10/30/14

Whereizzit in the Black Hills?


This farmstead had remained unseen by a 35-year resident of the Black Hills until this morning. Anybody know on which road it can be found?

Click on the image for a better look.

Okay, here's a hint:



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10/28/14

Krugman: why GOP won't fund infrastructure

The federal government could easily have provided aid to the states to help them spend — in fact, the stimulus bill included such aid, which was one main reason public investment briefly increased. But once the G.O.P. took control of the House, any chance of more money for infrastructure vanished. Once in a while Republicans would talk about wanting to spend more, but they blocked every Obama administration initiative. This hostility began as an attack on social programs, especially those that aid the poor, but over time it has broadened into opposition to any kind of spending, no matter how necessary and no matter what the state of the economy. [Paul Krugman, New York Times]
Where to start?

South Dakota's current governor 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.

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.
The report, “Rural Connections: Challenges and Opportunities in America’s Heartland,” (pdf) was released Thursday by TRIP, a national non-profit transportation research group based in Washington, D.C. The report says that in 2013, 21 percent of South Dakota’s rural bridges were rated as structurally deficient, the fourth-highest rate in the nation. In 2012, 12 percent of South Dakota’s major rural roads were rated in poor condition. The fatality rate on South Dakota’s rural roads was 2.21 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles of travel, the 17th-highest rate in the nation and nearly three times higher than the fatality rate of 0.74 on all other roads. [Mitchell Daily Republic]
The crumbling bridge over the Missouri River between Fort Pierre and her neighbor, the putrid cesspool to the east, won't be replaced until at least 2025: how many more times do you want to go over it for free?
By 2100, Rapid City, South Dakota—in the vicinity of the Pine Ridge Reservation—will reach the average summer temperatures of Cedar Park, Texas, which means a rise from 81 degrees to 93 degrees, Climate Central reported. [Indian Country Today]
Self-reliance or moral hazard?
Officials say five electric cooperatives are using state and federal disaster funds to bury hundreds of miles of power lines to protect against widespread outages from storms. The cooperatives are burying more than 530 miles of line damaged in a powerful storm that struck 14 western South Dakota counties last year. Officials say the cost of the line-burying project is estimated at more than $32 million. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is paying 75 percent of the cost. The state provided 10 percent and the cooperatives paid the remaining 15 percent. [Associated Press]
That 10% the state kicked in also came from the feds.

The above article doesn't say how many white ranchers will get buried cables and how many tribal nations will still have storm-prone overhead lines.

After public outcry one South Dakota utility thought better and chose not to assess a fee on customers who add alternative means of electricity generation to their services while those poorly served by cooperative utilities are becoming power self-reliant.

From KSFY:
Agriculture Secretary Walt Bones said the department is asking those affected by the drought what they could the department could better. Bones says many farmers have developed a safety net for drought conditions but livestock ranchers don't have the same assistance.


Remember this? South Dakota's embattled earth hater governor wants government assistance according to the Sioux City Journal:
Gov. Dennis Daugaard has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a preliminary assessment of damages the recent ice storm caused to public and nonprofit property in southeastern South Dakota. Daugaard says damage to rural electric cooperatives and the removal of fallen tree limbs and power lines will likely be a significant part of the cost.
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."
Remember, too, that these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention. This is a venerable old boys network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century.--David Roberts at Grist
What a fucking surprise.

Scientists have excused anthropogenic climate change as a negligible influence in the 2013 blizzard.

So, this is how red states finance infrastructure improvements while bitching about Big Government.

Expect the same swindle next year.

The South Dakota governor has turned to Matt Varilek and the Small Business Administration after the Federal Emergency Management Agency denied a disaster declaration request. The governor's political party passed a resolution at their convention to impeach President Obama.
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10/25/14

“There is still a lot of water in the flood pool.”

