News Flash: Ravalli County Commissioners Save Taxpayer Cash by Buying Cheaper Tea While Blaming Wolves for the Bad Taste

Have you ever wondered how our money-saving, Constitution-thumping commissioners are spending your money these days? That’s just what I was wondering when on March 6^{th ,} I travelled to Helena to attend Fish Wildlife and Parks’ Large-Predator-Control work session. This session was specifically scheduled to offer Montana county commissioners disposed to blaming wolves for a large chunk of their counties’ ills a chance to do exactly that in front of the FWP board, which is exactly what they did. Led by our own, fastest-talking commissioner Kanenwisher, one after another stood before the FWP board and wagged their tax-payer-funded fingers at them, accusing them of everything from dishonesty to being shills for well-funded, out-of-state environmental organizations who have a secret, unspecified-yet-anti-American agenda that only these environmental organizations—and apparently only these county commissioners—were privy to. And, of course, of wasting tax dollars. One Madison County commissioner even went so far as to state that if things don’t change more to his liking, he will encourage citizens to break the law in unspecified-yet-threatening ways. This commissioner, by the way, is a fairly new arrival to Montana. But let’s not let that stop him from playing Cowboy, right?

More than half of the fifteen or so commissioners who spoke held up Ravalli County’s recently-passed “Large Predator Control Policy” as a shining example of how they planned to wrest control of scientifically-based wildlife management from the hands of Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials. Ravalli County’s policy is, of course, based almost entirely on American Stewards of Liberty’s county-supremacy scheme euphemistically dubbed “coordination”, the latest Wise-Use process they peddle as the way to cut out public involvement and write unscientific, emotion-based wildlife management public policy that suits inflammatory commissioners better than the scientific, democratic kind. Apparently Commissioner Kanenwisher was one of the ringleaders of this effort to bring this slate of commissioners with emotional issues before FWP to vent. He was enabled to coordinate this essentially anti-government message to FWP, of course and in part, by using the tax money he and his fellow commissioners saved by firing low-end women county employees, just for instance.

I was there largely to witness the spectacle, and to counter what I knew would be Kanenwisher’s characterization that Ravalli County’s “policy” was in fact scientific, democratic, and spoke for “the people” of this county through their majesties, the Ravalli County Commission. Which is what he did and what I countered.

There are many observations I could share regarding the anti-wolf hysteria our right-wing populists are so happily stoking. One would be the “testimony” presented by a six-and-a-half-foot-tall Darby resident presented during our commissioners' publicly-funded werewolf hunt that during the 2010 hunting season he backed up for a half-mile to his pick-up parked at the popular Tin Cup trailhead, firing rounds IN THE DARK at what he took to be a pack of wolves' beady eyes. Another would be that for all the years I have been seeing wolf tracks up Sweathouse and Gash Creek I have never actually seen wolves IN them, which speaks volumes about how much they want to be seen by me. But here’s a few bullet points to consider before you read the comments I submitted to the FWP board.

Have you noticed that:

·         These very same tea-sipping officials and citizens—in our neck of the woods as well as throughout Montana—who have repeatedly and consistently demanded the privatization of public lands and public policy on public lands are now the ones whining mightily about how public policy needs to be changed to push elk back on to those same evil public lands they claim to hate because it’s the only place where they can more freely kill them?

·       That American Stewards of Liberty’s county-supremacy scheme dubbed “coordination” is less a scheme to target wolves than a scheme to target pesky environmental organizations and green individuals who have stood the ground to keep the public lands these tea sippers depend on to kill the wolves they can’t find... public?
·        That the very same people who bedeck themselves with 19^th century cowboy-warrior garb are the ones who claim they fear an animal that they factually see so little of they can’t find enough of them to shoot when the time comes?

Sounds a lot like the health care debate, doesn’t it? Or like every other public-policy issue these Right-wing populists and their corporate sponsors corrupt.

I don’t know if this bears repeating, but my main observation concerning this mess is that Intellectual Honesty is not a city in China. Let’s do a better job of demanding that these folks and officials acknowledge that the world really is, in fact, round. It really is embarrassing.

Comments to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Board

Re: Ravalli County Commissioners’ “Large Predator Control Policy”

American Stewards of Liberty/ “Coordination”

                                                                                                                        March 7, 2012

Commissioners,

Ravalli County Commissioners’ “Large Predator Control Policy” that they adopted last Monday has not been properly or legally vetted with the public, does not represent the public at large, is undemocratic in nature and practice, and is extreme to the point that, if implemented in whole or in part by Fish Wildlife and Parks could seriously jeopardize Montana’s ability to manage wolves within its boundaries. There have been serious and unaddressed concerns raised within Ravalli County concerning the commissioners’ relationship to American Stewards of Liberty, the principle purveyor of what we view as a classic county supremacy scheme they term “coordination” and we urge you to continue using the best science to manage our wildlife notwithstanding emotional, antidotal and quasi-legal attempts to convince you to do otherwise, such as the Ravalli Co. “Large Predator Policy” does.

This is just a thumbnail of issues relating to what we’ve been dealing with here in Ravalli Co. in relation to this wolf policy and with “coordination” and American Stewards of Liberty. Hopefully it’ll give you an idea of the depth of concern we have about the path our commissioners have chosen in this regard.

Our commission has made it clear they intend to pursue American Stewards of Liberty’s (ASL) vision of “coordination”. They hired ASL as a consultant and we can only conclude that they are consulting with ASL on their wolf policy. According to their information and training documents, ASL recommends that local officials who buy into their scheme represent “coordination” meetings with agencies such as FWP as “government-to-government” where “there will be no public comment because of the government-to-government nature of the meetings” http://americanstewards.us/coordination/introduction/how-it-works . This concept sets the groundwork for forming hoc, undemocratic committees to develop policy, such as they have done in this case, excluding voices they don’t approve of, such as organizations like Wolf watchers, then taking the policy to agencies such FWP and claiming that the public has already spoken through them and now it’s time not to listen to any pesky naysayers because now the conversation is “government-to-government”. Below are just a couple of examples from Commissioner Foss to demonstrate that they do indeed believe that they have the jurisdiction to “help” you make wildlife management decisions.

