Federal officials are nearing an agreement to let the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation use its modified Huey 205 helicopters to fight wildfires, and one of our most resiliently boring stories is drawing to a close. In a nutshell: Ordinary Huey 205s can carry 200-gallon water buckets, but Montana’s Hueys have been modified with jet engines and larger tail rotors, so they can carry 324 gallons. The feds don’t have a box for that on their clipboards, so five such modified Hueys were grounded during this year’s unusually intense fire season.

It was another case of big government getting in the way of the states with onerous regulations. Also a contractor falsified his helicopter’s capacity in 2008 and several firefighters died. But this isn’t about loft and yaw. This is about liberty and tyranny, federal overreach and states’ rights—you know, like everything else. There are four problems in contemporary America: big government, terrorism, taxes and Republicans. Any little problem can be understood in terms of those big ones. It’s a clever system, in that you can use it to deduce your own opinion on issues from abortion to Zbigniew Brzezinski, although not insofar as it will keep helicopters from falling out of the sky.

The merits and drawbacks of this approach to discourse are the subject of this week’s column in the Missoula Independent. There’s also a Wizard of Id joke. My mother is coming to visit Missoula, and soon I will pick her up at the airport. She arrives with fall, with the returning students and coffee-hour entertainment of watching people parallel park on Front Street. It’s good to be in Missoula, and it’s good to read about our weirdo politics even if they don’t directly affect you. Think of us as Lake Wobegon. We basically do.

Good news, everybody: a Human Rights Bureau investigation has found that Missoula County Sheriff TJ McDermott really did discriminate against former undersheriff and political rival Josh Clark. Wait—that’s not good news at all. Nor is it good news that McDermott offered no comment on investigator Josh Manning’s report, which included this paragraph:

The investigator was troubled throughout this process by the petty personal attacks both parties used to color the way the Bureau would look at the people involved and left those details out of the report. It did not paint a good portrait of the people responsible for the public safety of one of Montana’s most populous counties.

The report also notes that the two deputies McDermott promoted to captain upon taking office were the two largest donors to his campaign. The sheriff referred all questions to his lawyer, County Attorney Erica Grinde, who said they would withhold comment until the matter had been resolved. From an outsider’s perspective, though, the conclusion of the HRB investigation looks a lot like resolution—at least a resolution of the question, “Did the sheriff do that thing he said he didn’t do?” Yeah—it appears he did. He should at least acknowledge that the outcome of this investigation is significant by talking to reporters about it.

If this leads to some kind of settlement—and it almost certainly will—then it will be the fourth settlement for political discrimination the sheriff’s department has paid out in the last two years. One of them went to McDermott himself, in 2013. It seems like maybe this county agency is operating on the spoils system. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent.

After you read that, why don’t you bop on over to the New York Times Magazine and read my essay about Banksy, sarcasm and kitsch? That’s the actual good news today, and I’m very excited about it. I think this one captures something I’ve been trying to articulate about how we use the word “sarcasm” online, be it in news-aggregator sites, memes, or Ok Cupid profiles. I think sarcasm is our kitsch. That’s the kind of statement I consider bold and exciting, but maybe the internet is not as concerned as I am with our emotional relationships to various categories of art. Still, “Banksy and the Problem With Sarcastic Art” is total clickbait. Click it up, sluts. Why don’t you try sharing it, so we can both be smug early adopters when it goes viral?

The first thing I did this morning was revise another essay, so I did not discover Combat! blog’s grievous database error until around noon. Then I had lunch. The intervening period was a hold in three acts presented by GoDaddy, whose customer service lives up to their standard as the lowest bidder for my web hosting needs. In the end, they disconnected me, but some how they fixed the problem too. We’ve written about GoDaddy’s problematic advertising and problematic CEO Bob Parsons before, and I urge you to revisit that one today. The videos don’t work with the new WordPress, but the puns are evergreen.

 

After months of strongly implying it, entrepreneur and conservative political activist Greg Gianforte has announced that he will run for governor of Montana. The last time one of Gianforte’s announcements made the news, he told an audience at Montana Bible College that “the concept of retirement is not biblical.” Quote:

How old was Noah when he built the ark? Six hundred. He wasn’t cashing Social Security checks. He wasn’t hanging out. He was working. So I think we have an obligation to work. The role we have in work may change over time, but the concept of retirement is not biblical.

That’s the kind of well-intentioned, Protestant work ethic stuff the rest of us regard as completely insane. It’s a shame, because Gianforte’s big idea—to encourage telecommuting to repatriate skilled workers who left Montana for high-paying jobs—is a good one. It’s just that the man who suggested it also donates money to the Family Research Council, Focus On the Family, and the Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum, which argues the Earth is 6000 years old and dinosaurs lived contemporaneously with humans.

Gianforte has done such a good job making his faith a driving force in his public life that he has forced me to buy his good idea as a package deal with his crazy ones. Those of us who eat brunch on Sunday mornings consider that a bug in his campaign, not a feature, but Gianforte seems to believe it’s the thing about him we all love. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent. While you’re at it, think about how much the Gianforte Family Foundation has spent fighting gay rights, and how little it has spent “lifting people out of poverty,” as its mission statement puts it. There’s Christianity and there’s what Christ did, and never the twain shall meet.