Month: November 2018

by William Skink

Do corporate media outlets like CNN report on news, or do they obsess over everything Trump? According to Larry King, his former employers, CNN, “stopped doing news a long time ago“. From the link:

“CNN stopped doing news a long time ago,” King said while being interviewed by another former CNN anchor, Rick Sanchez. “They do Trump. Fox is Trump TV and MSNBC is anti-Trump all the time.”

“You don’t see a story — there was vicious winds and storms in the Northeast the other day — not covered on any of the three cable networks, not covered,” King noted. “So when CNN started covering Trump — they were the first — they covered every speech he made and then they made Trump the story. So, Trump is the story in America.”

Why care what Larry King thinks? He’s old, probably senile. Maybe he’s already dead and RT is just spoofing his likeness? I dunno.

What I do know is going after the media is what Trump does. And anything Trump does is bad, per the resistance. This overly simplistic dynamic puts local media scold, Don Pogreba, in a difficult position.

When Don Pogreba was called out by actual journalists on Montana Public radio’s campaign beat, and his partisan blog referred to as not a credible source by professor Rob Saldin, a sorta mea culpa was triggered. Here’s Don acknowledging the limits of being a Twitter scold while also scapegoating his stable of jackasses for failures in being factual:

This past cycle, my frustration over what I perceived to be failures in their coverage crossed the line from pointed criticism to hectoring and nagging that only probably served to make any press who wandered by this site or my Twitter feed even less interested in what I had to say. I’m not sure that I can repair some of those relationships—and I’m not sure that reporters in the state will ever see the value of a blog covering political and government issues—but I do understand that tone matters. I’m still furious that Matt Rosendale’s connection to militia groups wasn’t covered and Pearl Jam’s concert poster was, but moving forward, my goal will be to make my case for coverage and hope for the best.
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We’ve also made mistakes in our pieces, and I want to put in place more stringent checks to make sure that what we write is backed by facts. As the site quickly expanded to include more voices than my own, I never really grasped my role other than as the tech guy behind the site who did the lion’s share of the writing. While our reporting and commentary is certainly partisan, I’ve always taken pride in the accuracy of the work here and there were a few lapses this cycle I regret.

Regarding the accuracy of MP’s reporting and commentary, I do appreciate the recent changes made to the solicitation for donations at MP. The original ask referred to their content as “journalism” which it clearly is not.

So this:

If you appreciate our efforts to hold Montana Republicans accountable and the independent journalism here at The Montana Post, please consider supporting our work with a small pledge.

Is now this:

If you appreciate an independent voice holding Montana politicians accountable and informing voters, and you can throw a few dollars a month our way, we\’d certainly appreciate it.

The problem with corporate media goes far beyond how local races are covered. The alarm over the dreaded immigrant caravan has seemingly evaporated now that the election is over, just like the outrage over Saudi Arabia’s brazen killing of Khoshoggi disappeared when whatever big bribes were made to the right people took effect.

Corporate media companies don’t actually care if a journalist is killed, as evidenced by the near total lack of outrage over another dead Saudi journalist. The killing of this journalist was apparently enabled by Twitter. From the link:

Another Saudi journalist was reported tortured and killed at the hands of Saudi authorities last week, but this time the Saudis may have actually had assistance from Twitter in uncovering the identity behind a controversial account which led to the detention of the journalist.

Arabic news source The New Khaleej was the first to report that Saudi journalist and writer Turki Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Jasser died after being tortured while in detention after his initial arrest last March. According to the report his arrest came after it was learned that he administered the Twitter account Kashkool — which was known for highlighting human rights violations and crimes committed by the royal family and government officials.

If we, as Americans, asked more questions of corporate media, like why this journalist’s murder isn’t as newsworthy as Khoshoggi’s murder, maybe we would get some isight into the mechanisms of manipulation and control employed by corporate media.

Unfortunately I don’t think Americans want to know the extent they are being manipulated by the media they consume. And that’s a much bigger problem than how local media covers local elections.

by William Skink

With the elections over, what agendas will emerge as priorities in Missoula? Snow is on the ground, which my kids are ecstatic about, but the homeless individuals unable to access shelter services due to substance abuse? Probably not so much. Will a wet shelter, or some other alternative to ER rooms and jail cells, finally get the focus and funding it deserves?

