Month: November 2016

by William Skink

Some Missoulians held a rally Saturday morning calling for peace and unity. Some of the signs were donated by the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center. How nice. From the link:

McCloyd, a mother of three young children, watched again the following day as protests and spiteful social media arguments broke out, and she wondered what kind of country the United States might be as her children grow-up. Watching wasn’t enough, she said.

So she threw together the Missoula Peace Rally, marching with about 40 other people down Higgins Avenue on Saturday morning holding signs, waving flags and singing classic protest tunes.

“I’m in no way an activist,” McCloyd said with a laugh as she walked with her mother and daughter down Higgins. “This is way out of my comfort zone. But I wanted to come out with something peaceful because I want a peaceful world for my kids to live in.”

Of course you want a peaceful world for your kids. Guess what? So do moms in Yemen and Somalia and Honduras.

Where were these people for the last eight years? The Obama regime has significantly continued and expanded wars across the globe, making the world a much more violent, dangerous place.

The sad reality is these people weren’t paying attention because it was a smooth talking black man doing the imperial killing, and they didn’t feel directly threatened by coups in Honduras and Ukraine, mass-famine in Yemen, and the destruction of Libya and Syria.

Now that Trump has won, they feel threatened and they are rallying for peace and unity.

The irony here is Trump exploited the anti-war sentiment and again outflanked the Queen of Chaos by bashing the neoliberal/neocon interventionism that has literally taken this country to the brink of a military confrontation with Russia.

While it remains to be seen what Trump will actually do, I think the prospect of deflating NATO and warming relations with Russia is a net positive. An added benefit is the now galvanized opposition to Trump if he does try to do something insane, like start a war with Iran.

Obama’s foreign policy has been an unmitigated disaster. Terrorism has metastasized thanks to our “allies” in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and the sectarian wars we are enabling them to fight.

So go ahead and rally for peace, that’s fantastic. After eight years of Obama’s neoliberal interventionism, Trump may actually be positioned to do some good by reversing the violent trend toward WWIII.

by William Skink

There is a growing sense that the divide in this country is more rural/urban than it is Republican/Democrat. That makes sense, and may be one of the factors that helped Adam Hertz squeak by with another close electoral victory for House District 96.

I was happy to see Hertz win because I think Missoula needs him to be part of our representation in Helena next year. There isn’t much patience for Missoula at the State Capitol when the legislature is in session, and with the recent gun ordinance and refugee relocation efforts, not to mention big losses in statewide races for Democrats, Missoula will be even more of a legislative pariah.

Hertz’s presence will provide balance to offset headline-grabbing political opportunists like Rep. Ellie Hill Smith, who is already chomping at the bit to take on America’s electoral college system.  From the link:

A Missoula lawmaker on Friday said she will introduce a bill to the state Legislature that would see Montana join Maryland in giving the state’s electoral votes for president to the winner of the national popular vote.

The bill, by Rep. Ellie Hill Smith, D-Missoula, came in response to Tuesday’s presidential election, in which Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College yet lost the popular vote.

“The Electoral College is a thing of the past,” said Smith. “We now have our second president who the majority of the people of the U.S. didn’t elect. It’s not equal representation. It gives more power to the rural areas.”

Ah, there’s the rub: gives more power to the rural areas. We can’t have that, now can we, because those rubes just blew up America with their Trump bomb and deprived HRC of her rightful place in the White House. So instead of preparing to actually work on Montana problems, which is what I assume her constituents would like her to do, Rep. Smith is going to waste time trying to take down the electoral college.

Here’s more from the link:

Smith believes the states are already equally represented by their appointments to the U.S. Senate. Each state has two senators, regardless of its population. With equal representation already established, the presidential race should depend on the popular national vote.

“Rural areas are weighted more than urban areas in the Electoral College, and that’s outrageous,” said Smith. “I put this out there just today, and it already has close to 300 likes and has been shared 93 times on Facebook.”

When asked if she would make the same push had Trump won the popular vote but lost the election, Smith said she would. She believes the time has come to balance the presidential race and not give rural areas of the county more say than the nation’s population centers.

“The reason that it happened is because the white rural areas that elected Trump in the Rust Belt and elsewhere, their electoral vote is more heavily weighted,” Smith said. “People worry about equal representation, but we already have it in the U.S. Senate. I don’t buy it that there’s not already checks and balances for rural representation.”

Like many Democrats, Rep. Smith is willfully refusing to learn any lessons from Trump’s victory, instead claiming the scales are “weighted” to those simple country folk, so let’s change the rules.

