The terrorist attacks on 9/11 were terrible on so many levels. From the first, numbing shock of seeing bodies falling from the burning towers on live television, to the wicked exploitation of the event by conservatives for political gain, the events surrounding 9/11 for me are inextricably entwined with anger and disgust.
One of the cruder side effects was a new outpouring of racism. Chatter about how terror was unique or somehow integral to Islam - and, specifically, the brown-skinned version -- lightly categorized as a horde on the brink of overrunning the United States. Happily for many righties that vision of an endangered Anglo-Saxon empire dovetailed nicely with rhetoric on immigration, then neatly transformed into the hysteria surrounding Barack Obama's birth certificate and secret, "socialist" agenda.
One of the outputs of all this talk was a call to racial profiling, kicked off by New York's resident whack job, Peter King, back in 2006:
Declaring that airport screeners shouldn't be hampered by "political correctness," House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King has endorsed requiring people of "Middle Eastern and South Asian" descent to undergo additional security checks because of their ethnicity and religion.
The Missoulian jumped right in, supporting the idea (the editorial, alas, has been scrubbed from the newspaper's digital memory):
Of course, many screening measures are intended to dance around an uncomfortable reality. The primary terrorist threat comes not from the general public. Our society's sensibilities and laws, however, don't permit us to focus on that specific subpopulation because it would seem discriminatory. Instead, we screen everybody, conduct random searches and, soon perhaps, even employ high-tech machines trying to divine their hidden intentions. The broad-brush approach makes it less likely to detect a terrorist, not more.
The problem we have is that we are unwilling as a society to acknowledge that we are at war with people who are more homogenous than the general U.S. population. Because of this, using a person's ethnic heritage as one of many factors to decide if a person should be inconvenienced a little more than the 80-year-old grandmother isn't discrimination. It is affirmative action....
But...racial profiling actually makes us less safe...
As Spencer Ackerman notes, racial profiling is "a move that would not have caught shoebomber Richard Reid (British citizen, Jamaican heritage); would-be-underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab at the time (Nigerian citizen, lots of time spent in the U.K.; and now Jihad Jane (American citizen, white as the driven snow, and we know white people can't be terrorists)."
But then, racial profiling isn't about making us safer. It's about making us feel safer.
Across the nation, calls for GOP Chair Michael Steele to make an apology for his racist, uneducated comments on national televison continue to mount, but he's not having any of it. Huffington Post has his comments defending his racism on the Dennis Miller radio show:
I said look you want o come after me, you want to do this job then take it from me. But until then, shut up and get in line.... This is why are at 22 percent approval in the polls, why no one wants to identify with us because we spend more time tearing each other down as opposed to talking about those principles that have defined us for generations.
What kind of "principles that have defined us for generations" is he talking about?
Here in Montana, American Indians are our state's first residents and among our most honored leaders and elders. Governor Schweitzer has worked hard to rebuild the relationships between our state and the sovereign nations within its borders. And for the first time, Montana voters elected our first American Indian woman, Denise Juneau, to statewide office.
We want leaders who will end racism, not promote it. So we want to know: Will the Montana GOP renounce the bigotry and ignorance of their national leader or will they continue to lend him their silent support?
The mounting establishment backlash against pointing out the obvious racist tinge to some of the Tea Baggers' signs, rhetoric, and paranoid fantasies reminded me of a story I should have written about long ago: there was a shakeup in the Ravali Country Republican central committee earlier this month, in which three chairpersons resigned.
Why? Ostensibly because "'fake' Republicans have taken over the party at the local, state and federal levels." But the more deep-seated reason?
Cox and Docteur said a factor in their resignation was the Central Committee's response to the controversial "No Mo Bro" sign displayed at last month's Stevensville Creamery Picnic parade.
Cox, Docteur and Thayer asked Cathy Kulonis, a precinct committeewoman who displayed the sign, to resign because they considered it racist, offensive and embarrassing to the Republican Party.
Kulonis refused to resign, saying the sign wasn't racist.
The Central Committee also said "No Mo Bro" wasn't racist, but that it wasn't a good choice of words given the current political climate.
The committee chastised Cox, Docteur and Thayer for contacting the Ravalli Republic and airing the party's "dirty laundry" in public.
