Tyler: "All of the Constitutional Amendment votes need a 'No.'"

Obese Earth hater Pat Powers believes Amendment K is a "wise investment." Like most of us do, retired South Dakota legislator, Kathy Tyler believes he's full of shit.

Here's a one post summary of the amendments:

The first is Amendment I which repeals Medicaid Expansion if federal funding goes below 90%.

Those who cared started fighting for Medicaid Expansion at its inception in 2010 (2014). Since the SD legislature wouldn't pass approval of the expansion that would provide health insurance for thousands of people below a certain poverty line, a citizen led petition drive with thousands of signatures got the issue on the ballot in 2022 where it passed with 56.21% of the vote. Since the legislature thought that the citizens didn't know what they were talking about, they voted to place Amendment I on the 2026 ballot.

So...here we are again.

I'm against the Amendment change for these reasons and am very willing to discuss. From the SOS's website:

"A vote NO would keep the South Dakota Constitution

unchanged and preserve Medicaid expansion as approved

by South Dakota voters in 2022.

Medicaid expansion provides health insurance to adults

with incomes up to $1,835 per month (about $22,00 per

year) for a single individual or $3,142 per month ($37,700

per year) for a family of three. Before expansion, many

low-income South Dakotans had no affordable way to see

a doctor or fill prescriptions.

A vote NO would allow approximately 30,000 South

Dakotans who receive insurance through Medicaid

expansion to keep their insurance and access the care

needed to stay healthy, support their families, work, and

contribute to their communities.

A vote NO would ensure that changes in federal funding

do not automatically take health coverage from South

Dakotans.

Statement from Deb Fischer-Clemens, RN, BSN, MHA"

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Kind of boring, but so important #2--Constitutional Amendment J.. "clarifying that an individual must be a citizen of the United States to be eligible to vote."

Again, submitted by the legislature.

This rule is already established in South Dakota as stated on the South Dakota Secretary of State's website:

"12-4-1.2 Voter Registration form - Certification.

The voter registration form must include a certification of voter eligibility by which the applicant attests, under the penalty of perjury, that the applicant:

(1) Is a citizen of the United States;

(2) Will be eighteen years or older on or before the next election;

(3) Is a resident of the state of South Dakota;

(4) Has not been judged mentally incompetent;

(5) Is not currently serving a sentence for a felony conviction; and

(6) Authorizes the cancellation of a previous registration, if applicable."

And, Article VII of the state's constitution states the same:

" § 2. Voter qualification. Every United States citizen eighteen years of age or older who has met all residency and registration requirements shall be entitled to vote in all elections and upon all questions submitted to the voters of the state unless disqualified by law for mental incompetence or the conviction of a felony. The Legislature may by law establish reasonable requirements to insure the integrity of the vote."

Waste of time and not necessary.

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Kind of boring #3--Constitutional Amendment K.

This amendment establishes a trust fund for the unclaimed property fund. Here is the AG's explanation.

"Under South Dakota statute, intangible property is presumed to be abandoned if it remains unclaimed by the owner for more than three years after it became payable or distributable. Examples of intangible property are traveler's checks, money orders, bank deposits, refunds, stocks, funds owed under a life insurance policy, and property held in a safe deposit box. Abandoned intangible property is transferred to the State Treasurer to hold while waiting for the owner to claim it. The State Treasurer must provide public notice of the abandoned property. This proposed constitutional amendment establishes a trust fund where unclaimed abandoned property' will be deposited. Portions of the interest and from this fund will be distributed into the general fund for the benefit of the state. This proposed amendment requires the Legislature to determine the amount to be distributed that promotes the growth of the trust fund and the distributed amount."

At the surface this sounds pretty good, but legislation such as this should be written and endorsed by the legislature in the form of legislation, a law, not a constitutional amendment. What happens if down the road, a glitch is found? The only option to change the constitution is via a state-wide ballot initiative.