I know one priority that is going to emerge—in fact, was already being articulated before last night’s shooting in California—and it will become the next contentious step in Missoula’s attempt to impose its guaranteed-to-fail gun control agenda on Montana: red flag laws.

I will continue to express my opinion that political capital spent on Missoula’s gun control efforts have been a waste of time and resources, distracting Missoula’s political leadership from the more dire needs of their non-coastal-transplant constituents.

So, what are red flag laws? This is how Mother Jones describes these laws:

Red flag laws, sometimes called extreme risk protection order laws, allow a judge to issue an order that enables law enforcement to confiscate guns from individuals deemed a risk to themselves or others. Since the Parkland shooting, at least two dozen states have considered enacting similar laws in their states. In Vermont, a red flag law has already passed the both the Senate and House.

“We think this is a sensible approach to put power in the hands of family members who are concerned about [someone] but don’t have any tools in their hands,” says Kristin Brown, the co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

According to the Brady Campaign, 42 percent of mass shooters exhibited warning signs before committing their crimes. Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old responsible for the Stoneman Douglas shooting, was on law enforcement’s radar and the FBI had been alerted about his behavior.

Red flag laws are a fairly simple process. Depending on the state, family members or law enforcement can go to court and seek an order that would allow police to remove guns from the individual’s home and restrict their ability to purchase firearms. The person seeking the order must first fill out a form providing evidence of danger to others or self, then the court holds an expedited hearing. If a judge agrees that the individual is a threat, their guns will be removed for a temporary period that can last from a few weeks to a year.

The “fairly simple process” described here is still a process only a court can enact, so if there are already problems with the criminal justice system in a given community, like there are in Missoula and Montana, then I would imagine the courts would need more resources in order to properly oversee implementing red flag laws. Where are those resources going to come from in a state that just voted to erase health coverage for 100,000 Montanans?

Cost is just one problem advocates for gun control will need to address in order to make their case. Another problem with this approach to gun control is the potential chilling effect this could have for someone suffering from depression. It’s difficult enough to get people, especially men, to talk about their struggles with mental health. If those men are also gun owners, and they know coming forward could mean their guns will be taken from them, how many people are going to decide NOT to reach out for help?

Yet another issue is how this reporting system could be abused. There are lots of dysfunctional families out there, made worse by our divisive political environment, and I can see heated arguments turning into attempts by disgruntled family members to get someone’s guns taken away as revenge/retribution. This will just add more work to already over-burdened courts.

Then there’s the question of, if passed into law, will it work? The dead shooter in last night’s rampage had a mental health contact by law enforcement in April. The Parkland shooter similarily provided multiple opportunities for law enforcement to intervene. How did that work out?

I don’t want to see local efforts to address suicide get hijacked by the Missoula gun control clique.

I would love to see an all-hands-on-deck effort to save Medicaid expansion in Montana because failing to find a solution to this looming crisis will cause signifcant harm to tens if thousands of our friends and family.

by William Skink

The votes are in. Housing will get more expensive in Missoula, poor people across the state are screwed thanks to the failure of I-185 and Jon Tester gets to keep his job, which is accepting lots of lobbyist loot and taking care of poor bankers.

Now that Americans have had their opportunity to virtue signal on Facebook regarding voting, they will go back to ignoring things like never-ending wars in Afghanistan and the US-backed genocide in Yemen.

Oh, and we will get more investigations from the Democrat-controlled House. I heard it reported that Trump has faced zero accountability since being elected. I guess the nearly two years of the Russiagate investigation doesn’t count.

by William Skink

If I thought the effort by Missoula Rises to shut down Steve Bannon’s appearance in Missoula was going to be an effective response to the fascist ideas gaining popularity across the globe I’d support them.

But I don’t, so I won’t.

Shutting down an effective messenger of a scary ideology will not stop the ideology from spreading. It actually does the opposite by signaling to those on the fence that the counter arguments of opponents are weak and therefore avoided.

Those who are trying to combat, rhetorically, the rise of a national populism increasingly resembling fascism need to be better prepared than David Frum was a few nights ago during the Munk debates that had him in a one-on-one showdown with Bannon. The results were not good:

Well here’s a shocker: at the beginning of the debate, only 28% agreed with Steve Bannon that populism was the future. 72% agreed with @davidfrum. After: 57% agreed with Bannon. Given crowd reaction thru the night, that seems an impossible result. But there ya go. #munkdebate

The resistance continues to fail to provide an effective counter-narrative to this right-wing capturing of populism. The mechanisms of exclusion within the corporate Democratic party structure successfully suppressed the Sanders campaign, while the GOP gave in and let their Kraken loose.

