Tag: politics

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Openly Dirty Tricks

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

Hey, South Dakota Democrats! Let’s make trouble: let’s nominate Gordon Howie to run for U.S. Senate.

Former Republican legislator Gordon Howie announced this month that he is running for U.S. Senate as an Independent. The Rapid City conservative says he wants to ensure that voters have a conservative on the ballot. Democrat Rick Weiland and apostate Republican turned Indy Larry Pressler clearly do not fit Howie’s arch-conservative mold; Howie and some other conservatives contend that pragmatic GOP front-runner Mike Rounds doesn’t, either.

Howie’s bid might suggest a lack of confidence in his friend Rep. Stace Nelson’s ability to carry the Ted Cruz-y/Rand Paul-y conservative banner to victory in the primary. But Howie just co-hosted a fundraiser for Nelson and swears that he will withdraw from the race if Nelson beats Rounds in June. Howie seems to be engaged in some pragmatism of his own, offering conservatives a Plan B, just in case Nelson’s message can’t muscle past Rounds’s millions.

The only reason I like Howie’s Plan B is that it helps Rick Weiland. It boxes Rounds in: he can’t attack Nelson too hard in the primary, because that would alienate Nelson’s hard-right supporters, who could (as Kevin Woster notes) happily hand their votes to Howie in November. That increases the chances that Nelson can stage an upset in the primary, and Weiland can beat the cash-poor Nelson more easily than he can beat the Nine Million Dollar Man.

Democrats should want Gordon Howie on the ballot. Democrats can sign to put Howie on the ballot (any registered voter of any party can sign a petition for an Independent candidate). But do Democrats dare sign for a candidate who threatens religious freedom, opposes women’s rights, and tramples on the U.S. Constitution? Can one in good conscience sign a petition for a candidate one would never want to win?

Fortunately, Gordon Howie won’t win. His tax-dodging, illegal mountain-lion killing, and general political ineffectiveness (see his fourth-place finish in the 2010 GOP gubernatorial primary) will keep him from winning statewide office. Democrats outnumber Howie supporters; he will only win enough votes to split a possible Rounds majority with Pressler and increase the chances of a Weiland victory by plurality.

At that point, Democrats can look at placing Howie on the ballot not as a risk to the Republic but as a tactical move to help their candidate win.

So here’s the deal, Democrats: if that calculus and your conscience square, and if you didn’t sign for Weiland (you can’t sign two!), go find a Howie supporter by Tuesday, April 29 (they’ll have clipboards and Agenda 21 buttons) and sign Howie’s petition.

But then you have to do penance: you have to promise you will send Weiland nine bucks. You will vote for him in November. You will bring a friend and tell 10 others to vote for him in November.

Gordon Howie wants to run against Rick Weiland. Let’s help him run … for Rick Weiland.

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.

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Money Talks

By Ken Blanchard

Samuel Johnson famously said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. That would be a lot more help without the word”foolish.” When is consistency foolish and when is inconsistency wise? It is hard to be consistent because sometimes we like certain ideas and other times they become inconvenient. Occasionally it happens in the same sentence, as when someone says that you shouldn’t impose your values on others or declares solemnly that there are no absolutes. The first fellow is at that very moment imposing his values on others and the second is declaring an absolute truth.

More often it is a matter of applying the same principle in one case and denying it in another case. When the United States Supreme Court recently struck down aggregate limits on political donations, the chattering class was almost universally appalled. The court had ruled that such limits violate the First Amendment freedom of speech, but is spending speech? With a few notable exceptions (Michael Kinsley for one) the left answered with a bombastic”no!”

It is true that money isn’t speech in the same sense as opening one’s mouth isn’t speech. However, duct taping someone’s lips together is an effective curb on speech and limiting one’s power to spend can be an effective limit on the expression of ideas. If you say that a newspaper is free to print whatever opinions its editors choose so long as they don’t buy any paper or ink, you are no friend to the freedom of the press.