“Coordination is a process required by federal law, and one part of the nine criteria some state and all federal agencies must meet within any county where they conduct business. With coordination, your commissioners, when they have developed various county wide management tools, and advised federal agencies of their intent, can require those conducting business, resource management, etc. within their county, to coordinate the agency's policies with those of the county. All it really takes is informing those agencies of the requirement and preparing the documents defining county management.” Ravalli Republic Oct. 2010

“You do not need to have your policy or plan in place to invoke coordination. You can send a letter of coordination to an agency in which you want to work (sic) and at that moment they have to start working with you on an equal footing…” Transcript from Suzie Foss’ testimony before Senate Local Government Committee in support of SB 117 – Coordination Between Local and Feds sponsored by Sen. Greg Hinkle (R-Thompson Falls) 1/17/11

At the commissioners’ April 5 meeting when they adopted their “large predator control policy”, Commissioner Kanenwisher stated that part of the intent of this policy to provide landowners, presumably at state or county expense, with the technological tools to detect collared wolves in the vicinity so that they could more easily dispose of them. This is not hunting or fair chase in any way. Also at that meeting, substantive changes were being made to the document they voted on during that 45-minute session they allotted for passing the policy. Needless to say, there was no chance for anyone other than those few in the room to review that document or have any say whatever in whether or not they agreed with it or not. Notwithstanding a vocal and emotional minority, the public-at-large has been cut out this process from the beginning, and this “Large Predator Control Policy” you have before you from Ravalli Co. represents no more than the opinion of five commissioners.

The full video of this meeting, as well as a wealth of other related material, can be viewed on www.rcwatchdog.org . We highly recommend you peruse this site before considering changing your large-predator policies in any way to match Ravalli County Commissioners’ suggestions.

Thank you , Bill LaCroix

Stake in the Heartland #1

GlaxoSmithKline Implicated in Massive Global-Warming-Denial Scheme

or

Are Vampires People, Too?

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed three fat robins in our crabapple tree, picking off the fermented fruit the waxwings inexplicably never came for. That’s been one of several odd things I’ve noted this winter. The waxwings usually get most of the crabs before the robins arrive. It’s usually quite a party, but almost March and no waxwings. The shriveled red raisins still beckon all comers.

I watched the robins for a minute, and then another flew down to imbibe, and then another and another, like leaves falling from the tall green ash by the driveway. I looked up and there was the whole community, about twenty birds, huddled against the wind in the old tree’s unkempt branches. Gossiping, I suppose, like we do at our parties.

 But unlike our parties, dreams of worms were in these fat kids’ eyes. They weren’t just winter-overs. They were part of the migrant horde, and they’d settle for fermented crabs now and have some fun, but they were expecting the ground to thaw sooner rather than later, the worms to wriggle out of the wet, warming soil. They knew, even if we can’t quite wrap our heads around it through gossip or by other means, that spring’s coming weeks earlier than usual.

Notwithstanding gossip, a big part of why we’re behind the robins in understanding our beautiful, fragile world is Heartland Institute (1) , probably the most well-heeled and well-funded Reality-Denial factory (“conservative think tank” in the vernacular) in the world. With a projected 2012 budget of almost $8 million, they promote scientific ignorance, misrepresentation of facts and good ol’ American naked political expediency. Among several other anti-science canards which, if they can sell them to the public will make them richer than Zeus, is a program to promote a money-cooked curriculum to our public schools which will teach K-12 kids that global warming (or climate change if you’re squeamish) is a liberal hoax.

How do we know this? Not from Corporate Media that’s for sure. But rather from extrapolating Reality out of grade-B horror movies. We’ve always known, for example, that while vampires aren’t really alive, they are possessed of certain anti-social personality disorders that animate and mobilize them for the sake of their own bottom line at the expense of Life itself, and that we as a society reward this kind of behavior at our extreme and scary peril. So it goes for corporations, and for Heartland Institute.

A creature of giant energy companies, the tobacco industry, the Koch brothers and the Bitterroot’s own GlaxoSmithKline, Heartland was recently exposed about its secret plans to corrupt society for the sake of profit (surprise!) in an internal document  leaked by the Pacific Institute(2). According to the leaked document (3) Heartland proposes to manufacture a “global warming curriculum for K-12 Schools” that “isn’t alarmist or overtly political”, and then they plan to buy the politicians to stick this high-priced garbage to us and our kids.

This “curriculum” is being developed for Heartland by Dr. David Wojick, a scientist who has worked for the Dept. of Energy and has no degrees in climate science. For about $1 million, Dr. Wojick is slated to produce the step-by-step educational tools our teachers will need to teach our kids to pony up to corporate ideology regarding global warming that essentially goes like this:

·         Global Warming isn’t happening.

·         Well, there’s no evidence it’s happening.

·         Well, if there is evidence, then it’s not due to people.

·         Well, if it’s due to people, then it’s beneficial.

·         Well, if it’s not beneficial, our C.E.O.s have the right to make obscene profits, so too bad.

Just as we know that vampires aren’t living people, we also know that corporate cynicism isn’t genuine scientific skepticism.  You don’t need a degree in science or cinematography. It’s visceral. To point: Heartland Institute cut its teeth—or fangs if you will-- back in the 80s and 90s funding “studies” disputing the overwhelmingly and patently-obvious evidence that cigarette smoke was bad for you. Anyone who remembers the tobacco industry’s—and Heartland’s-- sleazy tactics during the long battle to get lawmakers to admit the obvious then will recognize the tactics used by Heartland now, in its campaign to attract vast amounts of capital from what it self-defines as its “affluent libertarian” donors. These tactics can easily be boiled down to the following:

·         Any reality-based situation that is in danger of being regulated by the government to the detriment of the “affluent libertarian’s”  bottom line will be denied and opposed by well-funded junk science and junk arguments with paid-for “scientists” who behave more  like defense lawyers trying to save a mafia boss’  skin than technical professionals promoting a truly-alternative view.

·         Conversely, any government actions or regulations that will pad their bottom line, like War for instance, will be supported to the point of destroying our kids’ and grandkids’ health and ecosystems up to and including the point of their possible extinction.

In other words, Heartland and its “affluent libertarians” fundamentally believe: that they bought this government and it is theirs, not ours, that they will do with it what they want, thank you, and that we and our kids and grandkids can simply go to hell. Is it a coincidence that this is the same philosophy adhered to by the 18^th century despots America’s “founders” overthrew? I don’t think so.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and, more to the point, the average Bitterrooter, has a level of responsibility in all this. I certainly don’t blame you if you count yourrself with the majority of Bitterrooters who cherish the notion that our little community is too small-potatoes to make any difference in the Big Bad World so the best thing to do is go skiing or fishing. Of course it is—on  the surface. But here’s a few things to think about that might bring this train wreck of a social disease home a bit: Heartland’s budget is up 170% from their 2011 $4.6 million budget .  A single “Anonymous Donor”—probably David Koch—has contributed $13 million between 2007 and 2011. Nineteen corporate donors, including GSK, contributed almost $1.5 million last year alone.  While GSK’s  contribution of $50,000 appears small to Koch’s $13 million infusion, consider that General Motors (remember that company that got billions of taxpayer-funded bail-out money?) kicked in only $30,000. Microsoft contributed $60,000. For all you good ol’ boys out there, put $5,000 from Anheuser-Busch in your boilermaker and pound it down for perspective. GSK’s $50,000 will buy 50 of the 70 “elected officials” Heartland intends to purchase with a plane ticket, a party and steak and eggs for breakfast. For perspective, when was the last time you had $1000 spent on your head that wasn’t a criminal background check? How much does your local Democratic Central Committee have in its bank account? For a clue, most Democratic organizations in Western Montana operate on less cash than the price of buying off just one of these corrupt politicians. In other words, GSK is a major player in this death-wish façade our kids will have to pay for and live with, and it wants to be. And part of their massive profit-base that enables such bad-boy corporate behavior is generated right here in Ravalli County. That should be of significant concern to Bitterrooters who care about robins and suchlike.

