By DARRELL EHRLICK | Editor-in-Chief
“I don’t know by the time this is over who is going to be left. It’s going to be a real small group.” – Rep. George Nikolakakos, R-Great Falls, on recent attempts by the state Republican Party to pressure members into espousing only views endorsed by the party.
More Republican leaders say state party is ‘purging.’ GOP says it’s ‘vetting.’
by Keila Szpaller
More Republican legislators are finding themselves on the outs with the Montana Republican Party ahead of the 2026 election — even those long considered hard-liners. Last year, the state GOP disowned a group that party leaders called the “Nasty Nine,” moderate Republican senators who worked with Democrats on significant legislation during the 2025 Montana Legislature. […]
Gianforte is highlighting legislative allies ahead of primaries. Just don’t call them endorsements.
by Micah Drew
Many of Montana’s most prominent Republican elected officials have been throwing their support behind candidates in the state’s legislative races, with a clear exception – Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte. And while Gianforte has officially endorsed candidates for federal office — Aaron Flint for the state’s western House district and Kurt Alme for the U.S. Senate […]
Montana’s primary election is Tuesday; here’s how to vote
by Keila Szpaller
Drop off your ballots to be sure they get to your county elections office on time — don’t pop them in the mail anymore. That’s advice from the Montana Secretary of State’s Office. The primary election in Montana is Tuesday, June 2, and Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen said voters should return ballots in […]
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
United States Vice President J.D. Vance convened a meeting of states attorneys general, including Montana’s own Austin Knudsen, to discuss how to eliminate fraud from the federal government — a noble goal. But Democratic attorneys general say they were snubbed and not invited, while their GOP colleagues were.
THE HOOK
Popular music has always had a sort of long-running interest in trends and what may happen in the not-so-distant future. In the 1950s, predictably during the Atomic Age and the “Space Race,” popular music was filled with songs about flying saucers, aliens and space rock, including “Telstar” by the Tornadoes, which celebrated the satellite. Other lesser serious songs included songs about alien invasions, like “Purple People Eater” and the Ran-Dells’ “Martian Hop.”
With the advent of computers and the digital age, the music turned to all things electronic, including fusing the two things together. We have “Star Wars” and “Battlestar Galactica” and the mind-bending realities of when we wouldn’t be able to tell the human from the computer (Darth Vader, I’m looking in your direction). Music mirrored these realities, too.
Now, what was previously the dreams of science fiction has morphed into reality with artificial intelligence. That point was driven home when one of the most stable, historic institutions in the world, The Vatican, issued a major document on the sanctity of humanity and the necessity of closely guarding AI’s influence.
That got me thinking about all of those future songs. As we’ve mentioned previously here, the funky and futuristic sounding “Yours Truly 2095,” by The Electric Light Orchestra, has been of interest. It predicted that future girlfriends would be nearly human, but could also fax and copy. That sounded like a clever joke until recently and the rise of “AI relationships.”
One of the other videos that was extremely popular in the new-wave media of MTV was Styx’s “Mr. Roboto,” which was another very full sounding miniature rock opera that dealt with what seemed to be a far distant problem: Telling the difference between human and computer.
Right, we thought, as if someone could design something like that.
Like with so many things, though, technology had the last laugh (wait … does it laugh?). It’s not just that the songs predicted the future, it was that they seemed — at the time — a lot farther away than 2026.
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