The Montana Shooting Sports Association, which doesn’t release numbers of its membership, has endorsed Fox, McCain and Schweitzer’s Republican opponent, Roy Brown, and will work to get out the word to gun owners, says its president, Gary Marbut.

I suspect there is a reason that the MSSA doesn’t release its membership numbers. They’re likely so small that releasing them would make clear just how irrelevant their opinions should be.  Despite their near-constant presence in the Montana media, the MSSA is an irrelevancy that should simply be ignored. How small is the MSSA?

They’re small enough that Gary Marbut is simultaneously their President, Treasurer, and apparently color blind web developer. They apparently haven’t registered to lobby the legislature. In total, their organization has a couple of thousand dollars, showing how little impact it really has, as well as how little support it really has from the sportsmen and women of Montana.

Since 1998, they’ve had exactly two contributions in excess of $200. When? In 2006, when Leo Giacometto and and associate at GAGE International each gave $750, in the midst of Conrad Burns’s tough re-election campaign. (You know, the one he lost, only to get a job at GAGE afterward). The MSSA hardly acted as the champion of gun rights; instead they were just the middle man for some of the dirty money that Leo Giacometto kept throwing at Conrad Burns.

It’s pretty clear what the Montana Shooting Sports Association is: a one-man Republican front group that uses imaginary threats about the loss of gun rights to support Republican candidates. While it’s to Mike Dennison’s credit that he acknowledged in the article that the size of the organization could not be verified, it’s entirely unclear to me why Marbut and his faux organization gets any coverage at all.

Unfortunately, the ubiquitous coverage that Marbut receives gives the mistaken impression that he speaks for many Montanans. It turns out that he seems to really only speak for a few Washington lobbyists and members of the media. They might be easy to look up in the Rolodex when writing a story about gun rights, but Montana journalists would be much better served ignoring this unimportant partisan hack in the future.

“America needs a Congress that will act now to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and work to lower gas prices,” said Rehberg, a member of the House Appropriations Committee. “Speaker Pelosi closed up shop, left town, and is now on vacation signing autographs for her book, instead of displaying true leadership and helping to pass an energy plan.”

Because of this critical issue, Rehberg then spent a whole six hours in Washington on Wednesday, shooting amateurish videos and listening to a Republican kind of debate on energy. Montana’s media, no doubt frustrated by the lack of a legitimate gubernatorial campaign, jumped all over the story. The Great Falls Tribune gave Rehberg prominent coverage, quoting him as saying:

“If you were to go out and ask the general public in Montana today should Congress be on a five-week vacation or should they be in Congress trying to solve the energy crisis, they would tell you overwhelmingly that they want us in Washington solving this issue,” Rehberg said.

The Lee State Bureau gave Rehberg the opportunity to let us know that the energy issue demands attention now:

“Folks in Montana are suffering from a constant strain on their pocketbooks,” Rehberg said. “They’ve asked me to come back and tell those stories.”

Through a spokesman, Rehberg also said he’s disappointed that the Montana Democratic Party is politicizing the issue rather than looking for solutions.

“Denny isn’t interested in politics; like all Montanans, he wants results,” said Bridger Pierce, communications director for Rehberg. “He’s going to continue to roll up his sleeves and work to solve the problem.”

The Missoulian loved the story so much that it offered an editorial that was a barely reworded version of the original Rehberg press release, criticizing Congress for taking a vacation and commending Rehberg for giving up campaigning time…you know, in race against an opponent who isn’t raising money or campaigning.

All in all, it was a great week for Rehberg. He received a great deal of positive press, and was able to play to the base, claiming to be working on a pro-drilling energy solution. Everyone wins, right?

Well, everyone except for the battered corpse of the media’s credibility and the people that Rehberg promised to help. It turns out that Representative Rehberg went to do the “people’s work” for exactly one day. Let’s ignore the fact that news stories about the Republican faux Congress ignored the past recess practices of these members, their trips, and their justifications for leaving. Let’s ignore the fact that the Montana media left out any context about the nature of these show debates.

How could they not notice that Rehberg wasn’t even there the rest of the week?

He certainly wasn’t there on Thursday, when 17 Republicans came to play debate. So, despite claiming that Congress should not be on vacation, that suffering Montanans were asking Rehberg to come tell their stories, and that real leadership would mean staying in Congress, Rehberg went on vacation, after speaking for 14 minutes.

The suffering on Montanans who want their voice heard? Worth less than a TV sitcom’s worth of time for Representative Rehberg.

That’s the kind of leadership that Representative Rehberg believes in—and the Montana media let him get away with it. Where is the follow-up story, asking what he did Thursday and Friday?

Ultimate responsibility for the superficiality of the political debate in this country rests on many heads, but until the media stops treating press-release driven drivel as front page news and letting politicians get away with stunts rather than substance, the quality of the debate—and more importantly, the solutions engendered from them—are unlikely to change.

