More Library! More Virtue-Signaling! More Happy Smiles! – by Travis Mateer

When I saw this article about the library “testing the mood” regarding asking the public for more money I thought maybe it was a joke. There’s no way the same assholes who just panhandled multiple jurisdictions for over a million dollars for a “living roof” would ask for MORE money already, right?

Wrong.

Backers of the Missoula Public Library are testing the waters for a potential request to voters to boost funding for staff and services at the facility.

Some area residents received a digital survey from Lake Research in November that explores a number of potential scenarios, including a possible levy request for more funding.

Are they insane? Are they high? Because literally seven days ago this was the story from the same local media outlet:

Citing the heat produced by the Missoula Public Library’s roof and the need to address polluting stormwater runoff, members of the City Council on Wednesday approved a $149,000 contract to turn the rock roof into a green island.

To aid in the project, the city landed a $1 million grant from the Western Montana Conservation Commission’s green stormwater infrastructure program. The grant requires a 25% match, with the Library Foundation providing $70,000, and the Missoula Redevelopment Agency (MRA) and Missoula County each contributing roughly $75,000 over the next two fiscal years.

While the virtue-signalers who make budget decisions proclaimed dead homeless day day last night, the article that posted earlier in the day reported how LIVING homeless people could be part of this latest library panhandling effort. Are they really this tone deaf? Or maybe retarded?

Here’s more from the KPAX article on how “The Friends of the Library” and the “Library Foundation” are developing their panhandling propaganda to sell the public on this latest effort to squeeze more money from their tax-funded piggy bank:

“The Friends of the Library and the Library Foundation funded the survey, but they don’t have the authority to request a mill vote from the (county) commissioners,” said library director Slaven Lee. “The company that conducted the survey will present the results at the Library Board’s public meeting in January.”

Among other things, the survey tested various phrases and whether they’d make a potential voter more or less likely to support a funding boost.

Among them, the survey stated that “The library may not have the capacity to meet the public’s needs while meeting the needs of people who are experiencing homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health issues.”

With dead homeless people being memorialized and living homeless people being used by the library to leverage more money from the public, I decided City Council needed to hear from me last night about how INSANE they all appear to be, especially when you factor in the building and then destroying of a bridge in less than ten years for a combined cost of $1.6 million dollars.

That’s why I suggested to Council that they wear Joker makeup, take a pile of cash, then burn it, because that’s essentially what their insanity is doing with tax money at this point. You can watch the video here (for some reason I can’t embed videos anymore and I don’t feel like figuring out why)

I need to stop paying attention to this shit because it’s not going to change. There are too many well-intentioned road-pavers to hell to stop at this point, so just enjoy the clown show. It’s all a fucking grift anyway, so just accept it.

Thanks for reading (I guess).

Why Give Badges More Power When They Suck So Bad? – by Travis Mateer

Just a few months ago the FBI was making international headlines for its use of an animal shelter in Billings, Montana, to destroy meth. What could go wrong?

Fourteen staff members at a US animal shelter have been taken to hospital after the FBI used an incinerator at the facility to burn two pounds of seized methamphetamine.

Staff and some 75 cats and dogs were evacuated from the Yellowstone Valley Animal Shelter in Billings, Montana, when the building filled with smoke on Wednesday.

The incinerator is usually used by animal control officers to dispose of euthanised animals, but local authorities said it can also be used by law enforcement to burn seized narcotics.

After this amazing fuck-up residents of Billings should be a little weary about the new FBI field office opening up–the first in Montana since the Federal Bureau of Investigation closed its Butte office. Here’s what our Governor thinks the FBI will be helping with:

Gov. Greg Gianforte says having an office in Billings instead of Salt Lake will make a big difference in fighting crime.

“These resources are critical for murdered and missing indigenous children, for tracking the cartels, for getting fentanyl off the street. Having a law enforcement, FBI office here in Billings is going to help us make Montana safer,” he said.

To bolster the new Republican WAR ON DRUGS that Trump is fighting by blowing up Narco-boats, conservatives are lining up with law-and-order hardons to LARP for their favorite agency. My favorite local cop-boosting media outlet, KGVO, is taking the hint and printing hilarious TOUGH-COP content like this:

Whether or not you were ever on board for the “war on drugs”, one thing’s for sure: drug dealers know no boundaries and don’t care where they do business. All they care about is doing business.

But that ain’t happening here; not on the watch of Montana law enforcement.

Actually, KGVO, it IS happening here, so why print such easily refutable bullshit? Is it because our Attorney General, Austin Empty-Hat, is gonna be the BIG DOG for Republican AGs across the country?

In a statement, he said next year’s election cycle is significant, given that more than half of the nation’s attorney general seats are up for election. Montana’s AG seat is not up for election next year.

“I am honored to be selected by my colleagues to lead the Republican Attorneys General Association during the most critical year in our organization’s history. Next year, we’re facing 30 AG races which means we must build upon 2025’s record fundraising to ensure we have the necessary resources to defend incumbents and take advantage of opportunities to grow our majority,” stated Knudsen. “As Republican Attorneys General, we are both Freedom’s Frontline and America’s Last Line of Defense. To successfully answer that call, we’ll continue to work with the Trump Administration to preserve, promote, and protect America’s future while also keeping our communities safe from threats of liberalism and lawlessness.”

In lawless Missoula, where KGVO also regularly prints articles like this one about people stealing from businesses over and over and over again, the strategy to explain this will mirror the strategy of local officials when it comes to explaining tax increases–IT’S SOMEONE ELSE’S FAULT!

For the badges in Missoula, they primarily blame local judges for the revolving door of drug addicts committing crimes, but another option for local badges is to whine about not having enough technology toys to play with. Well, if enough dumbasses in this town vote, local cops will get an entire tech-trailer to play with. Isn’t that cool, Missoula?

The Missoula Police Department can use your help, and all it will take is for you to cast a vote.

The Missoula Police Department has been selected as one of five finalists nationwide for SUMURI’s 2025 “SUMURI Gives Back” program, and has the chance to win a brand-new, dual-boot PALADIN TALINO forensic workstation.

According to a press release from Officer Whitney Bennett, from the Public Information Office of the Missoula Police Department, Missoula is currently in second place with nine days left in the competition.

The forensic workstation is cutting-edge technology used to process child exploitation cases, investigate violent crimes, recover stolen data, and support complex digital investigations.

Sure, this will make our local cops SUPER cops, right? Too bad with all the tech toys and multiple agencies involved, it still took law enforcement OVER A WEEK to find that dude in Anaconda who fled the scene of the quadruple homicide in his underwear.

Maybe this tech-trailer will help the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office finally arrest someone in the brutal murder of 88 year-old Dephine Farmer, or maybe it will speed up releasing information to the public, like the name of dead body found on a hiking trail on November 14th that still hasn’t been publicly identified nearly a month later. Actually, I think that kind of stuff could probably be handled by regular, competent, investigative police work. Do we have THAT in Missoula?

Or, more likely, do we have the kind of cops who eagerly arrest people like ME for all the very serious criminal acts I’ve been involved in, like being too poor to fix a headlight, too angry to be in a relationship with a professional victim, and too invested in uncovering the dynamics that allow a “coroner” to remove someone from life support in a private hospital room without first notifying family.

It’s always interesting to see who gets rewarded for loyalty, and who gets targeted. One of the first cops on the scene when Sean Stevenson was allegedly assaulted by JUST Johnny Lee Perry inside the Poverello Center now writes the press releases for the Missoula Police Department while ignoring my substantive inquires about the suspicious death of my co-worker, Leah Hartley.

Isn’t that interesting?

To wrap this up, my analysis is that until we deal with the very real CIA tentacles that have slithered around this part of the country for decades, badges in Montana are just the cucks of intelligence, and this “intelligence” has been taking this country in a very bad direction for a very long time.

Thanks for reading!

Does The Public Know Its Bridge To Nowhere Is Going To Be Removed? – by Travis Mateer

When I started explaining to my readership in 2019 that they were getting a “bridge to nowhere”, that explanation came with a plea to local media to cover the increasing cost of this bridge, originally estimated by the Missoula Redevelopment Agency to be $500,000 in Tax Increment Financing.

That cost, which I had already heard was going up before the bridge was completed, ended up being (we were finally told) $800,000. And now they want to remove it?

Yep, and the image above makes it clear: the final draft of the master plan for the West Broadway Corridor proposes removing the bridge built less than a decade ago. And, like in 2019, I’m not sure a significant portion of the public even knows.

Today I went through the obnoxious process of calling in to make a public comment at the Climate, Conservation and Parks Committee, but when I got through at 10:12am, the person leading the meeting had already moved on to the agenda items. Did the meeting start early?

When I did finally get the stream of audio going through my phone, I heard that Missoula’s latest performative freak out over the dark cloud of artificial turf was the ONLY agenda item for the committee today. Really?

Since I was deprived of making my comment, I’ll clue any of the council hate-readers of this blog with my plan: DECLARE THIS BRIDGE WORKFORCE HOUSING!

It’s either that, or Missoula should be fully made aware that THIS is official municipal policy now:

One of my sources told me the line-item on this part of the MASTER plan is $800,000, or, for those keeping score, approximately the SAME AMOUNT it cost this city to built a bridge I warned them about building in the first place.

