Joseph Bullington grew up in the small town of White Sulphur Springs, Montana. He recently spent more than a month living in and reporting on the Standing Rock resistance camps opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. At In These Times, he writes—Don’t Blame Montana Voters for Quist’s Loss: Blame the Frailty of Our Democracy. An excerpt:

 The Montana race has often been mentioned in the same breath as Jon Ossoff’s campaign in Georgia—that is, as a referendum on a Trump-led Republican Party. But the comparison confuses more than it explains.

Ossoff, an outsider but centrist Democrat, is running just such a campaign: His slogan is, “Make Trump Furious.” This makes some sense in Georgia’s wealthy, suburban sixth congressional district, where usually dependable Republican voters were apparently not enthusiastic about Trump and his message of right-wing populism. After going for Romney by 23 points in 2012, the district went for Trump by only one and a half point.

Just the opposite is true in Montana’s at-large congressional district, which Obama lost by only two points in 2008 and Trump won by 21 points. It was no oversight that, at Quist’s rallies with Bernie Sanders in May, Trump’s name was barely mentioned. Instead of picking up the pieces of Hillary Clinton’s crashed campaign, the pair tried to articulate a left-Democratic platform that might fly in Montana: “You shouldn’t have to be a millionaire to hunt, fish and hike in our great outdoors, get a good education or be able to support your family,” states the campaign website.

The Quist campaign was not as much a campaign against Trump as it was a left attempt to reclaim populism from the Right. And so the Quist and Ossoff campaigns are more accurately seen not as cohorts in the Democratic resistance to Trump but as two sides in the internal battle to determine the shape of that resistance.

Quist was the underdog in both cases. Democratic PACs got into the race late, and when they did they spent less than $1 million. This is a lot of money. But two days before the Montana election, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee poured $2 million more into the Georgia race, pushing its total spending there to more than 10 times what it spent in Montana.

It is hard to say whether this spending gap results from big liberal donors’ antipathy to the left wing of the party, from the party’s misunderstanding of the rural West and consequent abdication of the region to the Republicans, or some of both. [...]

However, the more than $7 million in spending by outside groups, which made this the most money-infused house race the state has been subjected to since at least 1990, favored Gianforte 10 to 1.

In the face of that gap, Quist needed two things to win: a large voter turnout and media coverage of the race that could cut through the ads and help Montanans understand the stakes and where each candidate stood on key issues. Neither happened. [...]

[T]he unusual placement and reduced number of polling places presented an obstacle to increased turnout. After an expensive election in 2016, Montana’s rural counties were strapped for cash to run a special election and lobbied for a bill that would allow counties to run the election by mail-in ballot. Despite support from the elections offices in 46 out of 56 counties, Republican leadership fiercely opposed the bill. [...]

As a result, some counties had to cut election resources. For example, in Glacier, the rural county in northwest Montana where Quist is from and which contains the large and impoverished Blackfeet Indian Reservation, the number of polling places was reduced from seven to two. This might sound like a mere inconvenience until you consider the geography. The Blackfeet Nation comprises more than 2,300 square miles of land—about the size of the state of Delaware. Of the 10,400 people who live there, only 1,000 live in Browning—the only polling place on the reservation. And there is no public transportation.

As journalist Stephanie Woodard noted for In These Times in 2014, such structural barriers are part of a much larger problem. “American Indians are still working to obtain equal voting rights,” she observes. [...]

TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES

QUOTATION

“When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated.” 
                    ~bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, 1999

TWEET OF THE DAY

BLAST FROM THE PAST

At on this date in 2010—Obama vows justice in address from the Gulf:

From the devastated shoreline of Grand Isle, Louisiana, armed with stories from local residents, President Obama used his weekly address this morning to bring passion and promises, not just to the Gulf region, but to the nation in some of his most powerful remarks to date about the BP disaster.

Every story he tells is an American story: of hard work and love of the sea and land, ravaged and despoiled by the carelessness of Big Business.

The president seems to be finding the path to his inner populist. And the results are impressive.

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin helps take out the weekend trash. Trump tweet-flubs London response, doubles-down on travel ban. Armando stages an emergency Trump tweet intervention & sticks around to learn about the Qatar crisis. And Mercer’s gaming your Google.

