Rapid City's Laura Armstrong would be a formidable gubernatorial candidate

Editor's note: In the years after my 1997 vision at Orman Dam, a quest for redemption overtook me. I pursued numerous concepts nearly simultaneously including a recycling initiative that would look much like Rapid City's Material Recovery Facility does today: metals, paper, plastics, glass, the whole schmear. 

Laura Armstrong is a local speech language pathologist who served on the Rapid City Common Council from 2017-2023 serving twice as Council President. This interested party has asked her to enter the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Rapid City residents are being told — once again — to brace for higher waste service fees and reduced recycling pickup. We're told it's necessary. We're told it's inevitable. We're told that someday, eventually, something might improve "depending on market demands."

But let's be honest: this isn't about markets. It's about leadership. Or more accurately, the lack of it.

At the Dec. 1 City Council meeting, City Hall voted to raise waste service fees and cut recycling pickup in half. And they did so while admitting that our landfill is nearly full, the cost of the last waste cell doubled from projections, and we only have about twenty-five years of capacity left. We are running out of room, out of time and- apparently -out of vision.

The city now acknowledges not everything we carefully rinse and place into our blue bins is actually recycled. Plastics labeled three through seven simply end up in the landfill, because markets are unstable. Glass is often crushed and discarded. Shiny cardboard goes straight to the trash heap. Even the city's own outreach staff confirms that major categories of recyclables are landfilled because we lack the local capacity to do anything else with them. If this is the best we can do, then why aren't we doing more to change it?

It appears we have a problem of short-sightedness. The Material Recovery Facility (MRF) does impressive work with the limited tools it has. It is old but functional; and thankfully, staffed with dedicated workers making the most of aging equipment. And yes, it generates revenue: Around $350,000 a year. But the bigger story, the one city leaders seem unwilling to confront, is that our current system is fundamentally reactive, not proactive.

We increase fees instead of increasing capacity. We reduce services instead of expanding partnerships.

We shrug at global markets instead of building local solutions. And all of this in a state that is growing by thousands of new residents every year-people who bring with them jobs, families, energy, and yes, their garbage. Yet our planning for solid waste has not kept pace with our growth. Leadership matters, and on this issue, leadership has been missing.

Years ago, I approached the School of Mines to explore a potential collaboration for local waste innovation, recycling science, and sustainable materials research. That conversation could have sparked a long-term partnership between our city and one of the nation's most respected engineering institutions. We have worldclass minds right here in Rapid City. People from all over the world come to our local university to learn, innovate, and take on the complex problems that shape our future.

Why weren't we leveraging that talent? Why aren't we now? Imagine the workforce development opportunities. Imagine local businesses built around materials recovery. Imagine becoming a regional center for waste innovation, instead of a regional dumping ground.

We could be training engineers, creating jobs, and establishing Rapid City as a leader in sustainable waste solutions across the Upper Midwest. Instead, we are patching gaps and raising rates.

Our landfill is reportedly $8.3 million in the hole. That number will only grow unless we do the work now to rethink our waste stream, engage real partners, and invest in solutions that reduce what we bury in the ground.

Other communities have already moved in this direction: waste-to-energy technologies, reprocessing clusters, advanced sorting systems, and public-private innovation labs. Rapid City has the brainpower, the institutional partners, and the regional role to lead. What we lack is leadership willing to do more than approve annual fee hikes and incremental service cuts.

I believe we can choose a better path. Residents deserve a system that innovates, not one that throws up its hands. We deserve planning, not patchwork. We deserve leaders who understand that waste management is not a burden-it is an opportunity.

Rapid City can either plan for the future or keep paying for the past. That starts with engaging in real, productive conversations with the School of Mines and other regional universities-institutions filled with people who come here to learn, innovate, and tackle the complex problems that shape our future. Let's bring those experts, alongside industry partners and community leaders, to the table. Let's choose meaningful, forward-looking solutions instead of settling for higher bills and smaller bins.

You miserable bastards

For my family and pals in the Black Hills and northern plains: yep, that’s 60° at sunset in rural Santa Fe County.

Stasi in Brookings, RC

Trump approval in the shitter

Read it all here.

