April 7, 2013


You guessed it -- Hagstrom is against abortion rights. But he doesn't want to pay to take care of premature babies who are already born, no siree!

Montana Street Fighter, which broke this story, now reports that the Helena Vigilante has picked it up. The guy sounds like your basic extreme dyed-in-the-wool teabagger nut, worried about the government "printing money" and making people weak and lazy. (Guess that's why he voted against providing affordable housing to returning vets.)

Need more evidence that Republicans in the Montana House of Representatives are total whack jobs? Read this letter in which a House Republican mocks single mothers and hungry kids and tells his tenants they should die sooner.

This month, Dave Hagstrom (R-Billings) sent his tenants one of the most bizarre and disturbing letters you might ever read. Hagstrom works for the Affordable Housing Development in Billings.In a lengthy letter (that is very much worth reading and can be found HERE), Hagstrom tells his tenants – you know, the people who pay him rent every month – that they are living “a fairly-tale life-style.” What “fairly-tale” means remains a mystery. Maybe Hagstrom meant to write “fairy-tale.”

The letter then gets extremely bizarre and mildly creepy when Hagstrom writes, “I feel it would not be loving of me not warn you about” the impending social crises facing Montana.

Hagstom contends that the root of all our problems “is a very bad practice” of providing “free healthcare services at Riverstone Health, more money for food in schools for the kids, more money to help pregnant single moms stop smoking, more money to help elderly people get out of nursing homes and get individualized care in their own homes, etc.”

If that weren’t enough, the Representative from Billings goes on to mock single mothers. The government “creates a mindset that if I have kids and their dads are dead-beats, the government should buy my groceries and help me get a job while they provide day-care for my kids and send me to school to educate me so I can get a better job.”

You literally can’t make this stuff up. For good measure, Hagstrom also mocks school programs that feed hungry kids.

In Hagstrom’s closing, he makes five recommendations to his tenants. The first is the most notable and disturbing. He recommends that “you accept that not everyone, including yourself, needs to live as long as they currently do, or as ‘comfortably’ as they currently do.”

That’s right. Go and die as soon as possible.

Personally, this is my favorite part of his letter:

One of the ways this problem has become real to me is that in Helena, I am being asked to vote for many bills that spend money from the Federal government for programs and services that are in fact real to all of us in the neighborhood. These would be bills that provide free healthcare services at Riverstone Health, more money for food in schools for the kids, more money to help pregnant single moms stop smoking, more money to help elderly people get out of nursing homes and get individualized care in their own homes, etc.

There are literally dozens and dozens of government programs to help people who have health issues, transportation issues, housing issues, criminal issues, addiction issues, etc. And though it could be argued that the intentions of these programs are good, the practice of printing money to pay for these programs, in my opinion, is a very bad practice.

Among the many reasons it is a bad practice is that it creates in the mindset of the people a dependency on the government to meet all their needs. It creates a mindset that, if I have a premature baby, the government should spend Whatever it takes to keep it alive. It creates a mindset that if I have committed a crime while on drugs, the government should give me a treatment program rather than send me to prison.

Death panels! Killing babies! God, I love these people.

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