Tagged: Joe Balyeat

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: November 28, 2012 at 6:34 am

GOP Launches Job Creation Plan

Today, the Montana GOP laid out its plan to bring more high-paying jobs to Montana.

TEA Party Republican state Rep. Clayton Fiscus (R-Billings) is proposing a bill that would require the teaching of intelligent design alongside evolution in all Montana schools.

The Huffington Post and the National Center for Science Education reported this week that ridding our schools of science is Fiscus’ first orders of business. (If his website is any indication, ridding our schools of technology might be next.)

As the NCSE points out, this brilliant plan has already been declared unconstitutional in Kitzmiller v. Dover, in 2005.

The last time a creationist bill was tried in Montana was in 2001, when Joe Balyeat, now with Americans for Prosperity, introduced it. This latest effort reaffirms the GOP’s position as the anti-science party.

Posted: August 9, 2012 at 5:24 pm

Credibility Problems Plague TEA Party

Montana’s top opponent of the women’s medical privacy and the Affordable Healthcare Act, Tea Partier Annie Bukacek, appears to have delivered false testimony before the Montana Legislature.

On January 21, 2011, Bukacek testified before the state Senate Public Health Committee in favor of SB-161, a bill to nullify federal health care laws, and cited “statistics from a 2010 Investor’s Business Daily article based on a survey by the United Nations International Health Organization.” She then read a list of statistics that supposedly indicate how people in countries with universal health care are dying at a greater rate than Americans. Here’s a copy of her written testimony, and here’s a video clip.

The supposed study she cites is a fraud. It does not even exist, actually, nor does the organization she cites. In fact, this non-existent study is one that right wing activists have been citing across America, in hearings, in articles, on websites. It’s become an internet meme. But it’s a big canard, according to the Center for Public Integrity. There is neither a study nor even a group called the UNIHO.

Sadly, Ms. Bukacek is a licensed physician in the state of Montana, albeit with a religious twist–her clinic, which closed down, was called “Hosanna Healthcare.” She was also investigated for Medicaid fraud, but she claims it was because she prayed with patients.

She also penned a guest editorial in the June 14 edition of the Flathead Daily Interlake (see page 4 of this PDF) extolling the dangers of vaccination, a favorite topic among black helicopter conspiracy theorists.

Ms. Bukacek’s anti-vaccination claims prompted a rebuke from a far right Republican who sits on the Flathead City-County Health Board, Dr. P. David Myerowitz, who moved to Columbia Falls after retiring from a professorship in surgery at a major university in Ohio. Dr. Myerowitz called Bukacek’s assertions “disturbing,” as well as “misguided, inaccurate and dangerous.” (You can download a PDF of his response here, see page 8.)

In general, you ascribe very little credibility to any data offered up by the Tea Party. It’s usually nonsense.

Posted: August 8, 2012 at 10:36 pm

Cowgirl Finishes Her Sophomore Year

In July, the Cowgirl Blog turned two.

And, the blog is on the verge of receiving our one millionth viewer. Montana Cowgirl has been featured on CNN, and in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, and numerous Montana press outlets, much of it in the course of exposing the 2011 Republican legislature for the lunatics that they were (are).

But far more flattering is this: at a recent Washington, DC “summit” of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation group (the Koch brothers’ outfit of angry right-wing misfits), there was a panel at which I am told my blog was the main topic of discussion. Who is this person, they asked. How does she do her research? What dark arts must she know?

It is truly hilarious that these dingbats believe my blog to consist of some sort of magic. They view it with a sense of awe and bewilderment, like when Tarzan watched in amazement when he first saw the British artistocrat shave his face with a strait razor. To the Tea Party set, this blog is an item of technological wonder, believed to emanate from some advanced, alien civilization.

A few pieces of advice for the panel participants. First, if you are literate, you can start a blog. It costs almost nothing and can be done for free. Second, if you know how to surf the web, conduct google searches, read a Facebook page and receive reader tips by e-mail, you can do all of the things that this blog does. (Thank you readers! Your tips make up the most important content on this blog. Send tips to mntnacowgirl (at) gmail.com) True, this sets a high bar for an organization (AFP) whose Montana leaders are Joe Balyeat and Henry Kriegel. But it’s incomprehensible that there is such a dearth of credible GOP blogging in this state. The relative absence of conservative blogging (compared to all the really great Montana progressive blogs you see among those on the blog roll here to the right of this post) speaks volumes about the right wing.

As to the occasional remark made that this blog “lacks courage” because it is penned anonymously, these critics do not understand that anonymous writing is a crucial component of political discourse and has always been so. Among other examples, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a 1776 work that set forth the basic principles on which the American Revolution was based,was published anonymously. I’m sure that Tea Partiers, with their intellectual command of American history, are aware of this.

Posted: August 2, 2012 at 7:45 am

This is Embarrassing

Which Montana Republican strategist decided it was a good idea to make a woman caught in a Medicaid fraud probe the public face of the conservative health care message?

