Month: November 2020

by William Skink

The Democratic apparatus in Montana got their asses handed to them last night. Maybe Monica Tranel will eek out a victory at the PSC, but beyond her race (which got a boost from the Missoulian’s endorsement/retraction of Jennifer Fielder) there isn’t much for Democrats in Montana to be happy about.

Democrats in this state have never quite rebounded after providing money laundering services to the Hillary Clinton campaign during the last presidential cycle. Montana was one of 33 states involved in the Victory Fund scam. From the link:

In August 2015, at the Democratic Party convention in Minneapolis, 33 democratic state parties made deals with the Hillary Clinton campaign and a joint fundraising entity called The Hillary Victory Fund. The deal allowed many of her core billionaire and inner circle individual donors to run the maximum amounts of money allowed through those state parties to the Hillary Victory Fund in New York and the DNC in Washington.

The idea was to increase how much one could personally donate to Hillary by taking advantage of the Supreme Court ruling 2014, McCutcheon v FEC, that knocked down a cap on aggregate limits as to how much a donor could give to a federal campaign in a year. It thus eliminated the ceiling on amounts spent by a single donor to a presidential candidate.

In other words, a single donor, by giving $10,000 a year to each signatory state could legally give an extra $330,000 a year for two years to the Hillary Victory Fund.  For each donor, this raised their individual legal cap on the Presidential campaign to $660,000 if given in both 2015 and 2016. And to one million, three hundred and 20 thousand dollars if an equal amount were also donated in their spouse’s name.

Democrats notoriously failed to do any honest reflection after losing to Trump in 2016. Instead they doubled down on identity politics, launched Russiagate, attempted impeachment, and used seemingly every method to depose Trump from office.

In Montana, these efforts have moved the electorate away from Democratic support, and last night highlighted that movement. It doesn’t help that Montana Democrats have been absolutely terrible at developing fresh talent in this state.

So now we have Governor Gianforte, Senator Daines, Congressman Rosendale, SoS Jacobsen, AG Knudsen and Auditor Downing.

I don’t expect Democrats to engage in any honest reflection about their massive failures in this state. It was much more important for them to spend the last four years in open insurrection against the elected president instead of articulating a positive alternative to Trump’s rule.

If Democrats ever want to win a major political office in Montana again, a lot is going to have to change for that to happen.

by William Skink

What will happen today?

In order to prepare for different scenarios, a tech firm with ties to Israeli intelligence has been running doomsday election simulations since 2016. For more on this creepy gaming out of election chaos, here’s Whitney Webb from her new site, Unlimited Hangout:

Cybereason has — with little fanfare — been promoting extreme election day scenarios since before the 2016 election. Cybereason’s first mention of these tactics appears in a September 2016 blog post written by the company’s CEO and former Israeli government contractor Lior Div — a former leader of offensive cyberattacks for the IDF’s elite Unit 8200 and a former development group leader at the controversial Israeli-American corporation Amdocs.

Div wrote that hackers may target U.S. elections by “breaking into the computers that operate traffic lighting systems and interfering with the ones around polling stations to create massive traffic jams, “hacking polling companies,” and “targeting live election coverage on cable or network television stations.” A follow-up post by Div from October 2016 added further meddling tactics such as “cut power to polling stations” and “mess with a voter’s mind.”div

Two years later, Cybereason held its first election meddling simulation, touting many of these same tactics, in Boston. The simulation focused on local and state responses to such attacks and saw Boston-based Cybereason invite Massachusetts state and local officials as well as Boston police officers and a former police commissioner to participate. “Twitter accounts spreading fake news,” “turning off a city’s closed-circuit cameras,” “hacking self-driving cars and navigation apps,” and “targeting a city’s 911 call center with a DDoS attack” were all used in the simulation, which saw Cybereason’s “ethical hackers” attempt to disrupt election day. Media coverage of the simulation at the time framed it as a necessary preparation for countering “Russian” threats to U.S. democracy. Like the more recent simulations, the mock election was canceled and voter confidence in the electoral process was devastated.

I haven’t had confidence in our electoral processes since 2000, when the Supreme Court picked our President for us.

But that won’t stop me from watching the spectacle.

To make the day extra fun, my in-laws are in town, so we’ll be watching the results with two people in their 80’s who love Trump and watch Tucker every night, and my dad, who supports Biden and watches Rachel every night.

Stay safe out there, don’t drink too much booze, and, whatever happens today, remember that you are an autonomous human being comprised of consciousness, a soul, and the free will to choose your course of action.

by William Skink

Tracking housing policy in Missoula is beginning to feel like being in the movie Groundhog’s Day. Am I going crazy, experiencing the same thing over and over again, or is there an actual need to keep STUDYING and STUDYING a problem that keeps getting WORSE and WORSE?