So what to do? Well, first of all, contact GSK and ask them what the hell?! Bearing in mind, of course that those who work at GSK are our friends and neighbors, which also begs the question. Do we Bitterrooters really believe that we have to drink the libertarian Kool-Aid, mixed up for us by ethically-challenged Big Pharma companies and equally-challenged commissioners, faux preachers and anti-environmentalists who would dope us into believing we have to teach our kids that Reality is a Liberal Hoax in order to keep jobs in the Bitterroot? That, in my opinion, is the core question we all have to deal with before we can make any headway against this Tea Party/libertarian “populism” that is threatening to turn our county into a theocracy.

If you think this chain-of-thought is simple-minded to the extreme, you’re right. If you think it’s just plain false, then first of all please download and read the document  (2), and then consider how simple it has been for these “corporate persons” to bald-facedly buy and pedal enough influence within our corrupted political and media systems to stall the United States, and therefore the whole world, against acting on any meaningful policies to avert the unprecedented human-caused ecological disaster we affectionately refer to as Global Warming.  

As for robins and other Bitterrooters, inevitable life dramas shrink up even normal winters for us mere humans. That can’t be helped. In a way we’re too smart for our own good. Sometimes we can’t find our seasonal bearing because we just have more mental clutter than a robin. But notwithstanding our limited capacity to comprehend life cycles as well drunken birds do, we all know spring is coming earlier and earlier. We don’t need a Big Pharma company to tell us different. The snow’s on the ground for less and less days.  Short season with no real cold weather. Bark beetles molly-coddled through light frosts lurking in the lurch, along with early runoffs and rumors of drought. Blamers waiting in the wings, already deploying accusations of treason against those who have been fingered by our corrupted politicians—local and national-- to be the easy targets of their unexamined anger. The conclusion of that drama, of course, is for us to decide. I won’t name names here, but history is unkind to societies who allow thugs and snake-oil salesmen to flush them violently down the collective toilet bowl. Even rational minds, for all their faults, can grasp this. It could get bad for those of us who consider ourselves rational. The least we can do is speak up.

Contact GlaxoSmithKline (553 Old Corvallis Road, Hamilton, http://us.gsk.com/html/contact-us/index.html ) , and tell them to quit funding junk science with their Bitterroot profits.   

(1) http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Heartland_Institute

(2) http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/(1-15-2012)%202012%20Fundraising%20Plan_0.pdf

(3) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/21/peter-gleick-admits-leaked-heartland-institute-documents?newsfeed=true         

"Fundamental Inferred Constitutional Parental Rights" vs. Real-World Family Planning

 Turning the Constitution on its Head---Literally

In the Fall of 2009, I was staffing the Bitterroot Human Rights Alliance booth at the Ravalli County Fair. Our theme that year was “Health Care Is a Human Right”, because B.H.R.A. had spent a lot of time and energy that year advocating for a Universal Health Care model to replace the so-obviously broken one we still suffer from today. We had had some early success in the Winter and Spring, when most public health care discussions were overwhelmingly pro-single-payer or at least pro-public option. It was obvious and heartening. It looked like we were finally going to go somewhere, get something.

Most of the serious health care discussions pre-dated the April 15^th coming-out party for the teabaggers (and yes, they started out proudly calling themselves “teabaggers” and I don’t see any reason to contradict them now).  That was the date that Constitutional Literalism and a whole raft of other old and discredited Militia/sovereign-citizen tenets caught fire among adherents to the newly-minted, well-funded “Tea Party” movement throughout the country as well as in the Bitterroot. Mostly white, mostly middle-to-upper-class people were suddenly awakened to the fact that a non-white person could actually be elected president, and they were upset. They got religion. They repented, all of which was not such a hard transition since many of the faithful were already leaning towards biblical literalism (fundamentalism, reconstructionism etc.), essentially a branch from the same literary tree. A lot of Big Money, it turned out, was also behind the push to get the faithful to climb on board the Sovereign Citizen/ Militia bandwagon of claiming that anything that wasn’t literally written in what they claimed was the divinely-inspired constitution, including over 200 years of case law and amendments, was null and void unless it passed the test of their self-appointed “sacred” scrutiny. Attaching this ready-mix right-wing populism to Sovereign-Citizen/ Militia dogma also had the obvious advantage for Big Money, like the Kochs, of allying their economic interests with a large segment of poorly-informed, well-armed “2^nd Amendment” warriors of the lower economic rungs who were also worried about the future status of their white privilege and were not shy of openly wearing their racism on their sleeve (1). Point made, they figured, without having to stick their own necks out. The Ron Paul model of political obfuscation, also a product (or at best a by-product) of Big Money. A perfect fit, I guess they figured.

The first ones I noticed were small knots of 2-3 at our Single-Payer rallies, with weird signs like “Govt. Out of My Health Care”, or single abusive drive bys, making (at the time) incomprehensible statements like “If you can’t afford it, then you don’t deserve it, you retrograde hippie”, and other savvy sayings very similar and heartfelt. By summer these folks were rolling into Belgrade airport, where Obama had landed to make a speech, on Koch Bothers “Hands Off America” luxury buses(1), claiming they’d bought and paid for the “free-speech zone” we’d been shunted to when we showed up, telling us to “get off their private property” (a true story) and, when we incredulously didn’t, trying to start a riot with us pro-single payer and/or public-option elderly people and students.

In Ravalli County, the new grouping of an old, old problem here, Celebrating Conservatism, started attracting hundreds of the above-mentioned repentants to the Fairgrounds, with revival-style chile feeds and extremist-hit-parade guests like notorious anti-Semite Red Beckman who lectured the good folks on how the Jews deserved the Holocaust because they killed Jesus and on the salubrious effects of Sovereign Citizen snake oil labeled “Sacred Constitution Elixir”.

So by Fall, with Health Care reform looking like the wreck it was destined to become, we figured we’d run our banner up the pole anyway, and there I sat at the 2009 BHRA fair booth, defending our posters proclaiming health care as a human right to all comers. About three days in, I was growing weary of challenging absurd constitutional notions half-baked for resale by the likes of..well..the Koch Brothers, of course, but also of Red Beckman, Richard Mack and Chuck Baldwin (2008 Constitution Party candidate) and eaten whole by those who apparently didn’t pay attention in high school government class. On that third day, a tall, cowboy-bedecked gentleman stopped briefly and stared at our posters with his arms folded and a deep frown on his face. I waited politely for what I knew was coming, which it did when he finally half-shouted at me, “That’s not in the Constitution!”

