12/18/15

Oregon tribe entering cannabis agreement with state; South Dakota falling down

Republican former South Dakota legislator Stan Adelstein has come up with a novel alternative to raising taxes on himself.

Fellow GOPer South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard's Blue Ribbon Task Force found need of $75 million to implement its findings. The GOP-heavy task force is leaning toward a regressive sales tax increase to nudge teachers' salaries out of 51st place.
Members of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs said yes to growing, processing and selling marijuana on the recreational market in a historic vote Thursday that drew record turnout, tribal officials said. The referendum passed with 86 percent approval, said Don Sampson, CEO of Warm Springs Ventures, the tribes' economic development corporation, the group behind the proposal. Thursday's vote is the first step in the process of entering the market. The tribe will meet with officials in Gov. Kate Brown's office to hash out the conditions under which the enterprise will operate. Two tribes in Washington recently brokered historic agreements with the state to sell marijuana on the state's recreational market.
Read it here.

Stan Adelstein is the second wealthiest white man in South Dakota. Of course he would expect other people to pay the taxes. He's is the poster boy for South Dakota crony capitalism.

In 2003 i met with Adelstein to persuade him to sell me the Roundhouse in Lead. He told me he would never sell it then promptly sold it to someone from out of state. Adelstein routinely buys Mike Rounds’ support for Israel while unearthing minerals that used to belong to people who lived in the Black Hills for millennia and then has the temerity to make somebody else give him property tax relief. It makes me puke up in my mouth.

I’d rather see implement taxes earmarked for highway infrastructure upgrades. As long as oil prices stay low ethanol is going out of style very quickly. I really don’t care what happens East River because it’s already destroyed but West River can still be rewilded and preserved. I want to see money for West River land owners who would put their ground back into native grasses be exempt from taxes and leased as wildlife corridors. I want to see domestic livestock confined to internment camps East River where Hutterites will ultimately control all the ag ground there.

Stan’s generosity is genuine. Nobody can take that from him. He’s been pounded on by way bigger bullies than i am.

Adelstein’s plan is DOA, people. Anyone who believes anything he says is delusional.

Republican Rapid City lawyer, Doyle Estes wants to raise taxes on those least able to pay to fund task force recommendations.

South Dakota is one state where the perception of harm from cannabis is declining.

A law that decriminalizes cannabis in Delaware went into effect today.
A spokeswoman for Democratic Gov. Jack Markell said legalization will free up resources to be used elsewhere and limit the number of people incarcerated by the state. With the changing attitudes toward pot nationwide, full legalization may be just around the corner, particularly if the federal government chooses to change marijuana laws. Even if that is the case, however, the time line is very much in doubt.
Read the rest here.

South Dakota: urge legislators to pass a corporate income tax, end video lootery, reduce the number of South Dakota counties to 25, turn Dakota State University into a community college, and adopt my cannabis template: the kurtz solution painted on a thumbnail.

Nanny state blogger: teen skin cancer okay!

Scott Munsterman is a statesman like Pat Powers is a triathlete.
Representative Scott Munsterman of Brookings says he is bringing a bill to Pierre in January that would add South Dakota to the list of states that ban tanning to anyone under the age of 18. [Today's KCCR]
Former lawmaker, Steve Hickey believes Rep. Munsterman is one of the only sane Republican legislators left in Pierre.
The American Cancer Society and the World Health Organization have placed tanning booths in the same category as tobacco and asbestos: Carcinogenic to humans.
Read that here.

SDGOP blog bully Powers embraces usury but cannabis prohibition is not nanny-statism. He has kids suffering from autism yet he decries an effective therapy for the afflicted.

Video lootery, payday loan sharks, domestic violence and homelessness are inextricably linked putting children at risk to more catastrophic consequences far more often than has happened in states that have legalized or lessened penalties for casual use of cannabis.

If Munsterman was a real statesman he'd offer legislation that would create excise taxes on firearms and ammunition.

Little wonder cops abuse their families, alcohol, drugs, food, power, detainees and even occasionally murder their wives.

I'd add the link to Powers' comments but his blog loads so glacially you'd find something else to do before you could read them anyway. Here's a quote from him about Munsterman's initiative:
It is so overly intrusive in a free society that we have to be offended by it. If we're not, then we need t examine what we believe our definition of freedom is. [Dakota War College]
The hypocrisy of that statement is so over the top in light of his resistance to legal cannabis it reads like satire.

The US Department of Justice is siding with Colorado and asking the Supreme Court of the United States to dismiss a case brought by Republican attorneys general in Oklahoma and Nebraska.

The US Federal Drug Administration hosts a Frequently Asked Questions cannabis page and has announced a campaign to raise awareness of the dangers of tanning booths to youthful skin.

Powers has long been banned from this and other South Dakota related sites because of a constant stream of bigotry, misogyny and other hate speech.

12/17/15

Daschle, Lott: Congress at 'Crisis Point'



Montana Senator Max Baucus threw fellow Democrat Tom Daschle under the bus during a pre-confirmation quarrel in 2009.
Why doesn’t anyone mention Tom Daschle when they talk about possible Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate election in 2016? The retirement of the party’s last federal office-holder, U.S. Sen. Tim Johnson, last year left the Democrats without a leader. So the question remains. If not Daschle in 2016, then who? [excerpt, Bob Mercer]
President Obama's pick for Health and Human Services Secretary, Daschle was widely expected to push Congress toward a Medicaid-for-all health care plan as Big Pharma-backed Baucus worked to pass the Affordable Care Act or ObamaCare. Daschle withdrew from nomination.

Note during the video introduction that Daschle proudly said he is a Democrat from South Dakota.

