14 year-old elects not to prove point by shooting everyone

By Dan Brooks in Gun control 1 Comment
Harrison High School—who wouldn't want to go there five days a week as required by law?

Harrison High School—who wouldn’t want to go there five days a week as required by law?

Last week, police arrested a 14 year-old student for bringing two handguns and 47 rounds of ammunition to Harrison High School in Montana. According to another student, the boy said he did so for political reasons; he wanted to prove that you didn’t need an assault rifle to shoot up a school. Later, in a detail that reminds you the person in question is 14 years old, prosecutors said that he decided to run away to the mountains and use the guns to hunt food. You actually do kind of need a rifle for that.

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Montana Rep reads fake news story, demands EPA change policy

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 4 Comments

Montana Rep. Dennis Rehberg, photographed during the House’s popular Corny-Ass Parody of the State You Represent Day.

I don’t normally do this, but the opening paragraphs from this article in the Billings Gazette are too perfect not to quote in full:

Two weeks after telling the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to ground surveillance drones allegedly spying on American farmers and ranchers, Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., acknowledged the drones don’t exist. In a statement issued by his office Tuesday, Rehberg acknowledged there aren’t any drones spying on farms and ranches to enforce the Clean Water Act. Rehberg’s staff blamed President Barack Obama for the mix-up.

Sometime in early June, Rehberg read a report that the EPA was using unmanned drones to monitor farms for possible violations of the Clean Water Act. That story is not true. It initially appeared on Infowars.com, after which it spread to the newsletter of the John Birch Society, various conservative media outlets, and finally Fox News. Shortly thereafter, Rehberg demanded that the EPA stop the practice in a strongly-worded letter that he also included in this press release. Then the five-term lawmaker admitted that he did not know what he was talking about.

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On the kindness of America

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 5 Comments

A rig in the Bakken oil shale formation of North Dakota

If you live in Montana or even know someone from here via Facebook, you have probably heard about Ray Dolin. The 39 year-old West Virginia man was hitchhiking in eastern Montana when he was shot by a passing motorist, apparently for no reason. The motorist was Charles Lloyd Danielson III, drunk on his way to work the oil fields of Williston. Danielson was apprehended a few hours later, and Dolin was picked up by another passer-by and taken to Frances Mahon Deaconess Hospital. He had been writing a memoir titled “The Kindness of America.”

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Montana governor on money in politics

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy 4 Comments

Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana, wearing the legally mandated bolo tie

Say what you will about Montana—where, for example, the most liberal city in the state does not provide garbage pickup—we do preserve a certain political culture. The same Montana that devotes very little money to public services and has a legislature that meets for 90 days every other year was also one of the first states to legalize medical marijuana. When I first came to grad school here, it was legal to drink whiskey straight out of the bottle while driving on the interstate. Like the great libertarian states, Montana is suspicious of pretty much all laws; yet, like the great liberal states, it is also suspicious of corporate influence. Montanans are just suspicious generally. That’s why we have some of the tightest campaign finance restrictions in the country, and why Governor Brian Schweitzer took the New York Times yesterday to defend them.

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This week in disenfranchisement: college students

By Dan Brooks in Inequality 3 Comments

Dirty hippies moan around their crap bus.

If you live in a college town like I do, you’ve probably noticed that the streets go unpaved and everyone pays exorbitant taxes so the state can give free abortions to black girls. That’s because all the students overbalance the electorate, forcing real, over-25 human beings to cow to their agenda of ignorance and, I dunno, socialism. College students don’t know anything about politics. They may live in one town for four to six years, but they don’t actually live there, because they’re too busy swallowing live goldfish and listening to raps. They’re not real people, which is why they should only be allowed to vote wherever they came from—presumably where their parents live. That’s the reasoning behind House Bill 176 in New Hampshire, which would bar college students from voting in the cities where they attend school, and Republican opposition to HB 130 in Montana, which would have expanded voting by mail.

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