The legislature passed this unanimously. Why? I have no idea. If there was that much support, legislation would have passed.

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Constitutional Amendment L is probably the most egregious of all the ballot questions. It mandates a 60% majority for an amendment to be passed by the people via the ballot.

Let's look at the history of this amendment proposed by the legislature.

Getting a referred law or constitutional amendment on the ballot for a vote can be done two ways---petitions with LOTS of signatures or Legislative mandate for constitutional changes. (See picture). It takes LOTS of work.

I think it all started with the minimum wage law referendum in 2014 which raised the minimum wage to $8.50. But the legislature didn't think the public knew what it was talking about, so it changed the law. It was referred again in 2020. This was the start of the legislature changing/killing referred laws. This led to petitioners referring constitutional amendments instead of laws even though the number of signatures is basically twice as much. Constitutional amendments cannot be changed by the legislature. It also led to numerous new rules governing the petition process..some okay; most not. But that's another topic.

So, now, the legislature wants to change it so that a 60% majority of voters is needed to pass a constitutional amendment. A simple majority will no longer rule. The reason given basically is that "we want to make sure the public knows what it really wants." (That's a translation from a candidate page.) Amendment L is an insult to voters; it's a punishment for the petition process; and it's a cop out for legislators who think the public doesn't know what it wants.

Big Brian Bengs continues to expose Reich Mike Rounds

Koch-backed fascists, National Federation of Independent Business, have endorsed Earth haters short, fat guy Reich Mike Rounds and divorced philanderer Marty Jackboots. Since 1990, NFIB has donated only $725,551 to Democratic candidates and party committees compared to gifts amounting to $11,972,074 to Earth haters and their PACs.

50 dollars. That’s how much military personnel can accept before a gift becomes a bribe.

I was a military ethics advisor, and I’m running against the system that lets Big Money Corporate PACs legally bribe politicians and corrupt our system. pic.twitter.com/Q92vKAphQg

— Brian Bengs (@BrianBengs) September 24, 2026

No surprise to see Mike Rounds at the top of the list. Spending hundreds of thousands in taxpayer dollars to fly private — considering he won’t hold town halls and won’t debate me, he’s gotta make sure he doesn’t run into any South Dakotans at the airport either. So much for… https://t.co/xym6kmFHCn pic.twitter.com/wE9SdV1SE6

— Brian Bengs (@BrianBengs) September 26, 2026

I find it very convenient Mike Rounds has finally decided to care about USPS service in an election year. Folks have been sounding the alarm for YEARS. pic.twitter.com/osbYn078vD

— Brian Bengs (@BrianBengs) September 25, 2026

SDSU Student's Association recognizes college land grab

Despite the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862 that distributed unceded lands in the public domain to raise funds for colleges. 

After the defeat of the 7th Cavalry at Greasy Grass in 1876 and the Great Sioux War Congress abrogated that treaty in 1877 and the Utes, Lakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne and others who migrated, lived and hunted all along the Front Range were driven into concentration camps.

In 1980 attorney Mario Gonzalez filed the federal court case stopping payment of the Black Hills Claim award to the Oglala Lakota Nation. Gonzalez contends that the commission charged to make peace with tribes inserted language into the Fort Laramie Treaty signed in 1868 that Red Cloud had neither seen nor agreed to in negotiations. 

In 2019 during an episode of The Keepers, a podcast produced by the Kitchen Sisters and NPR, the lead Archivist at the National Archives told listeners lawyers are combing the records for treaties with tribal nations none of which have been honored by the United States.

The Morrill Land-Grant Acts are directly linked to the Native American Genocide and South Dakota State University is just one of those offenders. SDSU was funded using 160,000 acres of land-grant scrip or parcels. A significant portion of the lands allocated for South Dakota's land-grant fund came from territory originally recognized under treaties with the Sioux (Oceti Sakowin) nations, including the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 and subsequent agreements that were systematically altered or violated by the federal government as white settlement expanded.

