Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/category/blog/page/27/)
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.
Regular readers of Last Best News will probably remember our story about Kate Morris’ little grain bin house on the prairie, which we wrote about when it was under construction and again after its completion. We wrote about how Kate worked with Nick Pancheau from Collaborative Design Architects to realize her dream of living in a converted grain bin on the property north of Great Falls that she inherited from her parents. (more…) Continue Reading →
KTVQ is reporting that a Billings police officer is being investigated over a physical altercation he reportedly got into with a fellow officer from Laurel. The story said Paul LaMantia, a 6-year veteran “with a growing disciplinary file,” is under investigation for a “dispute” that resulted in extensive injuries to Jim Huertas, an officer with the Laurel Police Department. The two police officers are also business partners at Prohibition Boutique & Barbershop in downtown Billings.
We have a winner. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about “Real Montana,” the short-film competition sponsored by the state Office of Tourism. I also said my favorite out of more than 150 entries was Colin Ruggiero’s “Montana,” a dazzling, time-lapse tour of the state, with a particular emphasis on southeastern Montana. (more…) Continue Reading →
Last May, my old Billings Gazette colleague Dennis Gaub wrote a profile of Norm Clarke for Last Best News, just before Clarke came back to Montana to deliver the commencement address to graduates of Montana State University Billings. This is how Dennis’ article started:
“Norm Clarke agrees: he’s come a long way from his small-town start. “His lengthy journalism career began when he was in high school in his Eastern Montana hometown of Terry. The personable Clarke talked the editor of the local weekly newspaper, the Terry Tribune, into letting him report on a Class C basketball tournament in a nearby town.” Yes, he has come a long way, and on Friday Clarke was given the Damon Runyon Award from the Denver Press Club. Continue Reading →
Eric Stern, Montana’s deputy secretary of state, has written a good piece in Salon about why the Koch brothers’ well-publicized attempt to torpedo Medicaid expansion in Montana failed so spectacularly. The piece is a few days old now (and was published one day before Gov. Steve Bullock signed into law a piece of legislation also hated by the Kochs’ minions) and it is obviously very partisan, but I think Stern is mostly right. His main point is that the anti-Medicaid campaign was so clearly run by out-of-state stooges that it offended regular Montanans. Who likes being hectored, lectured and talked down to by a bunch of punks in suits—punks who can’t even be bothered to know, within a million or two, what the population of Montana is? Stern also makes this good point:
“Tea Party threats aren’t what they used to be. Continue Reading →
Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, has an interesting story about Luke Jackson, Sen. Jon Tester’s executive assistant. I had never heard of Jackson, and by far the most notable thing I learned about him in this article is that he, just like his boss, is missing the middle three fingers on his left hand. Could somebody better than me at math compute the chances of that coincidence? (more…) Continue Reading →
Don’t miss this great piece from NBC News on two of the most amazing women in Montana. Rhonda Cahill and Rachelle Croft, both of Bozeman, make up Team X Elles, and they came in 14th out of 125 teams competing in the Rallye Aicha Des Gazelles in Morocco, which concluded over the weekend. The race through the Sahara Desert is billed as “the longest, most difficult, all-female off-road rally in the world.” It’s not just the harsh terrain that makes the race so tough. Competitors are allowed to use dead reckoning only—which means employing only a compass, outdated maps and plotters. Continue Reading →
Don’t miss Dan Brooks’ fine analysis of the 2015 Legislature. Writing in the Missoula Independent, Brooks reminds us that, despite so much evidence to the contrary, there is occasionally some justice in the universe. The jumping-off point for Brooks’ column was the recent outbreak of bipartisan cooperation in Helena. Searching for a cause, he concluded that we can thank Rep. Art Wittich, R-Belgrade, for this unexpected turn of events. “Wittich’s doctrinaire conservatism,” Brooks writes, “forced moderate Republicans into a coalition with Democrats last week, and their cooperation might make the 2015 session productive after all.” Continue Reading →
I am proud to call myself a resident of Montana this morning. Why? Because I stumbled across a map of the United States that shows how Google automatically completed the phrase, “How much does (blank) cost in (name of state)?” Google’s autocomplete, you understand, is generated based on the most popular word or phrase used to complete that search in every state. I found this on Vice, which had its own opinions on which states had the saddest and the least-sad price-related searches. Continue Reading →
A spokesperson for Glamour magazine has responded to a claim made by Sheri Boelter in a story about the Tumbleweed Runaway Program that we published Wednesday. Boelter, the director of the nonprofit agency, was featured by Glamour last November as one of “50 Phenomenal Women of the Year,” and she told Last Best News, in a tape-recorded interview, that she did not provide Glamour with the information used in her profile. “If you ask Glamour magazine where they got their information, they Googled it,” she said. Mistrella Murphy, a spokesperson for Glamour in New York, wrote to Last Best News on Friday and asked us to publish this statement:
“The information in question was provided by Boelter to our writer, and the magazine has an email transcript of the exchange.” In its profile of Boelter, Glamour printed an anecdotal account of a frigid evening in February 2014 when the drop-in center at Tumbleweed was supposedly crowded with homeless teens. Continue Reading →
