Commander Zinke’s booth at the 2014 Montana GOP convention

Remember on Thursday, when I promised you a surprise for Friday links? I’m sorry, champ, but it’s been real busy at the office. The surprise was that I wrote this examination of Commander Ryan Zinke’s (R-Mont.) Twitter account for the New York Times Magazine, which went up Friday night after links were tucked away. This news will come as no surprise if you follow me on Twitter, where I have been flogging the piece all weekend. But I thought I’d direct you good, potentially non-Twitter-using folks toward it, since you have done so much for me. Depending on what time of day you’re reading, there may or may not be an image at the top of this post. As of press time, Combat! blog’s WordPress server is neither accepting uploads to its image library nor allowing the placement of images in posts. You know what my favorite part of running a blog is? Abstruse technical problems. Anywhom, I’m always thrilled to be in the Times, and it was great to work with editor Jazmine Hughes who, like Willy, made the final draft of this piece much better than the first. How ’bout you read it, or merely click on it and create the impression that I am popular? In exchange, I will write free essays for you every weekday. Almost every weekday. I love you. Obey me.

What is this? I don’t know what that is.

I’ve never tried marijuana, but I sometimes wonder if it might ease the pain in my surgically repaired shoulder, or my probable Crohn’s disease, or the titanium plate in my hand that hurts every time it rains. Unfortunately, I’ll never get to find out what it’s like to smoke “grass,” because the Montana Supreme Court ruled last week that providers of medical marijuana can have no more than three paying patients. That effectively kills the dispensary as a viable business model in this state.

It’s too bad, because when I got here in 2009, Montana’s MMJ industry was booming. The people who talked about it most were electricians, who suddenly had more work than they could handle wiring up grow houses. Medical marijuana similarly produced jobs for HVAC technicians, farm and garden suppliers, dispensary employees, et cetera. Seeing that Montana had a growth industry for the first time in decades, the legislature moved quickly to stop it.

Republicans in the 2011 legislature passed a law forbidding providers from accepting money in exchange for cannabis. A district judge found that unconstitutional, but the Supremes have essentially upheld the provision, and a once vibrant industry has been shunted back into the black market. I think that was a mistake, and one that does not comport with the conservative movement’s stated policies on every other industry. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, in which I call on gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte to be cool. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links, including an exciting surprise.

Cafe.com pundit Carl Diggler appears as a hostage on Russian state television.

Who could have predicted that Marco Rubio would win Minnesota last night, or that Bernie Sanders would win Colorado? Answer: Carl “The Dig” Diggler, fictional pundit and Washington insider at Cafe.com. Somehow, Diggler’s satirical Super Tuesday predictions were more accurate than those of Nate Silver and virtually every other actual pundit, including but not limited to Bill Kristol. Over at the questionably reputable International Business Times, Brendan James has a recap and interview with Diggler creators Felix Biederman and Virgil Texas, who are themselves borderline ficitonal Twitter entities. It’s a tangled web, but I am pleased that it produces more accurate predictions than, say, Bill Goddamn Kristol. On the other hand, the accuracy of these predictions was contingent on Donald Trump probably becoming the Republican nominee for president, so you have to take the good with the bad.