In my endorsement letter from the Montana Conservative Alliance it reads: “We count you as a genuine limited government conservative, a true friend of the taxpayer and a true friend of freedom… MCA applies a very high standard of principle and conviction to all candidates we consider. The majority of Republicans and all Democrats fail that test. Unfortunately, history shows that most politicians who campaign as “conservatives” go to Helena and vote as liberals. The unabated growth in government spending and regulatory power (regardless of which party is in control) attests to this sad truth… Montanans are fed up. Voters want to know who, if anyone, they can truly depend on to stand in the gap and say “no” to higher taxes, “no” to bigger government, “no” to further erosion of their rights and liberties, and “no” to more meddling and interference in their businesses and their daily lives... We believe you are a person Montanans can count on to protect their family incomes, their personal liberties, and the traditional moral values upon which all free societies are based… You are a person whose faith in freedom can bring great change and innovation to an out-of-control government and a bloated state bureaucracy. You are a statesman, not a politician, who stands on the Constitution and stands for integrity, honor and justice… You are a true and principled conservative.”

I invite you to go to the MCA website and take the test yourself. Bob Lake did not pass the test which required above 69% and failed with the rest of the Democrats with his liberal voting record which is there for all to view.

As for Dallas’ unrelenting misrepresentations of Ron Paul as a “Libertarian” on social and moral issues, let us put his record up for scrutiny. In Congress he authored H.R. 1094 which sought to define life as beginning at conception. He was a prime sponsor of H.R. 300 which would negate the effect of Roe v. Wade by removing the ability of federal courts to interfere with state legislation to protect life. He authored H.R. 1095 - no government funds for abortion. He was endorsed in the summer of 2007 by the National Pro-Life Alliance. He was endorsed by the New Hampshire Right to Life Committee. He was endorsed by the Carolina Students for Life. He says, “The right of the unborn child to life is at the heart of the American ideals for liberty.” His professional and legislative record demonstrates his strong commitment to this pro-life principle. During his 40 years of medical practice delivering over 4000 babies he says he became an unshakeable foe of abortion and never once considered performing an abortion, nor did he ever find abortion necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman. He says, “Much can be understood about the civility of a society in observing its regard for the dignity of human life.”

Admittedly it is hard to define a conservative, or libertarian. The Constitution, however, is defined and I try to define my political beliefs by it and will always put principle above party. However, to be fair let us examine the facts and take a look at some of Dallas’ own words from my e-mail correspondence to see where he stands on honoring it.

Following are direct quotes of Dallas Erickson. (Nov 26, 2007): “God is not going to care if we ‘followed the Constitution’ on ‘States Rights!’ He could not care less. But we will be responsible for the children (and adult) victims we allowed because of ‘liberty.’ He will not ask us if we followed the Constitution if we lived in America or China or Russia.” (Nov 28, 2007): “I have recognized a danger that I have never seen before and that is letting the Constitution become our God as we turn our worship to it rather than what the Lord says.” (Nov 28, 2007): “I can guarantee He is NOT going to ask me if I followed the Constitution. Not ours or someone else’s, not anyone’s.” (Dec 24, 2007): “Do you actually think that socialism and Communism brings about immorality? That is a ridiculous belief neither supported by scripture OR history. We probably would get to the Gomorrah stage much slower as communists because if we pushed porn or were homosexual we would be killed. The communists knew the destructive influence of pornography and did not allow it and therefore did not suffer the consequences of it.”

So there you have it, Dallas feels we would be better off under Communism because they would at least be able to control pornography, (which they haven’t) so ask yourself who would foist their extreme positions upon us.

I would agree on the last point he made. Be careful who you vote for.

Letters to the Editor

Re: Obamacare

Dear Editor,

The rhetoric has calmed down on President Obama's medical insurance plan. Now I would like to give my thoughts on some of the practical problems with Obamacare, without discussing the Constitutional or political issues surrounding the statute.

Does anyone think that 32 million more people can be insured and it not cost more money? That a portion of the funding for the program will come from cutting payments to Medicare doctors by 21%. That the small penalty ($95 at first and moving to $695 per year) imposed on people not having insurance will force them to buy expensive health insurance, when they can simply apply for insurance when they have a major medical problem? Will very expensive union health plans, also know as "Cadillac" plans, ever be taxed to support the uninsured? Will disease management, encouraging people to stop smoking, exercise, take their medications and eat more healthy foods, significantly reduce health care costs? Billions in waste in Medicare and Medicaid will be "saved" to help fund the new program.

