Montana Senate Race: Who Hates Wolves More?

Does Sen. Jon Tester's disdain for wolves also extend to t-shirts that become Internet memes?<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Three_Wolf_Moon.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>

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Next fall’s Montana Senate race is shaping up to be the most expensive election in the state’s history. Karl Rove’s dark money outfit, Crossroads GPS, is already saturating the airwaves in the state (it’s also going after Elizabeth Warren). The race, pitting incumbent Democrat Jon Tester against longtime Rep. Denny Rehberg (R), could well decide which party controls the Senate. There’s a lot at stake—so naturally, the race has come down to the important question of which candidate hates the endangered western wolf more.

Eli Sanders files a dispatch from Montana and highlights this element of the race:

While in most states you won’t find a Democrat trying to out-hustle a Republican over who got an endangered animal like the Western wolf less federal protection, this, again, is Montana — where a lot of voters see wolves as livestock predators. So when Rehberg, who has a stuffed Canadian Black wolf in his office, suggested he’s the one responsible for the de-listing of American endangered wolves, Tester’s campaign pounced, reminding people that Rehberg’s bill actually didn’t go anywhere in Congress. “The record is clear as to who did what,” Tester told me. “It is absolutely, unequivocally clear. He could not get his bill out of committee. I got my bill signed by the president.”

Boom. Maybe noted coyote-killer Rick Perry is running for the wrong office.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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