Growth is painful. Change is painful. But, nothing is as painful as staying stuck where you do not belong. – Unknown

Today’s independent commentary deals with these people/issues:

• Montana Sports Betting
• Trump & Mueller
• Nancy Pelosi

Montana Sports Betting:

On Friday the Associated Press (AP) reported that Montana became the first state to legalize sports betting this year after Gov. Steve Bullock signed a bill Friday for the state lottery to oversee a system of wagering through kiosks and mobile applications that could be running by fall.

It does not appear you’ll be able to place bets from home over your phone. The AP added the following information further down in their article:

The bill allows licensed bars and restaurants to have kiosks and mobile applications that can only be used inside those establishments. The Montana Tavern Association had lobbied heavily for legalization, and the measure effectively gives the association’s members a monopoly.

It was nice for the AP to point out the monopoly the tavern association has in Montana. It’s too bad many state legislators are afraid of them.

Once again the Montana Legislature has screwed up something that could have been really good for the state.

You can read the entire AP article HERE.

Trump & Mueller:

Reuters reported that President Donald Trump said on Sunday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller should not testify in Congress about the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, after saying on Friday it was up to the Justice Department’s top official.

That information was contained in a Tweet from the President.

Politico had this to say:

Trump’s tweet — if interpreted by the attorney general as a direct order to stifle Mueller’s testimony — could set up the most consequential legal question related to the special counsel’s probe: whether executive privilege can be used to stop an executive branch employee from testifying about an investigation into the president.

This should be fun to watch. It seems I say this about something the President has done every week.

Nancy Pelosi:

It’s amusing to monitor social media sites and see which elected official gets the most negative attention. Most of the time in the past two years, Donald Trump has been getting the most negative attention.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has been getting her fair share of negative attention recently. People want her gone. Some people are just ignorant enough to think their post to 100 friends will do anything.

The fact is that Pelosi will probably be around for as long as she wants. She may outlast Trump. If someone wants her out of Congress, one thing they could do would be to move to her district in California and vote for her opponent in the next election. It would take a lot of people to move there and vote against here because Pelosi usually wins reelection with anywhere from 65% of the vote to 92% of the vote. (Wiki)

It would be easier to defeat her as Speaker of the House, especially if several members of her own party wanted someone new. So far Pelosi has been able to keep the Democrats in line. Pelosi was elected Speaker in 2019 with 51% of the vote (220). Second place went to Republican Kevin McCarthy with 192 votes or 45%. (Wiki)

Since I look at politics through an independent lens, I think what Pelosi has done is admirable. Besides being the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House back in 2007, she regained that post in January 2019.

She is handling Trump so far. The big question is can she keep her fellow Democrats from going silly and trying to impeach him. If that happens, Trump would then play “victim” and probably win reelection in 2020 because of it.

 

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