Month: April 2019

by William Skink

Operation Grange
don’t ever think it strange
inertia is a strategy
someone knows their names

what Cann parents do?
networks get the order
power opens borders
she disappears–poof!

no composite sketches
will bring the perps to justice
no amount of resources
will bring the networks down

that little Portugal town?
a blip upon the earth
where evil does its work
but no one wants to know

so the market share, it grows
and money streams they flow
and no alleged “authority”
Cann bring Madeleine home

by William Skink

Missoula is place that likes to plan for big, visionary things, like zero waste, no plastic bags and cars that run on positive vibes.

Ok, that last one isn’t real, but the other lofty efforts are very real. I mean, the talking about these goals is real. Real words are used by real people. All the good intentions are there, and they are fabulous intentions.

But reality is a son-of-a-bitch in its relentless persistence.

The omission of words about pesky realities one would rather ignore can be a powerful tool. Take this article about how we need to be good stewards of the Clark Fork. The Clark Fork Coalition is expanding their work to other rivers and focussing in Missoula on addressing the Smurfit Stone site. Good things, good intentions.

The omission is what’s happening at the camps by the Reserve Street bridge. There is both an omission of words in the article and an absence of action during the recent Clark Fork clean-up, which happened on April 20th, but DID NOT happen at the camps.

With water levels rising, the trash the water dislodges will flow downstream. So will the fecal matter. Not talking about it and not doing anything to address it won’t magically make what’s happening there disappear.

I’ll give some reluctant kudos to Missoula’s perpetual candidate for local office for at least going back down to the camps and capturing some images of what’s being left behind by the inhabitants. I also appreciate seeing this comment from the Mayor’s Communication director, who appeared last month on KGVO:

One of the topics brought up by the many callers to the show on Friday was the homeless camp that exists in the area around and under the Reserve Street Bridge and the dangers of disease and poor sanitation that exist in the camp.

One caller asked specifically if the city is turning a blind eye to the area.

Merriam responded first by stating that the area is under several distinct jurisdictions including Missoula County, the State of Montana and even the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“We do not turn a blind eye to it,” said Merriam. “However, it is extremely labor intensive. At least once a year, sometimes twice, the city participates with a number of our city employees with the county and other jurisdictions and I believe, even the Forest Service in cleaning out that camp. We give people notice that we’re coming and that we’ll be dismantling structures and hauling away trash and they need to depart from here with your belongings.”

Merriam said once the job is done the homeless simply return.

Ginny Merriam is describing what the clean up efforts USED to be like when I was involved doing outreach for the Poverello Center. We did give notice weeks in advance that the clean-up was coming, and we did dismantle structures. From what I have heard, having talked to people still directly involved, dismantling structures is no longer happening.

I haven’t been involved in organizing the clean-up efforts for a few years now, but it never involved more than a handful of city staff. It was mostly volunteers involved, thanks in large part to the Clark Fork Coalition. When the Montana Department of Transportation begrudgingly funded the first effort, which was contracted out, it cost over $15,000 dollars and took over a week to accomplish.

Merriam is correct about the different jurisdictions being an issue. That is the main factor driving the inaction. A lack of interest from the Sheriff’s Department is another, from what I hear.

At some point something will happen to force more to be done to address these camps. At the very least, the visibility of the camps will fuel skepticism that any headway is being made to address homeless.

by William Skink

The video below is my creative interpretation of the Mueller Report.

by William Skink

If the average citizen was asked what they thought was representative of the glory of the American experiment, what do you think the average citizen would say? Probably something about our national aspiration to things like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or some other lofty principle enshrined in our founding documents.

Well, those at the top of the intelligence community are not your average citizens, and therefore will have slightly different notions about what constitutes the glory of the American experiment. Take recent comments NOT getting a lot of coverage in mainstream media by Mike Pompeo. On April 15th, at West Point, this is what Pompeo had to say:

What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s — it was like — we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.

Ladies and gentlemen, one of the luminaries of your glorious intelligence community.

Chronic liars, even the professional ones, find it difficult to manage and compartmentalize all the lies they spin. In a recent New York Times article the CIA director, Bloody Gina, let slip a serious incident of deceit aimed at President Trump regarding the alleged nerve-agent attack against the Skripals in Salisbury. Moon of Alabama was one of the first to catch and understand the implication.

First, here is the money quote from the NTY:

During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the president that the “strong option” was to expel 60 diplomats.

To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the only victims of Russia’s attack.

Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.

Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option.

The problem? No sick children and no dead ducks ever existed. But that’s not a problem for a professional liar who exists above the law. Remember, destroying evidence of a crime is also a crime, and Bloody Gina is directly responsible for allowing evidence of CIA torture to be destroyed, despite calls for Congress for the evidence to be preserved. Her defense that she was just following orders–a defense that didn’t work for the Nazis tried at Nuremberg–was good enough to allow her to keep climbing the career ladder.

Now, here is how MoA described what happened:

The Skripal case was widely covered and we followed it diligently (scroll down). There were no reports of any children affected by ‘Novichok’ nor were their any reports of dead ducks. In the official storyline the Skripals, before visiting a restaurant, fed bread to ducks at a pond in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury. They also gave duck-bread to three children to do the same. The children were examined and their blood was tested. No poison was found and none of them fell ill. No duck died. (The duck feeding episode also disproves the claim that the Skripals were poisoned by touching a door handle.)

