While we’d felt confident about our chances, the 64-36 margin blew out of the water anything we could have imagined.

Thank you to all who helped make it possible.

Monday, Oct. 25 — WOLF POINT: Meet the Candidates, Wolf Point, 7-9 p.m., Sherman Inn, Wolf Point

Tuesday, Oct. 26 — TBA. [Two events occurring -- one in Glasgow, one in Circle]

Wednesday,Oct. 27 — HAVRE: Candidates Forum, Havre, 6:30 p.m. MSU-Northern auditorium

Thursday, Oct. 28 — GREAT FALLS: Great Falls Conservation Council, 12 noon, Penny’s Gourmet to Go

If you have last-minute functions you’d like to attend or if you’d just like to help out, let us know via our feedback page.

Here’s our television spot, playing on KRTV and elsewhere.

Clear Difference [click the link to view on your screen]

We need your support to keep our ads running and to get our message out there. Donate here.

Only 30 days to go until Election Day!

You can download the whole thing (part I & part II).

The national magazine Reason has a web article from its science correspondent Ron Bailey about the wind farm owned by Invenergy located at Judith Gap

The wind-generation facility is under contract with NorthWestern, a regulated utility of the PSC. The farm produces some of the cheapest power in NorthWestern’s renewable portfolio. (The company is mandated by a 2005 law passed by the state legislature to use 10% renewable energy, or buy the “renewable-energy credits” to make up the difference.)

Yet, as Bailey notes, wind is still more expensive than traditional fuels. Wind has to be backed up by spendy new infrastructure like natural-gas-fired firming plants, like the one at Mill Creek which cost ratepayers of NorthWestern $200 million.

Just click on the Volunteer tab and submit the online form, writing your address in the comments. It’ll go straight to the campaign’s inbox. Thanks!

I’ve been on the road for about 2,000 miles from Aug. 4 to Aug. 14. As you know, it’s fair season, which has meant travel to Great Falls to Scobey to Sidney to Glasgow, back to Great Falls, then to Glendive.

And that doesn’t include travel to Havre, Lewistown, and Chinook for the fairs there.

This weekend, you can find me a little closer to home in Fort Benton.

This I now know: Demolition derbies and rodeos don’t get old. On the contrary, it’s so nice at these, and at the 4-H ag sales, a community really coming together and supporting its own.

That’s excellent news, but we still only have a handful of drilling rigs operating in Montana, compared to the 100+ in North Dakota.

I can tell you from my own frequent travels to the northeast that oil is causing a boom in Sidney, Culbertson, Plentywood and the smaller towns in between. That’s not news to the people of eastern Montana, but it is to the many western-bound types who enjoy the social benefits of oil production, but don’t really have a grip on what’s going on in their state’s arguably most productive part.

Anyways, there’s lots of new arrivals out east, finding a hotel room is difficult, and the restaurants and bars are bustling. Anyone skeptical about the future of Montana’s natural-resources economy need only go out east–or perhaps just take a gander at the state-gov’t budget–to see the vitality it continues to bring.

Moreover, it’s not just Montana’s part of the Bakken that is producing. Sources say that places just off the Bakken have seen some of the most productive wells in the state.

Waxman called Keystone “a multi-billion dollar investment to expand our reliance on the dirtiest source of transportation fuel currently available.” He wants a new Environmental Impact Statement to show what damages would be caused by the burning of CO2 from tar-sands oil.

Waxman’s strategy is to artificially constrict supply–not to world markets, of course, but just to our markets–in the hope that consumers will be forced through higher prices into electric- or biofuels- or natural-gas-propelled vehicles (even though most electricity comes from coal; biofuels leave an enormous footprint on the earth; and natural gas is also a fossil fuel releasing carbon-dioxide).

What’s not to love?!

Waxman, like so many, is doing nothing to reduce carbon emissions. Someone is going to get that oil, and burn that oil, maybe just not us. The carbon dioxide will be added to the atmosphere regardless–I hope that’s in the EIS–and I wish I were more surprised by Waxman’s going around with this mask of indignation, throwing a wrench just now at a project which has been inching forward for years.

Montanans should be absolutely furious at this little weasel’s routine insertion into every possible aspect of the energy sector–and always, it seems, in a negative way, opposing, opposing, opposing. The one thing Henry Waxman never does is clue us in on an economical alternative by which to generate electricity and fuel motorized transport.

Well, what’s worse? A reliance on a relatively cheap, energy-dense fuel source which, together with the internal combustion engine, has been the backbone of American ground transportation for over a century? Or a forced reliance on technologies which have not even been invented or which are, in their current form, far less economical?

The thing that’s going to revolutionize the transportation industry is not the point where Government says: “You will buy this” or “you won’t buy that.” It will be the point where an alternative becomes a genuinely attractive–which is to say economical–option for consumers.