Eric

Missoula residents will recognize Eric, who has been panhandling/sleeping on the streets/hanging out in the Ox for the last 13 years. For a small town, Missoula has a serious homeless problem. It is more serious in part because you get to recognize them, making it harder to regard the homeless as a problem and easier to regard them as people. That’s when the guilt kicks in. You can read about it in my most recent column for the Independent, which is what y’all get today instead of a real blog. But do Indy readers get a free picture of Eric stolen from the Wall Street Journal? They do not.

Barry Beach, who was sentenced to 100 years in 1984, released pending a retrial in 2011, then returned to prison last week

In 1983, Barry Beach was arrested in Louisiana for contributing to the delinquency of a minor—his stepsister, whom Beach took in after she ran away. Detectives interrogated him for three days, until he confessed to the 1979 murder of high school classmate Kim Nees and to the murder of Louisiana woman Kathy Wharton. A judge threw out the Wharton confession when it was contradicted by physical evidence, and the same detectives subsequently extracted false confessions to the Wharton murder from two other men. On the strength of his confession to the Nees murder, which Beach denies, a Montana judge found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to 100 years. In 2011, after nearly 30 years in prison, another judge granted him a retrial, and Beach was released. Two weeks ago, the Montana Supreme Court overruled that judge and returned Beach to prison without his trial, after he had been free for a year and a half. You can read about the whole sordid affair in my Indy column, which is what you get instead of a blog today. Come on, summer hours.

Justice is blind and kind of stupid, but she has great arms.

It’s a beautiful day in Missoula, but I have to stay inside with the windows tightly sealed against the ongoing workstorm. You would not believe how much I billed this week if I told you, but I have covered a year’s rent since May first. Money is useless to me now, but I have to keep grinding away to get it because…okay, I actually do not have a good reason why I don’t just tell all my clients to stick it. But I’m going to finish their work, because I’m selling reliability in addition to craftsmanship, originality—everything but customer service, really. All this meandering ends in the sad announcement that there is no real Combat! blog today. There kind of is, though, if you read my latest column in the Missoula Independent. It’s about how the Republican Party successfully blocked Medicaid expansion in Montana, even though it was federally funded and would have insured 70,000 people. House Democrats would have stopped them, but one of them accidentally voted wrong. It’s a saga, and I complained about it. We’ll see you tomorrow for Friday links.