I’m not even really trying to be an ass, here. I’m just amazed that there are people who so unquestioningly swallow this political tripe that’s purely designed to score political points in our sound bite culture. They accept it so unquestioningly that they repeat it, jeopardizing the credibility of their online pseudonyms.

Wouldn’t it be great if the right wing blogs did more than parrot Rush Limbaugh’s version of truth?

On another note, this is my favorite post from the Republican side of the Montana’s ‘sphere this week. Presented as “Support from Around Missoula” for the claim that Congress’s recess is causing the energy crisis, offer five videos of average citizens.

Just a thought, guys…you might be a bit more credible if four of them weren’t standing in front of the GOP booth at the fair, and the fifth didn’t indicate she was a friend of the poster, the President of the UM College Republicans.

Keep the stunts up. You guys are AWESOME at them.

… in Bozeman, Mont., the daily newspaper there said it has to cut six full-time and three part-time positions through layoffs amounting to 6.5% of its staff, according to a story in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

It’s very sad. This is definitely not what our regional papers need.

From Forbes:

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle has announced it will lay off six full-time and three part-time employees.

The newspaper, the fourth largest in Montana, currently employs 138 people. The layoffs equal about 6.5 percent of the newspaper’s staff and include three people from the newsroom.

…

In announcing the decision, the newspaper noted advertising comprises 75 percent of its operating revenue.

“We started the year strong, but the second quarter showed a dramatic downturn,” Pressly said. “With reduced consumer spending, businesses have cut back on advertising.”

…

The Chronicle’s parent company, Big Sky Publishing, also owns the Belgrade News, the Lone Peak Lookout in Big Sky, the West Yellowstone News and Montana Quarterly magazine.

I can only hope that these other publications are not affected in addition to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

Now, having been at college recently, I put too much importance on language, like a good college student. I thought of my own family’s use of the word “holler”. I can definitely trace it back to my grandmother, who likes to say things like “if anything’s wrong, just holler.” Now, my grandmother is not black, but she is from Oklahoma. And I’d be willing to bet that the current hip use of ‘Holler’ (or ‘holla”) stems from usage by black people who also left Oklahoma, only they migrated to Chicago and New York, not Baker Montana (and those white people who did go to Chicago and New York had an easy time mixing with the white people already there, thus dropping ‘holler’, ‘y’all’, and other elements of their vocab identity).

And fifty years later, the urban world rediscovers the word ‘holler’ through its use in black popular culture and decides this is a black word. And they have a debate with 60 comments about it, because they never bothered to look beyond the edges of the suburbs to notice a word that has been in continuous usage for god knows how long.

Short story is: Liberals on the coasts need to get out of their cities every once and a while (or just out of their universities, for a start) if they want to be taken seriously when they make a legitimate point.

I’m sure the article will be good, but the choice to put up this cartoon on the cover shows horribly poor decision making skills. The New Yorker has made me very sad today.

I am struck, however, that some plainly refuse to understand that the new media exists. Witness:

Republican presidential nominee John McCain seems to misunderstand that today’s statement to Good Morning America is tomorrow’s viral YouTube clip. A search of McCain’s name on the popular video service returns a list of…

…mocking homemade videos

A Gallup survey put Obama up 59 percent to 29 percent over his rival among registered Hispanic voters across the United States. The community will likely play a pivotal role in general election swing states like Colorado, New Mexico and Florida.

If you were listening to big media’s coverage of the Hispanic vote in relation to Obama during the primary season, you could have easily made the conclusion that America was on the brink of a massive race war between African Americans and Hispanics. For example, from The New York Times,

Mr. Obama confronts a history of often uneasy and competitive relations between blacks and Hispanics, particularly as they have jockeyed for influence in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York.

“Many Latinos are not ready for a person of color,” Natasha Carrillo, 20, of East Los Angeles, said. “I don’t think many Latinos will vote for Obama…”

The New York Times was obviously not the only news outlet to beat the drum of racial tension, not by a long shot. It really makes one consider how reliable big media’s analysis (if you can call it that) is.

Then the piece argues that the attacks had an impact on three races.

Get that? In five paragraphs, the piece argues that the mailers worked, voters will ignore them, and that they should backfire. Once my head stopped spinning, I thought a bit more about the piece, and realized that the main issue is not an incomprehensible, well-meaning editorial. It’s about journalistic responsibility. While the piece that ran earlier this week about the questionable nature of the sleazy organizations that ran these ads was great, where was this story in the days before the election? Where was the indignant editorial condemning the mailers before the election? The one that would have given voters a chance to understand the nature of these dirty tricks?

Yesterday, the Missoulian ran one of its most frequent editorials, the defense of the critical role of the press in democracy piece. It’s a valid point, but not if the press only acts as a scold after the fact, rather than as a vital provider of information before voters act.