Tagged: Whitefish

Posted: May 13, 2013 at 5:10 am

Would-be “Peaceful Ethnic Cleanser” from Montana Makes National News

A white supremacy group leader who has called for a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” that would clear parts of North America for only white people was profiled on the Rachel Maddow show this week.

Here’s the clip:

The Human Rights Network has done some research on this group, which calls itself the National Policy Institute.

In 2011, they held an event at the National Press Club to release its report called “Majority Strategy: Why the GOP Must Win White America.” The report urged the Republican Party to “reach in” to its base of white voters instead of “reaching out” to minorities. The report told the GOP to embrace immigration restrictions, end civil rights laws, and stop all forms of affirmative action.

The group’s leader, Richard Spencer, recently moved the group from Georgia to Whitefish. He says: “It is perfectly feasible for a white state to be established on the North American continent,” adding, “I have a dream.”

You’ll want to go read James Conner’s post on this, which is up at the Flathead Memo.

Posted: October 18, 2012 at 6:25 pm

Mailer Touts TEA Partier’s Role in Nutjob Bills

A bizarre mail piece appeared in Whitefish arguing that voters should support Tim Baldwin for legislature because he wrote one of the worst nutjob bills of the 2011 session.

The piece actually brags about Baldwin’s work to write HB 414, one of the infamous nullification bills, an idea so nutty it made national news. As TIME magazine reported in its profile of Montana’s wacky bills, nullification has a sinister history:

It was invoked by South Carolina lawmakers seething over tariff laws in the antebellum South, and again during the civil-rights era, when states opposed to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 used the idea of interposition, nullification’s kissing cousin, as a mechanism to resist integration.

Like nullification fanboy Derek Skees, (R-TEA) who currently holds the HD 4 seat Baldwin is running for, Baldwin is a states-rights fanatic. He believes that the fifty states individually can, should and must override federal law when they please. He admittedly does not recognize the supremacy clause of the US Constitution, saying it is a tool of “socialist and nationalist ideologues” designed to bring “state annihilation.”

The concept of nullification was a key feature of the most extreme legislature in Montana history–nearly a dozen bills to declare federal authority “null and void” or unenforceable in Montana were introduced by Republicans during the 2011 session. Gov. Brian Schweitzer in his veto of this particular nullification bill, HB 414, wrote:

“The 2011 Legislature may best be remembered for its efforts to “nullify” numerous federal laws and set records for the greatest number of unconstitutional bills in a legislative session -as identified by its own legal staff.”

Spear-hunting, war on women, nullification and militia bills have taken their toll on the Montana legislature, with polls showing that 61 percent of voters don’t approve of what the lunatics in the state house did, while only 24 percent of voters approve of their behavior.

Baldwin recently moved to Montana from Florida and lives in Kalispell, another trait he shares with Rep. Skees. Baldwin has lived in Kalispell for two years and has never lived in Whitefish.

Contrast that with forester Ed Lieser who has served Whitefish for 22 years.

Posted: August 22, 2012 at 6:25 pm

TEA Candidate Calls Domestic Violence Laws Unconstitutional ‘because they Discriminate Against Heterosexuals’

A Whitefish TEA Party Republican is arguing that laws against domestic violence are unconstitutional. This is because they discriminate against heterosexuals, Tim Baldwin says. Baldwin, who hopes to replace Derek Skees in the race for Whitefish’s House District 4, made this argument in court today as the attorney for a man charged with domestic violence.

As the Whitefish Pilot report, Baldwin said,

“The state can no more discriminate against the heterosexual class of persons than it can discriminate against the homosexual class of persons similarly situated,” Baldwin wrote. “Were the [Partner and Family Member Assault laws] to enhance penalties only against homosexual partners, it would be facilely unconstitutional…”

Based on this argument, the Lincoln County justice court judge dismissed the domestic violence charge. The state of Montana has appealed.

Baldwin and his father Chuck Baldwin are featured in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s recent Intelligence Report, which focuses on the recent uptick in extremist activity in Kalispell and the Flathead. In the article “A Gathering of Eagles: Extremists Look to Montana” the SPLC details the activities of the various far-right movements and their leaders, including Chuck and Tim Baldwin.

Tim Baldwin took issue with the report on the TEA Party blog PolyMontana, saying that he is not a racist:

“Some of my closest friends are of African descent. The same can be said of Chuck Baldwin.”

A local Republican penned an opinion piece about some of the problems with Baldwin in today’s Bigfork Eagle. The author writes that he doesn’t find Tim Baldwin to have “a moral compass or common sense. This makes his Republican status irrelevant, and I hope it makes him unelectable.”

Baldwin is running against Vietnam War veteran and forestry consultant Ed Lieser.

Posted: August 18, 2012 at 9:21 am

The Crew that Brought You the Iraq War, Hanging out in Whitefish

We now know that Karl Rove, the slob who helped bring us the George Bush presidency, two wars at a trillion dollars a piece, a giant deficit, and a giant economic mess, was in the Flathead last week for at least two purposes.

