Zinke calls on both Trump and Clinton to apologize to military families

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 0 Comment
Rep. Ryan Zinke prepares to crack a walnut.

Rep. Ryan Zinke prepares to crack a walnut.

Remember a few days ago, before we were all mad at Donald Trump for implying that someone should shoot Hillary Clinton, when we were all mad at Trump for insulting the parents of a dead Muslim serviceman? At the Democratic National Convention, where Khizr Khan lambasted Trump for his bigoted remarks about Muslims. “You have sacrificed nothing and no one,” Khan said to the billionaire restorer of American greatness, who missed Vietnam due to bone spurs. It probably would have chastened a normal person, but Trump hit back, suggesting that Khan’s wife, Ghazala, hadn’t spoken during her husband’s speech because Muslim custom forbade her.

These remarks put Montana’s Rep. Ryan Zinke in a bad spot. Zinke is a freshman congressman, and he can’t afford to buck his party too often. On the other hand, the unimpeachable dignity of military service is his whole thing. His political brand is rooted in his identity as a former Navy SEAL, and his personal ethics seem to hold veterans in the highest regard. So he released this statement on his campaign website:

Both of our candidates for president have picked fights with and said extremely regrettable things to the families of service members who paid the ultimate sacrifice in defense of our great nation. As a grateful nation, we cannot allow this to become the norm, and we cannot allow it to go without notice. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton should swallow their pride and apologize to the families and service members they have offended. Politics has no role in the military.

Can I get partial credit on this? Because I can definitely think of the extremely regrettable things one candidate said to the family of a service member that should occasion an apology, but I’m blanking on the other one. Was it Benghazi? Was it the part where she runs against Trump, and therefore must be made equivalent to him in all things? These and another pressing question—why would Zinke, who has a future in politics, risk his credibility for a man who is to his party as the chicken pox is to a sixth grader?—are explored in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Two years and $14 million later, Missoula wins right to buy Mountain Water

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 0 Comment
Missoula mayor John Engen atop Water Works Hill

Missoula mayor John Engen atop Water Works Hill

On Tuesday afternoon, the Montana Supreme Court upheld a district court decision forcing the sale of Mountain Water to the city of Missoula by eminent domain. It was the culmination of a fight that has lasted almost two years, beginning when the city offered multinational private equity fund The Carlyle Group $50 million for our water system in 2014. After Carlyle refused and Missoula started preparing its eminent-domain suit, the city estimated the total legal cost of condemnation at $400,000. As of this writing, we’ve spent $6 million, and we’ll likely be held liable for Carlyle’s $8 million in legal costs, too. But the important thing is we bought the water company—not for the $50 million we considered a fair price in 2014, but for $88.6 million. But we won, and Mountain Water is a good deal at any price, as the mayor expressed in this tweet yesterday:

That’s kind of infuriating. At a City Club forum in January of last year, before the value of Mountain Water had been established by a district court, I asked city council members at what threshold the purchase price of the water company would no longer save ratepayers money over the life of a 20-year bond. They didn’t know. The city had not run the numbers to determine at what point Mountain Water stopped being a good deal. Fifty million was a good price, apparently, and $50 billion would be too much. But within that range, no one could say exactly where a smart investment would turn dumb. Then-Councilman Adam Hertz said no such detailed financial analysis was available.

Engen insists this deal will save ratepayers money, and he admonishes us to study before we tweet. But he did not study before he embarked on the largest purchase in Missoula’s history. His insistence that those who criticize him base their arguments on careful examination of the numbers ignores the fact that he committed to this plan without studying those numbers himself. It’s a bad look, and so is the lawsuit alleging that the $8 million Carlyle spent on legal defenses was excessive. The city is going over Carlyle’s expenses with a fine-toothed comb, looking out for taxpayer dollars in the matter of dinner at Hooters, for example, when it overshot its own estimated legal bill by 1400 percent. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent.

I’m glad we won City of Missoula v. Mountain Water. It will be good for this town to own its water system. But I don’t know whether it will be good for ratepayers to have bought it for $89 million plus $14 million instead of $50 million. Apparently, neither does anyone in city government. That’s the problem. The city didn’t perform its due diligence on this deal, and now we have committed to a massive investment that may or may not save us money over the next two decades. It doesn’t matter. We just did it.

Zinke stands on principal before RNC, rolls over during

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 0 Comment
Commander Zinke addresses the RNC in front of an OS X Lion desktop.

Commander Zinke addresses the Republican convention before an OS X Lion desktop.

