Part of a periodic series of reminders that, when Republicans in the Montana Legislature and members of Montana TEA Party organizations tell you they represent the mainstream of Montana views, they might just be wrong.

Park City Republican member of the House David Howard believe that Obama is little different than German, Japan, and Italy during World War 2. No word on WW2 Hungary, though.

TEA Party stalwart Eric Olsen believes that statues of athletes and entertainers are part of the Marxist agenda. You can criticize my President, my nation, and my party, Mr. Olsen, but leave your lies about baseball off my Internet.

Republican candidate for State Auditor and opponent of government (confused as I am?) Derek Skees might want to work a bit on his campaign messaging just a bit. He’s certainly right about that “least capable” bit, but he should probably apologize to the good people of the Flathead. I’m certain they wouldn’t vote for him again.

Bob Fanning’s running mate, Chuck Baldwin, in his typically understated way, argued that the passage of the NDAA has turned the United States into a war zone:

Pastor Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party’s candidate for President in 2008, wrote, “Americans should realize that, coupled with the Patriot Act, the NDAA, for all intents and purposes, completely nullifies a good portion of the Bill of Rights, turns the United States into a war zone, and places US citizens under military rule.”

Fanning and Baldwin also have a Confederate-style plan to save Montana:

Which of the Gubernatorial Candidate teams have a plan to set up and execute a sovereign state economy, independent of the federal economy, with our own banking system independent of the Fed Money Monopoly, as needed for our state’s survival for when this End Game of Federal, State, and County collapses occur?  Only the Fanning/Baldwin team have a contingency plan, or even a clue as to what to do and how to do it.  This is the reason for their strong 10^th amendment stand as part of their campaign message.

Vote for Reason. Vote for a Democrat.

Highlighting some of the most interesting and provocative posts in the past week at Montana blogs.

D Gregory Smith pointed out, that despite constantly talking about his availability to Montanans, Representative Rehberg has been awfully unwilling to meet with them lately.

Montana Cowgirl found it interesting that Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Hill would depict himself as someone who struggled as a single father, given the reasons he became one.

I’m not sure that I agree with much of anything Ed Berry says, but I wonder if he’s right that far right conservatives will not support Representative Rehberg because of his support of the Defense Authorization Act and HR 1505.

Rob Natelson managed to blame liberals for the Citizens United decision. It’s really a conservative jurisprudence must-read.

Barb Rush showed once again why she should not ever be elected to the School Board.

Over here, I kept yammering on about Representative Rehberg’s continued dishonesty about Pell Grants, new poster Winston wondered why campaign web sites weren’t in better shape, and Gabriel Furshong argued for the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act.

Montana’s hive of conspiracy theories and offensive commentary, PolyMontana, is featuring a post that suggests the Obama Administration murdered the Special Forces members recently killed in Afghanistan. No, really.

Ed Berry, the site’s peculiar owner, posted a piece from “Global Research” offering a conspiracy theory rivaling the worst of those from the 9/11 Truthers. In part, it suggests:

The wiping out of 30 US special forces in the Chinook helicopter crash in Afghanistan comes at a time when Washington’s official version of how it carried out the assassination of Osama bin Laden was falling apart from incredulity.

Among the 38 dead in the helicopter disaster – the biggest single loss of American lives in the 10-year Afghanistan war of occupation – are believed to have been 17 US Navy Seals. The dead also include other members of US special forces and Afghan commandos.

The argument goes something like this: either American forces shot down this helicopter or it was crashed intentionally to cover up the “big lie” that bin Laden was killed by American forces in Pakistan. One has to assume that those responsible will themselves soon be killed to cover up the cover up. Until Jason Bourne uncovers the plot, I imagine.

Berry’s crackpot site isn’t the only rightwing outlet trying to exploit this tragic loss, of course. The Investor’s Business Daily posits that the members of the team were killed because Vice President Biden outed them to the Taliban:

The RPG that felled the SEALs may have been a random act of war. The Taliban could have just gotten lucky. Or they could have been plotting and waiting for revenge, looking for helicopters that might be carrying more SEALs on another mission, a big bull’s-eye painted on their backs by a vice president who forgot that loose lips sink ships — and can get Navy SEALs killed.

Another entirely plausible theory from an impeccable source.

It’s not surprising that people so divorced from reality could confuse a bad B movie plot with actual events, but it’s astonishing that those who identify themselves as such strong supporters of the military would be willing to exploit a tragedy like this to score cheap political points.

Offensive and ignorant beyond imagining.