First, he was at a Whitefish fundraiser. The Huffington Post reports that he was raising money for Denny Rehberg and the Republican Party, with special guest Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell is the imbecile who said recently in a FOXNews interview that it should not be a concern at all that 35 million cannot afford medical care, to the shock of the FOXNews interviewer Chris Wallace.

The second thing Rove was doing was meeting with Ryan Zinke. Zinke proudly tweeted about this meeting of the minds. Zinke, who is coming off of a lopsided defeat in his campaign for lieutenant governor with Neil Livingstone (aka The Hooker Man), has started an organization called SOFA, for the purpose of attacking Obama over his management of the armed forces. He evidently was meeting with Rove to discuss strategy and perhaps get money.

Zinke is claiming that Obama failed our country by revealing the identity of the Seal Team that got Bin Laden (not the names of the individual seals, but rather, revealing that it was Seal Team 6). There are other theories about this you’ll want to read. Zinke also plans to try to convince Americans that Obama is taking personal credit for the raid. Zinke, who was a member of Seal Team six many years ago, intends to raise money to conduct a “swiftboat” type of attack on Obama regarding this matter.

You should appreciate the irony that Zinke was rubbing elbows with George Bush’s mastermind in Whitefish. Rove was the man who micromanaged the publicity event aboard the aircraft carrier, nine years before the Iraq war was actually ended (by Obama, thankfully), where the dunce George Bush (talk about trying to take personal credit) landed in a fighter jet beneath a banner declaring, in large letters, “Mission Accomplished.”

The mission was accomplished–by Obama in 2011, in Pakistan, when Bin Laden got wacked and dumped into the ocean. So you gotta love the idea of Zinke and Rove scheming together to try to take down Obama. For that matter, you gotta love Rehberg and McConnell being there two. Those two geniuses were among the herd that bought into the Iraq war, hook, line and sinker, and got so revved up about it that they basically were accusing anybody who opposed the war of “siding with the terrorists.”

The best news, I suppose, is that if Zinke’s new effort is anything like his campaign for governor, Obama has nothing to worry about.

Posted: May 22, 2012 at 12:30 pm

Whitefish TEA Partier: True Christians Needn’t Obey Law

TEA Party Republican Tim Baldwin has authored a book to explain his belief that Christian people need not submit to secular laws. Baldwin is a self-styled bible fanatic and lawyer that specializing in using the bible to find loopholes that allow True Believers to break the law. You need simply believe that the government is evil to do so.

If you believe that parking meters are a tyrannical conspiracy theory to prevent Christian people from getting a good parking space–you need not feed them. If you believe parking tickets are the faceless hand of government’s way of depriving the Godly of funds they were surely going to donate to orphanages–you need not pay. If you believe stem cell research is murder–you need not obey the government that prohibits murdering the scientists behind it.

Baldwin explains his unique beliefs on the Alex Jones Show. Jones is an apocalyptic conspiracy theorist on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate watch list.

The entire interview can be seen below. Baldwin is running for the Democratic-leaning Whitefish house seat formerly held by TEA Party Republican Derek Skees. Baldwin will face either Tom Muri or Ed Lieser depending on who wins the Democratic primary for this race.

Posted: November 1, 2011 at 7:05 pm

Political Quick Hits

We Take It Back

The Great Falls Tribune reported this week that the Great Falls Chamber of Commerce has flip-flopped, rescinding its endorsement of embattled Great Falls TEA Party leader Cyndi Baker, who is running against Mary Jolley. When asked about whether the reason for the un-endorsement had anything to do with the fact that Baker had threatened local schools with “bad publicity” if they didn’t offer her a government job as a liaison to the TEA Party, a Chamber representative said that was “part of it.”

Rehberg’s Lawsuit Continues to Make Waves

Dems continue to pound Rehberg for his lawsuit against Billings firefighters this week, but that’s not the only controversy the lawsuit has raised. Some Democrats are upset that Attorney General candidate Jesse Laslovich has found an unusual source for his campaign treasurer and financial support in Cliff and John Edwards. The pair are, respectively, the Rehberg’s lawyer and his son. Both work at the Edwards firm, which represent the Rehbergs. Rep. Carolyn Pease-Lopez (D-House District 42) posted on her Facebook page this week:

I just learned some disturbing news. The law firm that is representing Rehberg in his lawsuit agains the Billings Fire department are supporters and donors of the Jesse Laslovich campaign for A.G. One of the lawyers is even his campaign treasurer. What is Laslovich thinking! This is ridiculous.

Flathead Fallout

The latest political scandal in the Flathead keeps getting bigger. James Conner of the Flathead Memo and former State Representative Mike Jopek have some harsh words for the Flathead County Commission today. Here’s a sneak preview. The entire post is not to be missed:

Once only landowners did have the vote — and those landowners had to be white men. There are those who think that’s how things should be today.

Posted: November 1, 2011 at 7:41 am

Flathead County Republicans: Renters Aren’t Real Citizens

In the United States of America today, it would be illegal to allow only wealthy property owners to vote. So the Republican Flathead County Commissioners have done the next best thing.