When Rep. Smith says she would be promoting this gambit if Hillary had been elected, I call bullshit. The entire rationale of this effort is to take away the alleged disproportionate power rural voters have in the electoral college. If Hillary had won, that would have meant more of the urban voters had made the effort to vote for her, and the rationale that rural votes are unfairly weighted wouldn’t exist.

On Facebook, which provides those quantitative likes that apparently this State Representative is using to guide her legislative decisions, Adam Hertz has already indicated how he would vote on any bill introduced along these lines:

I look forward to voting against it and reiterating the incredible foresight our Forefathers had when they created the electoral college system.

At a time when our state and our country is facing serious problems, along with a level of divisiveness that is currently spilling into acts of violence and intimidation from both sides, this effort by Rep. Smith is nothing more than a headline-grabbing publicity stunt, just like the opportunism displayed in Rep. Smith’s failed attempt to exploit the murder of the German exchange student to attack Montana’s version of the Castle Doctrine.

It’s too bad those who can’t handle the outcome of Tuesday’s election want to exacerbate the divide between rural voters and urban voters by launching a pointless effort to change the rules after those rules delivered a shocking defeat to HRC.

Instead of doing that, how about getting to work to solve Montana’s problem? Or is that too much to ask?

by William Skink

As a privileged white male, there are things I’m not experiencing right now. I’m not afraid of my reproductive rights being taken away, and I’m not afraid of being deported. I’m not wondering if a new permissiveness to grope my body will go viral or if articles of my clothing can now be violently ripped from around my head with impunity.

While individual acts of violence should be strongly condemned and prosecuted, depicting every single person who voted for Trump as racist, sexist and Islamophobic is a mistake.

Yesterday I stood in a short line outside Best Buy to get the Nintendo Classic. To help pass the time, conversations meandered and eventually touched on politics. A woman who identified herself as Hispanic indicated she voted for Trump, and now that she is seeing stories of gay friends being harassed on Facebook, she expressed dismay that she would be associated with that kind of behavior.

What would the losing team think about this woman? That she is stupid and ignorant? That she has an abusive male spouse forcing her to vote Trump? Would they ridicule and mock her and blame her for the ugliness that seems to be rising to the surface?

The narrative forming right now explaining Trump’s victory is best summarized by this term: whitelash. The problem with this notion is exposed by the actual data of who voted, and who didn’t. The following lengthy excerpt is from Jeffrey St. Clair’s analysis at Counterpunch:

There’s no doubt Clinton lost the white vote. Lost it big: 58-27. She was even trounced by Trump with white women voters by a stunning 53 to 43% margin. Think about that for a moment. More than half of the white women who bothered to vote preferred a serial sexual predator to Hillary Clinton. (Hillary won the total women’s vote 54 to 42 percent. But that’s one percent less than the 55% Obama got in 2012!)

But did whites vote in such large margins for Trump because they feared blacks, Muslims and Hispanics? Some of them, surely. America is a racist country, has been and will be. But is it any more racist now than it was four years ago, when the Tea Party and what we now call the Alt Right feverishly tried to take down Barack Obama?

There’s no evidence to show that it is and plenty of data to suggest that it is not. For one thing, the voting age population is more diverse now than it was four years ago. This should have been a decisive advantage for Clinton, but it wasn’t. Why?

Let’s dig a little deeper into the numbers. Clinton lost the white vote by almost the exact same margin that Obama did to Romney in 2012. Holding that margin should have been a huge advantage for Clinton because, demographically speaking, the share of white voters is falling and the share of black and Hispanic voters is rising. How could she possibly lose given that dynamic?

The problem, and this should come as a shock to the Whitelash Theorists, is that Trump did 2% better with blacks than Romney did and Hillary performed 5% worse than Obama for a total spread of 7% less than the 2012 margins.

Even more startling, given Trump’s vile Mexican-bashing, is that Trump won a higher percent of Hispanic votes (29%) than Romney (27%) and Hillary won a much smaller share of Hispanic votes (65%) than Obama (71%) for a total decline of 8% from 2012.

Even so, Hillary should have won the election. Why? Because Trump got 1.5 million fewer votes than Romney. There was no great white surge.

The fatal problem is that Hillary got 5.4 million fewer votes than Obama, many of those black and Hispanic voters, and lost 6 states that Obama won twice: Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio. That’s pretty conclusive evidence that Hillary didn’t lose because of racism.

This data isn’t going to help those wishing to immediately direct the rage and confusion of Hillary supporters at racist white people. The protests that have immediately sprung up are being depicted by those on the right as a Soros-style color revolution. There’s no doubt Soros has helped finance color revolutions in other countries, but now the contention is a “purple revolution” is being direct at America.

