Sunday Gazette roundup and branding

Front page on Mike Lange: Montana Headlines has never met Lange, but is looking forward to an interview. So he's thinking of challenging Baucus? Now that might actually be fun. When you're running a race where you know you've got nothing to lose, your candidate had better be a pistol. We can just hear Lange debating Max "man of the people" Baucus in Butte: "So, Max, let's talk union cards. You show me yours and I'll show you mine."

The "divvying bill": Maybe Montana Headlines hasn't been paying attention, but this is the first report in the press, that we've noticed, telling us that dividing the spending megabill HB2 into multiple parts is the way the state did it until 1977. Listening to the squealing from the left side of the aisle, we had mistakenly thought that Mike Lange and the House Republicans were proposing to burn the Montana Constitution on the front steps of the State Capitol.

Montana Democrats weigh in on Iraq: Feeling shortchanged by only getting to be involved in water wars with Wyoming and Canada, a Butte state senator wants to put the Montana legislature's vast experience in waging overseas wars to use. Washington insiders have confided to Montana Headlines that the resolution, should it pass, will likely go straight to the desk of General Petraeus. He needs to know that Democrats in the Montana state Senate have studied the situation closely on the ground, and after their classified briefings are recommending that he not be sent more troops.

Selling federal lands: Montana Headlines understands that once the government has something, good luck trying to get it to part with it. Every April 15th is a reminder of that. No-one is going to allow the selling of public land. But if the federal government insists on holding onto the land, there has to be a provision for funding county governments when income from leases dries up. Private land is subject to property taxes, so selling it would solve funding issues. Max Baucus, however, apparently has a secret alternative plan for funding county governments.

Keeping teacher certification out of the hands of the riff-raff: Montana Headlines has never understood the rigidity of the teacher certification process, except as a sort of monopoly to exclude potential competition from people who know Chemistry or Latin cold but haven't taken courses like Educational Psychology. In May, high school seniors aren't allowed to learn from anyone but a certified teacher. In September, they find they can learn quite well from a faculty that contains none.

When a bill suggesting local control of the certification process was introduced on the House floor Saturday, public education advocates in the gallery responded by imitating the students in their classrooms. No reports yet on whether any Republicans were hit by spitballs.

Ed Kemmick's City Lights: You, sir, have no shame. What next, gondola rides in Billings canals?

The Gazette's partisan spin on Denny Rehberg

It might seem odd that Montana Headlines is only today commenting on a Billings Gazette editorial that was published more than 48 hours ago: "Rehberg's partisan spin on spending."

The honest truth is that it was just too difficult to understand exactly what the editors were trying to say. Perhaps it was written in haste. Perhaps the editors were fighting a battle against clean prose and well-crafted thought and were determined to win decisively.

Whatever the reason, even after reading the editorial several times, perusing the couple dozen responding comments on-line, and reflecting at leisure for a day or two, the murk didn’t clear much when it came to substantive arguments.

We even considered rewriting the editorial into something intelligible and then arguing against that, but something stubborn inside us wasn’t inclined to provide that kind of assistance. After all, Denny Rehberg has a tough enough job as it is being the lone high-profile Republican in Montana, and we would prefer to support him when he's being sniped at rather than help draft subcontracted opposition ads.

Montana Headlines will, however, accept responsibility for our inability or unwillingness to understand the editorial well enough to engage its points articulately. Accepting responsibility is appropriate, since we Republicans aren’t as intelligent as Democrats and should be humble enough to accept that judgment and move on, just trying to do the best we can with what we have.

One might then justly ask: if Montana Headlines thinks the editorial is so poorly written, why waste a post on it? A good question. A couple of answers spring to mind. First, Montana Headlines understands that the Gazette wants to cow Rehberg into being the Republican sidecar rider for our driving Democratic duo of Sens. Baucus and Tester (read the last paragraph of the editorial -- that much was clear.)

We are convinced, however, that they can do a better job of it than they did in this editorial. Unlike us at Montana Headlines, they do this for a living.

Second, we also realize that the main point to the editorial was to tie Rehberg, partisanship, and nasty earmarks into a neat package. The obfuscation (probably unintentional) if anything served to help that along since the casual reader would have a hard time following their argument long enough to be able to disagree with it.

The Gazette has endorsed Rehberg in his non-competitive races, but in 2000 when he was in his one competitive race for the House, the Gazette naturally endorsed his opponent, Nancy Keenan, dismissing Rehberg with two lines of faint and fluffy praise.

We can probably expect the same when Rehberg next finds himself in a competitive election – probably a key U.S. Senate race – so it is understandable that the groundwork has to start being laid. The editorial progression will be interesting to observe, and it is good for Rehberg and Republicans to be reminded just where things stand.