3/17/24

SDGOP disintegrating over CO2 pipelines, vote tabulators

Industrial agriculture is ecocide and for those of us who love the Earth CO2 pipelines are subsidized corporate greenwashing but ironically many Republicans actually benefitting from reduced greenhouse emissions decry the sequestration of carbon as caving to the Green New Deal. 

But as the South Dakota Republican Party faces disintegration and braces for potential violence that could test Kristi Noem's riot boosting law during Veto Day in Pierre at least two issues threaten the Big Tent. Republicans are militantly divided over the utility of eminent domain for private enterprise for pipelines to move carbon dioxide but are just fine with employing it for the entrepreneurial transport of oil and gas.
The most controversial part of the new law is its perceived effect on the Public Utilities Commission and local setback laws. Prior state law allowed the commission to overrule counties’ pipeline setbacks, although the commission has so far declined to do that. [New group aims to refer carbon pipeline law to voters]
A private plane carrying Republican former Mesa, Colorado County Clerk Tina Peters and other Trump operatives took them to Sioux Falls, South Dakota to attend a rally held by Mike Lindell. Peters' trial on charges that she copied files of the county's election tabulations then shared them with Pillow Guy, Lindell has been pushed back to at least July. Peters is probably going to jail after compromising election results and forcing polling machines to be discarded and Lindell is bankrupt.
Most of the county officials who administer elections in South Dakota don’t consider hand counting to be an effective or efficient method of tabulating votes. That’s the result of a South Dakota News Watch survey that saw input from 49 of the state’s 66 county auditors. Auditors are elected officials who supervise county, state and federal elections as well as maintain financial records and other duties. The hand count debate comes as South Dakota is viewed as a proving ground by election reformists who claim that recent elections across the county were marred by hacking or fraud, allegations repeatedly rejected by courts of law as well as Democratic and Republican election leaders. Jim Eschenbaum, a semi-retired farmer from Miller who serves as a Hand County commissioner, thinks some of the election reformists have gone too far. [Hand counting vs. voting machines: Debate rages in South Dakota]
The grassland fire danger index will reach the high and very high categories Sunday for most of South Dakota and will reach the extreme category Monday for the northwestern part of the pathetic red state.

Based in Brookings, Pat Powers is a morbidly obese establishment SDGOP blogger whose kids all suffer from the effects of ag chemicals but is in the bag for Summit's pipeline boondoggle nevertheless. The irreversibly polluted Big Sioux River runs through Brookings County.

In a related story more than half of Iowa's streams and lakes are impaired because of runoff from industrial agriculture.

3/16/24

As Noem targets migrants South Dakota dairies face labor crises

In 2015 Republican former South Dakota US Representative Kristi Noem said her brothers used the H-2A program to bring in workers during planting and harvest season but complained that those using the program were targets of the US Department of Labor and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

In 2020 Mrs. Noem sued to have the checkpoints that protected Native Americans removed from the highways on reservations. But today there are no checks on executive power and the governor's cronies routinely raid the state's general fund. The state is second in addiction to gambling, East River dairies are polluting rivers in at least three states, teachers' salaries surf the bottom of the US and wage slavery is the state's biggest claim to fame. 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion: Trump state economies are in the toilet according to Creighton University's Ernie Goss but it's not about laziness, it's about Maria shrugged, if you will. Now, South Dakota's governor is going full blown Netanyahu and planning to wall off the north bank of the Rio Grande to keep America white and she has targeted Venezuelans in particular.
In fact, most livestock producers, such as ranches, dairies, and hog and poultry operations, are not legally allowed to use the program to meet year-round labor needs. Even if they were, 10 months isn’t long enough, Nicolien Hammink said. Training employees takes time, especially for higher priority positions like calf management. Nicolien and her husband Wim Hammink own and operate Hammink Dairy near Bruce, South Dakota, where they milk roughly 4,000 cows. Hamminks employ 40 people, most of whom are from Mexico, Nicaragua and Guatemala. She and her husband immigrated to South Dakota from the Netherlands in 1995. [Who’s going to milk them?]
So since Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem (KLAN) is militant about rejecting potential workers at the southern border wage slaves could make real social justice change by walking off their jobs then calling for a general strike and tourism boycott to bring Kristi to her senses, too.

3/15/24

Go Fund Me announced

After consulting with the Horse Shelter and an equine veterinarian Donnamarie and Larry have decided that the best way to protect ten free-roaming horses is to keep them in their care. Forage is scarce and the only water available is from wells on their property so the four mares that will foal very soon will be safe, well cared for and as wild as possible. 

