Tagged: Jason Priest

Posted: May 16, 2013 at 6:07 am

National Watchdog Group Profiles Jason Priest’s Dark Money Group

Michael Beckel has just published a new profile on the dark money group a GOP state senator used to influence the Montana state Supreme Court race and block the Medicaid expansion.

The profile shows how Priest used dark money to demonize Supreme Court candidates Ed Sheehy and Elizabeth Best in support of a TEA Party candidate. Priest also used the dark money group to send out attack mailers to kill the Medicaid expansion. Because of Priest’s actions, 70,000 of Montanan’s most disadvantaged working poor won’t be able to get health care.

Beckel, who writes for the Center for Public Integrity, published the report on the heels of a new analysis by the National Institute on Money in State Politics that found Montana is one of 35 states where rules regarding the disclosure of political spending by independent groups are less stringent than federal election law.

There’s much more on this, so check out the links in Beckel’s story above.

Posted: April 29, 2013 at 7:26 am

The Ties that Bind

by Cowgirl

While embattled Montana state senator Jason Priest has tried to separate himself from American Traditions Partnership, his donor sheet tells a different story. Continue reading →

Posted: March 28, 2013 at 10:12 pm

Wrong Side of History

by Cowgirl

Montana lawmakers who have spent the entirety of their paltry careers voting against equality now find themselves on the wrong side of history. In the wake of the upcoming supreme court decision on equal marriage, no one who reads a newspaper can come to any other conclusion. Even Rush Limbaugh says marriage equality is inevitable.

The nutjob wing of Montana’s Republican Party aren’t just wrong, they’re way out in right field, and soon to be there alone. Montana is one of only four states that has a law on the books that makes being gay an imprisonable offense. This fact alone is despicable, but when you consider what else the Montana Legislature has done you start to wonder if the Montana legislature isn’t among the most bigoted in America.

Consider this: During the past 21 legislative sessions least 32 bills have been introduced to make all Montanans equal under the law. Some, like Sen. Facey’s SB 107 attempted to repeal the “deviate sexual conduct” law, others would have prevent discrimination in housing, or stopped the bullying of young people in schools. Many have been introduced by Sen. Christine Kaufmann, of Helena.

Not a single one of these bills has ever passed in the history of this state.

But it’s worse than that. The Montana legislature isn’t content with blocking equality bills. They’ve tried year after year to make things worse.
Look what they did in 1995, when Republican Senator Rick Holden added an amendment to a bill to require gay men and lesbians to register as felony sex offenders. Democrats tried to remove the amendment, but 32 of 50 Senators voted to keep it in.

It was only after twenty-four hours of scathing national press coverage from CNN that the Republicans were finally forced to take the sex offender amendment out. But not before Billings GOP Sen. Al Bishop decided to share his beliefs with the world. He said consensual activity between people of the same sex was “a worse offense than rape.” (The bill was HB 214 and predates the online legislative search.)

Anyway, the Chick-Fil-A munching bunch was not happy to be denied a “felony sex offender registry” of gay citizens. A couple of days later anti-gay slurs and graffiti were “scrawled across the doors of the capitol, and a famous statue was defaced. With no sense of irony, and no mention of the anti-gay nature of the spray-painted slogans, Senators introduced a bill to make defacing the capitol a felony.”

And who could forget what happened ten years later in 2005, when the all-day kindergarten was opposed by religious right Repubs, who claimed bill was part of the “gay agenda.” “The purported evidence given by these groups was that gay activists were NOT at the hearing, proving it was part of the activists’ secret agenda.”

Public sentiment is now so firmly behind equality that the reaction to democratic politicians who announce their support at this late date ranges from “who isn’t” to “where were you earlier.” The Montana Senate even voted, finally, to erase our “anti-sodomy law” which makes it an imprisonable crime to be gay. Although invalidated by our state supreme court in 1997, the law has remained on our books because Republicans have always refused to go along with efforts to scrap it.

Now, SB 107, a measure to strike the offensive language from our statutes finally passed the senate. That said, the vote was far from unanimous. Ten Republicans voted no.

