Over at Intelligent Discontent, Don Pogreba reports that GOP U.S. House hopeful Matt Rosendale — an erstwhile Maryland resident now living in Glendive, MT, a miserable, low, little town just west of the Dakota border — has hired a campaign operative with a colorful history that would not make all ethical people proud.
Kalispell Ward 1 city council candidate Sandy Carlson probably doesn’t need to put up her lawn signs. As the InterLake’s Tom Lotshaw reported a few days ago, she’s for most intents and purposes running unopposed:
In Ward 1, candidate Joseph Apple is running against Sandy Carlson. Apple tried to get his name off the ballot but cannot, and said he will decline the position if he is elected.
Carlson’s sign contains too many words, a common error. I strongly suspect her sign designer did not put a full sized proof on a lawn and drive past a few times to see how easily it could be read.
He’s 70 years old, basking in the Caribbean sunshine, and he’s no more returning to Montana to lose a third campaign for the U.S. Senate than he’s having his left testicle removed at high noon in the Capitol Rotunda in Helena on Monday. Like Marc Racicot and John Bohlinger, he’s indulging himself with a final strut in the gaslight, imagining he’s feeling the love one last time, and having fun playing games with reporters who should be spending their time on important stories. Steve Daines will file for the Senate, and Larry Williams will file back to his wicker chair under the palms, never, we hope, to be heard from again.
Money for food stamps (SNAP) could run out at the end of the month. So could money for the Women, Infants, and Children program. Neither program provides enough money to eat as well as the Boehner-Cruz cabal, but each helps people stay alive. SNAP, for example, pays approximately ten bits per meal.
Can you stay alive on less? On just a dollar a day?
Yes, at least for a while. It won’t be fun, it won’t be tasty, it will scandalize nutritionists, and disturb physicians, but it can be done. It’s called the noodles and oil diet, aka the Daines Diet. It’s not a balanced diet, and healthy only to the extent that surviving is better than starving (although in a sense you’ll be slowly starving), but it does provide your daily caloric requirements.
Adult men and women require (PDF) approximately 2,200 and 1,800 calories per day respectively. A standard package of ramen noodles contains 380 calories, and costs $2.24 at Walmart. A pound of Blue Bonnet margarine contains 2400 calories (~ 70 cents/oz) and costs $0.92 at the same health food emporium. Twelve cartons of ramen costs $26.88. Four pounds of margarine costs $3.68. Your monthly total is $30.56, or $1.02 per day, which rounds off to a dollar a day. That gets you 1,800 calories per day, enough for women, and enough for men if they slow down a bit and accept losing a pound or two a month. The noodles and oil provide the carbohydrates and fat, and the eater provides the protein by converting muscle mass to blubber.
Ideal? Of course not. A viable survival strategy? You betcha, at least for a month or two. A reason to vote only for Democrats? Damn right.
“It’s getting colder,” Chris Krager of Kalispell’s Samaritan House homeless shelter reminded us Friday:
Revised 6 October. Progressives who think that shutdown supporting House Republicans are fundamentally reasonable souls temporarily gripped by fever and throwing a temper tantrum, a fever that will break and a tantrum that will end, miss the chilling truth about the shutdown and the GOP. The Republicans are not crazy people behaving like children — they’re political extremists, zealots, behaving as revolutionaries. The shutdown and the impending debt default are the opening battles in a far right attempt to nullify the last two presidential elections and roll back progressive programs dating back not just to the New Deal, but to the days before the progressive income tax became law.
Kalispell State Senator Jon Sonju abruptly announced today that he’s not running for the U.S. House of Representatives. He cited the usual, and never to be taken lightly, family considerations, but I wonder whether he’s received word that Rep. “Shutdown” Steve Daines has decided to run for a second term in the House. Sonju’s candidacy was predicated on Daine’s vacating his House seat to run for the Senate.
Updated. Lt. Governor John Walsh announced this morning that he’s running for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senator to “…to tackle the national debt and defend those who don’t have a voice: Our seniors, our veterans, our children.” The full press release is below.
Walsh said nothing about the shutdown of the federal government or the impending disaster that will occur if the debt ceiling is not raised two weeks from now — but he should have said something. The shutdown and possible default are too important to go unremarked by a man who would be Senator. Update: he’s now on record on the shutdown. Details below.
David Leaser wants to be a U.S. Senator, but he didn’t want the job he took at Glacier Park International Airport. He did 22 years in the Navy, rising to the rank of chief petty officer with a speciality in air traffic control, a skilled position with considerable responsibility. You can read about him at Together We Served, where you can also read this:
The Associated Press reports that David Leaser, the air traffic control manager at Glacier Park International Airport, and 10-year resident of the Flathead, will seek the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2014. Rep. Steve Daines is expected to run for the Senate, and will announce when he can spare a moment from his war on food stamps and the Affordable Care Act, Leaser’s candidacy will provide Daines will fundraising advantages. Leaser might even be able to make Daines look moderate by comparison, an unpleasant thought.
