A new, 6,200-acre state park planned for Alberton near Missoula cleared another hurdle here Wednesday when Montana's Fish, Wildlife and Parks commissioners unanimously approved it purchase.

A longtime state Commerce Department official says the Schweitzer administration forced him to quit Friday because he responded to a Republican senator's inquiry about why $3.5 million in local government grants were being stalled.

Montana Change That Works, a vocal advocate for health care reform, is running out of money and will close shop at month's end, a spokesman confirmed Wednesday.

Here is a list of the legislative candidates and district judicial candidates who filed last week to run in the 2010 primary election:

Both political parties are taking tea party activists seriously and are wary of offending them – if they are not already actively wooing them for state races this fall. Just look at the governor’s election in Ohio. Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich openly touts his tea party credentials in his bid to defeat incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland. “I think I was in the tea party before there was a tea party,” Kasich famously told a Columbus crowd earlier this year. “This is a real movement with a real message about people’s frustrations by broken promises that leaders on both sides of the aisle would be foolish to ignore,” he went on to write in a blog posting.