This is what Trump means when he refers to “professional protesters” helping to fuel this civil unrest. Because Trump is saying it, the idea is instantly poison to anyone on the left, but the left should remember the seeds of the Occupy Wall Street movement did indeed originate from a Soros-funded petri-dish, which Reuters reported on back in 2011:

Anti-Wall Street protesters say the rich are getting richer while average Americans suffer, but the group that started it all may have benefited indirectly from the largesse of one of the world’s richest men.

There has been much speculation over who is financing the disparate protest, which has spread to cities across America and lasted nearly four weeks. One name that keeps coming up is investor George Soros, who in September debuted in the top 10 list of wealthiest Americans. Conservative critics contend the movement is a Trojan horse for a secret Soros agenda.

Soros and the protesters deny any connection. But Reuters did find indirect financial links between Soros and Adbusters, an anti-capitalist group in Canada which started the protests with an inventive marketing campaign aimed at sparking an Arab Spring type uprising against Wall Street. Moreover, Soros and the protesters share some ideological ground.

Both sides–Trump supporters and Hillary supporters–are being skillfully manipulated for maximum effect.

I doubt many protesters hitting the streets these last few nights are consciously aware of how wealth can seed and direct color revolutions–they are legitimately horrified at the prospects of a Trump presidency and face the threat of real violence from emboldened segments of America’s extreme-right fringe. That doesn’t mean the claim of professional protesters involved is without merit.

On the flip-side, most Trump supporters aren’t card-carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan, but that doesn’t mean the growth of the “alt-right” is a harmless, benign phenomenon. In today’s Missoulian there is an article about American Nazi Party literature showing up in Missoula.

I think what we are seeing (for those with eyes to see) is a classic divide and conquer strategy deployed by the plutocrats and their billionaire puppet masters.

If both sides allow themselves to be manipulated, then what we will have is a Soros-backed color revolution violently disrupting an American Fourth Reich. If that’s the narrative, both sides lose and the Plutocrats win.

by William Skink

This morning I woke up with a line of poetry in my head, so despite it being 3am, I had to work it out. The video will be below.

But first, the video features shots of the Clark Fork river. Thinking about protecting water, I wanted to highlight some things the Democratic leadership in Montana are doing (and not doing) to protect water.

First, what they’re not doing. In a letter to Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality, Missoula County Commissioners expressed their frustration. Here’s a bit of that frustration:

The commissioners told the EPA that the public process has been limited to a “few public meetings” and email updates that have not provided detailed information or results. They believe that they have been kept out of providing comments on work plans for the site investigation.

“The length of time that it has taken to get the investigation initiated, results released and further work conducted to clean up the site has been disappointing,” the letter continued. “Unfortunately, the process that has unfolded at the Smurfit site is substandard compared to what we were expecting after our experience with the Milltown process.”

Commissioners also hinted that the EPA is letting the corporations that ran the mill in the past and the current owners have too much control.

“We believe that West Rock and International Paper, along with M2Green, are exerting substantial control over work at the site, with little or no public review,” their letter states.

But freshly reelected Governor Bullock isn’t happy to just let his DEQ keep commissioners in the dark while colluding with industry. Nope, the Governor has also authorized sending state troopers to join the militarized police response to water protectors at Standing Rock:

North Dakota requested help from Montana under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, an agreement between all 50 states that requires approval by both the governor and the Montana Department of Emergency Services, according to Montana Attorney General’s Office spokesman John Barnes.

Last month, through that agreement, the state sent 10 Montana Highway Patrol troopers from across Montana to North Dakota to assist with protests, Barnes said.

Democratic leadership in Montana, folks. No wonder so many people are saying fuck ’em.

Now here’s the poem, Fog. Enjoy!

by William Skink

By the more sober light of morning our new reality is slowly sinking in. On Facebook the shock is shifting to anger and calls to action. It’s time to fight, I see people saying. But fight who? The angry white people who elected Trump? That will mean the oligarchy wins. Who needs to start a war with Russia when we can just get a civil war going instead?

On the Democratic side, I don’t see much capacity to acknowledge what the harsh reality of Trump’s win means. James Conner is one of the few bloggers who does seem to get it:

Democrats intent on making history by putting a woman in the White House nominated Hillary Clinton, her high negatives notwithstanding. She and they then ran an identity politics campaign that confirmed for many Americans that the Democratic Party considers the white working class deplorable bigots who are, and should be, second class Americans.

