Quiet concerned

I keep pointing to this story, because it’s fascinating to me, but I might be the only one. Maybe it says more about me than it does anything else, but I’m still astounded by the latest revelations in the Yellowstone Club debacle.
Today, Edna Blixseth says that she opposed a $375 million loan. What exactly does that conversation sound like? It’s so mind boggling I can’t even imagine. The Montana Standard runs this quote, “’I was quite concerned with us getting a loan of that amount of money,’ she [Edna Blixseth] said of the 2005 transaction engineered by her then- husband, Tim.”
Quite concerned? My wife is quite concerned when I eat too much red meat or decide to play basketball with twenty year olds. Financially, I am quiet concerned that we might need to purchase a new vacuum or that the brakes in the suburban are going out. Anything over a few hundred dollars and I’m quiet concerned. Yet, in this article people are talking about $200 million dollars that went into a personal account like this is a fairly normal occurrence.
I don’t know the Blixseths, I only know a little about the neighborhood they purchased. It’s been a bad deal for everybody involved. The Yellowstone Club is like a cancer growing in the valley. In general I’m not even against rich people, but at some point this case highlights that we seem to have lost perspective when it comes to greed, gluttony and obscenity. Wealth like that in the face of so much need is nothing if not obscene.

If you need a laugh from the same paper read Bill Foley’s column today. If that’s not a Butte column I don’t know what is. A lot of times I disagree with Foley and I have accused him of being the worst columnist in Montana, but the longer I’m out of Montana the more I enjoy reading his stuff because there is something so “Butte” about it. Reading today’s took me back to a seat at a table in the Vu Villa drinking a beer and watching a kid in a letterman’s jacket walk up to the bar and walk out with a case. Different times.