This is just amazing. Countdown to The Restoration of Sarah Palin begins now…
April 2010
A few weeks ago, I was in Missoula at Bagels on Broadway watching a couple of high-school age kids engage in some “grassroots activism” on behalf of CI-105, the Montana Association of Realtors-backed initiative that would prevent Montana from ever raising revenue on real estate sales.
Their efforts were a combination of amusing and somewhat sad: every few minutes, one of the kids was calling their handler to find out when they could get lunch, because they were “hungry, tired, and lost in this town.” Not getting a response, they half-heartedly tried to get some signatures, so I decided to play along and asked what the initiative would do.
When they told me that the initiative would reduce taxes because Montanans were all “being double taxed” right now, I politely said I’d look into the initiative on my own. It’s hard to imagine a John Sinrud-backed organization telling its workers to be dishonest, isn’t it?
Apparently, I’m not the only one who has seen these signature gatherers.
I was reminded of this today when I read the story in today’s Independent Record about a couple of people working to pass I-160, to restrict trapping on Montana’s public lands. Instead of a collection of hired hands, misinformed and disinterested about the initiative they are collecting signatures for, the supporters of I-160 are passionate and knowledgeable, exactly the kind of people that the initiative process was designed for:
“I’ve put my life on hold and I’m accumulating debt left and right to do this,” Heister said. “I’m a student and I’m cleaning houses to make ends meet. But this is something I believe in. It’s a true grassroots effort.”
As of last week, supporters of I-160 had gathered 6,232 signatures across the state. They need 25,000 by mid-June to get the measure on November’s ballot.
It’s too bad that people like John Sinrud have done so much to corrupt such a powerful tool for direct democracy.
When he’s not making empty political gestures, you can usually count on
Representative Rehberg to fall back on his other campaign strategy, right wing, dishonest fear mongering. In a brief interview with Dan Testa at the Flathead Beacon, Rehberg went to both wells, drawing a long drink of the crazy each time.
Let’s start with the empty political gestures. Rehberg’s really trying to get a lot of mileage out of his plan to not support federal money coming to Montana, but the purported benefits of this grandstanding gesture that will actually hurt Montanans seem to get more illogical every day. Nothing would excite me more than the prospect of this financial wizard making more important decisions as a member of the Appropriations Committee:
“Everybody says, ‘Oh, that’s a pittance.’ OK, so a pittance doesn’t matter? Alright. Good. Why don’t you go ahead and give me that billion dollars from Montana and the billion across the country because for every dollar Montana gets remember, I’m just one of 435, and then there are a hundred senators,” he said. “So all of a sudden, it starts adding up.”
I’m beginning to wonder when the Montana Republican Party is going to come out against Social Security and Medicare. After all, they certainly seem supportive of the idea that the federal government has no role in health care.
At the latest hyperbolically named “rally” of the curiously lightly employed Montana Tea Party, Montana Republicans were central figures. According to the Independent Record, the Montana Republican Party’s Executive Director Bowen Greenwood issued a media advisory promoting the event and Republican legislative candidates were in attendance.
Can one assume that these candidates agree that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, not to mention dozens of smaller programs, should all be abolished as unconstitutional, socialistic schemes?
I’d certainly hate to consider the alternative: that Republicans are playing a cynical con game on Montana voters. Did Dennis Rehberg lose his playbook somewhere?