Even now, there is a class/race argument happening, and the race warriors who blame racism for Hillary’s loss seem to retain their dominant positions of influence with the DNC.

This Intercept podcast is a good example of how the class argument keeps getting shutdown.

In support of the class argument, a new study provides new insight into the attitudes of the electorate two years ago. This insight includes explaining why this study’s approach got at sentiments other studies did not:

The authors of this new study — Thomas Ferguson, Benjamin Page, Jacob Rothschild, Arturo Chang, and Jie Chen — use a combination of figures from the American National Election Studies data set, along with aggregate data from congressional districts, to paint a far more complicated picture.

Trump eschewed traditional Republican orthodoxy, promising to protect Medicare and Social Security, while training his fire at the bipartisan consensus around free trade. Many voters conflate trade deals that have hollowed out the country’s manufacturing base and decades of stagnant wages with increased immigration, seeing the issues as inextricably linked. Trump spoke to this view, blaming immigrants and refugees for crime and terrorism, but also for economic hardship and national decline, a message that appeared to resonate with voters.

“Not only were several major economic factors important; our analyses make clear that the social and the economic were intertwined, both in Trump’s rhetoric and in the minds of many voters,” the study notes.

The study is careful not to claim that race and gender played no role in the election, and notes that Trump absolutely mobilized anger over identity, gender, religion, and national origin. But the effects were limited. Explicit gender and ethnic insults used by Trump appeared to help the real estate tycoon prevail largely in the primary election but may have harmed him among many swing voters in the general election.

Previous attempts to use ANES data to discern the connection between economic anxiety and Trump support have found little correlation.

Previous papers rely almost entirely on ANES’s short-term economic attitude questions, which the authors argue are “known to be error-ridden, subject to partisan and other biases.” What’s more, these questions only provide a limited range of fill-in-the-bubble answers that do not reflect the full range of sometimes conflicting views of voters.

The authors of the Institute for New Economic Thinking study incorporate open-ended responses to ANES questions, which allow voters to write out their own spontaneous responses to broad questions, rather than selecting a canned response.

The open-ended answers, they argue, show that social and economic factors were deeply connected for many voters, including crucial voters who swung from voting for Barack Obama to Trump, voters who went from supporting Obama to not voting, and voters who went from not voting in 2012 to backing Trump in 2016.

For us critics of the Corporate/Neoliberal DNC it’s easy to understand why race and gender are the preferred focuses over class. A party that pledges fealty to Wall Street doesn’t want to spook the donor class by mobilizing class consciousness against their benefactors.

Without an effective counter-narrative, all the resistance can do is mobilize outrage to shut things down. If that’s the main strategy then more fearful Americans will be pushed into supporting the fascism that could easily turn the political infrastructure of authoritarianism, constructed by Bush AND Obama, into a true, red white and blue version of Nazi Germany.

by William Skink

I dropped off my ballot today after work. The biggest potential impact on Montanans is what happens with I-185. I really can’t put into words what losing a half billion dollars in matching federal funds is going to do to this state. I don’t expect it to pass and what that will mean to so many, I don’t know.

Another important local vote, for me, was a vote against Marie Anderson for Justice Court judge. The criminal justice system in Missoula is bad enough without this kind of shit show to deal with.

I struggled with what to do for the House and Senate bubbles. For the Senate seat I was going to leave it blank, but a friend talked me into doing something, and that something was a vote for the loose-goosey last minute endorser, Rick Breckenridge. I was truly inspired by his inability to understand what words like “endorse” means and all the fun last minute fire works he provided in this hotly contested showdown between the Republican and Matt Rosendale.

For the House race, I again contemplated a blank disapproval of my two choices, but some texting from the Williams campaign, and a creeping sense of my own righteous assholery toward just saying no over the party’s past transgressions, pushed me toward voting for Williams.

To celebrate the completion of my civic duty to uphold democracy in America, here is a video of my Missoula Trump Poem for your enjoyment: