Hi-Line flood photos

You can read my story about the flooding in Glasgow in today’s Great Falls Tribune.

I plan to stay in Glasgow for at least another day as flood waters continue to threaten the Green Meadows subdivision east of the city and Nashua prepares for all the water to make its way to their town.

I’ll try to post more here today, but I’m pretty busy buzzing around Valley County so it might have to wait. In the meantime, here are some photos of the flooding from the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation out to the Fort Peck dam.

Rocky Boy’s bridges washed out:

 

Flooding near Saco:

Flooding near Glasgow:

Flows from Fort Peck Dam

Record Flooding on the Hi-Line

I’m in Glasgow this morning where residents are preparing for the worst flooding they’ve ever seen.

Driving along Highway 2 between Havre and Glasgow already looks more like the Florida Everglades than Montana.

Torrential rain and hail pelted Glasgow Tuesday morning. The already completely saturated earth wasn’t able to hold any of that water, and a flash flood rolled through town around noon. An underpass flooded and police blocked off some streets until the water receded. According to Glasgow resident Amanda Hall, even higher points around the town weren’t safe from the water.

“We live up on a hill and we had water coming in the basement,” Hall said. “The water table is usually so low up there but everything is so wet any rain we get just comes into the basement.”

Tuesday’s storms also knocked out power around parts of town, and rescuers spent much of the day yesterday trying to reach area residents who were stranded by high waters. Members of the volunteer fire department were busy pumping water out of the hospital. 

Waters are expected to reach a record of 33.5 feet today, nearly three inches higher than the record flood stage of 33.2 feet. I’ll post later today with more photos and news from the Hi-Line.

Public employees file complaint over pay plan

Three Montana public employee unions representing state employees will file an unfair labor practice complaint against the state of Montana today.

MEA-MFT, the Montana Public Employees Association, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) announced at a press conference at the Capitol this morning that they planned to submit the complaint to the state Board of Personnel Appeals.

If the Board of Personnel Appeals finds in favor of the three unions, the unions will demand that the state come back to the bargaining table to negotiate. Union leaders said this could force the Legislature to return to Helena for a special session to ratify a pay plan agreement.

“The legislative majority left us with no other option but legal action,” MEA-MFT President Eric Feaver said in a statement to union members. “We will not stand by and allow them to roll Montana’s state employees under the bus.”

The unions in November negotiated with Gov. Brian Schweitzer for a salary increase of 1 percent in 2012 and 3 percent in 2013. Union members ratified the pay plan deal later that month.

However, Legislature failed to approve the pay plan during the Legislative session, freezing state workers' salaries for another two years. The state employees' unions agreed to a pay freeze during the 2009 session to help ease the state budget during the recession.

Montana women sue philanthropist Greg Mortenson in federal court

Two Montana women have sued philanthropist Greg Mortenson and his charity, the Bozeman-based Central Asia Institute, alleging that Mortenson committed fraud and deceit.

The plaintiff's—Michelle Reinhart, of Missoula, and Jean Price, of Great Falls—claim Mortenson fabricated material details about his activities and work building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan and defrauded charity donors as well as unsuspecting consumers who bought his bestselling book  “Three Cups of Tea,” which purports to be a work of non-fiction.

The claims stem from author Jon Krakauer's investigation of Mortenson and his charity in his book "Three Cups of Deceit," in which Krakauer accuses Mortenson of lying about and fabricating key parts of his inspirational autobiography.

Great Falls lawyer Alexander "Zander" Blewett, the plaintiffs' attorney in the case, said the federal class-action lawsuit seeks to disgorge monies Mortenson and the charity obtained fraudulently and give those funds to other charitable organizations to fulfill Central Asia Institute's purported mission of building schools in impoverished central Asian villages.

"Everything Mortenson has been saying to people to get them to give him money, to buy his books, to donate to his charity, have been massive falsehoods," Blewett said Friday. “It is apparent that the only way the children in Afghanistan and Pakistan are going to receive the schools promised to them is through this class action. Otherwise Mortenson and his organization will get away with this sham."

The Central Asia Institute was closed Friday afternoon and a call to the corporation's Kansas City attorney was not immediately returned.

Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock last month opened an investigation into Mortenson and the charity after a CBS "60 Minutes" broadcast reported that the Central Asia Institute paid for Mortenson's travel for speaking engagement and book tours even though the charity receives no income from the bestseller.

I’ll update this post later with more information and links.

Rehberg: “I am land rich and cash poor”

The Montana Democratic Party posted a video on YouTube clip this morning from an event in Missoula in which Rehberg tells an attendee that he is “land rich and cash poor.”

An unidentified man asks Rehberg a question about his priorities--and presumably took a shot at Montana’s Republican Congressman for being rich because Rehberg references “gratuitous shots like ‘the rich like myself.’”

Here’s the clip, which I’ll discuss further below.

The tape is only clip so we don’t know what the full context of the man’s question was, but Rehberg was obviously irritated at being labeled “rich.” Democrats have repeatedly played the “rich” card and no-doubt will continue to play it throughout the 2012 Senate campaign as they try to draw distinctions between “Big Sandy Farmer” Sen. Jon Tester and “Millionaire Congressman” Denny Rehberg.

Since this is going to be one of the major sub-themes of the 2012 U.S. Senate Race, I’ll take a few minutes to look as just some of the fact available in the public record.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Tester’s net worth in 2009 was estimated at $602,004 to $1,280,000, which is well below the Senate average in 2009 of $13.4 million.

Rehberg’s net worth in 2009, according to the same source, was estimated at $6,598,014 to $56,244,997, which is well above the House average of $5 million.

According to the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, the current salary for all Senators and Members is $174,000. The salary for the Speaker is $223,500 and the salary for the Majority and Minority Leaders is $193,400.