Guest post: DWC is Cream of Bullshit Soup

Editor's note: Speaking of the unctuous Pat Powers, a morbidly obese white man who spews nonsense in support of South Dakota Republicants who with his butt buddy Jason Gant, left a mess at the Secretary of State's office. After bringing order to some of the chaos in the Gant/Powers hack job SDSOS Shantel Krebs said a half million documents were deleted.

"I want to clarify that the corporations system or website was on an outside server. And it was not on the state's information and technology--state sanctioned and state secured--server," Krebs said. "We're sitting at about 90,000 of those documents reviewed so far; we started at the current year and are working our way backwards. We started at 2015 and we're done with 2014 and 2013 and we're working on 2012," Krebs said.

Now, at his Faceberg page South Dakota's most vociferous former teevee anchor, Shad Olson is calling out fat Pat's role in Pierre's culture of corruption.

If Lindsay Graham and John McCain lived in South Dakota, rest assured, Pat Powers and the (South) Dakota War College would be their reading material of choice. Probably on the toilet. And probably when they’re not catching up on Tavistock Institute literature or checking their endorsements from the Southern Poverty Law Center or planning new ways to flip the demographics of the country to benefit the United States Chamber of Commerce and the DNC. Pat would be their boy just like Americans for Prosperity is their Daddy. And Donald Trump would call the whole steaming pile of functionalized fiction, “Fake News.” Next.

For most of 20 years, Pat’s fake blog, Dakota War College, has served as the direct propagandized bully pulpit of a paper mache Republican party that has presided over the most corrupt era of public administration in South Dakota history. Dead bodies and millions of dollars missing in bungled programs and misappropriated grant money frosted with squelched investigations and quashed evidence and a surprisingly missing allowance of a normally perfunctory independent investigation to sort any of it out.

No concern for transparency. No time for explanations, public trust be damned. And certainly not an honest investigative peep about scandals like EB-5 and Gear Up from moderate GOP water boy, Pat Powers, on his smallish web operation that draws fewer daily visitors than a kissing booth at a leper colony.

Instead, readers and viewers are treated to what Pat makes his paycheck for: Personal attacks on any conservative critic of the GOP machine and anyone else who dares dissent from the milquetoast Democrat-lite of the South Dakota Republican bourgeoisie and their cookie cutter assumed line of bureaucratic ascendancy that ensures friends go unpunished and promoted and naysayers feel the wrath of the RINO. And it’s all according to plan. Stamp my pay stub, if you please.

Back in the toddler years of internet journalism just after the millennium, it became apparent even to the pedestrian intellects that serve as the brain trust of the SDGOP that it might be useful to build a standalone blog or news site that could be used to carry water for the moderate elephant against the growing din of independent journalists and patriot voices that were quickly supplanting the mainstream media as the credible scribes and describers of local political theatre. They were right. Hogs and acorns and broken clocks, don’t you know.

In short order, the search was on to find someone of requisite skill, articulate eloquence and credibility to honcho such an effort in captaining the newest set artillery piece in the South Dakota Republican armada. Short of those deluxe prerequisites, the need was for a middling ability “Yes Man,” of any description willing to serve as a mercenary propagandist masquerading as an objective reporter. You get what you settle for. And so it was in that grimy embryonic process on a certain day long ago that my office landline in a local television newsroom chirped to life with the car salesman voice of a party acolyte who tried to schmooze me into accepting a job.

What would it take to lure you away from what you’re doing now? We’d really be interested in making an offer. Let’s make this happen. Yada and yada.

With a couple Emmys to my name and a wall full of hardware from various organizations specializing in self-congratulatory plaques and journalistic trinkets of ego and pecking order, big city job offers were frequent and frequently ignored. But an in-state offer had my attention. I had but one question. “Will I have the freedom to report honestly on the actions and policy and legislative process of both parties, regardless of whose interests are at stake or whose sacred cow is rendered hamburger?” I asked, knowing the answer.