Quickly assuming he was referring to the human rights aspects of medical treatment, I took this as my cue. I uttered the phrase “living documents” and watched his back predictably stiffen. But this time, before allowing him a response, I quickly added, “And that’s where we part company.” Which, fortunately, we did, by his eliminating his presence in a huff. I certainly wasn't going to say anything more, and I learned something useful right then. You just can’t argue with them when they get like that. Better just to say what you mean up front, hope for the best and save your breath.

So here’s what I have to say:

Article Six of the U.S. Constitution literally says that “…no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”.

It reads that way because the so-called founders knew from first-hand experience the evils perpetrated on individuals and society in the name of “God” by the various theocracies known as “states” before the revolution. They wanted no semblance of theocracy in their new experiment, and in fact a good few of them didn’t even identify themselves as “Christian”.

So the far-right fad of “constitutional literalism”—or “legal fundamentalism” if you mix fundamentalist dogma with constitutional law as Commissioner Kanenwisher happily does (2)—has always surprised me. How, I wondered, can a “constitutional literalist” whose staunch supporters demand that everyone else accept the literal interpretation of the constitution as “holy writ” find “inferred fundamental constitutional parental rights” in the same “holy writ” constitution you find Article Six in? Article Six is in black-and-white. Article “Kanenwisher” could—literally—be referred to as “black-and-blue” if carried to its logical conclusion. Demanding that the constitution be taken as a sacred, infallible document that must be taken literally and then turning around and ignoring nine-tenths of what doesn’t suit you used to be labeled, in the good All-American sense, snake oil, wasn’t it?

The roots of modern literacy and its apparently-unavoidable corollary—the  snake-oil salesmen--go at least as far back as the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible, and maybe some folks can get farther than me in understanding these inscrutable mysteries by examining why God allowed all those “f”s in the original document when He really meant “s”. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not qualified to take the tangle straight on in a thousand words or so.

But I can try.

(1)From cover page of Koch Brothers Hands Off America website: “Dear President Obama, Get your hands off my America! I can no longer sit by and watch you intrude on our freedoms, our faith, and our family values. You want to take the money from our pockets and the guns from our hands. You’ve tried to replace our doctors with bureaucrats. Don’t you realize Americans have the right to make choices from their house-not take orders from the White House? Enough is enough—I’m taking my country back!  Sincerely, America”

 http://www.handsoffamerica.net/  

(2) As far as I know, within the religious/legal framework I’m using them, I’m either making these phrases up whole-cloth, or I’m shamelessly stealing them.  If it’s found that I’m making them up; remember, you heard it here first!

Ravalli County Family Planning Update

Dear folks,

Let’s declare Victory, but let’s not go home. We still got a lotta work to do.

Yesterday the commissioners voted 3-2 in favor of signing a letter-of-interest informing the Montana Dept. of Health and Human Services that they would accept the Title X grant this summer when it’s time to renew. The grant, just below $40,000 this year, has funded our Family Planning Clinic for almost 40 years. Hundreds of low-income people, overwhelmingly women, have depended on this service to meet their most basic health needs they could not otherwise afford, for decades. In Commissioner Iman’s own words, "This is the very lowest level (of heath care) at the very least cost." Simply signing an agreement accepting this longstanding federal grant would seem, to any reasonable person, the least our commissioners could do for their constituents.

Not so according to two commissioners, and a couple others wavered in their comments before voting in favor.

Let’s admit up front that it’d be a good thing to call and thank commissioners Iman, Chilcott and Foss for ultimately supporting our Family Planning Clinic (this year). But it would be equally as good a thing, and probably a more productive thing, to recognize yesterday’s vote for the critical reminder that it was. In terms of reproductive issues, our Ravalli County government is just one vote short of becoming a theocracy, and on many other “social” issues not even that. And that’s with five commissioners. Imagine how it would have gone if the two nay-sayers were sitting on a three-person board.

Commissioners Stoltz and Kanenwisher voted their religious dogma, which in these days of willful intellectual carelessness combined with unchecked anti-democratic recklessness also passes as their politics. Let’s look at that. But before we do, let’s remember that Chilcott made sure we heard that he was also concerned with what he called "the state appearing to assert itself between a parent and a child", and that Foss made sure we heard that part of her decision was based on our (corrupt, venal, spineless?) Congress’ banning the distribution of the “morning after” pill for women under seventeen. In other words, at least four out of our five sitting commissioners believe at some fundamental level that a society can’t have too many kids born to parents who don’t want them. Why? Because then these unwilling parents can turn around and assert what Kanenwisher continues to insist on calling their “fundamental inferred constitutional right” to “parent”. I guess.

Kanenwisher has used the phrases “parental rights” and “fundamental inferred constitutional right” interchangeably at least ten times in my hearing. After about the fifth time I started doing a little research as to what planet this concept comes from, and here’s a thumbnail of what I came up with, and what I think is in store for Ravalli County—and our country-- if this theocracy trend continues.

Parentalrights.org is an organization founded in 2006 by Michael P. Farris, who also founded the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). Both are well-connected far-right organizations (are we tired of those yet?) and both predictably take a fundamentalist approach to both “parental rights” and home schooling, insisting in both cases that their narrow, biblically-based definition of “parental rights” is “inferred” in the U.S. Constitution and is therefore inviolable. Farris’ Parentalrights.org has been one of the main pushers of the so-called “Parental Rights Amendment” to our constitution since it was first introduced in 2008. This proposed amendment is largely a reflection of the traditionally-allergic reaction the American Far-Right has to the United Nations in general, and to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child in particular, which was adopted by the General Assembly in 1989. Proponents of the amendment, which apparently include theocratic aspirants like Commissioner Kanenwisher, assert that the “state” should never be allowed to get in between the “sacred” bond between parent and child.

Sacred?  Let’s connect a few dots here and then draw our own conclusions. Michael Farris, one of the main influential far-right cheerleaders of the “Parental Rights Amendment”, can claim positive results to many religious-extremists litmus tests. One significant example is his signing onto the Coalition on Revival’s 1986 COR Manifesto. In fact he sat on its steering committee for several years. Here’s, in part, what the COR Manifesto says:

"We deny that anyone Jew or Gentile, believer or unbeliever, private person or public person is exempt from the moral and juridical obligation before God to submit to Christ's Lordship over every aspect of his life in thought word and deed." Another COR requirement is that one be "willing to submit to the hierarchical order that God has created in which we are willing to submit as to Christ to employers, civil government, and church leaders, and within families, wives to their husbands, and children to their parents."

This document, as are many other far-right religio-political documents and tenets, is a classic reflection of Christian Reconstructionism, a theological movement whose leadership has also been represented on the COR steering committee.

