I'm driving over to Missoula today from Helena, so posting is going to be light. I leave you with this photo of my fly fishing trip on the Blackfoot River - the same river from A River Runs Through It. Sadly, I caught nothing...but that's more a commentary on my (lack of) talent than on the river.

This is the last stop - and therefore the last post - on my 2+ month book tour. It ends where my book begins: in Montana. That's appropriate - this region has been a populist bellweather for both the Right and Left for most of American history.

I started the book in Montana to analyze the clash of uprisings - the conservative one from the late 1970s, and the more progressive one happening right now. The Great Falls Tribune has a nice summation of what I found in its story today about my events this week in Montana:

MISSOULA - Gov. Brian Schweitzer today announced that the state will be requiring Stimson Lumber Company to clean up contamination at its former mill site in Bonner.

One of the country's oldest mills, the Bonner mill closed earlier this year due to timber market and supply conditions.

The Montana Department of Environmental Quality has found that a cooling pond that extends into the Blackfoot River along with its berm and the sediments in the pond are contaminated with PCBs and other toxic compounds.

Politicians have particular leverage over industries that cannot move - industries like timber, coal, oil, gas, etc. This is a good example of a politician using that leverage to make sure an industry doesn't walk away from its mess.

To his credit, Obama manages to address his questioner's grievances in a fairly straightforward manner. What's creepy is the way in which his supporters at the meeting are hell-bent on displaying their blind devotion to their candidate in a cheer-for-the-demagogue, shout-down-the-opposition kind of way that is eerily reminiscent of fascist rallies and the like.

It's precisely this kind of blind devotion from the Obama supporter camp that is the most worrisome aspect of his campaign right now, insofar as it enables the kind of calculated triangulating moves we've seen him take on issues from campaign finace to FISA to offshore drilling in the past couple of months. If this kind of uncritical support continues, progressives will be hard pressed to push Obama for meaningful stands on the issues like free trade, health care, and energy policy -- not to mention impending escalations in Afghanistan and potential aggression against Iran -- where we most need and have a right to expect decisive and courageous stands from him.

If your man can do no wrong, then its hard to push him to do things that are actually right.

At a time when scores of companies are freezing pensions for their workers, some are quietly converting their pension plans into resources to finance their executives' retirement benefits and pay.

In recent years, companies from Intel Corp. to CenturyTel Inc. collectively have moved hundreds of millions of dollars of obligations for executive benefits into rank-and-file pension plans. This lets companies capture tax breaks intended for pensions of regular workers and use them to pay for executives' supplemental benefits and compensation.

The practice has drawn scant notice. A close examination by The Wall Street Journal shows how it works and reveals that the maneuver, besides being a dubious use of tax law, risks harming regular workers. It can drain assets from pension plans and make them more likely to fail.

Full story here.

Now, I think it would be great to see Ritter on the Democratic ticket - but I also think it would be great for people paid to report facts to actually check the facts. Because had Gerson bothered to take 5 minutes looking at the actual empirical public opinion data, he would have found that Bill Ritter isn't that popular. In fact, he would have found that Bill Ritter is unpopular.

Let me reiterate - this is about journalism, not about Bill Ritter. I think he'd make an intriguing choice for VP, and I wish he was more popular. But if I wrote a column about Ritter for VP, I would not come right out of the gate pushing a pure, provable fiction that exposes me as a slothful purveyor of fantasies that I fabricate in my own head. That such sloth pervades our most Serious Newspapers of Record should irritate everyone who takes the craft of journalism seriously.

More than 10,000 California state employees were thrown out of their jobs at a stroke of the Governator's pen yesterday. Meanwhile, nearly 200,000 state employees are looking at seeing their pay cut to the federal minimum wage of $6.55/hr., in blatant -- not to mention undemocratic -- disregard of California's $8/hr. minimum wage standard. All this in the two states that are supposedly the poster children for progressive governance?

I'm sure that's why Focus Films asked me, Dan Rather, Jane Hamsher, Rick Perlstein and Katha Pollitt to recommend our favorite flicks about political campaigns and elections: The movie industry knows that between the recession and a grating campaign season, people are looking for a little entertainment. I turned my recommendations into my newspaper column this week, which you can read here.

Like most states in the country, New York is facing unprecedented budget pressures that typically result in cutbacks to crucial social spending programs, layoffs of public employees, and, of course, tax breaks that expand the already regressive nature of state tax systems. Paterson is playing it fairly close to the chest at this point with regard to specific policy proposals. However, peeking through the poker face are some fairly unpromising sings.

The drive will remind even the most casual observer of what I found in reporting THE UPRISING: Namely, the politics of oil, gas and taxes are a volatile mix in a region that will likely decide the 2008 election and the most important policies after the race is over. Here's a quick look at three of the states that are on the front line:

First is one attempting to teach John McCain some basic economics:

The second makes a pretty funny - and powerful - point about the health industry: