Tagged: Rick Hill Affair

Posted: September 11, 2012 at 6:55 am

Mermaid Reference Upsets Great Falls Columnist

Mermaids are making quite a splash in the news this week. CNN is reporting that Montana has the number one live mermaid performance venue. Mermaids also appeared in the local news. Though for the Great Falls conservative radio host who referenced mermaid venues in a column this week, they are the stuff of outrage rather than joy.

Radio host Rick Tyron writes that he is upset by “a reference to “Rick Hill as “Rick Sip & Dip Hill” he encountered on Facebook. GOP gubernatorial candidate Rick Hill can’t be too pleased about the column, which only serves to remind Tribune readers of some sordid details of Hill’s adulterous past.

Hill has admitted in the Great Falls Tribune that while married with young children, he was having an affair with a barmaid at a lounge in Great Falls. At this bar, waitresses take turns slipping into bikinis and mermaid tails and jumping into a tank behind the bar, swimming around and blowing kisses to the patrons.

The author is also upset by a Facebook photo of Eddie Munster “mocking the resemblance to Rehberg” and a pic of a local Republican legislator and his TEA Party partner in full costume with the title “Batcrap Crazy X2.”

Posted: June 27, 2012 at 5:02 pm

In the Money Game, It’s Bullock, 7 to 1

Lost amid the hoopla over the Citizens United news yesterday was a small item about the kind of fundraising that does, and should, matter: Steve Bullock is sitting on a nest egg of campaign cash that is almost seven times greater than that of his opponent. Bullock has $776,000 in the bank, while his feeble Republican challenger, Rick Hill, has only $118,000

It’s not surprising given that Hill has just emerged from a bruising primary, in which he was assailed by his opponents has having “too much baggage.” He was accused, specifically, of:

- having dodged the Vietnam draft

- having enriched himself with state contracts, from his stint as a congressman

- having cashed in on his wife’s influence when she worked in the Governor’s office

- having screwed up the state work comp system

- having been the victim of a ponzi scheme,

- having been an insurance executive, and

- having porked a cocktail waitress while he was married

That’s quite a resume. Hill had to spend down his war chest to combat these attacks, while Bullock had no meaningful primary challenge at all. This has left Hill at a massive disadvantage as we enter the upcoming general election season. Mind you, this is not corporate money; these are the hard-earned, smaller contributions that candidate’s raise by themselves, in increments from $5 to $600.

Some big, unregulated, out-of-state money will no doubt make its way into this race, more easily now that our sacred campaign corruption laws have been struck down by the five ignoramuses who call themselves “conservative justices.”

But one wonders whether the national GOP, and other national groups with fat corporate wallets, might not simply walk away from the Montana governor’s race, viewing it as an impossible project to rehabilitate a weak and battered candidate who is nearly broke. Outside groups with large war chests have fifty states in which to spend money. They rarely waste their time on candidates who do not do a good job raising money of their own. It’s usually a bad bet.

Democrats out-raised Republicans in all the statewide races. Pam Bucy has raised $162,000 and has $27k in the bank. Fox has raised $109, 000 and has $22k in the bank. In the state auditor’s race, Monica Lindeen has $64,000 in bank while TEA Party Republican Derek Skees had about $6,500. For Superintendent of Public Instruction, Juneau has $92,000 in the bank. Republican Sandy Welch has $20,000. In the Secretary of State race Linda McCulloch has $49,000 on hand while Brad Johnson has $3k.

Democrat Ed Smith has $4,300 left in the bank in his re-election campaign for Clerk of the Supreme Court. He has no opponent, since GOP Executive Director Bowen Greenwood failed in his write-in campaign attempt to garner enough votes to appear on the ballot this fall.

