Month: April 2017

by William Skink

I don’t usually endorse political candidates, but when I do it’s because the candidate is Greg Strandberg.

I first noticed Greg Strandberg in the comment threads of Missoulian articles. Like walter12, any article was game for commentary. Here is someone with access to a computer and the ability to write complete sentences, I thought. The sky is the limit.

When the Missoulian shut down comments, I knew that wouldn’t phase Greg Strandberg. The few places that hadn’t banned him would surely become the recipients of his insight and wisdom. Now, many Missoula Current and Last Best News posts have one or two comments, and you damn well know one of ’em is from Greg Strandberg.

Commenting on other people’s content is not the only thing Greg Strandberg does well. At Big Sky Words one can clearly see Greg Strandberg knows how to work with people he doesn’t agree with.

Just last month, for example, Greg Strandberg stood his ground when legislation threatened to make his tobacco and marijuana more expensive. In the brilliantly titled post Fuck You, Mary, Greg Strandberg puts it all on the line to keep his vices affordable:

Mary Caferro is of course the dumb broad that’s foisting this cigarette nonsense on us.

Starting April 30, I have to pay more for the exact same thing.

This is typical Democratic politics.

What is Greg Strandberg? I’ll tell you, Greg Strandberg is not typical Democrat politics. For a few weeks Greg Strandberg was even a Republican, but sadly they wouldn’t have him either.

Greg Strandberg is going to be Greg Strandberg. If elected, Greg Strandberg will fill the shoes left behind by Harlan Wells, whom Greg Strandberg admires for saying no a lot while barely showing up for work. I have no doubt Greg Strandberg will show up. And, he will say things. He is not afraid to say things.

Take his position on the Mayor, for example. A lesser candidate would refrain from saying anything overtly offensive about the Mayor, but not Greg Strandberg. In another brilliantly titled post, Greg Strandberg makes it known he considers the Mayor of Missoula to be Fat, Drunk and Stupid.

This is the kind of boldness Missoula needs from its elected officials.

So, Missoula, get ready for Greg Strandberg’s campaign. He’ll be pounding the pavement soon, with signs and cards and the steely resolve to win so he can finally get a steady paycheck and good benefits.

And you can be a part of the change Greg Strandberg wants for himself. Help him out, Missoula, he obviously needs it.

by William Skink

Spring is blanketing the valley with new growth (by growth I mean green and colorful things that grow, not banks and hotels). Easter has come, and gone, and the days are getting longer. Which means…

It’s time for Missoula’s annual complain-about-homeless-people-downtown discussion.

This year’s discussion happened at the state of the downtown luncheon, held at the Public House. You can read about it at this corporate rag, or you can read about here, at Missoula Current.

Before I got burned out and had to walk away, I was very involved in this discussion. And I do think there have been improvements in some areas. But there is a part of this story that is not being told, and it’s a significant barrier to improving the behavior of a VERY SMALL group of trouble makers.

As a member of the Mayor’s Downtown Advisory Commission, I was involved in doing some outreach with retailers that sold products like Steel Reserve and Colt 45. The idea was to see if there was any willingness among these retailers to consider a voluntary removal of certain products from single sale. Not a ban of cheap booze, but a minimal, voluntary effort to slightly reduce access to the type of booze the fuels so much of the problems downtown.

There was some willingness among retailers, but Tim France was not one of them. And that was too bad, because as the owner of Wordens and chair of the Business Improvement District, his decision carries weight, and that was that.

The failure of that effort was a contributing factor in my decision to stop jeopardizing my personal safety for booze peddlers who refuse to acknowledge their contribution to the problem downtown.

So when I read things like this:

Several downtown business owners, including Five on Black owner Tom Snyder, also expressed frustration over aggressive scofflaws, saying their storefronts have been urinated on and some downtown visitors remain fearful when approached by intoxicated panhandlers.

I wonder why Tom Snyder doesn’t follow that urine upstream and ask Tim France why he continues selling nasty, gut-rot booze only people with alcohol problems consume.

My suggestion to Tom Snyder and other concerned business people downtown is this: support an ordinance that restricts the sale of the alcohol products everyone close to this issue knows is a significant part of the problem.

I don’t think there would be much support for that approach, so downtown businesses should just prepare themselves for another season of dealing with our community’s chronic inability to understand this problem, and act accordingly.

By JC

Missoula Downtown Association Director Linda McCarthy:

“…$850 million is being invested in downtown right now.”

