It’s interesting that a post about a state worker potentially misusing computer resources is the genesis of this post, because my job puts constraints on my ability to moderate comments on the site. During the school day, I not only can’t do anything related to the blog, but I wouldn’t, because I simply don’t have time.

I do occasionally moderate comments after I get home, but I hate to think about some of them sitting on the site for hours during the day, because there is nothing I can do about them.

And that’s why I’m asking commenters here to please try to remember a few guidelines. You can be acerbic, direct, bitter, and cynical. You can criticize people and tear down public figures. All fair game.

What’s not are personal attacks, sexism, racism, or homophobic rhetoric, to name a few things. If you want that, watch a Republican debate in South Carolina.

I love the idea of discourse that can happen online, but let’s try to keep it a bit more reasonable. Okay?

Now I’m off to moderate a few comments.

Highlighting some of the most interesting and provocative posts in the past week at Montana blogs.

D Gregory Smith pointed out, that despite constantly talking about his availability to Montanans, Representative Rehberg has been awfully unwilling to meet with them lately.

Montana Cowgirl found it interesting that Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Hill would depict himself as someone who struggled as a single father, given the reasons he became one.

I’m not sure that I agree with much of anything Ed Berry says, but I wonder if he’s right that far right conservatives will not support Representative Rehberg because of his support of the Defense Authorization Act and HR 1505.

Rob Natelson managed to blame liberals for the Citizens United decision. It’s really a conservative jurisprudence must-read.

Barb Rush showed once again why she should not ever be elected to the School Board.

Over here, I kept yammering on about Representative Rehberg’s continued dishonesty about Pell Grants, new poster Winston wondered why campaign web sites weren’t in better shape, and Gabriel Furshong argued for the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act.

It’s always both disheartening and a bit amusing watching conservatives contort themselves to justify discrimination against GLBT Americans, especially when it comes to marriage equality. They couch their arguments in specious claims about judicial activism, but the truth is, their position rests on the bigoted idea that a group of people can be denied equal protection under the law simply because some people are uncomfortable with relationships that are different from their own.

The latest example? The media darlings and deep thinkers at Treasure State Politics.

When this is your argument, you’re in trouble:

I understand it is vital for every citizen, no matter their personal choices, to be guaranteed the same rights under our laws. Marriage isn’t a right, it’s a tradition. When a court begins to compromise the meaning of marriage that Montanans have overwhelmingly agreed on, the reverence of marriage can be quickly destroyed.

The Supreme Court has disagreed with the idea that marriage is not a right, most specifically in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, which outlawed anti-miscegenation laws. As the majority wrote:

The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men …

To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.

Loving v. Virginia is an especially instructive example, as it illustrates the absurdity of relying on popular opinion to determine the right to marry. In the 1960s, the majority of Americans opposed interracial marriage:

A Gallup Poll indicated in 1965 that 42 percent of Northern whites supported bans on inter-racial marriage, as did 72 percent of southern whites.

The “logic” offered at Treasure State Politics must, therefore, endorse the position that the Supreme Court was wrong to strike down inter-racial marriage laws in the United States. Surely, these future voices and current campaign staffers for the Montana Republican Party are not suggesting the Supreme Court should have left such an abhorrent remnant of Jim Crow laws on the books, are they?

They have to be—and that shows just how wrong the argument is.

Of course, the deeper issue is the bind the Republican Party finds itself in when it comes to the issue of gay marriage: in the short term, they have to take a hard line against equality for all Americans, because it plays well with their base. Long term, it’s not only a bigoted position, but one that’s a political loser.

This Pew Research Center chart shows that Americans are headed in the right direction when it comes to marriage equality, but equal access to rights shouldn’t depend on  either public opinion or what conservatives believe marriage means.

Equality under the law means equality under all laws, no matter how contorted the argument used to justify discrimination.

As a final note, the bloggers at Treasure State Politics might enhance their credibility if they didn’t write things like “the gay blog alienated the people it needed to convince.”  I don’t know what the hell a “gay” blog is, but it sounds complicated.

