Don Progreba writes about Republicans at Intelligent Discontent. He is predictable, repetitive, rote and routine, unimaginative and incurious to a fault. He invites ridicule, but imagines that it is only the party impulse that brings it about rather than an impulse we might call, thinking here thinking ….. intelligent disc… never mind.

But I laughed out loud when I read his most recent post, 12 Reasons Montana s Can’t and Won’t Elect Ryan Zinke. Perhaps a few of my readers share my sense of humor in these affairs. Here is Don’s first reason:

He can’t be trusted.

The above ad, timed for maximum impact on the Montana primary, is as cynical a maneuver as I have seen in politics, and is nauseating. It’s pure wedge, the crass emotionalism so blatant that it gives me goose bumps. John Walsh is about as inspiring as Major Frank Burns, and at least as deep. The fake sincerity he projects is enough to qualify him for an AVN award.

The Montana Democratic Party is deeply corrupt, and has managed to hold on to the governorship and senate seats due to sleazy trickery, dark money and the apparent ineptitude of its Republican counter-party. But then think about it: For all the years he held office there, former Senator Max Baucus only encountered one smart and well-financed opponent, Larry Williams, and dispatched of him with typical deceit and treachery, using a last-minute photo of him in college beads. He used a similar tactic against opponent Mike Taylor in 2002, with a homophobic attack that paralyzed his opponent. In campaigning, Baucus had no moral bottom. It’s how the Montana Democrat Party rolls.

But not this time, I think. Walsh is a tired man, uninspiring, military through and through, devoid of original thought and accustomed to doing as others command without reflex. (Even as I write that, I realize that Baucus held that seat for thirty years. I am swallowing hard on my words! Anything is possible in Montana.) His essential moral fatigue and intellectual shallowness comes across in the campaign images – if I can see through him, surely others will too. And that means that in 2015 Montana will again have a Republican senator, and Montana bloggers will again pay attention to an elected official after an election.

I ran across a pithy Mencken quote that adequately summarizes Walsh, below the fold.
Continue reading “A Montana wedgy” →

Maybe it is just the way of the world, the manner in which power manifests itself to us, its tentacles reaching into every aspect of our lives.

• As I have learned in my lifetime, if we want to know what is true in our everyday political lives, we must avoid journalists. They are required to lie for their living.
• If we want to know what is true about the products we buy, we must avoid advertisers. They are required to lie for their living.
• If we want to know what is true about our history, we must avoid historians, who are only ‘credible’ to the degree that they dress up scoundrels as saviors and villains as heroes. They are required to lie for their living.
• If we want an education, we must avoid our schools, whose function is quite the opposite, to dumb us down and prepare us for eking out mundane existences, steeped in the lies of journalism, advertising and history, sans curiosity.
• And, as I have known for some years and is finally coming out in the mainstream, if we want to be healthy, we must avoid food corporations, their products, their scientists, and professional nutritionists. Our children are not just obese. They are being poisoned and are very sick.

Jimmy Fallon had Neil Young on his show a couple of nights ago, and they did something historic: Young recorded Willie Nelson’s song Crazy directly to a Voice-O-Graph vinyl recording booth.

Music is subjective, so I suppose people will disagree, but I thought after Young was done, even knowing he was going for minimalist, that the result was a badly sung song accompanied by a weak guitar with poor sound quality. Young has never appealed to me – I have never picked up on the vibe that made him famous.

He’s done a whole album of similarly recorded songs. Kitschy.

How much of our taste in music is suggested to us? The clothes we wear are entirely the result of suggestion. Ties are getting narrow again, as Fallon and others are wearing them that way. Is music the same – do we learn to like various acts due to subliminal suggestion? Or is it like the fashion business – follow the leader? I cannot imagine why else such mediocre talents as Lady Gaga and Britney Spears achieved stardom. And I imagine that if Neil Young walked into a recording studio today, unknown, that he would be ushered out as quickly.

Fallon’s in-house band, The Roots, by the way – if we can objectively agree on what is musical talent, that would be it. That is one energetic, gifted group of players.

Big Swede inserted a Milton Friedman link over at 4&20, and so I went for a longer version. The appearance in 1979 on the Phil Donahue show [which I think I saw at that time] was forty-five minutes, Swede’s link was about 90 seconds, and this one runs about ten minutes. Swede’s portion is part of the longer clip here.