Reconstructionism, for its part, is a truly dangerous, over-the-edge-of-the-world movement that has been incorporated into political movements such as the Montana Constitution Party and other so-called “libertarian” political movements, although few admit to the charge because Reconstructionism is so demonstrably extreme. Nevertheless, all you have to do is look at most far-right religio-political movements in America these days and find reconstructionist dogma either whole-hog or in bite-sized installments, that (for instance) assert that the laws of Old Testament Israel should apply today, providing a biblical blueprint for society. Pure Reconstructionism embraces a wide use of the death penalty — not only for such crimes as rape and murder, but for blasphemy, heresy, astrology, and homosexuality — in accordance with what they call "biblical law" — a notion which largely grows out of biblical accounts of the judicial application of the Ten Commandments.*

So, does Commissioner Kanenwisher’s truly-bizarre tenet of “inferred fundamental parental constitutional right” have a direct DNA link to the truly-bizarre, openly-promoted and well-financed tenets of fundamentalist Christian Reconstructionism? Well, here are a few dots. Throw them in a glass of water and go get some litmus paper.

Commissioner Stoltz, who rarely says anything in public, ironically said it best yesterday in summing up this constitutional crisis of disingenuousness: “It's like putting poison in our cookies. How much poison will we eat until we've had enough?" Unfortunately, he was talking about his perceived constitutional right to interpret the constitution as a hairdryer that would make the founders’ powdered Rosicrucian wigs stick straight out in a friz, which same hair dryer he further feels constitutionally-entitled to beat us all over the head with just for good measure. I’m talking about the real constitution, and the real Rosicrucian founders who inserted Article 6 in that document as a hedge against the fundamentalist/ theocratic tendencies they recognized in our national darker nature even way back then. Duh.

So yes, we can breathe a sigh of relief for the hundreds of low-income folks who will not have the rug pulled out from under them this time. We can also see this whole farce as a classic example of why, at this point in time for Ravalli County, we need five commissioners, because this, folks, was a close call.

*http://www.publiceye.org

Is the World Flat or Round

A Serious Discussion about our Hamilton School District

"There are 15,700 local school boards in this country. It is our intent to take them over one by one. All we need is majority...and then we will determine what is taught, we will determine who is hired and who is fired.”


“We can and WILL continue to take back control of our local school boards and eventually the entire system. We will fight to the end to stop any atheism, values clarification psychology, hypnotism, necromancy, immorality, homosexuality, or denial of students' or parents' free speech and free exercise of our faith in our schools.”


"We need strong board members who know right from wrong. The Bible, being the only true source on right and wrong, should be the guide of board members. Only godly Christians can truly qualify for this critically important position.”


“We will be the stealth candidates, and you must carry out our mission in such a way that the public won't know what we're about until we've won control. I'm a fundamentalist Christian, and as far as I'm concerned, that's the only kind of Christian there is."


“When we get our Christian agenda operating inside the schools, we can control all those things much easier, because our agenda leaves NO time for those kind of things.”


"I believe they are realizing they really have little or NO choice but to cooperate. So far, the Lord's leading has been working beautifully."


Hamilton School Board member Nancy Ballance is a self-identified member of the amazingly-candid Ravalli County Tea Party Patriots. She also identifies herself as an active member of Montana Citizens for Excellence in Education (CEE). CEE is in turn, the innocuous-sounding division of the National Association of Christian Educators (NACE), whose founder and president, Robert L. Simonds, made the amazingly candid statements above to describe the mission of NACE/CEE.

NACE/CEE was founded in 1983, after Simonds served on President Reagan's Taskforce to Implement the National Commission on Excellence in Education Report, 'A Nation at Risk’. The group claims 1,668 chapters, 878 church-based Public School Awareness Committees, and about 250,000 members. In the past, NACE/CEE has received financial support from the Coors beer family through the Coors Foundation.

Notwithstanding that NACE/CEE has effectively banned a wide range of books from our schools, including Little Red Riding Hood, Simonds characterizes any criticism of the NACE/CEE’s agenda as "specifically meant to persecute Christians". "It now appears,” he states, “that Christians in America are beginning to share the same treatment Jews received in Nazi Germany." www.publiceye.org/ifas/fw/9502/nacecee.html

Homo sapiens (1) have a natural inclination to ignore truly important things that are also boring. It’s in our genes. A mastodon charging our village is one thing, and definitely not boring. School boards are quite another thing, although potentially just as destructive to our village as an angry elephant the size of a school bus. The anthropological jury’s still out as to whether mastodons actually got angry, but let’s go with this. It’s the only rational explanation I can come up with. We simply haven’t evolved fast enough to recognize modern dangers when we see them coming. Our technology has outstripped our wisdom. We get sucker-punched by the religious-right when we’re not looking.
All that said, the Hamilton School Board is currently revising its District Policy Manual, which to most people is about as exciting as watching a snail race on a wet sidewalk in a city you don’t like when you forgot your raincoat.

Hardly anyone pays attention to local school board politics, which is why organizations like National Association of Christian Educators and its division, Citizens for Excellence in Education (NACE/CEE) specifically target local school boards for takeover in order to advance their bizarre agendas. It’s cheaper than winning a seat in the Senate and, cumulatively speaking, is arguably as impactive as actually having a senator in your pocket. And usually no one’s paying attention.

So here’s what happened. Last November, Hamilton School Board Chair Dave Bedey submitted a draft Vision Statement that some staff and community members thought looked more like a recipe for a Christian military prep school than the preamble of the district’s new Policy Manual, which was what it was supposed to be.

To put the following drama in context, Mr. Bedey is a retired Colonel in the U.S. Army, a former instructor at West Point and a mid-level neoconservative Talking Head on T.V. shows such as Anderson Cooper for “issues” such as our national security being at risk if gays are allowed to serve openly in the military. He is a contributing editor to Family Security Matters, which is an offshoot for the DC neocon think tank, Center for Security Policy (CPS). CPS, in turn, is a member-organization of the Cooler Heads Coalition (2) which seeks to "dispel the myths of global warming by exposing flawed scientific, economic, and risk analysis." Bedey also has written for a publication along the same vein, Patriots and Liberty (3) .

In Bedey’s draft Vision Statement, he exhorted school officials to prepare students to “participate in self-government”. Now let’s be fair and start at the beginning. The term “self-government” used to be a phrase you could use without too much baggage. That was in The Old Days, three years ago, before our local gun-toting tea party outfit, Celebrating Conservative (4) , equated the term “self-government” with armed rebellion against the 99%. The term is locked and loaded now. Read on.

