FEC stands for Federal Evasion Conspiracy

Nominally, FEC stands for the Federal Election Commission, the agency where campaign finance reports for federal elections are stored and made available to the public. “Made available” is a term of art for “made available in the manner least convenient and most confusing to the public.” Which is what our blessings in the Congress and White House want.

This evening I downloaded fundraising data for the major candidates for the Montana Democratic primary for the U.S. House. I chose the comma separated values (CSV) format, an ancient although still serviceable format that one can import into applications such as Excel and Filemaker Pro. Here’s the first row for John Heenan’s preprimary filing:

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Matt Bell’s mistakes in HD-94 primary were boneheaded, but they’re not criminally defamatory as the Larsen v. Bell complaint alleges

When Democratic heavyweights in Missoula began denouncing Matt Bell for filing against incumbent Rep. Kimberely Dudik in the Democratic primary for House District 94, I defended his right to challenge an incumbent. But I did not endorse him.

I’m mighty glad I didn’t. As described by Susan Elizabeth Shepard and Alex Sakariassen in a fine story in the Missoula Independent, Bell sent to HD-94 voters a campaign card claiming endorsements he did not receive, and making assertions about Dudick’s voting record that were not documented and, alleges Dudick’s treasurer, Cliff Larsen, just plain wrong.

In a 37-page complaint filed with Montana Commissioner of Political Practices on 29 May, Larsen accused Bell of violating several sections of Montana’s laws governing political campaigns. He also claims Bell violated Montana’s criminal defamation statute, MCA 45-8-212

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Pestering voters is a strategy that can backfire

Back when I had a telephone, and when my door didn’t sport a “Do Not Disturb” sign, almost the only time I heard from the Democratic Party, its candidates, and progressive organizations, was just before the election. They didn’t want to persuade me of the wisdom of their platform. They just wanted to make damn sure I voted.

That’s still the Democrats’ approach, and, as Lara Putnam reported in the American Prospect, it can backfire:

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Veterans by the numbers analysis produces surprises

My grandparents, all born in the nineteenth century, always called Memorial Day by its original name, Decoration Day. Every year, at the end of May, they solemnly placed flowers and flags on the graves of friends, family, and fellow Americans, who had fallen defending our nation. I’ve not continued the practice, limiting my ceremonial involvement to flying Old Glory from my front porch, and spending part of the holiday reading history. This Memorial Day weekend, I looked at the distribution of veterans in the fifty states and territories.

Montana has the third highest concentration of veterans among its adult population of all the state, ranking behind Alaska and Virginia. I’ve displayed the results in the graphs below.

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Registered voter turnout for Montana primary now at 17.2%

If turnout for Montana’s 2018 midterm primary election is similar to that for the 2006, 2010, and 2014, midterms, approximately half of the votes have been cast. The table below, which includes the 2017 special Congressional election as well as the last three midterms, shows that that the percentage of ballots cast by mail (absentee) has increased, but that turnout as a percentage of registered voters has held steady at approximately 33 percent.

Download data for table
Download turnout data for Montana’s primary, special, and general elections for 1920–2017.

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The Flathead’s big spenders on ballot measures &
I-185 ballot sponsor hire out-of-state signature gathering firm

There are two, Yes! for Flathead Farms and Water, which is promoting Flathead County Initiative 17-10, the Egan Slough zoning measure, and the Kalispell Regional Medical Center, Inc. Incidental Committee, which is supporting Initiative 185, the measure slapping a big tax on tobacco to fund expanded Medicaid.

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“Let us never fear to negotiate”

President Trump, once eager to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, has chickened out of the summit meeting that was scheduled for 12 June in Singapore. In doing so, he gave Jong-un a piece of his mind, but decided against giving peace a chance.

A president and former Naval officer who survived war employed a different approach.

In his inaugural speech, John F. Kennedy said:

Trump fears to negotiate, but he does not fear to rattle the nuclear sword and raise the specter of war.

Therefore, let us begin anew, without Trump.

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I’ve got my ticket for the long way round…

…two bottles of whiskey for the way…. The Bankesters performing Anna Kendrick’s Cups (When I’m Gone).