Only an idiot would think the sign wasn't racist - would Kulonis had written the same sign were, say, John Kerry president? The rejection of Cox, Docteur, and Thayer, and the endorsement of Kulonis' sign signals Ravalli County Republicans embrace the extremist right's lunatic and, yes, racist messages.
The story traditional media should be covering isn't that the racism present in the Tea Bagger movement has been overblown, but how willing traditional party structures are to embrace it.
As JC pointed out, President Obama will be at the Bozeman airport on Friday for a public town hall meeting open to the public, and that Jake Eaton et al will be on hand to disrupt things.
Parading with Bitterroot Valley Republican groups in her Hummer, Cathy Kulonis said she was exercising her First Amendment rights Saturday when she hoisted a sign reading "No Mo Bro" during Creamery Picnic festivities here.
In response to angry requests to remove the sign, and contentions that it carried unsavory racial overtones regarding President Barack Obama, Kulonis held her ground, referring to those who complained as "red-faced maniacs" and "liberal extremists."
When the parade committee chairman requested that she remove her sign, she once again stood fast and refused to put it away.
She claims the sign was just "Okie talk."
"This issue is not about racism," Kulonis wrote in an e-mail to the Ravalli Republic. "It is not even about me. It is about control. A useless effort by the left to silence me."
"No one intimidates me," she continued. "I will not bow to or obey the pc police. I am afraid of no one. I was born for a time as this. Opinions and names do not change the facts or who I am. I say, 'Watch this Patriot Act!' "
Kulonis said it doesn't bother her that some interpreted her sign as racist.
"I can't help what people think and someone being offended is not my responsibility," she said. "Everything I did, I did with my own kind heart."
Racist, paranoid, self-obsessed, and oblivious: these are the people we're dealing with...
Update: This isn't the first time LiTW has mentioned Kulonis. The "Okie talker" got into a little set-to outside an abortion clinic when she blocked the sidewalk in front of the clinic. That little incident led to the abusurdist SB 497, a bill that made it a crime to "obstruct" anti-abortion demonstrations at clinics.
Steve M has more on Kulonis' extremist activities.
What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for. We've been reminded repeatedly during Gatesgate that Cambridge's mayor is a black lesbian. But a more representative window into the country's transition might be that Dallas County, Tex., elected a Latina lesbian sheriff in 2004 (and re-elected her last year) and that the three serious candidates for mayor of Houston this fall include a black man and a white lesbian.
Even Texas may be tinting blue, and as goes Texas, so will all but the dwindling rural minority of the Electoral College. Last month the Census Bureau released a new analysis of the 2008 presidential election results finding that increases among minority voters accounted for virtually all the five million additional votes cast in comparison to 2004. Black women had a higher turnout rate than any other group, and young blacks turned out at a higher rate than young whites.
It's against this backdrop that 11 Republican congressmen have now signed on to a bill requiring that presidential candidates produce their birth certificates. This bizarre "birther" movement, out to prove that Obama is not a naturally born citizen, first gained notice in the summer of 2008 when it was being advanced by the author Jerome Corsi, a leader of the Swift boat assault on Kerry. That it revved up again as Gatesgate boiled over and Sotomayor sped toward Senate confirmation is not a coincidence.
Obama's election, far from alleviating paranoia in the white fringe, has only compounded it. There is no purer expression of this animus than to claim that Obama is literally not an American - or, as Sarah Palin would have it, not a "real American." The birth-certificate canard is just the latest version of those campaign-year attempts to strip Obama of his American identity with faux controversies over flag pins, the Pledge of Allegiance and his middle name. Last summer, Cokie Roberts of ABC News even faulted him for taking a vacation in his home state of Hawaii, which she described as a "foreign, exotic place," in contrast to her proposed choice of Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the real America of Dixie.
Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter have condemned the birther brigades and likened them to "the truthers" who accused the Bush administration of engineering the 9/11 attacks. But those conspiracy theorists couldn't find 11 congressmen willing to sponsor a bill supporting their claims. Even Liz Cheney has publicly refused to dispute the libels on Obama's citizenship.
