Month: June 2016

by William Skink

When a German exchange student was gunned down in a garage in Missoula, State Rep Ellie Hill was the first politician out-of-the-gate to use the tragedy to try and repeal the Castle Doctrine. But instead of politics coming to the rescue, the criminal justice system did its thing, determining that the Castle Doctrine doesn’t allow one to set a lethal trap for garage-hopping teens. Kaarma is now in prison.

With Jon Tester’s pro-gun votes on Monday deflating the hopes of Democrats in the latest round of failed gun-control legislation, I’ve been looking for reactions from local Democrats to see if any dissent would pop up, and Rep. Hill didn’t disappoint with this comment on Facebook:

Dear Senator Jon Tester, I love you. Lots! But I do not care if my relatives have to undergo a background check when I give them my heirloom gun if it will save a few more LIVES. It is an inconvenience we here in Montana can all stomach to help solve this national crisis. I wish you would have stood with our President Barack Obama and with your fellow Senate Democrats in their valiant filibuster. I still support you but I am very disappointed and I really do NOT understand. Please do everything in your power to be a part of a solution: gun violence is killing 91 people and injuring 200 people, each and every day, in this country. In the wake of the biggest mass shooting in U.S. history – an act of hate and domestic terrorism perpetrated against my LGBTQ brothers and sisters in Orlando just last week – we in Montana have had ‪#‎ENOUGH‬
Love, Ellie (Rep. Hill, Missoula)

What’s not to understand? Tester is a powerful Senator and he wants to stay a powerful Senator, so he’s going to do what he thinks he needs to do to win his reelection. The key part of Hill’s statement is this: “I still support you…” Yes, even as Tester disingenuously explains his vote (one of the bills does allow transfers between family members, so Tester either doesn’t even know what the bill does or is once again being deceitful) he will still get support from Rep. Hill and other Democrats in Montana.

This is one of the core problems with Democrats. It seems no matter what their fellow Dems do, they will still give them support. Republicans don’t enjoy the same compliant constituency, which is one of the reasons the Tea Party has been relatively successful in forwarding their agenda in the political arena; they are more willing to sacrifice short-term electoral success to achieve their political vision. Republicans fear their base. Democrats take their base for granted, because they can.

Jon Tester’s vote on Monday wasn’t the only action he took against members of his party. This week Tester also signed off on a million-dollar attack against Florida’s Alan Grayson. The blog DownWithTyranny! had this to say about Tester:

Jon Tester, the disappointing senator from Montana and Schumer’s puppet chairman of the DSCC, had a busy Monday. He voted with the Republicans– as he often does– against the bill to pass meaningful background checks for gun purchases. That’s the HEAD of the DSCC. AND, he authorized a million dollar spend against Alan Grayson in the Florida Senate primary– a spend meant to help elect Wall Street whore Patrick Murphy. (I remember when Tester used to whime to me on the phone every day about how Chuck Schumer was working to defeat him in his first Senate race, on behalf of a Wall Street shill not even as bad as Murphy, John Morrison. Tester sold out within microseconds of winning his primary, morphing into Morrison and becoming Schumer’s lap dog, giving New York a third vote in the Senate.

Wow, what a corporate-shilling hypocrite. Should Tester be concerned that this will impact his reelection chances? Nope, he shouldn’t, because Democrats will just take it and vote accordingly when the time comes. That is if Democrats even know Tester is trying to destroy a fellow Democrat in Florida. So far, the two Democrat mouthpiece blogs have remained silent on Tester’s twin disappointments this week.

Jon Tester’s support of Patrick Murphy (who was once a Republican) is part of a larger strategic play for Florida.  This is how The Atlantic framed the political showdown last year:

The road to a Democratic majority in the Senate is a narrow one, and it runs through Florida. Marco Rubio is running for president, so he can’t run for reelection, freeing up his seat—and in a swing state like Florida, with the more Democratic-friendly electorate of a presidential cycle, there’s a good chance Democrats can win.

If they have the right candidate, of course.

