Month: September 2018

by William Skink

I’ve been thinking about death recently, and not just because I’ve been watching the American Horror Story take on our Trumpian horror show. And not because I’m reasonably certain my neighbor killed our family’s cat. And not because tomorrow, October 1st, marks a year since the worst mass shooting in American history, a shooting the “authorities” still don’t have a compelling motive for.

I’ve been thinking of death in less gruesome ways, like listening to a replay of On Being about Healing Our Fractured Civil Spaces on Abortion and seeing a post on FB about someone with terminal cancer being brave enough to live their end in a teachable way for others.

Locally, I’ve appreciated and participated in Missoula’s Day of the Dead celebration, later called Festival of the Dead, and now, apparently, rebranded as the Festival of Remembrance Procession after the procession of outrage erupted last year over accusations of cultural appropriation.

Will a name change be enough to appease the vocal minority clamoring for an end to this awful cultural transgression? I don’t know. What I do know is I would like a chance to help my kids process the grief over the death of our feline family member, and up until this year Day of the Dead has been that chance for us to remember all our dearly departed family members, some with more fur than others.

With the loss of the Indy still stinging, I hope another piece of Missoula doesn’t disappear.

by William Skink

It’s Thursday again, another Thursday without an Indy. I went to check the Missoulian and our worthless fish wrap of a newspaper has as breaking news a question: What happens to the Mueller probe if Rosenstein loses his job?

How can a question be breaking news, you ask? I don’t know, ask the new publisher of the Missoulian. Oh wait, that’s right, a day after hiring Paul McArthur, the Missoulian “reported” that Lee Enterprises was “changing course”.

What a shit show.

by William Skink

Last week every single Democrat in the Senate voted to further bloat the “defense” budget. Only that wild-haired progressive and a handful of Republicans voted against the obscene military largesse:

In 2018, the United States spent $623 billion on national defense – more than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the United Kingdom, and Japan spent on their militaries, combined. Last week, every Senate Democrat (with the arguable exception of Bernie Sanders) ostensibly decided that the Pentagon’s current budget wasn’t quite large enough.

On one level, this was perfectly understandable. In Mitch McConnell’s Senate, a heaping helping of Pentagon pork is the price Democrats must pay to keep basic public services funded; by voting for a $17 billion increase in defense spending, Democrats secured new appropriations for the departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services.

And yet, it’s still noteworthy that not a single one of the Democratic senators vying for ownership of the “progressive lane” in 2020 availed themselves of the opportunity for a protest vote.

Are Democrats making the cold calculation that their base doesn’t give a shit about war and death? Are Democrats confident that corporate media won’t expose the full extent of America’s enabling of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Yemen? Is there not an anti-war bone left in the Democratic Party?

There is one brave politician willing to speak honestly about US foreign policy, Tulsi Gabbard. I’ll have to go to Sputnik to show what happens when politicians step out of line of the official propaganda narrative. Here is how Sputnik reported on the Jake Tapper smear against Gabbard:

What followed was a debate between Gabbard and Tapper, who called Assad a ‘butcher’ and said that there was no democracy to speak of in Syria. Gabbard, who documented her conversations with ordinary Syrians during the fact-finding trip, said that she had heard something very different from what the mainstream media narrative is pushing.

“I’ll tell you what I heard from the Syrian people that I met with walking down the streets in Aleppo, in Damascus,” the Congresswoman said. “They expressed happiness and joy in seeing an American walking through their streets, but [asked] a question: Why is it that the United States, its allies and other countries are providing support and arms to terrorist groups like al-Nusra (al-Qaeda), Ahrar al-Sham, ISIS who are on the ground there raping, kidnapping, torturing and killing the Syrian people?”

Tulsi Gabbard is smeared by corporate media because she has the audacity to ask critical questions about who our tax dollars are supporting in places like Syria. While Gabbard is willing to put herself out there to be targeted by craven propagandists, her spineless colleagues remain silent as millions starve in Yemen.

by William Skink

I attended a panel discussion tonight, hosted by Partnership Health Center. The talk even had a title–What Safety Net?