At The Western Word, Jack Brown, who once worked for Conrad Burns, notes that “Tea Party members like Cruz and Daines are the reason many of us moderates have said, ‘See ya’ to the GOP.”
Progressives should be picketing Rep. Steve Daines’ offices in Billings, Helena, Missoula, and Great Falls, as long as the shutdown of the American government continues. Here are two posters (PDFs) you can download and print: Steve the Food Stamps Scrooge, and Shutdown Steve.
Instead of making every effort to keep government information online, Obama’s administration appears to be making every effort to shutdown, disable, or cripple government websites to drive home the point that the government must be shuttered because Congress failed to pass a continuing resolution.
Update, 1044 MDT. All NPS pages are on the server, but the NPS won’t let us visit them. Use Google cached pages (instructions below), and let the White House know this is mean-spirited and unnecessary.
Jim Mann at the Daily InterLake reported this morning that not only is Glacier National Park not letting people in because of the shutdown, it’s trying to deny access to its website: “People visiting Glacier’s website will be redirected to a national website notifying them of a shutdown, and all of Glacier’s social media will be suspended.”
There are ways of getting around that redirect.
Unless the redirect is inserted into all of the pages of Glacier’s website, we may be able to visit the website by avoiding the home page. Enter this search term in Google:
site:nps.gov/glac/
That will bring up a list of pages at Glacier’s website. Try the links. Some may work. Moreover, most of the pages are cached by Google and thus beyond the government’s control. You can reach the cached page by clicking on the little inverted red triangle.
If you have time, please let me know whether you found a workaround that was successful.
Most careers in professional sports end with a whimper, not a bang. Jump shots that once swished through the net bounce off the rim. Passes than once hit receivers with pinpoint precision are intercepted. Pitches that once produced strikeouts are pounded into the cheap seats. When the great ones stay too long, the memory of their final appearance is sad.
But not always.
Over at Ed Berry’s PolyMontana blog, Tim Baldwin has an interesting essay on the Liberty Amendments and the liberty movement. And GOP candidate for the U.S. House Corey Stapleton has some interesting comments on Baldwin’s essay. Baldwin, author of Freedom for a Change, has an independent streak that I suspect sometimes dismays his readers. Agree with him or not, progressives should not ignore him.
Fed up with Brian Schweitzer’s refusal to run for the U.S. Senate, disgusted by the dithering and dawdling of other Democrats thought worthy of the nomination, and worried that the only declared Democratic candidate is Dirk Adams, a man with a colorful banking history, a group of Democrats led by retired attorney Paul Van Tricht has formed a Draft Baucus committee to persuade the 71-year-old senator to seek one last term.
The committee’s organizational committee meets in Billings on Thursday, 3 October, at 1900 in the second floor study room of the public library in Billings, at 510 North 28th Street.
Our federal government may shut down at midnight Monday, or default on its debts 17 days later, because the GOP’s suicide caucus in the U.S. House — to which Montana’s blessing in the House, Rep. Steve Daines, belongs — seeks a gotterdammerung moment on health care.
This is not politics as usual, jaded commentaries from the usual mainstream media pundits notwithstanding. Along with last week’s despicable attack on food stamps, it’s part of a fanatical scheme to incinerate our social safety net in the belief that those suffering misfortune brought their woes upon themselves and should not be rewarded for their sloth and sin. As Sojourners President Jim Wallis, writing about SNAP (food stamps), put it last week:
When Brian Schweitzer decided not to run for the U.S. Senate, Steve Daines stepped into the frontrunner’s role, although he has yet to step into the ring (he will, probably next week). Daines doesn’t need a mistake free campaign to win, but he does need to avoid big mistakes that cause voters to lose confidence in him. That’s Politics 101.
Daines probably doesn’t see shutting down the federal government, or causing the federal government to default on its debts, as political or policy mistakes, let alone big mistakes, but I do — and I think a majority of Montana’s voters will, too.
Schweitzer, incidentally, headlines the Flathead Democrats’ Harvest Dinner on next Friday, 4 October. Tickets are still available and can be purchased online. But if you expect him to say anything kind about Steve Daines, you’re likely to be disappointed.
When Steve Daines throws his hat into the U.S. Senate ring, probably Tuesday, Kalispell Republican State Senator Jon Sonju will throw his hat into the U.S. House of Representatives ring, probably Wednesday. Sonju, reports Charles Johnson, is ready to throw and simply waiting for Daines to announce for the senate.
He’s hired Republican strategist and former state GOP Chairman Erik Iverson, who works for Moore Information, a polling firm. Iverson was a key adviser to the 2012 U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Denny Rehberg, who lost a close race to U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont.
