Thursday Thoughts

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Hello faithful readers – thanks for stopping by!

Here are a few topics that caught my attention:

  • TikTok Ban
  • GF Public Library Levy
  • Armed Forces Day
  • One More Thing

TIKTOK BAN:

If Montana Governor Greg Gianforte and I ran into each other in public, I would tell him to take his TikTok ban and shove it where the sun does not shine. I would do the same if I ran into Attorney General Austin Knudsen.

In case you missed it, Gianforte signed the TikTok ban bill into law Wednesday. It made the national news. After hearing about the signing, I spent two hours on TikTok to stick it to the man. Yes, I understand that the law does not take effect until January.

Here is how the Associated Press (AP) reported it:

Montana became the first state in the U.S. to enact a complete ban on TikTok on Wednesday when Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a measure that’s more sweeping than any other state’s attempts to curtail the social media app, which is owned by a Chinese tech company.

In signing the bill into law, Gianforte is violating my First Amendment rights.

In a statement, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen says his office drafted the legislation and worked closely with the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Shelley Vance (R-Belgrade), to get the bill to the Governor’s desk.

You would think an attorney general would know better.

Again, Montana will have to defend an unconstitutional law in the courts, and they will lose. The Republican legislature, Knudsen, and Gianforte will again look like imbeciles to the world.

Read the AP article HERE.

GREAT FALLS PUBLIC LIBRARY LEVY:

The haters of the public library are out in force to try to convince people to vote against the Great Falls Public Library mill levy on June 6. What they are doing is making Great Falls unattractive to future businesses and soiling the reputation of the city.

I encourage all my readers who will be able to vote in the election to support the levy. Please don’t listen to the ignorant people spewing lies. The facts about the library levy can be found HERE.

According to the Cascade County Elections Department, ballots were mailed yesterday (May 17), so be on the lookout for your ballot in the mail.

Vote FOR the library mill levy!

ARMED FORCES DAY:

Don’t forget that this Saturday (May 20) is Armed Forces Day.

The Department of Defense says that President Harry S. Truman led the effort to establish a single holiday for citizens to come together and thank our military members for their patriotic service in support of our country. On August 31, 1949, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson announced the creation of an Armed Forces Day to replace separate Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force Days. The single-day celebration stemmed from the unification of the Armed Forces under the Department of Defense.

Armed Forces Days is a day to pay tribute to men and women who serve the United States armed forces.

If you know an active duty, National Guard, or Reserve member, tell them thanks for serving.

ONE MORE THING:

When you die, God isn’t going to ask you about someone else. He won’t ask you about the two men down the street who got married. He won’t ask you about the girl who had an abortion. He won’t ask you about the atheist that lives on the corner. He won’t ask you about the woman who feels more comfortable as a man.

He will ask you how you loved those people as He called you to do.

And some of you didn’t. (Source)

## END ##

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16 thoughts on “Thursday Thoughts”

  1. Great variety of topics in this article! It’s great to see support for the armed forces and the importance of the library mill levy, even with opposition. Thanks for sharing!

  2. Tik tok? don’t want it don’t need it. The legislature and the governor look like fools. Did you vote for them? Now about Tik Tok. When the Chinese government allows our platforms in China then we allow their platform in the U.S.A. I do not doubt that the communist Chinese will insert their form of truth-telling any way they can. After all, Trump is the closest thing to a Russian asset I have seen and 74 million people voted for him, not to mention Jan 6th. Censorship? don’t want that either. Social media? It is a mess. We need free and open debate on how to construct a policy that will improve the freedoms with have. A good start would be to bring back the Fairness Doctrine. I guess you will show your age if you remember that.

    • The “Fairness Doctrine” would roll over in it’s grave if it saw today’s media. Thanks, JmB

  4. Everybody in Montana should download Tik-Tok whether they want it or not (and I don’t) just to thumb their nose at the christo-fascist histrionic ninnies that are so triggered by the app.

    • I think it is wonderful our legislators and governor have taken this easily circumvented TikTok step to “protect Montanans”, even though no one asked them for such protection. (While burnishing their far right authoritarian and anti free speech bonafides on the national stage as “further right than you other legislatures, nyah nyah nyah”, of course.)