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About seven years ago, singer/songwriter John Mayer gave a disastrous series of interviews where he talked about the life of a recording artist and all the women he was screwing, in the wake of being linked to an assortment of Hollywood starlets. At the time, Mayer was near the apex of his popularity, but the backlash from those interviews caused lasting damage to his public image. The most controversial of those interviews was with Playboy, where Mayer discussed an aversion to having sex with black women and used the N-word, claiming he had a “hood pass.” What followed after the interview was published was a lot of public condemnation and apologies.

Sometimes referred to as N-Word privileges, it‘s a fallacy white people have a tendency to fall into. They start thinking: “I’m liberal. I’m cool. I listen to hip-hop and have black friends who think I’m okay. Therefore, I can say anything I want and they’ll understand I don’t mean anything by it.” But that’s not exactly true. I know someone who dates a black man, and I was talking with her about the latest controversy in pop culture over the weekend. Her response was: “N*gga, please.” Now, she thinks she can talk that way because she’s having sex with a black guy, he doesn’t mind her saying it, and his friends don’t mind it either. But, as I’ve told her too many times, she’s gonna say the wrong thing in front of the wrong person one day, and they’re gonna set her straight on how they feel about that particular word coming out of her mouth.

The response to Bill Maher’s use of the N-word on his show has been heavy with criticism, leading to Maher apologizing for his actions, calls for Maher to be fired and Real Time to be cancelled, and with HBO calling Maher’s words “inexcusable” and vowing to censor the segment from both its streaming service and future broadcasts. Today, Sen. Al Franken, who knows a thing or two about comedy, canceled his appearance for this Friday because Maher’s comments had been “inappropriate and offensive.”  

Beyond arguments of whether or not racial epithets should ever be part of public discussion, the situation, like the Kathy Griffin controversy, leads into discussions of what exactly should be restrained in satire and comedy, especially given what’s happened before when Maher has said something controversial during a TV series which mixed humor and politics. But the past is prologue in this case in more than a few ways, since it’s also a situation where arguably context is king given some of Maher’s views about different ethnicities and religions, the general public perception of him as a smug asshole, as well as the overall imagery of watching two white men talk about “house n*ggas.” 

The week of March 26 wasn’t an extraordinarily busy one in GunFAIL terms. But it had an interesting mix of problems. Of course, there were all the usuals: 14 people who accidentally shot themselves, eight accidental gun fatalities, seven kids accidentally shot, five accidental shootings at or near the practice ranges (where “near” means someone missed their target & sent a stray into the neighborhood), four people who accidentally shot family members or significant others, and even two “defensive gun uses” that went wrong.

TSA agents at airports around the country discovered 71 guns “forgotten” in the carry-on luggage of passengers during the week of March 27-April 2. But TSA also made the news in Atlanta, where they were found to have missed one gun. The owner, finding it in her bag as she prepared to board at the gate, reported the gun to the authorities and was arrested. (Though she claimed to have a permit for the gun, issued in Alabama, she had neglected to take it with her. And then, I guess, promptly forgot she had the gun with her at all.) The Atlanta TSA screener who missed the gun was fired. No word on whether there was a TSA screener who initially missed the gun in Alabama, though. But I guess there was. We just don’t know who that was.

An unfortunate accidental gun death in Goetz, Wisconsin, gives us yet another opportunity to remind would-be cowboys that modern double-action handguns are not “safe” to spin on your finger. That trick you see in the movies is either just that—a movie trick—or is being performed with a single-action revolver. In other words, a gun that has to have the hammer cocked manually, and on which the trigger does nothing but release a cocked trigger. Guns like that shouldn’t fire when you spin them, no matter how hard you may hit the trigger, because the hammer isn’t cocked. That said, please don’t do this. There are a lot of people out there, and a lot of guns, and if enough of you do it, someone will screw it up and forget they’ve cocked the hammer, and accidentally shoot themselves while twirling a single-action revolver, and then we’ll have been wrong about something in a gun debate and will be forced under the Second Amendment to stop writing GunFAIL diaries. It’s a fact.

Other notable gun mishaps include a kindergarten teacher in Guns Everywhere Georgia, who merely did the unthinkable, thankfully, as opposed to the horrifically unthinkable. That is, she showed up at work drunk, with a gun in her purse, which she left under the desk in the classroom. But what she didn’t do was have her gun discovered by one of the students. So shut up, liberals! That totally won’t happen with armed teachers! Unless it does! In which case, Freedom! And also, “suck it,” snowflakes!