That’s where Alan Grayson comes in. Democrats have had a rough run in Florida recently. In 2010, their candidate was walloped in a three-way Senate race that Rubio won—Governor Charlie Crist ran as an independent after losing the Republican primary; Democrat Kendrick Meek finished a distant third. That same year, Alex Sink lost a close race for governor to Rick Scott. In early 2014, Sink lost a special election for the seat of deceased Representative C. W. “Bill” Young. In fall 2014, Crist—by now a Democrat—lost the governor’s race to Scott, even though the incumbent was strongly disliked.

The remedy, state and national Democrats believe, is Patrick Murphy, a young two-term representative who reached office after defeating Representative Allen West—as fiery and controversial a Republican as Grayson is a Democrat—in 2012. Murphy is a notably moderate Democrat (he was previously a Republican), but he’s a polished candidate who showed he could win in a closely divided district. Party leaders marked him for great things. Early polls show him leading the top Republican candidates.

The path for Murphy was clear until Grayson announced he was running. Now the loud-mouthed progressive is in the crosshairs of Tester’s DSCC.

I won’t be voting for any politicians this election cycle. I am too disgusted by the whole stinking system to participate in the charade anymore.

Democrats had a chance after Obama was elected to actually do something. They had Congress and the White House and a crippled financial sector sheepishly going hat-in-hand to DC after blowing up the global economy. But instead of helping distressed Americans, Democrats chose to rescue the predatory wolves of Wall Street, and they continue protecting these bastards while ignoring the worsening economic situation in this country.

I would rather chew on broken glass than support a duplicitous political party that serves the oligarchs while deploying every deceitful trick in the political book to maintain its power.

by William Skink

Angry and confused. That is probably how many Montana Democrats are feeling this morning as they hear the news that their Senator, Democrat Jon Tester, voted against closing the gun show loophole:

Sen. Jon Tester broke ranks with fellow Democrats on Monday night in opposing a bill that would close the “gun show loophole.”

Tester opposed a Democratic proposal that would require every gun purchaser to undergo a background check, and to expand the background check database.

The Montana Democrat said he opposed the measure because it would have blocked family members and neighbors from buying and selling guns to one another without a background check. Tester favors closing the background check loophole while preserving the family member exemption, which is important in a state like Montana.

Jon Tester wants to be reelected, so why give his opponents any more ammunition than necessary? And we all know Democrats suck at holding their candidates accountable once they get elected. What are you going to do, gun-control Democrats, vote against Tester? Yeah right, and he knows it. So bray and gnash your teeth all you want, Tester doesn’t give a shit about all that noise because you will vote for him in 2018 anyway.

Here is the angering and confusing reality of what happened yesterday, Democrats Tanked Gun Control To Up Their Election Chances:

On Monday evening, Senate Democrats put party over principle in rejecting common-sense, reasonable gun control measures. After the mass murder at Orlando gay club Pulse, Sen. Chris Murphy and his colleagues staged a flashy talk-a-thon in which they demanded that votes be taken on legislation strengthening gun control laws. The Senate Republicans agreed to the Democrats’ demand. Democrats got what they asked for, then blew it.

Senate Republicans agreed to vote on four gun control proposals—two offered by Democrats and two offered by Republicans. The Democratic proposals included Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s bill linking a terrorism watch list to a gun sales ban. On the Republican side, Sen. John Cornyn also offered legislation that would link a terrorism watch list to a gun sales ban, but his version added due process protections for Americans who are put on the list. The other two proposals expanded the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, although the Republican version did not go as far as the Democratic version. For a brief moment it seemed as if the Senate would take some kind of action.

Then all four gun control proposals were voted down because of the Democrats.

Rather than agree to the incremental gun control measures Republicans proposed, the Democrats chose to pass no gun control legislation at all. At some point after loudly demanding legislation for more than a week, Senate Democrats decided it would be better for their reelection prospects that no gun control bills pass the Senate during the election season. Their decision was hypocritical, unprincipled, and pure politics.

You want to win elections, right Democrats? So shut up and take this betrayal like the taken-for-granted voters you are expected to be. That’s what is expected of environmentalists and the anti-war crowd, after all. Maybe they can give you gun-control advocates some pointers on how to process the anger and confusion so as to not negatively impact your ability to darken that bubble for Jon when the time comes.