On Saturday, Rep. Ryan Zinke (R–MT) took the bravest stand of his political career. He resigned his position as a delegate to the Republican National Convention, citing his objection to a plank in the party platform that called for federal lands to be returned to the states. Commander Zinke feels strongly about federal land management, as befits an admirer of Teddy Roosevelt. It’s understandable that he kept his commitment to address the convention on Monday night, because pulling out 48 hours beforehand would be a dick move. Too bad the evening’s program turned out to be a parade of dicks, rubbing against each other until everyone was too sore and sticky to stand up any more, with Zinke coming in to mop up.

That’s an unpleasant metaphor, but it was a lot nicer than Monday night’s prime-time show. Zinke was scheduled to speak at 8:45pm EDT but didn’t take the stage until after 11:30. His openers included Rudolph Giuliani and the sheriff of Milwaukee County arguing that Black Lives Matter is racist, plus five different people whose relatives had been killed by illegal immigrants. The theme of the evening was “Make America safe again,” but the message was “black and brown people make America dangerous.” After his openers emptied the hall with hours of what Charles Pierce called weaponized grief, Zinke got up and did his SEAL schtick for six minutes, tacitly endorsing the craziness that came before.

It was disappointing to watch him do that after his courageous gesture last weekend. Why did Zinke stand on principle re: land management but not re: xenophobia, police brutality, or torture? That’s the question under inquiry in this week’s column in the Missoula Independent, which is a real criticism sandwich. I praise Zinke for taking a stand on our national parks. I praise him for being one of the few new Republicans with the biography to stand up to terror paranoia. But I criticize him for buying in, however passively. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Tim Fox puts Montana back on the wrong side of history

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 0 Comment
Montana Attorney General Tim Fox and his little badge, which isn't like tucking your jeans into cowboy boots at all

Montana Attorney General Tim Fox and his little badge

It’s been a long time since Montana was on the wrong side of a civil rights debate. Since 2014, when Attorney General Tim Fox withdrew his appeal of a circuit court decision that declared our ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, you hardly ever see Montana in lists of states that begin “Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi…” Fortunately, President Obama’s directive that transgender people be allowed to use the public bathrooms of their choice has given us a new civil rights issue to be wrong about.

Last week, Fox filed suit against the federal government over Obama’s directive, putting Montana in cahoots with a couple dozen other states whose governors and attorneys general are deeply concerned with staking out territory on meaningless social issues during an election year freedom. Obviously, this is an issue that affects all of us, in the sense that we all have opinions about it even though it affects a small number of people. National estimates of the number of trans people in America are famously hard to come by, and estimates of the Montana trans population don’t exist. Here’s the New York Times on what we can glean from Social Security Administration data:

Since the Social Security Administration started in 1936, 135,367 people have changed their name to one of the opposite gender, and 30,006 also changed their sex accordingly, the study found. Of Americans who participated in the 2010 census, 89,667 had changed their names and 21,833 had also changed their sex.

Ninety thousand is probably a low estimate, since many trans people presumably do not officially change their names or genders with Social Security. Still, these numbers put the lowball estimate of transgender Americans at about .03% of the population. If we work from that estimate and assume Montana’s trans population is improbably identical to the national ratio, we can expect to find about 300 transgender people in the whole state.

And how many of them attend K-12? Fox’s lawsuit focuses narrowly on how Obama’s directive affects public schools. He may have taken the historically bad bet of using his state office to sue the feds over a civil rights issue, but at least he’s chosen an issue that is extremely minor. I think trans people should use whatever bathrooms they like, and I don’t mean to suggest that their rights are unimportant. But the effect of their rights on non-trans people is unimportant. I submit that transgender bathroom use is a purely theoretical idea for cisgendered Americans, particularly in Montana.  You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, in which I praise Fox for his bold action. It’s ironic. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Thanks, Missoula!

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 1 Comment
Me on Double Dare

Me on Double Dare

Remember Double Dare? I feel like it was one of the most important shows on television, and I don’t understand why they haven’t remade it along with everything else. But maybe I only think it was important because it’s familiar to me. On an unrelated note, respondents to the Missoula Independent’s Annual Best of Missoula Poll and Pull-Out Advertising Section have selected me as Best Journalist, along with actual journalists Erika Fredrickson and Kate Whittle. In case I did not yet wonder if they were being sarcastic, they also put me on a list of Best Writers with Gwen Florio and winner James Lee Burke. You may remember Florio from her nationally-admired reporting on the Jordan Johnson rape case and her subsequent crime novels. You may remember Burke from being famous and great. As you can see, the Best of Missoula poll is accurate about 67 percent of the time, while a third of us benefit from noise in the statistics. That’s part of this town’s peculiar charm, as I discuss in this week’s column for the aforesaid Independent. Now you understand how I got where I am today: pandering.