I have my own views of Friedman, and some ability to hold them with integrity as I was swayed by him in the 1980’s with his book/TV series Free To Choose. His logic was so crystal clear that it seemed unassailable to me, and like Swede, I could not understand how anyone could argue with him. But so much of what he advocated turned out wrong. He was on the wrong side of a fascist dictatorship in Chile, and deregulation of the S&L industry and later electricity in California led to disasters. (Like the Great Depression, I assume Friedman hung those somehow on government failure too.)

But there was no way I could fathom in my mind a better way to organize an economy than around freedom of choice. I would not begin to break through the barriers of neoclassical economics until I removed the ideological underpinnings, removing “capitalism” and “free markets” and “free trade,” which are mere window dressing, and putting in their stead mere fascism. The essential feature of the market is market power. In a “free” market there are no restraints on power, and those who do not have it must suffer. The ultimate expression of this freedom they so cherish is slavery. After all, what force protects a man from being owned by another? The free market? Or government.

So I listened to him again so many years later and realized he was a charlatan, smooth and glib in his assertions. Most of them are just wrong. People like him (or Chomsky or Nader) should be presented to us on adversarial platforms, never to merely blandly assert to the tides, but to endure cross-examination and refutation until the subject has crystallized. Putting Friedman up against Donahue, an entertainer, was OK. At least there was some blowback, and Donahue did not pretend to understand economics well.

It is 1979, there is a Fairness Doctrine, so I imagine that Nader, who came under attack was allowed to respond. The format was cordial and the men were respectful of one another, each allowing time for full questions and answers. All of that went out the window with the Fairness Doctrine, so that TV interviews are torture these days, usually one-sided with mikes cut off, people talking over one another, audience unrestrained in their applause and jeers. It was a different era. Back then we were stupid, but polite. Today we are just stupid.

Democrat candidates need to appeal to the nurturing instincts of their party’s natural base when campaigning. The ad men are working the numbers, trying to help him appeal to various factions. This ad was designed to reach teachers and appears via Facebook.

John Walsh is yet to utter an original thought, typical of a military man. He’s not had to think for himself throughout his life, and won’t start in the Senate if, God forbid, he’s elected instead of, God forbid, Steve Daines.

Montana teachers: Walsh’s people are making a run at you, but you won’t even get a cuppa joe with this guy if he wins. That’s now it works – they want you to show up, vote for him, and then go away and let him work for his money backers. That is his real constituency.

There is a candidate for Senate in Montana, Dirk Adams, who is talking progressive talk. I dunno … I fell for Jon Tester’s pwoggie talk in 2006. Tester played us and won and then quickly turned on us. Dirk Adams could be Lucy holding the football for the Charlie Brown progressives again, but if there is any real choice in the senate field in Montana in 2014, Adams appears to be the guy worthy of support from the left, such as it is.

I am currently watching Mad Men Season 6, and enjoying it. Like everyone, I am taken in by the casting, writing and acting. As far as my memory goes, they do a good job recapturing that era with desks and hair and props. But they have complete control there, as my memory is triggered by their props and I do not know what is not triggered.

Woody Allen had a nice message in his movie Midnight in Paris: nostalgia is pointless. The past was just like the present. Back then we thought we were on the cutting edge of consumer technology (we were). So did Mark Twain, who thought the telegraph and electricity were the bomb. We forget that people then were as smart as people now, and better informed. (In 1969 perhaps 30% of the American public thought the moon landings were faked. Now it’s only 7%. We are dumbed down considerably.)

I don’t care about moon landings – that is Lincolnesque log-splitting stuff, the mythology that binds countries together. We all have it everywhere, and we need it if we are to have political boundaries and cohesive cultures.

The episode of a Mad Men I just watched included the Martin Luther King assassination. I was fortunate to have had a phone conversation with James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable, last week. He and my cousin are close friends, and she put me on the line. He had a good message for me.

More important than details here and there, he told me, is why they murdered JFK. I’ll add RFK, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King? Why did they murder or imprison every Black Panther leader? Why did Stokely Carmichael take refuge in Cuba? Ever hear of Mary Sherman? Gary Webb? Mike Connell? Mary Jo Kopechne? There are not scores of unsolved murders in our history. There are not hundreds. There are thousands, most names not well-known.

But take just one, Martin Luther King. With JFK and RFK, we fell into deep sadness. But killing MLK risked insurrection and revolution. Mad Men captures some of that. I remember when it happened that the Rat Pack entertainer, Sammy Davis Jr., came on The Tonight Show to beg everyone to stay calm, not to riot and tear down the cities. He was the epitome of the good negro, hair straightened and hanging out in Vegas with Frank and Dean and the boys. Take it in stride he said. Don’t get uppity.