In fact the folks who are strenuously denying that money is speech know very well that it is. If you don’t believe me, ask Brendan Eich. He now has some time on his hands. Eich was, very briefly, the CEO of a company he co-founded. Then he was forced to step down. Six years ago he donated $1,000 to the campaign for Proposition 8 in California. Prop 8 amended the state constitution to say,”only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” That was the sin that cost him his job.

Now I pause here to note that I am in favor of legalizing same sex marriage. I would not have contributed to Prop 8 or voted for it, had I voted in that state where once I lived. I also believe in freedom of speech and thought, and it seems to me that we live in dangerous times when a man can lose his job for taking sides on a ballot proposition.

What is important here, however, is that Eich took a position that was shared by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Senator Tim Johnson. President Clinton, after all, signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which did on the Federal level what Prop 8 did in one state. Yet none of the latter have suffered much for their positions. I doubt very much that those who opposed Mr. Eich for CEO will fail to vote for Hillary Clinton if she is the Democratic nominee in 2016.

And why is that? It is because no one is fooled. Bill and Hillary and Barack and Tim didn’t really believe that same sex marriage was wrong. They took a position that they didn’t really believe in for reasons of political expediency. Mr. Eich, by contrast, could have had no ulterior motive. He suffered because his donation was a genuine expression of his beliefs.

That would be the point. Brendan Eich’s cool grand was obviously political speech. Instead of standing up on a soapbox or writing and printing his two cents worth, he donated to an organization that represented him on this issue. Eich has been defended by those who oppose gay marriage. He has also been defended by those on the left and the right who believe in free speech. No one, I think, has risen to defend him on the grounds that his contribution wasn’t speech at all.

If you really believed that money isn’t speech you would have to believe that someone’s political contributions are politically irrelevant. No one really believes that. To deny, then, that money is speech is foolish inconsistency. That almost means that the denier is a fool.

Editor’s Note: Ken Blanchard is our political columnist from the right. For a left-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Cory Heidelberger every other Wednesday on this site.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.

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Casey at the Generational Bat

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

I’m not the only person speaking from the Left in South Dakota. Democratic activist, Navy reservist, and pretty smart South Dakotan Ryan Casey unsettled the Sioux Falls Rotary Club Monday with a speech on generational change and South Dakota politics.

Casey ascribes to generational theory, which ties American political cycles to a seemingly Newtonian theory of how young people respond to their forebears: for every generation, there is an equal and opposite re-generation. Kids compensate for what they perceive as their parents’ mistakes and shortcomings and become a generation acting politically different.

Casey says two types of generations dominate our political cycles: idealist generations and civic generations. Baby boomers, says Casey, are idealists. His generation, the millennials, are civic … um, civil … civilians … civicisticists? Casey doesn’t help me out with a noun.

George McGovern mobilized his civic generation, who’d grown up seeing an active federal government saving South Dakota’s skin. They saw government as an effective tool for solving problems. (Hmm … even McGovern’s Republican colleague Karl E. Mundt liked government building dams and Interstate highways.) The idealist baby boomers looked at Dad McGovern and Grandpa FDR and reacted with conservative idealism (starring McGovern contemporary Ronald Reagan, who shows generational theory is a sociological explanation for how the electorate works, not a psychological explanation of how each individual will vote).

Casey sees idealists currently in charge of South Dakota. He spotlights the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act as a perfect issue to frame the differences between those idealists and the new civic generation which Casey sees rising against the idealists in charge. South Dakota’s idealists reject Medicaid expansion on principle, saying we shouldn’t take money from an unreliable, debt-ridden government. Casey says nuts to that. He and his civic friends just want to solve problems:

A couple of Ph.D. economists from the University of Nebraska-Kearney delivered a report to state legislators in Pierre last month. Over the next seven years, they found, the net impact on the state of South Dakota revenues alone is estimated to be $64 million dollars! … [I]t gets better when we calculate the economic benefit for the state that Medicaid expansion would bring. That number is $1.04 billion over seven years. And oh, by the way, we get to provide health care for more than 48,000 South Dakotans who don’t currently have it … [Ryan Casey, speech to Sioux Falls Rotary Club, 2014.03.31].

