Big Sky Cairn

Obama was the Democrat Party’s nominee 24 hours before the polls closed in Montana. Of course, no one knew that was going to be the case and for awhile it looked like the Montana Democrat Primary would actually matter. So campaign staff - nameless and countless - invaded Big Sky Country - sort of like a senior frat boy acting like he is really interested in the high school stories of a cute freshman girl he met on his way to class. He listened intently, acting like he shared their values and would help show them around the glorious progressive campus. At every turn, he urged them to take another sip of the alcohol-spiked kool-aid until, slowly, they started to believe that he actually had their own interests in mind.

They let down their guard. They invited the frat boy up to their dorm room. One thing lead to another and… well, you know what normally happens in these situations.

Obama got his satisfaction. He got the votes he came for, and like so many upperclassmen frat boys in similar situations, it looks like he’s out the door as fast as he can run - not even bothering to ask Montana Democrats for their number.

Volunteers packed boxes, folded up chairs, scrubbed windows clean and loaded up a U-Haul sitting on the street. Balloons, half-empty wine bottles and glittery party hats lay around the room, evidence of the Tuesday night party.

Montana Democrats, feeling a little confused, still cling to the hope that their new lover will come back and that last night was just the beginning of a beautiful long-term relationship. They haven’t yet done the electoral math that almost guarantees that their romp was nothing more than a one-night stand and that the handsome frat boy is going to spend his time wooing older, more established girls who have the connections they need. They are still flattered by the attention, not yet savvy enough to realize that they have been used.

We can only hope that they used some sort of protection. It would really be a shame if the excitement of one night had permanent consequences for the entire state.

Democrats have been eager to convince Republicans that their vote doesn’t matter in today’s primary elections. Missoulapolis and Montana Headlines have already done an excellent job of disproving this misrepresentation, so I’m going to take a different tack and suggest that contrary to what you are probably reading in the Montana media, voting in the Democrat Party’s primary probably isn’t going to matter that much either.

Here are five reasons the Montana Democrat’s Presidential Primary is irrelevant on the national stage.

1) Super Delegates - Surprise, you’re voting in an elitist Democrat Party system that is designed to reign in the unpredictable vote of the people - your vote if you dare to buck who The Party thinks you should vote for. In Montana, unless you’re one of eight super-delegates whose single votes can cancel over 100,000 opposing plebiscite ballots, the Democrat Party doesn’t really care who you think should be the Democrat Nominee for the Presidency. Hope you vote correctly!

2) The Democrat Party already knows what you want - In Michigan, no votes were cast for Obama because - well - he wasn’t on the ballot. Hillary Clinton was on the ballot - against the will of her party - and earned 55 percent of the vote. The Democrat Party decided to award Obama the majority of Michigan’s delegates anyway because, well, they already know how the people of Michigan were going to vote so why actually go to the trouble of counting their votes? If Montana gets it wrong, well, thank God super delegates can save Montana Democrats from their own ignorance.

3) Puerto Rico - So even if Montana minds it’s p’s and q’s, and does what it’s supposed to do, it doesn’t matter. The Democrat Party doesn’t really care that much about what Montana thinks anyway. See, there are 50 states (unless you’re Obama) and the Democrat Party has determined that what the people of Puerto Rico think is more important than more than half of them (27, to be exact). Puerto Rico has 55 Democrat delegates. Montana has 25 or less than half of Puerto Rico. Really want to the Democrats to listen to you? Avoid U.S. citizenship - and all hail the international community!

4) It’s already over - It’s really gotta be hard on the Montana Democrats who have been so excited about their votes making a difference today. There’s got to be some frustration that Hillary couldn’t keep a lid on her plans to concede for 24 itsy-bitsy more hours so they could have their fun (and for that matter, she spoiled the fun for Andrew Hammond too). Not that her exit is really that important since pundits have been calling her challenge mathematically impossible for months now.

