the worst in the state—as a corollary to their axiom that Missoula is the worst generally—so it follows. It’s been a great week for vindication.

Back in September of 2014, the City of Missoula announced, with some embarrassment, that it had spent all the money it expected to spend on the legal effort to purchase Mountain Water before trial began. That initial estimate was $400,000. Today, the legal bill approaches $6 million, and we don’t own the water company yet.

The city’s gross underestimate of the cost of condemnation is not the only place where it seems to have failed at due diligence. At a meeting of the City Club in January last year, no one involved in the purchasing process could say what a good price for Mountain Water would be. The Carlyle Group rejected the city’s original offer of $55 million. Everyone seemed to agree that their $115 million counteroffer was too much. But nobody could say at what price buying Mountain Water would save ratepayers money over the life of a 20-year bond. Although they were preparing to make the largest single purchase in Missoula history, no one in city government had run the numbers.

The justification at the time—or maybe the excuse—was that we would have the water company forever, and pretty much any cost was worth it because the community would benefit from owning its own water system. There’s a convincing philosophical argument there, if not a financial one. But Montana Supreme Court Justice Beth Baker suggested last week that she rejects the philosophical case for eminent domain, and that she views the city’s overall argument for the necessity of condemnation with skepticism.

“The fact that it’s more common in other cities doesn’t make it more necessary,” she told the city’s attorneys. For the first time in two years, the possibility that we shouldn’t buy Mountain Water was overshadowed by the possibility that we couldn’t.

And suddenly questions like how much we were spending on legal bills seemed more importantly. The court might well find in Missoula’s favor, in which case we’ll get Mountain Water for just shy of $90 million, plus our own $6 million and whatever the process cost Carlyle. But if the Supreme Court determines that Missoula cannot force the Carlyle Group to sell, we’ll be out $6 million-plus and have nothing to show for it.

I consider that outcome in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. If the city indeed emerges from this process with no water company to show for it, issues like being off on the legal estimate by a factor of 15 or never actually calculating a fair price will look less like the cost of doing business and more like the cost of doing business poorly. But hopefully the case will go our way, and this time next year we’ll all be drinking city water. Inshallah.

There is no Combat! blog today, because I am busier than a one-legged man in an office that requires travel among several work stations, some of which are separated by stairs. While I get that paper, how about you read this fine and sometimes blood-drawing essay on the smug style in American liberalism? Props to Attempt for the link. We’ll be back Monday with something better, or at least longer.