According to the USDA Department of Economic Research, the median household income in Montana in 2009 was $42, 222.

I doubt voters will feel much sympathy for Rehberg’s claim of being “land rich and cash poor,” because by Montana standards  one could argue both Tester and Rehberg are “rich.”

Liberal bloggers feuding over Tester’s record

Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, once a darling of the Montana and national liberal blogosphere, appears to be having some trouble with the netroots as he embarks on a tough reelection campaign against Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg.

On issues ranging from wilderness to immigration reform to wolves the past several months have seen liberals’  irritation with Tester go from a slow simmer to a rolling boil in the blogosphere. 

National blogger Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos fame—one of Tester’s most ardent and influential netroots supporters in the 2006 election—slammed Tester in December for voting against the DREAM Act, a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for undocumented aliens who were brought to the United States as children. The bill was a top priority of Congressional Democrats last session, but Tester and fellow Montana Sen. Max Baucus joined three other Senate Democrats and in voting against the measure, which Tester referred to as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.

Wrote Kos:

“Not only will I do absolutely nothing to help his reelection bid, but I will take every opportunity I get to remind people that he is so morally bankrupt that he'll try to score political points off the backs of innocent kids who want to go to college or serve their country in the military.”

More recently a fiery debate erupted on the Missoula blog 4&20 blackbirds over a post by frequent anonymous liberal blogger JC. In the post JC criticizes Tester for breaking key campaign promises dealing with wildness protection and the use of legislative riders and accuses the senator of marginalizing liberal policy critics by calling them “extremists”:

During Jon’s first term in office he took two actions that have explicitly gone against his promises: 1) he has introduced his Logging Bill, which would release certain lands protected as wilderness under current statutes and management practices; and 2) he inserted the wolf delisting rider into the 2011 Budget Bill.

Both pieces of legislation have been heavily panned by those who supported [former progressive Democratic Senate candidate] Paul Richards in his withdrawal from the primary race, and endorsement of Tester–and by many, many others. And for that vocal criticism of Tester’s legislation, Tester labeled his former supporters “extremists.” I guess their position once upon a time wasn’t too extreme for him to shake hands with. And Jon invited “extremist” Paul onto the stage for a victory salute. But those supporters have not changed their principles, policies, or politics. Jon Tester has.

But Tester supporters were quick to fire back arguing, in part, that Tester never pretended to be the liberal the netroots hoped he’d be, and that criticism of Tester is only aiding Republican Denny Rehberg’s effort to unseat the one-term Democrat.

Wrote commenter Jake:

We must remember that the lines have been drawn and our primary focus has to be to get Jon re-elected. The alternative is not in any way acceptable. Intellectual squabbling is a waste of energy, especially as some have estimated, it could be a close race.

Helena educator and 0ne-time Democratic gubernatorial candidate Don Pogreba (well, he filed for governor anyway), picked up the discussion on his blog Intelligent Discontent where he provided a lengthy rebuttal to JC’s post on 4&20 blackbirds. Pogreba says he’s troubled by the “developing trend in which progressives seem a lot more interested in tearing down a moderate-left Senator like Tester” than in attacking his opponent.

Writes Pogreba:

“The fact remains that Senator Tester is who he represented himself to be, not the person we progressives want him to be all the time. Montana’s not going to elect Bernie Sanders; it’s not going to elect Russ Feingold (hell, Wisconsin doesn’t even elect Russ Feingold anymore). What we can do is to support a Senator who looks out for the working class, did his best to create a Wilderness Bill that balanced environmental protection with political and economic reality in the state, and who has worked to protect small businesses and family farms here in Montana.”

The comments sections of each of the blog posts I reference above are well worth reading, if not lengthy. It’s too bad I don’t have the time or space to highlight them all here.

However, one interesting nugget stood out from comments on the 4&20 blackbirds piece.

Wilderness advocate Matthew Koehler, a staunch critic of the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, was invited in November to become a front page author on the prominent Montana Democratic blog Left in the West.  He got the gig from Rob Kailey, a.k.a. Wulfgar!, who took over administrative duties of the blog after longtime administrator Jay “Touchstone” Stevens left in November, followed shortly thereafter by blog founder Matt Singer. 

In announcing Koehler’s elevation to front-page post status, Kailey wrote:

His issues may often be singular, and his statements may not always meet with approval. I don't care. He has a great deal to say of importance to the left.  That I do care about.

But according to  a comment Koehler left on the 4&20 blackbirds post , he apparently lost  front page posting privileges on LiTW after openly criticizing Tester for attaching a rider that removes grey wolves from the Endangered Species Act to a must-pass spending bill.

Some might argue all of this blog squabbling is much ado about nothing.

That may be true, but it’s hard to deny that the netroots played a integral role early on in Tester’s rise from obscure Montana dirt farmer to U.S. Senator…as Tester himself said in an August 2006 interview shortly after his surprising defeat of presumed front-runner John Morrison in the Democratic primary:

“I’ll tell you, I think [blogs] are critically important to this campaign…They’ve brought more people into the political process, and I have nothing but high praise for what they’ve been able to do and what they’ve given me.”

An overstatement? Maybe.

But During the 2006 Senate campaign Act Blue donors raised $342,823 from over 10,000 individual online contributions for Tester’s campaign, mostly from blogs. ActBlue donations to Tester’s 2006 campaign outnumbered donations from any single PAC, according to OpenSecrets.org.

There’s no question that an incumbent Senator—in what is likely to be one of the most hotly contested U.S. Senate races in the country—will rely less on netroots  enthusiasm and activism as he will on the the traditional party resources.

What remains to be seen is whether Tester—a candidate lefty bloggers almost universally fawned over in 2006—will electorally suffer from the divisions flaring up among what was once his most active and vocal base.