About fifteen acres is fenced with horse-safe wire but the gate is always open so the herd can come and go as they please. The couple has been buying hay and so far that is working but the three stallions need to be gelded and that is expensive so we're asking you to pony up to help defray the cost. 

3/14/24

Black Hills forest experts rebuke Republicans after Spearditch roundtable

After a century of fire suppression, a decades-long moratorium on prescribed burns, a lack of environmental litigators and GOP retrenchment the Black Hills National Forest has been broken for decades. The collapse of the Black Hills hydrologic region was forecast in 2002 even as the mountain pine beetle raced to save Paha Sapa water supplies.

So, during remarks to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in 2021, US Forest Service Chief Randy Moore outlined a plan to ship logs from as far away as California to sawmills owned by Hulett, Wyoming's Neiman Enterprises.

In June, 2023 an interested party asked former acting Black Hills National Forest Supervisor Jim Zornes to comment on an article appearing in South Dakota Searchlight about the heinous state of affairs on the Forest then Seth Tupper followed up on that piece with another describing the unheard of turnover of supervisors so an interested party asked Dave Mertz to comment on it.

Mertz is a retired natural resource officer for the BHNF who attended a roundtable discussion in Spearditch hosted by South Dakota's lone US Representative Dusty Johnson when he sicced two fellow Republican congress members on Regional Forester Frank Beum and BHNF Supervisor Shawn Cochran. Cochrane was the sixth different leader in 2023 alone and 11th in the past seven years.
After introductions, the panel quickly turned to grilling the two Forest Service officials. It appeared that they were there to browbeat the Forest Service. Johnson participated in these tactics as well. Much of the hour and a half revolved around blaming the Forest Service for not selling more timber and for being ineffective. Repeatedly, panelists stated what the timber industry needs. Never was there any concern for what level of timber harvesting the forest needs. The two Forest Service participants showed up in good faith only to be interrogated. What was the point of all this other than some people enjoying seeing the Forest Service get beat up? No solutions were found that I could tell. [Dave Mertz, We know what the timber industry needs, but what can the Black Hills provide?]
This blogger forwarded Mertz's column to The Smokey Wire where Zornes and Mertz continue the discussion.
But, can you imagine, the FS paying to ship logs, by rail, from California to South Dakota? Remember a few years ago when the old BCAP (Biomass Crop Assistance Program) couldn’t find enough money to even be relevant? This is playing out in real time, and it is absolutely shocking on how The Hills are being mined for volume…. BHNF was cutting more than growth plus mortality, losing suitable and “standard” component acres, and those cumulative effects finally came home to roost! This should have been nipped in the bud in 2016, but the politics, industry tantrums and Agency egos just carried too much weight! And now, we have a mess…..[Jim Zornes]
There are far, far better life choices than working in a sawmill for ten years let alone living in states like Wyoming and South Dakota where workers are commodities so Neiman bought mills in blue states Colorado and Oregon that expanded Medicaid. Earth hating US Senators John Thune and John Barrasso introduced the Save Jim Neiman's Ass Black Hills Forest Protection and Jobs Preservation Act of 2022 but it died in committee. 
It’s some crazy stuff going on here Jim! When you were here, things were just borderline crazy, but it’s full One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest now! It’s almost impossible to find out how much the rail thing is costing taxpayers but it’s likely an outrageous amount. These are supposedly salvage logs, they can’t be worth much. The transport must be costing several times what the logs are worth. It’s hard to believe our politicians can solve big problems when they are devoid of objectivity. [Their] answer is always just get a bigger hammer. It is putting band aids over band aids. They parrot the story that if a mill closes, the Black Hills will burn to the ground. This is not true, other mills will remain. The real fire risk here is the hundreds of thousands of acres of doghair stands of young trees. Not the sawtimber. But sawmills don’t make money on doghair. And so it goes…. With the current state of the forest, there are fewer and fewer options of any kind to properly manage it. [Dave Mertz]
Nevertheless, Republican welfare ranchers ginned up by the likes of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Wyoming's US Representative Harriet Hageman, disgraced former Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin, American Stewards of Liberty rabble-rouser Margaret Byfield and others are plotting violence against public land managers in the West.

Jim Furnish was deputy chief of the US Forest Service from 1999 to 2002. He believes Neiman will close the sawmill in Spearditch, too.

Historian Paul Horsted, the Norbeck Society, People for Sustainable Logging in the Black Hills and the Black Hills Environmental Coalition have joined the condemnation of Rep. Johnson's attack on the Forest Service.

South Dakota’s junior Republican US Senator has introduced likely doomed legislation in Congress that would increase bureaucracy and open the BHNF to the wholesale pillage of any surviving saw timber.