I’ve been enjoying a new Montana blog, Montana’s Bully Pulpit, a collaborative blog dedicated to preserving the heritage of conservation in Montana and the United States. In particular, I enjoyed their take on Representative Kris Hansen’s entirely illogical editorial about the need for spear hunting in Montana. Definitely a blog to keep an eye on for hunting, fishing, and conservation issues.

4and20 blackbirds has the most information on the spread of the Occupy Wall Street movement in Montana. For more information about the movement in Missoula and Helena, follow the links.

Enjoy out of state billionaires manipulating our political system? Then you’ll love Dennis “Cash Poor” Rehberg taking his marching orders from the Koch Brothers.

While the local media seems unwilling to cover the absurdity that is Denny Rehberg’s effort to appropriate, you can learn all about his efforts to cut HIV/AIDS prevention efforts and pursue fraudulent lunchroom taco eating.

The Electric City Weblog and MT Cowgirl discussed the the costs of a power-hungry mayor and overzealous city attorney cracking down on someone with the temerity to speak out against a city policy. It’s about $500,000.

On the media side, Politics in the ‘Root offeed an in-depth look at the continuing budget tensions in Ravalli County and the Missoulian Cops and Courts blog discussed its stories plagiarized by the content mill Examiner.com.

MT Cowgirl blog, two days ago:

The leader of the Billings Montana Shrugged TEA Party and a TEA Party Republican state lawmaker have been caught posting remarks online that imply support for shooting their political opponents.

Matt Gouras, writing for the AP, today:

A Republican Montana state legislator said Wednesday he was talking about weapons of the mind in an online discussion with a tea party leader about stocking up on “ammo” to “attack” socialists.

Rep. James Knox, of Billings, raised some eyebrows with a recent conversation on Facebook.

The Associated Press’s attribution policy:

Therefore, here is our policy for crediting other news organizations in our reporting. This policy is aimed at introducing consistency to our practices around the world, and applies to our print, broadcast and online news reports.

The policy addresses two kinds of situations:

– Attributing to other organizations information that we haven’t independently reported.
– Giving credit to another organization that broke a story first, even when we match it — or advance it — through our own reporting.

While I’m glad (and I suspect Cowgirl is as well) that over one hundred news outlets have picked up this story about TEA Party extremism, it would certainly be nice if the guardians of truth in the halls of journalism would acknowledge the debt they owe to those unprofessional, Cheetos eating bloggers living in their basements, wouldn’t it?

Your sensible right-wing voice in Montana blogs speaks:

The Left needs to be destroyed. They need to be eliminated from the face of the Earth. They are dangerous traitors who don’t even deserve the bullet to the head that is waiting for them. Laws should be passed mandating that they immediately commit suicide, the sick bastards that they are. The Democrat Party needs to be outlawed as a traitorous entity that has no legitimacy, and all Democrat office holders need to be taken out, lined up against the wall and shot for their crimes against humanity.
They are all so stupid, they have been blindly following their orders while working for the destruction of the country that has provided them the tools for them to use against us. No more! Rid the pests, denounce them in the public square. Exterminate them!

I’d like to think this is just an example of a dittohead breaking into Rush’s oxycodone, but if you peruse the the posts that have been posted at this site, today’s Hitleriffic rhetoric is the culmination of someone who has slowly become more and more unhinged.

It’s both sad and frightening.

But, hey, always remember it’s entirely inappropriate for the government to investigate the danger of right wing extremists in this country.

The start of the school year, completing my summer debate research for Big Sky Debate, and a great little trip up to Glacier National Park have certainly slowed down my posting here lately,something I’m pretty pleased about.

It’s not just that my posting has been light. In the past week or so, I’ve dramatically cut down my consumption of digital media—not checking my e-mail very often (as at least a few of you have noticed), skipping the morning newspapers online, and even reducing my committed addiction to Google Reader.

