Big Sky Cairn

It’s always possible that what informed people take as lies are really just the uninformed rantings of political sheep. Jay Stevens finds himself between a rock and a hard place: he is either a liar or he just has no clue what he is talking about. Supposing he was a liar, of course, would be crediting him with being able to see through the cloud of B.S. that Montana Democrats lay down and he doesn’t have a very strong track record with that.

What’s leading me to think that maybe Jay Stevens may not be lying and may be merely demonstrating his clueless constitution instead?

Read the rest of this entry »

Back before Big Sky Cairn was even a twinkle in my eye, when the “Dextrasphere” was still new and growing, conservative blogs in Montana faced a bout of dishonesty amongst their own. A blog called Montana Pundit was correctly accused of plagiarism by Shane Mason. They way conservatives bloggers responded when it became clear that they were being lied to by Hagen was one of the reasons I eventually decided to throw myself in with their lot. The infant Dextrasphere responded by removing the site from their Dextra feed and disavowing the author - even though he was “one of their own.” Integrity, for them, rose above partisan loyalty. The Dextra policed its own and Montana Pundit is now an internet ghost town.

I want to pose a question for the left-leaning blogs in Montana: What role do you believe that integrity plays in blogging and what measures are you willing to take to preserve it? Are you willing to castigate one of your own for lying?

The subject I’m about to breech has already been discussed by Missoulapolis, Rabid Sanity and Electric City Weblog but I’m interested in what, if any, response this situation invokes from the left-leaning blogs. How dearly do you hold the integrity of your associations?

Jay Stevens at Left in the West is perpetuating a lie. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll say it now for the record, I think Matt Singer is the most gifted political mind in the Sinestrasphere. His post on the possible Tester vs. Rehberg matchup in 2012 is certainly worth a read, if for no other reason than the double meaning of this line:

Montana Headlines is already previewing what could be the heavyweight match of the decade: a 2012 U.S. Senate battle between Sen. Jon Tester and Rep. Dennis Rehberg.

Too easy. Let’s just say that Senator Tester is a “heavyweight” in only one meaning of the word and leave it at that.

What’s more interesting is that like Art Noonan and senior Democrat Strategists, Matt Singer’s commentary seems to assume that Congressman Denny Rehberg will be a viable political candidate - a “heavyweight” - in 2012. Read between the lines and Matt Singer is acknowledging that it’s unlikely he’ll lose in 2008 or 2010. To be fair, he first refers to this match-up as “a good chance” but later refers to it in the simple future tense using “will” which removes the previously applied conditional.

Poor Jim Hunt. What’s next? A Rehberg endorsement from his Mom?

On a related note, I wonder if, by 2012, Tester will have secured that seat on the Appropriations Committee that Montana was promised… Somehow I doubt it; not a lot of first-term Senators on that Committee and like I said, Tester isn’t exactly a political heavyweight. He’s already served his purpose - no need to pander to Montana anymore.

I’ve commented on this before - the inacurate portrayal of voting records by Montana Democrats in an attempt to tie Congressman Denny Rehberg to President George W. Bush.

The Gazette has made this point (again).

U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., is getting political flak this election year over his voting record, criticized by Democrats as a yes man for President Bush and Republican policies in general.

A look at 16 key U.S. House votes in 2007 shows Rehberg siding with the president and fellow Republicans on two-thirds of those votes - and generally against them on the other third.

And this…

Rehberg said criticizing him as a Bush yes man appears to be a national “cookie-cutter campaign” drawn up by Democratic strategists in Washington, D.C., and recommended to Democratic challengers nationwide.

“He’s trying to fool Montana voters, and they’re not going to be fooled,” Rehberg said of Hunt. “These kind of charges just don’t work.”

Read the whole article.

Here’s the thing. I trust Denny Rehberg - which is not something I can say about the rest of our say-anything delegation. I trust a man who says what he thinks even if there are obvious political hurdles.  When political expediency can be removed from the motive, what’s left is sincerity.

While I’m not writing “C.C. + G.W.B.” on any scratch paper and I have some problems with Bush policies, I think Congressman Rehberg is on the right track.  Liberals have made in a little over a year the error of hubris that caught up to the Republicans after a decade; you assume that everyone hates Bush as much as you do.  And that’s just not the case.  Your hate is blinding you while the right hasn’t lost sight of our ideals.

2006 was not an endorsement of the left; it was a referendum of the right: clean up your act and get back to the party of small government and fiscal responsibility.

I commented on this story before. There’s a lot of good stuff there. I mean a lot. Go read it. Even if you already read it. It’s sort of like Moby Dick - a new meaning at every reading. Inspiring.