The Missouri River system still has an above average level of water in storage.
During the flood of 2011, the swollen river carried tons of sediment, dumped it into these backwater areas and filled them. Sediment deposits cut off slower side channels from the main river. It left fish, such as the endangered pallid sturgeon, without the habitat needed for survival. Through dredging, the corps is restoring those backwaters and side channels and reviving that habitat. Wallace said wildlife and vegetation are returning to these areas, which didn't have the visibility of flood-damaged structures such as levees and revetments. Those projects will help ensure the river's ecological diversity, said Dave Swanson, director of the Missouri River Institute at the University of South Dakota. [Nick Hytrek, Sioux City Journal]
And, from Lake Sakakawea above North Dakota's Garrison Dam:
The corps will unveil its annual operating plan for the Missouri River in a public meeting at 11 a.m. Tuesday at the Bismarck Event Center. State engineer Todd Sando, who will present testimony at the meeting, said a number of factors are contributing to the risk of ice-induced flooding this winter. Sando said the corps’ plan is to release around 24,000 cfs of water through the dam during the winter. “That can create issues during the winter,” Sando said. Higher releases after the Missouri River freezes for the winter could cause overland flooding, as has been the case in some winters since the 2011 flood. “Public input and comments will be fundamental factors at this meeting,” he said. “There is still a lot of water in the flood pool.” [Brian Gehring, Bismarck Tribune]
In related news: the vice-president of the GOP-owned South Dakota Farm Bureau is whining at the US Environmental Protection Agency for what she believes is usurpation of her God-given right to pollute the imperiled Belle Fourche watershed.

South Dakota's earth hater junior US senator is leading a crusade to block EPA from identifying non-point sources of pollution deposited by his GOP donors.

Missouri River discharge from Oahe Dam at Pierre in 2011
photo courtesy Bruce Venner
A report released Sept. 12, 2014, by the Government Accountability Office said a number of factors were behind the flood and there were no forecasting tools available to the Corps that could have prevented the event. “By June 2011, the volume of water coming into the reservoirs from the extreme rains and melting snow was so great that the Corps had no choice in June and July but to release water to accommodate the inflow and prevent damage to dam infrastructure, such as spillways in danger of being overtopped,” the report says. [Joel Ebert, Pierre Capital Journal]
US Senators called for testimony from the attorney general of the State of South Dakota. It's suing the US Army Corps of Engineers to determine ownership of so-called 'surplus water.'
Fort Pierre and Pierre, South Dakota, sit at the head of Lake Sharpe. The Army formed Lake Sharpe after the closure of Big Bend Dam in 1963. The capital of South Dakota and its sister city now face a flood of epic proportions because of a combination of high water releases from Oahe Dam and the presence of a silty delta at the head of Lake Sharpe, which begins just southeast of Fort Pierre. [Muddy Mo: Reservoir Siltation and the Flood of 2011]
Hardly coincidentally, a former earth hater governor of South Dakota after having built a house in a swamp that flooded received a generous self-reimbursement from insurance coverage underwritten by his own company. He's the same US Senate candidate under federal investigation for his role in the EB-5 Bendagate scandal. He also lavished $75 million of state money on political cronies and donors and flagrantly violated the Indian Child Welfare Act.

A sleazeball earth hater state senator who also built a house in a swamp sued the Corps.

Recall this intersection at interested party in June, 2011?
The Corps sells 24% of US hydropower capacity. The Corps enjoys sovereign immunity; expect a political powerplay directed at them from Marty Jackley.
With federal investigators crawling up every GOP asshole in the state with microscopes there may be justice served yet.

Mr. Obama: tear down these dams.
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10/22/14

Today's intersection: frac sand mining or mining the waste stream?

The Baja Waldo/Red Rock Road geezers try to meet for breakfast every other Tuesday or so. It's a pretty diverse group for a handful of sometimes seven or eight old white guys.

Several are local celebrities. One is a retired Swiss orthopedic surgeon, one a Vietnam vet, one a registered nurse, one a global tour guide; and, yet another is a political blogger with his remaining hair on fire. All live off the grid trying to minimize the amount of waste generated by each household.

One book making the rounds is Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.

Food scraps go to chickens or are composted, paper not recycled is stored to start fires, but one material in the waste stream remains a challenge: glass. It takes enormous amounts of energy to melt and millions of yards of earth to disturb every year to mine the silica used in its manufacture.

There should be a kitchen appliance that turns plastic packaging into liquid fuel or gas for the stove and oven.

