Montana
Montana is unique among the states of the United States. While many states proudly display wildlife, farm animals, flowers or trees as part of their twenty five cent commemorative piece, Montana simply has a skull.
Inspired, some think, by early Eagles album covers?
The official state nickname is "The Treasure State."[1]
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[edit] Awesome destinations
It should be noted that these destinations don't take long to get to, despite the size of the state; Montana is unique among the states by having no speed limit on interstate highways during the daytime.
[edit] Missoula
Missoula is the hippest little town between Seattle and Minneapolis, full of Grateful Dead fans, radical environmentalist wackos, Rockin' Rudy's, and the like. Missoula can be easily spotted from the sky by the big peace sign on the hill.
[edit] Glacier National Park
An absolutely stunning national park in the north-west of the state with only glacier in the continental US. It is proof of global warming for anyone who has visited the park in five year intervals. A national park since 1910; it has only one major road, the Going to the Sun Road
[edit] Not so awesome destinations
[edit] Butte
Butte is a rough and ready little mining hamlet famous for three things: child abuse, St. Patrick's Day, and the Berkeley Pit. The majority of Buttians are Catholic because they know hell is a very real place. Butte has voted Democratic in every election since Montana attained statehood, but this is probably because of massive vote fraud by tommyknockers sabotaging the voting machines.
[edit] Havre
(This is what you might actually see while driving down 1st Street (U.S. 2) on a windy day.)
[edit] The greatest Montanananans
- The best thing to come out of Montana in recent years is Senator Jon Tester, who, when confronted by the Republican incumbent during a debate that he wanted to weaken the USA PATRIOT Act, replied "weaken hell, I want to repeal it!"
- Some people think the worst thing to come out of Montana, as of late, is Max Baucus.
- The single greatest Montana of all time was Joe Montana.
- Norman MacLean had a spiffy movie made about him and his brother fly fishing. Reportedly fly fishing became a brief fad in 1992 because of it.
- Rick Jore, a State Representative from Ronan was the only member of the Constitution Party to hold an elected office. Despite his repeated bashing of public education he was made chair of the House Committee on Education by the state Republican party.
[edit] Cranks
- The Montana Freemen were a group of cranks from the sovereign citizen movement who thought they could get rid of all their debts by filing bogus liens at the county courthouse and then floating worthless checks against those liens. An attempted 1994 foreclosure on their property followed by a 1996 standoff with the FBI put an end to that silliness.
- Stan Jones, Montana's perennial Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, is a notorious consumer of colloidal silver. No word yet on whether he will change his name to Papa Smurf.
- Elizabeth Clare Prophet and the Church Universal and Triumphant who prepared for a prophesized nuclear war by collecting weapons and armored vehicles, presumably to finish off the survivors.
[edit] The Montana Power debacle
By area, Montana is the fourth-largest state in the United States. It is also one of the most sparsely populated.[2] In the years before World War I, the state government decided to bring electricity to all of the people of Montana by creating a statewide electric company. The new utility operated as a monopoly, albeit a heavily regulated one. Montana Power built a statewide network of power lines whose installation and maintenance ate up huge chunks of revenue. If it had not been a monopoly, Montana Power could never have broken even, let alone turned a profit. For decades, the people of the state were happy with their reasonably priced, reliable electric company.
Then, in 1997, the Republicans in the state legislature caught the deregulation bug and broke up the monopoly. (And, yes, Goldman Sachs was at the center of it.)[3] Now, many Montanans pay through the nose and the ass for their electricity. And if you're a rancher who lives in the middle of the middle of nowhere, and your power line breaks thanks to an ice storm, have fun waiting for the power company to send out a repair crew.
[edit] Not much to do with Montana
Vasily Borodin would have liked to have seen Montana.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ One has to wonder how it got that name.
- ↑ In 2000, when the U.S. census showed a state population of 902,195, state officials were sure that the state's population would exceed one million by 2010. They were off by about two years as the 2010 census placed the state's population at 989,415.
- ↑ Kohn, David, and Steve Croft. "Who Killed Montana Power?" 60 Minutes-CBS News website, posted 10 August 2003.