Any day now the bill will be voted on in committee, and then on the Floor of the House. No assumptions can be made about body which includes Verdell Jackson, Krayton Kerns, David Howard and Jerry O’Neil, so start contacting the lawmakers in the House of Representatives, which you can do via this online form. FYI, you can always use the back button after submitting your message, which allows you to skip retyping all your info when you contact multiple legislators. Or you can cut and paste this list of House GOP legislators.

Conservatives were on the wrong side of history with women’s suffrage, they were on the wrong side of segregation. Let’s see whose side they’re on now.

Posted: March 27, 2013 at 9:13 pm

Montana Republicans Reach Out to Young People

by Cowgirl

NPR is reporting this week that the GOP is trying up it’s digital game. Republicans are taking heat because their anti-science platform and failure to embrace technology is repelling young voters.

But Montana Republicans could change the game this week at a Holiday Inn in Bozeman.

First, local repubs announced by modern email technology that former State Senator Joe Balyeat “will deliver a powerful power point presentation” this week on “Economic Freedom.” This is exciting stuff, and a major leap forward for the Montana GOP. Sure, the first emails were sent in the 1960′s, but PowerPoint first came into being as recently as 1987–and will certainly appeal to the many GOP’s who are young enough to have qualified for AARP cards in the last decade.

Senator Balyeat (pictured), though not a young person himself, was once a college student and is a “former editor of The Montana Companion,” which sounds like something a lot of young people have surely heard of. The GOP email states that Balyeat’s “list of accomplishments and awards is too long to catalogue here”–but we can at least try. He looks like a confederate general and wrote a book about how gays, the UN, and non-christians are leading America toward an armageddon.

With such an exciting, relevant speaker, a hip venue and a fascinating topic you can see that this event will be packed with youths, and not just with older men, angry and on the fringe-of society, conspiracy-theory minded, gun-wearing, Sasquatch hunters.

In all seriousness, technology isn’t the only roadblock preventing the Montana GOP from attracting young people and women. Who can forget the famous incident in Whitefish in 2010, when a burly guy with long white hair, tattoos and a mullet showed up at a female voter’s house with a gun on his belt and holding a clipboard. The woman called the police. The guy left. It was later discovered that the guy meant no harm. He was simply a canvasser, canvassing for the GOP.

That small incident in Whitefish has also played out on a much bigger stage in Montana. The Koch brothers have repeatedly failed to find a normal person, an organizer, to lead the Montana chapter of their national group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), to go around keynoting GOP events in Montana. The current guy is the Colonel Sanders wannabe. The previous leader of AFP is worse. He had been a senior member of a cult that built a $30 million underground bunker to prepare for the end of the world, which they believed would occur on April 23, 1990.

The state Tea Party hasn’t done much better than the Kochs. One of the many leaders they’ve cycled through was showing up to legislative hearings dressed in a pirate hat, jeans and a leather jacket, and posted violent rhetoric against gays on his Facebook page. And Republican lawmakers haven’t done much better than the TEA Party. Montana legislative leader Jason Priest was forced to apologize for anti-gay remarks he made on his Facebook page too, the Billings Gazette reported.

Ultimately, even embracing advanced 1990s technology isn’t going to help Republicans. They need to realize that their party is packed with lawmakers whose vision is morally bankrupt and that bigotry isn’t a viable ideology. If they can’t do this, they’re going to continue to repulse young people, women, and minorities and they will continue to shrivel and shrink.

The first step of course is getting rid of Montana’s law that makes being gay an imprisonable crime. Tom Facey has a bill that would to strike the offensive language from our statutes finally passed the senate. by passing SB 107 has yet to be voted on in the House, though it will be any day now.

It’s time to contact the lawmakers in the House of Representatives, which you can do via this online form. FYI, you can always use the back button after submitting your message, which allows you to skip retyping all your info when you contact multiple legislators. Or you can cut and paste this list of House GOP legislators.

Only four states in the U.S. have a law this ridiculous, and Montana is still one of them. The others are Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. That’s right, even Mississippi and Alabama don’t have this garbage in state law.