How often does anyone say that any more?

With Harry Reid stepping down as Minority Leader and the possibility that Democrats could retake the Senate why wouldn't Tom Daschle, who retains his seniority if elected, want to reach for the brass ring an unvetted, ethics-negative John Thune can't touch?

Ponderosa pine not native to Black Hills

Okay, i have put off this post long enough.
A new analysis of the fossil record by scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has revealed that the structure of plant and animal communities changed significantly about 6,000 years ago, around the time agriculture began to spread across North America. Obviously, something had changed the way plants and animals interacted with each other and with their environments — the question that remained was what might have been the cause. The researchers had two main theories: the first was that changes in the climate were responsible, and the second was that some kind of other biological pressure, likely human activities — which were on the rise during this period in history — was to blame.
Read that here.

And, from the US Geological Survey:
Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), the most widely distributed pine in North America, experienced one of the most rapid and extensive of these post-glacial plant migrations. The eastern race of ponderosa pine (variety scopulorum) spread northward along the Rocky Mountains, starting at its northernmost known distribution in southern New Mexico and Arizona around 13,000 years ago, and reached central Montana only within the last millennium. The western race (variety ponderosa) experienced a parallel but less well-known migration along the Sierra Nevada, eventually mingling with the northernmost populations of the eastern race in the northern Rockies. [Climate Past as Prologue for Ponderosa Pines]
Talk about shutting the barn door after the horses were incinerated by arsonists.
Any fire study that only looks back as far as 1979 ignores huge fires that resulted from major droughts in earlier decades. The 1970s were one of the wettest decades on record, with an average of just 3 million acres a year burned. By comparison, there were 9 million acres of annual fires in the 1950s; 23 million in the 1940s; and 39 million in the 1930s. While there are some problems with data from those early decades, they are valid enough to show that recent changes in droughts and fires are due to cyclical variations in climate, not to human-caused warming. [The Antiplanner]
How firing off those forests didn't contribute to a warming planet remains a mystery.

Global warming has been accelerating since humans began setting fires to clear habitat, as a weapon or just for amusement. The Industrial Revolution and European settlement in the New World took hardwoods for charcoal then humans allowed fast-growing conifers to replace lost forests.

According to the US Department of Interior forests, grasslands, shrublands and other ecosystems in the West sequester nearly 100 million tons (90.9 million metric tons) of carbon each year.

The US Forest Service responded to 52 new wildland fire starts totaling 23,425 acres during just one day in August. 15,089 of those acres are in the Northwest. The US Army mobilized to assist with structure protection. A record 35 Incident Meteorologists were deployed to support firefighters and to provide vital weather info to responders.

Latest reports place western wildfire damage at a record-breaking 6.9 million acres so far this season, 45% higher than in an average year. Half of the Forest Service budget is ear-marked for wildland fire costs and this year's allotment is up in flames.

Dense Douglas fir, spruce, lodgepole, ponderosa pine stands prevent aspen restoration and hardwood release while opposition to mechanical harvest rages on in the environmental community. No longer natural after a century of fire suppression Montana's forests are building fuel loads in habitats where indigenous cultures cleared for millennia.

Last year the western spruce budworm defoliated 25,000 acres of Douglas fir, Engelmann spruce and lodgepole pine in northwestern Wyoming: more evidence of anthropogenic climate change.

Trees growing on public land are not agriculture any more than wild salmon are aquaculture. One part of a solution to forest management woes is to move the US Forest Service from the US Department of Agriculture into Interior where American Indian nations could more easily assume additional responsibilities for stewardship on public land.

People building in or near these hazards should be denied homeowners insurance but blaming federal land managers for running out of money to protect private property while denying climate disruptions are influenced by human activity is just delusional.

Pre-emptive burns and managed lightning-struck fires are essential to restoring balance in western ecosystems just like letting bison crop invasive grasses is to the Greater Missouri Basin.

There are no naturally-occurring white spruce in the Wyoming Bear Lodge Mountains likely due to the massive aspen community there.
The area near the headwaters of Middle Redwater Creek is hardly extraordinary. Located in the Black Hills National Forest 10 miles north of Sundance, scraggly trees and brush surround shallow ponds and slow-moving streams. Because the beavers left, the ponds started to deteriorate. This not only affected finescale dace, which were no longer in the immediate area, but also surrounding vegetation and deer, waterfowl and other wildlife. But people eventually moved in, killing beavers, blowing up dams and redirecting water for human consumption and use. This transformed the environment of the region. Aside from that, the finescale dace still hold an important place on the landscape if nothing else than the fact they are a “glacial relic.” [Sheridan region biologists work to preserve finescale dace]
Recall that dace was the only fish identified in Black Hills streams by the Custer Expedition in 1874 and trout are not native to the region. Creek chub and white sucker are also native fish.

Box Elder Creek is still running in December because of the mountain pine beetle's feast of pine while a town named for a war criminal is preparing another celebration of ecocide.

South Dakota Governor Denny Daugaard is a climate and Anthropocene denier yet state climatologist Dennis Todey is ringing the climate alarm.

So, the question remains: should rewilding efforts seek to restore sustainable wild lands to Pleistocene Era conditions or let the Anthropocene lay waste desertifying precious resources changing the landscape forever leaving survivors to cleave out habitable zones forsaking native species?

“Clearcuts are the prescription for lodgepole pines,” according to Kelly Norris, the Wyoming State Forestry district forester in Buffalo.

Get cattle off the Black Hills National Forest and make it part of the Greater Missouri Basin National Wildlife Refuge.

If enviros succeed in driving from office the only Democrats who can preserve public lands and leave Republicans to their devices we are truly fucked.