In the Rushmore State where Founding Fathers adorn a mountainside, you’d think that Republicans in charge would be the purest of the lot. Reddest of the Red. Conservative as the day is long. In fact, the opposite is true. As often happens whenever and wherever the Republican label is an automatic 20-point head start at the ballot box or country club cocktail circuit, Democrat name changers are the bulk of the GOP elite and South Dakota suffers as many heavy red states do with an infestation of RINO politicians at every level of government. The present chair of the South Dakota GOP Central Committee was most recently a registered Democrat in Iowa. The GOP Lieutenant Governor nominee this time around voted Carter over Reagan in 1980 and sports one of the bluest legislative records by any ‘Republocrat,’ in state history. In fact, that tendency toward masquerade Republicanism is so pervasive that even the opposing party takes pot shots. At a legislative soiree signaling the end of the 2018 session, South Dakota Democrat Gubernatorial Candidate [Billie] Sutton scored the line of the decade and brought down the house by giving a mock award and open thanks to outgoing Governor Dennis Daugaard, as “the best Democrat Governor in state history.” It might have been tongue-in-cheek if it weren’t so obviously true.

Knowing all of this as I did and do, the telephoned sales pitch that winter’s day left no doubt that expectations would be to promote mainstream party favorites, controlled quantities and compromised political toadies, while bashing independent voices, relegating, ridiculing and suppressing truly conservative grassroots candidates and killing off natural leaders who pose threat to the status quo. Protect the establishment. Destroy conservatives. Ignore reality. Construct fantasy for the benefit of the GOP elite. Provide ample lubrication to the public political shiv job by the marionettes in Pierre and covering fire for the RINO herd. After an uncomfortable silence that reeked of ethical halitosis, my question produced a muddle of stumbles and guttural posturing that sources typically engage in when attempting to prevaricate in real time without a facility for ad lib. I expressed polite thanks for the interest and hung up. I might have sprayed the phone handset with Lysol.

In the years since that conversation I watched with quizzical bemusement as Dakota War College was commandeered to fill that void and has undertaken exactly the prescribed task of protecting the mainstream moderate GOP brand with bonus accoutrement of a meanness of spirit and viciousness at the feast that bely the unhappy blunderings of an operator who found himself rejected by actual media enterprises (when those still mattered) and is taking it out on the people his bosses tell him and pay him to hate. Sources tell me that a salary of $70k a year from benefactors of the South Dakota GOP, plus ad revenue in election years by establishment cronies (or some reasonable facsimile thereof in the same ballpark) is the going rate to get a man to surrender his principles and maintain the pretense of an independent news medium that is every bit as phony-baloney as CNN, MSNBC and the big three and every bit as false as the imitation naugahyde elephant suits that the Dan Lederman’s, Jeff Partridge’s, Dave Roetman’s and Dennis Daugaard’s of the world pull over the eyes of kindly South Dakota folk who are just too polite and trusting not to believe the very best about what their leadership promises and their RINO blogs reinforce.

Bread and circuses to distract from voting records and Pierre chicanery that would make Rod Blagojevich and Al Sharpton blush.

Under Pat’s watchful and twitchy eye and at the behest of those holding his digital leash, people who dare question the establishment narrative are punished, made fun of, shamed and ridiculed in a scene straight out of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, complete with banner headline balderdash and ardent flourish. Conservatives and candidates saying exactly the things that elected Donald Trump in 2016 are tin foil hat conspiracists, UFO believers and black helicopter paranoids deserving of being forever shamed from polite society. Meanwhile, the effete coterie of South Dakota’s Republican blue-bloods (emphasis on the blue) are thrown rose petals and scented kerchiefs and mints for pillows for behaving like an embarrassing political hybrid of Eddie Haskell and Nelson Rockefeller, minus the cash.

Thankfully, the present awakening to the media deception of the globalist cabal is not limited to CNN and all the demon voices that President Donald Trump has rightfully identified as enemies to the American people, guilty of near fatal deceitfulness that has sown enough confusion and misinformation to bring us to the divided brink of civil conflict in the United States.

It’s understood that Donald Trump is a third-party President assailed from both sides of the fake binary system by exactly those same type of poseurs that inhabit the South Dakota RINO club, forever interested only in perpetuation of political control and an agenda that has as afterthought the wellbeing of American fortunes. At a time when it has never been more crucial to discern actual members of the populist-conservative team from those who are coopting the name and the brand for fun and profit, add to that list anyone who has sold the luxury of their integrity at auction for a few thousand dollars of ad revenue from the establishment candidates who bash Trump populism, wax neophyte on international trade and then spend their establishment campaign dollars giving the false impression that Dakota War College is anything but Josef Goebbels with a web address and a weakness for super size fries.

