by jhwygirl

News of this comes to us via jockyoung of Daily Kos, who received a push-polling call yesterday from “Central Research” - a mysterious New York research firm.

Here’s his report:

With the Montana primary approaching, I just received an anti-Baucus push poll that was fairly well disguised as a legitimate poll. It wasn’t particularly nasty, but with standard push poll types of questions like “Would you be more or less likely to vote for Baucus if you knew he voted to raise your taxes over 200 times?” Has anyone else in Montana received this call yet?

All I could get from the questioner was that he was calling out of New York and worked for “Central Research.” I don’t know if the fact that he had trouble reading the questions had anything to do with the nature of the outfit. Has anyone heard about this? Is this sufficiently egregious that we should look into it, or has this become standard campaign fare?

The poll started off with a few minutes of various standard poll questions about voting preference, candidate favorability, and opinions on standard issues. They asked about all federal offices in Montana as well as Governor Schweitzer (which he couldn’t pronounce correctly). Although they tried to mix things up pretty well, it was clear they were focusing on Max Baucus (he even had trouble with that one).

After a couple of rounds of that, it went directly to the push poll, starting with “Would you be more or less likely to vote for Baucus if you knew the following statements to be true.” I refused to answer each one of these, but stayed for all 10-15 of them to see what was going on.

They were fairly standard loaded questions on hot button issues like ANWR, the “death tax,” gay marriage, and Congressional pay raises (e.g. “His salary has tripled while median income for Montanans has gone down.”)

They then of course ended with the classic question: “Knowing the above statement to be true, NOW would you be willing to vote for Baucus regardless of his opponent?”

Besides being a push poll, I assume this was an attempt to find out which attack ads would have the most effect with voters - the questions were worded as typical attack-ad rhetoric.

What do we do about these things? I don’t have time to go on a lone crusade to figure this out and complain, but I would certainly participate if others wanted to look into it.

Has anyone else in Montana received this call yet?

I’m wondering the same - has anyone gotten this call? - although they probably wasted little $ calling Missoula, I know we’ve got readers from other corners of the state.

by Pete Talbot

In Montana, the Clinton campaign coaches are doing a better job than Obama’s. This is not an endorsement, just a fact.

There are a number of reasons for this and I’ll mention a couple here.

1) Messaging. Now, I can’t remember hearing a more dynamic speaker than Sen. Obama (Bill Clinton is close) but when it comes to Montana-centric prose, both Clintons have Obama beat. Check this Bill Clinton snippet out, as reported by the Missoulian:

“When I was president in 1995, the University of Montana won a national football championship,” Clinton said. “And I called the team to congratulate them. And I thought you might be interested to know or remember that one was won with a fourth-quarter comeback engineered by a quarterback named Dave Dickenson - and the game was won in West Virginia.

“Hillary won last night in West Virginia by 41 points,” he said to a cheering crowd. “I think it’s worth noting that no one has won the White House without carrying West Virginia since 1916.”

Mention the Montana Grizzly football championship and Dave Dickenson to a Missoula crowd and then tie in the West Virginia primary win — sheer genius.

There’s also this account of Bill Clinton in Billings from Dave Crisp at the Billings Blog:

“The guy is a master. He started by talking about his last visit to Billings, including the name of the horse he rode when he was here (”Phirepower”) and his visit to the Kit-Kat Cafe. He even knew that the Kit-Kat was no longer around — a tribute to great staff work, or a great memory, or both.”

Obama’s main reference to Montana was that he might try a little fly fishing. Not a whole lot of research done there. Hillary, on the other hand, spoke of Jeanette Rankin and acknowledged current Montana women in politics, like Carol Williams and Dorothy Bradley and Carol Juneau, etc., etc.

And here’s an email I just received from the Clinton campaign:

“Team Hillary will pass out stickers and candy along the Bucking Horse Sale Parade in Miles City this weekend. All participants will go home with limited edition “Team Hillary” courtesy of the campaign.”

Now I don’t think “Team Hillary” actually includes Hillary but still, the Bucking Horse Sale in Miles City? Man, you can’t get much more Montanan than that.

2) The Williams family. There are few Democratic families in Montana that garner as much respect or are as well connected. Pat, Carol and daughters have all been active in the Clinton campaign, and they’ve brought a number of other influential folks into the fold. I have a feeling that the Williams’ insights into campaigning in Montana (and the insights from people that they brought to the campaign) have been picked up by the Clinton camp.

Is Barack slacking in Big Sky Country? Not really. Obama is starting to campaign as if the nomination is already his, which is good strategy.

The stakes are definitely higher for Ms. Clinton. There is no recent polling in Montana for the candidates but the pundits are giving the nod to Obama, so a win for Clinton would be huge. Our June 3 primary will tell us if Hillary’s messaging efforts pay off.

UPDATE: The above piece was edited substantially, by me, from the original post. The original headline was, “In Montana, Clinton is better organized” and the first sentence read, “Hillary Clinton’s field organization in Montana is doing a better job than Sen. Barack Obama’s.”