One of the loudest birther enablers is not at Fox but CNN: Lou Dobbs, who was heretofore best known for trying to link immigrants, especially Hispanics, to civic havoc. Dobbs is one-stop shopping for the excesses of this seismic period of racial transition. And he is following a traditional, if toxic, American playbook. The escalating white fear of newly empowered ethnic groups and blacks is a naked replay of more than a century ago, when large waves of immigration and the northern migration of emancipated blacks, coupled with a tumultuous modernization of the American work force, unleashed a similar storm of racial and nativist panic.
As Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post and Helene Cooper of The Times have pointed out, a lot of today's variation on the theme is class-oriented. Some whites habituated to a monopoly on the upper reaches of American power just can't adjust to the reality that Obama, Sotomayor, Oprah Winfrey and countless others are now at the very pinnacle, and that they might sometimes side with each other just as their white counterparts do. Threatened white elites try to mask their own anxieties by patronizingly adopting working-class whites as their pet political surrogates - Joe the Plumber, New Haven firemen, a Cambridge police officer. Call it Village People populism.
Some question why Obama isn't stepping in and showing his real birth certificate and ending this nonsense. Does he mind the Birthers? Does their paranoia help or hurt Obama's popularity outside of Southern white voters? Of course, answering them directly gives them credibility.
Bottom line: Rich is dead on. There's a hysteria to the tea-baggin' nativist crowd that's similar to the desegregation era. Forget buses, lunch counters, and water fountains, desegregation opened up economic opportunities and government financial assistance that hereto was reserved for whites, opening whites to competition for jobs, housing, loans, and grants. That's a good thing if we want to better be an egalitarian democracy, but it sure burns the britches of lots of folks, many of whom are just barely getting by as it is.
Yes, the email is an incoherent mess riddled with puerile and racist remarks. Yes, yes, it's a long litany of rightwing rhetoric, an ugly peek into the garbage-addled, xenophobic, sexist, and paranoid mind of a Fox-News-Glenn-Beck-watchin' wingnut. And, yes, it's disturbing that a Boston police officer and National Guard captain thinks like this - and I'm glad he wrote the email, so he could be duly suspended from bothjobs.
All this is true. But what got me the most was the opening of his email:
"I am a former English teacher, writer..."
Yup. Justin Barrett, the author of this stunning incoherent rant, considers himself an educator and intellectual...
...so what's the under/over on this dude appearing on Beck's show as the victim of liberal elitism and reverse racism?
Big hubbub on the 'tubes today about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr, an African-American Harvard professor who was arrested for "breaking in" to his own house. Well, more accurately, he was arrested for disorderly conduct after being accused by a white police officer of breaking into his own house.
But here's the thing: Gates broke no law. He shouldn't have been arrested.
Meanwhile, note that racial motivations or there absence have really nothing to do with the nature of Officer Crowley's misconduct. What happened basically is that Crowley accused Gates, whether for good reason or not, of breaking into his own home. Gates, pissed off, offended Crowley. At which point Crowley, even though he was now perfectly aware that Gates was not guilty of anything, decided to exact revenge by manipulating the situation to create a trumped-up disorderly conduct charge. That's not professional policing, and it's not a good use of the City of Cambridge's law enforcement resources. That's why the charges were dropped, and that's why it's fair to say that Crowley was acting stupidly racial issues aside.
It seems clear to me that race did play a part in this arrest: someone called the guy in, probably because of his skin color. No doubt Gates was belligerent and rude. But there's no law against being rude. To me, this is really a story about a minor abuse of power.
Predictably, righties have swarmed all over this story and have created a familiar narrative for the incident. The arresting officer, Sgt. Crowley, is a salt-of-the-earth blue-collar good guy, a hero! For trying to save a black man, even! Mouth-to-mouth! He even taught a class on how not to do racial profiling, fer chrissakes! And then come all these elitist dandies to crucify this poor man and defend the ungrateful privileged uppity black man...it's enough to make yer blood boil, ain't it?
Recognize the pattern? Sure you do. It's the age-old Nixonian strategy of shaving off blue-collar votes by invoking the fear of black privilege. Only these people get to fold a president into their narrative...
Western Montanans recently entered the debate over a congressional resolution formally apologizing for the way the U.S. government has treated Native Americans. The Missoulian's Gwen Florio wrote a news story detailing the fact that a key phrase having to do with the federal government's mismanagement of tribal funds held in trust had been dropped from the resolution.
