Trego's Mountain Ear

The illusion of choice reigns.  Given the choice between Trump and Hillary, the choice between Trump and Biden, I had to choose Trump.  Others are more down on Trump and had to choose Biden or Hillary.  Voting against the worst candidate is a choice.  The thing is, it’s a forced choice, an unnatural choice.  How good it would be to be allowed to vote for the best candidate, instead of against the worst.

Here, I’m given a choice – vote for a special library district, or see library locations reduced to Libby.  Again, my choice is crap sandwich or crap salad.  I’ve done the math – north Lincoln County is the cash cow when it comes to property taxes, Libby is our feedlot for fattening county employees.  When you look at 45% of the taxes coming from 35% of the population, it adds another dimension to the slogan “Taxation is theft.”  

I see that RealClearPolitics lists Montana’s Senate seat as a ‘tossup’ – but when I look at the polling data, Jon Tester leads by 5 ½  percent.  I figure that Tester is an easy guy to like, whether or not you like his voting record.  Kind of the same thing for Neil Duram – last time around he ran as a nice guy.  This time he voted to raise the school taxes for Trego.  Actually it’s worse than that – his vote will force Trego’s trustees to add a special levy.  While he doesn’t have a primary opponent (and he was one of the folks to vote to remove subsection 7, so if you write in an opponent it doesn’t count) we at least have a democrat candidate so we can vote based on Neil’s voting record.  Face it, Zooey Zephyr came closer to voting for Trego School’s best interests and competitive elections than Neil did.  Nice guy, good cop, but his voting record shows he didn’t think about screwing  Trego taxpayers.  (For the sake of consistency, Mike Cuffe’s votes on these issues were the same as Neil’s – but he has a 4 year term). 

I’m not sure if I should classify the upcoming election as a crap sandwich or a crap salad – but I am solid on the main ingredient.  I can vote for a library district that will benefit my distant Libbyan neighbors more than my north county neighbors, and the candidate who earned being voted against is unopposed in the primary.