5) McCain wins Montana anyway - Doesn’t matter who gets the Democrat nomination. McCain beats ‘em both in Montana - land of the bitter gun-clinging racists.

In what I can only describe as a procedural catastrophe, the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee awarded the Michigan delegates 69 for Hillary and 59 for Obama, each with half a vote. Once the decision was made to seat delegates from Michigan, which I will mention at the end, the scheme in which these were awarded is truly mind boggling.

Hillary “won” the Michigan primary with 55% to Obama’s 0%, since he was not on the ballot. The rest broke down 40% uncommitted, 4% Kucinich, 1% Dodd. Those numbers, after removing candidates who have since dropped out, gives 73 delegates to Clinton and 55 uncommitted.

The Clinton camp argued, and rightly so in my opinion, that the stripping of 4 delegates Clinton earned by her percentage of the vote and then reallocating them to Obama is an unprecedented move. Think about it, the Obama majority on the Rules panel did not like how Michigan voted so they simply ignored the will of the people and apportioned delegates how they saw fit. Harold Ickes put it nicely that this is probably not how Democrats should go about building party unity.

Second, since Obama’s name did not appear on the ballot, the DNC elite hearkened their best Florida 2000 impression and declared voter intent by fiat. What percent of those uncommitted would have voted for Edwards and not Obama? I doubt anyone knows, but the DNC rules committee declared that number was approximately zero, and awarded all uncommitted delegates to Obama.

I am wondering what the Obama camp was afraid of that they resorted to these tactics? The delegate math would not have shifted all that much if the Michigan numbers were respected like Florida and 55 delegates, each with half a vote, went to convention uncommitted, Obama will still win the primary. This is the same party that gives us the superdelegate system and awards Puerto Rico more votes than 27 states, so maybe this decision is just business as usual.

As I mentioned at the top, if the DNC wanted to set a strong precedent to adhere to the rules set at the start of the primary, Michigan and Florida delegates should not have been seated at all. In my mind, that would have been the proper and orderly way to go.

As a general rule, when an elected official introduces legislation, they almost never call it something bad. If they could get away with it, I’m sure every bill would be called the “Happiness, Puppies and Children Act.” Of course, the devil is always in the thousands of pages of actionable legislation behind the frou-frou title.

Now, Democrats have gotten really good at using bill nomenclature to set up Heisman Votes. Sometimes, they even trick themselves. And here are three examples from recent history.

Read the rest of this entry »

Republican Denny Rehberg sleeps on his couch, holds campaign events at bars with animal heads on the wall and raises his money in Montana.

Democrat Max Baucus lives in Georgetown, spends thousands of dollars at swank DC restaurants, drives a new BMW and raises his money everywhere but Montana.

Democrat Jim Hunt… well he wants to live in Washington, DC and doesn’t really raise much money from anywhere.

Why isn’t the media talking about where the millions of dollars that Baucus is going to dump into Montana races comes from?  Since that Missoulian article (linked above), we haven’t heard a thing about where Baucus is raising his money.  Since it’s going to have a pretty big impact on the political face of Montana, I think it’s a story worth telling.

Sometimes, I read blog posts and they just confuse me.  They make an argument or a claim and then use it to support a completely unrelated conclusion.

Montana Peaks & Politics is ticked at President Bush for vetoing the Farm Bill.  Makes sense.  So am I.  So are a myriad of other Montanans.  But MPP doesn’t stop there, he decides to take this argument into the stratosphere of poor partisan logic.

President Bush vetoed the Farm Bill.  President Bush is a Republican.  Denny Rehberg is a Republican.  We must get rid of Denny Rehberg.

What?  Forget the fact that Rehberg voted in support of the Farm Bill.  Forget the fact that he voted to override the President’s veto.

Nope, he’s a Republican and the President is a Republican so he must be punished for the President’s stupid decision to veto the Farm Bill.  Yeah, that makes sense.