The Montana Street Fighter blog is not impressed:
Over at the Montana Jungle Primary website, I just posted an update on Legislative Referendum 127, which, if approved by Montana’s voters in the 2014 general election, will replace our partisan primary with a top two primary. Boiled down to its essence, LR-127 is a Republican scheme to kick Libertarians, whom they blame for defeating Denny Rehberg and Rick Hill last fall, off the ballot.
Democrats, Libertarians, and good government groups, must form an independent organization to defeat LR-127. The time to do this is now. Otherwise, there’s a substantial probability that Montanans will find their general election ballots controlled by a two party tyranny.
Your son is a ninth grader, a freshman in high school. He’s big, athletic, likes football, and wants to play football — not touch or flag football, but tackle football, the full contact, head conking, knee wrecking, violent kind of football that millions of Americans love watching, especially if their son or brother is on the field of battle.
Here’s the question you won’t like pondering. At what point does the risk that your son will suffer a brain injury playing become too high to be acceptable? Or to put it another way, how many concussions, or near concussions, or hard knocks to your son’s noggin, can you accept?
I encourage you to visit The Western Word and read Jack Brown’s new post on Judge Baugh and the state of Montana’s judicial system. A lot of bloggers and newspapers have commented on Baugh, urging that he resign or be removed from the bench, but few have discussed the situation in the context of what can happen when judges are elected instead of appointed. Brown thinks electing judges leads to uneven judicial quality, and his opinion has merit.
Whether the 71-year-old Baugh will resign if pushed hard enough is problematic. Old men can be stubborn, especially if pushed. He might just dig in his heels and even file for re-election. He needs a face saving way out, but at this point there probably isn’t one.
When I was in high school, the team members of the sport in season ate in their own special dining room, which was slightly elevated above the main cafeteria floor. Some argued it was a necessity, that it ensured a balanced diet and enough food for athletes, and contributed to the esprit de corps required for victory on the fields and floors of competition. Perhaps. But no thinking person disputed that the training table told the athletes they were special; they knew it, and they made sure, damned sure, that the lesser mortals known as their fellow students knew it, too, and paid proper respect.
We’re testing a new commenting system that should make it easier for visitors to post comments. This is a much requested feature and we’re pleased to provide it. At the beginning it will be moderated, and even after the cows come home anonymous comments will not be allowed.
Meanwhile, we’re performing some long deferred website maintenance this week, so posts may be infrequent, sporadic, and short than usual. Today we updated the blogroll, paring it down some.
Below, some eye candy from my back porch.
Does Kalispell need its very own airport? If so, what’s the best place for it? If not, should the current city airport remain open? Those are the fundamental questions underlying the the dispute over whether to expand the current city airport south of town.
Yesterday, Rep. Steve Daines joined 215 other Republicans in approving a $40 billion cut in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, once and forever known as food stamps) over the next ten years. No Democrat voted for H.R. 3102, although some didn’t vote, and 15 Republicans voted against it.
The impact on Montana and the 129,000 Montanans currently on SNAP? According to the Center for Budget Policies and Priorities (CBPP), approximately 12,000 would become ineligible for the program. In 2012, the monthly mean per person benefit was $127, so Daines voted not only to keep food from the hungry, he voted to deprive Montana — and Montana farmers and grocers — of $1.5 million each month.
This isn’t tough love or smart economics. It’s ideology run amok. And it directly hurts not just the down and out, but Republican businessmen, and indirectly hurts the entire state. How on earth can our congressman justify casting this vote?
Is Montana’s lt. governor, John Walsh, finally getting ready to become a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator? There are some signs, faint signs to be sure, pointing that way. A 16 September story in U.S. News reports:
Updated. Kalispell’s 84-year-old city airport is in trouble. Its runway nearing the end of its service life, it must close or expand. Once surrounded by open fields, today the city airport is surrounded by businesses and residential neighborhoods (large image). It’s not a setting in which a new airport would be approved, and therefore not a setting in which expansion makes sense.
Nevertheless, a lot of the people who run Kalispell want to expand the airfield. Unless Kalispell's voters say NO in November, a facility rendered superfluous by Glacier Park International Airport nine miles to the north-northeast may get a new lease on life and a longer runway. I'm not a resident of Kalispell, but if I were, I'd vote against expansion.
After months of imagining himself as a U.S. Senator, former Montana Governor Marc Racicot announced yesterday that he would not run for the senate seat being vacated by Max Baucus. That’s no surprise — the 66-year-old Washington, D.C., lawyer now making big bucks was indulging himself by basking one more time in a rapidly dimming limelight — but it does clear the way for Steve Daines to announce for the Senate. Or, perhaps it forces Daines to make a decision, as he no longer can say he’s deferring a decision out of courtesy to Racicot.
