Tag Archives: Tea Bagger

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.Tweet

How to Dispose of a Tea Party Imbecile, For Good

Bye Bye, Birther

Last week, we saw the demise of a right wing lunatic.

You may remember Bob Wagner, the Montana state legislator, for his appearance on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 in which he defended his special birther bill which would have forbidden President Obama from appearing on the Montana ballot in 2012.

Wagner was indeed riding high two years ago, swept into office on the 2010 Tea Party wave and happily making an ass of himself in the Montana legilsature, going on national talk shows with his nutty ideas, speaking at Tea Part rallies, sponsoring crazy bills (in addition to his birther bill, he tried to reintroduce the Gold Standard), and generally being an ass. But Wagner did not know that he would walk into a trap, in which he would be ensared and hoisted and which would end his political career. He would be unable to chew his leg off to free himself.

Like a good Tea Partier, Wagner voted against every single appropriation of money put forward by the legislature, including a bill that arrived on Governor Brian Schweitzer’s desk last April which contained grant money for local communities (including Wagner’s district), for things like sewer upgrades, fire department repairs, and the like.

Schweitzer–who is known to enjoy mixing it up with right-wingers–saw an angle. He noticed that Wagner had voted against the bill. So, Schweitzer used his “line item veto” power and selectively crossed out the funds that would have gone to Wagner’s district. Schweitzer did this to several legislators who voted against the grant bill, stating as he deleted the items that if Wagner and others voted against the bill, then their constituents must not have expressed much interest in getting the money.

But as you might expect, community leaders in Wagner’s district hadn’t even been aware that Wagner had voted against it. For when he voted against the bill, Wagner had been on a frolic of his own, and not representing the interests of his district. Wagner figured that the bill would pass anyway, and so he could flex his Tea Party biceps while knowing that Democrats and moderate Republicans would turn in sufficient votes so that the grant bill would survive.

But he hadn’t counted on Schweitzer calling out his bullshit.

When the folks in Wagner’s district learned of Wagner’s vote and of the consequent loss of funds, they were outraged. Wagner then tried to save face by suing Schweitzer, claiming that the item veto had been illegal. Well, that didn’t go over very well with the Tea Partiers who reside in Wagner’s district, because they don’t think Government should ever spend money at all.

So Wagner ended up in the headlines, first proudly decrying government spending, then being revealed as having denied his district important funds, and finally suing the Governor to try to get more government spending for his district.

Alas, caught in these crosscurrents, the flimsy hypocrite Wagner was beaten last week in his GOP primary, by a Republican moderate (or at least what passes for a moderate in Madison County, Montana) who used all of these points against him very skillfully and vocally.

Goodbye, Birther Bob.

TEA Party Legislator: Birth Control is “Death Nail in Coffin of our Republic”

TEA Partiers huddle at a GOP event, perhaps to discuss how glad they are that few women are present. Pictured are Eric Olsen, Krayton Kerns (center) and Dennis Rehberg

The folks at the Western Ag Reporter understand that what goes on inside the mind of TEA Party Republican Rep. Krayton Kerns is important. So important, in fact, that his words merited front page real estate in the last edition of the paper. This way, we can all get a peek at how a mind of this caliber thinks. (Hint, it barely does.)

More than anything, Krayton Kerns is angry.

He’s angry that Sandra Fluke dared to say that birth control was $1000 per year, a great expense for many.

Krayton’s idea of illustrating how angry we should be about Fluke’s statement is to wax nostalgic about his own life experiences. He tells us of a dog he knew in vet school that earned that amount each month in stud fees.

Krayton Kerns is angry because he believes that birth control is the “death nail in the coffin of our Republic.” And, he’s angry because he believes that it was Mitt Romney who made birth control the focus of the 2012 elections. Now, because of this, Krayton Kerns says the conservatives are “screwed.”

A PDF of the entire piece can be read here. WARNING: Reading his column means losing four minutes of your life you can never get back.Tweet

The Montana TEA Party Hypocrite of the Week Award Goes To…

Great Falls City Commission candidate Cyndi Baker, who campaigned against school district spending, then turned around and sought a district paycheck.

