Note to readers

Flathead Memo is standing down today, but will post during the Labor Day weekend.

Two more signs that Tester and Rosendale are running neck ‘n neck

Sign one. President Trump is holding a rally for Rosendale in Billings on 6 September. He would not be making that 1,700-mile flight unless Republican campaign strategists believe the race is close and that Trump’s presence in Montana could make the difference between defeat and victory for Rosendale.

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Partisan poll reports Rosendale leads Tester by two points

A poll conducted 20–22 August by WPA Intelligence, and commissioned by the Republican National Senatorial Committee, reports that Matt Rosendale is leading incumbent Sen. Jon Tester 47 to 45 percent. The probability that Rosendale is leading is 69 percent. FiveThirtyEight gives WPA a “B” rating.

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A sales tax by any other name is still a sales tax

If certain people in Montana had their way, the phrase “sales tax” could be used only for a statewide sales tax. That’s because they know Montanans are dead set against a statewide sales tax, and they don’t want a “sales tax” “confused” or “conflated” with a local option sales tax, which they prefer calling a “local option tax” or, as in one bill in the last legislature, an “infrastructure tax.”

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City leaders in Montana still want a local sales tax

Greg Strandberg, who writes the Montana Blog at www.bigskywords.com, is not universally admired by Montana’s Democrats. Many, frankly, hate his guts. On occasion, I’ve not always agreed with him.

Yesterday, he published 10 Montana Democrats That Want a Sales Tax, a post that names names and that will infuriate a lot of Democrats. It’s an excellent overview of the forces that are gathering to try to convince Montana’s legislature to approve a local option sales tax, such as is inflicted on the residents of Whitefish.

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Six weeks before voting starts — 1609 mdt

As always, I’ll be voting in person on election day. As long as I have the strength to visit my polling place, even if I have to be driven there in a wheelchair while breathing bottled oxygen, that’s were I’ll vote. (After I die, I’m considering being buried in Butte so I can vote from the grave.)

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Note to readers

Flathead Memo is standing down today.

A note on website redesigns

My blood pressure is up. The New York Times and Talking Points Memo have redesigned their websites. The Times’ home page now sprawls over hell and gone on my 24-inch monitor. It’s much harder to read than before. TPM has rearranged everything in search of the perfect home page. It’s also much harder to read than before.

The effect is akin to coming home to find your spouse has thrown out your comfortable overstuffed armchairs and couches, replacing them with hideous, and spine breaking, Early American junk, and changing the layout of every room.

That’s not going to happen at Flathead Memo. TPM, the NYT, and others, are designing for little screens, the screens on smartphones and undersized tablet computers. That requires dumbing down designs, and using “responsive design” techniques that surrender the control of how a page looks to an algorithm. Computer and marketing geeks swear by responsive design. I swear at it.

Flathead Memo is designed for a screen at least 1,024 pixels wide. Desktop, laptop, and most tablet, computers have screens that wide or wider. That’s good enough. People who really want to read Flathead Memo will read it on a decent sized screen, not on a telephone. Figuratively speaking, I’m keeping my comfortable chairs, and keeping them in the same place.

Nate Silver rates Gianforte v Williams as a toss-up to likely GOP

At fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver presents three sets of predictions for the U.S. House of Representatives. He gives the Democrats a 75 percent chance of winning control of the U.S. House.

Silver rates incumbent Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte’s odds of winning a second term as slightly better than even to likely. Here’s a table of the three cases:

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Flathead filling with smoke again

Updated at 1151 MDT. By late afternoon yesterday, air quality in the Flathead was at “moderate” levels, down from the “very unhealthy” levels we experienced Sunday. This morning, the PM 2.5 concentration increased to over 100µg/m^3 again. Visibility is down, and the mercury sank to 37°F. Stepping outside provides an opportunity to cough in the cold. Here’s the time series plot of one-hour PM 2.5 values for the Flathead for 14 August through 1100 MDT this morning.

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Bullets, ballots, and Bullock

Sen. Steve Daines received good news over the weekend. Gov. Steve Bullock won’t be running against him in 2020. That’s because Bullock announced, in a backhanded way, that he’s running for president.

Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, reports the Washington Post, Bullock said he would support a ban on assault weapons, the AR-15 genre of semiautomatic military style rifles that are designed for killing people and have been employed in some of the nation’s most horrific mass shootings.