Anyway, it’s also interesting because the part of the story that makes it fair journalism - the entire section dedicated to Montana Democrat’s spinmeistering. From it, we can catch a glimpse at what The Democrat Machine has in store for 2008 (and beyond?).

Rehberg’s biggest vulnerability, Democrats say, is his pro-war, pro-Bush record and lack of legislative initiative. He’s voted in lock step with the Bush Administration and fellow Republicans 92 percent of the time, according to the Washington Post, including votes on major issues like the federal budget, tax cuts, and the Iraq War.

This meme is likely to manifest itself quite a bit because if the man is popular you just have tie him to someone that’s not popular. That’s the politics of personal destruction that the Montana Democrats perfected with Burns in 2006, and they’re polishing up their picks to take out another bull.

Trouble is, the varas aren’t sticking, and the bull as strong as it ever was as their neophyte mariachi enters the arena.

Read the rest of this entry »

I had some misgivings about Rob Harper and the Missoula Independent after a pretty unfair hit-piece about Erik Iverson. But the recent story, Can this man be beaten? is actually very fair which of course makes it seem tremendously bias to people used to left-wing bias in Montana reporting. Pogie’s outrage would be a lot more convincing, of course, if it wasn’t Democrats saying that Rehberg was so darn strong.

Kudos to Rob for having the guts to tell a story that even Montana Democrats know. Denny Rehberg is tough to beat and Jim Hunt isn’t the one to beat him. So while Noonan is thinking 2010, other Senior Democratic strategists don’t think they’ll have a chance at the House seat until 2012.

With pre-imminent name recognition, impeccable political savvy, and a formidable grassroots organization that’s 25 years in the making, Rehberg has evolved into a political machine so robust the Democrats rightly wonder if they’ve got any chance of beating him now, or any time in the near future. Some say a Demo overthrow might just have to wait until 2012.

Seems like something else is going on in 2012. Oh yeah, this guy will be running for his second term. I can’t help but think that Tester’s seat will be pretty attractive right around then for a guy that could probably have beaten Baucus this year if he’d thrown in his hat.

So that House seat is Denny’s until he abdicates or moves on to something bigger. And that according to Democrats. One would almost feel sorry for Jim Hunt if he wasn’t - you know - a personal injury trial lawyer.

So anyway, read the entire article. And see what some of the other Dextra bloggers had to say about it here, here and here.

It seems odd that a law that has become as controversial as Real ID (at least in Montana) passed with such popular margins in Congress (100-0 in the Senate, 368-58 in the House). Why?

Our borders and immigration system, including law enforcement, ought to send a message of welcome, tolerance, and justice to members of immigrant communities in the United States and in their countries of origin. We should reach out to immigrant communities. Good immigration services are one way of doing so that is valuable in every way-including intelligence.

It is elemental to border security to know who is coming into the country. Today more than 9 million people are in the United States outside the legal immigration system. We must also be able to monitor and respond to entrances between our ports of entry, working with Canada and Mexico as much as possible.

There is a growing role for state and local law enforcement agencies. They need more training and work with federal agencies so that they can cooperate more effectively with those federal authorities in identifying terrorist suspects.

All but one of the 9/11 hijackers acquired some form of U.S. identification document, some by fraud. Acquisition of these forms of identification would have assisted them in boarding commercial flights, renting cars, and other necessary activities.

Recommendation: Secure identification should begin in the United States. The federal government should set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and sources of identification, such as drivers licenses. Fraud in identification documents is no longer just a problem of theft. At many entry points to vulnerable facilities, including gates for boarding aircraft, sources of identification are the last opportunity to ensure that people are who they say they are and to check whether they are terrorists.

And this one too:

For terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons. Terrorists must travel clandestinely to meet, train, plan, case targets, and gain access to attack. To them, international travel presents great danger, because they must surface to pass through regulated channels, present themselves to border security officials, or attempt to circumvent inspection points.

In their travels, terrorists use evasive methods, such as altered and counterfeit passports and visas, specific travel methods and routes, liaisons with corrupt government officials, human smuggling networks, supportive travel agencies, and immigration and identity fraud. These can sometimes be detected.

Before 9/11, no agency of the U.S. government systematically analyzed terrorists’ travel strategies. Had they done so, they could have discovered the ways in which the terrorist predecessors to al Qaeda had been systematically but detectably exploiting weaknesses in our border security since the early 1990s.