But it’s worse then that, as the Great Falls Tribune reports, Baker tried to threaten the local government for taxpayer funded payola in the form of a position as “ombudsman” to the local TEA Party anti-government activists. Here’s how the threat worked. Baker had been complaining for some time that it was “illegal” for district employees to criticize her opposition to district funding. Baker said if she were hired, she’d keep the “illegal” activity quiet. She did not explain how the proposed ombudsman position would work with people who are divorced from reality.

As the Tribune reports, while the district’s criticism may not have been flattering to Baker, there was nothing illegal about it. What the Tribune didn’t report is that Baker is the leader and spokesperson for the Great Falls TEA Party. Apparently Ms. Statue of Liberty (Baker’s preferred costume when at TEA Party rallies) is engaged to TEA Party Republican legislator Cleve Loney (who prefers to dress as George Washington, among other things, as you can see from this KRTV video).

So there you have it folks. Another city commission candidate seeking your vote as a platform to spew right wing nonsense in public meetings, in the newspapers and on our airwaves.

Americans for Prosperity Sends Its Luxury Bus Over the Cliff

It is every astroturf special interest front group’s worst nightmare: the moment when, despite their best efforts to carefully orchestrate each facet of the campaign, reality comes crashing down–sending the movement careening into crackpot-ville for good.

This is that moment for Americans for Prosperity, the group funded by the Koch brothers to trick people into thinking that the TEA Party was a grassroots uprising. Rumors are circulating that the front group has selected a new leader for the Montana chapter. Henry Kriegel is to be the group’s new figurehead, replacing Scott Sales, if the rumors are true. Right now, Kriegel is the organization’s number two, but word is he’s getting called up for prime time.

Montana Cowgirl readers know Henry Kriegel well. He’s a right-wing nutjob, former New Yorker, radio-host, and the leader of the Bozeman TEA Party.

A few years ago, Henry Kriegel was busted by the IRS for failing to pay a fortune in income taxes. Somehow, he got a bankruptcy court to let him off the hook on a large portion of it. Kriegel told reporters that he didn’t believe his tax history should keep him from speaking out about tax reform (in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle on June 15, 2009). It may not keep him from speaking out, but it keeps him from doing so with any credibility. Having Kriegel lead the charge against taxes is like tapping Bernie Madoff to campaign against tighter securities regulation.

That’s not the only skeleton in Kriegel’s closet. It turns out that Kriegel has been a high-ranking member of the Church Universal and Triumphant, also known as CUT. In fact, Kriegel was actually featured a while back in an LA Times article about people who wander off and get caught up in cult-like religious movements. An “out-of-stater” (to use a Republican phrase), Kriegel is from New York and left the east coast on a soul search, came to Montana, and joined up with CUT. During the 1990s, Kriegel spoke out against the deprogramming efforts of anti-cult activists, saying he was the “victim of an attempted deprogramming” by people opposed to his CUT membership. (Bozeman Daily Chronicle, March 15, 1992.)

Wikipedia says that CUT members worship, among other things,

“esoteric mysticism, the paranormal and alchemy, with a belief in angels, elves, fairies, and other beings…such as Sanat Kumara, Maitreya, Djwal Khul, El Morya, Kuthumi, Paul the Venetian, Serapis Bey, the Master Hilarion, Lanto, Lady Master Nada, Godfre, Lady Master Lotus, and Lanello, Enoch and Elohim.”

But even better, CUT was the bunch who believed that the world was going to end of a nuclear holocaust at a particular hour and minute on April 23, 1990. They built a massive underground bomb shelter up near Gardiner, MT and stocked it to the rafters with illegally purchased semi-automatic weapons, in preparation for The End (as reported by the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Feb. 27, 1995; Bozeman Daily Chronicle, March 14, 1995).

But I guess none of this was enough wacky for Kriegel, so he went looking for another fringe sect. He definitely found it in Americans for Prosperity.Tweet