There was also some “good” GunFAIL, too. A racist would-be murderer accidentally shot himself when he tried to shoot a co-worker at the Desert Hot Springs, California Autozone store where they both worked. Rudy Arana allegedly brought a sawed-off shotgun to work and announced he was “there to kill a n----r.” Well, he didn’t. Instead, he shot himself in the “lower torso” when he pulled that shotgun out of his waistband, which is really no place to keep a shotgun, not that I want to counsel him in any fashion.

Finally, our title story, involving the “security” guard (and former Tulsa County “reserve deputy”) at a Tulsa, Oklahoma gun show who accidentally fired a gun he was handling, injuring a fellow officer also working “security” that day. Yes, reserve deputy Robert Bates was the one who accidentally shot and killed Eric Harris at contact range in 2015, somehow thinking he had drawn a Taser rather than a firearm. But you would have most recently seen Tulsa’s reserve deputies in GunFAIL in connection with a gun accident on February 23 of this year, when a former reservist’s gun “went off on its own accord” inside the the White River Fish Market restaurant in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Way to go, fellas! Good thing their training and certification methods are impeccable! Otherwise, you’d start to think that having this many accidents among them was due to some laxity in standards, or something!

This isn’t complicated. The purpose of terrorism is to terrify people. Terrorists want masses of people to respond irrationally and live in fear. That is how they draw their power. That is their goal. But Britons will have none of it. They keep calm and carry on. Trump doesn’t like that.

Of course, Trump didn’t criticize the mayors of Orlando, San Bernardino, Baltimore or Portland for trying to calm their people. Of course, he also hasn’t once mentioned the terrorist attacks in Baltimore and Portland. But what could it be about Sadiq Khan that makes Trump need to lash out? Why a personal swipe at Sadiq Khan? What could it be?

But the worst of it is that Trump wants people to be afraid. His initial tweets, even before he expressed sympathy, were to use the London attacks to pursue his own agenda. Then he goes out of context to criticize London’s mayor for urging calm. Trump objects to people trying to respond with purposeful calm. Think about that. The terrorists want people to be terrified. Trump seems to agree.

The Congressional Budget Office keeps raining on the Republicans' Trumpcare parade. GOP leaders have promised again and again that they'll bring down premium costs, but the reality is they can only do that for the people who need health insurance least—the healthy ones. Here’s a reminder from the CBO on how the Zombie Trumpcare bill passed by the House fails here.

[P]remiums would vary significantly according to health status and the types of benefits provided, and less healthy people would face extremely high premiums, despite the additional funding that would be available under H.R. 1628 to help reduce premiums. Over time, it would become more difficult for less healthy people (including people with preexisting medical conditions) in those states to purchase insurance because their premiums would continue to increase rapidly.

So the template provided by the House for that isn't going to work at all for the Senate, but they still have that pesky problem of the big promise they made on affordability. It’s a promise that's biting them in the ass now.

Republicans say that Obamacare’s insurance regulations are responsible for making coverage prohibitively expensive and contend that premiums would fall if those rules are rolled back. They say they have multiple ideas about how to roll those back while also insulating the most vulnerable but have yet to weave those together into actual legislation.

"We can overcomplicate it," said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said of reducing premiums. "But at the end of the day, does it make sense for a family that’s trying to get health care, trying to pay for their insurance?" […]

Analysts say Republicans might achieve their goal for younger, healthier consumers, but at the cost of wiping out popular consumer safeguards like the ban on insurers charging more for coverage to those with pre-existing conditions. That, in turn, could leave millions unable to afford the hikes associated with heart disease or rheumatoid arthritis or cancer.

It would do more than that: it would once again create uncertainty for everyone, because everyone is vulnerable to being just a bad accident or a bad diagnosis away from catastrophe.

Toss this on to the pile of problems Senate Republicans are facing in repealing Obamacare and the Medicaid expansion that went with it: Medicaid expansion is ridiculously popular. Seriously, hugely popular, even among Republicans. More popular than just about any politician could hope to be.

The House bill would significantly reduce federal funding to states that expanded their Medicaid programs to low-income adults under the ACA. A vast majority (84%) of the public say it is important that states that received federal funds to expand Medicaid continue to receive those funds under any replacement plan.

This includes large majorities of Democrats (93%), independents (83%) and Republicans (71%).  Support for continued funding for the Medicaid expansion is also popular among people living in states that have not expanded their Medicaid program. […]

When asked about this proposed change, seven in 10 (71%) say Medicaid should largely continue as it is today, while fewer (26%) say it should be changed to limit federal funding while letting states decide who and what to cover. Democrats and independents largely favor the status quo (90% and 70%, respectively) while Republicans split, with similar shares supporting the status quo (47%) and the alternative (48%).