Posted: March 26, 2013 at 12:10 pm

Moderate GOP Breaks Away from Loons on Dark Money

Right wing blaming anonymous blogs for GOP’s problems

by Cowgirl

Kudos to GOP senators President Jim Peterson and Senator Bruce Tutvedt, for thumbing their noses at their neanderthal GOP compatriots in the Senate and supporting (and actually carrying) Steve Bullock’s bill, SB 375, to reform campaign finance. Peterson and Tutdvedt held leadership posts once in the GOP, but were bounced by the new ruling right-wing junta.

Bullock’s bill imposes a very simple requirement, something you would think everybody could agree on: it requires campaign funding sources to be disclosed. If there is an ad on TV or radio, or a glossy mailer that arrives at a voters house, or a yard sign or leaflet, Montana law has always required that the voter be able to inquire as to who, exactly, is paying for the mass-produced item.

But the Supreme Court struck aspects of our law down (in Citizens United) and so Bullock and Peterson are trying to rewrite the statute to meet with the Supreme Court’s idiotic conclusion of law. At another time, Bullock was actually arguing the case in the Supreme Court.

Art Wittich, Jason Priest and others are leading the right-wing charge against the bill.

Hilariously, one of the GOP’s main arguments against this bill is….ready for this…..that Democrats are winning elections because of anonymous blogs, and this bill does nothing to regulate them. From the Helena IR today, reporting on Priest’s floor testimony on the bill:

State Sen. Jason Priest of Red Lodge warned fellow Republicans that the measure won’t affect anonymous blogs, a venue he argued where Democrats hold an advantage.

Priest went on to say that the democratic party uses blogs to “motivate voters,” presumably in a way that the GOP blogs fail to do. ”Vote for this bill, and keep on losing elections,” Priest warned his fellow party members.

This same point is being made today, in a series of tweets, by party operative and former state GOP communications director Chris Shipp.

The bigger conflict, as we all know, is between conservative and moderate Republicans. Moderates are furious that right-wing groups, acting as a conservative Mujahideen, took it upon themselves to enforce conservative purity in recent elections. In 2010 and 2012 they spent big money to oust GOP moderate candidates in state legislative primaries. This division is a giant disaster for the GOP and has fractured the party possibly beyond repair. So it makes sense that they are blaming their problems on an anonymous blog. That’s what the GOP does best–blame someone else when it fucks up.

For the record, this blog is my own free speech, done on my uncompensated free time, and with the help of many tipsters who let me know about juicy stuff taking place in Montana politics. Mostly it is about googling, emailing and writing, things that many Republicans seem to struggle with as if these tasks require some advanced degree in science.

I get a few thousand readers on a good day (although I did get 14,000 on a single day last month!). It is true that this blog has become influential, but only because it prints facts and opinion that state newspapers, and in some cases democrats in general, choose not to bother putting out there. And don’t forget other blogs such as Flathead Memo, From Eternity to Here, Intelligent Discontent and the many of the blogs listed on the right of your screen on this page, who also do the same, important type of work.

More to the point, Jason Priest and other Tea Partiers should try to take this occasion to become more introverted and ponder an important question: why are typical Republican thinkers and writers in Montana incapable of producing a blog worth reading?

Posted: January 17, 2013 at 6:56 pm

Legislative Roundup

Roger Koopman Should Not Be In Charge of Taxi Cabs

Rep. Ellie Hill of Missoula has proposed deregulation–not of energy, but of taxicabs. Little did anyone know that the Public Service Commission is the branch of government that regulates taxis in Montana. That is ludicrous. If you’ve ever tried to get a cab in Missoula, you will know that Ms. Hill is on the right track here. There is a government-granted monopoly in the city, and that needs to change. Hill is trying to move authority over cab regulation from the PSC to the Montana Legislature. After all, can anybody, Republican or Democrat, say that it’s a good thing that Roger Koopman is in charge of taxis? The bill is LC1416.