But few of the comments posted online with that story concerned this facet of the discussion. Instead, many provided a stark reminder that racism runs rampant through our community.
Gwen Florio ran a followup on the Missoulian blog, "The Buffalo Post," in which she posted a letter from Patrick Weasel Head. It's worth a read in its entirety, but essentially Weasel Head wonders what the Native American community can do to soften its image, yet ultimately calls to task all of us who tolerate racism in everyday life:
There are sensitive individuals that bridge the cultural gap between indigenous peoples and the community, and I applaud them for their effort and true feelings of diversity and inclusion. They are truly the kind of people I want to interact with and to grow a sense of community for all. Yet, I feel that society expects, and tolerates, this insensitivity toward indigenous peoples and that it is so easy to 'pick on' the Indian community (or individuals) without any reaction from their statements. I think this has to end. Too often I hear that indigenous peoples are seen as the easiest to disparage, to make fun of and to chastise without any level of sensitivity or compassion or better yet, repercussions. That too has to stop.
I challenge all to make a difference, to see what they can do to dispel this insensitivity to the indigenous populations and remember, that respect goes in both directions. Are these few comments as listed in the Missoulian article representative of the community and that rampant racism exists? If not, speak out.
I couldn't agree more.
But it is surprising that the Missoulian sounds surprised by all of this, and is essentially calling for others to decry racism when they see it, because the newspaper, frankly, doesn't have such a great track record when it comes to criticizing those who engage in racist rhetoric.
Take the recent kerfluffle over a racist letter (pdf) sent to former Missoulian reporter, Jodi Rave. The Electric City Perfesser defended the letter, agreeing there was too much coverage of Native Americans in the paper. Instead of supporting Rave, explaining why it felt Native Americans should be included in the news, and decrying Natelson's ignorance on race matters, the Missoulian said...nothing.
And while Jodi Rave wrote about the racist rhetoric in the state OPI campaign, the paper's editorial board said...nothing.
(One wonders how the paper will handle anti-Native-American rhetoric now that Rave left the the Missoulian...)
And given the numerous questionable statements that both Dave Berg and Dave Rye have made - and will no doubt continue to make - instead of questioning whether Taylor Brown - the man who hired them both for his radio network - was fit for public office, the Missoulian said...nothing.
When Corey Stapleton made racially insensitive remarks on the floor of the state legislature, the Missoulian...said nothing. Matt Singer did, and was slammed for it by the Choteau Acantha, which wrote a puff piece about Stapleton and slammed blogs, and the Missoulian...said nothing.
And let's not forget that not too long ago the Missoulian editorial board endorsed racial profiling.
Whether those that pen the editorials want to admit it or not, neglecting racism from prominent public figures implicitly encourages such rhetoric. So, yeah, I think it's a bit hypocritical for the Missoulian to sound shocked or outraged at all of the racist comments engendered by a recent report...but the paper has essentially been complicit with the racism for years. Perhaps instead of a treacly editorial pointing out the ickiness of racism, the paper could instead make a vow to do better at singling out prominent racists and denouncing racist rhetoric when made by public figures...
On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.
You know, because black people don't really count.
I haven't paid much attention to the flap over racism that the Perfesser kicked off over a racist letter (pdf) that was sent to the Missoulian's Jodi Rave. Certainly Wulfgar! expressed the proper outrage, as did Rave'sreaders. 'Nuff ced.
But then I stumbled on Natelson's latest, in which he "proves" there's too much coverage of American Indians and not enough of white "taxpayers" by entering terms like "Indians," "Germans," "Irish," "Hmong," "taxpayers," "professors," etc, into the Missoulian search engine, and then tabulating the results. Naturally, "Indians" wins hands down.
Sadly, Natelson is looking in all the wrong places for references to white or other cultures. The coverage is there -- and right beneath his nose. Take today's newspaper:
Lead story? A ski jumping competition at Snowbowl. How's this for an alternate lede? "A crowd of mostly white people today enjoyed the traditionally Nordic sport of ski jumping at a local white-owned ski area." The picture that accompanies the article is a white man with his white child.