Mayor John Engen:

“…homelessness is an almost unsolvable issue…”

by William Skink

Those of us still around writing posts have watched the media landscape change dramatically. The corporate takeover of the Missoula Independent is just the latest blow to an industry on the ropes and struggling for relevancy.

Corporate media is really its own worst enemy, and to provide an example of what I’m talking about, let’s take a look at Dan Brooks and his latest post.

Now, most people probably wouldn’t associate Brooks with corporate media, but give the guy credit: he’s been published in the New York Times. In that piece Brooks took an the artist Banksy, and in this post he’s mocking Alex Jones.

Personally, I could care less if Alex Jones is now claiming to be a performance artist for legal reasons. The more important story, imho, is how Alex Jones is used by corporate media, like the New York Times.

To get that perspective one must have the fortitude to explore non-establishment media, like the various sites slandered by this Washington Post hit piece.

One of those alleged “peddlers of Russian propaganda”, Consortium News, has a great post about the once credible New York Times and how it uses conspiracists like Alex Jones to ensure its narrative is the only one seriously considered by its oh-so-serious readers. From the link:

In the old days of journalism, we were taught that there were almost always two sides to a story, if not more sides than that. Indeed, part of the professional challenge of journalism was to sort out conflicting facts on a complicated topic. Often we found that the initial impression of a story was wrong once we understood the more nuanced reality.

Today, however, particularly on foreign policy issues, the major U.S. news outlets, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, apparently believe there is only one side to a story, the one espoused by the U.S. government or more generically the Establishment.

Yep, that’s what major U.S. news outlets do these days, and Alex Jones provides the ideal scapegoat to keep the American public consuming government/corporate propaganda. Here’s more:

A mocking article by the Times’ Jim Rutenberg on Monday displayed the Times’ rejection of any intellectual curiosity regarding the U.S. government’s claims that were cited by President Trump as justification for his April 6 missile strike against a Syrian military airbase. The attack killed several soldiers and nine civilians including four children, according to Syrian press reports.

Rutenberg traveled to Moscow with the clear intention of mocking the Russian news media for its “fake news” in contrast to The New York Times, which holds itself out as the world’s premier guardian of “the truth.” Rather than deal with the difficulty of assessing what happened in Khan Sheikhoun, which is controlled by Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate and where information therefore should be regarded as highly suspect, Rutenberg simply assessed that the conventional wisdom in the West must be correct.

To discredit any doubters, Rutenberg associated them with one of the wackier conspiracy theories of radio personality Alex Jones, another version of the Times’ recent troubling reliance on McCarthyistic logical fallacies, not only applying guilt by association but refuting reasonable skepticism by tying it to someone who in an entirely different context expressed unreasonable skepticism.

When it comes to impacting our daily lives, this Alex Jones story is significantly more important than whether or not Alex Jones believes the crap he peddles. The New York Times wants the American public to view any skepticism of its propaganda as being indistinguishable from the conspiratorial carnival barker known as Alex Jones.

Lines have been drawn, for years now, in this information war between corporate news and alternative news. I lost a lot of respect for the Indy after they jettisoned Ochenski’s column and wrote up this disingenuous assessment of Montana’s progressive blogosphere.

So I’m not going to mourn the selling out of the Missoula Independent. I think the sale to Lee Enterprises just makes official a process that has been ongoing for awhile now.

by William Skink

I recently put an old poem to new music and it’s got me thinking about the good old days of 2003-2007. I had just polished off my BA in creative writing at UM in 2003, so naturally I applied that higher learning to a kitchen job at Food for Thought because that’s how artists in Missoula roll, right?

During that time I worked with a lot of really great people. One guy who I talked geopolitics with (because he actually knew a few things) now runs a business on the hip-strip. Another guy got a stab at Top Chef and will soon be opening his own spot in Portland.

I worked with the Missoula Rabble photographer, an iron-woman triathlete, and many other talented people I’m sure are kicking ass and taking names.

The work, at the time, was far from glamorous. I started washing dishes and ended my tenure as a weekend breakfast omelet ninja responsible for delivering massive omelets to hungover college students as fast as possible. I was good, but also relieved when the job was over. The food industry is a difficult environment to sustain, as anyone grinding away within it can attest.

Now that nostalgia has taken hold, I go back to those years and think how much simpler the world was. George Bush was president, the economy had yet to collapse, and people knew where they stood with wars of occupation.

Taking a poem written back then and applying it to my limited musical abilities and video production skills has been fun.

So here it is, Putting Shoes On: