There is no Combat! blog today, as I have contracted illness from a toddler and must prepare for death. How is it that a baby could survive this cold and I cannot? Answer: the baby takes naps every four hours. I intend to do the same, not because I hope for a cure, but simply to escape. By body is like an episode of Double Dare right now. Pity me. You might also read this article about Tea Party activists and their omnidirectional suspicion, which now includes other Tea Party groups. I was all set for a narrative of groundless paranoia, but it turns out that grassroots conservatives have reason to feel betrayed. Tea Party Express, for example, raised $8 million this election cycle and spent $7.5 million on operations. It’s almost as if the ill-defined political movement that hates both parties and hardly put any candidates in national office has attracted hucksters. We’ll be back tomorrow with more groundless speculation, but longer.

These are interesting times to live in Missoula. Anyone will tell you that our little mountain town is fine and pretty as all get out—many will additionally express their desire for all to get out—but it’s also got a seamy underbelly. Really it’s the seamy overbelly: at either end of town, where the highways are, Missoula is pretty gross. Also as you come in from the airport, and also along the river—those parts of Missoula are kind of squalid. Come to think of it, squalor may be the rule and not the exception. The Missoula City Council wants to declare two more swaths of urban blight, presumably so they can encourage redevelopment and improved property values and cetera. But do their ideal Missoula and mine look the same? Last January, the council gave $66,000 in property tax dollars from the Brooks Street urban redevelopment district to subsidize a new Starbucks. Never mind that there’s another Starbucks one mile away, not to mention the local coffee shop across the street. But Starbucks is classy. It’s how you know you’re in a nice bookstore. You can read about Missoula’s planned metamorphosis into a nice retail establishment in my latest column for the Independent, which is what you get today instead of a blog. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

There is no Combat! blog today, because I am moving. I presume that I am moving every day at the prose level, but today will be spent pretty much entirely in the realm of the physical. While I frighten various spiders, how about you read this crazy article suggesting that consciousness is a state of matter? Props to The Angel Ben Gabriel for the link. We’ll be back tomorrow with some kind of baseless conjecture, plus weird scrapes on our knuckles.

 

There is no Combat! blog this morning, because I am taking a personal day. We’ll be back tomorrow with our scurrilous opinions. In the meantime, how about you read this early Jeeves story by PG Wodehouse? The prose is not quite so developed as in the subsequent novels, but we both know that you’re not going to read an entire novel online. You could, though.

 

Last week, Republicans in the Montana Senate called an out-of-session meeting of the State Administration and Veterans’ Affairs Committee to figure out what they could do about Jonathan Motl. The Commissioner of Political Practices had just submitted to a district court judge the results of his investigation of Art Wittich, the Senate Majority Leader from Bozeman, who Motl says illegally coordinated with Western Tradition Partnership. You may remember WTP—now called American Tradition Partnership—from this story about a box of incriminating documents found in a Colorado meth house, or this one about how they stopped existing right before a judge fined them $250,000. Or you may be a WTP classicist and remember them from their legal effort to overturn Montana campaign finance laws after Citizens United.

It appears that Wittich remembers them from the time they printed up 13,000 letters with his signature at the bottom. He claims he never coordinated with the super PAC, though, and that Motl is “a partisan hack.” Although the commissioner lacks the power to judge election violations or even bring charges, state senator Dee Brown (R–Hungry Horse) has complained that he is “the jury, the executor, the all-knowing.” Senator Brown was probably thinking of “executioner,” although an executor does implement people’s wills. Maybe the people of Montana should not get rid of their election commissioner immediately after he revealed campaign finance violations committed by the senate majority leader. That’s the gist of my column in the Missoula Independent, which I encourage you to read today instead of a blog post or the Bible. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.