Well, I took some hits on this, and rightfully so — although I don’t agree with all the criticism and stand by my premise that the folks prepping the Clintons are doing a better job. But it was unfair of me to paint the entire Obama field organization as being behind the curve. I appreciate everyone’s comments.

by jhwygirl

Dave Crisp of Billings Blog has a nice synopsis of the doings at Yellowstone County Democrat’s annual Truman Dinner this past weekend.

Don’t miss it.

by jhwygirl

I try not to pimp this blog out too much for personal causes, but I’m going to openly depart from that now to ask our readers to take a moment here to sign a petition at Media Matters, calling on the major news networks to report on the symbiotic relationship between military analysts and the network news.

I’ve blogged about this issue here and here and here.

From Media Matters:

In the face of a largely silent media, members of Congress - including Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Carl Levin (D-MI), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Hillary Clinton (D-NY), and Russ Feingold (D-WI), and Reps. Paul Hodes (D-NH), Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), Ike Skelton (D-MO), Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and John Dingell (D-MI) - have taken prompt action by calling for congressional hearings and investigations by the Department of Defense, the Government Accountability Office, and the Federal Communications Commission.

Notice there is not one Republican on that list. I’ve also mentioned before that the right-wing blogosphere - including Montana’s conservative bloggers - have been silent on this too. How could they be silent to this in the face of this slap on the face of the troops? With so many Montanans serving?

Signing that petition shouldn’t take more than 20 seconds or so….and if you have maybe 5 minutes to spare, why not take time to draft a short email to send to the email addresses that are provided on the side of that page I link to with the petition?

Thanks.

from Pete Talbot

Seminal Montana bloggers Matt Singer and Jay Stevens over at Left in the West were chosen to represent Montana at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Howard Dean even sent them a personalized video!

We await your posts with bated breath.

(We wanted to link readers to a Missoulian piece on the subject but, as often as not, it couldn’t be found online.)

by jhwygirl

Monday night’s The Daily Show - which shows at midnight Tuesday morning here in the mountain west - had an extremely interesting interview with Douglas Feith, former Undersecretary for Defense Policy - the man who helped formulate the war in Iraq.

So there I was a midnight, trying to fall asleep. Stewart interviewing Feith about his book, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. {yawn}

Boy, I was wrong.

Maybe he thought he’d get the cakewalk that McCain got last week when Stewart let the defacto Republican presidential candidate escape any question regarding his pastor problems (Pastor I-hate-Catholics Hagee and Pastor Rod Islam-is-a-false-religion-that-must-be-destroyed-by-America Parsley).

Far from it - Feith was but-but-buttin’ from the get go, but only after a deadpan “holy crap” look on his face from Stewart’s first real question out of the box, after first asking him what was his favorite baseball team. Video is best, really - like I said, the look on his face was priceless, but here’s some highlights:

Stewart: oh, man. we really disagree. mets. “war: indecision.” what if it boils down to that, i like the mets, you like the phillies. the whole thing falls apart. it seem like in reading it sort of the basic idea of the book– and tell me if i’m wrong– that a lot of what we know about the run-up to the iraq war, a low of the conventional wisdom is wrong. this idea that, i think it’s something that you might take offense to that we were misled into war somehow. (one person applauding)…
settle down. it will be a long ten minutes, lady. the idea we’re misled in a war is wrong. now, from this side of it, i always felt like we were misled. so, let’s bridge that gap in ten minutes. what makes you say we were not misled? what was so honest about….

Feith: i think the administration had an honest belief in the things that it said. some of the things that it said about the war that were part of the rationale for the war were wrong. errors are not lies. i think much of what the administration said was correct and provided an important argument that leaving saddam hussein in power would have been extremely risky even though the president’s decision to remove him was extremely risky.

Stewart: let me stop you there because the president’s decision to remove him was extremely risky. that’s not the sense, i think, that the american people got in the run-up. (applause) the sense that you got from people was not… the sense was, we’ll be greeted as liberators. it will last maybe six weeks, maybe six months. it will pay for itself. all these scenarios that were publicly proffered never happened. you said something that i thought was interesting. the common refrain that the post war has been a disaster is only true if you had completely unrealistic expectations. where would we have gotten those expectations? (laughing)

Feith: well, there were a lot of things that did not go according to expectations. we know that the war has been bloodier and costlyier and lengthyier than anybody hoped. but the president had an extremely difficult task. after 9/11, there was a great sensitivity to our vulnerability. and the president had to weigh– and what i do in the book is i look at the actual documents where secretary rumsfeld was writing to the president and powell and rice and the vice president and general myers and others. i talk about what they said to each other and what they were saying back to secretary rumsfeld. what you see is there was a serious consideration of the very great risks of war. i think that many of them were actually discussed with the public. but to tell you the truth, looking back one thing is absolutely clear. this administration made grocerors in the way it talked about the war. some of them are very obvious like the….