Under “local control”, Bedey clarified. ”Local control of the Hamilton schools,” he stated, “is central for achievement of the District’s mission.” Therefore “…The Board of Trustees shall strive…to oppose further encroachments into the management of the District’s schools by the state and federal government and to restore those elements of local control that have been lost over the past several decades.” This is an extremely interesting statement to make in a school board draft document, at least to us homo sapiens (1) who have been paying attention to Ravalli County craziness these last couple of years. Remember the “Ravalli County Questionnaire” (5) that Celebrating Conservatism threatened our local officials with two years ago? That singular document included a demand that all “federalized employees” get permission from the sheriff before “approaching a Citizen (sic)” or face criminal charges and trial by a “citizens’ grand jury”. In militia-jargon, “federalized employees” includes any local school employees “attempting to enforce a federal agenda (sic)” and “citizens’ grand jury” refers to kangaroo courts officiated by the Good-ol’-Boys-Du-Jour who empower themselves with executing those they—and they alone—define as “traitors”. In other words, “Federalized employees”, with all the implied disloyalty these “Citizens” insist on attaching to the silly phrase, would include all teachers and staff just doing the jobs we pay them for. For added flavor, the amazing “questionnaire” also demanded that the sheriff be required to form a county militia to “protect” citizens from domestic enemies. “All able-bodied Citizens (sic)” will forcibly serve, and women will serve in combat only if “men are in danger of being overrun (sic)”. Remember all this? Ah, Yes…

For a context-break, let’s remember that vision statements can and often do run as short as one or two sentences. Who wants to waste time on wordy dogma, for instance, when you have kids at home who need feeding? Maybe if you’re tapping your brain out to find the exact right words to open a document that calls for armed insurrection against a king, and you want to get it right for history in case the king ends up hanging you. But for a school policy? Do we really need a whole section headed “Preparation to Participate in Self-Government”?

Yes we do, according to Bedey’s draft. And under that rubric he submitted the following “vision”:
“The definition of what it means to be an American is an issue that our graduates will decide.  To make sense of the various positions put forward by ideologues across the political spectrum, our graduates must have a sound grasp of the political principles set forth by our Founders and of the free market system.  Furthermore, increasingly politicized scientific claims and counter-claims confuse the discussion of many crucial issues.  Thus, to prepare our graduates to engage in self-government, it is also essential that they gain an understanding of both the scope and the limits of science.” (See footnotes 2: Cooler Heads Coalition & 3: Patriots and Liberty)

Shortly after the release of Bedey’s draft document, school board member Nancy Ballance (of Montana Citizens for Excellence in Education and Ravalli County Tea Party Patriots) sent an email to Republican Central Committee vice-president Lilya McAllister, who forwarded it to Commissioner Suzie Foss, who passed it on to such a large and indiscriminate list that even I got a copy of it. As did all of our already-concerned teachers and staff. In it she stated that:

· Bedey’s draft is “very encouraging”.
· It has “gone viral throughout the teaching staff and many are not happy about it. I am expecting to see several teachers show up at the next meeting to voice their opinions. It is very important to get supporting opinions represented”.
· “I expect we will have members of the public at every meeting for the next few months….we will need representation from the conservative voices. Feel free to forward this to anyone you think would be interested in coming to support the conservative voice”.

Ironically for someone proclaiming membership in an outfit that demonizes federal subsidies and bank bailouts (Tea Party Patriots), Ms Ballance is a recently-retired vice-president of Farmers Insurance Group, which is 100%-owned by multi-national giant Zurich Financial Group. Farmers, you might remember, bought AIG’s toxic insurance assets after an $80 billion+ taxpayer-funded bailout made their poisonous soup edible for the 1% at the expense of the rest of us. She is a recent arrival in the Bitterroot and is currently running for Gary McClaren’s seat in HD 89. Gary, you might be interested to know, is the Montana State Chairman of American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) (6) , a political Creature from the Black Lagoon of the Koch Brothers that brought us Montanans, among many other gifts, crippling power bills through Energy Deregulation (7).

Perhaps injudiciously, Bedey’s draft ended up in every school teacher’s in-box, and representative samples of these public employees charged (by us) with educating our children to do the very best they can with the 21st century have been attending and watching every school board meeting since. This is good news for Us the Taxpayers, but we need to do more than cheer our teachers on. We need to pay attention. We need to show up.

If you’ve ever wondered why public schools are so dissatisfying to more and more parents, wonder no more. The reason’s staring you in your Bitterroot face, and it’s a DNA-proofed child of Voodoo Reaganomics (shrinking government to the size of an unwed, pregnant Hollywood starlet you can drown in a bathtub). Our schools have taken a nose-dive in quality over the last 30 years exactly because of this kind of fundamentalist-reconstructionist assault. Rational people can only last so long on any given school board or teaching staff debating with these denizens of the deep-six as to whether their school ought to teach such radical notions as Science, to impressionable youth who might end up pregnant because they were exposed to too much….science! They get tired. They get disgusted. No one’s paying attention. No one thanks them. They quit, and their seat opens up to the possibilities of the vast beyond, biblically-speaking from a fundamentalist’s perspective, of course.

We Montana progressives have always acknowledged that there are deep divisions of thought and opinion within our communities. We have always accepted those with whom we disagree. Many of us know the same hymns they do. But we also acknowledge and resent that this basic expression of empathy and decency is not necessarily reciprocated by those who constantly try to demonize anyone who wants to teach their kids science and birth control as hounds from the gates of Hell trying to foist Evil Socialism on the unwary citizens of Hobbitville. We accept that a respectful debate is one thing. Teaching our children how to have a respectful debate is another one thing. But teaching our children, on our public dime, that “respectful debate” includes discussing whether the earth is flat or round is quite another thing. We declare that it’s no small stretch, in the face of demonstrable and catastrophic climate change and equally demonstrable and potentially-catastrophic college entrance exams, that this kind of nonsense is the other side of Ignorant and just this side of Criminal. There are plenty of private Christian military acadamies in this world without aiming Hamilton towards that rathole, thank you, and I think if you feel the same way you should let your school board members know. Right now. These kinds of red-herring issues make everyone working for the district defensive, which is not the position from which to be your most productive and creative, which is what our kids so desperately need, and unless you’re really into vast discussions centered around how many angels really can dance on the head of a pin, these kinds of disingenuous slams from the Right can only be seen as intentional squanderings of our valuable public resources on pointless personal dogma. If you feel you need to have these discussions with your kids, have them in your church, or in your home, and let your church or your home pay for them. Leave the rest of us and our kids out of it. Where are all these Constitution-lovers when it comes to…THE CONSTITUTION???!!! What the hell?!
I rest my case (8).



(1) Latin for "wise guy".


(2) http://www.globalwarming.org/category/global-warming-101/ Funding for Cooler Heads Foundation comes from Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor Co., Big Pharma heavy-hitter Pfizer, the Scaife Foundation as well as another giant front-group in Big Energy’s kit bag, the Earhart Foundation.


(3) Some of the articles listed on the Patriots and Liberty website include: “Too Many Christians–including Evangelicals—are Socialists”, “Creation vs Darwinism: God and Liberty vs Man and Tyranny”, “Welfare Recipient Lives in Million Dollar Home”,  “Yoga’s Frightening Demonic Experiences”, and of course Col. David F. Bedey: “Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’: A Clear and Present Danger “ http://www.patriotsandliberty.com/


(4) Reminder: The now-defunct Celebrating Conservative was the spiritual parent of our three incredible new commissioners, district attorney and Planning Office-manager.


