Special Note: This is the 200th post on this 2014 Montana Election Blog
I didn’t watch the second U.S Senate debate between Steve Daines and Amanda Curtis tonight. The main reason for this is that I couldn’t see it on the link that it was supposed to be at. It was a voter freeze-out.
I figure this was because the feed was overwhelmed. That internet bandwidth infrastructure over there in eastern Montana isn’t supposed to support that.
And then I figured, boy, that sure is convenient for Steve Daines, isn’t it? I’ve been publicly speculating since the first debate ended last night that Steve Daines wouldn’t show up for this second debate. Well, he did show – it’s just that the voters were frozen-out.
So what happened? There was a debate, yes. And if you were one of the 200 of people in Sidney, then yes, you could see and hear the debate.
Maybe you were one of the perhaps hundreds or thousands of people on the radio that could have heard it around the state, although we sure didn’t get any of the debates on my crappy radio this year.
Perhaps you saw the video on TV, one of the numerous channels to carry it. We don’t have TV anymore in my house because the corporations that control television in Montana and America pulled the plug on that a while back, although we can get one more year of free service before we have to start paying for something we used to get for free.
Anyways, I didn’t watch the debate, and that wasn’t that bad, mainly because I was watching my 3-year-old son Paul tonight at home while my wife Jenny went over to the coffee shop to study her early childhood development books. I guess if she does that she might get paid a pittance more an hour.
But back to the debates, or the lack thereof. I guess it just shows what the future will be like in Montana – a select few in a small room in some far-off corner of the state, where most of us can’t listen and see. If you want to watch online or anywhere else, you’ll need pre-21st century technology to do so. This is all a convenient way for Republicans to keep the electorate dumb and uninformed, which makes it a lot easier for the powers-that-be to keep people on the couch and not caring about their future.
It’s hard not to see a whole conspiracy in the thing, and any quick look at the hours’ worth of tweets in frustration will tell you that a lot of people felt wronged tonight. I guess the Montana newspapers will soon have their propaganda up – it’s 9 PM here in Missoula but I still haven’t looked yet (new news goes up at 8).
So what can be done? The steam seems to have been taken from many in the past 24 hours, and for the following reasons:
- First, the shambles-for-a-debate tonight that has a lot of people angry;
- Next, the fired-up national Republicans on Twitter and social media today trying to salvage their multi-million dollar investment in Daines;
- Finally, the corporate-controlled media failing to declare any kind of winner in last night’s debate, effectively robbing it of any meaning for the countless that didn’t see it.
The good news is that all three of those things can be used to fire up the base and get those registered voters out. We’ve got 80,000 registered voters here in Missoula County, yet 60,000 of them stayed home, according to the primary numbers.
I know a lot of other counties are like that, and the Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts need to be increased.
Well how the hell do you do that? I don’t know…I don’t work for the main Democratic organization. They should be doing that stuff, and hopefully they have some great strategies to do that.
So why am I not convinced? Probably because of this sad, sad debate tonight.
There are now about 2 weeks until the election. Let’s not let Daines, the national Republicans, and their Tea Party-cohort, get away with this shit.
Tell your neighbors to vote. Tell people on Facebook and on Twitter and in the email. Call someone and tell them to vote. Send in that absentee ballot. Drive someone to the polls on election day.
Steve Daines can be beaten, we saw that last night, and as long as we don’t let his tricky-dick tactics get us down, he will be.