For context on what was supposed to be accomplished with this the building of this bridge, here’s some of my reporting from a different 2019 post:

Behan, I believe, is now a consultant who still attends MRA board meetings from time to time, and Mike Brady got his parachute job with the city for protecting our alcoholic Mayor, John Engen, when he was still alive and doing active damage to this town.

Can we save this bridge as workforce housing? No, I’m not seriously suggesting that. Instead, let’s make removal of this bridge contingent on removing EVERYONE at MRA responsible for supporting this bullshit at the time, because I can personally attest that I fucking told them so.

Thanks for reading!

The Grifter Who Tried Monetizing Johnny Lee Perry’s Death By Missoula County Sheriff Deputies – by Travis Mateer

The man who took this picture, Frank Paletta, is not the grifter this post is about, though his interest to talk to me did seem to vanish pretty quick after he told me about this picture in a text exchange yesterday.

The killing of Oscar Grant, along with the aftermath, helped set the stage for the “Black Live Matter” grift by showing parasites like Shaun King how much money can be made off the corpses of dead black men.

Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris filed a $25,000,000.00 wrongful death claim against BART on behalf of Grant’s family. BART settled with Grant’s daughter and mother for a total of $2,800,000.00 in 2011. It also settled with several of Grant’s friends who had sued for damages because of police brutality. A separate suit by Grant’s father did not result in a jury award, as it was decided that due to his imprisonment he was not sufficiently involved in Grant’s life.

The killing, and the protests against it, were an important precursor to the Black Lives Matter movement, which began in 2013. The biographical drama film Fruitvale Station (2013), written and directed by Ryan Coogler, portrays the last 24 hours of Grant’s life, his killing, and the immediate aftermath.

The various grifts of Shaun King’s “career” fill his Wikipedia page, like fundraising off the death of Tamir Rice without the family’s permission, raising money to climb mountains only to quit training after a few days, and purchasing a “family pet” for $40,000 dollars with donation money, only to return the purebred Mastiff because it was too “high energy”.

Here’s just a small portion of the claims and questions King has caused within the “social justice” community:

King has been accused of raising funds for causes that were never received by those he was fundraising for, including at Justice Together after King abruptly closed the organization. A former member of the organization who asked to have a donation returned said that King refused to refund her money. An investigation by Goldie Taylor of The Daily Beast detailed a variety of questionable financial practices, such as discrepancies in reported amounts raised the Haiti relief project as well as King’s personal income from short-lived crowdfunding venture HopeMob numbering almost 40% of the company’s total revenue. Activists on Twitter questioned if he took the $100,000 reward money for information that led to the arrest of the men who shot Jazmine Barnes. On September 12, 2019, Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson wrote a lengthy article raising multiple concerns in regards to King, especially related to fundraising.

King has denied all allegations of wrongdoing. On January 15, 2019, he tweeted that he was pursuing legal action against social justice activists on Twitter who questioned his previous fundraisers, and his attorneys later sent cease-and-desist letters. David Dennis Jr. wrote in NewsOne that the purpose of the cease-and-desist letters seemed to be “old-fashioned intimidation and forcible silencing”. King wrote an editorial explaining the purpose of taking legal action and addressed some specific critiques levied against him.

The religious grift is one of the best for a parasite like Shaun King, but it’s hard to know what religion to use. Early in his “career” King was a Christian man, but, to reposition his religious approach to being a scumbag, he became a Muslim so he could make claims about being a hostage negotiator helping to free hostages in the Middle East. I’m not kidding.

“There was a time when he did good work, calling attention to racial violence with a clarity and efficiency no one else could — but lately it appears that he has gone astray and perhaps, the fame, money or other things have infected his moral compass or clarity,” associate law professor T. Anansi Wilson said.

The most recent example came in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war. Judith and Natalie Raanan were visiting family in southern Israel when Hamas launched a surprise attack that killed 1,400 people; Hamas also took 200 hostages. The Ranaans were the first hostages released by Hamas since the attack, and have since been welcomed home by residents of their hometown in Evanston, Ill.

King claimed to have been part of a group that helped negotiate the Ranaans’ release. The family initially disputed this claim but later acknowledged King had been in contact with one family member.

Was Shaun King in contact with Johnny Lee Perry’s family around the time of the coroner’s inquest I covered? It would appear so, but I refuse to pay any money for this article behind a paywall, so I’m unclear what King’s “reporter”, Donny Rose, reported on in regards to the death of Johnny.

Thanks to Frank Patella, an artist who worked for Nike and other “blue chip” corporations, I at least know that Johnny was a friend or relative of Oscar Grant, and that the chance to make money of Johnny’s death is, more than likely, why a piece of shit grifter like Shaun King materialized to see what kind of dollars he could extract from grief.

