Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/category/blog/page/15/)
This is the weblog page of Last Best News. Here you will find some news, perhaps, but also lots of commentary, opinion and satire. Just so you know.
Tomorrow is the last day to make your nominations for the 2016 Magic City Music Awards. You can click on the MCMA ad on top of this page (it rotates with a Tumbleweed ad) or just go here to make your nominations. There are 60 categories to choose from, and you can also suggest a new category you’d like to see in the future. Voting will then be conducted on the same site, Oct. 6 through Oct. Continue Reading →
Better get involved, Denise Juneau warned about three dozen Rocky Mountain College students on Tuesday night. “If you’re not at the table,” she said, “you might be on the menu.”
Juneau was speaking as the part of the Freshmen Experience program, which is on the theme of “Self and Society.” Juneau, who has been Montana’s superintendent of public instruction for the last eight years, is running as a Democrat against incumbent Republican Ryan Zinke for the state’s seat in the U.S. House. Juneau pointed out that only about 60 percent of eligible voters turn out for presidential elections. In off-year elections, that percentage falls to 40 percent or lower. “We cannot afford to have people sitting on the sidelines,” she said. Continue Reading →
Generally speaking, the proprietors of Last Best News do not like to give businesses free advertising. There are exceptions to every rule, however. The exception here is that this particular business, or at least its PR company, came up with something so intrinsically interesting that we couldn’t resist. Here you go:
Via SelfStorage.com Montana Continue Reading →
The West Yellowstone News is dead. Long live the West Yellowstone Star. West Yellowstone News Editor Jeremy Weber penned a farewell column last week for the News, which closed its doors after 30 years in business. One day earlier, Weber announced on his Facebook page that he was starting the Star, with the first issue to be out “in a week or two.”
Weber will edit the new paper, he said, and Mike Moore will stay on as reporter. It will be owned by the publishers of the Ennis Madisonian, Susanne Hill and Erin Leonard. Continue Reading →
A Montana House candidate emphasized Thursday that he is not now suing anybody for libel but that his opponent has to be held accountable for “blatantly false” statements. Robert Saunders, 27, had a Billings law firm send a cease-and-desist letter over Labor Day weekend to Rep. Jessica Karjala, whom he is attempting to defeat in the House District 48 race. The letter threatened to sue Karjala for defamation if she did not apologize to constituents to whom she made allegedly false statements and to provide copies of the apologies to the law firm. Saunders responded on Thursday to a telephone message left by Last Best News on Tuesday. “This isn’t about hurt feelings,” he said. Continue Reading →
The Billings Gazette on Tuesday shut the spigot on the firehose of public comments that had marked its online edition for years. The decision to kill public comments was announced in a Sunday column by Editor Darrell Ehrlick. He gave readers until Tuesday to respond. More than 200 did before the comments section went dark on Tuesday. Ehrlick wrote, “What began as a noble experiment in conversation has been mired in name-calling, epithet and trolling.” He noted that National Public Radio also recently ended reader comments on its website and said that other newspapers are following suit. Continue Reading →
The Greater Yellowstone Central Labor Council Labor Day Picnic follows an unvarying agenda: fried chicken, hamburgers and hot dogs for lunch; a range of free domestic beers ranging from Budweiser to Bud Light; bluegrass music by Jim Southworth and Southbound; inflatables for the kids; and speeches by Democrats. The only difference this year was that an early drizzle and cool temperatures appeared to hold down the size of the crowd. Lunch lines, which sometimes take a half hour or longer to get through, were so short that one line closed altogether at an early hour. But the light rain had stopped and the sun was shining by the time political candidates were given a few minutes each to make their case to union members. As usual, all of the speakers were Democrats, except for Dirk Sandefur, who is running a nonpartisan race for the Montana Supreme Court. Continue Reading →
I wrote last year about how people from all over the country were licensing their pricey RVs in Montana, to avoid paying the sales tax in their home states. Well, a writer for Autotrader.com says the owners of high-priced exotic cars are doing the same thing. Here’s how Doug DeMuro starts the article: (more…) Continue Reading →
Montana colleges and universities posted mediocre results in Washington Monthly’s annual rankings, which came out Monday. The University of Montana ranked 115th nationally in the overall rankings. It was the only Montana school to make the list, which included more than 300 colleges and universities. In the “Best Bang for the Bucks” listing of colleges in the West, only the University of Montana Western campus in Dillion cracked the top 40. Montana Tech in Butte was listed 49th. Continue Reading →
Editor’s note: Anybody who has followed Last Best News since our founding knows that I am a big fan of the Montana Folk Festival in Butte. I believe I once referred to it as the coolest event in the history of Montana, and I was not exaggerating. I’ve written about it on more than a few occasions, and I have also posted lots of photographs of the festival, mine own and those of Anna Paige. And now the folk festival needs our help. Here’s the whole story, in the form of a press release from the festival. Continue Reading →
