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You’ve been invited! The Minnehaha County Republican Party is hosting a debate watching party tonight in Sioux Falls.

What? – Republican Presidential Debate Watching Party
When? – Tonight at 8 PM
Where? – The District – 4521 W Empire Pl, Sioux Falls, South Dakota 57106

The Minnehaha Republicans will hold a debate watch party at The District, main dining area. Big screen TV, closed captioning and cash bar.

Update – word is from CNN that things will start around 7:30. Be at the District!

Noem: EPA Must be Held Accountable for Breaking the Law

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Representative Kristi Noem today released the following statement after the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) found the EPA violated federal law in promoting the agency’s controversial “waters of the United States” rule on social media:“The ‘waters of the U.S.’ rule could be the largest federal land grab in our lifetimes. Ranchers have raised concerns. Farmers have raised concerns. Homeowners, construction teams, and state governments have all raised concerns, and yet, the EPA has pushed the rule forward,” said Noem. “When they couldn’t find enough supporters, the EPA resorted to what the GAO calls ‘covert propaganda’ to create the illusion of grassroots backing. Not only did that violate the public trust, but they broke the law. The EPA must be held accountable for their actions.”

The GAO found that the EPA’s use of Thunderclap, an application that allows a social media message to be shared across multiple Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr accounts, was an unauthorized use of the EPA’s appropriations. It also found the agency in violation of a grassroots lobbying prohibition. To read the full GAO analysis, click here.

I was poking around to see if Paula Hawks’ invisible campaign had bubbled up and shown any signs of life this month, and I was pointed back to something I’d written about earlier, where announced she was going to introduce a “Bernie Sanders-eque” resolution this next legislative session on college debt.

What has me revisiting the topic was one of the damndest misconceptions I think I’ve ever heard uttered from an elected official. I’ve been around 27 years, so that says it’s pretty darned goofy.  From SDPB Radio’s website, the Paula Hawks theory of economics:

“Those kids who are choosing not to go to college because they can’t handle the debt or because they can’t secure the loans are stymied in their approach to economic development for themselves, and that slows down the process of economic development for everybody,” Hawks says. “And those kids who are finishing college and are saddled with that debt are not contributing to economic growth in South Dakota, because they can’t buy houses, they can’t buy cars, they can’t pursue their dreams and their ideals and what they hoped for having gone through college and being promised a great job with a great pay.”

Read that here.

I think there’s a lot wrong with that statement we can examine. but first and foremost, her claim of college students “having gone through college and being promised a great job with a great pay.”

Who promised anyone “great jobs?” I mean, seriously?  I had previously known of no one at SDSU when I attended who walked into my classroom and said “Here’s a great job for you, and here’s a great job for you, and so on.”   Clearly, I should have gone to Paula’s classes, because hers came with the magic job fairy who skipped over the political science department.

Paula’s theory of economics ignores the fact that in the real world, going to a school generally doesn’t promise you anything. Anything at all.  Attending a college or university is not a guarantee of a darned thing.  What does it mean? It means that on average, your economic opportunities are greater. As you can see from this chart…

… on average, the more education you have, the less likely you are to suffer from unemployment, and the more likely you are able to attain a higher salary.  But, again, I don’t see anywhere where it promises anyone anything, despite her claims of people “being promised a great job with a great pay.”

Attending College provides an education, which is never a bad thing. And it opens up doors for opportunity. There may be jobs here and there. Or not, and to take a job, you have to travel away from your home, or across the country.

There is no societal responsibility on whether you take a certain kind of job. Whether to take an opportunity is up to the individual. You might take a mediocre job and try to move up in pay and responsibility. Or you do something until you can find something better. Or you can’t find a darn thing in your area, and you’re delivering pizza because you want to live in the area. That’s kind of up to you.

Paula Hawks may believe as she’d stated that people were promised things. But those of us who live in the real world know generally, no one has promised anyone anything. And it’s up to each of us to take opportunities, or to make our own.

That’s what people used to believe in America.  Maybe it’s time they – including Paula – need to start considering the concept again.

In a legislative forum recently in Pierre, the District 24 legislators met with the Pierre School Board, and discussed several topics, including teacher salaries.

The biggest question, where to find the money for it, faces a hurdle, as Rep Tim Rounds points out. They just raised taxes:

One of the biggest concerns for the Pierre School Board was finding the $75 million.

“I think one of the biggest questions is whether you would support that $75 million being new revenue,” said Pierre School District Superintendent Kelly Glodt.

That, state Rep. Tim Rounds said, would be an incredibly tough sell.

“You have to understand that this legislature passed a massive tax increase last year,” he said.

Rounds was referring to a bill passed last year that raised some state taxes to pay for highway maintenance. Asking the same group of overwhelmingly conservative lawmakers to increase taxes again, he said, may not work.

Read it all here.

Can legislators find that loose change in the couch? Or are we going to see a penny sales tax? And if so, who will put their name on the line for it?