They sent out a survey to the ‘doughnut’ residents (people who live in a ring around the outer edge of the city of Whitefish) asking who they prefer to manage planning and zoning, the county or city of Whitefish. Instead of mailing surveys to the registered voters in the area in question, they sent the surveys only to corporations and property owners.

The the lack of transparency seems to be an issue here is well, though the county claims that, “the survey is not a voting ballot measure,” [GOP County Commissioner Jim] Dupont said in the Flathead Beacon. Commissioners also apparently believe it “doesn’t require a public notice process” either.

It’s just a “tool in the toolbox” in the effort to bring clarification to an issue in need of it.

Over at the Informed Whitefish forum, word is that some sixty surveys went to a single Whitefish address (one for each parcel of land the individual owns in the area) while others expressed outrage that many of the surveys were mailed to out-of-area addresses – including Texas, California, Canada, Switzerland and England.

In fact, some say most of the surveys that the County mailed went to owners who do not live in Whitefish: Forty percent of the survey votes were actually mailed out of Montana. Flathead County surveys our Canadian neighbors to the north 300 times. Texas gets 70 votes, Missoula 60, and California got nearly 160 surveys.

Here’s Commissioner Jim Dupont explaining the merits of the GOP-ers’ plan:

“Then we’ll have exactly what the people in the doughnut think because I don’t know – I hear so much one way or the other,” Dupont said. “I don’t know why anyone would want to complain about it. It’s a simple answer.”

Perhaps next the Commissioners can throw out any surveys from women and people of color. Whitefish is 45 percent renters, Flathead County is 27 percent and Montana is 31 percent.

Posted: October 20, 2011 at 10:39 pm

The Ground Zero of Slime

City Commissions have been the hot topic in Helena and Great Falls of late, but nowhere are local politics filled with more intrigue, money, and slime than in the Flathead.

A city election would normally be a local contest with little statewide interest. But this is Whitefish, where the local races are ground zero in the fight between those who want unregulated development at all costs, and those who support zoning protections for local citizens against big developers and polluters. Political observers and members of the conservation community from around the state have been keeping a close eye on the upcoming city elections in Whitefish and so should you.

That’s because same big money shadow groups that spent $3-5 million to give us the Great TEA Party Legislative Disaster of 2011 cut their teeth playing in Flathead area politics, spending hundreds of thousands to influence recent city races and creating a myriad of single issue PACs with innocuous sounding names to obscure the money trail. To put that in perspective, the average city commission candidate here in the state’s capitol city raises $1,000 bucks or so.

First, the race for mayor:

Turner Askew, is a current city council member and is now running for mayor. Askew is a big shot commercial and industrial real estate broker, known for doing whatever the development industry asks. But Turner Askew isn’t just a member of the development industry who is backed by industry cash. He’s also an original member of the Flathead Business and Industry PAC–the group behind the one of the sleaziest political smear campaigns in recent memory.

The TEA Party has also thrown in with Askew. In fact, the TEA Party mega-millionaire donor Ray Thompson, who was exposed by Mother Jones for bankrolling some of the TEA Party’s most radical candidates is helping to fund his campaign.

Running against Askew is John Muhlfeld. John is well-liked and has a reputation for coming to all meetings prepared. He’s the founder of ‘River Design Group’ which has been recognized by Outside Magazine as one of the best places in the country to work. He’s supported by local folks, no PAC’s.

Here’s who’s running for city council:

Richard Hildner is a teacher at Glacier High and is probably the most knowledgeable candidate in the race. He’s known for attending more council meetings than the councilors. It’s hard to go wrong electing teachers.

Frank Sweeney is a local business attorney and has been the recipient of the majority of the personal attacks and political action committees bankrolled by wealthy landowner Rick Blake. Actually, Blake was a truck driver (born Ricky Lynn Blake) until he married an heir to the Avis car rental fortune. Blake, like Askew, is also founding member of Flathead Business and Industry Association PAC. Perhaps thinking one PAC wouldn’t buy him enough influence, Blake also founded a one-man PAC oddly titled “We Love Stumptown.” Sweeney has served as chairman of the local planning board and several other volunteer boards, and has lots of local support.

John Anderson, is another local attorney running for city council. He’s currently president of the local Chamber board. He seems to be a young family man who has a way of bringing folks together and who also has local support.

Then we have Mary Vail, who is most known for being a hard core supporter of one Derek Skees. She sits in the front row of many of his lectures. Vail will probably tout her service on the local library board, but her supporters are the usual right wingers. These include Askew and Blake’s wives and several other folks from the development community.

Word on the street is that candidate Doug Wise registered to vote here only three years ago. His known associates include Rick Blake, Turner Askew, and Ryan Zinke. When asked about city issues, Wise seems to regurgitate what he’s been told to say by them. Once the discussion becomes more in-depth however, Wise is any thing but. His money comes from the development community.

Finally, we have Life Noell, who is a young guy with a reputation for his great energy. Noell is a big advocate for medical marijuana and would probably do better to focus there rather then the city council race. He’s indicated that he is not willing do any campaigning that would cost more than $50.