Ordinance 26-1-O passed during Monday night’s Students’ Association (SA) meeting, establishing a formal and acknowledgement for all SA Senate Meetings. The ordinance was created in collaboration with the American Indian Students’ Association (AISA). SDSU’s land acknowledgement, created through the Wokini Initiative, will be read after the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of each SA meeting. Senator At-Large Paul Fasen said he spoke with members of his constituency after initially reading the ordinance and asked them whether or not they care about the land acknowledgement. “Resoundingly, the constituents that I talked to said that they didn’t care,” Fasen said. “One person actually said that he would prefer it if we didn’t include this land grant.” [Students’ Association passes land acknowledgement]

Spearditch is asked to separate church and state

Spearditch is the seat of whiteness in LawCo and in the winter Exit 14 looks like a monument to the clear-span building that has been air-dropped into Antarctica so life-long residents drive to Rapid City and Denver to shop forsaking local merchants. 

The resultant soaring median age of the retirees seeking deliverance from the cultural diversities thriving in Colorado, California, Minnesota, even Arizona and Oregon drives the exploitation of South Dakota's regressive tax structure and reinforces the racially insulated Nazist enclave that Spearditch is today. 

But, to little surprise, the assisted living, funeral home and florist industries do very well and now that brown workers can take the driver's license exam in Spanish white people can spend more time snorting and shooting meth. Many, if not most, of these obese Republican slackers take advantage of the dynasty trust industry and flee the frozen tundra in their RVs ahead of consecutive six-month winters and strings of below-zero days.

A christianic invocation adopted in 2025 by the Spearditch City Council between the roll call and the Pledge of Allegiance was added at the request of disgraced, fired former city administrator Bobby Falcon but on Monday, two residents asked the city council to reconsider the addition. 

Following mounting public and council pressure over performance and transparency, the Spearditch civil authority voted unanimously in February 2026 approving a separation agreement, paying $250,000 and parting ways with Falcon because of opacity obscuring a 1995 felony conviction in North Dakota where he had been convicted of simple assault, terrorizing, and preventing arrest.

“By asking people to stand if they want to observe is dividing this community … There is too much division already,” said [Spearditch] resident Rosalie Aslesen. She asked the council to remove the request to stand from its invocation. A second speaker, Jay Desort, went one step further. He asked the council to suspend the practice altogether. Desort asked that the city attorney be directed to do research on the topic for discussion. On Monday, both Aslesen and Desort said they plan to fill out an agenda item request form to ask the city council to formally reconsider the invocation. [Black Hills Pioneer]

USD journo tackles CTE

The NFL, the Fox group and the Trump Organization are among the country's most hated companies so dissolving the NFL then ending college and high school ball can't happen soon enough. 

A 2017 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found 110 out of 111 brains of those who played in the National Football League had chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). In 2023 Arizona State’s Neurodegenerative Disease Research Center learned that the worst damage to developing brains comes from repeated blows to the head especially among those who play American football.

A University of South Dakota journalist is telling readers just how horrible the results have become.  

Eight-hundred-seventy-eight former NFL players died between 2016 and 2021. Researchers were able to examine 235 of the deceased players’ brains, and found CTE in 215 (91.5%) of those brains. This means that at least one in four NFL players have the disease. Tanner Peterson, the coordinator of athlete mental health, addiction & preventative services at USD, discusses student athlete mental health and what he looks out for. Peterson compares mental health to physical health, “Just like we anticipate physical strain with student-athletes, we also want to equip them with the tools to manage the mental and emotional strain of being a student-athlete.” The disease cannot be diagnosed until after death however, so the current rate of CTE in current NFL and football players is unknown. [Brady Cartledge, The Volante]

"Chronic traumatic encephalopathy has devastated generations of football players. Does that mean it’s unethical to be a fan?" www.statnews.com/2026/09/14/f...

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— STAT (@statnews.com) September 14, 2026 at 11:10 AM