US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has been selected to speak at Augustana University this coming March, and already liberals are attacking and trying to pressure the school to rescind the invitation:

Scalia is known for interpreting the Constitution with what he believes the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote it, as opposed to the more modern and arguably more popular belief that the Constitution is a “living document” that changes with the culture. This philosophy is called originalism, and, according to Center for Western Studies Executive Director Harry Thompson, it will be the topic of Scalia’s talk in March.

Scalia also has very clear opinions about where the lines of power should be drawn. He is not only concerned about what the Court decides, but how they decide it and whether it is its place to make a ruling.
And…

Sophomore Rachel Polan sees it differently.
“He rubs a lot of people the wrong way,” she said. “I think they should have chosen someone less controversial.”

Read it here.

And outside of the Augie community, Obama campaign manager Steve Hildebrandt was on Facebook this weekend trying to paint Scalia as a racist, also campaigning for the invitation to be yanked:

I hope Augustana University here in Sioux Falls will retract their invitation to Scalia after his hateful and bigoted comments about African Americans.

In case you haven’t heard what he said, here it is: “There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well,” Scalia said.

And..

Please contact Augustana and encourage them to take the invitation back.

(Steve Hildebrand, Facebook, 12/12/15)

I have not looked at the context of the comments, but I sincerely doubt that a Judge of his stature is a raging racist as they seem to be trying to portray.

The call to deny him an invitation seems more designed to whip students into a frenzy by yelling racism to deny a conservative an appearance on campus as they have been doing across the country, as an atmosphere of campus political over-correctness has been popping up nationwide.

I think we should count ourselves as fortunate that one of our country’s top judicial officials would come for a visit and lecture at one of our states universities. 

Unless there are those whose grasp on their worldview is so tenuous, they might be forced to curl up in a ball when it’s subjected to a challenge.

So, supposedly the Democrats met yesterday in Oacoma at Cedar Shores, according to the Sioux Falls chapter of Drinking Liberally:

In Political News: The South Dakota Democratic Party (SDDP) meets in Oacoma (Cedar Shores) on Saturday to amend their Constitution, review their candidate recruitment efforts (Will they introduce a US Senate candidate?), and plan for the 2016 election. Lest they get overconfident, I reprint a paragraph from last week’s Drinking Liberally post describing the abyss into which their Party’s voter registration numbers have fallen in South Dakota:

“Democratic voter registration in South Dakota fell to 169,059 this week, the lowest level of Democratic registration since 1972 when it stood at 158,086. Democratic voter registration has declined by 37,000 from its historic high of 206,000 in July of 2009. Over the same period Republican registration has remained around 240,000. Republicans now top Democratic registration by 69,000 voters, vs a workable 36,000 advantage in 2009. (For comparison purposes, in 1972 Republicans outnumbered Republicans by 37,000 registered voters, but the Democrats held the Governorship (Richard Kneip), the two US Senate seats (George McGovern and Jim Abourezk) and one of the two US House seats (Frank Denholm). In 2014, the Democratic Party was unable to deliver its own 35% share of registered voters for any of its statewide candidates, the highest vote total being the 33% received by the Democratic House candidate, Corrina Robinson.)”

Suffice it to say, the SDDP has its work cut out for it. I wish them luck and I plan to join them in Chamberlain to cheer them on. As they say, hope springs eternal.

Read that here.

They seriously need an RSS Feed, as they’re the only ones on the other side of the aisle who actually talk about what’s going on in Democrat Circles. The other sites tend to be ignorant of it, willfully or by that being their natural state.

The important point to take away from Sheldon Osborne’s 12/11 post was that this meeting was an opportunity for Democrats to introduce who their standard bearer was going to be in the US Senate race, and possibly to give some face time to Paula Hawks for a mid December media bump. But if you look at Social Media for the State Dem Party and Hawks…. I hear a quiet, lilting sound:  *chirp* *chirp* *chirp* 

Yes, the only things you hear are crickets chirping. If you look, you’d hardly know they had a meeting.  And there’s no indication whatsoever that they’ve been able to come up with a candidate yet.

Make no mistake, no matter what script the Democrat party is handing out to be parroted, petition circulation begins in 19 days.  Fundraising should have begun between 6 months to a year ago. There are very few, if any, scenarios where a candidate on the other side of the aisle can begin to approach legitimacy, much less be able to raise the funds to go on TV.

Even their high mark candidate last election, Corinna Robinson, whom I hear is job hunting and passing around her resume in Washington, DC nowadays, began her efforts in October of 2013, when she moved to South Dakota. Robinson gave it a good try, but was unable to raise awareness and money in that amount of time.  Slick Rick Weiland, who suffered under the disadvantage of people knowing him started back in May.

Dems are months PAST those points in this cycle, and there’s still no hint of names bubbling up to the top of the swamp.

It was unheard of when they took a pass on running a US Senate candidate 6 years ago. When they do it again this election, you’ll hear the word “historic.”

If you notice some oddness on the site today, I’m doing some administrative work on the back-end. I’ve got to boost storage, so I can update whm and cpanel for site administration. Apparently, I’m out of room.