Overall six in 10 Americans (58%) say Medicaid is either “very” or “somewhat” important for them and their family, including a majority of Democrats (64%) and independents (57%), and nearly half (46%) of Republicans.

Very few people who aren't Republican—and not too many of them!—like the idea of their fellow Americans losing their insurance. Seems that it's just elected Republicans and their Koch overlords. That's even with a little over half (52 percent) of Republicans who think Medicaid is "welfare," as opposed to the 60 percent of Americans who just call it "health insurance."

That's a reflection of the nearly 60 percent of Americans who say Medicaid is important to them—because it is the insurance that covers their children, or their elderly parents, grandparents, or spouses. It's the primary payer for long-term care, covering at least half of all patients in long-term care. Which, by the way, would be far too expensive for just about everybody but the Koch brothers to pay for out of pocket. That's why it’s so popular and so important to Americans—it makes some of the hardest parts of life—like having to put a parent in a nursing home—a little easier because it at least takes away the specter of having to bankrupt trying to afford it.

So good luck, Mitch McConnell, taking all that away.

Being a good Republican in this day and age means that you like who Donald Trump likes and his enemies are your enemies. U.S. intelligence is bad, Vladimir Putin is good. McClatchy found that attitude fully on display at the weekend’s North Carolina Republican Convention:

“There’s nothing about Jim Comey that I trust,” said state Sen. Ron Rabin. “There’s nothing consistent about what he says.”

Asked whether Comey has any credibility, he offered a view shared by many Republican activists gathered at this airy waterfront convention center: “None. Zero.”

Comey may have handed Trump the election, but he wasn’t a loyal foot soldier, so screw that guy. Putin’s Russia, on the other hand ...

“Putin suggested Russia’s being made a scapegoat for hacking,” [secretary of the Union County GOP] said. “That’s what I think too.” [...]

Others didn’t go that far, but a number of people questioned whether Russia had really sought to interfere with the U.S. election.

“We need to do everything we can to become allies with Russia,” said T.J. Johnson, the vice president of the North Carolina Federation of Republican Men. “As for election meddling, I don’t think they really had anything to do with it.”

Loyalty to Dear Leader is all that matters here. 

The good news is, Trump's base is shrinking. The bad news—the very, very bad news—is, these people still control the Republican Party, and the Republican Party still controls most of American government, and they’ve shown they’re willing to do just about anything to keep that control.

El Cenizo, a tiny Texas border town where the 34-year-old mayor gets paid $100 a month, is quickly emerging as one of the leaders in the growing resistance to the state’s discriminatory “show me your papers” law, which will turn local law enforcement into federal immigration agents and force sanctuary cities to honor all ICE requests to turn over undocumented immigrants. El Cenizo, along with the League of United Latin American Citizens, Maverick County, and the county’s sheriff, filed the first lawsuit against Senate Bill 4 in May. Later that month, the national ACLU and ACLU of Texas joined City of El Cenizo, Texas v. State of Texas:

On one side is Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and the GOP-led state legislature. Emboldened by President Trump’s blunt rhetoric on illegal immigration, they passed a law in May that forces “sanctuary cities” such as El Cenizo to help detain and deport those who are in the country unlawfully. Uncooperative local governments face large fines, police chiefs and sheriffs could be jailed, and elected officials could lose their jobs.

On the other side are progressive activists such as [Mayor Raul] Reyes, part of a fast-growing younger generation that is largely Hispanic and U.S. born but lacks the political power of conservative white voters. With him are advocates who have pressured Dallas, Houston and other cities to resist cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement because they fear it will lead to racial profiling or deportations for minor offenses.

In El Cenizo—“sprung from a shantytown of landscapers, farmworkers and house cleaners who could not afford the rent in nearby Laredo”—it’s personal, and a risk the town’s leader is willing to take as even the mayor of the 1.4 million-strong city of Houston continues to waffle on suing the state over the legislation. “People have been posting that they should make an example out of me and that they should lock me up,” said Mayor Reyes. “It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for this cause. I know I will be on the right side of history.”

“He’s trying to defend us,” said one 72-year-old Mexican immigrant about the mayor. “He sees the injustices that are happening with the people.”

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, former financial exec, meet budget director Mick Mulvaney, former Freedom Caucus crusader. This is where Wall Street hits a wall of ignorance.