I suggest that, if after answering the above questions you still believe that Obamacare will be cheaper than the present situation, and that current responsible purchasers of health insurance will not pay more for their insurance, you may believe in the tooth fairy.

Jim Shockley
Senate District 45

Discrepancies in wolf quota numbers

Dear Editor,

In the Wednesday June 2, 2010 issue of the Bitterroot Star (BS), the article on "FWP Commission considers 2010 wolf season quotas" has either some misprints or some faulty statistics on the overall decreases in the number of wolves resulting in the 2010 quotas. The paragraph I address is the second full paragraph on page 13 of that issue. By simple algebra, the total wolf population (TWP) can be estimated from the quota numbers and associated percentages as follows:

1. 216 = TWP * 0.20

2. 186 = TWP * 0.13

3. 153 = TWP * 0.09

If you do the math or have any high school student in the senior class do the math, you will find that the calculated TWP in equations 1, 2 and 3 are not equal and the ratios of the 216/186, and 186/153, for example, do not equal the percentage ratios of 20/13 and 13/9, respectively. Thus, I must conclude that either the Bitterroot Star or the Regional Wildlife Manager, Mike Thompson, does not know how to calculate percentages because the percentages are much larger than those being quoted.

Finally, I will mention that on Friday March 5, 2010, I awoke to discover 80+ elk within 100 feet to 200 feet around my house which is around the entrance of the Bitterroot National Forest on Ambrose Creek Road. Over half of the elk were yearlings with several antlered elk in the herd. Thus, the argument that the wolves are killing off the calves may not necessary hold in the Bitterroot Valley. In addition, that herd increased to over 130+ animals during the month of March until it dissipated into small herds and vanished just a quickly as it appeared. Now, I see smaller herds, e.g. 35+, from time to time.

A similar article to the one in the BS appeared in the Missoulian, Saturday, May 8, 2010 issue. I wrote the writer of that article, Ms. Eve Byron, an email which is attacked below on the same observation. I saw no further article in the Missoulian on the inaccuracy of the numbers in her article.

I think the estimated wolf quotas being proposed by FWP in 2010 need to be investigated and the actual numbers and percentages revisited with someone in the FWP, e.g. the Regional Wildlife Manager, Mike Thompson, before the quotas are set in stone and we find that we have "harvested" too many wolves in 2010 which would affect the diversity of the wolf population in Montana.

No response is necessary from you, just some good investigative reporting would be appreciated from your paper on this issue.

Joseph G. Gallagher Jr.
Stevensville

Support for climate and clean energy legislation urged

Dear Editor,

I have called Senators Tester and Baucus, urging them to help pass climate and clean energy legislation which is now under consideration in the Senate. A massive oil spill is wrecking our Gulf and Florida coastline. Glacier melting is turning precious drinking water into deadly flooding. Continuing pressure to mine coal threatens our very air. It is past time to lessen our dependence on oil and coal and to reach for the promise of clean/green energy, as outlined in the American Powers Act. A vote is expected June 10. A call to your senators would be your vote to go green, come clean. Thanks for caring.

John Carbin
Stevensville

Facts about John Birch Society

Dear Editor,

John McManus, President of the John Birch Society, was in Hamilton last Friday to give an anti-immigration presentation to about 50 people. Since very little context was given in Friday’s Ravalli Republic article as to who the John Birch Society was and what it has represented here over the last 50 years, we’d like to make an attempt to partially fill the void.

"The mission of the John Birch Society” McManus says in the article, “is pretty simple; it's just to have small government …”

It may be cliché by now, but it’s worth repeating: “Small Government” rhetoric has become an easy and ineffective slap at complex problems. It’s also a euphemism for our decades-long deregulation mania that led to the corporate heist of our economic system, the BP oil disaster and a lot of corporate hooliganism in between. But notwithstanding the contradictions underlying the rhetoric, the “Society” has been about much more than what the paper quoted McManus as saying it was. A brief thumbnail examination of them also gives us an opportunity to reflect on the dangers of allowing mainstream public debate to be hijacked by xenophobic and corporate interests.

