Month: August 2021

by Travis Mateer

This week’s episode is an analysis of Missoula’s Mayoral forum, held on August 9th and put on by the City Club of Missoula.

Primary ballots will be mailed out soon for the September 14th primary. Stay tuned for more coverage.

by Travis Mateer

I have some new insights into the workings of Democratic politics in Missoula that some parents of the Missoula County Public School system might be interested in exploring.

Let’s begin with Erin Erickson, a lawyer and community organizer in Missoula who does LOTS of stuff, like run the community organization known as MISSOULA RISES. Erickson is so busy, apparently, that she hasn’t had the time to check off all the transparency boxes for the Facebook page, though that hasn’t stopped them from running political ads:

Let’s learn more about what kind of lawyer Erickson is from her office’s website:

Erin M. Erickson is a managing partner and shareholder at Bohyer, Erickson, Beaudette & Tranel P.C. She has been a member of Bohyer, Erickson, Beaudette & Tranel, P.C. since she began practicing in 2002. Erin focuses her practice on civil litigation, including construction defect and personal injury, and insurance disputes. Erin and her firm have developed an innovate approach to handling cases – they are resolution-oriented and are not driven by billable hours. The result is efficient resolution for the clients and decreased legal spend and cycle times for the insurance carriers. This has proven to be a highly successful model for Erin and the firm.

While this excerpt makes taking cases on contingency sound like some kind of amazing legal innovation, I’m more interested in the name “Tranel”, since Monica Tranel is one of the many Democrats chomping at the bit to run for Montana’s brand-spanking-new Congressional seat.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s more about Erickson:

Erin earned her B.A. from Gonzaga University and then graduated from University of Montana School of Law in 2002. While in law school, she gained experience as an intern with the US Attorney’s Office, then continued onto private practice with her current firm. Erin is admitted to practice in all Montana State and Federal Courts, as well as the Confederated Salish & Kootenai and Blackfeet Tribal Courts. She has experience practicing within the Montana Human Rights Bureau and the Department of Labor and Industry. She has also served on the Montana Medical Legal Panel to adjudicate medical malpractice claims.

Why the emphasis on the Montana Human Rights Bureau? Because it’s the agency that allowed Joshua Manning to right the wrong done by Run Wild Missoula when they discriminated against a hand-cyclist:

Montana Human Rights Bureau investigator found that the Missoula Marathon and its parent organization Run Wild Missoula discriminated against disabled athletes who wanted to travel the course using a hand cycle.

In findings submitted to the bureau last week, investigator Josh Manning sided with Joe Stone, a quadriplegic athlete who has worked with Run Wild Missoula since 2012 so hand-cycle racers can compete in the marathon without prohibitive restrictions.

Joshua Manning, for those who don’t know, is the son of Tracy Stone-Manning, a political career-climber who successfully leveraged her brush with environmentalist saboteurs back in the day for a shot at running the Bureau of Land Management under Biden.

Joshua Manning is definitely his mother’s son, using his “former” intelligence bonafides and corporate media connections to Russiagate true believers, like Malcolm Nance, to raise his profile among Mommy’s political players.

I’ll leave it there for now, but trust me when I say there’s MUCH more to discover about the political entanglements involved in pushing unpopular and unscientific political policies, like mask mandates, that I will now be investing some time and energy to uncovering.

Thanks for reading.

by Travis Mateer

I don’t have time for a proper post this morning, but I did want to put something up before today’s VIRTUAL mayoral forum, so consider this post an open thread.

One of the candidates, Greg Strandberg, has been writing up some great posts lately, like this one excoriating the local GOP after their endorsement of candidate Shawn Knopp.

Strandberg acknowledges he’s got little to no chance, and he had been banking on making a big splash with a well-rehearsed IN-PERSON performance, but days before the switch to virtual, Strandberg made the prescient prediction the format would change.

And he was right.