Bullock, a hunter and gun owner, also supports universal background checks and restrictions on high capacity magazines.

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Ten days of smoke in the Flathead Valley

On 7 August, the Flathead Valley filled with smoke — and with a couple of exceptions, has remained full of smoke. The concentrations of fine (≤ 2.5 microns) particulates are published online by Montana’s Air Quality Bureau, but the AQB’s graphs only cover only one day (midnight-to-midnight) of data, and thus do not tell the extended story. The graph below displays one-hour averages, but not the health category breakpoints.

PDF for printing
Download data

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Flathead Memo is standing down today because of smoke

It’s an oppressive day in the Flathead. Dead calm, overcast, smokey, with temperatures in the high seventies at Glacier International, and the low seventies at my place, and the relative humidity in the 25–30 percent range. According to Montana’s air quality bureau, the Flathead’s air is “Unhealthy for sensitive groups.” Unfortunately, my age means I belong to a sensitive group, and my lungs and watering eyes confirm my membership. See you tomorrow. I hope. — JRC

Pearl Jam’s poster, a nasty oped, Save the Brain, single-payer truth

Pearl Jam’s poster. The band’s bass player, a friend of Sen. Jon Tester, and no friend of President Trump, commissioned a controversial poster for the band’s concert in Missoula earlier this week. State Auditor Mass Rosendale, Tester’s Republican opponent, took umbrage, denouncing the poster. The story made the Washington Post. Tester’s spokesman, Chris Meagher, sort of apologized.

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Gianforte’s attack ad has weird “fast food hamburger” ending

As J.M. Brown noted at The Western Word this morning, Rep. Greg Gianforte’s new 30-second spot attacking Kathleen Williams is not the work of Mr. Nice Guy. It’s a savage attempt to tar Williams as a reckless critic of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) who loves immigrants more than she loves her fellow Americans. It’s also an ad featuring a very weird ending: a drawing of a pigtailed woman above the words “Every fast food hamburger” that flashes on the screen for a fraction of a second.

Frame grab from the end of Gianforte’s attack ad.

It’s almost an example of subliminal advertising. Compared to Clara Peller’s “Where’s the beef?” ads for Wendys in 1984, it’s pretty bland fare. But why the devil is it in a political ad?

Gianforte’s decision to employ the bodyslam approach to campaign ads from the gitgo probably is as much an indication he’s worried about Williams as it is a reflection of his personality. As for ICE, an agency that makes life miserable for immigrants, it may have become so brutal that it’s beyond redemption. Williams’ criticism of it is merited. Gianforte’s criticism of Williams is not.

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Soapboxin’ with Utah Phillips

Utah now shouts from his soapbox in the sky, but while he was still on Earth, labor had no better or wittier friend. Were he still with us, he probably would be in Three Forks, standing with the locked out union.

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How much should we worry about right wing
demonstrators when they’re outnumbered by the police?

Not much, in my opinion. Later today, the Unite the Right Rally 2 will be held in Washington, DC. According to The Hill, as many as 400 will attend, waving American and Confederate flags. They’ll be outnumbered by the police and counter-protesters.

There could be trouble. Black-masked Antifa thugs reportedly are in town, intent on starting fights and giving the political left a bad name. And some of the Unite the Righters will be the same people who gathered in Charlottesville, VA, last August, where one counter-protester was killed and another beaten badly.

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When elections are close, Democrats don’t vote for Greens

Democratic leaders live in mortal fear of the Green Party, believing that when Green Party candidates are on the ballot, they steal votes from Democratic candidates. That’s true only for a small number of Democrats, and only when the election is so one-sided that a few defections won’t make a difference. But, as Tuesday’s special election in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District demonstrates, when elections are close, Democrats vote for the Democratic candidate.

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The Flathead needs to go to Stage 2 fire restrictions Right Now!

So much for standing down. Public safety exigencies require comment.

The thermometer in the shade on my back porch reads 100°F. It’s still a few degrees cooler at Glacier International Airport, but the relative humidity is down to 18 percent and the rising south wind is blowing at nine miles per hour. Walking across my lawn, which I’m trying to water 24/7, the grass snaps, crackles, and pops, underneath my feet. Everything is tinder dry, ready to burst into flame at the slightest spark. The National Weather Service has issued a fire weather watch Red Flag Warning for Friday and Saturday.