And you will darken that bubble because you are Democrats and you have no where else to go.

by William Skink

What’s worse, using the Orlando shooting to try and exclude refugees from Montana or using the Orlando shooting to justify escalating air strikes in Syria, creating even more refugees and possibly a direct military confrontation with Russia?

The latter link is to a Consortium piece about the collective insanity that has taken hold at the State Department, former lair of the despicable warmonger, Hillary Clinton. These warmongering bastards from a department once tasked with diplomacy abroad have used something called “the dissent channel” to bash Obama for not using enough death and destruction to oust Assad and create another chaotic breeding ground for Islamic jihadists:

Some 51 State Department “diplomats” signed a memo distributed through the official “dissent channel,” seeking military strikes against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad whose forces have been leading the pushback against Islamist extremists who are seeking control of this important Mideast nation.

The fact that such a large contingent of State Department officials would openly advocate for an expanded aggressive war in line with the neoconservative agenda, which put Syria on a hit list some two decades ago, reveals how crazy the State Department has become.

The State Department now seems to be a combination of true-believing neocons along with their liberal-interventionist followers and some careerists who realize that the smart play is to behave toward the world as global proconsuls dictating solutions or seeking “regime change” rather than as diplomats engaging foreigners respectfully and seeking genuine compromise.

Even some State Department officials, whom I personally know and who are not neocons/liberal-hawks per se, act as if they have fully swallowed the Kool-Aid. They talk tough and behave arrogantly toward inhabitants of countries under their supervision. Foreigners are treated as mindless objects to be coerced or bribed.

These people are clearly not diplomats and should be fired immediately. But I suspect all they are doing is laying the groundwork for Hillary once she obtains residency at the White House.

When it comes to exploiting Orlando, Democrats and Republicans are both doing it. One policy area that finds political overlap is the push to expand the police state in the wake of the Orlando shooting.  To this end, while Hillary isn’t doing the xenophobic two-step like Trump, she is nonetheless more than ready to further shred the constitution and bestow even more power to the security state that can’t seem to stop even the unstable people they are surveilling for 10 months.  Here is part of a speech Hillary delivered less than 48 hours after the Orlando tragedy:

We already know we need more resources for this fight. The professionals who keep us safe would be the first to say we need better intelligence to discover and disrupt terrorist plots before they can be carried out. That’s why I’ve proposed an ‘intelligence surge’ to bolster our capabilities across the board, with appropriate safeguards here at home.

While partisans are either incapable of interpreting this, or unwilling to acknowledge how dangerous Hillary wielding her war cock will be, we luckily have other, less complicit stooges to help us understand what Hillary is really saying:

As with all things Hillary, one must carefully deconstruct the statement to unravel the distortions and empty rhetoric, and distill her actual proposal. The first part of her statement is instantly suspect as the US has already grossly inflated its intelligence budget. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the 2017 intelligence budget will reach nearly $70 billion, with $50 billion being spent on the National Intelligence Program (NIP). One would have to seriously question the logic in Clinton’s statement, namely the implied consensus about the need for more resources. How much more exactly will prevent incidents like the one in Orlando? Perhaps another $50 billion would do the trick?

The second fallacy embedded in the torrent of misinformation that is a Hillary Clinton speech excerpt is the specious argument that “better intelligence” would “discover and disrupt terrorist plots before they can be carried out.” This vacuous statement must be dismissed out of hand after one considers the fact that the alleged Orlando killer, Omar Mateen, was investigated, followed, and interviewed by the FBI multiple times (he was also introduced to FBI informants whose responsibility was likely to keep tabs on him).

So, according to Clinton the US should spend tens of billions more dollars to fund the agencies and programs that already have the ability to single out a potential terrorist, do all the leg work to establish contact with him, invest human resources into his case, and yet still be unable to stop his alleged actions. To put it in terms Hillary’s Wall Street patrons would understand: sounds like a bad investment strategy.

