Now that’s a Mammoth truck.A new scheme threatens to tear up Montana to facilitate tar-sands oil extraction in Canada. Imperial Oil (you couldn't make up a name like that) has contracted with the Dutch company Mammoet (meaning "mammoth," another apt name) to transport giant machines from South Korea through Idaho and Montana to Canada's Athabaskan tar-sands project in Alberta. Imperial, which is 69.6 percent owned by ExxonMobil, has proposed to Montana that an initial round of 200 giant machines creep through the state almost daily and nightly for a year. Some of the machines weigh 334,000 pounds and measure 24 …

Rick BassHaving elected Team Obama, and seen a few months of promising leadership, have we achieved Mission Accomplished with regard to righting the environmental wrongs of the Bush administration? You don't hear the question being voiced so much as instead sense it infiltrating, with an air of unearned relief. Everywhere, after the majestic battle of the long campaign, there is hope, and the feeling that one is no longer a prisoner in one's own country. It's sweet. But it's slightly misplaced: Barack Obama's got the bully pulpit, but he's still just one man. It remains to the 290 million of …

The governor is a politician of such breathtaking dexterity, ability, and raw, hungry, political instinct that your first thought upon witnessing him -- no matter whether you're a Republican or Democrat -- is likely to be, "When does he explode, and in what manner?" For rarely in American politics has anyone this good been that way indefinitely. Brian Schweitzer has only been the governor of Montana for a year, but already, among Democrats in the state and beyond, I sense a Clintonesque déjà vu creeping in, a relief that all will be all right, that our values are protected. We …