Santa Fe County does a lousy job recycling or repurposing glass.
Officials are working to change the fact that Santa Fe only diverted roughly 8.4 percent of its waste stream to recycling in fiscal year 2013, a number revealed by a draft of an external audit. That number represents a steady worsening of recyling habits, down from 9 percent in 2011. For now, however, there’s a temporary use for some of the excess glass. Officials have been busy blasting away thousands of cubic yards of basalt rock at Caja Del Rio landfill. The construction of the new cell will help lengthen the life of the landfill to keep it up with the 300 million pounds of trash it collects annually—5.5 pounds of waste per resident per day. The agency estimates that it will spend over $5 million to construct the new cell. In a bid that’s due this month, companies are vying to be selected by the entity to use some of that glass as a lining for the landfill to help prevent contamination. [Justin Horwath, Santa Fe Reporter]
Now open pit frac sand mines are competing to tear into yet another thousand acres.
Right now the ceramic alternatives are much more expensive, but companies are experimenting with different ways to bring the cost down. One idea is to manufacture it near where the fracking is taking place, using local clay. For now, sand remains king. It makes up about 90 percent of the proppant market overall, according to Brian Olmen of Kelrik, a Wisconsin-based consulting firm that analyzes the industrial minerals industry. [Minnesota Public Radio]
Growstone, Inc. buys Albuquerque's glass and manufactures a medium for horticultural applications.

The US has thousands of mountains of glass cullet from the municipal waste stream just waiting to be repurposed: Japan recycles nearly 100% of her glass.

We sell millions of tons of salvage material to India and Asia to be recycled while tearing up our own ground mining for virgin minerals while steel and plastics, that could be petroleum, are buried in landfills.


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10/20/14

Thune, Noem donors resisting Black Hills habitat protection

The US Fish and Wildlife Service is considering habitat protection for the northern long-eared bat endangered by human encroachment in the Black Hills.

Donors for South Dakota's junior senator and the sitting At-large member of the US House of Representatives are having a cow. Earth hater and longtime lobbyist for land rapers, Larry Mann, works for the Black Hills Forest Resource Association, the GOP-owned cabal mentioned in this piece:
A possible restriction would be no harvesting of trees over three inches in diameter from April through October, when the bats are leaving the caves and mines in which they hibernate for the winter and moving to nests in trees. The Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to make a decision next spring. Officials are concerned about being able to manage the forest, but they also want to do what's best for the bat if it truly is endangered, said Kerry Burns, a U.S. Forest Service forest wildlife biologist in the Black Hills. "We want to incorporate conservation measures that are truly going to make a difference," he said. "The first and foremost threat is white-nose syndrome." [Rapid City Journal]
If history is any guide, locals will just kill the offending bats like they do with elk, cougars and their kittens.

And of course: the fake bark beetle war is just a subsidy for Republican donors.

$20 bucks says black bears, wolves, and moose sighted in the Black Hills coming from the Bighorn Mountains are migrating up the Little Missouri from the Tongue via the Yellowstone River.

How would their presence in the Black Hills not automatically make them candidates for endangered species protection?


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10/17/14

Bill Janklow's idea of public broadcasting anchor blows etiquette

Last night, during a "debate" between Major Corinna Robinson and South Dakota's sitting At-large US Representative, the teevee personality for Bill Janklow's idea of public broadcasting, Stephanie Rissler, addressed the decorated Army veteran by her first name while calling the bimbo-at-large by her title.

I apologize to news director Cara Hetland for confusing her with Rissler: I was livid and savaged Hetland on twitter by mistake.

This is not the only time an SDPB anchor has pulled such a stunt. An on-air interview with a former UN ambassador and South Dakota senator turned from a laugh out loud moment into a cringeworthy eternity when host Brian Bull asked his esteemed guest how he'd like to be addressed to which Ambassador McGovern replied, "George." To listeners' aghast amazement, that's how cub reporter Bull began every question.

Public broadcasting in the failed red state serves at the pleasure of the Republican Party whose legislature controls the purse strings. Paul Guggenheimer, a five-year host of Dakota Midday, the flagship program at Bill Janklow's idea of public radio, posted his last show in December, 2011 and moved to Pittsburg to host a similar program.

It's easy to speculate that his exit was the result of red state collapse after he performed a virtual blow job on SDGOP's Lucas Lentsch during a broadcast.

Dakota Midday's current host, Karl Gehrke, soft-balled the state's corrupt GOP former governor and US Senate candidate this week during an interview.

twitter coverage of the forum, read @carasdpb

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10/15/14

Bison restoration imperative



The GOP is lying: there is no bark beetle epidemic in the Black Hills, there is a ponderosa pine infestation.

Red flag warnings were in place for nearly all of the proposed Greater Missouri Basin National Wildlife Refuge.
Historically, Montana’s Great Plains teemed with an abundance and diversity of wildlife species not found elsewhere in North America. Arguably, the most definitive and iconic of these wildlife species was the American Plains bison. Yet, through a series of disastrous choices made by the non-indigenous settlers in the 19th century, bison were virtually extirpated from the Great Plains, and a remnant population of wild bison survived only in Yellowstone. We are convinced they will do so again given the chance to engage and discuss the future of wild bison in Montana. [excerpt, Montanans can meet challenge of bison restoration]
It's time to rewild the West.