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Election notes & stand down advisory

Stand down advisory. Flathead Memo will stand down tomorrow and Friday, and possibly over the weekend as well.

Election notes

Ohio’s 12th congressional district. One hundred percent of the precincts have been counted, but as of daybreak approximately 8,400 absentee, military, and provisional, ballots remained to be counted. Republican Balderson leads Democrat O’Connor by 1,754 votes. O’Connor would need to receive more than 60 percent of the uncounted ballots to win by a single vote. That seems unlikely. Trump carried the district by 11 percent, so the outcome does not augur well for Ohio’s Republicans in November.

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Notes on free speech and on police and protesters

Free speech. Yesterday, Apple, Facebook, and YouTube, kicked Alex Jone off their social media platforms. Jones, a not-that-well-educated conspiracy enthusiast who is not always constrained by fact, still has his Infowars website for disseminating his ideas, which conservative attorney David French, writing at the New York Times, finds loathsome.

As French observes, Apple, et al, were within their rights to deny their platforms to Jones. Whether they were wise is another question. Driving people like Jones underground instead of keeping them in the sunlight, where their lies and calumnies can be exposed and refuted, may not be to society’s ultimate benefit.

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How Flathead legislators voted on the call for a special session

Four voted for calling a special session, eight voted against the call, and two abstained from voting. Because not voting was the functional equivalent of a “No” vote, abstaining from voting was a backdoor “No” vote, and while legal, an abdication of a legislators moral obligation to stand up and be counted clearly.

The “Yes” votes were cast by the Kalispell triumvirate of Blasdel, Garner, and Lavin, and by Dee Brown of Hungry Horse. I’ve prepared a spreadsheet of the actions of all of Montana’s legislators on the call for the special session.

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A complete accounting of the votes cast
on the call for a special legislative session

At The Montana Post, Pete Talbot, after much searching, found the final tally for the failed call for a special legislative session to meddle with two citizens initiatives, I-185 (extending expanded Medicaid and paying for it with a tobacco tax increase) and I-186 (requiring that mining operations not require treating water in perpetuity).

Because Secretary of State Stapleton’s report contained only the names of the legislators casting votes for or against calling the session, I’ve prepared a spreadsheet listing all 150 legislators, their votes and whether they abstained, and their party, district, and city. Telephone numbers, and mailing and email addresses are available from the roster on the legislature’s website. Stapleton would not have annoyed the public had his tally contained as much information as my spreadsheet.

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“Dark Money, Green Party” and practical advice for Montana’s Greens

Who paid Advanced Micro Targeting to gather signatures to qualify Montana’s Green Party for the 2018 ballot? That’s still unknown, but reporters at KGBA, the University of Montana’s student radio station, are digging into the subject and publishing their findings in a series of podcasts. The first, Dark Money, Green Party, available on the station’s website, interviews two of the signature gathers who worked for AMT. It’s well worth your listening time.

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Hand counted paper ballots cannot be hacked.
Computerized voter registration databases can.

Electronic voting machines, and machines that count paper ballots (the system we use in Montana), can be hacked. They also can be programmed incorrectly, a mistake that can have the same outcome as a hack.

The remedy is simple, but labor intensive: paper ballots counted by hand. That process introduces other paths to error, but it cannot be tampered with by a cyberwarrior entering commands in a laptop in Moscow.

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Updated Dictionary of Democratic Dogs

There’s a species of congressional Democrats, the Blue Dog caucus, that, I’m sorry to say, sometimes dogs it when confronted with the opportunity to cast a progressive vote. And that’s the kindest possible description of their dilatory tactics and incoherent policy announcements. But they’re not the only Democratic dogs. There are others, so here, for your convenience, is a limited guide to a species that’s not always humankind’s best friend:

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An attractive weed

Meet yellow goatsbeard (tragopogon dubius), aka yellow salsify, aka fistulous goatsbeard, a hardy weed that from a distance resembles a dandelion. The root, long and hairy, exudes a sticky white liquid. Goatsbeard, a great subject for photography, is both a pretty flower and a pretty big nuisance. These images are of goatsbeard in my backyard.

There usually are 13 green bracts behind the yellow petals.

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