A first-of-its-kind training and intervention program for veterans celebrated its grand opening in Missoula Thursday, Sept. 29.

The Rural Institute for Veterans Education and Research – “RIVER” for short – helps vets reintegrate back into civilian life after their military service ends.

Executive Director Ed Lesofski says, “just like when they went into the military it took a while to learn how to become a military person, they have to relearn what society is all about and that’s part of what we do.”

RIVER offers job training, crisis intervention and some basic medical services.
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The institute was approved for GI Bill funding through the Office of Public Instruction.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Denise Juneau says that allows vets to use their benefits to pay for training programs at RIVER.

“It’s a real benefit to particularly rural Montana," Juneau says.

Come Celebrate the American Presidential Elections in Geneva!

The upcoming American election promises to be one of the most important and interesting in U.S. history. On this occasion, and for the first time, five American organizations in Geneva have come together to organize a non-partisan American Election Night Celebration.

The AENC Joint Committee unites American Citizens Abroad Geneva Chapter, the American International Club of Geneva, the American International Women’s Club of Geneva, Democrats Abroad Switzerland and Republicans Overseas.

The celebration will begin at 9:30 pm on Tuesday, November 8th, and will continue until 5:00 am Wednesday morning. There will be live news streaming from the U.S. networks, live music and entertainment, interactive games, refreshments and raffle. Ticketholders will receive all final event details on November 6th.

Donald Trump won large victories in online polls conducted by Breitbart and the Drudge Report. Which is a bit like saying the GOP nominee won a poll of his rallygoers.
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But when we concentrate on scientific polls — which are based on random samples of debate viewers — Clinton was the clear winner.

CNN’s survey found 62 percent of voters saying the Democratic nominee had won the contest, while just 27 percent said that about Trump. That’s the third-widest margin that CNN or Gallup had recorded in a post-debate poll since 1984, FiveThirtyEight notes.

Meanwhile, Public Policy Polling found Clinton winning by a margin of 51 to 40 percent. More critically for Clinton, 63 percent of younger voters saw her as the winner. One of the primary reasons Trump is nipping at Clinton’s heels — even as he’s earned the antipathy of most nonwhite voters and a good many women — is that roughly a third of millennial voters have been pledging their allegiance to third parties. But after Monday night’s debate, 47 percent of voters under 30 told PPP they were more likely to vote for Clinton than before the evening began.

Pundits are only useful insofar as they focus on policy substance or factchecking. Their “who’s up, who’s down” commentary is worthless. Here are three reasons why you should basically ignore the onslaught of horserace punditry that is about to rain down.

1. What commentators think about “exceeding expectations” is an anti-indicator.

2. If polls move after the debate, the reasons were baked in a long time ago.

3. Polarization has made it difficult for opinion to move much.

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Several stars of the hit TV show will hit the ground running with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton this weekend, traveling to multiple campaign stops in the Buckeye State.

Members of the “West Wing” cast, including Allison Janney (C.J. Cregg), Bradley Whitford (Josh Lyman), Richard Schiff (Toby Ziegler), Dulé Hill (Charlie Young), Mary McCormack (Kate Harper) and Joshua Malina (Will Bailey) will join forces at six different locations on Saturday and Sunday.

The actors will encourage Ohio residents in Mahoning Valley, Sandusky, Toledo, Cleveland, Dayton and Columbus to register to vote in the battleground state.

Martin Sheen, who played President Josiah Bartlet, won’t be there, but he’s already endorsed Clinton. And he’s dismissed her Republican rival Donald Trump as an “empty-headed moron.” The president has spoken.

Migration is not a catastrophe, nor is it an invasion. Often, it is not even an emergency. Throughout human history it has mostly been, simply, one thing: inevitable. Migration is history’s oldest and most effective anti-poverty measure, a natural human response to challenges and a facilitator of greater opportunities.

At least 244 million people today live outside the borders of their homelands (UNDESA). People move to improve their lives, whether that means access to a better food supply, access to more sustainable employment, education opportunities or to save their own lives and the lives of their family.

Sadly, unprecedented levels of migration have led growing anti-migrant sentiment globally. Migrants embody the essence of multiculturalism, as they are the bridges between countries of origin, transit and destination. It is time that all actors—including States, civil society, the media, international organizations and the private sector, migrants and communities—effectively and factually communicate about migration.

Political leaders and the media have an important role to play in combatting xenophobic narratives on migration that leads to limited perceptions of migrants and to reshaping public discourse and political response. For example, note that the Secretary-General’s Report for the United Nations Summit on Refugees and Migrants, In Safety and Dignity: Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants, does not speak about “illegal migration” but rather of “irregular migration”. These two terms are often conflated. Political leadership should be enhanced in order to combat the currently toxic migration discourse. The beauty of diversity should be embraced.

Women in upscale suburban areas are the offset to the working-class white males who are streaming into the Trump camp elsewhere. In the August Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 42% of white men with less than a college education had a positive view of Mr. Trump. Just 28% of suburban women had a positive view.

That means Mrs. Clinton has to hope that women in Montgomery County and similar areas of eastern Pennsylvania swallow their misgivings about her and provide support that balances out the vote in Trump country in the traditional coal and steel communities in western Pennsylvania. There, the Trump populist message has great resonance among workers who feel left behind by the current economy as well as the political system.

This equation is repeated in a series of battleground states, where women in suburban areas are crucial to the outcome. The suburbs around Denver in Colorado, and those in northern Virginia outside Washington, D.C., could be decisive in those two states, and in both cases the votes of suburban women are crucial to the Clinton effort. The same is true in Ohio and North Carolina, and, to some extent, in Florida.

Suburban women “have in the past voted consistently Republican, and this year they are leaning heavily toward Hillary Clinton” says GOP pollster Whit Ayres, who works with Sen. Marco Rubio. Says one Trump adviser flatly: “Suburban women will decide this election."

Hillary Clinton is using her fundraising dominance to unleash all manner of modern voter tools that Donald Trump’s organization is too cash-poor, disorganized or uninterested in to use — but are they worth the massive price tag?

The question will be argued until election day, and probably for years after. But one thing clear right now is the Clinton campaign is leaving nothing to chance. Launching apps that track the movements of paid canvassers and organizing poetry slams to build camaraderie in field offices, the Clinton operation is in the final frenzy of assembling some of the most sophisticated campaign infrastructure ever.

It is building on the hallowed playbook written by President Obama’s campaign teams, implementing technological advancements that enable field organizers to find, track and prod potential voters with even more precision and efficiency.

Clinton’s approach is a stark contrast from Trump’s. He left field organizing in the hands of a Republican National Committee that must incorporate Trump into its broader effort on behalf of down-ballot candidates often at odds with the nominee.