westslope wrote:
 
This is the problem I have with the particularly anti-government crew - If you fundamentally don't believe in government, and you manage to find yourself in charge of government, your incentive is to prove yourself correct by doing a poor job.  They never manage to actually shrink government (which is often warranted, but difficult to do while maintaining services), or reduce costs, or manage to improve anything. But they get to leave pointing the finger and saying 'see, I was right'. 

westslope wrote:


That guy.

 Lazy8 wrote:
 
This guy?  

1. Not budgeting correctly to plow the snow and ice from the dangerous roads of Helena in winter. This led the sheriff’s office to call a state of emergency on February 10^th, 2017. Schools were closed and multiple accidents occurred.
2. In 2015 Smith did not support the removal of the Confederate Monument (he has since bowed to public pressure.) He said a descriptive sign would suffice but never paid for one to be made.
3. Smith continually underfunds essential services in the city of Helena like firefighting and road maintenance. The Helena firefighters have been below adequate staff levels for years, which led the Helena Firefighters IAFF Local 448 to endorse Smith’s opponent in the 2017 Mayoral race.
4. Smith supports Tim Ravndal and ACT for America in their blatantly bigoted ideas and actions.

 R_P wrote:
 
Did you read the Times piece? I think RS is being completely inaccurate about it. It's not sandbagging and I don't see much if any skewed reframing in any of that reporting. As a liberal, I think you can read that piece and see Sanders as unique and heroic. As a conservative, you'll probably think he's a Marxist. As long as he's a contender, this chapter of Sanders past is going to be written about regardless. If anything, I think the press was remiss in not writing about it in 2016. Sanders fans think the NYTimes did him an injustice and promoted Clinton. As a daily reader, I saw the opposite - no vetting of Sanders while running endless pieces about the email server. Sanders got a pass on negative press in 2016 in large part because the GOP wanted him to derail Clinton - if they really saw him as a threat, he would have been written about ad nauseam, and this is the kind of stuff Fox would have turned into mountain ranges. 

Right now I think the press is remiss by completely ignoring Marianne Williamson. She's managed to get enough 65K donors required to be included in DNC debates... though I may have missed it, I haven't seen her mentioned at all in NYT & WP candidacy pieces. I'm not saying she should be a nominee, but she's certainly more qualified to be POTUS than the dotard, and I'd like to hear her voice included in platform discussions. 

westslope wrote:

Collins is the second black mayor of Helena. It's not rural by Montana standards.

We don't have a lot of black politicians because we don't have a lot of black people. I'd say Collins' advantage was more his personality than his record. The previous mayor was an alt-right troll.

 Lazy8 wrote:
 
Impressive.   

Can you Lazy8 or anybody else please cite an example of a Black African politician being elected to office by rural Montana voters?  Just curious.  I can imagine more than a few rural ridings in Canada where that would be a tough act.   Or does Collins' service record transcend his skin colour?  

Recent efforts to sandbag Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard are crude repeats of behaviors that helped elect Trump in 2016

The whole episode was a Back to the Future version of the same criticisms leveled at anyone who opposes regime change in Venezuela today — if you protest the policy, you’re not antiwar, you must support the targeted foreign leader.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
probably unlikely to happen but i'd like to see a moderate/centrist politician from the major parties

preferably someone who is at least open to good ideas and the desire to implement them

collins is a good story, he seems legit, but my initial search with bing on his positions came up a bit short

miamizsun wrote:

No, far from perfect. He's good at soft-pedaling his agenda and logrolling his opposition—which in Montana is pretty inept. Those aren't skills that get you a lot of attention in Democratic primaries and it certainly doesn't get activists fired up to volunteer.  He's savvy enough to realize that so I think what he's really angling for is the veep nomination.

He can be the token moderate on the ticket if the progressive wing succeeds in nominating an actual communist or something. Or he could contrast as the young guy next to a fossil like Biden.

But I acknowledge that my gift for political prediction has been returned for a certificate good for one free beverage I don't drink, and his luck may hold. That luck has given him the gift of political opponents as appealing as used toothpaste.

This also overshaodows some much better news from Montana: Wilmot Collins, mayor of Helena and a former Liberian refugee, has announced a bid for the US Senate. This guy has a legitimate shot if he can reach beyond his urban base (hey, Helena is what counts for urban in Montana) and connect with a broader audience.

Which I think he can. He's a really personable guy, genuinely nice and easygoing. I think he'd get eaten alive in DC but when Trump comes out to bad-mouth him (and he will, and I predict some memorable ugliness here) it'll probably cost Trump more support than Collins.

not perfect but...