The third unmistakably wrongheaded statement (I only selected three sentences, so she’s 3 for 3) is the absolutely odious suggestion of an “intelligence surge” to improve the capabilities of the intelligence community. In fact, what Clinton is actually suggesting is a massive increase in contracts awarded to private intelligence firms and military contractors, though veiling it as a boost to the intelligence community. This fact is made clear by the renowned investigative journalist Tim Shorrock in his 2008 book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.

Over the weekend, the woman who should be indicting Hillary Clinton for multiple felonies relating to her email server was on tv to explain why the American public will be fed only the portions of the 911 calls in Orlando they want us to hear:

In the ongoing war of words between president Obama on one hand, who has repeatedly said that Orlando shooter Omar Mateen was “self-radicalized” and was not influenced by Islamic elements, and Donald Trump prominently on the other, where the Republican presidential candidate has repeatedly alleged that Mateen’s actions were provoked by “radicalized Islam” which has prompted Trump to renew his calls for a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants as well as profiling Muslims already in the US, it appears that the president is about to get some much needed help from none other than the Department of Justice, which will step into the debate, by releasing Mateen’s 911 transcripts however only after heavy edits which censor and remove all references to Islamic terrorism.

As RealClearPolitics writes, in an interview conducted earlier today with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Attorney General Loretta Lynch said that on Monday the FBI will release edited transcripts of the 911 calls made by the Orlando nightclub shooter to the police during his rampage. One minor matter: the transcripts will be heavily edited.

“What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this man’s pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda,” Lynch said.

“We are not going to hear him make his assertions of allegiance [to the Islamic State].”

What utter bullshit. So what’s really going on here? Could it be that what Mateen actually said about wanting the government to stop bombing his country (his dad was born in Afghanistan) is more an indication that this massacre is actually blowback from US foreign policy in Afghanistan? That’s what this piece asserts:

The FBI’s motivation to portray events in a way that supports U.S. foreign policy, and its history of portraying its actions in a way that has served to hype an ISIS threat should make journalists cautious about taking officials’ words at face value. Especially in the case of a 911 call, which is a public record in Florida, proper journalistic due diligence would be to consult the actual source of the claims being disseminated.

Instead, not a single journalist appears to have done this with Orlando killer Omar Mateen’s 911 call.

On Tuesday, CNN aired interviews of eyewitnesses to the shooting spree who described their harrowing encounters with the gunman inside the club. Patience Carter, who was inside a bathroom stall feet from the gunman when he called 911, said he told the dispatcher that “the reason why he was doing this is because he wants America to stop bombing his country.” (Mateen is a native of the United States, but he was presumably referring to Afghanistan, where both of his parents are from.) She said he then declared that “from now on he pledges his loyalty to ISIS.”

This demonstrates that his primary motive for his terror attack was retaliation for the U.S. aggression in Afghanistan, where nearly 100,000 people have been killed since the illegal U.S. invasion in 2001. His mention of ISIS seems merely adjunct to what he admits was his justification for the attack. His motivation precedes his ideological alignment with ISIS, not the other way around.

Here is the uncomfortable reality that most Americans will be reluctant to acknowledge. The enemies of this country and its founding principles—the people who most threaten our families and our community’s safety—are the Democrats and Republicans exploiting this tragedy to fulfill their political agendas, which really only differ in terms of rhetorical window dressing.

Some day in the not-distant-future it might be up to our military to intervene, but not abroad in some country ripped apart by America’s jihadist/Zionist pals. No, what might finally put a stop to the insanity is a military coup in these here United States of America to stop these psychopaths and their minions from perpetrating any more madness and destruction before it’s too late.

by William Skink

The role of being a father is changing, hopefully evolving a bit as men get more hands on with the nitty-gritty of dirty diapers and late-night cry sessions. From the link:

Several decades of encouraging equality have paved the way for the changing role of fathers. Studies of undergraduates have shown that men (and women) became more egalitarian from the 1970s through the 1990s.

“Since the 1970s, we’ve been raising our kids with the idea that women can do anything, including having any career they want,” Smiler says. Over the last 10 years, we’ve gotten used to seeing women as CEOs, secretary of state, and even heads of state. That shift has influenced men and their ideas about fatherhood.

