Posted: August 31, 2010 at 8:34 pm

Republicans Cut Taxes–By Encouraging People Who Owe Them Not To Pay Them

Even though they love trillion-dollar wars, abolishing all income taxes and the IRS is a favorite mission of the mountain-men and militia-types who seem to constitute about 80% of the Republican party nowadays. There is a central and long-held belief among Republicans, most likely held by Bowen Greenwood and Will Deschamps as well, that the federal income tax is unconstitutional, because supposedly it was not properly ratified by one of the state legislatures back a century ago when it was amended to the Constitution.

Kudos to Schweitzer and the Democrats for cracking down on out of state tax cheats. The Administration announced this week that there is cash to be gotten from national travel companies that have been booking rooms without paying the 7% hotel tax.

Needless to say, Republicans have never supported the Democrats on any efforts to collect taxes from deadbeat corporations who don’t pay what they owe. In fact, the Rs have often tried to put up road blocks to the Revenue Department’s efforts to collect taxes that are due. During several legislative sessions when Democrats and the Adminsitration tried to get important legislation passed to help them in this effort (like this bill, in 2007), Republicans, lead by visionary statesmen such as Scott Sales, Mike Lange and John Sinrud, did everything they could to kill it. It’s really bizarre in fact, that Republicans are so averse to any taxes at all that they believe a person should simply nullify the law by disregarding it. Or, the Rs simply go out of their way to take all the teeth out of the enforcement powers of the MT Department of Revenue.

Funny, because Republicans like Hannity, Beck and company, and no doubt their numerous brown-shirt followers in Montana, delighted in uttering the refrain “Democrats like raising taxes, they just don’t like paying them” during Obama’s transition when it was shown that a few of Obama’s cabinet nominees owed back taxes. Unfortunately, in Montana there can now be uttered a similar slogan: “Republicans believe in cutting taxes, by allowing people to break the law and not pay them.”

Posted: August 31, 2010 at 7:11 am

Why you should care about the Helena District Court judge race

It’s hard to get information about judicial races, especially on the district judge level, but folks around the state will be interested in the race for Judicial District one, which covers Lewis and Clark and Broadwater counties, because this is the first court in Montana where constitutional issues are often heard.

One of the candidates for this race really stands out in terms of experience, and that’s Jim Reynolds. Reynolds has had experience with a lot of big cases resulting in some important decisions that benefit all Montanans have come out of Jim’s work.

Take, for example, Associated Press v. Senate Republican Caucus: Jim represented 26 newspapers and other media groups to argue that legislative caucuses must be open to the public; he won, promoting transparency in Montana’s government.

Without this, we would have never seen the true colors of Mike Lange, the crazed Republican who went on a profanity laced tirade in a GOP legislative caucus meeting.