Former GOP legislator Joe Balyeat says he has “a group of doctors” who are “rallying” in support of a “free-market” health care system, the Ravalli Republic reports.

Yet only one doctor was mentioned in the article on the rally, which appears to have had more reporters in attendance than actual rallyers based on the coverage it got. Sen. Balyeat insisted that:

“the new coalition has 12 to 15 members.

“We are going to try to involve other health care professionals,” Balyeat said. “Right now, it’s almost exclusively doctors.”

Right…perhaps he means “exclusively” the one doctor quoted, and that one has quite the history.

Annie Bukacek is the leader the movement which has failed three times to collect even half of the signatures needed to get an abortion ban on the ballot. The reason it didn’t qualify is because Montanans simply don’t want this garbage in our Constitution. That the signature gathering was found to be pushed largely by out-of state interests could not have helped. The proposal was so extreme that even Montana’s in-state anti-choice groups refused to get involved.

Posted: July 2, 2012 at 12:03 pm

Rehberg’s Truth Tour Slams Romney, Postal Service, Medicare

Someone just sent me the official handout from the so-called Tester Truth Tour a few days ago, and it’s a trip through crazytown.

Remember the Tester Truth Tour? It involved a handful of Dennis Rehberg’s TEA Party nuts, tinfoil hats, a fancy RV with cartoons of Jon Tester on it, some T-shirts and a whole bunch of wasted paper. It’s the first project of Joe Balyeat, the legislative dropout who became the new Americans for Prosperity Director. The spendy Tour was billed as a “project” of Americans for Prosperity, the secretive organization run by billionaire TEA Party founders Charles and David Koch.

Apparently, Rehberg’s Americans for Prosperity doesn’t think much of Mitt Romney and his record of health care in “Massachutts” [sic].

Before we go on, let’s remember that Dennis Rehberg has already endorsed Romney. I wonder how that sits with Rehberg’s Americans for Prosperity?

And check out what Rehberg’s truth brigade thinks of Medicare, Social Security, and even the Postal Service:

No wonder Dennis Rehberg voted to force cuts to Medicare and cut service at Montana Post offices. At least his people tried a little harder to spell Massachusetts. The entire program can be downloaded here.

Posted: June 14, 2012 at 9:07 pm

A Wingnut and Prayer

Joe Balyeat has resigned from the Bat Crap Crazy Legislature to become the new leader of the Montana TEA Party. The Washington D.C. TEA Party booster club Americans for Prosperity has struggled with keeping and finding leaders since it started meddling in Montana politics in 2009. Now, the group has quietly instated its fourth new leader in less than three years. Henry Kriegel, Jake Eaton, and Scott Sales, have all come and gone, making the organization less about pretending that the TEA Party is a grassroots phenomena and more of a contest to see who can be America’s Next Top Crackpot. So Joe Balyeat it is.

Balyeat’s first acts as the new TEA Party leader include sending out a robo-call on behalf of TEA Party Dennis Rehberg, which can be heard here. A leaked photo of Balyeat’s remodel of the TEA Party offices can be seen below. (Don’t tell anyone where you got this, I don’t want AFP to know I have a tipster on the inside.)

Montana Cowgirl Blog readers know Joe Balyeat well. For some reason, however, the TEA Party’s official biography of Balyeat does not mention that he’s the author of “Babylon: The Great City of Revelation,” (from $7.95 used on Amazon.com) which attempts to make the teabaggers’ case that if Christians don’t get involved in politics, “not only will hell prevail against us, but abortionists and homosexuals and humanists and pornographers and tin-horn TV networks will as well.”

Shortly after Balyeat’s world class work of non-fiction was published, Balyeat became vice-president of the Christian Coalition of Montana. This was the group that fought to uphold Montana’s unconstitutional law that actually made it illegal to be gay in our state. When a Montana court struck down the law making it illegal to be gay in the 1990s, the Christian Coalition was outraged, saying that the law making gay people illegal was “a necessary health and safety statute.” Balyeat is also known for introducing a bill to require creationism to be taught in schools. His bill failed in committee even though Republicans controlled the legislature by a wide margin.

Balyeat’s TEA Party bio doesn’t mention Balyeat’s attempts to declare war on Montana voters with a myriad of failed and legally flawed ballot initiatives. In 2006, Balyeat was behind the infamous ballot initiative scandal in which three initiatives were stricken from the ballot after a judge cited “pervasive fraud in the signature gathering process.” (CI-97 would have arbitrarily limited state spending, CI98 allowed for recalling judges for any old reason, and I-154 would have made governments pay corporations if they passed consumer health and safety laws which the big wigs claimed limited their profits.) This year, the courts rejected two more of Balyeat’s ballot measures: to restrict the ability of every Montanan to vote in all Supreme Court justice races and to gut the Montana budget with a tax give-away to big corporations.

Anyway, it seems Balyeat’s former pursuits weren’t wacky enough so he went looking for another fringe cause. He definitely found it in Americans for Prosperity.