And as I’d mentioned earlier, the latest WordPress update seems to have wreaked havoc. Now I’m discovering that it has messed with how media is inserted into posts as they’re authored. I can still put them there by declaring the full URL, but it’s supposed to do that automatically. And the latest update has messed up a few things, such as the icons for twitter and facebook, which have disappeared from the top of the page, about the same time it mucked up the rss aggregator, so I’m going to see what I can do to solve the issues.

If WordPress has anymore updates, I might have to go back to Blogger!
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Update – MUCH better on the admin side. Images work again, and so do the twitter and facebook icons.  And, maybe we’re getting closer on the RSS Feed Aggregator.

Although my old one I was forced to abandon a while ago is doing what it always did.  It’s back to working like a champ, so I’m less inclined to solve that problem at all.

From the Rapid City Journal continues the odd tale of the Sasso lawsuit. It was dropped, but new information reflecting poorly on alderman comes to light.

Sasso’s lawyers threatened to file a federal lawsuit and a complaint under the Rapid City Code of Conduct for Elected Officials unless the city paid Sasso $855,000 by Dec. 24.

“Wright’s response to Sasso’s column appearing in the Rapid City Journal was so outrageous in character, and so extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bound of decency,” the letter said. “His behavior is atrocious and intolerable in a civilized community such as Rapid City.”

Then, this past Wednesday, Sasso said in a written statement provided to the Journal that he had dropped the lawsuit threat. The decision came less than two weeks after his letter to the city.

and…

City Attorney Joel Landeen subsequently told the Journal that evidence had arisen of termination documents that were prepared against Sasso before his column was published.

“It destroyed their case,” Landeen said.

and…

In the letter, Nooney apparently recounted what he described as a “rather bizarre” lunch conversation he had with Wright. According to Nooney’s letter, Wright told Black Hills Works that it should not employ people like Sasso.

“For what it is worth,” the Nooney letter said, “Wright shared with me that very few people were aware of his ‘ability to get Sasso fired…'”

Kooiker, who was ousted from office in June, shared the information from Nooney’s letter with Sasso, who has claimed that Black Hills Works gave him no other reason for his firing. The letter’s contents made Sasso suspect that Wright was the cause of the firing, and Sasso’s attorneys quoted from the Nooney letter in their letter to the city.

and…

Whether or not Wright caused Sasso’s firing, Sasso continues to believe that Wright clearly sought to cause it.

“Whether his actions were the basis for my termination is not the point any longer,” Sasso wrote in his statement to the Journal, “but the issue remains as to the appropriateness of a City Council member attempting to get a person fired for exercising his right to freedom of speech.”

Read it here.

When a politician is so thin-skinned that they can’t take public criticism without seeking retaliatory action, they don’t have a political problem. They have an ego problem.

Never a dull moment in Rapid City local politics.

Delivering On Our Promise to the American People  
By Sen. John Thune

Last year at this time, Republicans were preparing to take control of the Senate – the first time Republicans would control the upper chamber since 2007 – and follow through on the promises we made to the American people. Republicans were serious when we pledged to get Washington working again. It wasn’t a half-heartened slogan we used to campaign for the majority, it was a commitment by which we intended to govern in the majority.

Republicans pledged to tackle the big issues, which is why in just the first few weeks of the new Republican majority, we sent a bill to President Obama that would have approved the long-stalled, job-creating Keystone XL pipeline. We also passed important legislation that gave the American people a voice on the president’s misguided nuclear agreement with Iran, a ten-year balanced budget that didn’t raise a single dime in taxes, a bill that funds America’s men and women in uniform, numerous resolutions that would block burdensome EPA regulations, legislation that defunds Planned Parenthood, and a bill that repeals Obamacare.

I was glad we were able to help secure the Powder River Training Complex (PRTC) expansion, which was an effort nearly nine years in the making. As I said in March when the expansion was first announced, while this was a long process, I’m proud we’re able to provide our servicemen and women with the resources they need to be successful in a combat environment. In early December, PRTC commanders and airmen completed their first of what I hope will be many successful large force exercises.

It was a humbling experience to play an integral role in getting the first long-term highway bill in more than a decade signed into law. The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, of which I am chairman, can be credited with nearly half of the legislative text included in the final version of the bill, including reforms that will enhance safety, provide regulatory relief, streamline grant programs, and improve the accountability and efficiency of oversight efforts. Having served on the conference committee that negotiated the final version, I was in a unique position to ensure South Dakota’s interests were given key consideration.

States like South Dakota that depend on freight rail to ship products to and from their communities will benefit from the important Surface Transportation Board (STB) reforms that I helped usher through the Commerce Committee and full House and Senate. These reforms – the first of their kind for the STB – will end the uncertainty faced by businesses and agriculture producers and help protect the consumers who are ultimately impacted by disruptions in freight transportation.

While we’ve been able to accomplish a lot of important things for the American people, there is more work to be done. We plan to spend the second year of the 114th Congress the way we’ve spent the first: fighting to make our economy stronger, our government more efficient and more accountable, and our nation and our world safer and more secure.

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