State of South Dakota snubs tribes, will sell railroad right of way to Kansas polluter

South Dakota's rail board is made up of two Democrats and five members of the Republican American Nazi Party. A majority has voted to put all of the state-owned track up for sale.

Watco Companies owns some 43 shortline railroads in North America and Australia but in Chicago the firm has been accused of environmental racism after the US Environmental Protection Agency found high levels of manganese, lead and arsenic in the soil on the city's Southeast Side. Chicago is a notorious railroad bottleneck where spills of toxic materials are myriad. Based in Pittsburg, Kansas Watco's biggest customer is Koch Industries, a major campaign contributor to Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. 

After USEPA required Watco to install air monitors for manganese, the facility in February 2019 committed to stop handling unpackaged manganese. However, throughput data reported under a zoning change adopted in response to community pressure shows massive amounts of the neurotoxin moving through several other Southeast Side facilities. The monitoring data also shows significant spikes in manganese, indicating that harmful emissions are not under control despite USEPA’s enforcement actions and the City’s regulations. “If Lincoln Park had these levels of lead, arsenic or manganese, the Mayor would do everything in her power to fix it,” said Peggy Salazar, director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force. “When this happens in the Southeast Side or the West Side, no one seems to care about the consequences that our kids have to live with. We are calling for an end to environmental racism in Chicago.” [Natural Resources Defense Council]

Despite those revelations the State of South Dakota intends to sell the former Milwaukee Road right of way from Mitchell to Rapid City to Watco instead of deeding it back to the tribal nations signatory to the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868.

The move comes after catastrophic plunges in commodities prices, numerous wrecks and water breaches on track owned by Rapid City, Pierre and Eastern Railroad (RCPE), a subsidiary of Genesee and Wyoming operating just north of the former Milwaukee line on a nearly parallel trackbed. The Trump Organization's Department of Transportation headed by the wife of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has just awarded more than $5.6 million in grants to upgrade infrastructure and enhance rail safety in the red moocher state that is South Dakota including $2.24 million for the RCPE mainline.

Recall that in 1997 the perpetual welfare state received $23 million from taxpayers for going without Amtrak service then TEApublican former governor, Mike Rounds squandered it on an airplane for his personal use now Republican Governor Kristi Noem is using it to campaign for Herr Trump.

This blog spoke to a RCPE executive in 2015. She said that the line connecting Rapid City to Crawford and Dakota Junction, Nebraska is active and hauling bentonite south from Colony, Wyoming to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and to the Union Pacific but building two east-west rail systems exclusively for freight in South Dakota is lunacy. 

The same geology that thwarts RCPE along the Bad River from Fort Pierre to Wasta and forces engineers to rebuild I-90 between Reliance and Rapid City and I-94 between Mandan, North Dakota and Billings, Montana every year also makes construction of the Keystone XL pipeline untenable.

Photo: rail switch on the former Milwaukee Road at Stamford in occupied South Dakota.

Sioux Falls diocese scraping the barrel for officiants

Joe Biden or not the Roman Catholic Church believes their pederastic officiants can transubstantiate bread and wine into the body and blood of a Jew who has been dead for some 2000 years then offer that to a Mass. How is that even normal? 

Although nothing untoward ever happened to me as an altar boy for Fr. Louis J. Miller at Our Lady of Good Counsel a high school girlfriend told me their family attended Mass in Aurora because Miller had done something bad in Alaska then was transferred in the late 1950s to the Elkton parish under Sioux Falls cleric, Lambert Hoch. Hoch was born in Elkton. Marlboro-smoking, scotch-drinking Louis Miller was elevated to monsignor, built a gorgeous church and grade school, coached St. Mary's basketball then was nearly decapitated in a life-ending automobile accident near Pierre in 1968. Fr. Leonard Fox, the bean-counter who succeeded him and assigned to pay the bills was a greasy sleazeball who drove me from catholicism.