“Many men have also begun to express a desire for greater connection to their fathers and, in turn, have sought to ‘do’ fatherhood differently for their kids,” he says. “They don’t want to be that emotionally distant dad whose conversations only last for three minutes.”

While a lot of the changes are good, economic stressors have not changed for the better, especially for the traditional role of dad as the main provider for the family.  Now, two-income households are the norm:

The two income household is now the common default for Americans. However, in many cases the two income household has arisen primarily for economic necessity. Many households today simply cannot get by on one income earner. Especially if a family has children, childcare is expensive and a good portion of any additional income is diverted into this expense. The decline of the middle class household would be more dramatic if it were not for the emergence of the dual income household. Given demographic trends, it appears that we have peaked in this category and many young Americans have no choice but to live in households with multiple streams of income. Many Americans learn the hard way that the two income household may actually be a trap.

For struggling dads in Bozeman, they have Batman enthusiast and former blogger, Patrick Duganz, to help them, as this article from earlier this year explains:

Hung above social worker Patrick Duganz’s desk in the Gallatin County Health Department is a quote from anthropologist Margaret Mead, to the effect of how teaching men to be good fathers represents “the supreme test of any civilization.”

By that standard, his job — as the department’s “dad liaison,” or, technically, “father engagement specialist” — is among the most important in town.

“We know we get the best outcomes if everybody is doing well in the family,” he said. “We help the parents so that the child succeeds.”

To that end, his job is all about working to support dads, especially new fathers or those stepping into an active caregiver role for the first time, helping provide them with the skills to be the sort of parent their kids deserve.

I know quite well that being a dad is the most challenging, most rewarding job a man can have. Dads in Bozeman are lucky to have a kick-ass dad like Patrick to help them out

To all the dads out there, enjoy the day and do your best because the world our kids will inherit is broken and they will need all the love and support we can provide them.

by William Skink

I was going to write two separate posts, one about an upcoming vote decades in the making with the Norther Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, and one about the Mayor’s new push to create a more comprehensive housing policy for affordable housing.

UDATED CLARIFICATION:

One point of clarification, which you may want to just change in the post, NREPA isn’t scheduled for an upcoming vote.

The news was that NREPA was introduced in the U.S. Senate last week, the first time in the 20 year history of the bill. It’s been introduced in the U.S. House each session of Congress going back 20 years, but never has been introduced in the Senate.

While these two issues are mostly not connected, Greg Strandberg put up a very interesting post, titled Shady Business Surrounding Young Montana Democrats that takes a look at how one politically connected couple took ethically dubious advantage of subsidized housing built to make housing more affordable for non-politically connected poor people.  Here is some background on the couple from the link:

We know that Gabe Furshong – who’s the deputy director of the Montana Wilderness Association, meaning he’s the #2 person there – is married to Lauren Caldwell.

Lauren Caldwell is the current campaign manager for Denise Juneau’s U.S. House bid.

Before that, Caldwell was the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (MDLCC) Director.

When Montana Democratic Party Executive Director Andrea Marcoccio was fired after the dismal 2014 election results, Caldwell took over as interim director of the Montana Democratic Party.

Prior to her work at MDLCC, Caldwell was an aide to Senator Max Baucus.

While politics is often incestuous, it’s interesting to see how relationships can help one understand policy positions. For example, in the first link about the coming NREPA vote, Furshong’s organization, the Montana Wilderness Association, is refusing to comment. But Steve Kelley did comment, clearly describing one impediment to this bill getting Congressional consideration:

“The main obstacle for years was Senator Max Baucus. Now he’s in China doing trade deals, so now we don’t have that to overcome.”

Further on in the article, the divide between environmentalists is described:

Natalie Dawson is director of the Wilderness Institute at the University of Montana.

“Environmentalists fall within their own spectrum of being environmentalists. They tend to fall in different places. Some people feel collaborative bills are a sellout, that they’re giving away too much of the pie. Other environmentalists feel like ‘if we don’t make compromises that nothing’s going to be done.”

Case in point – the Montana Wilderness Association.

