Showing posts with label Brent Bien. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brent Bien. Show all posts

Friday, May 15, 2026

The 2026 Election, 11th Edition. The only good voting Indian is a disenfranchised voting Indian edition.

 


By https://www.facebook.com/eshoshonetribe/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61356655

Friends & Brothers, listen: Where you now are, you and my white children are too near to each other to live in harmony and peace. Your game is destroyed and many of your people will not work and till the Earth. Beyond the great river Mississippi, where a part of your nation has gone, your father has provided a country large enough for all of you, and he advises you to remove to it. There your white brothers will not trouble you; they will have no claim to the land, and you can live upon it, you and all your children, as long as the grass grows or the water runs, in peace and plenty. It will be yours for ever. For the improvements in the country where you now live, and for all the stock which you cannot take with you, your father will pay you a fair price.

Andrew Jackson, part of a letter to the Creek, 1829.  That sure didn't come true.

Chuck Gray, auditioning for the role of adoring political paramour to Donald Trump, his beloved and dearest, and thick in the throws of turning Wyoming's voter registration roles over to his dearest illegally, is now seeking to have the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision of Louisiana v. Callais applied.  In so doing, he's sent a demand to the Fremont County Commissioners to redistrict their county commissioner boundaries to wipe out a district that was designed to provide a commissioner from the Wind River Reservation, and he's written the Governor about the legislative districts, stating; "“I believe House District 33’s boundaries need to be examined to ensure compliance with Callais” .

Let's look first at what Callais actually says which few pundits have to date.  It's a long decision, so we'll only post part of it, but that part is where the Court made its decision:

So what that tells us is:

1.  A district must have a basis in more than race.

2.  The jerrymandering by race cannot have a demonstrable impact in favor of a political party.

3.  The totality of the circumstances must be considered.

Chuck, who loves Trump more than Trump loves Trump, has made a name for himself by being a divisive asshole and this will be no exception. The over monied little man who has never really worked likes to scream and howl, but this may prove to be a mistake in his bid for the House.  A large percentage of Wyomingites do not like him for variety of legitimate reasons, and he's been taking flak from the right from gadfly Reid Rasner, to which he's flop around like a fish on a deck trying to react to, and not very effectively.  Gray probably sees this action to terminate Native American districts on the Reservation as serving his far right nut case masters' cause of bringing back the Confederacy, but he's not a lawyer and disrupting Wyoming districts, ironically in one of the most conservative regions of the state, may not go well and is not likely to be appreciated.

There's a fair chance it might not succeeds as well.

Fremont County has a voting district for the county commission that causes it to have one commissioners who is drawn from the Wind River Reservation.  That was in fact the intent of the boundary.  And it has one House District that is also from the Reservation.  The legislator who is from that districts, HD33, is Ivan Posey, who is enrolled in the Eastern Shoshone Tribe but also also has Northern Cheyenne and Northern Arapaho ancestors.

Gray, of course, is a carpetbagging white rich unmarried white boy, but this fits right into the current MAGA effort that's disenfranchising minorities in a country that's on the verge of becoming a majority minority nation.  While they aren't willing to say it, MAGA basically hopes that they can reverse this demographic trend.

They can't, and they'll pay for it soon.

Here, Gray, who isn't a Wyomingite in the first place, likely doesn't grasp that the Wind River Reservation isn't solely an ethnic boundary, but the home to two sovereigns.  So there's a racial and sovereign divide here.  I suspect that these boundaries will hold up.

They already voted Democratic, they sure will in the future.  Gray's ordering the Fremont County Commission and Governor Gordon around may not sit well with the voters, and frankly they're likely to tell him to pound sand, in which case he'll sue, and try to disrupt the general election.  That won't work.

Gray needs to be sent packing.  He needs to find a real job for the first time in his life.  Let's hope he's offered one out on Wind River.

By Elders of the Arapaho Nation [2] - This W3C-unspecified vector image was created with Inkscape . based on photo and description here, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1031311

We will note here that the GOP race in Wyoming is turning batshit crazy with panicked Freedom Caucusers concerned that the South might not rise again while one notable one is actually attacking Donald Trump.  Hardcore WFC members are supporting Still Sucking On the Government Tit Bien.  While I may be imagining it, Bien seems to draw support from the less educated and poorer sections of the Wyoming population which demonstrates something peculiar, but I don't know what.  The more likely you are to economically and personally be hurt by Bien's world outlook of no social services and hardly pull yourself up by your bootstraps, while he sucks on the government tit, the more likely you are to support him.  

