By Bob Marshall

Presidential candidates traditionally spend their campaigns making plenty of promises--then quickly forget most of them if they get elected. After looking at the energy plan Mitt Romney released this week, sportsmen can only hope the GOP candidate follows that custom should he win this November. That’s because of the following, which is from page eight of Romney’s energy policy white paper.

Empower States To Control Onshore Energy Debelopment

• States will be empowered to establish processes to oversee the development and production of all forms of energy on federal lands within their borders, excluding only lands specially designated off-limits.

by Hal Herring

I was sitting in the airport in Grand Junction, Colorado, reading The Drake, and killing time. I’d dawdled with friends and missed my flight home to Montana. I flipped open the magazine, and read a few paragraphs in a story called “The Triumvirate” about the three Montana rivers that form the mighty Missouri.

"Downstream you can catch bigger trout below Holter Dam. You can troll for walleye and sauger in Fort Peck and snag a paddlefish around Slippery Ann, but this is where the whole serendipitous shooting match has its start. Three valleys, feeding together to form, moment by moment, something unique to the world." Even for the Drake, that is some powerful verbiage. I flipped back to see who had written the story, and found that it was Allen Jones, a novelist, a friend of mine, sometimes editor, sometimes fishing and hunting buddy. I should have known as soon as I read the first sentence, because nobody writes like Allen.

By Bob Marshall

Hooray for the Senate! Both parties!

No, that's not a mistake. I know this space spends more time slapping Congress in the face rather than on the back. But the entire membership of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee deserves a big fat "Attaboy!" for sending three important wetlands and waterfowl conservation measures to the chamber's floor without opposition. They are:

- S. 2282, which reauthorizes the North American Wetlands Conservation Act (NAWCA)  through 2017.

As Ducks Unlimited points out, since 1989 NAWCA has leverage $1 billion in federal grants with $3 billion in matching and non-matching fund to conserve more than 25 million acres of habitat on the continent. NAWCA has been a prime target of GOP budget cutters in the House even to the point of elimination for almost two years. But this bi-partisan support from the Senate gives it muscle to survive.