Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/category/blog/page/16/)
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.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte has been distributing fliers about Gov. Steve Bullock’s stance on admitting Syrian refugees into Montana. You can see an image from the flier to the left and below. The flier was being distributed statewide just as a refugee family from the Democratic Republic of the Congo was settling in Missoula. We thought Gianforte got the message exactly right but the image wrong. So we updated it for him and posted it above. Continue Reading →
Economics Professor Jack Chambless wrote a piece in Wednesday’s Billings Gazette arguing that Hillary Clinton’s proposal for free college tuition is a bad idea. He could have said, “Nice thought, but we can’t afford it.” Instead, he makes a more complicated case. Here’s his argument: (1) free tuition would create an artificial demand for college classes, forcing universities either to expand or to raise admission standards; (2) inept students would be enticed to attend college; (3) those inept students could have spent their time more profitably with an internship or vocational training; (4) the value of a college degree would be reduced; (5) professors would be stuck teaching “educational welfare recipients”; (6) free stuff is poor stuff; and (7) taxpayers should not be forced to pay to educate the children of others. Whew. That’s a lot of weight for a short column to bear. Continue Reading →
Rocky Mountain College faculty and staff got an unusually upbeat message Wednesday from President Bob Wilmouth. The annual all-campus meeting has focused in recent years on financial and enrollment challenges facing the liberal arts college. But Wilmouth told a packed auditorium today that he had good news. The college had its first positive net revenue in more than five years in 2015-16, he said. Positive revenues also are expected in 2016-17. Continue Reading →
The Outside magazine piece on Billings’ selection as the best town of 2016 is now posted online. Better yet, so is the five-minute video tribute to Billings that was created by the folks at Outside. To find the video, just click on the link above and scroll down to about the middle of the article. Two Billings attractions are featured prominently in the video: all the nearby mountain-biking opportunities and the many craft breweries in town. (This seems like a good time to remind our readers to be careful when combining these attractions.)
The downtown-centric video covers the ground quite thoroughly, to the point where you could almost imagine someone in a distant part of the country watching it and then Googling “job opportunities in Billings, Montana.” Continue Reading →
Lee Enterprises, Montana’s media behemoth, has purchased a share of Okanjo, a native commerce company in Milwaukee, Wis. Native commerce has nothing to do with business on the reservation. It’s a technique for presenting ads on web pages so they blend seamlessly with news content. Lee’s investment in Okanjo was announced in May, but the two companies had been working together for a year, according to an article in the August issue of Editor & Publisher. The size of Lee’s investment and its stake in the company were not disclosed. Continue Reading →
Somebody was wondering the other day why the Billings Gazette had not announced its new redesign. Good question. The redesign rolled out on July 22, when I was in Texas, so I figured I had just missed the announcement. But going back through the paper, I see no mention of the changes that day, or the next, or on the Sunday opinion pages. Google also didn’t help. Continue Reading →
Corby Skinner, who has probably done as much to promote the arts and culture as anybody in the history of Billings, is the subject of a justly laudatory article in the new issue of Big Sky Journal. Written by Stella Fong, with photographs by Anna Paige (both of them contributors to Last Best News), the article paints a well-rounded portrait of Skinner. Here’s the gist of it:
“He helped raise the curtains at the landmark Alberta Bair Theater in Billings, gave writers a venue with the Writer’s Voice, and honored authors through the High Plains BookFest and High Plains Book Awards. For his efforts in these various arenas of arts, he received the 2009 Governor’s Humanities Award. These days he is promoting the nascent music venue Tippet Rise in Fishtail, Montana.” Continue Reading →
New York magazine has an infernally long but rewarding story about everything wrong with the media today. Based on interviews with more than 40 journalists, the article gives 53 reasons, with examples, of how the media screw up. If you are insufficiently depressed, it’s worth a look. Even if you aren’t, you might take a moment to skip down to No. 29, under the heading “Whoever the subject, the press can be cruel.” Marin Cogan describes traveling to Montana to interview former Gov. Brian Schweitzer, then a bit of a national media darling with possible presidential aspirations. Continue Reading →
In a rare act of political courage, or of political opportunism, U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., became an early and strong supporter of Donald Trump. Initially, this required ignoring or explaining away Trump’s assertion that John McCain was no war hero and the accompanying implication that prisoners of war in general are losers unworthy of our admiration. Now it requires that Zinke somehow excuse Trump’s attack on a Muslim family who spoke at the Democratic National Convention about their son, a U.S. soldier who died an undeniably heroic death fighting in Iraq. In a guest column in Saturday’s Billings Gazette, Zinke tried to get over the hurdle by accusing Trump’s presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton, of equally reprehensible behavior. He wrote: “Both of our candidates for president have picked fights with and said extremely regrettable things to the families of service members who paid the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our great nation. Continue Reading →
The Atlantic had an article in July about a Montana man who may have overturned scientific understanding of how those incredibly tough and hardy lichens work. For 150 years, the article by Ed Yong says, scientists thought that lichens were composite organisms made up of a fungus in partnership with algae. Toby Spribille, who was home-schooled in a Montana trailer park and returned here after studying in Germany, found a third element: another sort of fungus that works in partnership with the other two. Spribille suspected that the additional fungus existed, but it took him five years to find it, going through some 45,000 lichen samples he collected over the years. “Many of the fundamentals of lichenology will need to be checked, and perhaps re-written,” Yong writes. He quotes John McCutcheon, with whom Spribille works at the University of Montana: “Toby took huge risks for many years. Continue Reading →