Posted: May 6, 2012 at 9:45 pm

GOP Senator: Democratic Operatives, Not Ken Miller, are Behind Latest Ad

Dave Lewis, GOP state senator and big Ken Miller supporter, has declared a belief that the 30 second web ad contrasting Ken Miller and Rick Hill on family values (entitled “Abuse and Adultery”) has been planted by democratic party operatives. Lewis wrote:

Come on guys. There may be some smart Democrat operatives, not a contradiction in terms, who wanted to fire an early volley. Do it now and blame it on primary politics. We play rough here. Suspect everyone. Fun month ahead.

Lewis made the claim last week, on this blog, but stated no basis for it except to say that democratic operatives are “talented” and thus may have created the ad, the implication being that GOP operatives are not talented. Here’s the ad:

Doth Lewis, a Miller surrogate, protest too loudly?

Let’s examine his theory.
First, the woman behind the ad, Nancy Davis, has been active against Hill before, but not in favor of Miller. And she has a large conservative following on Facebook, counting among her friends many GOP legislators and Tea Party idiots.

Furthermore, if Lewis’s premise is correct that Democrats want to elevate Miller at Hill’s expense (which I don’t believe is correct; Hill is a lame candidate, insider, part of the problem, and thus a good horse for dems to run against) this would not be the way to do it since this video risks backfiring on Ken Miller. Negative stuff like this is dynamite and can explode in the hand of the person lighting it.

And finally, not only has Miller made no effort at all to denounce the video act in a way that would indicate he isn’t connected with it, he actually has been aping it.

Hilariously, in the last week he’s referred to himself at least twice as a”Christian”, “family man” and “small businessman” in the same breath, and to Rick Hill as a “lobbyist”, “insurance” executive” and “congressman,” comparative language taken directly from the ad. Miller clearly likes the action.

A tipster informed me today that Miller contrasted himself to Hill using these terms at a recent debate. And a new video on Miller’s website similarly uses the same message points, with Miller describing himself as a Christian and a family man (note: Miller today removed that video, for some reason). And below is a “straw poll” from Miller’s own website. We will ignore for the moment the sad fact that Miller could only muster 61% in a vote that takes place on his own website; what’s interesting is, again, the way he messages himself against Hill:

Also, there’s something about the narrator’s voice (might it be Davis herself?) that strikes me as that of someone who watches lots of Foxnews and is an angry Tea gal (or maybe that’s just my imagination).

So I’d say its very unlikely that Democrats are behind this lovely piece of political theater. Some GOP “operative” does indeed have some minimal talent.

I’m told that all of the GOP candidates are in the process of buying TV time now. We will see what these ads look like, and then revisit this subject.

Posted: May 1, 2012 at 12:05 pm

Adultery and Abuse, Front and Center

I was forwarded a juicy e-mail late last night from a tipster, but didn’t have time to blog about it and I woke up to find that Pogie at Intelligent Discontent had scooped me. Check his post out. The e-mail contains a 30 second TV spot, by Montana Conservative Families, contrasting Rick Hill and Ken Miller on…..family values.

Miller is shown with his family, described as a Jesus-loving devoted husband, a “John Wayne, Johnny Cash and John Deere” type of guy, if you will.

We are then shown Rick Hill’s mug, and are told that he is an adulterer. A photo of a cocktail waitress, in revealing dress, is then shown, the face blurred out, along with headlines from when Rick Hill’s first wife went public with his infidelity during his the 1998 Congressional campaign (said infidelity having been consummated with a cocktail waitress).

The narrator tells an abbreviated story of how Hill was stepping out on his wife at “a motel bar,” which we know to be none other than the world famous Sip ‘N Dip lounge in Great Falls (soon to have its own reality show, by the way.)

One might conclude, as Pogie does, that Ken Miller is behind this ad, though there is nothing in the ad to confirm this. What we do know is that the apparent ring leader of Montana Conservative Families, a woman named Nancy Davis, has sent several emails out in the past, some bashing moderate Republicans and specifically Rick Hill for not having “social conservative values.”