It's dumb.

Yesterday, of course, we have the oddity of Rebecca Bextel announcing a completely delusional and panicky run for the Governor's office on the Constitution Party ticket.  In a more sane political structure, all of the state's Cornfederates would be in that party.  Poor Bextel thinks she's a conservative, and has this on her website:
Like many of you, I know Megan Degenfelder or Brent Bien would make an excellent Governor! I sincerely hope one of them beats out Eric Barlow for the Republican nomination, but unfortunately, history is not on the side of us conservatives.

Well, that's just deluded, but it's typical of the Cornfederates who aren't conservatives or even Republicans, but think they are.  She's going to lose big and hopefully the WFC does in general, so they can go back to Sweet Home Alabama (where Bextel is actually from) and leave the West alone.


Go home Becky. . . the Southland is calling you.

cont:

And it looks like state legislators are beginning to see the pitchforks. . .South Carolina dropped its effort, Louisiana refused the map Trump wanted them to adopt., Mississippi decided to wait until 2027.

May 15, 2026

Bill Allemand, a complete and total no go on our list, is running for reelection to House District 58.  His DUI trial has not yet occurred.  He  faced opposition from Bar Nunn Mayor Peter Boyer as well as  Democrat.

J. R. Riggins is running for reelection in House District 59.  He faces opposition from the batshit carpetbagger far right.

Art Washut is running for reelection to House District 36.

Last edition:

The 2026 Election, 10th Edition. The Setting the stage for a Pyrrhic Victory edition.

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

The 2026 Election, 5th Edition: The Saddle Up Edition.

The last edition of this was already sufficiently confusing that a new one is in order.

In this one, when we list the candidates to start with, we're not going to try to comment on each for the most part, as we've already done that in the prior edition.  Having said that, we've made some exceptions.

February 1, 2026.

U.S. Senate

GOP

Harriet Hageman. On our don't vote for list.

Jimmy Skovgard.

U.S. House of Representatives

GOP

Jillian Balow

Chuck Gray.  On our don't vote for list.

Reid Ransner. On our don't vote for list.

David Giralt

Independant

Daniel Workman.

Governor

GOP

Eric Barlow:  At least so far, Barlow seems to be by far the best choice for this office.  I'm seeing some of his signs around.

Brent Bien. On our don't vote for list.

Meggan Degenfelder. On our don't vote for list.  Degenfelder is from the relatively hard right and has been tarred with the brush of a Trump endorsement, which she really doesn't seem fully comfortable with.  She may be aware that it's problematic.

Democratic Party

Gabriel GreenGreen is listed here for the first time.  He's associated with the DINO movement, so while he's running as a Democrat, it's "in name only". Indeed, he founded the state's DINO movement, and he might be the only person to run under that banner.  He's aggressive in this strategy, and is nearly as hard on the Democrats as he is the Republicans.

This is an interesting approach, and I've wondered why somebody hasn't tried it before.  It'll be interesting to see how he uses it.  Many of the state's past Democratic Governors were as conservative as any Republican, in actual terms, so there is something to be exploited here.

Independant

Joseph Kibler.  On our don't vote for list.

Kibler announced as a Republican, but now is running as an independant.

Kibler is a carpetbagger and has the typical carpetbagger "I just moved here from California for all your freedom and now I'm going to run things". 

Go back to California.

*******************

On this race, WyoFile has asked the candidates, asd seems to have caught all of them, on what they think about the Freedom Caucus budgetary  nonsense.

Where Wyoming’s gubernatorial candidates stand on budget cuts: WyoFile asked the five candidates whether they supported some of the more drastic proposals lawmakers will consider in the upcoming legislative session.

Treasurer

GOP

Curt Meier

*******************

In election related news, Chuck Gray turned over the entire state's voter rolls to the Federal Government.

UPDATE: Gray defends voter roll compliance after Wyoming’s League of Women Voters slams transfer

Secretary of State refutes League’s claims, says group has ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’

I'd really question the legality of this, but if the Trump Administration ordered states to run over kittens with bulldozers Gray would gleefully comply.  His actions provoked the criticism of the League of Women Voters which Gray accused of being liberal fanatics, his standard retort to everything.

