Good morning; on the Beacon today, a retired neurosurgeon, Jim Mahnke, running for the Legislature for the first time takes on the incumbent, Keith Regier, a Republican seeking a second term in the race for House District 5. Through three weeks, it has been an up-and-down season for Flathead Valley football teams. A 33-year-old construction worker is recovering after he and the small excavator he was operating fell down a steep embankment next to Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road.
The chairman of the board of the Big Sky Tea Party Association says former president Tim Ravndal is still a member of the party. Some of the biggest names in business said Monday that they see a bright future for the economy, with famed investor Warren Buffett declaring the country and world will not fall back into the grips of the recession. The Montana Highway Patrol says a pickup truck rear-ended a school bus west of Corvallis, injuring the pickup driver and six children. The University of Montana football team tumbled from first to sixth in Football Championship Subdivision polls released Monday. TransCanada Corp. said Monday that it would ship 100,000 barrels of oil daily from Montana and North Dakota under a proposal to allow U.S. crude onto a planned Canadian pipeline. With the work on a “streetscape” project already a month under way, more than 20 people, most of them Main Street property owners, gathered at a special Polson City Commission meeting Monday night to object – not to the project per se, but to how the city has dropped half the $1.3 million cost into their laps. Sen. Max Baucus announced that $2.4 million in federal grants were headed to Montana to help workers and employers in the hard-hit timber and wood products industry. The state’s political practices commissioner ruled Monday that Public Service Commissioner Brad Molnar, R-Laurel, violated state ethics laws and fined him a record $5,750. The Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks is investigating whether wolves have established a pack in the Bridger Mountains after a dead wolf was found in the Brackett Creek area over the weekend.