On a somewhat related note, if you want to buy some art to support grifters, the gallery in Santa Monica where Frank showed some art has a nice piece for you, and it only costs $25,000 dollars!

While this is above my budget, I wonder if Missoula’s academic race-baiter, Tobin, is in the market for some virtue-signaling crap?

If you want to follow a grifter on X to see how an example of how a shameless POS “Muslim” is playing the outrage game, I’m sure Shaun King would appreciate a follow so you can get great insights like this:

Or, if you’re appreciative of what a REAL citizen journalist can do in a corrupt, grift-rich town like Missoula, there’s still space on my little gofundme page to help me reach my modest goal of $5,000, which is $35,000 dollars less than what Shaun King spent on a fucking dog he didn’t even keep.

Thanks for reading!

On Taking The Billion Dollar Train To Homeless No Where – by Travis Mateer

A friend sent me a video yesterday about California’s $24 billion dollar Homeless Industrial Complex scam and it’s probably the most maddening, disgusting 7 minutes I’ve seen in quite some time because it lays everything out I’ve been saying and writing for years about Missoula’s version of this bullshit, but the guy in the video admits despite all this exposure, there’s zero accountability. None.

If you want to understand WHY Montana will never hold people accountable for ripping off the tax payer, lying to the public, and getting away with it for YEARS despite measurable, quantifiable FAILURE, let me summarize the reason with one simple picture:

For six months I was legally banned from writing about United Way of Missoula County by the bathroom judge who just got himself more local media headlines for being such a good little progressive lapdog bitch when it comes virtue-signaling activism from the bench.

The ACLU of Montana argued on behalf of the plaintiff, “M.B.”, a nonbinary resident, in the case, which Missoula District Court Judge Shane Vanetta oversaw. The plaintiff was seeking an “x” marker for the sex identifier on their license, although the only options given were male and female.

The ACLU argued that if the plaintiff had selected male or female, they would be lying about their identity and be subject to punishment under the law.

The Montana Human Rights Commission, comprised of political appointees, had previously ruled that gender based discrimination is not protected by the Montana Human Rights Act (MHRA).

The ruling concluded that the commission erred, however, as the court centered its ruling around the MHRA and the state constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, focusing on the fact that a cisgender person can obtain a license without issue, but a nonbinary person cannot. In its ruling, the court decided that the decision by the Montana Human Rights Commission must be reversed.

The ruling orders that MVD must issue M.B. a license with a nonbinary sex designation and that the Montana Department of Justice is prohibited from denying driver’s licenses to applicants who indicate their legal sex on a driver’s license application.

While this oh-so-important issue is getting such careful judicial attention from the judge who doesn’t like private security keeping him safe in his chambers while fucking a citizen journalist’s first amendment protections, the Strohmaier Express is setting up to pair trains with homeless failure JUST LIKE CALIFORNIA DID! Isn’t that amazing?

Right now you would hard-pressed to find a politician in Montana who hasn’t been tickled by Dave’s train obsession, but, despite Republicans and Democrats holding hands like pigs twirling their little tails together before the slop hits the trough, there is one train skeptic trying to blow his little whistle of warning for anyone with the bandwidth to give a shit.

BSPRA’s ally in the state Legislature, Rep. Denise Baum, D-Billings, tried and failed to secure millions in funding for the early stages of route planning during the 2025 legislative session. U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Montana, who delivered a virtual keynote at BSPRA’s annual conference in September, is sponsoring a bill in Congress that would eliminate the need for matching investments from local and state governments for large-scale railroad projects. (Though most of the funding would come from the federal government, the early planning phases require a local investment BSPRA is currently struggling to acquire.) The bill has not progressed since Sheehy introduced it in late September.

The most vocal opponents to a new passenger rail route, including 40-year veteran of the freight rail industry and passenger-rail enthusiast Mark Meyer, peppered BSPRA’s Facebook page with enough dissent to prompt the agency to turn off comments.

“You have to tell people what the obstacles are, what’s going on. And Amtrak is in such sorry shape now, we really need to fix what we have, otherwise we’re going to lose it all,” Meyer told MTFP in a recent interview.

Mark Meyer is cute. Kinda reminds me of me all those years ago when I thought warning people about local corruption would mean a goddamn thing. Sure, MRA might be enacting a short-term PR retreat, but they still have MILLIONS of other people’s money to play with and, to keep control, they play DIRTY.

If that’s what it takes, so be it.

UPDATE:

I almost forgot to include the money shot of what Dave Strohmaier’s train resurrection dreams look like from the Montana Free Press article, so here it is:

Thanks for reading!