We found that as many as 15 of the 19 hijackers were potentially vulnerable to interception by border authorities. Analyzing their characteristic travel documents and travel patterns could have allowed authorities to intercept 4 to 15 hijackers and more effective use of information available in U.S. government databases could have identified up to 3 hijackers.32

Looking back, we can also see that the routine operations of our immigration laws-that is, aspects of those laws not specifically aimed at protecting against terrorism-inevitably shaped al Qaeda’s planning and opportunities. Because they were deemed not to be bona fide tourists or students as they claimed, five conspirators that we know of tried to get visas and failed, and one was denied entry by an inspector. We also found that had the immigration system set a higher bar for determining whether individuals are who or what they claim to be-and ensuring routine consequences for violations-it could potentially have excluded, removed, or come into further contact with several hijackers who did not appear to meet the terms for admitting short-term visitors.33

Our investigation showed that two systemic weaknesses came together in our border system’s inability to contribute to an effective defense against the 9/11 attacks: a lack of well-developed counterterrorism measures as a part of border security and an immigration system not able to deliver on its basic commitments, much less support counterterrorism. These weaknesses have been reduced but are far from being overcome.

Recommendation: Targeting travel is at least as powerful a weapon against terrorists as targeting their money. The United States should combine terrorist travel intelligence, operations, and law enforcement in a strategy to intercept terrorists, find terrorist travel facilitators, and constrain terrorist mobility.

Remember that 9/11 Commission Report? Turns out that among the central recommendations of this report was something like Real ID. That’s where those excerpts are taken from.

Look, liberals love to set their standards way above federal minimums. Except, apparently, when it’s a matter of national security.

Rack this one up to media bias.  Yes, Rehberg voted for Real ID.  It’s all over the papers and in every news story about Baucus and Tester.  Usually the article also mentions that Renberg changed his position on the law after the state unanimously passed legislation refusing to comply.

So I find myself wondering why, in every article I’ve read about Baucus and Tester opposing Real ID, there is absolutely no mention of how Baucus voted.  It seems like in an article about their opposition to a law, it would be relevant to know how they originally voted when that law was made.  And I figure the reporters know it’s relevant because they mention Rehberg’s support for the law even when the story isn’t about Rehberg at all.  But Baucus’ press release probably didn’t have that information in it, and as busy as it gets, it was probably too much work to determine if he ever supported Real ID.  After all, its not like anyone would try to use this as a political issue.

Fear not dear readers; I did the 2 minutes of research on Google.  Turns out, that like 99 of his colleagues in the Senate, including the other Senator from Montana, Max Baucus voted for Real ID.  Doesn’t that seem newsworthy to you?

I harbor no great hopes for fair and balanced editorial control at the Billings Gazette. However, even for the Gazette, today’s letter by Jeff Simkovic is rare for its perfect combination of pointlessness, coupled with self-interest, and topped off with a political smear job.

My problems with the letter are two-fold. First, from a public policy standpoint, this letter puts forward no proposal. From the lead-in, one would imagine Mr. Simkovic is asking for assistance correcting some unspecified problem with certain Blackfeet housing units. Yet, less than 50 words after assailing Congress for inaction the author lets slip the reason why nothing has been done.

“Baucus’ office explained to us how Congress was procedurally unable to help…”

In absence of a clear policy motive it becomes apparent to me that this letter is nothing more than a cheap political hit against Denny Rehberg. Without going into any details, Mr. Simkovic feels comfortable lobbing the potshot; “Rehberg late to help with Blackfeet housing.” Although the letter refers to Congress as a whole, the Representative is singled out for inactivity.

Max is praised for his “real interest,” whatever the hell that means, while Senator Tester is not mentioned at all. The second part should seem a bit odd given that Senator Tester sits on the Indian Affairs panel. Although, I suppose when the point of the letter is a cheap smear details do not matter all that much.

Doing a bit of research, the details of the case Jeff Simkovic is talking about are complex. At issue is whether or not 8 individuals who received 1970s era housing units from the Blackfeet Housing Authority have standing to sue HUD and the tribal government over unsafe living conditions. In January, a judge in Great Falls ruled no, citing the sovereign immunity clause which shields entities such as the Blackfeet Housing from private lawsuits.

Mr. Simkovic has been working on this lawsuit for five years. He is understandable upset about losing a reliable fee. But to infer the Congressman doesn’t care about Natives is absurd.

The icing on the cake of this adventure in conjecture is the close.

“The only hope for the Blackfeet people living in these homes is the courts. The Blackfeet families who live in these homes are in no way responsible for these problems and have nowhere to go.”

Hope lies only in litigation when you are a trial lawyer. Why? Simple it is the only place where folks like Jim Hunt and Jeff Simkovic can make a buck. Despite rhetoric that Jim and Jeff are out looking for the little guy, they are only out to get their name in the paper and collect a fee. In biology they would probably be classified as parasites.