Second story, on wilderness proposals, tells of the mostly white upper legislative body in a government formed from Anglo-European traditions of democracy, which is debating bills (along European parliamentary procedures) that would use a legal system based on English Common Law to enact a contemporary Anglo-American notion of public ownership of land -- an interesting component of European views on property ownership.
Third story, a review of a Russian ballet -- a European classical dance -- performed by the Missoula symphony orchestra, a body of musicians playing classical European instruments and arranged along classical European music traditions. They play in a typical early 20th century Anglo-American performance hall.
Get it? If it's a report about the dominant culture -- Euro-Anglo, white American, whatever -- it's not explicitly mentioned. White culture is implied, it's the norm. To Natelson, a debate on wilderness bills is inherently neutral alongs lines of race, ethnicity, gender. However, I suspect there's probably a young Native American woman out there who instead views the debate through the prism of her particular race and culture, who sees a bunch of old, rich middle-age white guys in suits and ties arguing over how they're going to divide up land that once belonged to her people. Her perspective is entirely legitimate.
Don't mistake this post for as an indictment against Anglo-Euro culture. I thrive in my culture. What I'm doing now -- the act of typing, crafting a rhetorical argument, sitting on a wooden, hard-backed chair at my kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee -- is firmly rooted in my culture.
Instead this post is a plea for perspective and empathy, characteristics that the Perfesser sadly seems to lack when he writes, as a suggestion to "counter-balance" Jodi Rave's stories featuring American Indians, "have other reporters assigned to subjects that concern the rest of us. For example, a taxpayer columnist might do a semi-weekly column on legislative bills...This sort of thing is supposed to be done by the Lee Bureau in Helena, but there has never been a huge amount of sympathy for taxpayers there."
Here's the thing, Rob. American Indians are taxpayers.
I understand that it's a rough year to be a Republican. I understand that it's rough having conservative ideals, and watching them fail, spectacularly. Conservative foreign policy gave us Iraq. Conservative governance gave us the prosecutor purge, deficeits, collapsing bridges, torture, and the banking crisis. I also understand it's human nature to retract and get defensive rather than fess up and change your way.
Still, the rhetoric emanating from the right over the Obama campaign is, frankly, reprehensible.
Kevin Drum posted a compiliation of some recent examples a couple of weeks ago:
One: Bill Ayers really wrote Obama's book, Dreams From My Father. Two: Obama had an underage, gay affair with a pedophile. (That, by the way, is called "molestation," folks. -- Jay) Three: It's entirely possible that Obama was involved with bombing the South African rugby team while he was at Columbia in the 80s. Four: Obama, Bill Ayers, and Jeremiah Wright (via a chain of associations too Rube Goldbergesque to summarize) were engaged in a conspiracy to teach Pan-African "cultural nationalism" to Chicago schoolkids during the 90s. Five: Obama was having an affair with one of his fundraiser babes in 2004 until Michelle found out and banished the woman to a "little Caribbean island."
And then there was serious discussion about whether Obama is a Maoist or a Stalinist...and this was at the Corner, the blog for the National Review, a "reputable" magazine. This week's hooplah is that Obama was accused of altering a United States flag to put an "O" in the field of stars and standing it alongside US flags during a speech in Toledo. Turns out it was an Ohio state flag. To sum it up, apparently Obama is a "black Muslim, anti-Christian socialist plotting with an evil Jewish billionaire."
And let's not ignore the fact that a lot of this is encouraged, if not abetted by the McCain/Palin ticket. It's McCain and Palin, for example, who are pushing the Bill Ayers line of attack. It's McCain/Palin who are pushing the ACORN story. It's Sarah Palin who's identifying certain areas of the country as "pro-America."
If you've been following the presidential races as closely as me -- which makes us outliers among the public, to be sure: most folks are off doing reasonable things with their time -- you've no doubt heard that racism is going to play a part in this campaign.
One of the threads of that talk surfaced in the primary and had to do with the "Bradley effect": the theory that African-American candidates poll better than their actual election-day results because white voters are ashamed to admit their bias to a pollster, but will vote their prejudice in the election booth when the curtain's closed and no one's looking. It's one of those insidious little arguments that's hard to shake off because it's impossible to demonstrate the argument's merit until election day.
