Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/category/from-the-outpost/)
It was reported last week that a survey of job satisfaction in the United States ranked newspaper reporter at the very bottom of the list for the third year in a row. You’d never have guessed it Friday evening at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Uptown Butte, site of the annual meeting of the Butte Press Club. There was some talk about the dismal state of print journalism, but the prevailing mood was anything but gloomy. (more…) Continue Reading →
Susan Balter-Reitz, an assistant professor at Montana State University Billings, set my mind at ease last week about the laws governing journalism. But she said nothing to make me feel better about the future of the profession. Balter-Reitz was giving one of a series of talks on political cartooning developed by MSU Billings professors. She was speaking in the Community Lecture Series at the Billings Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. (more…) Continue Reading →
I was delivering the Outpost and listening to Sean Hannity, between commercials for mail-order razors and Hoodie-Footies, responding to terror by spreading terror. The president was weak, feckless and driven by ideological rigidity, Hannity was saying. Homeland Security was bedeviled, the military hamstrung, the FBI over its head, the borders bulging with potential terrorists. (more…) Continue Reading →
The sirens had barely died down in Paris when U.S. Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., was calling to block Syrian refugees into the United States. Zinke, known for his distinguished service on the battlefield, has yet to show similar courage in politics. (more…) Continue Reading →
At last week’s Republican presidential debate, Sen. Marco Rubio made a case for vocational education by attacking philosophy. “I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education,” he said. “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” (more…) Continue Reading →
The debate over last week’s Republican presidential debate has snared the usual “liberal media” suspects. But that misses the point. The debate questions that caused controversy didn’t even break along liberal-conservative lines. Moderator John Harwood got in trouble by asking whether Donald Trump was running a “comic-book version” of a campaign. (more…) Continue Reading →
The 2016 presidential election is still very much up in the air, but when it comes to grammar, Democrats have a commanding lead. At least that’s the conclusion of a new study by Grammarly, an online grammar-checking website. Grammarly checked supportive comments on presidential candidates’ Facebook pages, and concluded that Republican supporters made twice as many errors as Democratic supporters. (more…) Continue Reading →
In his 1944 story about the death of Capt. Henry T. Waskow, probably the most famous piece of war correspondence since Thucydides, Ernie Pyle described a soldier who looked at the body of the fallen officer and said, “God damn it to hell anyway” before walking off into the darkness. I first read that line when I was barely a teenager, and I used it at times of tragedy and loss for decades before I realized where I had stolen it. It came to mind again this weekend, when my wife and I returned from an emergency trip to Texas to bury her mother only to learn that longtime reporter and Outpost columnist Roger Clawson had died. (An obituary is below this column.) (more…) Continue Reading →
I was thinking the other day about how much I hate computers. It’s not just that they have turned every American worker into a computer maintenance technician, or that ads pop up in the middle of the screen while I am trying to read something. It isn’t even that the only language computers seem to understand is profanity, nor that the screen may suddenly go blank at some crucial point. (more…) Continue Reading →
When I deliver the Outpost on Thursdays, I have for years listened to conservative talk radio. It probably has made me more liberal than I ought to be. My contrarian streak runs deep. (more…) Continue Reading →
