From small things, Mama, big things one day come: Ron Paul is on the Montana ballot. In the last poll, taken over a month ago, McCain and Obama were tied in the state.

More convention scuttlebutt: Brian Schweitzer's well-received speech on energy was largely improvised after the Montana governor felt that the crowd hadn't been revved up enough.

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer said his show-stealing speech Tuesday night, which brought the crowd in Denver to its feet and made him the talk of the convention, was a last-minute improvisation that departed from the prepared remarks he'd agreed on with the Obama campaign.

"We had a convention that went through the first day and didn't get anybody fired up," said Schweitzer, who spoke on the second evening after keynote speaker Mark Warner of Virginia. "We didn't have anybody stand up, and we didn't have anybody get excited," he said.

"Sometimes you go to the line and you say, 'Let's go,'" he said in a brief interview after appearing on a Politico/Yahoo!/Denver Post panel at the Denver Athletic Club.

Everybody's raving about Brian Schweitzer, who managed to get the crowd fired up about energy and about Obama after Warner put them to sleep. (Everybody! Benen, Marshall, Kos, Giordano.)

One of the still-underappreciated stories of this election, I think, is the national hunger for a honest conversation about energy and the environment, something we've been entirely denied by coal-industry-sponsored debates in the primaries and Exxon-sponsored convention coverage in the general.



In the cheap seats, stand up!