The ideological arguments made by the “Society” from their beginnings to this day remain consistent and are full of similar contradictory clichés. Their central thesis is that a sinister cabal of politicians, bankers, globalists and other elites throughout history – including the Illuminati, every U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson and the Council on Foreign Relations – have worked to peel away the rights of individuals and put the U.S. on a path toward a totalitarian one-world government. Liberals, in their view, provide the cover for this gradual process and therefore must actually be secret communist (currently “socialist”) traitors whose ultimate goal is to replace the nations of western civilization with one-world government. The wild tenet that modern liberalism is a handmaiden for godless communism (now “socialism”) has long been mainstreamed into core Right Wing rhetoric, supported over the decades by a never-ending stream of imaginative conspiracy theories. National media outlets seldom challenge the premise anymore, let alone small, hometown papers.

Maybe that’s because the roots of the John Birch Society are inextricably tangled with the roots of corporate money corrupting modern public policy. Consider Fred Koch, founder of Koch Industries (a huge energy conglomerate) who was also one of the exclusive founding members of the John Birch Society in 1958, at the height of the Cold War. His sons, David and Bill Koch, are today considered among the wealthiest people in the world, and have provided significant financial backing (to use a euphemistic understatement) to global-warming-denial efforts and to front-groups that fought healthcare reform. In other words, for all their talk of freedom and liberty, their roots speak at least as much about corporate greed as of lofty principles.

Throughout its existence the “Society” has openly promoted homophobia and sexism, sought to ‘restore’ a fundamentalist application of school prayer, repeal income tax, stop "Communist influences within our communications media," and stop what they call the "trend of legislation by judicial fiat." Their concern that internationalism would be ushered in through a subversive communist conspiracy evolved into a "Get US out of UN!" campaign, which alleged in 1959 that the "Real nature of [the] UN is to build One World Government." In this context the Society’s founder, Robert Welch, once asserted that President Eisenhower was "a dedicated conscious agent of the communist conspiracy."

Their “states rights libertarianism,” one of the big planks that our local slate of Libertarian-In-Name candidates have in common with the “Society”, may have originally been based on sincere Jeffersonian principles. But it also clearly served as a cover for organizing by segregationists and White Supremacists in the Jim Crow south, which caused the Society to be held at arm’s length by the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964, one of the most ultra-conservative presidential campaigns of the last century. Unsurprisingly then, the John Birch Society opposed the civil rights movement, and in fact published a book portraying Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as an agent of a massive communist conspiracy to agitate among otherwise happy Negroes to foment revolution.

In 1989, when the world anticipated the long-awaited ‘peace dividend’ as a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “Society” participated in the sleight-of-hand rhetorical trick common to that era, re-focusing their message from claiming that “Communism” played a key role in undermining America to claiming that now “Secular Humanism” was the enemy. The cumulative effect of the upside-down rhetorical campaign the John Birch Society participated in? We got war instead.

Revisionist “historian” Cleon Skousen, whose book, “The 5000 Year Leap” has been promoted by Glenn Beck after years of well-deserved obscurity, had a longstanding association with the Society. In an interesting local footnote, Skousen was cited by at least two far-Right candidates in recent Republic articles as the author of “the last book I read.” Unfortunately, from our view, in one of those books cited, “The Making Of America,” Skousen claimed that slaveholders were the biggest victims of slavery and referred to African American children as “pickaninnies.”

Another core tenet of the Society has been that the US is a republic, not a democracy, and that collectivism has eroded that distinction. Predictably, this “distinction” was largely recognized as a semantic trick at the time, but given some of our current neighbors’ allergic reaction to the term “democracy,” it apparently has a long half-life in some geographic areas.

In the late 1960s a weapons cache was found in a cave up Blodgett Canyon in which the local John Birch Society was implicated. The point is: The John Birch Society has been around the Bitterroot for 50 years, and so have the rest of us. The question is: Is there any more reason now, in a similar climate of conspiracy theories with no visible means of support raining down on us, to take any of the above more seriously than many old-time Bitterrooters did back in the “good old days”?

We don’t think so.

Roger Williams & Bill LaCroix
Bitterroot Human Rights Alliance

Upset over sign ordinance

Dear Editor,

After reading your article, “Hamilton City Council News” (Sign regulations amended), I am very upset with the Hamilton City Council for their decision on animated digital signs. How anti-business can you be? Digital signs are a sign of progression and modernization in the Valley. Reader boards are just as distracting. Have you guys ever left the state and been into any major city? You will see digital reader boards effectively used, informing people about their business and upcoming events in the city to inform visitors of what is available in their great city. I have recently spoken to the owners to get their opinions on this matter (and though they will comply without suit on this matter) and their main complaint was that this sign was not just put up overnight without warning, but that same city council that is disapproving of the animated sign are the ones that approved it less than a year ago. If the City Council is making them comply over the next four years, then they (the City Council) should comply in reimbursement over the next four years to the businesses they are making the new rules for.

