Senate candidate blames “deep state” for hunting permit violations

By Dan Brooks in Self-Promotion 1 Comment

Troy Downing and a fish

Troy Downing is running for the Republican nomination to challenge Democrat Jon Tester for one of Montana’s seats in the US Senate. He is also responding to accusations that he illegally applied for resident hunting and fishing permits every year between 2011 and 2016—spiritedly. Last week, his campaign issued a statement saying that “It’s unfortunate the liberal Montana FWP deep state is on a witch hunt,” referring to the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks as an instrument of secret anti-conservative government. That was a stretch. Normally, a candidate would just cop to this kind of violation and kill the story. Downing can’t do that, though, because the essence of FWP’s allegations is that he doesn’t really live here.

I would describe the evidence against him as comically substantial. According to FWP, Downing and his son Dylan used the same Montana driver’s license number to purchase resident hunting licenses within three minutes of each other. He filed Montana income taxes as a nonresident in 2013 and 2014. His property at the Yellowstone Club lists a San Diego post office box as its owner’s address. A 2013 profile in the Lone Peak Lookout describes him as a “part-time Yellowstone resident” who enjoys throwing grape-stomping parties at his vineyard in California. On his blog, he has written about returning from his vacation property in Montana to his home in California. And he is the CEO of a real-estate investment company based in San Diego.

Nevertheless, Downing insists the charges against him are political. So far, though, his campaign has avoided saying he was a resident of Montana all those years. They’ve pulled out all the stops otherwise, repeatedly citing his veteran status and calling the judge in his case a Democrat who released records to sabotage his campaign. Actually, the Gallatin County attorney ordered those records released. You may remember him as the Republican who refused to release Greg Gianforte’s mug shot until a court ordered him to do so.

The point is Troy Downing was framed. He’s a true resident of this state no matter where he quote-unquote “lives.” When you think about it, what’s more Montanan than using the money you made in California to buy a bunch of property here and run for public office? You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, in which I look past the surface conspiracy of the Big Wildlife deep state to uncover something even deeper, darker, and dumber. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links, perhaps!

91 year-old has “great work ethic,” says governor turned celebrity

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 2 Comments

Work

Work: We all have to do it, except for rich people, who don’t. Even those people do a kind of work, though, by stewarding their family fortunes and encouraging the rest of us to cultivate strong work ethics. Sarah Palin participated in that second kind of work today, when she shared this story from usa.sarahpalinnews.com. I wish there were a news site that had my name and the name of my country right in the URL, but that’s beside the point. The point, in the words of USA Sarah Palin News, is INCREDIBLE! You’ve Got to See This 91 Year-Old’s Attitude About Working, It’s Perfect.

Elena Griffing is a patient relations coordinator at the Sutter Health Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley. At age 91, she’s been working there 71 years—ever since she came in with a hemoglobin disorder at 19 and stayed four months, until a lab technician told her to “get to work.” She took a job as a secretary and has been at SHAB Summit ever since. In all that time, she’s only taken four sick days. It’s an inspiring story, especially if you are a human brand who went from local newscasting to executive government to vaguely monetized celebrity. If you are a person who has been working in medical billing for 40 years, on the other hand, it’s a glimpse of a nightmare from which you might never awake.

USA Sarah Palin News describes only taking four sick days in 71 years as the “perfect” attitude toward work. Perfect for whom? If you run a hospital, that’s exactly what you want from your workers. But if you work in the hospital, one day off for illness every 18 years does not describe your ideal working life. Yet the Yahoo piece from which this article was aggregated frames the relationship between Griffing and her employer in terms of ethical obligations on her side and her side only. Here’s the lede for their recurring feature, called Lifers:

In current culture, millennials move from job to job in order to climb the ladder. The average time spent at a company is just two years. For baby boomers and other generations, this was not the norm. Loyalty and dedication to a single company or career drove, and still drives, many of their careers.

Damn you, current culture! Another way to look at the statistical differences in employment length between millennials and baby boomers is in terms of what employers are offering. Compared to older generations, millennials are much less likely to find jobs that offer benefits or even a living wage. You can see their propensity to move from job to job as a failure of “loyalty and dedication to a single company,” or you can read it as a failure of those companies to give them reasons to stay. Millennials change jobs because the jobs available to them suck. Maybe that’s because nice old ladies refuse to retire, perhaps because the same economy that forces young people to move from job to job also forces older people to work until they’re dead.