It does not back NREPA.

MWA declined our invitation for a taped interview.

But in an emailed statement the group says it prefers locally developed, landscape-based wilderness proposals; projects such as the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act, the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Project and the Kootenai Forest Stakeholders Coalition.

So an organization with “wilderness” in its name doesn’t want to talk to MPR about a bill that would protect millions of acres of wilderness. That might seem strange if the people and their political connections weren’t known, but thanks to Strandberg’s piece, we can see the incestuousness for what it is: smarmy insider politics. No wonder the idea of “collaboration” has gotten such a bad reputation.

Gabe Furshong and Lauren Caldwell went further than just pimping themselves out to politicians and the timber industry. As Strandberg explains, the housing project they took advantage of wasn’t just subsidized, it was also drowning in debt until NMCDC went hat-in-hand to the Missoula City Council for a bailout:

Gabe and Lauren bought and owned 1400 Burns Street #15.

What everyone in Missoula knows, however, is that those Burns Street apartments/condos are taxpayer-subsidized housing provided through the North Missoula Community Development Corporation (NMCDC).

You might remember that back in 2012 the City of Missoula considered forgiving the $243,000 of the $400,000 taxpayer Title 1 funds loan that NMCDC was given to help build the 17 housing units after NMCDC began struggling with their $1.14 million in debt.

At the time, Gabe Furshong served as a resident board member of NMCDC and told the City Council that if NMCDC didn’t get loan forgiveness they could fail and Missoula wouldn’t get that loan money back anyways, so why not forgive it?

The whole intention of the Burns Street housing units was to “make housing permanently affordable.”

That is supposed to happen when Title 1 funds earmarked for projects benefiting low income folks are used to do just that.

That’s why I find it interesting that Gabe and Lauren actually bought and lived in a taxpayer-subsidized house until last year.

I find it even more interesting that they sold that house to Pam Walzer, who used to serve in Ward 2 for the Missoula City Council until she was defeated by Adam Hertz in 2011.

I find this interesting also. And unethical. But after watching local politics for years up close, this is what I have come to expect.

Now, with the Mayor trying to do more to solve the housing problem in Missoula, the only bright spot I see is the person the Mayor has tapped to head this effort–Eran Fowler Pehan, director of the Poverello Center:

“For the past decade or so, I’ve been talking about housing in our community – affordable housing, safe and decent housing, and housing for everyone,” Engen said. “We’ve talked about it and we’ve placed emphasis on the notion, but we’ve largely relied on our nonprofit partners in the community to figure it out.”

Engen said the current approach has led to the creation of smaller projects across the city – projects that have done little to meet the city’s growing need for safe and affordable housing. The process needs a cohesive vision and must move faster, he said.

“I’ve become increasingly frustrated that we don’t have a housing policy here in the city of Missoula,” Engen said. “Nor do we have much intentionality around the way we make public investments in housing. The way we get there is to have a team dedicated to creating a policy and executing that policy.”

As presented, Eran Fowler Pehan, executive director of the Poverello Center, would serve as director of the city’s new housing office. Engen lauded Pehan for working through the challenges of building the new homeless shelter.

Pehan, who will start this July, will establish the new housing office and bring several grant programs into the municipal operation. Currently, the city contracts with Missoula County to manager the grants.

Pehan would also take over the city’s 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness, Engen said.

Eran is the exact opposite of a shady politician. She didn’t use the homeless shelter as a stepping stone to launch a political career like the previous director did. No, she stepped in and saved the shelter when that previous director nearly destroyed the organization with her ineptitude, something I know from painful first-hand experience.

If politics wasn’t dominated by self-serving insiders taking full advantage of their connections, the world would be a much better place. The grossness of just one political couple’s shady behavior provides a little glimpse into how politically incestuous entitlement operates. From the Queen of Corruption Clinton on down, political insiders take what they can for themselves, and fuck everyone else.

While this can make one quite cynical, part of me still believes another world is possible.  So good luck Eran, those without shady political connections need a true advocate like you to advocate for them, not more self-serving, lip-service-giving politicians who too often act in direct opposition to their lofty rhetoric.