In a better world, yesterday’s rampage in the Navy Yard that left 13 dead, counting gunman Aaron Alexis, would set in motion events leading to the passage of legislation tightly regulating firearms and including a national firearms registry. In the real world, however, the murders will provoke an outcry that quickly fades and we’ll be left with the same laws we have now. That’s not because a majority of public opinion opposes tighter firearms regulation. As Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog puts it:
President Obama will address the nation at 2100 EDT. He’s expected to make his case that Congress should authorize the use of military force in Syria, possibly while arguing that while he wants the blessing of Congress, he doesn’t need its permission.
Obama reminds me of Woodrow Wilson, a proud, serious, highly moralistic man who never entered a room in which he found someone more intelligent than himself. On 2 April 1917, in his “The world must be made safe for democracy” speech, Wilson asked a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. Some key excerpts are below, but the entire speech is online and I encourage you to read it in full.
Well, he’s the kind with the guts to run for the senate seat Max Baucus is vacating. That’s a plus, and at the moment that makes him one of a kind. And he was a classmate of Sen. Charles Schumer, which makes him a classmate of the senator from Wall Street (and a man not ashamed to drop a name).
But he thinks Citizens United was decided rightly. The Montana Street Fighter reports he opposes raising the minimum wage. And Politico reports his banking career had downs as well as ups. One down was in Little Falls, Minnesota (birthplace of Charles Lindbergh), where his story might be entitled Adventures in SubPrimeville:
Is there a scenario in which a U.S. attack on Syria might make realpolitik sense? Yes: an attack leading to a new government of Syria that destroys its stocks of chemical and biological weapons. In theory, if the U.S. received credible assurances from the insurgents that upon ousting Assad they would ask the international community to help get rid of Assad’s chemical and biological arsenals, assisting the insurgents with airstrikes would be consistent with our policy of eliminating most weapons of mass destruction.
Could such a deal be cut with the insurgents? Could that deal hold? I have my doubts. The rebels would promise anything to have American air power deployed on their behalf. Once in power, they could change their minds, although from a Western perspective that would not be in their enlightened self-interest. But between the first U.S. bomb and a rebel victory, I think Assad would use every weapon at his disposal to hold on to power. Far from deterring Assad, I think a U.S. attack would convince him he had nothing to lose by gassing his adversaries again, and again, and again.
In fact, will they teach it at all? The debate begins in earnest next week, when Congress reconvenes and takes up resolutions to authorize the use of military force (AUMF) in Syria. If Congress approves war, and I suspect it will, high school seniors who enlist in a military service next spring could find themselves being shot at in short order. They have a vested interest in the debate, and to my mind our schools have a duty to address the subject.
If I were in charge, I would require that students and teachers spend their evenings watching at least two hours of the debate on C-Span, assign at least an hour a day of reading on the issue, and lengthen the school day by an hour so that the debate could be discussed and the issues taught. I might also hold classes for half a day on Saturday.
That won’t happen, of course. The time is available, but the will to make that use of it isn’t. Our high school system provide almost no flexibility for adapting the curriculum to address extraordinary current events. Not only would my scheme interfere with football practice — and we all know that football is more important than civics — it would run afoul of contracts with teachers unions and encounter resistance from parents who think homework of any kind is cruel and unnecessary.
My high school experience provides no guidance on the issue, incidentally. School was still recessed for the summer when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August, 1964. My classmates and I learned about Vietnam in college or in the jungles of Southeast Asia. And at least one classmate’s name is etched on the black granite of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. If Congress votes to make war on Syria, how many of today’s high school seniors will have their names etched on a similar wall?
Todd Baugh is the district judge in Billings who sentenced a man to 15 years in prison with all but 30 days suspended for violating the terms of a plea bargain in a case devolving from a charge of statutory rape. Because the young woman involved committed suicide before she could testify against the 40-something school teacher who had intimate relations with her when she was just 14 years old, the original statutory rape case never came to trial.
By Marian Bradley, Kate Olp, and Sheena Rice
Like so many of you, we were angry this week. We were angry at Judge G. Todd Baugh for his inappropriate comments about a 14-year-old rape victim, and we were angry at a legal system that allowed a rapist to walk away with just 30 days in jail. But as this week has passed, we have come to realize that our anger is ultimately directed at more than one situation or individual: it is directed at the whole of a culture that could allow something like this to happen.
Kalispell mayor Tammi Fisher recently sent the 911 center’s board a letter questioning, among other things, the wisdom of a board with an even number of members; board meetings held during the day instead of the evening, and; the amount of information posted on the 911 center’s website. She was right to do so, and frankly it’s high time that these issues were raised. There’s the appearance of some dysfunction, and the inability to keep directors more than a year or two is a red flag that cannot be ignored.