It’s quite likely that he has a number of peculiar (read antebellum) ideas about women, but I found this tidbit in his paean to Michelle Bachman too funny to ignore. He writes:

On the practical level in the TV age:  Bachmann easily pulls off the challenging feat of looking simultaneously traditionally-feminine and competent.

Strangely enough, I’ve never found it challenging for women to be both competent and “traditionally-feminine.” In fact, I think that both men and women can be quite competent no matter how they fit Professor Natelson’s outdated views on gender, sex, and appearance.

In moments when I feel like the schism between the far right and reality is not as pronounced as I fear, I only need to visit conservative blogs and their comments to have my cynicism and pessimism restored.

A quick tour of sites like Red State, Michelle Malkin, and Free Republic reveals these “arguments,” presented less than 24 hours after the announcement of the death of the person responsible for the 9/11 attacks and many more crimes against the world:

• Never mind the fact that intel showed they knew where he was since last November.
  It must have been quite a struggle for Urkel to have his mind made up for him.
• Every anti military loon voted for this cut the military President, and now all of the peace now, cut and run lefties are all celebrating a military success and rushing to give their anti military candidate credit for sitting behind a desk.
• They are treating his body in Islamic tradition!
  WHEN OH WHEN WILL WE GET A GOVERNMENT THAT WILL HATE THE FREAKING ENEMY AND TRY TO HURT THEM!?!?!
  Oh, when our government is no longer allied with the enemy, I guess
• You do have a point. OR, Osama maybe died long ago and we now have confirmed the fact and decided to use it politically. That sounds more like this Thug-In-Chief’s tactics.
• This monster was a mass-murderer of almost 3000 innocent civilians. Instead of burial at sea, we should have marinated him in pig fat and strung his carcass up on a pole at the WTC site.But, I guess we don’t want to offend anyone, now do we…
• OBL has not been seen for years and yet all of a sudden were are supposed to believe he carelessly exposed himself in a high profile mansion/compound and then is hastily buried at sea?
• Is there any doubt why he released his birth certificate when he did. Now no will be able to question it.

Unfortunately, that kind of response isn’t just anonymous commenters online, but comes from Montanans as well. Jennifer Olson, the other person in her father’s Montana Shrugged Tea Party Patriots, had to attack the President as well:

Is it too much to ask that Americans all take this moment to congratulate our military and intelligence services for their efforts and thank them for the risks they’ve taken? To reflect seriously about what this means for the future of the “war on terror”? Wouldn’t those be the actions of a patriot?

Now, of course, a few isolated comments online can perhaps be taken with a grain of salt, but it’s important to remember that the Republican Party has been hijacked by this kind of extremist, the kind who will not believe that Osama bin Laden has been killed until they see the long-form death certificate. The majority of Republicans may not hold these views, but when 45% of Republicans believe that Obama was not born in the United States, the GOP has become a party dominated by a conspiracy theorists and ideologues.

A few readers have questioned how one might be able to tell if the 14th richest member of Congress, a man with a net worth of as much as $56 million dollars, and one who “owns the rims” around Billings might be struggling from the economic downturn he and his party created. I’ve created this brief list and would love to hear some more.

10. He has to further sub-divide the ranch his father and grandfather built, lying to potential homeowners in the process.

9. He waits until he gets a 10 cent discount on gas with his Safeway Club Card before filling up his personal helicopter.

8. He only buys his alcohol in massive quantities to get a bulk discount.

7. He saves money by sleeping in his office and some of the sketchiest bars in Washington D.C.

6. He claims not to remember the minimum wage, so he doesn’t have to pay it to his employees. Oh, and he keeps voting against it, too.

5. He resorts to paying Erik Iverson over the table or lets taxpayers pick up the tab.

4. He votes to cut vital services to the elderly, firefighters, veterans, police, schoolchildren and more to reduce his own tax burden.

3. He asked Steve Daines if he could have some of those cool Senate signs he had lying around in his garage.

2. He advocates gutting the Pell Grant program because college graduates are much more expensive to hire than those making the new minimum wage of $1.25/hour.

1. He sues the city of Billings and its hard-working firefighters to raise a little personal cash.

This is spectacular.

In nearly six years of blogging, I don’t know that I have ever promoted an old post back to the front page, but following the Senate’s 29-21 vote to repeal the voter-approved medical marijuana imitative, this post seems even more relevant.

This session is a failure of leadership, vision, and governance. The GOP majority should be ashamed of itself.

