Good morning; on the Beacon today, incumbent Democrat Joe Brenneman and GOP challenger Pam Holmquist will go head to head in the race for the District 2 seat on the Flathead County Commission. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Mutual Self-Help Housing program is aimed at helping low-income borrowers buy homes with reasonable mortgages and no down payments. A design team is asking for public input on a street project in Whitefish that will reconstruct two downtown blocks of U.S. Highway 93 from Baker to Spokane avenues. The president of a Montana-based conservation group, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, is asking hunters in the Northern Rockies to refrain from “vigilante” killings of endangered gray wolves.
Republicans nationwide are attacking Democrats with a “failed stimulus” campaign drumbeat. At least 75 House seats — the vast majority held by Democrats — are at serious risk of changing hands, and roughly 25 more where Democrats were assumed to have the upper hand have tightened in recent weeks, raising the possibility that some could flip to the Republicans as well. The government is offering American Indian farmers who say they were denied farm loans a $680 million settlement. Settlement talks over Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s lawsuit alleging the Legislature unconstitutionally passed a major bill stalled during a testy meeting. A trial is underway in Thompson Falls over whether the 2004 suicide of a girl at a boarding school for troubled youth could have been avoided. About 300 people from across the state are expected to attend the Montana State Conference on Mental Illness on Oct. 27-29 in Billings. A Montana man who at first blamed his common-law wife’s shooting death on a hitchhiker has been sentenced to more than 33 years in prison. Just by chance, a woman putting air in her car tires stumbled upon eight puppies in a cardboard box sealed with duct tape, Bozeman Animal Control Officer Kathy Middleton reported Tuesday.