If politics is show business for ugly people, being the media show organ for those people must be an assignment from one of Dante’s deepest and most miserable rings of hell. For that, and even as the clock winds down on the neoconservative falsity that gave him his position, Pat has my genuine pity and my thankfulness, for willingly filling a thankless job that one can only guess has filled his pockets and emptied his soul with equal facility. And all of that for what some might make in an average month in the commodities futures trade.

Everyone has a price, I guess. Everyone has a price paid for bargains made.

In the words of President Trump, fake news.

You haven’t been called.

Next.

Guest post: farmers need markets not bribes

South Dakotan Julian Beaudion is the Democratic candidate for US Senate. He heard the frustration with the Trump Organization at the SD Farmers Union annual meeting in Huron.

Yesterday, I attended the 110th Annual South Dakota Farmers Union Convention and spent time with farmers and ranchers from every corner of our state. I heard the same message I have been hearing all across South Dakota. Rural communities need leaders who listen, show up, and deliver.

We talked about rising input costs, tight margins, and the uncertainty many producers are facing right now. We also talked about the urgent need to pass a strong farm bill that works for producers and rural towns, not just corporate interests. While the current farm bailout may provide short-term relief, it is not a long-term plan. South Dakota farmers need solutions that bring stability and certainty so families can plan for next season and the next generation.

I also joined the Farmers Union policy discussion, where producers spoke directly about what is working, what is not, and where the system is falling short. The conversations were honest, practical, and rooted in real life.

Across this campaign, I have heard the same priorities again and again. Farmers want fair cattle markets with real competition and clear pricing. They want strong enforcement of competition laws so that consolidation does not squeeze family operations. Many also raised the right to repair, so producers can fix their own equipment and control costs when time matters most.

There was also strong concern about foreign ownership in key parts of our food system. I heard broad support for moving toward mandatory country-of-origin labeling. These steps protect producers, strengthen our supply chain, and help consumers know where their food comes from.

Farmers also talked about raising families in rural South Dakota. Rural childcare and after-school programs matter so that farm families can work, hire help, and keep small towns growing. At the same time, we should protect SNAP for kids and seniors, stop EBT theft, and make sure these programs are run with integrity.

South Dakota’s farmers, ranchers, and rural communities deserve leadership that focuses on real solutions, not short-term fixes. If you believe in standing up for family farms and small towns, I invite you to join this campaign and help us build a stronger future for South Dakota.

South Dakota farmers warned of collapse

Yes, the grassland fire danger index will reach the very high category again Thursday for much of the chemical toilet, sacrifice zone, perpetual welfare state and permanent disaster area that South Dakota is today. 

Learn more at Bill Janklow's idea of public radio.

Page One in Sioux Falls, S.D.:

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) December 11, 2025 at 4:23 AM

South Dakota District 10 candidate touting New Mexico's child care initiative

Extreme wildfire danger licks at chemical toilet

The grassland fire danger index will reach the extreme category this afternoon. Extreme weather conditions and very low moisture content of grasses, and other dry organic material on the ground, indicate that critical burning conditions exist. All fires have the potential to become large and spread quickly becoming erratic with extreme behavioral characteristics. No outdoor burning should take place.

This isn't national forest being blocked from fuel treatments by radical environmentalists; it's Republican ranch land decimated by a century of poor management practices and if livestock grazing is the key to preventing wildfires why is ranch country still suffering from near daily high even extreme grassland fire danger indices? Because Republicans are evil. 

Just a hundred and fifty years ago bison, wapiti, bighorn sheep, pronghorns and deer cleared the grasses driving western South Dakota's fire years. If grasses remained in the fall tribes burned the rest.

Fire departments are struggling with aging fleets, broken-down equipment, and wait times of up to four years for new trucks that now cost double what they did before 2020. https://t.co/XrUoyZG9TZ pic.twitter.com/G0V6McwiNl

— KOTA Territory News (@kotatweets) December 9, 2025

BLM burning LawCo piles

Kristi Noem will go or be fired

Three former Department of Homeland Security officials have made it clear that either Kristi Noem will resign early in the new year or Herr Trump will fire her and replace her with Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin who is leaving that post. It has been reported that South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds will resign and Mrs. Noem will run for that seat in 2026. The Rounds campaign bank account is a tiny fraction of Noem's. Learn more at Raw Story. Image: Marty Two Bulls.