(5) The “Ravalli County Questionnaire” was signed by almost 200 people, including three far-right candidates in the last election cycle, one of which shot a neighbor in his run-up for the Sheriff’s race (Wayne Kelly) and our two self-described “moralists”, one of whom accepted $100,000 from Wall-Mart in their corporate attempt to destroy our downtown business section (Dallas Erickson) and one who is alleged to have swindled $150,000 from a fellow believer while simultaneously condemning anyone who doesn’t want righteous people like himself sticking their nose in their bedrooms to Eternal Damnation (Harris Himes).


(6) ALEC is much more powerful than a lobby or front group. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. The corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the country as their own important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC, which describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization, predates the Supreme Court’s 2010 ‘Citizens’ United’ decision by a significant timeframe. ALECexposed.org.


(7) Ironically, the “father” of Montana Deregulation, Fred Thomas, whose successful 1997 deregulation legislation was written by Goldman-Sachs, is running for SD 45, which HD 89 is within. If consummated, this would be a match made in 1% heaven.


(8) It’s worth noting here that Christian Fundamentalism is not Christianity Whole-Cloth. It is a sect of Christianity, and a particularly peculiar one in this age of science for lack of a better word. Consider that one of the main tenets of Fundamentalism is that every word in the Bible is literally true, that the Earth is in fact only 6,000 years old, etc. Many of these good folks, in turn, believe that this literal belief in the Bible is a required pre-requisite to Constitutional Literalism, which is the Far-Right tenet that the U.S. Constitution—a document written during the European Age of Enlightenment by men who specifically believed in Science with a capital “S” was divinely-inspired AS WRITTEN and all frivolous add-ons to it, such as the last dozen or so amendments and 200 years of case law, are the Devil’s work. Add to this history-as-seen-through-a-literalist-prism that many of these divinely-inspired “founding fathers” specifically refused to self-identify with the Christian Religion at all, were slaveholders, or both. One can only say “ Wow”.

Tempest In A Teapot

So here’s the deal in Ravalli County these days. It comes down to the inevitable collision between unreal ideology and real people, budgets and lawsuits. There are also a few corollaries I’d like to address and I’ll try to be coherent, but I want to have fun, too. So…begging your indulgence…here we go.

 Two nice round numbers to keep in mind when thinking about the Ravalli County budget is $50,000 and $250,000. Also keep in mind that Magic, at least in its application to current far-far (far-far) right ideological tenets, is real.

When our newly-elected commissioners presented their budget last August, their first move was to claim that the county was in “crisis”. In real-speak, this “crisis” was manufactured by applying their other-worldly ideology to real-world numbers. In other words, the previous commission had been advised by the very same budget director our new commissioners are now using, that a 3% reserve was normal and fine for a county like ours. After the election, the Ideological Ones (our new commissioners) proclaimed that 3% to be an odious number foisted upon an unsuspecting citizenry by socialists and Agenda 21 dupes who didn’t want them to know that We The People were as broke as three of the richest men in the world keep telling us that we are. For a fact check, remember that Rupert Murdoch is from Australia and the Koch brothers from the sheikdom of Texas. Anyways, our new commission now insisted—using the same budget director as the old commissioners--that the county reserve should have always been 15% and that that’s by god the round hole they’re going to pound it home into come hell or high water.

They then proclaimed that anyone who didn’t agree with them was…well….a socialist or an Agenda 21 dupe not worthy of being represented by them. This blanket dismissal of political rights included folks like myself who were used to vacuous dismissals by developers-in-power. But the blanket was now being thrown over middle-road Bitterrooters who weren’t as used to the treatment and are now scratching their heads wondering how they found themselves wrapped up in the same blanket as U.N. dupes and tree huggers. To any dispassionate observer, which now includes a lot of self-identified conservatives in our valley, this can only be described as Magic.

                          

It’s also revisionist history. We all remember Grover Norquist and Ronald Reagan bragging about shrinking government to the size of an unwed pregnant starlet they could drown in a bazillionaire’s Jacuzzi-spa. We all remember Tinkle-down economics, the Reagan tenet that if you give all your money to rich people they’ll tinkle down on you. Actually, Tinkle-down economics worked as advertised, but laissez-faire economics didn’t. Bathtub-sized government is not only proven B…S…, the striving for it has some really unfortunate side effects for grandkids who didn’t deserve the effects but end up having to pay for them. The Occupy Wall Street movement can be labeled our Exhibit A of really-pissed-off grandkids paying for the follies of their largely aging, predominantly white-middle-class tea-party grandparents, which we’ll label Exhibit B. It didn’t work, doesn’t work, deficits soared and will soar, and the blame for the debacle gets and will get shifted to communists, or in our case, wolves (Exhibit C). This is magic, and believe me. I’m in awe of it.

The amount our intrepid tepid tea ones decreed would save us from communist debtor’s prison (or a pack or two of wolves in our case) was placed at something looking like a quarter of a million dollars. I can’t say the exact number because I’m not sure anyone really knows, but that was roughly what they were going to “save” by firing 20+ county employees, the majority of whom were our lowest-paid salaried workers. The most vulnerable, in other words. Mostly women, in other words.

What a huge coincidence it seemed to all of us who recognized this figure as almost identically-matching the amount the commissioners almost simultaneously agreed to settle for with a disgruntled employee in a secret, improperly-noticed meeting over what turned out to be a bungled political-payback scheme!

Add to this coincidence the first lawsuit, filed by our two J.P.s, claiming that the commissioners were overstepping constitutional separation-of-powers boundaries by unilaterally firing court staff the judges claimed were critical to maintaining the kind of court required to provide justice to the people. By statute and by constitution, both state and federal, the executive branch, our commission in this case, can’t simply wage economic war with the judiciary branch by decree, which they were attempting to do.

Never mind, said the commissioners. They wanted to save the citizens that $42,500 by firing the two women so they took the county to court against itself. Ironically, the trial, conducted in Judge Langton’s court at undisclosed public expense, was argued for the commissioners by Howard Recht, a new hire in the county attorney’s office at $64,000/yr. The justices hired former county attorney George Corn, also at undisclosed public expense. George grilled Kanenwisher to a fine brown toast on the stand, and the county lost all the way around, fiscally-speaking. The commissioners in turn pulled out their magic Ideology Cosmoscope (I guess), inserted the court debacle into it which in turn shined an image against their wall that looked eerily similar to a Kanenwisher power-point presentation, and came up with The Revelation. Rather than lick their wounds and at least act like they believe their own rhetoric about “limited government”, they would throw even MORE supposedly-scarce county resources toward firing two relatively-low-paid women and take this freight train of a case all the way to the Montana Supreme Court. This could take years and cost the county far more than they are purporting to save”…………...........................................................................Sigh...