Stewart: that was all we had to go on. you know, that was… i guess the difference in my mind is if you knew the perils but the conversation that you had with the public painted a rosier picture, how is that not deception? that sounds like… when you’re sell ago product…. ( applause ) what it sounds like for me. sorry. the fact that you seem to know all the risks takes this from manslaughter to homicide. it almost takes it from like with the cigarette companies. if they come out and say, no, our products i think are going to be delicious. you go back and you look and they go, well, they actually did talk about addictiveness and cancer. isn’t that deception?

And so it goes - and that was only the beginning.

Every once in the while you see something on the television that makes you want to get up and cheer like you’re sitting in the endzone at Heinz Field and its 4th and 10 and Roethlisberger is earning his pay.

Stewart’s interview was one of those times.

Here is the full transcript.

There’s also uncut video - as I said, the look on Feith’s face is priceless. Part I and Part II.

by jhwygirl

Olbermann’s Special Comments are a treat. Most of them leave me standing in the livingroom, fist raised in the air, cheering or sitting there saying “oh no he didn’t!” Olbermann is the best of the best political pundits anywhere.

Wednesday night’s Special Comment was another one of those moments - with me both cheering and saying “oh no he didn’t!” as he chastised Bush for his lies and feigned non-sacrifices in the face of the 4077 U.S. soldiers now killed in Iraq.

He closed it out with this:

When somebody asks you, sir, about your gallant, noble, self-abdicating sacrifice of your golf game, so as to soothe the families of the war dead - this advice Mr. Bush: Shut. The HELL. Up.

Full text here. It’s 4 pages - longer than usual - but a thorough dressing down of Bush arrogance.

~~I love you Keith. Call me.

by jhwygirl

Local beverage house Liquid Planet has signed on to a $100,000 military contract with the Department of Defense.

They’ll be distributing their coffee at military bases around the world.

by Pete Talbot

Missoula’s Sustainable Business Council will hold its 4th Annual Sustainability Awards tomorrow night (Thursday, May 15) at the Stensrud Building.

The Stensrud Building is on Missoula’s Northside at 314 N. 1st St. W. A social get together starts at 5:30 p.m., the awards will be presented at 6 p.m. and a lecture will follow at 6:15 p.m. It’s free and open to the public, and there are always treats and beverages at these events.

Each year, the SBC presents a series of awards to recognize and appreciate outstanding contributions to the concept of sustainable practices and the resulting positive effect on the quality of life in Missoula and Western Montana. This year’s winners, listed below, will be recognized at the opening of the final lecture for the 2007 – 2008 lecture series.

Categories & Recipients

SBC Business Award: Big Sky Brewing

SBC Nonprofit Award: Missoula Urban Demonstration Project (MUD)

SBC New Venture Award: First Interstate Bank and Missoula Federal Credit Union (for building green)

SBC Advocate Award: Ms. Lizzi Juda

SBC Volunteer Award: Mr. Kevin Dohr and Ms. Kaia Peterson

Following the awards, Merrill Lynch Senior Partner Susan Estep will give a presentation on the $2.71 trillion socially responsible investing market. Estep has over 25 years in the securities industry and is a portfolio manager specializing in socially responsible investing.

(Full disclosure: Pete Talbot is on the board of the Sustainable Business Council. For more information on the SBC, please visit the Council’s website.)

by jhwygirl

City Club Missoula is going to host Office of Planning & Grants’ Planning Director Roger Millar this coming Monday for a lunchtime discussion on the Urban Fringe Development Area (UFDA) Project.

Everyone is welcome, but reservations are required, and the need to be made by noon on May 15th (this Thursday). There is a lunch or no-lunch option - cost is $11/members, $16 for nonmembers if you do lunch, or $5 for the no-lunch forum only. Email ccm@cityclubmissoula.org or call 406-546-6643 before noon Thursday, May 15, for reservations.

The event is being held at the Doubletree Edgewater, 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Roger Millar and his staff will lead a public discussion to help develop a framework plan that incorporates what the community wants in its Growth Policy. The purpose of the UFDA Project is to look at where Missoula’s growth has been going and where it might go.

Millar’s project is pretty ambitious, and OPG has been at this one for quite a while now - gathering data and meeting with Neighborhood Councils, the County School Board, the Business Improvement District, various service clubs, and Five Valley’s Land Trust. Millar is taking a methodical approach to figuring out how our community wants to handle the growth we all know is coming - how to take us into our future. Actual planning - or at least the beginning throes of it. It’s comforting, frankly, to have a new Planning Director come into town and instead of telling us what we need to do, he comes into town and begins figuring out what makes Missoula tick.

He’s also placing heavy emphasis on mapping and visual tools, giving the GIS staff in OPG quite a workout. All things are very helpful, and provide wonderful tools for analysis once it’s all in the system. Even this skeptic (me) is a fan.

There’s a nice list of the maps available on this page - scroll about 3/4 of the way down. There’s also some other links there too. (Be nice if this project, given the amount of information available, had its own page.)

Laval Means (lmeans@co.missoula.mt.us) and Casey Wilson (cwilson@co.missoula.mt.us) are the main staffers on the project. Shoot them an email if you have any questions.