Ken Miller has recently attacked Hill directly in public, in a very personal way–making fun of Hill for spending most of his time in Palm Springs, California at his second home–but has never alluded to his extramarital past. Only the Stapleton campaign has crossed that line, with Bob Keenan, Stapleton’s number two, suggesting that Hill’s “skeletons” would ultimately take him down.

The timing of this video is also interesting if you consider the simliarities to what occurred in the Democratic Primary in 2006 between John Morrison and Jon Tester.

A month or so before election day during the Tester-Morrison face-off, Lee Newspapers had a big front-page expose about Morrison’s extramarital affair. He had a relationship with a woman many years earlier, but when he became State Auditor, his office ended up investigating her new husband for securities fraud. This raised a question about whether Morrison should have recused himself from the investigation.

But before the story hit the paper in 2006, an effective whisper campaign was conducted against Morrison, with letters and e-mails making the rounds among Democrats, giving the story a certain ripeness. We will see if this Ken Miller-Rick Hill business follows the same trajectory.

Posted: January 13, 2012 at 8:42 pm

Rick Hill Responds to Attacks

Montana GOP Gubernatorial primary candidate Rick Hill has had enough of the personal attacks on his sex life. He has released this campaign ad to respond to the dirty attacks on him.

Posted: October 24, 2011 at 12:14 pm

Cowgirl Contest!

At the suggestion of Montana Right, a conservative who blogs here occasionally and has come up with a very funny idea, I propose a contest.

Here is a an excerpt from an Associated Press article back in the 1990s, describing an episode during Rick Hill’s affair with a cocktail waitress at the Sip N’ Dip Lounge in Great Falls, the bar with the live mermaid tank.

Spaulding remembered learning about the affair after Hill began coming home very late at night. She recalled packing their three sons, aged 18 months to 8 years, in a car once and driving to the Sip-N-Dip lounge where she saw Hill with the other woman. She said she begged him without success to come home.

The contest is: let’s see who can come up with the the most effective (or funniest) script for a campaign ad against Hill, regarding the above-referenced events. All readers may participate. Please simply post your script into the comments section. No special format required. Can be in the form a script, a descriptive paragraph or just a concept, of course, video submissions will also be accepted. Perhaps we’ll do an online poll to determine the winner.

And if any squeamish readers think that this exercise might cross the line or is not fair game, you are advised to remember that Hill tried to destroy Nancy Keenan in 2000 with a filthy campaign in which he told voters that she was unfit for public office because she was a childless single female and thus lacked family values. He was never held accountable, because Rehberg pushed him out of the race and went on to beat Keenan–though Rehbherg benefited from the stinging, durable innuendo of Hill’s attack and repeated it in his own campaign.

And remember, too, that Betti Hill (Rick’s second wife who is now measuring the drapes in the Capitol) was Hill’s attack-dog operative during his campaigns. In one instance, as was reported widely in the press at the time including in TIME Magazine, she even helped produce a third party TV ad, accusing her husband’s opponent of lacking family values.

Posted: September 12, 2011 at 5:16 pm

Short, Fat, Bald, and Old: Choices for GOP voters

Politics is as much about physical presence as anything else. For as long as democracy has existed, citizens have been drawn to Charisma, which comes only partially from ideas or arguments, from the content of a politician’s rhetoric. The rest is made of physical gifts, face and body, movement and sound, stance and stride. Obama would not be president if he were ugly or ungainly.

Montana Democrats are lucky this cycle in this regard. We have a gubernatorial candidate, Steve Bullock, who looks, acts and talks in a way that citizens and voters will to respond to.

The GOP has a problem in this regard, as was made apparent by Matt Gouras’s piece in the IR this past Sunday (though I’ve linked to a non-Lee paper for those saving clicks) profiling the GOP field.