When I left my job at the Poverello Center in 2016 the director at the time, Eran Pehan, was also leaving her job. Later that year Mayor Engen announced why:

“I’ve become increasingly frustrated that we don’t have a housing policy here in the city of Missoula,” Engen said. “Nor do we have much intentionality around the way we make public investments in housing. The way we get there is to have a team dedicated to creating a policy and executing that policy.”

As presented, Eran Fowler Pehan, executive director of the Poverello Center, would serve as director of the city’s new housing office. Engen lauded Pehan for working through the challenges of building the new homeless shelter.

Pehan, who will start this July, will establish the new housing office and bring several grant programs into the municipal operation. Currently, the city contracts with Missoula County to manager the grants.

By the end of 2018, it was becoming clear some on city council were getting frustrated at a lack of progress, as evidenced by this article, titled Patience: Missoula’s long-sought housing policy nears public debut. From the link:

Nearly two years after its creation, the Housing Policy Steering Committee is nearing the end of its journey and will bring its recommendations to the Missoula City Council next spring.

Until then, the committee’s proposals will remain under wraps, raising the anticipation around what Missoula’s first-ever housing policy might look at, and how it will address what’s emerging as a stubborn national challenge – affordability.

After the working groups and steering committees and studies went through their various processes, a 95 page document was unveiled in May of last year:

Reducing the barriers to development and subsidizing construction of affordable housing – including the donation of city land and possible taxation through a bond or levy – emerged among the recommendations in the city of Missoula’s new housing policy.

Unveiled on Wednesday, the 95-page document offers a suite of recommendations intended to address the cost of housing and ensure that “a slow emergency doesn’t become a full-blown crisis.”

Now that a pandemic has created the term ZOOM TOWN, the inaccurately framed “slow emergency” has become a full-blown crisis.

With the full-blown crisis having arrived, one might assume the years of work that went into creating a 95 page foundational document for housing policy in Missoula would mean we could maybe hold off on doing any new studies, but NO.

For some goddamn reason that leaves me mystified and a bit enraged, I read a headline last Friday that had the audacity to tell me about how a REGULATORY STUDY seeks ways to streamline development, affordable housing in Missoula.

I guess nearly the entirety of Trump’s first term in office wasn’t enough time to adequately study housing regulations in Missoula, so they’ve been doing it again for the past six months:

After a roughly six-month study, Design Workshop in collaboration with the City of Missoula presented a series of recommendations this week designed to make housing more affordable in Missoula through a streamlined process.

“We’ve been able to discover things that I don’t think we would have done if we just said: ‘OK, now’s the time. Review your subdivision regulations and update them,’” said Laval Means, manager of Planning Services Manager. “Here we really had an opportunity to do that deeper dive and collect a lot of great insights through many different processes and evaluations. It’s going to really enrich how we can improve our processes.”

So, around the same time a global pandemic and subsequent shutdown got going, our enlightened city braintrust was embarking on a process of studying how to improve city processes that already had three years of previous processes invested because back then the Mayor was frustrated the city wasn’t being INTENTIONAL enough with its housing policy.

I really do find it dumbfounding that these studies and surveys just keep happening over and over again. Maybe that publicly funded communication plan Spyder’s consulting firm is putting together will help explain it all to simpleton’s like me.

by William Skink

If I had to reduce the two warring political campaigns for America’s Top President (2020 edition) down to two weird, probably innocuous data points, it would be Hunter Biden’s back tattoo and Jared Kushner’s PR guy.

Before getting to the PR guy, the picture above is allegedly a comparison between Hunter Biden’s back tattoo and the Finger Lake region of New York. There is a lot of online sleuthing going on right now over this by the channers.

Now, on to selling the presidency.

Trump’s son-in-law (the guy who kind of looks like a mix between the omen boy and Tom Riddle) hired Josh Raffel, from Blumhouse productions, a film company responsible for movies like THE PURGE movie franchise.

Did you know KEEP AMERICA GREAT was the tagline for THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR?

This article came out in 2017, which seems like a decade ago:

President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has hired a publicist practiced in the art of selling scary things to lead communications for his new White House office. Josh Raffel is joining the newly created White House Office of American Innovation after leading PR efforts at Blumhouse Productions, the plucky horror house that put out The Purge, Paranormal Activity and, most recently, Get Out, among other movies.

Before joining Blumhouse, Raffel worked for Manhattan-based Hiltzik Strategies, which repped Kushner’s family business. Trump’s strategic communications director Hope Hicks is also a former Hiltzik employee.

Halloween, blue moon, day of the dead, Monday, then election time.

Buckle up.