BREAKING: DHS Secy. Kristi Noem is on "thin ice," as President Trump considers removing her as early as January 2026. MS NOW's Jake Traylor has the latest

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— MS NOW (@ms.now) December 8, 2025 at 8:57 AM

More proof Bengs needs to run in the SD Democratic Senate primary

This interested party has been urging Brian Bengs to run in the South Dakota Democratic Party Senate primary or suspend his campaign and stand for SDAG at the 2026 Democratic State Convention. If all South Dakota Democrats and most unaffiliated voters do that maybe it will sink in. Bengs has less than $30,000 in the bank and Julian Beaudion has a little over $31,000 on hand. Learn more here.

PPP poll | 11/13-11/14 RV

South Dakota Senate (informed ballot)

⬜️Brian Bengs 42%
🟥Mike Rounds 39% (incumbent)

(Poll sponsored by Bengs) https://t.co/Ag6AFbvCtb pic.twitter.com/W9FklvOkXS

— Politics & Poll Tracker 📡 (@PollTracker2024) December 5, 2025

Survey 160 poll | 11/6-11/12 RV Generic congressional ballot 2026 🟦Democratic 46% 🟥Republican 39% — President Trump approval Disapprove 61% Approve 36% www.survey160.com/methodologic...

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— Poll Tracker 📊 (@polltracker.bsky.social) December 5, 2025 at 10:35 AM

More people are fleeing South Dakota

Few policymakers dispute the reasons educated people are fleeing my home state of South Dakota. The state's governor is a reactionary cracker. Infrastructure is crumbling. Industrial agriculture is smothering wildlife habitat. Churches are girding for gun violence. Meth has replaced alcohol as the state’s drug of choice. Pierre’s culture of corruption and attacks on kids have ended open government. Native wildlife are being exterminated to make way for disease-ridden domestic livestock and exotic fowl. Jails far outnumber colleges. Bankers continue to enslave landowners and the state’s medical industry triopoly operates without scrutiny.

South Dakota ranks 9th in the top 10 of outbound states. The study said 56% moved out while 44% moved in during 2024. It’s the second year in a row more people have left the state than moved in, according to the study. [KELO teevee]

Freedom? Sobriety checkpoints are being conducted in Bennett, Brule, Butte, Codington, Custer, Day, Hughes, Jerauld, Lincoln, Meade, Minnehaha, Moody, Pennington, Walworth, and Yankton Counties.

de Adder on doomed Cabinet member

Michael de Adder lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

After midterm elections Democrats likely to impeach SCOTUS Justices, too

In January, 2027 after the Democrats retake the US House and Senate they will elect Hakeem Jeffries Speaker of the House, Amy Klobuchar Senate Majority Leader, impeach and remove Trump and JD Vance then Jeffries will become President of the United States. After that, Democrats will annul the Nazist legacy left by the corrupt Trump Organization then impeach Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas if DonOld Trump's rant is any indication.

In a Truth Social post, the president warned that his opponents in Congress aimed to bring down the nation's top court by flooding it with multiple new justices — and that they'd do it on the first day that they won election. [Raw Story]

Cult member Ginni Thomas, the Council for National Policy and others in the extreme white wing of the Republican Party have successfully engineered a scheme to use the packed Court to undo constitutional rights.

Articles of impeachment have been drafted against War Secretary Pete Hegseth for his role in the murders of civilians in the Caribbean and for mishandling classified information. 

Empire?

The Founding Fathers of the United States were deeply, even profoundly, influenced by the rise and the collapse of the Roman Republic. They knew their Plutarch, their Livy, their Polybius, and their Tacitus (especially Jefferson). John Adams considered himself the American Cicero, George Mason the American Cato, and George Washington the American Cincinnatus. [Clay Jenkinson]

Marty Two Bulls pokes the Earth haters

Retiring Minnesota Senator on full IDGAF

Doesn’t this guy have a day job?