 

Pennsylvania used a grand jury for the statewide investigation of predator priests and the Philadelphia Diocese is the bishopric of former Rapid City primate Charlie Chaput but don't expect suspected incel Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg, a former altar boy, member of the Church of the Holy Roman Kiddie Diddlers and who is now suspected of manslaughter to take on both South Dakota Dioceses.

At Ss. Simon and Jude Catholic Church in Flandreau, St. Peter Church in Colman and Our Lady of Good Counsel in Elkton, the Rev. Melvin Kuhn has replaced the Rev. Doug Binsfeld. Melvin Kuhn, 55, grew up on a farm in central Illinois, attended Catholic schools, earned a college degree in agriculture and worked for the Department of Agriculture before answering his call to the priesthood. “I’m just thankful to be a priest. I started late. If there wasn’t a shortage of priests, I might not have gotten a second chance,” he said. [Moody County Enterprise] 

The Order of the Presentation opened St. Mary’s in Elkton where I attended grade school but the nuns were from the Dominican and Benedictine Orders, too. They were Commies who taught us Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Puff, the Magic Dragon.

Photos above are from probably 1964 or ‘65. This scribbler is the tall kid wearing a bishop’s mitre in the middle of the upper left pic. 

Democrat Ahlers surging in South Dakota US Senate race

My opponent, Mike Rounds, said that the decision not to consider Judge Merrick Garland was a "directive of party leadership, not his." Funny, I thought he worked for the people of SD. As your next U.S. Senator, I will work for you.https://t.co/pA8NbUse4U pic.twitter.com/8DoQzzjdv7

— Dan Ahlers (@ahlers_dan) September 26, 2020

 

In a campaign fundraising email to supporters Senator Reich Mike Rounds (earth hater-SD) said he believes the Democratic blue wave is building momentum even in my home state and that "South Dakota could be the sleeper race that delivers Democrats a majority in the U.S. Senate." One of the least effective members of Congress, Rounds, bragged he could build a $9 million war chest in 2013 but has less than $2 million in the bank today. 

Dan Ahlers is a Dell Rapids businessman and former state legislator.

Dan Ahlers, a Democrat, is running against Mike Rounds, the coward who refused to impeach Trump thereby allowing the deaths of 190,000 Americans. We need an independent thinker, a true South Dakotan, as our U. S. Senator and not a man so afraid of Trump that he ignores all of his lies and deceit. [Editorial, Native Sun News Today]

Former Governor Rounds was elected to the US Senate with cash from the Kochs’ National Federation of Independent Business. The so-called “Americans for Prosperity” is a Koch-soaked dark money group with an agent in Sioux Falls. South Dakota's GOP legislators and candidates enjoy millions in lobbyist benefits from the Kochs and their American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC.

Rounds continues to play the cancer card releasing another video pimping his stricken wife and pleading with doubtful supporters to continue funding his crusade toward a second term.  In her bid to drive Rounds onto the ash heap of history upstart Republican primary contender Scyller Borglum has appeared with Governor Kristi Noem to raise awareness of youth art in South Dakota.

I’m a twenty year volunteer for DSCC, DCCC and DLCC charged with South Dakota as a territory but until now nobody in those organizations believed a Democrat could win any statewide race in the red moocher state. 

Ahlers has even been endorsed by South Dakota Republican former US Senator Larry Pressler.

Photo: Rounds poses with morbidly obese Brookings-based blogger Pat Powers.

Medicine Root will scrub white man's name from tribal community

This blogger has been arguing for Lakota names on South Dakota's geological features for nearly thirty years. 

A state park, a peak, a county and a town in the Black Hills, a county and national forest in Montana are named after a murderer. During the Battle of Greasy Grass on the banks of the Little Bighorn River in Montana George Custer attacked the encampment where the elderly, women and children were hidden and during the Washita Massacre he held a similar contingent as hostages and human shields. 