There were five people on the panel: the crime prevention officer from Missoula’s police department, a woman who oversees social workers at Providence, the PACT guy from Western Montana Mental Health Center, Diane Sands, who represents Senate District 49, and someone from NAMI willing to share their own personal experience of dealing with mental health issues.

Several participants mentioned the goal of being “solution-oriented”. Maybe that came from the moderator, Susan Hay Patrick, Chief Executive Officer of United Way.

The most compelling commentary came from the book-ends of the panel, the first speaker from the police department and the last speaker who self-identified as suffering from chronic mental illness.

The crime prevention officer, Ethan Smith, has been with MPD for 9 years. While the increase in crisis calls over just the last 2 years is bad enough, it was the reality of how many officers have had people complete suicide with a firearm right in front of them that was the most disturbing.

The last speaker was compelling because he spoke from experience. He spoke of someone he met in a psychiatric hospital who was fixated on getting a pair of boots (it was Buffalo, NY, and winter). When asked if he had a plan to kill himself, the man said yes, he would drown himself in the river.

About a week later the man drowned himself in the river.

This final speaker speaking from experience admitted he didn’t have any solutions. That’s because, unlike Diane Sands, he wasn’t there to promote the hail mary ballot measure to save Medicaid known as I-185, the regressive tobacco tax.

When the forum shifted to comments and questions from the audience I couldn’t help myself. The last speaker had referenced a line of a poem that transformed his story of literal drowning into a metaphor, so I began by saying how accurate the metaphor of drowning felt, and I asked how we get that narrative beyond the room where those in attendance already know how fucked the system is.

I went on to point out that there are people who don’t benefit from that narrative getting out, like a Governor who wants to run for President and supporters of open space bonds. Then I expressed how worried I was that the survival of Medicaid is apparently hinging on this regressive tobacco tax that will disproportionately impact poor people.

After that I thanked the panel and shut up.

I felt compelled to mention Governor Bullock because right before the panel discussion I read this article from Missoula Current. The article is about how Missoula County is bracing for more cuts from the 2019 Legislature. Why? Because Bullock just told them that is what will happen if I-185 doesn’t pass:

In his speech to MACo, the governor mentioned a few priorities for the next legislative session, including apprentice programs, criminal justice reform, and stronger campaign finance laws.

He also wants to provide opportunities for voluntary preschool programs and college and post-secondary education affordability.

Most notable was the conversation around sustaining Medicaid. The governor endorsed passage of the I-185 initiative on November’s ballot, which would use a tobacco tax to increase revenue to preserve Montana’s expanded Medicaid program.

That measure, Bullock said, will affect the “health of our overall budget.”

“I’m not going to sugar coat it from the perspective that I-185 fails to pass, we’re going to be in for a tough session,” he said. “If you thought cuts in the last special session were difficult, I think you should brace, unfortunately, for even more.”

Yes, threatening more economic pain and cuts and confusion if I-185 doesn’t pass–which will lead to more hospitalizations and trauma and actual death–is definitely not sugar coating it.

But don’t be fooled, the sugar coating will come when this duplicitous politician pivots to other audiences, like those in Iowa, to market himself as some brilliant Democrat Governor who survived the state-wide electoral slaughter in a red state.

All that said, I’m voting for I-185. Knowing what I know, I can’t not vote for I-185.

But that won’t stop me from openly despising all the political players who have put an already inadequate mental health system into total crises.

by William Skink

I know I don’t write many critical posts about DJT, but there is a very good argument to be made that he is indeed a puppet of a foreign power.

Of course this argument can’t be made for one simple reason: that foreign power is Israel.

Israel’s pummeling of Syria yesterday, which resulted in the downing of a Russian plane, is a brazen escalation directly undermining the agreement Putin and the aspiring Turkish Sultan hammered out to deescalate the impending Syrian offensive against the last jihadist haven in Idlib.

Yes, jihadists, like the ones who attacked us on 9/11. The ones Trump and Netanyeehaw now want to save.

I continue to rely on Moon of Alabama for tracking these geopolitical events and the quality commentary that ensues. Here is b’s latest on Israel’s provocation.