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— Tina Smith (@smith.senate.gov) December 2, 2025 at 11:30 AM

Trump tariffs trashing Midwest, South Dakota

Creighton University's Ernie Goss and his Rural Mainstreet Index have been warning of collapse for months and lenders in the Fed's 9th District, which includes South Dakota, said 80 percent of respondents said farm incomes have decreased since Joe Biden was POTUS. More supply managers and bankers expect incomes to decline next quarter because manufacturers and agriculture industries are taking a big hit. The region is in a K-shaped recession and Goss' Business Conditions Index fell to 40.5 in November from 50.5 in October so panic "regarding tariffs, inflation and slowing business activity restrained supply managers’ economic expectations." 

The November Business Conditions Index for South Dakota dropped below growth neutral falling to 49.1 from October’s 51.2 and the average weekly number of workers in the state receiving unemployment compensation is 5.1% higher. The US Dollar is in the shitter and suicide rates in the ag section are spiking.

For the ninth time in 2025, the region’s overall or Rural Mainstreet Index sank below growth neutral.

Approximately, 31.8% of bankers reported that the rural economy was in a recession.

For the 18th time in the past 19 months, farmland prices sank below growth neutral.

Approximately, 58.3% of bankers expect farmland prices to fall in 2026, with an average decline of 3.1% for all survey participants.

On average, bank CEOs expect 18.3% of farmers and ranchers in their area to record negative cash flow for 2025.

Farm equipment sales dropped below growth neutral for the 27th straight month.

According to trade data from the International Trade Association (ITA), regional exports of agriculture goods and livestock for the first eight months of 2025, compared to the same period in 2024,  fell by 5.9%.

Read it all here.

Guest post: Pat Powers has "the IQ of a Brillo pad"

At his Faceberg page Shad Olson is exposing the war raging within the South Dakota Republican Party.

Today, the Jon Hansen mouthpieces are laughing nervously at themselves for their open alliances with the likes of fired SDGOP RINO blogger Pat Powers and now, with the always biased and suspect mainstream press. (Because they all play for the same team.)

You're no longer just "frenemies" when you've shared a dozen War College posts smearing the people you hate. You're a partner and friend.

I'm quite sure Katie and PP text and spoon in their off time.

Toby Doeden appears to have been avoiding an overt attack against Jon Hansen by editing a KELO-TV piece... and they're mad about it, and openly celebrating another Pat Powers hit piece against Doeden, oblivious to the fact that being attacked by either Pat Powers or a network television station is gold standard certification of grassroots authenticity.

These people have the IQ of a Brillo pad, so long as it hasn't been used to scrub a dog's dish or a toilet or any other environment teeming with single celled organic lifeforms. They're correct on one point alone: They're not living in reality and haven't been for some time.

Still waiting for the "massive copyright lawsuit" these brain surgeons were predicting yesterday. Waiting....waiting....

Trump loathes Indigenous Americans: part n

Since at least 1851 treaties that served as constitutions for American Indigenous were broken and are still being rewritten for political expediency. Indian Country even had a champion in Venezuela's Hugo Chavez who practiced Liberation Theology and hated the Holy Roman Kiddie Diddlers.

Despite the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples American Indians are subject to at least four overlapping jurisdictions making tribes the most regulated people in the US without representatives serving in Congress and Native kids are slipping through the education cracks.

This week, the Education Department said it would break off several of its main offices and hand over their responsibilities to agencies like the Department of Labor and the Department of the Interior. “This transfer brings no additional support to our schools, and merely shifts us from one inadequate system to another,” said Steve Sitting Bear, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. “This instability is unacceptable when the well-being and success of our students is at risk.” The education funding and resources the federal government provides to Native Americans are part of the country’s trust responsibilities, which are the legal promises that were made through treaties and acts of Congress in exchange for the land it took from tribal nations. Tribal leaders have said that the administration of those legal obligations have been uncertain and precarious ever since the Trump administration began slashing federal spending and reducing the federal workforce. [Tribal leaders not consulted on Education Department changes]

Learn more at Native Sun News.

What kind of short guy weirdo carries a barking bedroom slipper?

 

Murder on the high seas

This is murder. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

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— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social) November 28, 2025 at 11:16 AM

Textbook war crime/extrajudicial killing "Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck. The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack ... ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions." Report by @alexhorton.bsky.social @ellenwapo.bsky.social o.bsky.social

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— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw.bsky.social) November 28, 2025 at 11:13 AM

Speirs running for Deadwood Commission

It's not his first rodeo. 

