Daugaard quietly embracing national socialism

38 million smackers!

Where to start?

South Dakota's governor Dennis Daugaard says he's a conservative; yet, he has begged for billions from the Obama administration. His predecessor's office where he was lieutenant governor and his current bureaucracy have trafficked Native kids, exploited the federal EB-5 green card scam, and is quietly expanding a Medicaid safety net for those not yet voting for his party. A former legislator insisting she is even farther to his right has threatened to run against him in a GOP gubernatorial primary.

Meanwhile, in South Dakota, infrastructure is crumbling and 20.6% of bridges are structurally deficient. Over the Missouri River, the US14 bridge between Ft. Pierre and the town to the east and the I-90 bridge at Chamberlain are imperiled.

Members of the public next week will get their first chance to provide comments on a new bridge that will span the Missouri River between Pierre and Fort Pierre. A public meeting is scheduled Tuesday night at the Ramkota hotel in Pierre to update the public and solicit suggestions on such matters as design and location for the structure that will replace a bridge built in 1962. More than 15,000 vehicles travel across the bridge each day, and it's starting to show its age. Construction on the new bridge isn't scheduled to start until 2023, and the bridge won't open to traffic until 2025. [AP, KELO teevee]

As the risible right rants, Big Government Governor Dennis Daugaard shoves South Dakota down its slide into the depths of police state fascism.

Gov. Dennis Daugaard is expected to detail the effort in a news conference this morning. He’ll be joined by officials from the Helmsley Charitable Trust, which is providing funding. The trust just last month announced money to pay for research into unmet health care services and needs in South Dakota. The trust was established by the late hotel and real estate baroness Leona Helmsley. [AP, Sioux Falls Argus Leader]

Candidate Dennis Daugaard drew gasps from a State Fair audience in 2010 when he said: “I am skeptical about the science that suggests global warming is man-caused or can be corrected by man-made efforts."

A team of scientists at the USA National Phenology Network, which is sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey, have published a study which shows that 2012 was the earliest spring over the 48 U.S. states since 1900 when systematic weather data began to be available for the entire area. The historical trend of spring indices suggests that the 2012 growing season advanced as much as 20-30 days in the East and Midwest from the 1900-2012 long-term mean. The beneficial effects of spring's quick start in 2012 were subsequently offset by a late spring frost and summer drought. In fact, the unusually early spring combined with late frosts in April to produce a so-called "false spring" that damaged fruit trees across the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes regions. [news release, US Geological Survey]

As political considerations trump the needs of their populations, governors in red states continue to lead voters over the climate cliff and to deny affordable access to medical care.

Years ago, Dr. Pamela Wible decided she was through with factory medicine and asked her community what they wanted from her as their family physician. She implemented their suggestions in her Eugene, Oregon, clinic and advocates for other clinicians who want to invite their communities to help design their practices. [The People's Pharmacy, WUNC.]

Republicans are cutting education while mass incarceration rates soar and prisons profit at historic levels. Snipped from a piece by JL Thomas posted at truthout:

Market-oriented education reform continues to produce evidence that it fails against its own goals and standards. But more disturbing is that current education reform also shares with the war on drugs evidence that the United States is committed to the New Jim Crow, to which Alexander quotes Martin Luther King Jr.: "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." (p. 203)

In Montana, the I-90 bridges over the Yellowstone at Billings and Livingston have been my biggest freaks.