      For you see, I heard somewhere that a guy’s cousin’s wife’s brother’s hair cut lady recently received one of those breathless right wing chain emails, this one penned by “A Mom from Stevensville”, wherein the Mom revealed that she had done her critical thinking homework and discovered that the Chinese were using TikTok to try and catalog the location of everyone’s secret fishing hole and huckleberry spot. Wow! Darn those Chinese. Blew my mind!

      So thank you Republicans for at least doing lip service to safeguarding these most precious of Montana secrets!

  5. I made a misstatement yesterday, in terming the humorous spectacle of the library haters at the Tuesday GF commission meeting the highlight of that meeting. It was not the highlight of that meeting.

    The actual highlight was the testimony of a woman named Shannon Wilson in favor of the funding for the Neighborworks homeless living project. This took place well after the library haters had all departed, many of whom – judging by local social media posts – seem to hate our library because, like other public libraries around the country, it is a place some of the homeless segment of the public uses, for computer access and reading materials as well as keeping warm in winter and cool in summer because there is nowhere else.

    Ms. Wilson said she worked at the warming center here in Great Falls over the winter and encountered a woman named Debra Rose (sp?) who had just lost her housing and came in one night, pretty disoriented. They helped her out then, but she later died in the alley behind First United Methodist Church, on March 4.

    Note this was well after the City had forced the church to shut down its temporary shelter program. But apparently the woman was still drawn or directed there seeking help.

    The testimony put a real name and face and story on someone the police and news later dismissed as “a transient”.

    In a master stroke of self-awareness just moments later, Commissioner Tryon made a point of declaring the new Neighborworks program (which may be up and running in 2024? 2025?) as the right way to address homelessness, while the church program using its parking lot – something Tryon worked very hard to shut down – had been the wrong way. Unfortunately Ms. Rose’s need was 2023, not a year or two from now.

    The testimony can be seen a bit after 2:00:20 of the commission video (along with all the empty seats where the gaggle of library/homeless haters were sitting earlier in their tres chic matching t-shirts). It is only a couple minutes long but is very moving and well worth a watch:

    https://greatfallsmt.viebit.com/player.php?hash=T1ssc5Qj1LJ791xB

    The short news story about Ms. Rose’s passing is here:

    https://www.nonstoplocal.com/great-falls-helena/woman-found-deceased-at-first-united-methodist-church-in-great-falls/article_544b15f1-2640-5cea-9bd5-482180b1b6c3.html

  6. I Love your One More Thing today too. It is spot on and I am going to pass it along.

      • I too love your one more thing today.

        I recommend you send it to Giantforte’s appointee to the humanities and arts board. For the life of me I can’t remember any artists or writers from Montana who shared the hateful right wing beliefs of this fellow. Fascism, racism, and bigotry are really not conducive to great art. So, I must ask, why did Gianforte select a guy like this? Is he hoping for a great resurgence of Nazi art in Montana?

        I am deeply offended by this selection. It sends a very bad message to the world about Montana.

        https://dailymontanan.com/2023/05/17/gianforte-appoints-right-wing-conspiracy-theorist-to-humanities-montana-board/

      • Maybe Gianforte hopes that adding hardliner ultra-conservative members to Montana’s Humanities and Arts Board, people dedicated to breaking “the left’s” supposed hold on humanities, will help channel some of the Federal dollars they control to worthy conservative institutions. Like for instance museums that promote the anti-science beliefs of just one stream of one religion, such as man and dinosaurs roaming the earth concurrently just 6,000 years ago. If anyone knows of such a museum.

        Otherwise no, the appointment of a guy with such radical views and writings does not reflect real well on Greg’s own character.

      • I take this sort of thing very personally. Although I’m not Jewish, I’ve known lots of people who went through the Nazi occupation of their countries. For me, it’s not theoretical. I know what they went through. My best friend’s parents as a kid went through the occupation in Norway. Some good friends from Great Falls went through the occupation in Greece. Another friend went through the occupation in Holland. And on and on. When I see Nazi views espoused in this country, my hatred is visceral.

        I saw the shell shock and PTSD suffered by nearly all of my father’s generation, including uncles and friends who drank themselves to death. They never really came back from the war. And for what? So that Gianforte can bring Nazism to Montana?

        This is what should happen to this guy.

        https://news.yahoo.com/jewish-democrats-call-mccarthy-censure-151312814.html

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