Milbank boy, former South Dakota State University golf letterman, economics graduate, now golf club builder and retired house painter, Mark (Spiro) Speirs won a Deadwood Commission seat in 2015. Today, he's running again.

Michelle Powers no longer at NHTC

This interested party has confirmed that Michelle Powers is no longer employed at Northern Hills Training Center in Spearditch. An audit of financial and client records is apparently pending as the war within the failing SDGOP escalates.

The not very flattering image appears at the Black Hills Pioneer.

Shad Olson added more at his Faceberg page.

Dr. Michelle Powers, wife of fired SDGOP RINO shlock-blogger Pat Powers, has reportedly been forced out as Director of the Northern Hills Training Center in Spearfish.

Dr. Powers' alleged departure comes amid year of criticism and staff defections over what some called "dysfunctional leadership" at the NHTC facility which serves the special needs community of the northern Black Hills, including mass resignations by staff members, missed fundraising goals and even allegations of a potentially criminal coverup regarding illegal materials discovered on client laptops and personal devices.

Insiders say a missed fundraising goal at the Training Center's annual September charity gala was followed closely by mass resignations by longtime facility staff, continuing what had been a yearlong exodus of experienced staff members who publicly attributed collapsing client care standards and a festering atmosphere of NHTC leadership unaccountability which had imperiled the facility's ongoing mission effectiveness and credibility.

Political observers of the Northern Hills laylines of the "Mr. and Mrs. Powers" power couple dynamic have also noted a contemporaneous dovetailing of both target and critique published on Pat Powers' blog, Dakota War College, and frequently verbatim online rantings of amateur social media mouthpieces, which have included incessant scurrilous and unfounded attacks on prominent South Dakota conservatives.

Chaco in Trump's gunsights

When the people of the Chaco Wash were building in what is now northwestern New Mexico the ancestors of the Lakota were living in post-archaic North Carolina. 

Today, the oil field traffic some driven by Black Hills Gas Resources near Chaco Culture National Historical Park, creates hazards for Indigenous and visitors alike. Fracking just outside of Chaco threatens to trigger seismic activity under the fragile sacred site and contributes to the methane bubble over the Four Corners area. In 2015 Santa Fe-based Wild Earth Guardians joined other interested parties in suing the US Bureau of Land Management to stop the encroachment. 

In 2021 New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich asked then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to end leasing within a 10-mile radius of the park because Chaco is an International Dark Sky Park at risk to flaring. So, in partnership with the Bureau of Indian Affairs BLM completed a draft resource management plan for Chaco and a decision released. 

In 2023, citing the scarcity and fragility of water supplies in the region a three-judge panel on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the BLM didn’t properly gauge long-term impacts under the National Environmental Policy Act so it suspended some 200 permits and blocked others issued by the Trump Organization. Trump's Interior Secretary has been invited to New Mexico to survey the destruction of the area's cultural resources. 

Genetic markers have identified the Picuris Pueblo predominantly among the Chaco descendants.

Mario Atencio (Diné) always looked forward to visiting his grandmother in Counselor, New Mexico. She lived what he describes as a “simple Navajo lifestyle” in the small rural town, raising dozens of animals on her lush green property, which he remembers as a magical and peaceful place. Two years ago, Atencio became the lead plaintiff in what could soon become a landmark climate litigation case. After winding its way through the legal system, the lawsuit will go before the New Mexico Supreme Court, which agreed this month to hear the case. If the court rules in Atencio’s favor, the case would join high-profile decisions like Held v. Montana, a suit brought by young people who accused Montana of violating their constitutional right to a healthy environment by not regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Atencio v. State of New Mexico could end up forcing the country’s second-largest fossil fuel producer to clean up its act. [Western climate litigants keep fighting]

In vindictive retribution and a slap at Native America the Trump Organization nominated New Mexico Earth hater, Steve Pearce to run the BLM.

In a related story, a coalition of community organizers is growing opposition to an extractive industry intent on raping the Black Hills.

ip image.

Kinney Law deserves space here

Editor's note: Matt Kinney and this interested party have a history.