We're stuck with Gray until the end of his term, assuming that he doesn't get elected to the US House, which we should dearly hope he does not.  If he fails to get the House, we can be assured that he will not run for Secretary of State again, as his only point in running for the office in the first place was to try to position himself for higher office.  He'll wonder off to some other state at that point.

In another developments, Texas continued a nationwide trend of Democrats advancing at the state level in advance of the November election.  In a district that voted heavily from Trump in the last general election, a Democratic candidate defeated a Trump endorsed Republican candidate whom Gov. Abbot had attempted to assist.  This means that the GOP holds the Texas Senate by a mere five seats.  They hold the House by 22 seats.  Some of these state legislatures are going to flip in the next election.

More locally, Harriet Hageman has been taking flak at town halls, with the one in Casper directly confronting here on her claims to be a "Constitutional lawyer", a status itself which I've never really figured out what it was supposed to mean.

February 3, 2026

Donald Trump has called for nationalizing the elections.

Chuck Gray turned Wyoming's voters rolls over to the Federal Government, which is seeking them.  Wyoming apparently was the first to comply with this outrageous request which not all states intend to honor.

This should disqualify Gray from being considered for anything further in Wyoming, right down to Walmart greeter.

Ranser is running piles of images of himself with rifles on his social media, apparently seeking to boost the view that  he's an outdoorsman.  Perhaps he is, but brings up the necessity of asking certain questions.  He's also come out with a statement that public lands should always remain in public hands, which I fully agree with but which is surprising given Ranser's generally slavish loyalty to the extreme far right.  This may be his genuine view, or he may realize that this is what the overwhelming majority of Wyomingites' hold.

There's clearly a current effort to take on the Wyoming Freedom Caucus that's developing.  It's late to the game, but it's definitely on.  A lot of focus has been given to it's funding which is overwhelmingly from out of state organizations with a far right political view.

February 5, 2026

Bo Biteman is considering running for the House.

And a candidate has entered the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction:

Tom Kelly Announces Run For Superintendent Of Public Instruction

And in addition to Kelly, a Chad Auer is considering running.

Bar Nunn Mayor Peter Boyer has announced a run against Freedom Caucus member Bill Allemand. Allemand, who is currently facing charges for DUI in Johnson County is a member of the Freedom Caucus who is very much on our Don't Vote For List.  We hope Boyer handily defeat Allemand.

February 7, 2026

The Tribune has an interview of Skovgaard in today's edition.

It's better than most local candidate interviews, but again frustratingly light on background. I don't know why local reporters ask such lightweight questions.

Cowboy State Daily took a look at the race against Bill Allemand.

'No-Nuclear’ State Rep. Bill Allemand Has Challenger For House Seat

February 8, 2026

And it's happened again.  

Democrat Chastity Verret Martinez has won the special election for Louisiana House District 60, defeating Republican challenger Brad Daigle by a wide margin in a district that supported President Donald Trump in 2024.  The district is traditionally Democratic, but like a lot of the traditionally Democratic blue collar or socially conservative regions of the country, it had been going to the GOP recently.

That's over.

February 11, 2026

Trump stated in an interview that the GOP should win in "a landslide" this November.

It's clear the opposite is true, which makes this clear.

Trump intends to steal the 2026 election.

February 18, 2026

And now a Democrat has entered the race for the Senate.

Former Wyoming Rep. James Byrd announces bid for U.S. Senate: Byrd is the first Democrat to enter what's now a three-person race to fill the seat being vacated by Sen. Cynthia Lummis.

James Byrd is a well known Democrat from Cheyenne. And what he's saying in the Wyofile article ought to make him an extremely strong candidate if people are able to get over the fact that he's a Democrat.

So far, we have, in the Senate race, as of now:

U.S. Senate

GOP

Harriet Hageman. On our don't vote for list.

Jimmy Skovgard.

Democratic Party

James Byrd

On the Republican side, I've been following Jimmy Skovgard's blog to try to figure out what he's about and its massively underwhelming.  He posts nearly daily, and his blog reads like; "Bananas, average people, oatmeal, I like pie".

I know that he's trying to be erudite and come across as a third option, but it sound the writing of somebody who really can't write.

In the race for Governor, we have this:


A Degenfelder fundraiser in Denver. . . gee, that's real Wyomingite. . 

Related posts:

Blog Mirror: WYOMING: IT’S TIME TO TAKE OUR GOVERNMENT BACK






Last edition:

The 2026 Election, 4th Edition: The Wasting No Time Edition*