And you know what? It’s been good. It’s been more satisfying to wait for and read about the news once the narrative has developed into something coherent rather than being little more than a desperate race to provide tidbits of information. As wonderful as modern technology has become at the rapid distribution of information, it’s perhaps struggled to develop commensurate tools for the dissemination of a coherent narrative and even the truth.

David Ulin in, one of the most thought-provoking books I have read in the past couple of years,The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, captures the impact of our desire to constantly know the details of what’s going on as quickly as we can:

What am I looking for? Something, everything, a way of staying on top of the information . . . it doesn’t matter. The looking is an end unto itself. I Google myself, or read the Google Alerts that pop up in my inbox, links leading me to reprints of my pieces in regional papers, blog posts critiquing me and/or my work. It all seems so important in the moment, and yet none of it sticks. Meanwhile, I can tap into whatever momentary obsession gnaws at me—Obama’s poll numbers, the reopening of the Etan Patz case, the state of the New York Yankees’ bullpen—and read not one article about it but a dozen, watching video, looking at photographs, recycling the same information, the same quotes and figures, in different configurations, parsing and reparsing as if it might yield something new. That the conversation rarely changes is not a problem; rather, it is entirely the point. I don’t want to be challenged but to be soothed.

Of course, Ulin is traveling ground that Thoreau covered in Walden, well before the advent of breaking news on Twitter and RSS feeds:

Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, “What’s the news?” as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night’s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe” — and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.

Oddly enough, one of the things that most made me realize the benefits of stepping back from the stream of information was the success of the Billings Little League team at the World Series. Of course, finding time to watch the games was ideal, but when I couldn’t, it was much more pleasurable and informative to wait for a fully-developed story than to follow it on Twitter. The latter met my modern desire for immediacy, but was never as satisfying as the former, even if I had to wait a few hours or even a day for the results.

Is the game of politics profoundly different? I suspect it’s not. If I miss one day of Denny Rehberg making a fool of himself and fail to read and post about it, it’s not like I won’t get another opportunity, after all.

It’s not that I am going to give up the benefits of rapid access to information. I suspect I’ll get back to blogging, tweeting and e-mailing just as actively as before, but as for getting away from the stream once in awhile?

There’s nothing wrong with that, and both the world and I will get along just fine if I don’t pay attention for a few days at a time. Once again, Thoreau:

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip.

Time to go read some Walden again.

There were a lot of great posts this week about the Yellowstone oil spill. Over at the Button Valley Bugle, a great post about the lack of transparency happening as the whitewash cleanup happens. MT Cowgirl and Rob Kailey discussed  Will Deschamps and his latest buffoonery. Finally, lizard argues that Governor Schweitzer needs to consider the broader implications of supporting oil extraction. 4and20 blackbirds featured a guest post by Larry Winslow about the dangers of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Montana Cowgirl wrote a devastating critique of Neil Livingstone’s campaign fundraising and expenditures. It was so good that the newspapers even had to mention it.

I was traveling last week and missed D. Gregory Smith’s absolutely great post about the Catholic Church’s response to the changing landscape of marriage law in the United States. He writes “The sky isn’t falling after all. In fact, it’s beckoning us, welcoming us.” That’s pretty damn exciting.

Big Sky Political Analysis, a project from Montana State, pointed out the dubious nature of Karl Rove’s opening attack ad on Senator Tester.

And finally, just a quick link to an absolutely despicable post at PolyMontana—a site frequented by Montana legislators. William Biernat, the Executive Director of Montanans in Action, waited exactly one day after Betty Ford died to post a personal and political attack about the woman. In part, this cretin wrote “Betty was a great poster witch for promoting the works of Satan using the White House as a bully pulpit.”

These are the kind of people we’re dealing with. People with no compassion, no decency and no sense of proportion. People who pretend that they are promoting Montana values while they make a living whoring themselves out to out-of-state corporate masters.

Shame on you, Mr. Biernat.