Grassland fire danger returns to chemical toilet

"This is not America"

SD Earth haters in same primary racing to kill

Editor's note: Marty Jackboots and Casey Crabgrass apparently love bloodbaths. How conservative.

.

1984

BIA Forestry hiring for SD, NE assignments

Uh oh. Even Fox 'News' poll shows Trump doing a shitty job

Read it all here.

Brutal

Marty Two Bulls on Epstein Trap

Marty Jackley is an unapologetic killer

Because he can't resist the urge to kill $20 says Marty would just love to dispatch a condemned handcuffed inmate with a shotgun blast to the abdomen just like someone did for Rich Benda.

Mr. Trump is clearly unwell

Trump: "They had restrictions on water. It comes down from heaven. You want to wash your hands, or like me, you wash your hair. I lather up. There's no water. I won't mention the 3rd item in the bc I always get criticized. If you don't know what I'm talking about you shouldn't be owning a McDonalds"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) November 17, 2025 at 4:56 PM

Trump suggests Khashoggi had it coming: "You're mentioning someone that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen. But he knew nothing about it. You don't have to embarrass our guest."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) November 18, 2025 at 10:46 AM

Norbeck Society, Mertz concerned about lack of timber competition

There aren't enough litigators to sue the Forest Service allowing Republicans to infiltrate management of the Black Hills National Forest and there is no evidence to support the claim that logging is effective insect control. Some imaginary war with the bark beetle on the BHNF is really more a fight for clean water because after all dead trees don't suck aquifers dry. Until forest managers and South Dakota's Earth hating congressional delegation get that they are being preyed upon by the Neimans to take legacy trees and leave the doghair for someone else to deal with because they aren't focused on hardwood release, prescribed fire and restoring the Hills bioregion to what it was 150 years ago.

The above images and the following copy appear at the Norbeck Society's Faceberg page.

Unit 5 of the Stinger Timber sale on the Northern Hills Ranger District. This timber sale was part of the infamous Black Hills Resilient Landscape Project (BHRL). The Black Hills National Forest has largely moved on from BHRL (which involved tens of thousands of acres of overstory removal) so hopefully this is one of the last timber sales covered by that terrible project.

Unit 5 was cut with an overstory removal prescription. This involves cutting most or all of the large trees on a stand and leaving the remaining understory of smaller trees. As you can see, what remains is a doghair thicket. This is some of the worst doghair we have seen on the Forest. How does a situation like this develop? It's hard to say exactly but it was probably a result of a really good pine cone crop years ago followed by really good spring moisture. In other words, perfect conditions for establishing Ponderosa Pine seedlings.

What remains now is a mess. These doghair thickets are really are not good for anything. Under the right conditions, they are a substantial fire risk. Virtually nothing grows underneath them, and they really don't serve any purpose for wildlife.

The Northern Hills Ranger District does have a fairly good track record of pre-commercially thinning young tree stands, as funding allows. Thinning allows them to grow substantially faster and healthier. The sticker is that there is never enough funding to thin all of these dense young stands. We want to be clear, these doghair thickets are a much bigger threat to the sustainability of the Forest than what remains of the sawtimber across the Forest.

We hope that the Northern Hills Ranger District will commit to thinning this doghair thicket.

Dave Mertz is a retired natural resource officer for the BHNF who attended a 2024 roundtable discussion in Spearditch hosted by South Dakota's Earth hating US Representative Dusty Johnson when Johnson sicced two fellow Republican congress members on Regional Forester Frank Beum and BHNF Supervisor Shawn Cochran. His comment below appears at the Norbeck Society's FB page.

Money paid for a regular timber sale can still be used in part to fund the KV Fund. KV stands for the Knutsen-Vandenburg Act. It was passed in 1930 and allows the Forest Service to use some of the proceeds of a timber sale to put back into the sale area for things such as pre-commercial thinning. I believe this is what you are talking about. The Forest used to have a K[V]  fund worth many millions of dollars. The problem is that it has been tapped so much to make up for other budget shortfalls that there is not that much left. Also, timber stumpage values have been relatively low, compared to times in the past, and that results in not much money going into the KV fund. Little competition also results in low bid rates. [Mertz]

Wildfires are still popping up on the Forest but the Bureau of Land Management conducted a prescribed burn north and east of Newcastle, Wyoming to control doghair and reduce fuels.