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10/13/14

Spain, Columbus, Church Instituted New World Genocide



The indigenous population at the time of European arrival in what is now the United Snakes was about 52 million: today it is around 2.5 million.

According to historian Clay Jenkinson, Thomas Jefferson would be surprised that there are any American Indians still alive at all in 2014.


Karl Gehrke interviewed the head of the Sioux Falls chapter of the Church of the Holy Roman Kiddie Diddlers during the Dakota Midday segment on Bill Janklow's idea of public radio. Topics of discussion included the implications of a pope tied to the military dictators who orchestrated Argentina's Dirty War and church abuses on South Dakota's reservations.
Pope Benedict XVI appointed Paul J. Swain as the eighth bishop of Sioux Falls on August 31, 2006 and he was consecrated as Bishop of Sioux Falls on October 26, 2006. Bishop Swain previously served as a member of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People.--bio, Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls.
Protection of children and young people, my sore ass.

Andrea Cook has reported in the Rapid City Journal that two tribal nations are preparing to sue the South Dakota Division of Social Services.

From a piece by Stephen Rex Brown in the New York Daily News:
A 15th century Catholic decree permitting Europeans to seize Indian land in the New World is a load of papal bull. That was the message Tuesday from the Onondaga Nation, which is calling on the new Pope to revoke the so-called Discovery Doctrine, which evolved from a papal decree written by Pope Nicholas V in 1455. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the doctrine in a 2005 ruling against the Oneida Indian Nation. The ruling affirmed the government’s sovereignty over lands, even if they’re sold to an Indian tribe. If the church were to dissavow the decree, Lyons said it would remove a legal argument against tribal land claims.
Seattle has chucked Columbus Day for a more culturally accurate celebration while many tribal nations are still fighting for equal protection under the law.



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10/10/14

"Friend of Obama" Larry Pressler co-hosted 2011 fundraiser for Romney




Larry Pressler is a skank:
The Sept. 29 fundraiser at the Bethesda North Marriott has a slew of Washington insiders signed up as co-chairs (promising to raise $10,000 each). More than two dozen prominent Washingtonians are lined up to co-host the bash, including, Constellation Energy’s executive vice president James Connaughton, former South Dakota Sen. Larry Pressler and his wife Harriet, National Association of Broadcasters chief and former Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Wash.) and his wife Sharon, and David Tamasi of Rasky Baerlein. One PI tipster noted that the event is mixing both supporters from the ’08 cycle and new supporters like Smith, Pressler and Westine. [Politico]


The flip-flopping Pressler was enlisted to run in South Dakota's US Senate race by GOP operative, Dick Wadhams to dilute Rick Weiland's base of support. Pressler has crashed to the left while saying he would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade if given the opportunity.
When asked which party he would caucus with in the Senate, Pressler said he would probably side with the party that would assure him roll call votes "on the five or six things" he cares deeply about, like tort reform in health-care. [Sean Sullivan, Washington Post]
If Pressler were really a friend to President Obama he would leave the campaign and throw his support to Rick Weiland.

A source close to former Senator Larry Pressler's campaign has passed a tip to this interested party that the candidate will soon announce his support for ending the federal ban on cannabis. More to come.


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10/9/14

Texas hospital rejected Ebola decedent for lack of insurance

Thomas Eric Duncan’s condition had taken a turn for the worse in recent days. He had been placed on dialysis and was receiving an experimental drug. Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings announced his death. Duncan, who had no health insurance, was initially sent home from a Dallas hospital, despite telling a nurse he had been to Liberia. New questions are also being raised about his treatment after he was diagnosed. [Democracy Now!]
The State of South Dakota has spent $170,000 in taxpayer money since 2011 defending a single anti-choice law, according to new figures from the state attorney general obtained by RH Reality Check. The amount is based on the number of hours that staff attorneys in South Dakota’s Office of the Attorney General have spent working on HB 1217, a bill linked to controversial lawyer Harold Cassidy. The tab for defending South Dakota’s HB 1217 could balloon. Already this year, spending has occurred at a far higher rate than in the previous three years. And when the attorney general was asked in 2011 to estimate how much it could cost to defend HB 1217, the figures ranged from $1.75 million to $4.15 million, according to a document obtained by RH Reality Check. The higher figure contains a $1.75 million contingency to cover Planned Parenthood’s costs, in the event that Planned Parenthood wins the litigation. [ Sharona Coutts, RH Reality Check]
Comes this from Irin Carmon writing in Salon:
We are in a moment of partial Republican self-examination, in which certain party reformers are facing the fact that there just aren’t enough white voters to keep them in power — a demographic problem! And every conversation about how allegedly unsustainable Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are, for one reason or another, mainstreams the pressure to radically cut its benefits or reshape it to the whims of the market. What better way to reclaim the narrative, to change the subject from the inconvenient autonomy of women, than to claim that all of this contracepting is bringing on the decline of America for all?


