Free Republic

I live south of Missoula, Montana, in the Sapphire & Bitterroot Mountains at 3,500 ft; in the area being discussed, and we haven’t been getting snow like this for several years. Our hunting seasons have been without snow quite regularly and last year we didn’t get ANY snow until the last few days of the season in late November. However the winter snow sticks around here until early August at higher altitude (6,000 ft+). So, it’s about 60 days early, and with this the bow hunters might stop complaining about terrible tracking conditions without SNOW. Animals leave tell-tale tracks in...

The STORMTracker Weather Team says a major storm system is on track to deliver heavy snow and significant rain to Montana. Cooler air is already spilling south out of Canada and temperatures will get even colder on Thursday and Friday. This storm is expected to be the beginning of the end of fire season across the state.

There seems to be an insatiable appetite among the punditry class for the “antifascists are as bad as fascists” argument, a subset of that orthodoxy of the moderate which argues for peace in the face of violence and love in the face of hate. In the last week alone, The Guardian published “Step Aside, Antifa. You Undermine the Trump Resistance,” Truthdig published Chris Hedges’ “How Antifa Mirrors the Alt-Right,” and Trevor Noah devoted an entire segment of his show to the issue of the “Punch Drunk Left” in which he referred to Antifa as “vegan ISIS.” The Department of Homeland...

Everyone in America was planning for the solar eclipse on August 21, except, apparently, the Montana Department of Transportation. That day, a contractor hired by MDT had scheduled a fairly major road construction project to begin on Interstate 15 near the Clark Canyon Dam. As tens of thousands of people headed north from the path of the eclipse to get home Monday around 4:30 p.m., they encountered a miles-long traffic jam that slowed traffic to a bumper-to-bumper crawl for more than an hour for some drivers. The flow of traffic was not a problem on the northbound lane of I-15...

MISSOULA, Mont. - A 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck western Montana around 12:30 a.m. Thursday. The National Weather Service in Great Falls said on Twitter that the shaking was felt as far away as 500 miles (805 kilometers). The U.S. Geological Survey says the the 5.8 magnitude earthquake hit just after midnight about 6 miles (9.7 kilometers) southeast of Lincoln.

Donald Trump may be off to the worst start in presidential history, but recent polls and election results show Democrats are even more unpopular than he is. What’s wrong with the Democrats? Recently I ran into a Democratic operative who was adamant that his dispirited party’s stock is rising. It’s looking good, for example, that with all Trump’s troubles, the donkey party finally will win enough seats in special elections this fall to take control of our state’s Legislature from the Republicans. “If Democrats can’t win this year,” he vowed, “we should be abolished as a political party.” Might not...

BOZEMAN, Mont. — The ending was shocking, but the result was no surprise. Despite a bizarre election eve altercation with a reporter that led to a citation for misdemeanor assault, Republican Greg Gianforte kept a red-state House seat in Republican hands in Thursday’s Montana special election. Yet his closer-than-expected victory against Democrat Rob Quist for the at-large congressional seat proved revealing, exposing GOP weaknesses that could threaten the party’s House majority in 2018 but reminding Democrats of the uphill climb ahead against President Donald Trump. Here are POLITICO’s five takeaways after the messy two-month brawl and wild final 24 hours:...

The Trump resistance couldn't take a GOP seat in Montana last night, even after the Republican candidate was charged with assaulting a journalist. A day after he was charged with misdemeanor assault for body-slamming a reporter, Republican candidate Greg Gianforte won the special election on Thursday for Montana’s at-large seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. According to early returns, Gianforte, a millionaire businessman, defeated Democratic folk singer Rob Quist for the House seat formerly held by Ryan Zinke, who left Congress to serve as President Donald Trump’s interior secretary. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence both recorded robo-calls on...

In 2015, after seeing too many people reluctantly leave Lincoln County to find work elsewhere, Minister Phil Alspaw and 15 or so other members of Libby Christian Church sat around a conference room table. “We started kicking around what the church might do to change that dynamic and bring jobs to Lincoln County,” Alspaw said. Several hours of economic development talk followed. The group’s aim was to establish a manufacturing ministry. Alspaw said they started with caskets — and ended with bullets. With a laugh Alspaw declined to say what other ideas they tossed around in between, but he said...