Government and special interest groups are making business so tough these days, they have no idea that small business is what keeps this great community alive! Main point of this article: Anything can be visually distracting on the highway. Why wouldn’t you want something attracting people to your business? Isn’t that the point? The sign was approved before it was put up and should be allowed to use its full animation. If you want to enforce the law on future animated signs, then go right ahead. I do not agree with your new “anti-business rules.”

Quinn Kirkland
Hamilton

Time to put a stop to predatory lending

Dear Editor,

After getting married, Ranee and her husband found themselves short on their rent, so they took out a payday loan for a few hundred dollars. It was easy to get the loan, but after two weeks they already owed $125 in interest and fees. They ended up taking out multiple loans to pay off the previous debt and soon they had taken eight or nine. Ranee’s husband was in the military at the time. “They started calling his boss. They would call our cell phone, our house phone, all of our family.” The young couple eventually lost their apartment and her husband was discharged because of concerns about debt they incurred. “It cost way more than it was worth.”

Unfortunately, Ranee’s story is not unique. Many Montana families have fallen into the debt trap set by predatory lenders. In 2008, over 154,955 payday loans were made in the state, according to the Administration Division of Banking. The average Annual Percentage Rate (APR) charged for payday loans in Montana is 436% and can be as high as 650%. These astronomical rates allowed payday lenders to collect over $9 million dollars in fees from Montanans in 2008.

Today, Ranee’s family would be protected from these unfair lending practices, because in 2007 Congress took action to protect military families with a rate cap of 36% APR. This action was taken in response to concerns raised by the Department of Defense that such loans were a threat to national security because they were ruining enlistees’ finances, jeopardizing security clearances and making service people unable to deploy. Unfortunately, greedy lenders are still able to target other Montana families with these predatory loans.

Montana Women Vote has heard countless horror stories from women like Ranee whose families have been caught in the cycle of debt by payday and title loans. The state legislature has failed in the last four sessions to pass legislation to regulate this industry.

Thankfully, this year Montana voters have the opportunity to take action to protect families from predatory lenders. Montana Women Vote, along with a dozen ally organizations from the AARP, to the Montana Catholic Conference, to the Montana Human Rights Network, is launching the “400% is Too High; Cap the Rate” state ballot initiative campaign to limit the interest rates changed by payday and title loans to 36%.

Payday loans are small, short term loans, with very high interest rates and fees. The loans are for a period of a few weeks to a month. A personal check is held as collateral for a payday loan and a vehicle title is held for a title loan. The industry’s business model is dependent on trapping families in loans they cannot repay in the short timeframe and then offering them subsequent loans to pay for previous ones – a practice called “flipping.” Nationally, according to the Center for Responsible Lending, the average borrower pays $800 on a $300 loan by flipping an average of eight times per year. The Center also found 90% of payday loan business is generated by borrowers with five or more loans per year, while only 2% of business is generated by borrowers who take out just one loan.

The I-164 Cap the Rate ballot initiative is part of a broader movement to curtail greedy lending practices that have jeopardized our individual and national finances. By passing this initiative, Montana would join seventeen other states that have already passed legislation regulating payday and title loans.

Most importantly the Cap the Rate initiative would make a big difference for real families like Sarah’s.

Sarah and her husband took a title loan when her husband was working. Sarah’s husband soon lost his job and they found themselves unable to pay back the $500 loan because he couldn’t find work. They quickly found themselves a month behind. The amount due at that point was $780. The lender repossessed their vehicle, which cost them an additional $300 for towing fees. They eventually paid $1100 to get their truck back, but still had a remaining balance of $300. They made payments for a full year ultimately paying $2500 total for a $500 loan.

In this economy, anyone could need an emergency loan. Families struggling to make ends meet should not be preyed on by greedy lenders charging over 400% interest. Want to get involved in this important effort? Montana Women Vote is collecting stories from Montanans like Ranee and Sarah who have been impacted by predatory lending. If you would like to share your story or collect signatures, or get more information, please contact Montana Women Vote Bitterroot Community Coordinator Kate Duggan at (406) 381-8050 or bitterrootmwv@gmail.com.

Alysha Goheen Jannotta and Kate Duggan
Montana Women Vote

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