I would have thought a Lt. Col. (ret) would have known military rules, but I would be wrong, especially after Hunt’s faux-pas during his campaign kick off. It seems to be a common thread amongst Democrats in this state that rules and laws only apply when they want them to. Plain and simple Hunt broke military rules. A fellow veteran, who is not a lawyer as far as I know, called him out on it.

What is a trial lawyer turned Democrat candidate supposed to do when confronted with a violation of the the law? Turn to Daily Kos of course. I wonder if Jim Hunt’s “Montana Values” are the same as Markos “Screw ‘em” Moulitsas Zuniga’s. I wonder if Hunt holds the same disparaging view of those risking their lives to help Iraqi citizens;

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them. Read the rest of this entry »

As I wrote about earlier, the House passed a $51.8 billion tax increase, ostensibly to pay for domestic spending priorities in the Iraq War Supplemental.

To get an idea of how much money this is, I went on over to the IMF website and used their handy dandy report maker on Global financial statistics. The $51.8 billion Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR) says won’t be missed much, is more than the Gross Domestic Products of 2/3 of the world. The Democrat tax increase amounts to roughly the entire economy of Croatia.

Why stop there? The Democrats want to pass a budget raising taxes by $683 billion. Or to put it a different way, slightly larger than the economy of Turkey and more than the economies of 165 out of 181 countries.

Seriously, props to Jay Stevens for the national attention. It must be exhilarating to get that kind of recognition. I mean, to have Howard Dean - Mr. Montana himself - recognize the hard work of being a lefty blogger along with 49 other official state blogs (sucks to be in states 51-57 I guess) has got to be exciting. I’m sure Dean is a regular reader - you can tell from the way his statement doesn’t seem scripted at all. I wonder if it was the 49th or the 50th one he did that day.

I mean getting a shout out of national significance - from an important place like Washington, DC, the home of Senator Max Baucus, Mr. BMW himself, is a remarkable accomplishment, so well done.

Of course, to share in your celebration we’ll all forget that we know that national Democrat Leaders will say anything to dupe Montanans into supporting them.

I guess we’ll just have to settle for the insignificant opinions of actual Montanans like Congressman Denny Rehberg and Gubernatorial Candidate Roy Brown. Ooooh the sour grapes taste awful!

YEEEAAHH!!!

Democrats swept into power in 2006 on promises of lower gas prices. High costs, they argued, were hurting the working poor, one of the constituencies they were courting in their move toward Populism. See, unlike our tax code, gas prices act regressively and have a particular impact on rural areas where driving cannot be supplanted by public transportation.

We thought things were bad when gas prices were $2.33 for a gallon when the 110th Congress gaveled into session. Today, the national average is over $3.53 and rising. Why haven’t Democrats done anything?

They’ll never admit this - and they hope that we’ll all have goldfish memories - but high gas prices are just what Doctor Democrat has been ordering for years. See, while the working poor are important because they vote, environmentalists are even more important because they donate. A lot.

And for years, environmentalists have been complaining about the low price of gas. They complain because low gas prices prevent the market from adopting more expensive alternatives. They complain because low gas prices make gas-guzzling SUVs economically viable. They complain because low gas prices don’t account for what they call the environmental footprint of fossil fuels. And they still think gas prices are too high.

Economists feel that gasoline prices would need to double and remain there (i.e. $7-8/gallon) before behavior would really change, and advocate a gas tax to get us there. The externalities (accidents, smog, global warming, etc.) are simply not reflected in the current price of gasoline.

They have proposed carbon taxes, mileage taxes, gas taxes, energy taxes, congestion taxes and just about any other mechanism they could think up to make the price of a gallon of gasoline higher. The price we’re paying at the pump is the result of years of their efforts to prevent us from tapping our own energy supplies.

So when Americans wonder about the plan to lower gas prices, I am skeptical whether the Democrats would enact such a plan even if they had one. Given their record of fighting for higher gas prices, their promises in 2006 seemed hollow to me.