GOP Voter Suppression Bill

The Repubs have wasted no time in trying to revive their bread-and-butter, old faithful favorite piece of legislation. Representative Ted Washburn of Bozeman has introduced a bill (HB 30) to do away with election day registration. If Washburn were from Billings, he’d not be sponsoring this bill. Voters waited on line several hours to vote in Billings in 2012, and if there had been no voting-day registration option, many would have been turned away after the long wait, even though they were lawfully qualified to vote.

Thankfully, Schweitzer vetoed the bill in 2011 and Bullock will almost certainly do so as well. Funny enough, the GOP does not believe this type of shenanigans has any political repercussions, that you can brazenly make a legislative move to take away voters’ rights and voters won’t notice. But I think they do notice, and Democrats will remind them in 2014. In fact, in 2014, Democratic volunteers should be walking the line of voters, explaining to the people waiting on the infernal line that the reason they have to wait so long, and waste half a day, is that the GOP likes it that way.

Although it’s not in the bill, Washburn told the committee he believes voting should be restricted to “driver’s license, the person that pays taxes in Montana, the person that actually resides here in Montana,” Chuck Johnson reported. Meaning if he had his way, many seniors, students, the disabled, and the very poor would not get to vote.

The Ruling Class

Washburn wants to restrict voting to taxpaying residents, but another GOP legislator wants to expand voting to non-residents–non-resident property owners, that is. Rep. Terry Murphy’s bill (SB 130) would let non-residents vote in municipal elections, including mill-levies, bonds, and candidates.

The Flathead County Commission tried a similar scheme in 2011 to decide who will control zoning in the outskirts of the city of Whitefish – the city, or the county with an “official survey.” They sent surveys to all those who owned property in the area–some of whom didn’t actually reside in the area at all. Some people got multiple votes depending on how many properties they owned. If you resided in the area, but didn’t make enough to own property, well, you weren’t allowed to voice your opinion. According to a citizens group who analyzed the survey results, “less than half, 47%, of the survey cards mailed out went to people who actually live in the two-mile area around Whitefish, while another 53% went to people who don’t even live in Whitefish.”

“Immigration Sanctuaries”

Speaking of stupid bills, the GOP has also revived the “immigration sanctuary bill” from 2011. An immigration sanctuary, as best I can tell, is a state of affairs in which a local government refuses to order its policemen to go hunt for dark-skinned people and ask to see their passports. This bill was vetoed last session and will be no doubt vetoed again as is it is utterly ridiculous. HB 50 is sponsored by David Howard (R-Park City).

Many Novice Legislators

Chuck Johnson has an interesting piece about a tough fact: lots of newbies in the Montana Legislature. Term limits have created a rookie majority, and several observations made in the Johnson piece are worthy of discussion and perhaps demand a re-examination of term limits. A few of the points struck me as intriguing: that the legislative branch of government is weakened by a lack of institutional knowledge that once resided in veteran legislators; that the executive has been strengthened, because legislators must rely on executive-branch bureaucrats for policy expertise; and that reliance on lobbyists for legislative expertise has become excessive. One wonders, looking back, whether Schweitzer’s successful bullying of the legislature was made easier by a weakening of the House and Senate by term limits, which eliminate veterans.

Reduce Size of House and Senate

Republican Jason Priest of Red Lodge has put in a bill to shrink the Montana legislature to 40 and 80 members, Senate and House respectively. I don’t know what to make of this, although one can assume that if a right-wing Republican is introducing such a measure, it probably disadvantages Democrats in some way. But here’s another idea: How about a unicameral legislature, like Nebraska? Actually, Nebraska has no party affiliation for members. How’s that sound? 100 legislators, one house, all independents by law.

Posted: January 16, 2013 at 8:56 pm

Leaked Emails Show Civil War in Montana GOP

The big news today, if it is news at all, is that Republicans in Montana are at war with each other.

Some juicy emails [PDF] were published by the Great Falls Tribune Wednesday, showing the machinations of rightwing Republicans such as Jeff Essmann and Art Wittich as they try to vanquish the moderates, led by ousted Senate President Jim Peterson. Presumably, these missives were leaked by one of the moderate legislators in the scrum, who thought it would be good to publicize the schism.