Following the end of the Legislature and a bit of a collective lull in the Montana blogging community, I temporarily stepped away from the Montana Blog Roundup, but we’re back! Below are some of the most interesting posts of the past week on Montana’s blogs.

MT Cowgirl takes a look at Rick Hill’s high disapproval numbers and how that will benefit Democratic candidates for governor. I plan to do a more extensive look at the GOP candidates soon, but this post makes the case that Hill, though the presumptive nominee, may have a more difficult road than he and his staff may have imagined. It’s almost certain that a fair amount of that disapproval comes from conservatives who aren’t sold on Hill’s claim to be a member of the “Tea Party before the Tea Party was cool.” Uh, cool?

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the Legislature didn’t give much thought about the practical results or even the legality of the law they passed to regulate medical marijuana, and jhwygirl makes that clear in this post.

Loki at 2 Helena Handbaskets also laments Lee Enterprise’s decision to eliminate the editor position at the Independent Record, but manages to entirely mischaracterize the decision. To suggest that this decision was to move the paper back to the left is wrong on too many levels to describe.

The Western World takes a look at the polling in the Tester-Rehberg contest, arguing that both candidates have to be concerned. In particular, he hits on the dilemma that Denny Rehberg is going to face: “Rehberg, on the other hand, aligned himself to the far right with the Tea Party.  In some GOP races candidates do this to win the primary, so we may see Rehberg try to become more “independent” after the primary or when he feels it’s too late for some other right-leaning candidate to come on board to challenge him.”

Some of that concern might be reflected on a relatively new site (Rehberg the Rino) whose author seems to believe that Rehberg is not conservative enough. It’s worth visiting this story for the image alone.

Finally, Rob wrote about the confluence of racism and populism in the Tea Party movement, along with the growing extremism in Montana. Given the re-emergence of organizations like the John Birch Society in Montana to compliment the occasional lone wolf militia member, it’s worth paying more attention to.

My apologies for missing the past couple of Montana Blog Roundup—while the content has been as interesting and provocative as always, life and work have certainly cut into my time for blogging. This collection of the best and most interesting posts takes a look at the past week of Montana politics.

Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful posts.

As always, jhwygirl offers in-depth looks at issues that simply don’t get enough attention in the media or on other blogs. Her look at HB 198 explained just how dangerous expanding the ability of companies to condemn private land for public utilities would be and argues persuasively that HB 198 should stay good and dead.

The PSC is back in the news in a big way this week, but not for making sensible policy. Once again, the 3 member GOP majority is turning the Commission into a circus. Commissioner (now Chair) Kavulla defended his crusade against Commissioners Gallagher and Molnar over at the Electric City Weblog, but the conservative Auntie Lib at 2 Helena Handbaskets was unimpressed: “Travis Kavulla proved that the 62nd Legislature isn’t the worst political joke of the year.”

Rick Hill has decided to step in the muck of his personal life early in the campaign. Like Cowgirl, I’m amazed that he has chosen to respond to an anonymous e-mail about his confirmed infidelity. It would seem that the media absolutely needs to cover this now. Montanafesto, which has really been driving the story, does an incredible job documenting not only Hill’s infidelity, but his predilection for very dirty campaigning. I’m reminded of a quote about reaping and sowing.

Rob wrote about the purpose and future of Left in the West. I’ve had a draft sitting here about the single issue “progressives” who attack Democrats without pause at Left in the West and other sites, but I think Rob does a great job explaining the importance of working to support Democrats, even as we occasionally criticize them. Do these “progressives” really think their issues would be in better hands with Denny Rehberg directing policy? it seems like it.

In a guest post, Stacey Anderson of Planned Parenthood dissected the misinformation about family planning services happening at the state and federal level. It’s an important, fact-based case for protecting “our daughters, our sisters, and our neighbors.”

Pete Talbot offered a scathing look at the childish antics of GOP Chair Will Deschamps. I suppose it’s fitting that the party of Knox and Hinkle would be led by this clown.