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Flowers releases Flathead sheriff candidates questionnaire

Kalispell activist Mayre Flowers, best known for her decades of work with Citizens for a Better Flathead, today released the results of a nine-question questionnaire she submitted to Flathead sheriff GOP primary candidates Cal Beringer, Brian Heino, Keith Stahlberg, and Jordan White. One of these men will be the Flathead’s next sheriff, as no other political party fielded a candidate.

The candidate’s answered at length. The questions, and their unedited answers, are available as a PDF.

Flowers put a lot of work into this, and has earned the community’s thanks for her efforts.

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Andy Shirtliff for PSC District 5 Commissioner
Vote YES on the Egan Slough zoning change ballot measure

An important office that should not be filled by an election, especially by a partisan election, and a neighborhood knife fight generating a spot zoning proposal that should not be on a primary ballot, are the subjects of today’s endorsements.

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One in six absentee ballots returned thus far

As of 20 May, the Montana Secretary of State reports that 355,993 voters — 52.5 percent of the state’s 678,478 registered voters — have been mailed absentee ballots, and that 15.8 percent of the absentee ballots have been returned. As some ballots undoubtedly are in transit via the U.S. Postal Service, the actual return rate is a bit higher.

As displayed in the graphs below, the numbers vary by county.

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I ignored my own good advice and made a mistake
reporting on today’s school shooting in Texas

First reports always are incomplete and often are wrong. Qualify one’s early comments on an event accordingly. That’s good advice that I offer frequently and try to follow.

But I didn’t do a good job of following it this morning when I Tweeted a link to the Houston Chronicle’s page on the shooting at the high school in Santa Fe, Texas, a small railroad town southwest of Houston. I introduced the link with “10 dead, 12 wounded, an AR-15 genre weapon, the shooter taken alive.” Most of that was correct, but identifying the weapon as an AR-15 genre rifle was not. I removed the Tweet after learning it was flawed.

According to later reports, the shooter, 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, used a shotgun and revolver owned legally by his father. There also are reports Pagourtzis might have used, or tried to use, pipe and pressure cooker bombs. A complete, and completely accurate, description of his arsenal probably won’t be compiled and released for a few days yet.

Meanwhile, I’m going to do a better, a much better, job of following my own advice.

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No cell tower at FHS, no slammer stay for Phil Mitchell

At the end, the cell tower vote wasn’t close. Tuesday evening, School District 5’s trustees rejected 7–1 Verizon’s request to put a powerful cell phone base transmitter atop Flathead High School. Some takeaways:

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Forum on cell tower at Flathead High begins at 1700 this evening

Citizens can speak this evening to a controversial proposal to put a cell phone base station on the roof of Flathead High School. After the one-hour forum, the regular meeting of School District 5 board of trustees begins.

Many opponents of the tower assert it will broadcase radio frequency radiation that can harm human health. The frequencies and power levels the tower would employ have not been, but should be, revealed.

Comments, available in the 67 megabyte documents package for the meeting, are running heavily against the tower, and the opponents of the tower have packed the record with information on the health effects of EMR.

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Note to readers

Appointments this morning and afternoon have filled my normal writing window. Therefore, I’ll be posting at length this evening. In the meantime, resist the temptation to fill out and return your mail ballot right away. The election is still three weeks away, and things could happen between now and then that could change your mind. — James Conner

Another graph of the Flathead at Blankenship

Here’s a graphical depiction of the Flathead River’s discharge at Blankenship on 10 May for 1940–2018. You can download my data set for the river at this point.

PDF for printing

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Jordan White leads the self-funding race in the
Republican primary for Flathead County Sheriff

Former undersheriff Jordan White, the least popular candidate in the Flathead County Sheriff Deputy Association’s endorsement poll (Brian Heino was endorsed with 80 percent of the vote), is the biggest self-funder in the four-man primary — and as the table below reveals, the biggest by a whopping amount.

The table is based on the C-5 campaign finance reports filed with Montana’s Commissioner of Political Practices at the end of April and in early May.

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Flathead River’s hydrograph at Blankenship
resembles hydrograph of flood year 1947

The Flathead River’s unfettered north and middle forks merge at the southwest tip of Glacier National Park just above the Blankenship Bridge, a popular recreational destination. A few miles downstream, just below Hungry Horse, at the eastern end of Badrock Canyon, the south fork joins the river to form the mainstem Flathead River.