There are some hilarious exchanges, and the article in the Trib, by John Adams, is required reading for anyone interested in Montana Politics. It’s fun to observe the various leaders, or aspiring leaders, openly agitating against the opponent faction.

But it is also quite disturbing. For the emails reveal that the objective of Tea Party Republicanism is to control all branches of Government, with absolute power, in its entirety. Here is an excerpt from a September 2012 e-mail by Essmann to his ultra-conservative cohorts (the subject line of the email is “Agenda Control”) about how a redistricting of legislative seats will make the ultimate goal achievable:

Jon Bennion was able to draw a map with 63 safe Republican seats. If we can implement the long term strategy we will be in a position to actually elect a majority of conservatives in both bodies, adopt conservative legislation and have a court that will uphold it.

And here is one from Art Wittich, describing efforts to get rid of moderates in GOP primaries:

We must help the purge along. Hopefully, a new phoenix will rise from the ashes.

Sadly, these writings and many of the other emails that were disclosed to the Tribune reveal an almost jihadist mentality at work. The right wing of the GOP views itself as an historic movement seeking a distant, ultimate triumph in which the opposition will be vanquished and the right-wing view of the world will be imposed, imposed upon all Montanans even if a majority of the voters don’t want it.

How can this type of thinking possibly be the basis for a successful political movement? It can’t, which is why Republicans are currently circling down the toilet nationally. America has a two-party system and regardless of what party you are in, to be taken seriously and help the greater good you must work with the opposition, and accept the fact that your opponents are not enemies, but simply a counterbalance representing the viewpoints of many.

Posted: November 27, 2012 at 9:57 pm

GOP Legislator Junkets Exposed

Today, new evidence of the extent to which Montana’s legislature has been corrupted by out-of-state corporate interests has come to light. Citizen advocates have released documents showing that several Montana legislators received all-expense paid junkets where they were wined and dined by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The latest ALEC extravaganza kicks off tomorrow in Washington D.C.

As Cowgirl readers know, ALEC is the bane of workaday Montanans’ existence. It’s corporate America’s mainline to corrupting the lawmaking process. At lavish, closed-door “summits” they write “model bills” and instruct GOP state legislators to force them through back home.

ALEC won’t say which Montana lawmakers are showing up for tomorrow’s posh retreat. However, documents released today reveal some of the state lawmakers who were in on these junkets from 2006-2008.

This influence-buying scheme is illegal in some states, and should be in Montana. Probably some smart democratic legislator is already coming up with a bill to this effect.

The list of the Montana junkateers who are still in office includes:

Elsie Arntzen R-Billings
David Howard R-Park City
Lee Randall R-Broadus
Llew Jones R-Conrad
Cary Smith R-Billings
Wendy Warburton R-Havre
Scott Sales R-Gallatin County
Jesse O’Hara R-Great Falls
Tom McGillvray R-Billings
Roger Koopman (now on the PSC)
Verdell Jackson R-Kalispell
Jeff Essmann R-Billings
Debby Barrett R-Dillon
Rick Ripley R-Wolf Creek
Bob Lake R-Hamilton
Krayton Kerns R-Laurel

Besides those listed above there are many other legislators who are members of ALEC. Some have already been busted directly introducing ALEC bills, including: Mark Blasdel, Jason Priest, Ted Washburn, Scott Reichner, Pat Connell, Tom Berry, Jeff Welborn, and Jon Sonju.

What kind of laws is ALEC pushing this year? Lots. One way to find out if a bill is ALEC boilerplate is to compare it to the lists of the latest model legislation from the various corporations which can be found here. Examples of new model ALEC bills include:

a law to require Attorneys General to do the legislature’s bidding,
requirement that all public employees must personally pay the costs of producing public documents unless the printed item does not display the publication’s printing cost,
a resolution for a constitutional convention to eliminate consumer protections,
repeal of voting access laws,
and ironically, a bill to create a new government commission to identify ways to cut to state government–at taxpayer expense,

and dozens more. Some of the bills are designed to enhance corporate profits by stripping consumer protections from the laws, while others are “message” bills designed to enhance GOP chances in upcoming elections by forcing democrats to vote on controversial, if impractical, bills.