Rounds pulls boner on ESA

Mike Rounds (earth hater-SD) is a serial liar. During a field hearing in Rapid City the dolt said, "I agree with the goals of the Endangered Species Act but I am concerned with the low success rate."

Fact is: the ESA is resoundingly successful according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

CBD found that the ESA had “a remarkably successful recovery rate: 90 percent of species are recovering at the rate specified by their federal recovery plan,” adding: “On average, species recovered in 25 years, while their recovery plan predicted 23 years—a 91 percent timeliness accomplishment.” [Scientific American]

This is certainly not the first time Rounds has outwardly lied to voters.

Rounds and chippy cohort Natalie Krings recently appeared on Facebook Live acknowledging that they are part of the dysfunction in DC.

The Tenth Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It is the clearest constitutional description of a federal government of limited powers. This is when a clause in the Constitution allowing Congress to regulate commerce comes in handy. Between the beginning of the New Deal and the early 1990s, federal judges allowed the federal government to vastly expand its powers, as long as Congress could find some plausible connection to interstate commerce. [Natural Resources Defense Council]

Recall that Rounds pledged to raise $9 million to run for Senate but is still struggling to erase his campaign debts. White supremacists like Mike see Donald Trump as their last hope.

Another step toward preserving some Black Hills habitat has been taken.

In an effort to conserve the northern long-eared bat, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced a final rule today that uses flexibilities under section 4(d) of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to tailor protections to areas affected by white-nose syndrome during the bat’s most sensitive life stages. As white-nose syndrome continues to affect this species, the bat’s status may decline to the point that it becomes endangered. In that event, the Service would publish a new proposal requesting public input. If the bat were to be listed as endangered in the future, the 4(d) rule would no longer apply, and all regulatory prohibitions under the ESA would take effect. In the United States, the northern long-eared bat is found from Maine to North Carolina on the Atlantic Coast, westward to eastern Oklahoma and north through the Dakotas, reaching into eastern Montana and Wyoming. [press release, USFWS]

GOP donors being subsidized by the federal government to log in the Black Hills are putting pressure on the state's congressional delegation to resist habitat protection for the black-backed woodpecker, too.

"The species, by any sensible measure, clearly deserves endangered status," says Mollie Matteson, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity in Vermont. "It's dying at rates of 90 to 100 percent." [Environmentalists Say 'Threatened' Status For Bats Not Enough]

Senator don Juan Thune and Rep. Kristi Noem have tossed bones to their campaign contributors by railing against the protection of endangered species like the northern long-eared bat and for more money for the Neiman family to log the old growth ponderosa pine essential to preserving Black Hills habitat. Neiman Enterprises sells clear pine to Pella for windows and doors.

Like most bats, northern long-eared bats emerge at dusk to feed. They primarily fly through the understory of forested areas feeding on moths, flies, leafhoppers, caddisflies, and beetles, which they catch while in flight using echolocation or by gleaning motionless insects from vegetation. [USFWS fact sheet]

Cougars and the American Dipper have been all but extirpated from the Black Hills.

While Rounds was governor the Department of Social Services seized hundreds of American Indian children and placed them in subsidized foster homes. Activists are reversing those attempts at genocide.

Mike Rounds is still blaming the US Army Corps of Engineers for his own stupid choice to build in a floodway.

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]

The Republican former 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 knowing Lake Sharpe is filling with silt.

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]

He's the same US Senator 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.

Rounds co-conspirator, Attorney General Marty Jackley, is engaging in legal sock-puppetry. By suing the corps over surplus water he is forcing We the People to pay for the clean up of a century of mine tailings and organic effluent that has saturated the banks of the Belle Fourche/Cheyenne River system depositing many tons of toxic silt into Lake Oahe and the other downstream dams after 1962 now displacing many acre-feet of water.

According to a source close to the Rounds family South Dakota's functionally illiterate junior senator is lamenting his time living inside the Beltway.