Reprise:

While the GOP “leadership” at the Montana Legislature will no doubt blame their poor grades from Montana voters on the EVIL, LIBERAL, GODLESS media and its decision to cover their actual bills and speeches, it’s becoming clear that Montana voters are seeing exactly what you get when you elect a batch of uninformed, unprepared, often bigoted, ideologues to the People’s House: the worst legislative session in decades, if not longer. The Republicans can scream that they are creating jobs until they are hoarse, but their obsessive focus on an extremist agenda Montanans don’t support has turned this session into an almost complete waste of time, other than as an object lesson in why we shouldn’t vote these people in again.

No issue better exemplifies this failure than medical marijuana.

Going in to the session, the Republicans had a mandate to reform medical marijuana laws. Even supporters of the law, people who had voted for it, were concerned about the abuses being perpetrated by “entrepreneurs” like Jason Crist and his kind. Far too many people were getting medical marijuana cards for spurious reasons, making a mockery of federal and state laws designed to control the use of the drug.

Montanans, who aren’t ready for full legalization or even decriminalization across the state, would have absolutely supported sensible regulation and stricter controls over the sale and distribution of cannabis. It would have been smart politics, sensible policymaking, and potentially even a way for the state to generate some desperately needed revenue.

But governing is hard. Legislating is hard. Because grandstanding for partisans and performing for the press is easier, that’s just what the Republicans at the Legislature did. We heard them cry out about imaginary drug cartels, organized crime, and teen prostitution. What we didn’t hear were solutions.

So, now, with the session coming towards a close, they’re considering HB 175, which would turn the decision back to voters. Rather than fixing the legislation (the task of the Legislature), this decision would put Montana voters in an untenable position: either criminalize the behavior of thousands of sick Montanans or continue a legal regime ripe for abuse.

The ballot box isn’t the place to legislate and refine laws; that should have happened in the big building a few blocks away. The Republicans have failed to do their jobs—and as concerned as they are about the Constitution, it’s hard to understand how they don’t realize what they are supposed to be doing.

Wouldn’t those hours spent debating UN membership, unconstitutional federal nullification, a personhood amendment, the gold standard, concealed weapons in bars and banks, denying basic rights to our GLBT brothers and sisters, and all those other terrible bills have been better spent crafting a solution to the medical marijuana issue? Writing a sensible, fact-based budget? Funding schools on something other than assumptions?

Medical marijuana is just a symbol of this session’s failure. Whether it has been an obsessive focus on extremism or just basic lack of understanding about the function of government, the Republican legislature has failed to do its job. While they will cash their paychecks, collect their laptops and health insurance, we’re left holding the bills—and the broken policies they leave behind.

Representative Knox, while describing his bill that would have allowed the state of Montana to renegotiate union contracts if proven that they would result in an increase in taxes:

Knox said it’s not about breaking unions, but rather fiscal responsibility. “They’re only wanting what’s been promised to them, and I understand that,” he said, “we need to change the promises, we can’t promise the moon and give them a rock.”

Promise: A declaration assuring that one will or will not do something; a vow.

Roger Koopman knows conservatism. You might say he is conservatism in Montana, and I applaud his efforts to expose the Montana Legislature for the hotbed of Marxist-Leninism it has so clearly become in the past few months.

Koopman is compiling a scorecard of Legislature for his Montana Conservative Alliance in which he categorizes members as Conservative, Conservative Leaning, Liberal Leaning, or Liberal.

Half way through this session, one marked by massive votes in favor of nullifying federal laws and allowing guns in banks and bars, Koopman has determined that more members of the GOP caucus are left of center than right.

Some of the specifics are even more amazing.

Twenty of the Republicans are identified as Liberal Leaning, including these champions of the progressive left: Wendy Warburton, Pat Ingraham, Jim Shockley, and Ken Peterson.

More ominously, Koopman identified a collection of 33 “Republican” Internationale-singing, beret-wearing, borscht-eating Liberals, including Janna Taylor, Mike Milburn, Taylor Brown,and Jeff Welborn.

That is some kind of litmus test for conservatism! One can almost imagine Koopman running through a list of potential candidates for office.

Genghis Khan—ruthless, nomadic herder, believed in private property, strong defense of the right to bear arms… but he did promote religious tolerance. Liberal Leaning

Ronald Reagan—raised taxes, gave signed a bill granting amnesty to illegal aliens, held meetings with our Soviet adversaries. Communist Leaning

I can honestly say I wish nothing but the best for Mr. Koopman in his crusade to purify the Republican Party. It can’t come quickly enough.