Their frontrunner is 64 year old Rick Hill. You don’t go into politics at that age. You retire. But Hill is chasing glory. Long in the tooth, stodgy, with failing eyesight and grayed hair and adultery in his past, Hill seems a poor contrast to Bullock, who is in his mid-forties, young and energetic, sharp, with a model family. How Hill’s 1976 affair, if it becomes an issue at all, will be affected by voters’ reception of Hill’s physical appearance is unclear. If Hill fails to explain thoroughly to voters that his affair is ancient history, then voters might settle on an image of a crusty old pervert, wearing boxers, an undershirt and knee-high dress socks, chasing a young waitress around a hotel room.

Nearest to Hill (in age and money) is Neil Livingstone, who is also 64, a follicly challenged, aloof but wealthy guy who hasn’t the slightest idea how to be a candidate or run a campaign or keep up appearances. Aside from his shiny dome, Livingstone has defined himself, in what little press coverage he’s received, as someone who is from Washington DC, not Montana. Politics is a young man’s game. To wit, only someone from Livingstone’s generation would think it wise to spend campaign money on consultants who live in Peru. True, Livingstone has chosen a GOP rising star as his second, but it’s unlikely to be enough to keep the Livingstone ship afloat.

Corey Stapleton, the diminutive former state senator from Billings, is probably the most savvy and up-to-date of the field in terms of how modern races are won. A young man, he’s come of age in the internet era. But its not clear that he brings any distinguishing aspect to the race. And he’s a recovering addict of some unknown substance problem, a fact which he made an oblique reference to on his Wikipedia page, and then deleted.

If looks and height alone were what mattered, Ken Miller might be the GOP’s man. Tall, dark hair, and not a bad looking fellow. But when he opens his mouth, he has a problem. His introductory video was widely derided across the internet as utterly comic, his delivery horrendous, his sentences vacuous. He is like an SNL skit version of a politician.

Then there is Jeff Essmann, who has been a rotund presence in the rotunda since he filled John Bohlinger’s vacant senate seat, and who has now staked his political future on an anti-pot crusade. Essmann was caught off-guard on a radio show when he was asked whether he’d ever smoked pot. He seemed to fumble with his answer, as if trying to stall for time to make a quick but crucial decision. One commenter here has said Essmann at least looks like he often gets the munchies. I’ll reserve comment. And as Gouras points out, Denny Rehberg’s team of goons seems to be quietly getting behind an Essmann candidacy. Why? Unclear. Perhaps Denny doesn’t like Rick Hill, because Hill probably detests Denny. After all, Denny chased Hill out of his congressional seat back in the 90s. So I guess Denny has to now pick a horse for governor other than Hill, and he’s settled on Essmann.

One thing is clear: the GOP primary ain’t no beauty contest.

Posted: June 29, 2011 at 12:35 pm

Wikipedia Editor Issues Warning to Hill Campaign

This is a story that I have observed unfolding for some time and has now become public after being reported by the Billings Gazette. Rick Hill’s campaign has made a constant effort to remove basic facts about Rick Hill from Hill’s Wikipedia page. For a while, the campaign manager Chuck Denowh (or perhaps someone else with the screen name “cdenowh) was removing facts on a regular basis. The history of what Denowh was removing is all laid out for anyone to see. He was usually removing any reference to Hill’s extramarital affair, something that was well documented in the news when it came to light in the late 90s.

But now a formal warning has been issued by Wikipedia, in bold letters at the top of Hill’s page: “A Major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection to this subject,” the warning says, and goes on to say that the article is no longer reliable and is protected from editing because its viewpoint neutrality has been compromised.

Wikipedia editing is a common thing for political operatives to fiddle with (Conrad Burns’, Brian Schweiter’s and Brad Johnson’s people both were all reported to have been editing their bosses’ pages). But, Hill is trying to remove a basic biographical fact that is a fair-game item in a political race. He is trying to make something (namely, his penis, and the improper use thereof) disappear, as if it never existed. Generallly not a smart thing in politics.