HOORAY! We lost!!!That is becoming the laughable mainstream media theme about many special elections since President Donald Trump's victory last November. We saw this happen in early March when Politico hailed Democrat performances in special elections despite the fact that there was no net change. The latest iteration of celebrating participation trophies, and likely to be repeated by MSM sources,  comes by way of the May 26 edition of Vox in which Matthew Yglesias declared that the loss by the Democrat candidate in the congressional special election was beyond mere good news for the Democrats. In fact the Vox headline acclaimed that Republicans'...

Body-Slamming, it’s not just for movies anymore. In fact it may become a new (Real) Republican campaign tactic. Gianforte wins Montana seat despite body slamOf course, the Republicans will shun him, the Democrats will curse and vilify him, the MSM will demean him at every opportunity…but the people will elect him anyway. Sound familiar? Progressives don’t do learning. The country is tired of wimpy metro-sexuals. They want a Marlboro Man. I predict both Representative Gianforte and President Trump will win reelection, handily.Posted from: MOTUS A.D.

OK my friends: Montana has a small population. It means that advertising is cheaper and a Montana Senate victory would be more doable than a big-state turnover. Do we charge full speed ahead or wait for our strongest candidates to get off their asses and get motivated to run? ND is in the running also. While we are in the drivers seat, the GOP has no fight. Defeat from the jaws of victory. The stupid party.

Republican Greg Gianforte muscled his way to victory in Montana, overcoming a challenge from Democrat Rob Quist and an election-eve scuffle with a reporter that led to criminal charges being filed against him. With 83 percent of the precincts counted, Mr. Gianforte led Mr. Quist by a 50.3 percent to 43.9 percent margin. Libertarian Mark Wicks had 5.8 percent of the vote. Undefeated in this year’s special congressional races after the election of President Trump, Republicans will now hold a 239-193 majority in the House. During the campaign, Mr. Gianforte embraced Mr. Trump, who won the state by more than...

Gianforte on OANN now declaring victory.

Montana GOP congressional candidate Greg Gianforte narrowly defeated Democratic challenger Rob Quist early Friday morning despite being charged with assault for “body slamming” a reporter.

Lest we forget this oldie-but-goodie news item - two Dem candidates got into physical brawl at a debate, one is now currently a sitting Congressman from CA......

Sorry dude. You messed up. Any time the media jump all over a story that looks terrible for a Republican, I smell a rat. And when the poor, innocent victim is a mainstream journalist, I smell a double rat. My instinct is usually that it’s all just a little too perfect, and usually when I look into it I find that I was right to trust my instincts. So when I heard that Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate in the upcoming Montana special congressional election, had assaulted a reporter for asking him questions about health care, my first thought was,...

Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs claimed Wednesday night that Montana Republican Greg Gianforte "body slammed" him, breaking his glasses in the process, after Jacobs asked him a question about health care. The altercation happened during an event for Gianforte, who is running for Montana's only congressional seat in a special election set for Thursday, at his campaign headquarters just south of Bozeman, Mont. BuzzFeed News reporter Alexis Levinson retweeted Jacobs' allegation and said that she was present at the altercation. "Ben walked into a room where a local TV crew was set up for an interview with Gianforte. All of a...

Montana Democrat Rob Quist, a locally famous musician, is a frequent performer at the Sun Meadow Resort, Idaho's premier nudist resort for guests seeking a "family nudist experience." ... Some of Quist's concerts at Sun Meadow came during a period when he claimed he was "unable to work" due to "significant health problems" caused by a botched gall bladder surgery in 1996. He previously blamed financial troubles for his inability to perform at all in 2011.

The Texas attorney general led a 15-state coalition Monday defending President Trump’s revised immigration order, amid lawsuits opposing the plan to halt immigration from six countries. In a friend-of-the-court amicus brief to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, 13 other state attorneys general and Republican Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, laid out constitutional and federal statutory provisions defending Trump’s authority. The attorneys general also defended Trump’s “lawful actions” to revise the executive order, which was blocked last month by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit. “The president’s revised immigration order is constitutional, lawful, addresses the 9th Circuit’s concerns and...