Posted: November 16, 2012 at 4:53 pm

R’s Move Right

The GOP has thrown out its leaders, and replaced them with more ideologically conservative purists.

Jim Peterson, the Senate President, has been sent packing (literally–poor Peterson could be seen carrying his office contents, including a giant plant and a few framed pictures and a box of supplies, to his car yesterday.) Peterson’s license plate reads “REDST8″–perhaps the right-wing newbies mistook it to mean he’s a commie.

Peterson stood for re-election but was roundly defeated in favor of Christian fundamentalist, anti-cannabis crusader and hard-core rightist Jeff Essmann. Essmann proudly declared yesterday that the “Republican message was well received by voters,” though it’s hard to see how anyone could arrive at this conclusion given that the GOP won only a single statewide race and lost the rest.

Art Wittich, lawyer for the right-wing Montana Policy Institute and also a lawyer for ultra-shady American Tradition Partnership (which ignored Montana Law on the way to buying house and Senate seats for Tea partiers with secret money) is the new Senate Whip. Wittich has also called publicly for an investigation into whether hungry kids might be fed via a statewide “gleaning” program, meaning hungry kids would be fed the scraps that restaurants usually throw away.

Young gun Mark Blasdel has taken over as House Speaker. Blasdel belongs to the Todd Akin school, believing that abortion should illegal in all cases including rape. I would suspect that this position helped him gain the Speakership. Also, Blasdel is on the ALEC education task force, ALEC being the corporate front group that ghost-writes most of the legislation that state Republican legislators introduce.

Gordon Vance, a car and ATV salesman from Bozeman, will be majority leader.In Vance’s first session he only introduced one bill – a bill to help out his pals in the motor sports industry. And in 2011 he spent his time introducing bills to root out the many undocumented workers he believes have infiltrated our state, and bills to help insurance companies, and the State Fund, make more profit.

And Austin Knudson will be Senate Pro Temp. The right-winger is a former college Republican (yeah, those insufferable twits) turned attorney. He was swept in by the ATP-fueled TEA Party takeover in 2010, and has had an unremarkable career. Knudson was elected by railing against health care reform, then he eagerly accepted taxpayer funded health care benefits for himself. (So did Essmann, Wittich, Vance, and Blasdel.)

For the Dems: Jon Sesso of Butte will be Senate minority leader and Robin Driscoll of Billings and Cliff Larson of Missoula will be the whips. In the House, minority leader will be Chuck Hunter and Reps. Margie MacDonald, D-Billings, and Edie McClafferty, D-Butte are minority whips. Rep. Bryce Bennett, D-Missoula is caucus leader.

Posted: June 2, 2012 at 2:46 pm

Report: Rick Hill Used Wife’s Influence to Get Plum State Contracts

Dirty Betti

The Associated Press is reporting that Rick Hill not only made a king’s ransom renting office space to the Montana state government in the 1990s and 2000s, but that his wife Betti used her job in Governor Judy Martz’s office to steer business his way. Thus did Rick and Betti Hill become very wealthy people.

E-mails from Betti Hill, obtained by the AP, show that she was using the influence of the Governor’s office to arrange meetings for Rick with high-level players in state government who dole out state rental contracts. It stinks to high heaven.

Betti and Rick put pressure on the Martz administration to kill a plan to construct a new building. Martz put the new building project in her budget. But shortly after Rick and Betti met with Lt. Governor Karl Ohs and several cabinet officials to complain about it, it got yanked from Martz’s budget. Why did Rick and Betti want to kill the project? Because a new building in Helena would have brought down the price of rent in the Helena market, and landlords, naturally, do not like that. Oops.

By the sound of it, Betti Hill was large and in charge, busting out her Helena GOP street cred, ordering people throughout state government (even the Lt. Governor) not to do anything that might compromise Rick’s business, and even going to bat for other landlords, including a “party leader” who owned a building and needed a favor. As a result, the Hills’ business stayed sweet and they kept raking in taxpayer dough, more than a million bucks worth.

Hill also appears to have used his job as Congressman and his perch as State Fund chair to get similar sweet treatment, since these jobs overlapped with his sweetheart deals. While sitting in these posts, ranting the GOP’s favorite rant about “less spending” and “less government,” he was guzzling down taxpayer money that should have saved rather than spent. Montana taxpayers got bilked because the rent was too damn high.

Betti’s conduct might well be a violation of the ethics law, which says that a state worker may not use state facilities for a personal or business interest.

At any rate, the Hills are clearly no model of fiscal restraint. Betti clearly interpreted her job in Martz’s office as nothing more than a nice opportunity to rake in some serious scratch for her and her hubby, so that they could fly first class to their posh Palm Springs crib.

These e-mails vindicate Corey Stapleton, Hill’s GOP primary opponent, who accused Hill of getting cake deals and special treatment from state government for his mega-landlord business.

But will any of this affect the outcome of Tuesday’s GOP primary? I doubt it. Sure, it is in the newspaper, but most right-wing voters do not read the newspaper. Glenn Beck is unlikely to cover this story.

Stapleton and Miller and Livingstone should have done their homework, hit the pavement, and moved this damaging story a month ago. It might have been a game changer. But they were all either too lazy or too stupid (or both, probably) to bother. Coming out on the Friday before the election, this story will have very little effect on Tuesday’s election.

However, these revelations will be center stage during the long general election battle ahead. Rick Hill is now CORRUPT LANDLORD, INSURANCE EXECUTIVE, CONGRESSMAN, LOBBYIST (and let’s not forget ADULTERER). Geez, if that isn’t a resume for success in politics, I don’t know what is. These are just about the five worst things an American political candidate can possibly be. Plus, Dems will be able to run TV ads against Hill that will simply repeat the accusations made against Hill by all of his GOP opponents. That’s a rare opportunity in a general election, and it’s a very effective play.