The confluence of the north and middle forks of the Flathead River and the Blankenship Bridge. Larger image displaying the confluence of the north and middle forks, and the merging of the south fork at the entrance to Badrock Canyon (opens in new window).

Because the north and middle forks are wild flowing rivers, and the south fork is regulated by Hungry Horse Dam, which applied its chokehold at summer’s end in 1951, the river at Blankenship reveals the true runoff and serves as a proxy for the unregulated Flathead River above Flathead Lake.

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What’s next? Bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran?

It’s a sunny day in Kalispell, and schools election day. I was going to enjoy the weather, plant some flowers, vote, and defer posting until tomorrow. Then President Trump announced he was scuttling the deal the U.S. and other western nations cut with Iran. In that agreement, admittedly imperfect but a good start and much better than the status quo, western nations agreed to lift their sanctions against Iran in exchange for Iran’s agreeing to abandon the development of nuclear energy and weapons.

Trump says that wasn’t good enough, that he can negotiate a better deal, a deal that replaces the existing Iranian government with one approved by the White House and forever forbids Iran from even thinking about thinking about casting an evil eye toward Israel.

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Don’t build a cell phone tower at Flathead High School

Updates on Friday’s post on the proposed cell tower atop Flathead High School.

• I can find no documentation for School District 5’s assertion that the annual rent for the tower would be $20,400. That amount should be disregarded, and the district should replace it with the $16,800 per year contained in the contract. Meanwhile, reporters should stop using the higher figure.


• School board action deferred to 12 June. The 15 May forum is still on, but the school board has deferred discussion and consideration of the project until after the public comment window closes on 8 June.

Below, notes on several aspects of the issue, followed by my conclusions and recommendation.

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About the annual payment for cell tower
proposed for the roof of Flathead High School

School District 5’s cell tower page reports the annual payment to the district will be “…$20,400, to be paid to KPS, in equal monthly installments on the first day of the month, in advance.” The initial contract would be for five years, with the cell tower company's having the option to renew four times for a possible 25 years.

But the proposed contract with the school district says the annual payment is $16,800, increasing at the rate of two percent a year.

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Newspapers behaving badly — in New York, in Kalispell

This week, the conduct of two newspapers, one big, the other small, have not honored journalism.

• In the Big Apple, the Gray Lady, aka the New York Times, published a defense of national Democrats meddling in local elections without revealing that the oped’s author is a long-time member of the Democratic National Committee.


• In little Kalispell, the Daily InterLake, which lacks an iconic nickname, decided it was the place for a Chamber of Commerce ceremony presenting a Spirit of Enterprise award to Rep. Greg Gianforte, who pleaded guilty to assaulting reporter Ben Jacobs of The Guardian.

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Will Tester weather Trump’s “You kept me from getting my way” tantrum?

President Donald Trump is mad as hell that his choice to the the Veterans Administration, Admiral Ronny Jackson, was sunk by the due diligence of Sen. Jon Tester, among other — and Trump’s launched a holy war against Tester. He demands Tester’s resignation from the senate. His cronies are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads attacking Tester. And Trump himself suggests he may fly to Montana to deliver speeches damning Tester.

Will presidential rage rally Republicans to defeat Tester on 6 November? Not likely, as Montana State University political science professor David Parker noted at the Monkey Cage, Trump’s threats are unlikely to hurt Sen. Jon Tester. In fact, they may help him. in yesterday’s Washington Post.

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A sampling of political yard signs in the Flathead

Along with dandelions, and sometimes just as attractive, political yard signs are popping up on Flathead lawns as the 5 June primary and early May school elections approach. Here are a few from northwest Kalispell.

An easily read sign along North Meridian Road in Kalispell. Egan Slough 17-10 is the ballot measure expanding the Egan Slough zone established in 2002. If passed, the measure effectively bans a facility for producing bottled water. I view this as mostly a Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) issue and have not decided whether to vote for or against the ballot measure. But I do think ballot measures should appear only on the general election ballot in November.

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