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Friday links! Declinism v. Triumphalism edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links March 21, 2014 0 Comment

Enjoy your cat videos now, because a NASA-funded study has predicted that industrial society will collapse in 15 years. This is what we get for not letting them go to the moon. It’s also what we get for developing an economy that uses more and more resources to exponentially increase the number of human beings while concentrating control of those resources in a progressively smaller fraction of the population. I’m selling a bumper sticker that says exactly that. Unfortunately it demands a bumper eight feet wide, so it only fits on the kind of cars that we can make for the next 15 years. Today is Friday, and the mechanisms of our triumph hasten our decline. Won’t you become a forgotten god with me?

Montana GOP offers “modified one-party system”

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized March 20, 2014 0 Comment

Montana Senate Majority Leader Art Wittich (R-Bozeman) reads a non-Bible book.

The cutline under that photo will not be accurate for long. After mistakenly filing his candidacy for a Senate seat that was not up for election this year, 2013 Senate Majority Leader Art Wittich has filed for House District 68 in Belgrade, where he will conveniently not face a primary opponent. Election season is nigh upon us, and the Montana GOP is in throes. Self-described “business Republicans” have organized an insurrection against the Tea Party wing, mounting as many primary challenges as they can against the people who brought you a 2013 proposal to pay state legislators in gold coins. Meanwhile, the Montana Democratic Party can barely contain its glee, the elation in its war room threatening to disturb the other patrons at IHOP. Montana is a tough place for a Democrat, partly because of its many bright-red districts and partly because state Dems have pinned their hopes on Republican infighting. You can read all about it in this week’s column in the Missoula Independent, which is what you get today instead of a blog. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links.

Hoax: Westbro Baptist plans to protest Fred Phelps funeral

By Dan Brooks in Hoaxes March 19, 2014 0 Comment

Pastor Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church. Not pictured: men’s parka.

Fred Phelps is dying, to the internet’s unbecoming glee. A Wisconsin woman has created a Facebook page called Fred Phelps Death Watch, which announces that “1 like = 1 death prayer for Fred Phelps!” The exclamation point makes it fun. “Sometimes it’s easier to make light of an ugly situation and to just laugh at everything,” she told USA Today, missing an important aspect of being good-humored: you laugh at bad things that happen to you. The Westboro Baptist Church brings out the worst in everybody. For example, a Twitter account that once belonged to Phelps’s daughter announced over the weekend that the church would protest Phelps’s funeral.

Campaign finance is dead. Long live campaign finance

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government March 18, 2014 0 Comment

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrdTX8m5G98

The Mitch McConnell campaign—which refers to itself by the parody-proof name “Team Mitch”—posted this video on YouTube last week. As you may have noticed, it contains no diegetic sound. There’s a weirdly contemporary electropop soundtrack, but at no point to do events in the video sync up with a particular element of the soundtrack or even narrative. It’s just footage of McConnell signing papers, turning alarmingly to the camera, shaking hands with a man in a tam and goatee whose vote cancels out yours, et cetera. You can dub whatever sound you want over this video, which, as The Daily Show has pointed out, makes it hilarious. It also makes it a free source of McConnell footage for whatever 501(c)4 organizations might want to produce ads to support him—but not coordinate with his campaign, since that is forbidden by law.

Yes!

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics March 17, 2014 0 Comment

A screen cap from Friday’s Missoulian

The best-case scenario in the Ravalli County treasury fiasco got a little more likely over the weekend. Part One—Valerie Stamey turns out to have done almost no work at all between her appointment in September and her suspension in February—is already in place. That’s more fun than the news consuming public reasonably could have asked for. But dare we hope for Part Two? I am referring, of course, to the unlikely but entertaining possibility that county commissioners really have been illegally selling tax liens, as Stamey alleges. Probably they haven’t. But now the FBI is involved, so oh man—if they have.