If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump’s announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked.

Celebrating deceit and lying to the President should raise serious alarms for us citizens about the intelligence community, but neither Pompeo’s statement, nor Bloody Gina’s lies, have received widespread mainstream media coverage. When Trump criticized the intelligence community back in January of 2017, you better believe the MSM covered it. Also covered, Chuck Schumer’s not-so-veiled threat to Trump when he said this:

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

“So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”

Actually, what appears to be really dumb is expecting enthusiastic liars like Pompeo and Haspel (and Brennan and Clapper, for that matter) to be honest, even with the President of the United States of America. Another thing that would be really dumb is for us citizens to believe anything these anonymous intelligence sources disclose to us through corporate media.

Trump is not the only political disrupter normalizing a new level of brazen deceit. The gloves are coming off on multiple fronts, and the most disturbing ones are getting the least attention.

by William Skink

The McResisters who have empowered Trump and destroyed mainstream media credibility with Russiagate are not going to stop. No collusion? No problem, they are just shifting to obstruction now.  

One of the best Montana examples of this delusional desire to pursue impeachment and ensure Trump wins reelection is McResister Josh Manning. His latest screed that we “must complete our Constitutional duties” exemplifies the partisan insanity that has gripped the McResistance.

First, I think it’s cute Manning is referencing the Constitution. We’ve been in a Constitutional crisis since 2001, when Congress decided to defer Constitutional authority to wage war to the Executive Office. Where was Manning’s sense of Constitutional duty back then? Things got worse under Obama when he assumed the power to become judge, jury and executioner, ordering a US citizen to be killed with a drone strike (and later, his teenage son). Where was Manning’s sense of outrage against the President for flagrantly violating a US citizen’s Constitutional right to due process?

Maybe Manning was too busy back then taking orders in a war started by fake news?

Now that Russiagate has crashed and burned without Trump overreacting the way it was hoped he would, the McResistance is still clinging to the delusion that they can persuade enough of the public that Trump really is some dangerous Manchurian aberration installed by the Kremlin instead of what I think he is, which is the culmination of a deep corruption that’s been rotting all our institutions for decades.

Here is Manning doing his best to rally the troops:

On April 18, 2019, the US Department of Justice released a heavily redacted version of the long-anticipated “Mueller Report.” The two volume, 448-page report provides a decent overview of the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s outreach to Russian interests then its subsequent attempts to cover-up those links as the DOJ began its investigation. Trump apologists and GOP operatives are quick to note Mueller did not find any evidence to bring charges of conspiracy or obstruction of justice. But, as Mueller notes, the report does not “exonerate” the President and Mueller and his team were wary to make conclusive charges because the power of the presidency has become so expanded that Congress has better latitude to make these legal decisions.

So we now exist, yet again, at an impasse in American history like Franklin tried to push us past. Some–like me–are calling for immediate impeachment proceedings against the president, others want to have continued public Congressional hearings (okay, fine), and others say let’s move beyond Trump and concentrate on the 2020 election cycle (this assumes we have a functioning democracy in November 2020). In trying to square all of that, my struggle the past few days has been with how I, we, as Montanans can add to this national conversation.
…
We can debate and argue about what the best political path or strategy is. After she read the complete Mueller Report, Senator Elizabeth Warren said people need to put aside their divisions and “do their constitutional duty.” When I finished both volumes on Friday, reading it through the lens of having watched Russia topple Western democracies, I took a long breath and had the same reaction as Senator Warren. We do not have much time before the cement of Trump’s and Putin’s foundation sets in and we move further and further from Constitutional norms. Let me put it in “Gray’s Anatomy” terms: we know why patient is sick and dying so we do not need to run more tests–we need to operate.

We need to operate? Like, what, a surgical strike? Is that the kind of Constitutional duty Manning is calling for to protect the Constitution from enemies, both foreign and domestic?

The reality is we live in a surveillance state where our Constitutional rights–like the right of citizens “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”–is violated on a daily basis. And how about the Constitutional right to have a free press? Is the McResistance going to raise a critical voice regarding the persecution of Assange as the Trump regime attempts to enact revenge for Assange’s role (along with the New York Times, Washington Post and Guardian) in exposing the crimes and corruption of America’s war machine?

It’s fine and dandy for Democrats like McWarren and McManning to talk about Constitutional duties, but I hope they don’t expect to be taken seriously outside of their partisan echo chambers. In the non-partisan world most of us inhabit, the economic recovery never happened and everything is going up except wages. Out here we understand it wasn’t a Russian click farm that got Trump into office, it was the despicable, utterly corrupt creature known as Hillary Clinton.

Democrats never dealt with reality when they had the opportunity after the 2016 election. It was easier to revive a McCarthyite Cold War and risk nuclear annihilation than admit the Clinton clan was electoral poison and the real majority of Americans are the ones too disgusted with their deplorable options to even bother casting a vote.

The Constitution to the McResistance is just a handy document to reference when it’s politically expedient to do so, and a document easily ignored when it’s their team in power.