Piles of Pieces from a Now-defunct Site

Welcome to this broad sampling of news stories from my days at a small regional news website based in Missoula, Montana, called NewWest.Net, which I left in late 2008. The weekly Missoula Independent recently ran a short and thoughtful item about the nature of news on the web, and how everything gets lost when the host server goes dark.

That’s what was happening at NewWest.Net. The site had suffered hard in the summer and fall of 2008, and apparently it ran out of money recently.

The web addresses where these old stories have existed will soon lead to dead-ends. I admit that it’s tempting to believe that online news, then, is somehow fundamentally different from print news, but I don’t know if I believe that. Each magazine, each sheet of newsprint will someday mold and decompose, no matter what we do.

The online stuff just seems more temporary because it can vanish when the lights go out, I guess. But I’m one of those people who believes that all things are temporary. Some are just more so.

Several weeks ago, a friend emailed me a link to the Missoula Independent story, and so I went back to NewWest.Net. I saved a selection of the things I posted. My goal was to save the ones with legs, the few that might be capable of keeping up with the passage of months and years.

The columns were the obvious first choices. Those include the one about backpacking with my son in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. I like that one, because it brings back to my mind a host of outdoor adventures with my son, including a great hunting trip we made with my good friend Rob Chaney, who still writes in Missoula where he lives with his lovely wife and two kids.

Other columns explore the shifting political landscape of the West, especially the growing political and voting power of Natives.

Another pile of news stories explores some of the happenings in the West at the time. Often my goal was to explore the links between local phenomena and the larger events of the day. For instance, when Lehman Brothers fell apart in the financial collapse of the summer and fall in 2008, I found places in Montana and around the West where the principals at Lehman Brothers had invested money. I do regret, though, that I never truly painted the broad picture with Lehman’s final CEO Richard Fuld and the Big Banks, at least not like I did with billionaire Bill Foley. Maybe it’s time to do that….

And then there are the political news pieces, like the one that tracks down the ridiculous comments of Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, made at a fundraiser in Pennsylvania. The comments had sparked a mini-maelstrom in conservative circles on the Internet, but so few of the bloggers and commenters out there of any stripe are willing to actually track something down. I did. And I’m quite proud of the result.

And lastly, I included a sampling of other stories, mostly about crime and tragedy. I’m not necessarily interested in misfortune as much as what I think it means.

I do hope this blog provides me with a way to write in a compelling way, broadly, about the things I find worth exploring. And I hope these pieces provide something of a prologue.

Note: I’m not particularly interested in leaving the pieces as they first ran. I’ve found simple grammatical errors in some places. Also, I have to admit that sometimes I wrapped up the pieces with trite wordplay, simply because I was in a hurry to get onto the next item or because I wasn’t quite there yet as a writer. I intend to follow-through with my earliest intentions when possible.

Gov. Schweitzer’s Tampering Comments Spark Controversy

Schweitzer jokingly described how he rigged the release of one county’s vote tally on election night 2006, when Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester narrowly beat Republican Conrad Burns, to avoid a recount. Was it a joke?

9-10-08

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer said in a July fundraising speech that he tampered with the 2006 election, in which fellow Democrat Jon Tester narrowly beat Conrad Burns for the U.S. Senate.

Specifically, Schweitzer laughingly  described how he rigged the release of one county’s election results with the goal of avoiding a recount and how he prompted reservation cops to run-off Republican poll watchers to keep them from harassing Indian voters.

“You know the governor,” said Sarah Elliott, Schweitzer’s spokeswoman. “He’s an animated storyteller. He loves to tell stories. He was joking about the Tester election, at a time when we were in the shadow of Florida. He meant absolutely no offense. He got going and told stories in his usual animated way. That’s really all there is to it. There wasn’t any attempt to influence” the election or the results.

“He’s just telling a story. He did not tamper. I wouldn’t let him or anyone else,” said Mary McMahon, head of the elections office for Silver Bow County. “I have to take some humor with it, otherwise it would drive you crazy,” she added. “As for the inference, I resent that.”

A spokesman for Montana Secretary of State Brad Johnson, whose office oversees elections, said, “I sincerely hope this is not true.”

As of Wednesday morning, no investigation was underway by either the Montana Attorney General or the U.S. Attorney for the state.

The speech, available online, features the governor’s signature storytelling about his grandmother homesteading on the Montana prairie as a 17-year-old illegal immigrant from Ireland.

Then Schweitzer regaled the Trial Lawyer’s Association with how, two years earlier, he had promised to deliver another Democratic U.S. Senator from Montana.

“I’m back to tell you we got it done,” Schweitzer told them. This is what he said: Out-of-state Republican poll watchers intimidate Native Americans at the polls, or, in his words, “there’s liable to be some sons-of bitches… who are going to show up, stand in front of the polling place” and drive away a portion of the voters. So he prompted reservation policemen to threaten the interlopers with indefinite jail time in the agency jails if they didn’t get off the reservation immediately. It worked, he said. “We didn’t lose one Indian vote.”

Then Schweitzer described watching Tester’s lead narrow on the night of the election, as the numbers came in. He wanted to avoid a recount, he said, as most Montana counties are controlled by Republicans, who would have handed the victory to Burns.

So Schweitzer pressured the Butte-Silver Bow election administrator, in not so many words, to stall the release of her county’s results to maintain Tester’s razor-thin lead. He also called the administrator “as nervous as a pregnant nun” at being phoned by the governor.

Secretary of State Brad Johnson’s office fielded no complaints of this kind of tampering at the time of the election, said spokesman Bowen Greenwood. He did field a complaint on Tuesday this week about the governor’s remarks from Tammy Hall of Bozeman, who asked the Montana Attorney General Mike McGrath and the U.S. Attorney General’s office to investigate the governor’s remarks.

The office of Johnson, a Republican, does not have investigative authority.

A spokeswoman for McGrath, a Democrat, Lynn Solomon said the state attorney general’s office, as dictated by state law, doesn’t conduct investigations because of requests from the public.

McMahon, election administrator in Butte, described how human error on election night in 2006 led to some discrepancies between the electronic vote counter and manual counts. McMahon stopped the count, found the error and fixed it. The entire day lawyers from both major parties watched the collection of ballots, the count and her office’s own recount. She did everything by the books and defends the independence and integrity of her office.

“He had absolutely no influence,” she said.

The governor did call, she said, to get the latest numbers. The two never spoke directly. She passed along a message that she would get results to his office when she had correct numbers, and she did, after she delivered the news to the press, she said.

As for the governor’s nun comment, she said, “I resent that.”