Once the backbone of the Democratic Party, the white working class, shunned, shamed, and deplored by Hillary Clinton and her political party, turned, in anger and despair, to Donald Trump, a strongman whose finger in the establishment’s face and promise to “Make America Great Again” resonated.

The results: President-elect Donald J. Trump, and a Congress controlled by Republicans.

Yep, the former backbone of the Democratic Party delivered the FUCK YOU Michael Moore recently and quite eloquently warned us about. So instead of the GOP crumbling, we are seeing an existential crisis for Democrats. How will they respond?

A positive response could be finding areas of common interest with the new GOP, like on trade. Donald Trump outflanked Democrats by coopting Bernie’s criticism of the disastrous trade deals, then used NAFTA to bash Hillary. That was one part of Trump’s successful strategy, and it’s something that any self-respecting Democrat who has looked at these terrible trade deals can agree with.

But are Democrats going to make any effort to acknowledge a common policy position, or are they going to throw tantrums and call every working stiff a bigoted, misogynistic, Islamophobe?

For a taste of that reaction, here is Don Pogreba throwing in the blogging towel because team Democrat got trounced:

While I would describe myself as still mostly being in a state of shock, I’m furious—at an electorate that refused to vote in its best interests, at a print media whose false equivalency and horrific coverage led to the election of candidate like a State Auditor who has no real understanding of the job nor a real desire to do it, at the people who tell themselves from awfully privileged perches that elections don’t matter.
…
It might be time for a little cleaning. It’s time to read books, go to the gym, plan trips to new and exciting places, pretend to work on my “novel,” and to step back from a system that seems, today, to be broken. I’m not sure a country that just elected a candidate they believed to be less fit for the office of President, a country that passed over the most qualified candidate in a hundred years, a country that elected a man who called for unity after running the most hateful, divisive candidate in a generation, is in a place where I feel like I can make real change here.

Sure, if only the ignorant rubes knew what was good for them, they would have voted for “the most qualified candidate in a hundred years”. Anyone who thinks that about Hillary Clinton, then goes on to lament our “post-fact” world, is part of the problem.

In addition to being a post-fact nation of deplorables, how about the fact we are also post-law in this country thanks to Democrats? Obama executed American citizens without due process and faced no penalty. The Clintons have flouted any semblance of following the law with their pay-to-play influence peddling foundation, and (so far) they face no penalty, legally speaking. Hillary Clinton had emails destroyed AFTER getting a subpoena, and she wasn’t indicted. There are even people in prison for doing far less than she did with regards to handling classified, yet for some reason HRC was able to break those laws and get away with it.

Democrats are correct to be scared about what Trump could do with the presidency. That was one of the points I often made when I criticized Democrats inability to hold their own politicians accountable. Obama going after whistleblowers now morphs into Trump going after journalists or that Muslim-looking guy that just looked at him funny. Obama killing a teenager with a drone strike (then later joking about killing his daughter’s would-be suitors at a press dinner) could morph into Trump ordering drone strikes on whatever or whomever he chooses.

Pete Talbot is also taking a break and didn’t offer much on the presidential race.  In his farewell post, titled We’ve gone mad, he had this to say:

I have little to say about the Presidential election. I’m numb. I did have a friend call me to tell me he is scared shitless that his pre-existing health condition will mean no more insurance once Congress and Trump torpedo Obamacare.

I’m glad Pete brought up Obamacare, because it’s currently imploding across the nation and is another big reason Trump got elected.

Yes, it has extended coverage to many previously uninsured people, and that is a good thing, but it’s not stopping the big insurers from imploding the ACA and financially pillaging those of us in the private market.

I’m feeling this one personally. I lost my insurance when I left my job, and for reasons I still can’t figure out, was unable to sign up for Medicaid coverage unless my whole family jumped from their plan. My wife and kids have been with BCBS, but the cost is going up $500 dollars next year to nearly $1,200 dollars a month with $6,000 dollar deductibles for EACH person. My parents plan–they are both healthy and in their early 60’s–is going up $800 bucks. Not only are these costs very difficult to absorb, there is the multiplier effect of less discretionary money to spend on other things, like maybe eating out every once in a while.

I don’t have any illusions that Donald Trump will fix any of this. But I’d be facing the same situation if Hillary had been elected, and unless the plutocrats running this grift-shop we call America want it fixed, then it’s going to keep doing what I suspect it was designed to do: further hollow out middle America.

I know my opinion means next to nothing to those still invested in providing legitimacy to this political system rotten to its core, but I have no immediate plans to shut-up and quit writing. That would feel too much like giving up, and I’m not quite ready to do that.

Stay tuned…