Kristi Noem and the United States House GOP voted again, for the 51st time, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Those votes are totally worthless. Has anyone figured out how much time and tax dollars have been spent on these repeal votes? [Arlen Hanson, Letter: Don't stop health care, Aberdeen American News]

There is a misconception that by expanding Medicare, South Dakota state spending will increase. This is simply not true. Federal contributions to those newly covered under the expansion are much higher than current spending, therefore shifting much of the financial burden from the state level. Hospitals provided approximately $40 billion in uncompensated care in 2011. If we can cut that spending by almost half while providing more citizens with insurance coverage, it is shameful that South Dakota would opt out of this opportunity. The South Dakota government is sending the message that the health of its citizens is not a priority and neither is finding a solution to the national healthcare crisis. [Abby Peters, letter, Pierre Capital Journal]

The Indian health system is underfunded and third-party billing — money from private insurance, Medicaid, Medicare, and other programs — is the only way funding will improve. Like it or not, Treaty or not, the Congress is not going to pay for Indian health through appropriations. The $6 billion budget for the Indian Health Service shows the agency collecting more than a billion dollars from Medicaid and only $90,307,000 from private insurance. [Mark Trahant, Indian Country Today]
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10/8/14

Oglala chef brings taste of the Black Hills to Minneapolis menu

Sous chef, Sean Sherman calls himself a 'Sioux Chef.'
After years of researching and experimenting with "pre-colonization" foods, he's preparing to open a restaurant in the Twin Cities this winter that showcases those foods, reborn for contemporary palates. "We were close to the Badlands and its sand hills, which is not the best growing area by far," says Sherman, who's now 40. "But we would also spend weeks in the Black Hills, crawling around and learning stuff." If his restaurant is successful, Sherman hopes he can expand the concept and create similar ones across the country, training young Native American chefs in keeping their tribes' best culinary traditions alive. [Serri Graslie, NPR's The Salt]
Americans waste food and pollute watersheds at biblical proportions.
The average deer collision causes $3,305 in damages, according to a report from State Farm Insurance. West Virginia was listed as the state with the highest risk for collisions, followed by South Dakota. Pennsylvania was number four, and Montana was number six. It’s a nationwide problem. [Jack McNeel, Antelope Learn to Look Both Ways Before Crossing Street, Indian Country Today].
Rob Chaney writes in the Missoulian:
In 2012, Montana motorists hit 4,754 whitetail deer, 1,977 mule deer, 220 elk, 72 antelope and 28 moose, according to state Department of Transportation records. They also hit 39 black bears, five grizzly bears, six mountain lions, 15 bighorn sheep, an uncertain number of wolves, and uncounted birds of prey and furbearing mammals. [Chaney, FWP serves up roadkill salvage permits online]
From a post by Alex Reshanov at EarthSky:
All this shifting meat consumption is a concern because, despite our middling trophic level, we’re quite good at sucking up resources. According to the study, humans use 25% of the net primary production (that finite amount of planty [sic, planetary, i think, ip] energy we discussed earlier), and food production accounts for 35-40% of that allocation. Given that agriculture isn’t even our only drain on global resources, the fact that we’re not at the top of the food chain is probably a good thing. [Reshanov, Humans aren't top predators, says report]
Humanity has wiped out half the world's wildlife population since 1970.

Is it 4:20 yet?


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10/5/14

Black Hills threatened by another strip mine, 1872 mining law

I almost peed my pants when the Rapid City Journal editorial board said:
The 1872 Mining Act was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant at a time when the government was trying to encourage people to settle and develop the West. Updating it to shift cleanup costs and extract royalties would generate millions in federal revenue. Nearly 1,000 recent mining claims have been filed in the watershed of Montana's Blackfoot River (PDF). Congress should undertake a long overdue revision of this antiquated law.
The US Forest Service is often powerless to stop the extractive industry from permanently altering sensitive watersheds because of the General Mining Act of 1872.