And there’s so much more. In another huge coincidence, the amount they claimed to be trying to “save” by spending more than the “savings could possibly be worth was almost immediately matched—by themselves   again! This time, it was the $48,000 paid out to political developer-benefactors Aldo and Nicki Sardot to upgrade their subdivision road. This deal is fraught with inconsistencies and downright hypocrisy, including another improperly-noticed Aug. 29^th meeting that might as well have been secret when they gave their friends the money, in part because it appears they actually falsified the public record before anyone knew what was happening. We’ll see where that goes, but there's a lawsuit pending on this now, and We The Folks are hopeful that a decision will ensue that enforces accountability on these true believers in the Wicked Witch and socialist wolves.

O.K., speaking of $50,000, how about that Title X grant to fund our Family Planning Clinic that the commissioners bent over backwards trying not to take because it wasn’t right to ask the federal government to do anything for low-income women? Now Commissioner Foss is claiming it’s all our fault we didn’t look for the “alternative” funds that they actually voted to find themselves, even though if they ever found such funds they would try to do something illegal with them due to discrimination issues (see newsletter). She’s also magically saying that they were going to accept the funds all along, that all those official minutes she and her fellow commissioners approved were just a big misunderstanding for those who can't read between the lines and she hopes those mean ol’ pregnant teenagers don’t pester the broke federal government anymore to take care of them. However, inserted into their truly inestimable Ideology Cosmoscope, which shined an image against their wall eerily similar to a Kanenwisher power-point presentation, they had ANOTHER REVELATION. $40,000 in federal grant money revealed itself as a GOOD THING when such funds are applied to building a jetport-lite to facilitate the transportation of golf clubs for rich out-of-staters , and they have not only duly accepted those funds in the name of We The One Percent, but they have their hands out for more.

Now a word about the Civil War. Has it occurred to you yet, when reading about all the wolf horror stories brought forth by neighbors of ours who by their own account moved to our little corner of The Wild West for, well, the Wild West, and actually dress the part complete with guns, that these same folks are also adamantly admitting to being scared to go outside their houses to experience some of that wildness? Wolves can legitimately be seen as scary creatures, to be sure, but so can cars and semi-trucks on a slippery winter road. Does one need to state the obvious? That in choosing a frightening experience you’d think these cowboy-bedecked folks would choose a face-to-face meeting with a beautiful, scary animal in the wild than an un-beautiful semi’s grill on I-90?

Just for reference, I log at least as much time in the woods and hills as most wolf-o-phobes can match, and it speaks volumes to me that I’ve not yet seen a wolf face-to-face. Only their tracks, scat and howls. They go out of their way to avoid anyone who’s really out there, so what the hell? If you have an encounter, I’d say savor it, or at least be honest about it.

Just a postscript on “coordination”: We still have an outstanding Freedom of Information request from last January concerning our commissions’ collusion and possible conflict-of-interest in American Stewards of Liberty’s  for-profit “coordination workshop” put on here in Hamilton for $45/head with four out of five of our commissioners attending. The commission has never honored their statutory obligation to fork over the goods,  like who actually profited from the meeting, what other meetings have our commissioners had with ASL etc. and we feel this would amount to another open-meeting violation as well as a broader open-government violation (vis a vis FOIA). Hasn't happened yet.

Finally, our new Planning Office-Manager Terry Nelson is pulling in about $50,000 with his government plum job gifted to him by his political beneficiaries—our new commissioners. Neslon, as you might remember, is the current Ravalli County Republican Central Committee chair, owns Applebury Surveying, believes the Earth is 6,000 years old, and has no professional experience in planning other than circumventing subdivision regulations for himself and his clients. Kanenwisher and Stoltz actually had to change the job description and title to fit Nelson’s un-qualifications. You might also remember that when he accepted the position, he publicly promised not to take on any new business for Applebury Surveying in an effort to side-step citizens’ charges of conflict-of-interest. There’s now hard evidence sitting on the table, so to speak, that Nelson has broken that promise and has willfully created screaming conflict-of-interest and corruption issues for himself by doing Applebury Survey business on county time in spades. He has yet to be publicly called out for this behavior.

As far as real magic goes, I find myself wishing that our local Celebrating Conservative spawn would click their collective heels three times and go back to pre-Civil War Kansas or wherever it is these crazy notions they’re operating under still hold some water. Suffice it to say that from my perspective as a veteran, a 30+-year-Montana resident, a descendent of pilgrims and union soldiers, prairie wives and  (real) cowboys, a little real-world perspective on the Big Bad Wolf and other related discussions going on in all of our lofty levels of government would be refreshing, and even welcome. Let’s have coffee sometime and talk about antique guns!

Next post promised will be on Hamilton School District

preface to Tempest in a Teapot

Preface to  Tempest in a Teapot

If someone told me that 99.9% of American scientists are involved in a massive conspiracy along with 99.9% of the rest of the world’s scientists to fool the American people into U.N. slavery through Agenda 21-style global-warming strategems, I would say that person should get a copy of the movie “Dr. Strangelove” and take notes. I’d point out they were manifesting classic symptoms of sociopathic paranoia that were identifiable to Hollywood script writers at least as far back as 1964 and that they were probably a danger to others if not treated, and I’d be right. If that same someone were to indignantly protest that I was misrepresenting her, that she clearly said she believed it was closer to 99% instead of my inflated 99.9%, I’d be forced to add that she was delusional to boot, still just as dangerous, and I’d be right again. If that person then accused me of being a U.N. dupe for holding such unpatriotic views, I’d be amused. Finally, if that person ran for public office and won, deafening fire alarms would start going off in my head and, once again, I’d be right.

Reasonable people who live in Ravalli County, Montana know that this isn’t a hypothetical situation. They’d also recognize that, compared to the toxic paranoid stew of national teabaggery these days, the Bitterroot is just a little teapot’s worth of trouble. But although real tempests are nothing if not localized catastrophes, the tempest we’re experiencing here is our own local version of what's going on all over our great land these days, and a symptom of a grave, possibly fatal, national illness. Every small, rural community is getting hit in similar ways. In a Democracy, Ignorance is Death, and when the burnt scrum of provincial local politics at the bottom of the pot finally builds up and boils over, the stew tastes like nothing more than overcooked personal issues liberally seasoned with jingoist bullshit . Like Samuel Johnson famously put it, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. He was talking about false patriotism, but we’ve all internalized his maxim, so to speak. So we’re stuck with it, and since we are, let’s use it to contemplate mass paranoia fed by corporate demagoguery.

I write this in the interest of full disclosure. Notwithstanding limiting factors such as time constraints and caffeine shortages, this attempt sums up my baseline definition of “paranoia” in any current political sense. All similarities to actual people and events, therefore, are completely intentional, as are references to “teabaggers” and “teabaggery”. I am, at heart, like Pete Seeger once said, not really a pacifist. If someone were really attacking my homeland—as I believe they are-- I would like to think I’d place myself in the front lines—at least rhetorically, eh? Here's hopin' for a more-informed public and please be forewarned.