Enjoy the performance, Missoula, and remember what I’ve been crowing for months now: SUPPORT ABE! (Anyone But Engen).

by Travis Mateer

Last Tuesday I attended a Covid task force meeting about whether or not to mandate masks for kids in public schools during the upcoming school year. Since that meeting I’ve been thinking hard about what I want to say, what I want to do, and where I’ll be doing the saying and doing.

A new local blog–Missoula County Tyranny–has given me an opportunity to be a paid contributor that I’m seriously considering, but first I wanted to get the feedback of some professional non-profit virtue-signalers who have already identified this new local media outlet as being extremist:

I was intrigued by this anecdotal screenshot of extremism, so I asked these professional virtue signalers (who care more about a broken window in Kalispell than they do a dead black man in Missoula) if I would be considered an extremist by MHRN if I started contributing to this blog, but I didn’t get a response.

I think asking questions is important, even if one doesn’t get a response. But some questions are more important than others, like the ones being posed to school board officials about the actual risk school children face from Covid, and the effectiveness of wearing masks.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the public comments as I sat in that room last Tuesday, and I’ll admit to cringing when the first woman who spoke used the term “face diaper”, but over-all the people who commented in support of PARENTAL CHOICE were articulate, well-informed and openly sympathetic to those who thought differently and feared the impacts of unmasked children being children in a school setting.

Those who spoke in support of mask mandates were in the minority and their arguments were based on fear-driven strategies of emotional manipulation, like the woman who used her young daughter like a prop to repeat into the microphone what she had clearly been coached to say.

After this meeting, Missoula County Superintendent, Rob Watson, made the decision to shift all meetings back to a virtual Zoom format. Is this to keep us all safe?

Of course it isn’t. If policies like social distancing were something these school officials took seriously, the sign-in sheet for those of us making public comment wouldn’t have been placed less than a foot from those actively speaking to school officials.

Then why go virtual? Because dangerous things DO happen if people are allowed to organize in person, like meeting new allies and expanding one’s personal network of opposition to authoritarian overreach.

Something EVEN MORE dangerous happened after this meeting concluded and almost everyone else went home, and this final interaction I had is what I’d like readers to think about in the weeks and months to come.

One of the pro-mask-mandate commenters was a young man with long hair who described a possible scenario of kids dropping dead from the Delta variant. I was so incensed by his blatant fear-mongering that I blurted out BETA as he described his DELTA fears.

I’m not proud that I allowed this emotionally-charged subject to trigger my outburst, so when I saw this man speaking with someone after the meeting, I stuck around to chat.

And you know what? After both displaying some active listening skills, I was able to find common ground with this man regarding the negative community impacts of Tax Increment Financing and the mental health crisis. It turns out this guy has worked as a caseworker for a notoriously shitty mental health provider in Missoula AND he’s educated enough about TIF to understand its use lining the pockets of developers while exacerbating the affordable housing crisis.

It goes without saying that this interaction NEVER would have happened had this meeting been done via Zoom.

While this post is only touching on a few of the social aspects of public meetings returning to virtual formats, there is a whole world of legal ramifications that could be developing for public officials exploiting DELTA fears in order to put screens back between them and the public they are supposed to be accountable to.

Maybe that could be a topic for future posts at an “extremist” website that presumes we still have Constitutionally protected free speech rights to cover what our government officials are planning to impose on our children with the financial backing of our tax dollars.

So stay tuned…

by Travis Mateer

This morning, on my way to the studio, I noticed several police cars rushing to Reserve Street. I changed my trajectory to see what was going on, parking at the Pawn Shop on the Northwest side of the bridge.

I went under the bridge, where I know one of the campers, and when I emerged on the other side a female officer with a long gun commanded me to stop and identify myself, which I immediately did. I stood there with my arms up while she radioed in my name and I was only allowed to leave when it came back that I didn’t match the description of whoever they were looking for.

At this time I can’t say anything more because it could be relevant to whatever happened at the Reserve Street camps. Stay tuned for further updates if there is more I can share.

UPDATE: according to NBC Montana, police were responding to a report of shots fired.