Thunder Basin National Grassland west of Devil's Tower is at risk to the 1872 act, not to mention the ground impacted by another Canadian invasion in the form of a proposed strip mine for rare earth minerals north of Sundance. Wyoming blasts through treaty lands and leaves mercury trails in its wake.

Another earth hater wants to mine the Black Hills not far from Pe 'Sla on Forest Service ground:
[South Dakota] Department of Environment and Natural Resources engineer Eric Holm said this week that Dakota Resource submitted applications for permits for its project from the state in early August and that the applications were reviewed, site-inspected and approved, and only await deposit of a $20,000 reclamation bond before taking effect. [Tom Griffith, Hunting for the second Homestake]
The GOP-owned SDDENR is a rubber stamp for earth scorching.

Repeal or even reform of the 1872 statute has been thwarted repeatedly: only affected tribal nations who lost treaty ground and environmental lawyers can stop mining on public lands.
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10/3/14

Feds freshly fixing failed infrastructure for South Dakota

Self-reliance or moral hazard?
Officials say five electric cooperatives are using state and federal disaster funds to bury hundreds of miles of power lines to protect against widespread outages from storms. The cooperatives are burying more than 530 miles of line damaged in a powerful storm that struck 14 western South Dakota counties last year. Officials say the cost of the line-burying project is estimated at more than $32 million. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is paying 75 percent of the cost. The state provided 10 percent and the cooperatives paid the remaining 15 percent. [Associated Press]
That 10% the state kicked in also came from the feds.

The above article doesn't say how many white ranchers will get buried cables and how many tribal nations will still have storm-prone overhead lines.

After public outcry one South Dakota utility thought better and chose not to assess a fee on customers who add alternative means of electricity generation to their services while those poorly served by cooperative utilities are becoming power self-reliant.

From KSFY:
Agriculture Secretary Walt Bones said the department is asking those affected by the drought what they could the department could better. Bones says many farmers have developed a safety net for drought conditions but livestock ranchers don't have the same assistance.


Remember this? South Dakota's embattled earth hater governor wants government assistance according to the Sioux City Journal:
Gov. Dennis Daugaard has asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a preliminary assessment of damages the recent ice storm caused to public and nonprofit property in southeastern South Dakota. Daugaard says damage to rural electric cooperatives and the removal of fallen tree limbs and power lines will likely be a significant part of the cost.
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."
Remember, too, that these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention. This is a venerable old boys network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century.--David Roberts at Grist
What a fucking surprise.

Scientists have excused anthropogenic climate change as a negligible influence in the 2013 blizzard.

So, this is how red states finance infrastructure improvements while bitching about Big Government.

Expect the same swindle next year.
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10/1/14

Menards forces closure of Pierre family store



Pierre is the Fort Pierre of Hughes County.

Bryan Rice has a right to be pissed at Mayor Laurie Gill and has chosen to leave the shit hole town without a home improvement store until earth hater-owned Menards is finished building next door sometime next year after another brutal winter.
The store has also been unfortunate to be along Garfield Avenue, which has been under heavy reconstruction for the past four months [to build the fucking Menards]. Still, the closing is a bitter pill to swallow, because in the past 102 years Knecht has only closed two locations. The store will make sure customers will have ready access to employees and supplies for any current projects and will support projects that extend past mid-November from its Rapid City location. [David Rookhuyzen, Pierre Capital Journal]
Menards, whose policies include issuing anti-democratic propaganda, pays its employees subsistence wages while massaging its margins in under-served markets like Rapid City and Scottsbluff, Nebraska.

O'Fallon, Missouri has been passed over according to a local media outlet:
The company is blaming the Obama administration for the project’s failure. A Menards spokesperson says the company no longer plans on adding a store in O’Fallon, Missouri because of the President’s economic policies.
John Menard is one of the country's richest white men contributing to earth haters like John Thune and Michele Bachmann while joining with Koch Industries in forcing primaries against those resisting its advances.
Menards and CEO John Menard have been cited for dozens of environmental code violations; in 1997 Menard and his company were fined $1.7 million when Menard himself was found to have used “his own pickup truck to haul plastic bags filled with chromium and arsenic-laden wood ash to his own home for disposal along with his household trash,” according to Milwaukee.--Adele M. Stan at AlterNet.
Gill is not only the mayor, she works for the embattled Daugaard administration, too.

Is this a great country or what?

Good call, Bryan: fuck 'em all but six then make them your pallbearers.
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