But that would require us to think that businesses owe something to their workers. Businesses owe nothing to anyone; their sole obligation is to make money, and the rest of us should thank them for what jobs they create in the process. USA Sarah Palin News skirts the question of why Griffing didn’t work for the same company for five decades instead of seven and then enjoy a posh retirement. Instead, they hit us with some statistics about how unreliable millennials are. Quote:

According to the most recent report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2016, American workers often changed their employment after just 4.2 years, but one 91-year-old woman looks to blow that average out of the water as she is celebrating 71 years working for the same company. The employee tenure saw a noticeable difference between age groups, with workers ages 25 to 34 years staying with the same company for 2.8 years, workers ages 55 to 64 stayed 10.1 years on average.

Yeah, it is bullshit that the average 25 year-old hasn’t been working at the same company since they were fifteen. It’s a rare editor who looks at these numbers and does not point out that people who have been working four times as long stayed with their companies, on average, four times as long. That’s the kind of ace USA Sarah Palin News is hiring, though, and I assume they’re getting great pension plans.

They shoot Keurigs, don’t they?

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 0 Comment

Still from the “Where Are They Now?” montage at the end of American Psycho

Here’s how a scandal works in 21st-century America. First, a series of women came forward to say that senate candidate and hairless southern cowboy Roy Moore tried to mess with them when they were teenagers. Then Sean Hannity said they were probably in it for the money, or Democrats. Then Keurig, maker of coffee machines for Air BnBs, stoped advertising on Hannity. This led certain conservatives to boycott Keurig, or do whatever the version of a boycott is where you have already bought the product and simply destroy it.

This is like when Martin Luther King bought thousands of Montgomery city bus passes and then burned them to protest racism. All funning aside, though, it’s a classic example of backlash to backlash. Hannity the conservative icon said something most people found disagreeable; a brand punished him for it, and that brand became an icon of people who find conservatism disagreeable. Enter the iconoclasts, because if contemporary conservatism is about anything, it’s about gleefully defying people who disagree with conservatism.

Maybe that’s why this video of a man throwing a Keurig off a balcony is packaged the way it is. “Liberals are offended by this video of a Keurig being thrown off a building,” young Colin Rugg says. “Please retweet to offend a liberal.” I question how many liberals would describe this video of a man dropping his coffee machine of a balcony as “offensive.” I’m no scientific pollster, but I think you’d get “baffling” and “badass” first. Rugg is sure these liberals have followed the Moore/Hannity/Keurig news as closely as he has, though, and this video has them twitching. He includes “politically incorrect” in his Twitter bio, so the idea that liberals are scandalized by what he does seems like an important component in his sense of himself.

That’s the thing about conservatism today: it feels so self-conscious. Maybe that’s just because we see it through the lens of social media, where everyone performs themselves. Yet lifestyle conservatives consciously identify with particular signifiers—guns, trucks, uniformed service, that goddamned frog—in ways that lifestyle liberals do not. Liberals may be known for their organic diets, effete childrearing, and fuel-efficeint cars, but that’s not how they think of themselves. These signifiers are ascribed to them from outside—not embraced as public expressions of their liberality, as things they do to drive the conservatives nuts. I guess what I’m saying is that liberals don’t have a persecution complex.

Maybe they do, and I don’t see it because their politics is closer to mine. But when was the last time you saw liberals defying conservatism by smashing things? They burned one limo in Washington, and they’re still fretting about it. I don’t see the analog to Keurig-destruction videos on the left. Maybe liberals aren’t doing that because they’re winning, and they feel no need to perform their defiance. Or maybe there’s something antisocial about contemporary conservatism.

Friday links! Daze of future passed edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

Two thousand and six

Remember like 14 years ago? We were all so innocent then. A new President Bush had just discovered secret proof that we were about to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A new housing market was revitalizing American cities by adding value to what people owned already. A new kind of publication, the blog, invigorated public discourse with its jaunty tone and periodic slander. Everything seemed fresh and exciting, which is weird, because 2003 is actually old. There’s just no way to argue that it’s still happening now. Yet one cannot ignore the feeling that we remain mired in the last decade: fighting the same wars, smugly denouncing a president who could only appeal to idiots, and putting skulls on everything. Today is Friday, and everything old is not so much new again as stubbornly still here. Won’t you survey the leftovers with me?

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Vote for me to control the weather and end government overreach

By Dan Brooks in Self-Promotion 3 Comments

It’s snowing in Missoula as I write this—just one more example of Mayor John Engen’s failure to guide this city toward a better future for all of us. It literally never did this before the mayor was elected. In addition to snow, we’ve had to contend with property taxes, out-of-control housing prices, and too-thoroughly-controlled everything else. I, for one, am sick of the mayor’s tax-and-spend progressive agenda. The time is right for new leadership, which is why I’ve announced my own candidacy for mayor, city council, US Senate—whatever I can do to help, really, so long as it puts me in a position of leadership with salary and benefits. You can read all about it in this week’s column for the Missoula Independent, in which I describe my platform of controlling the weather, halting immigration from other states, and ending government overreach. We’ll be back tomorrow with Friday links!