Month: September 2025

Two years ago, as I was driving across America doing research and buying up rare books, I shared a special conspiracy theory with every weed shop I visited. Was it the one about Elon’s plans to make tunnels under Texas which turned out to be true? No, it was about Nick Checota’s possible plans to leverage his Cannabis position after LiveNation gobbled up his LogJam like a tasty edible.

Thanks to friends in stoned places I got apprised recently of a curious move by Mr. President of the Montana Cannabis Coalition to get a big time lobbyist by the name of Mark Baker to represent the “MCC” interest (read: Checota’s) in Montana…and beyond?

Before I get to some context on Mark Baker let me note that Nick’s bio is just an empty box. When you click on Jace Dukart and Brandon Madland they have multiple sentences describing themselves, like adults. Any idea who the diva in this trio might be?

Now, here’s a little perspective on who Baker has represented recently in Helena:

The release of the full file this week revealed the lobbyist is Mark Baker.

Baker, if you don’t happen to recognize his name, is one of the Montana Capitol’s most prolific lobbyists. He was part of a team that lobbied the administration of Gov. Greg Gianforte and a legislative advisory commission on behalf of Charter Communications during a 2021 and 2022 process that resulted in Charter being awarded $110 million in broadband grants from Montana’s allocation of American Rescue Plan Act dollars. Disclosures on file with the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices indicate Baker is currently representing at least 29 separate clients before the Legislature, including private prison operator CoreCivic, Airbnb, Exxon Mobil, Charter and wireless carrier AT&T.

Before I posit two possible scenarios about Checota’s strengthening weed position, let me add a data point about Airbnb’s CEO getting a curious appointment from Trump last month:

U.S. President Donald Trump will appoint Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia to spearhead the new National Design Studio that will seek to make digital services at federal agencies more efficient, two officials familiar with the plan said.

Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to create the studio – a new body that one of the officials said appears to be a stripped-down successor to the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly headed by billionaire Elon Musk.

So, what could be going on here? Could it have something to do with the signals from the Trump administration regarding reclassifying cannabis products, with the latest signal coming form Yahoo Finance News just a day ago?

President Trump recently confirmed that his administration is considering reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug, and that shift could have a massive impact on the U.S. economy.

Currently, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I drug — alongside heroin, LSD and MDMA. These drugs are considered more dangerous and are defined as having no acceptable medical use.

The recent CNN coverage Checota got, plus the local fawning, is starting to make more sense to me now because what I think I’m looking at is Checota positioning himself to sell over-priced Cannabis products, like drinks and edibles, exclusively at LiveNation shows, or something along those lines. Also, a powerful lobbyist will come in handy when Checota’s Cannabis grows in Montana eventually compete with the rapacious energy needs of data centers.

This seems like a definite possibility, especially the move by Trump to reclassify weed-soma for the masses as the masses get restless over the realization we are in a long-con being carried out by professional con artists (read: everyone in power).

Thanks for reading!

Did you hear the story of the guy who keeps showing off his dong and buttocks while doing anti-social things like alleged burglary and alleged assault? If you track the crime headlines at KGVO, like I do, I’m sure you’ve seen the “story” of Jonathan Tifft, which goes something like this:

On August 26, 2025, a Missoula Police Department officer was dispatched to a business in the 1500 block of W. Broadway. It was reported that a person had entered the business, stolen from the tip jar, and exposed his genitals to an employee. The suspect was later identified as 34-year-old Jonathan Tifft.

The officer arrived on scene, and the complaining employee said Tifft had come into the store a few days prior to the evening in question and was acting strange. She explained that Tifft was removing pictures from the wall and bending over, exposing his bare buttocks. When she confronted Tifft, he opened his jacket, and she could see his genitalia. She also explained that a “day or two ago,” staff had to kick Tifft out of the store again.

On August 13, 2025, Tifft stole money from the tip jar. When this occurred, employees informed Tifft that he was no longer allowed in the store. The employee believed Tifft had left with approximately 10 dollars during the incident on the 26th, but did not know for sure how much had been taken during the previous incidents.

If you go to the KGVO link you will get five more chunks of content that, it says at the bottom, come from “sources that are publicly available”. What KGVO does NOT say is that it costs an interested citizen journalist a whopping FIVE BUCKS to get a copy, which I did yesterday while doing other investigative work.

The remainder of this post will be everything I got yesterday so that YOU, the public, can read for yourself how AMAZING our Homeless Industrial Complex + the criminal justice system has become under the leadership of a particular non-profit I’m legally forbidden from talking about until I discharge from the conditions of misdemeanor supervision, but that’s a story for another time!

Yep, for five bucks at the County Courthouse and about 15 minutes in front of computer I’ve provided more information than a paid reporter at KGVO. No wonder you’re reading Zoom Chron! Thank you, readers, your attention is really pissing off all the right people.

So stay tuned, LOTS more coming…

A Veteran-killing Sheriff’s Office up north, in Cascade County, got my attention after its Sheriff, Jesse Slaughter, explained how George Floyd turned him into Republican in 2021. The reason Sheriff Slaughter re-told his tale of political metamorphosis is because the County Attorney in Cascade County is ALSO a Republican now, though it doesn’t appear a dead black man in another state was the catalyst for THIS particular political transformation.

Before we get to the County Attorney’s statement, let’s skip ahead to Slaughter’s opportunity for a positive mention on the corpse of George Floyd:

Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter cheered the announcement on Thursday. The sheriff got national headlines when he ditched Democrats for the GOP in 2021, stating progressives had squandered their relationship with law enforcement in their response to the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis.

From Slaughter’s view, Great Falls, the state’s third-largest city, began voting more consistently Republican following the business restrictions and mask mandates that came with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hmmm, does this bring anything to mind?

While there’s no mention of George Floyd, the Cascade County Attorney definitely had funding cops on his mind, as reported by local media:

Racki broke the news on social media with a video denouncing the left’s embrace of the “Defund the Police” movement, which is considerably washed out of the current political lexicon but remains salient with Montana voters.

“For a long time now I’ve been feeling that way,” Racki said in a phone interview on Thursday.

The county prosecutor’s office is hardly, if ever, a political pulpit. Still, he said the move does realign him with the local community, which has trended further to the conservative side in recent election cycles.

“That was one of the reasons I did it,” Racki said. “Especially at the national level, the Democrat Party does not represent the values of Montana. And it wasn’t always that way, but it appears to be now.”

Here in Missoula, in 2018, Republican “king-makers” rallied behind Sheriff McDermott, who was still a Democrat at the time, because some bullshit about rancor being bad or something.

Isn’t that funny?

A group of high-profile Missoula Republicans on Thursday night hosted a re-election party for incumbent Missoula County Sheriff T.J. McDermott, a Democrat seeking his second term in office.

The event, which included some of the city’s top Republican king-makers, joined a handful of Democrats in promoting McDermott as the right candidate for the job, citing his experience and achievements in office.

But they also agreed on something else: The nation must move past the current rancor of public discourse and work more closely together in accepting differences of political opinion.

Ultimately T.J. McDermott’s transformation into a viable candidate for Municipal office was a failure, something I’d like to think I had a hand in delivering, which brings me to my final point, which is about poop.

Once upon a time I made marginal improvements by identifying problematic areas of Missoula where the “shelter-resistant” homeless population would literally make spaces uninhabitable, like the shit-filled alleyways where my former client, David Bishop, once lived before moving semi-permanently into the now-demolished Sleepy Inn.

Now I just document how some things never change.

There is no better image than this impressively large pile of literal shit in the alley behind Butterfly Herbs that encapsulates how I feel about BOTH political parties and the value of what what they claim to offer us, the beleaguered citizens of a rapidly devolving society.

Thanks for reading!