Montana Gov. Steve Bullock Announces 2020 Presidential Run

recent video below

I don't have a lot of enthusiasm for any of the Democratic candidates so far. But any of them would be a VAST improvement over the current occupant of The White House. I hate the party system. I want publicly-funded elections and no private money. I will still vote for whoever the Democrats nominate, because the alternative is unthinkable.

 Red_Dragon wrote:  

So far, I like Pete.

 kurtster wrote: 

Cat got your tongue?

Your photo of James Comey's tweet saying that he's "in" for 2020 isn't showing. Here's a link to the tweet:

https://twitter.com/Comey/status/1112798033320796160

Thoughts: 

1. Thank God it's April Fools Day. 

2. Can someone persuade Jim to take his towering ass somewhere else for a while? 'Cause I think we've all had enough of him. 

 kcar wrote:
 

I'm just saying that I mentioned the font issue when the site was under construction and Bill disagreed that it was indistinguishable and said it looks fine on a phone. So whattya gonna do?  It works as designed. :shrug:

Powell Wyoming has 3 traditional coffeehouses plus some drive-up huts. 

Ours was Parlor News Coffeehouse. We sold it, the buyers were drunks who ran up a deficit with every supplier, then somehow sold it for a pretty fair chunk of change. Those new buyers soon found out that the creditors were going to call every day; they didn't care that the place had changed hands. So they changed the name of the business and got a new phone number. Uncommon Grounds :roll eyes: was in the location for several years while the building ownership changed 3 times... the new owners are not nice people; told Meredith that they had to move out because someone else had offered more money. Meredith said okay, moved to a new location on main street, and the old landlords tried to say "we want to keep you" but she lol'd. So the new people installed their own coffeehouse. I don't expect them to succeed in any way but anyway there's still a coffeehouse in the location we created. And one on the main street. And the one I go to, in the old meat locker near my house. They don't have very good photos, but the coffee bar is in the old wooden ice box where they'd hang meat... a great space.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
 

"It works, it just uses a font that is barely discernable from the standard weight."


If you struggle to tell which words have been bolded...how well does that tool work? 

I see your point but I am fed up with this new editor. I was cursing earlier today when trying to post from my phone. My post included a quote from westslope; the box of quoted text pushed the area where my words appeared downwards and practically off the window of the phone. I could only see the top 1/3 of the letters I was typing so I had to repeatedly stop typing, push the words I'd just typed into full view, correct any mistakes and start typing again. Epic fail. 

I was using an iPhone 6 to compose and that offers its own special treat when listening to RP using the RP app. RP is famous for its brilliant segues (Bill? Rebecca? BiBecca? There's genius at work, I'll say that) but on fairly recent versions of the app, the songs run over each over for about 5 seconds. Those beautifully timed and themed segues turn into sonic car crashes. The developer of the app (a nice Italian guy, I believe) told me in a response to my bug report that there wasn't much he could do (I think. His English was not entirely understandable). Maybe the problem has been fixed, I don't know. 

Sorry for grumping. I hate February and I have a cold. Which coffee house in Powell is yours? Yellow Pages claims that there's only one but that doesn't seem right. 

 kcar wrote:
 

It works, it just uses a font that is barely discernable from the standard weight. Apparently, it's clearer on that phone...

 westslope wrote:




These new excerpts from the piece might clarify. I think the Times allows non-subscribers to read 5 articles for free each month, and this one is definitely worth reading from start to end.

I would highlight the main points with boldface but this new text editor on the new site has a boldface tool that DOES NOT WORK. At least I didn't have to compose this post on my phone...






By reducing prices and improving quality, technology was expected to raise demand, which would require more jobs. What’s more, economists thought, more productive workers would have higher incomes. This would create demand for new, unheard-of things that somebody would have to make.

To prove their case, economists pointed confidently to one of the greatest technological leaps of the last few hundred years, when the rural economy gave way to the industrial era.

In 1900, agriculture employed 12 million Americans. By 2014, tractors, combines and other equipment had flushed 10 million people out of the sector. But as farm labor declined, the industrial economy added jobs even faster. What happened? As the new farm machines boosted food production and made produce cheaper, demand for agricultural products grew. And farmers used their higher incomes to purchase newfangled industrial goods.

The new industries were highly productive and also subject to furious technological advancement. Weavers lost their jobs to automated looms; secretaries lost their jobs to Microsoft Windows. But each new spin of the technological wheel, from plastic toys to televisions to computers, yielded higher incomes for workers and more sophisticated products and services for them to buy.

Something different is going on in our current technological revolution. In a new study, David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Anna Salomons of Utrecht University found that over the last 40 years, jobs have fallen in every single industry that introduced technologies to enhance productivity.


...


Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work doesn’t grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.


...


The growing awareness of robots’ impact on the working class raises anew a very old question: Could automation go too far? Mr. Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University argue that businesses are not even reaping large rewards for the money they are spending to replace their workers with machines.