Mulvaney along with Trump's chief economic adviser Gary Cohn have signaled their willingness to see riders added to a bill to raise the debt ceiling. Bloomberg writes: 

"At the end of the day, Congress is going to raise the debt ceiling because they have no other choice,” Cohn said in a [Friday] interview on CNBC, brushing aside objections by conservative lawmakers who question the need to increase the limit.

“Treasury secretary would love to do a clean debt ceiling -- I get that. But if we need to get things attached to get it through, we’ll attach things,” Cohn continued.

That right there is a wink to the House crazies that they can go ahead and demand things like spending cuts as a condition of raising the debt ceiling. Except that Republicans will almost surely need Democratic votes to pass that bill. 

For their part, Democrats are more likely to insist on their own concessions, such as an assurance that the administration will continue making Obamacare subsidy payments to insurance companies.

Though Treasury secretaries have traditionally represented official administration policy on debt, not in Trumpworld. Mulvaney's made sure to publicly poke Mnuchin in the eye.

There are plenty of things standing in the way of Senate Republicans finding a Trumpcare solution, much less one that could get 50 votes and also be able to pass in the House—because the House's already-passed version of Zombie Trumpcare is not going to work. The main thing working against them, besides themselves and their disaster of a president, is time.

Here's the reality: The GOP health care debate is stalled in Congress, and its uncertainty has clogged up the legislative pipeline to Trump's desk. Republicans can't move on—and many are ready to do so—until they resolve the fate of their long-promised health care bill. […]

While a vote is not in sight, multiple aides close to the negotiations say that senators are acting in good faith and that everyone wants to get to "yes" on a bill—they just have no idea what that bill looks like. How to craft a bill that can win over warring factions and pass procedural hurdles is a question without an answer. […]

The pressure to act—or move on—is building. The reconciliation protections to pass health care with 51 Senate votes expire at the end of September—but senators and aides are operating under an assumption that if there is no bill by the August break, then hopes for health care legislation have likely tanked.

June could be a make-or-break month for the bill because, if the Senate has to negotiate a final bill with the House, it will likely need to be close to a deal by the July Fourth recess—just four weeks from now.

Which also means that June could be make-or-break for the resistance. Most senators studiously avoided having to face their constituents at town hall meetings over the Memorial Day break, precisely because they didn't want to face the pressure. Which means it's working. So let's keep it up.

Texas Republicans have done a bang-up job when it comes to passing incredibly outrageous and restrictive abortion legislation this year. Last month, they passed a series of dangerous anti-abortion bills that could actually become law including a ban on insurance coverage for abortions. Then they went so far as to try to make it legal to charge anyone connected with an unlawful abortion with a crime—and by anyone this includes the person who drove the woman to the procedure, and even the receptionist who booked the appointment. But as for addressing pregnancy deaths and trying to actually save women’s lives? Well, that’s too much of a stretch for these lawmakers.

Lawmakers in Texas largely failed to take any significant action to address the state’s skyrocketing rate of pregnancy-related deaths just months after researchers found it to be the highest in not only the U.S., but the developed world.

Legislators introduced proposals to address the issue after a University of Maryland-led study found that the state’s maternal mortality rate doubled between 2010 and 2012. But several key measures didn’t even make it to a vote, falling victim to Republican infighting over other issues.

What’s so hard about this? The state has the highest rate of pregnancy-related death in the developed world. Surely, since these lawmakers are so concerned about saving babies, they could actually find a way to give a crap about the women who are bearing them, too.

This is the ultimate hypocrisy. They don’t care about babies and they don’t care about women or their health. And once again this phenomenon is tied to race, with black women making up a significantly high percentage of the maternal deaths in the state. One Democrat thought that was worth learning more about. His colleagues? Not so much.

German newspaper Der Speigel got a chance to see what happened behind closed doors at the recent G7 summit. What the record of those meetings revealed was leader after leader attempting to reach Donald Trump—through logic, through common sense, through dollars and cents. All of them took a turn at trying to break through to a man whose mind was walled in by ignorance.

Strike one ...

The newly elected French president, Emmanuel Macron, went first. ... "Climate change is real and it affects the poorest countries," Macron said.

Strike two …

Then, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reminded the U.S. president how successful the fight against the ozone hole had been and how it had been possible to convince industry leaders to reduce emissions of the harmful gas.

And, with the final pitch ...

Finally, it was Merkel's turn. Renewable energies, said the chancellor, present significant economic opportunities. "If the world's largest economic power were to pull out, the field would be left to the Chinese.”

Trump was not only unmoved, his Rose Garden break with the rest of the world was seen as overtly hostile.