There were riots, anger and angst, but the King murder was salt on the earth, the end of an era, and civil rights died with him. In its place we got the Rockefeller Drug laws and every potential black leader either in jail or dying. You might argue that blacks have made great progress in the years since, but killing MLK kept them in their place. He was uppity, and worse yet, was talking about Vietnam. Some say that was the trigger, the final scene in the play called Killing Hope. (One more high-profile assassination lay in store before the close of the era, George Wallace.)

Why did they kill Martin Luther King? They knew the risks. They thought it had to be done. Every assassination and every witness murdered, every journalist and crusader removed dampens our expectations. The good really do die young. By design.

We can have our nice cars and computers and social media, we can have music if it is empty of meaning. We cannot have hope or change. Those two things are not allowed. Ever. The words are no more than an empty ad slogan.

This might qualify as a Paul Harvey “The Rest of the Story” piece. It is simply amazing how much evidence private researchers have accumulated over the past decades concerning the JFK assassination. They’ve identified the shooters, locations of the snipers’ nests, the probable command center, the role of officer Tippett, and some of the high-profile people who made it all happen.

Most players, of course, were involved only on a need-to-know basis. Once they realize what is going down, that they are part of a major crime, they know they are in deep trouble and so shut up. Ole Dammegård has spent the last 30 years investigating JFK and other crimes and has gotten some of these insiders to talk.

He noticed that the 1986 murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme had many similarities to JFK, and so came to realize that the formula for murder of high-profile people is pretty much the same over time and no matter the place. Mechanics are brought in from many places, some fire blanks so that the real murderer is never certain and all are accountable. A patsy is selected and sheepdipped, the murder committed (and the patsy murdered too if he cannot otherwise be kept quiet). A cover-up ensues that goes on for decades thereafter.

It appears that the cover-up takes more planning than the crime itself. There are still people in Langley and other places tasked with minding the details of the JFK murder, along with other high-profile crimes.

This is just a small detail but caught my eye. It was a piece of information from Dammegård coupled with something else a I had read. Dammegård says that a CIA agent based in LA in 1963, Chauncy Holt, was tasked with producing fake ID’s for all of the bogus Secret Service agents that were running around Dealey Plaza after the murder, confiscating film and tracking and interviewing (and intimidating) potential problem witnesses. Holt was not a witting participant in the crime. He was told to take the fake ID’s to Dallas and give them to a man named Charles Harrelson for handling.

Charles Harrelson was born in Midland, Texas, and married Diane Lou Oswald, just a coincidental name. He was a professional hitman, and was arrested in 1979 for killing a federal judge. He died in prison. Charles and Diane had three sons, Jordan, Brett, and Woodrow.

That last one, Woodrow Tracy Harrelson, is better known today as Woody Harrelson, the actor. I’ve long liked the guy and notice that he takes part in activist causes, plays edgy characters, and was in an insider’s delight of a truth-smuggling movie called Wag the Dog. He is also skeptical of the official story about 9/11. I wonder how much he knows about JFK, and if his Dad ever told him anything about the events of that day from his prison cell.
Continue reading “About a boy” →

This photo of grandson Seamus will be on display at Chicago’s Addison Station as part of a Montana tourism campaign. We are very proud and happy about this!

I thought I’d pretend I am on Facebook and put up a mediocre photo for all my friends and acquaintances so you can see where we are at. This is the view out our front window, looking southwest at the Montana Beartooths. Red Lodge is maybe twenty miles off behind those mountains. We are nearest Fishtail, Montana, a bend in the road and one of my favorite spots growing up. It’s on the road to the West Rosebud drainage.

We are on what was once a working ranch and perhaps will be again. I suspect the owner has read Omnivore’s Dilemma, as he is trying to make the place go using some of the animal husbandry that Michael Pollan espoused in that book.

So leaving Fishtail was a rush of pleasant memories of childhood and days of no responsibility. This place, these Beartooths were right in our backyard. Billings, my home town, has changed so much. It is just like all American towns and cities. Maybe ten percent of its population is doing well. The rest have little wealth and even fewer prospects for a better life. So the town is littered with high-end restaurants next to casinos, luxuriant new homes on its west end and miles of small and older homes in need of some upkeep.

But the Beartooths are the unchanged. They are now as they were when I hiked through them a a ten-year old kid.