Crow Peak or Paha Karitukateyapi just outside Spearditch is translated as "the hill where the Crows were killed" stemming from a battle between the Lakota and Crow Nations. The Crow allied with Custer and the United States Army believing they would reclaim the Black Hills. Custer’s name is on a peak in the Black Hills National Forest and should be removed. It's time to strike his name from the Custer National Forest, too. George Custer, Phil Sheridan, George Crook and William Harney all committed crimes against humanity yet their names still besmirch numerous government and geographical features. Crook City near Whitewood and Crook's Tower, one of the 7000 footers in the Black Hills, were named after a war criminal. 

Revisionist history turned the Wounded Knee Massacre into a battle but Senator Mike Rounds (NAZI-SD) said he won't vote for the Senate companion to the Remove the Stain Act that would rescind Medals of Honor for twenty war criminals responsible for the slaughter of children, women and men in 1890 at Wounded Knee in occupied South Dakota. But he and the South Dakota Republican Party are hardly the only racists in the colonized American West. 

Outside Yellowstone National Park the Hayden Valley memorializes Ferdinand V. Hayden who advocated for the extermination of tribal people and Mount Doane is named for Lieutenant Gustavus Doane who led a massacre of the Piikani, part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. One reason Republicans don't like Common Core history standards is that the curriculum long-ignored by textbooks includes genocide and near-extermination of American Indians by European colonialism.

The South Dakota Board of Geographic Names spent more of their time on renaming the Squaw Humper Dam than on the proposal to change the name of a local jurisdiction to Oglala Lakota County. Now Bismarck, North Dakota is considering a change for a mal-named park. 

Democratic former Representative Kevin Killer backed the name change of the South Dakota county from one based on white conquest and helped get the issue passed in 2015. He is a recipient of a Bush Foundation grant. 

Sunday night, the Medicine Root District executive board voted unanimously 4-0 to change the name of the community of Kyle to Little Wound. “This decision is something I really applaud, it’s the right thing to do,” said Kevin Killer, past SD state legislator who led the movement to change the name of Shannon County to Oglala Lakota County, “there’s not enough time to put together a referendum vote by the general election but they should take the issue to the county commission.” 

Read the rest here.

Front Range passenger rail not happening any time soon

Combined with some $5 million it has set aside, $1 million from the state and a $5.6 million federal grant Amtrak will conduct track and infrastructure improvements for the Southwest Chief between Trinidad, Colorado, Lamy and Los Cerrillos, New Mexico. 

Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and the Rio Metro Transportation District, which operates the New Mexico Rail Runner, will lay new ties along a 31-mile stretch of track south of Raton Pass, replace some 12 miles of bolted rail with welded rail between Lamy and Los Cerrillos and complete installation of a Positive Train Control system. 

Earlier this year Game of Thrones author George RR Martin and two other New Mexico celebrities purchased the Santa Fe Southern Railroad and the depot in Lamy. The State of New Mexico bought the track bed that Amtrak's Southwest Chief uses from just north of Lamy to Behlen south of Albuquerque from the BNSF Railway when the Rail Runner was built. BNSF owns virtually all the rail rights of way in New Mexico. SFSR was featured in the Breaking Bad episode, Dead Freight. 

“Our past and current investments, from Kansas through Colorado and New Mexico, demonstrate our commitment to the Chief route and also preserve this segment for eventual inclusion in a north-south connection along the Front Range between Denver and Albuquerque, via Colorado Springs and Pueblo,” Bill Flynn, Amtrak’s president and CEO, said in a news release. [Albuquerque Journal] 

Amtrak has long expressed interest in establishing passenger rail service along the Front Range but that "project is a long way away from reality." 

As rail coal traffic dies Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) and the Big Sky Rail Authority have moved nine counties to restore the North Coast Hiawatha line through southern Montana after Amtrak ended service in 1979. A Front Range route would connect the Southwest Chief to the Empire Builder at Shelby, Montana through Denver, Cheyenne and Gillette, Wyoming and intersect with the North Coast Hiawatha line at Laurel, Montana.

ip photo is of the Lamy depot.