It turns out, though, that the Bradley effect might not be a factor in U.S. politics anymore. At least, that's the argument of a recent Harvard political science paper (pdf):
By analyzing Senate
and Gubernatorial elections between 1989 and 2006, this paper has provided the first large-
sample test of the Wilder effect. In the early 1990s, there was a pronounced gap between polling
and performance for black candidates of about 2.3 percentage points. But in the mid-1990s,
that upward bias in telephone surveys disappeared.
I never really bought into the Bradley effect this election for a couple of reasons. First, the theory started in the context of Obama's electability, so it felt more political than reasonable.
Second, the American right has given the public plenty of cloaked terms to express their racial bias without sounding racist. From emphasizing Obama's middle name, "Hussein" or repeating the Obama-is-Muslim allegations or questioning his birth certificate, to calling him "uppity," these terms and accusations allow voters to express disdain for Obama's "otherness" without calling him a "nigger." That is, people would have no problem admitting to a pollster they're not voting for Obama.
Still, it's good to see some research validate those suspicions.
But we're in this mess, ultimately, because our political elites thought it was good social policy to encourage banks to give mortgages to uncreditworthy people, resulting in what Sailer months ago called the "Diversity Recession" (if this doesn't work, make that the Diversity Depression). In other words, if poor people in general, or blacks or Hispanics in particular, were less likely to be approved for a mortgage, the only possible reason was racism or classism or whatever. Thus "creditworthiness" was an illegitimate, dead-white-male concept, like middleclassness. Because, after all, isn't everyone entitled to credit? Therefore, I propose any bailout bill start with these words: "It is the sense of Congress that credit is not a civil right."
A few paces away, I catch up with a man named Ron Saucier and a woman who would only identify herself as Mary. Ron says his problem with Obama is the integrity thing. "He exaggerates too much," Ron says. "He's not honest."
"OK," I say. "What does he exaggerate about?"
"Well, like that time he was saying he had a white mother and a white grandmother," he says.
I ask him how this is an exaggeration.
"Well, he was saying . . ." he begins. "As if that qualifies him to . . ."
Despite my repeated prodding, Ron seems unable or unwilling to say aloud exactly what he means. Finally, his friend Mary, a grave-looking blonde with fierce anger lines around her eyes, jumps in, points a finger and blurts out one of the all-time man-on-the-street quotes.
"Look, you either are or you aren't," she says.
"And he aren't," Ron says, nodding with relief.
I was traveling a month ago -- and sitting in a bookstore in mid-town Manhattan, talking to some colleagues about the Presidential race.
A man walking by dropped a note into my lap reading something along the lines of, "Stop trying to elect a racist into the White House." And while that story line rarely plays out in mainstream media, I've also seen it on the Facebook profiles of old friends from high school.
There's no doubt (at least in my mind) that anti-white racism exists in America. But it strikes me as incredibly sad that the far-right would portray Barack Obama as the next Louis Farrakhan, while the far-far-right continues to apply a blood quota standard to indicate that not only is Obama not mixed-race, but that his mother and grandmother have somehow become black through a perverse construction of reverse genetics.
Probably worth linking to this, the most powerful speech on race I've seen from a contemporary political leader.
If you're looking for racism, just take a gander at the comments thread on this story at the Billings Gazette. The story is a lengthy one and an interesting one to boot -- about who will regulate and tax gaming on the Flathead Reservation.
The story is a fairly old one in government -- people declaring "taxation without representation," others pointing out that they aren't proposing a radical change to the status quo, and a lot of problems that appear to be caused by a lack of communication. For some reason, a number of commenters seem to have taken this as a sign that Indians are bad people, which is how to many conversations devolve in Montana.
That said, I'm not completely clear on the smooth way out of the question. The tribal government wants an increased say in matters on the reservation -- something fair. Business owners are saying that they want to be regulated by a government they have a say in -- a somewhat fair argument, except that they already live under tribal jurisdiction in a number of ways. And everyone says they want the employees to not lose their jobs (although some business owners seem to prefer going out of business to being regulated by the tribe, something that screams mild bigotry to me).
The state, meanwhile, isn't saying anything.
This strikes me as a good-place for the Governor to show a little get-'er-done attitude. I know he's got a lot of other stuff on his plate, but there are a number of jobs here, there's relationships between a number of Montanans, and there's a good deal of revenue up for grabs. Surely, a way out can be found.