Casey clearly hopes that generational theory predicts a civic generation supplanting idealist power to do practical, if Lefty, things like expanding Medicaid. I find that prospect appealing, but if Casey is right, does generational theory doom our aspirations? In 35 years will Casey and I be the complacent old white men at Rotary, shifting uncomfortably in our seats as some young whippersnapper tells us that her generation is kicking us out and bringing back good old Reagan-Daugaard conservatism?

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.

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Dumb and Dumber

By Ken Blanchard

Maybe the best read I ever got of the two political parties came from my favorite font of wisdom: my Dad. When I asked him what a Democrat was, he told me that they were the stupid party. Being about 9 years old at the time, I wanted to mull over that word”party.” But I forged ahead and asked about Republicans.”Well,” he replied thoughtfully,”they’re just plain dumb.” You have to admit that whatever his answers lacked in specificity, they made up for in comprehensiveness.

My Dad was Republican, but I didn’t know this until I was in high school. We lived in Arkansas, where Republicans ranked just below communists and atheists among people you wouldn’t leave unattended with your livestock. It occurred to me later that African American voters in my native state supported the Democratic Party because they saw it as the party of civil rights, while a lot of white Democrats hated Republicans because that was the party of Abraham Lincoln. That is one interesting political coalition.

Dad kept his political cards pretty close to his vest for fear that if his political affiliation got out business partners wouldn’t come to dinner and relatives would come to blows. He was Republican because he was conservative. He thought that people were naturally inclined to do too much of what they want and not enough of what they ought. He didn’t think that human beings were bad by nature but he did think that it wasn’t easy for us to behave responsibly. He thought that the great expansion of federal spending in the second half of the 20th century was irresponsible and unsustainable. He did not trust the Republicans to be responsible about such things but he did trust the Democrats to be irresponsible. For that reason, he preferred the dumb party to the stupid one.

Now that Pops is gone, I notice that the President has produced a budget that makes any number of rosy assumptions about the future but does nothing to move the federal government in the direction of fiscal responsibility. He has said on more than one occasion that our vast entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, are not on a sound fiscal footing and need reform. He has stripped even the smallest hint of such reforms out of his budget. The Senate Democrats have announced that they are not even going to work on a budget. House Republicans will produce a budget, but it will contain unrealistic assumptions and proposals that are woefully inadequate to the problems we face. The best thing you can say for the Republicans is that they at least try to address the problem.

The federal budget process has all but ceased to function. The cause is hardly invisible. Part of the federal budget is referred to as”discretionary spending.” That’s the part that Democrats want to increase but Republicans want to rein in. Unfortunately that portion of the budget is shrinking. It is being steadily and inexorably squeezed out by entitlement programs. Those count as non-discretionary spending, because they grow automatically unless Congress and some President finally decide to get real. That won’t happen any time soon because those programs are enormously popular. I think the average American realizes the dilemma but wants Congress to solve it without producing any inconvenience. We, and I mean we, are in the position of someone who wants to lose weight and will do anything it takes, so long as that doesn’t include diet and exercise.

When I was a child I thought my Dad knew everything. When I was in my early teens I thought he didn’t know anything. The older I got, the smarter Dad got. He didn’t know everything but he may have known what was important. We have two great political parties that are able to act with imagination and dispatch in that narrow space between stupid and just plain dumb.

Editor’s Note: Ken Blanchard is our political columnist from the right. For a left-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Cory Heidelberger every other Wednesday on this site.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.

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A Tale of Two Campaigns

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

I will eat my hat and yours if South Dakota’s U.S. Senate race becomes a battle between Rick Weiland and Annette Bosworth. Weiland’s path to the Democratic nomination appears to face no obstacles other than his gathering the requisite petition signatures. Bosworth’s only route to victory in the crowded GOP primary depends on Mike Rounds getting indicted over EB-5 and her not getting indicted for raffle fraud.

But Bosworth and Weiland offer an instructive study in opposing campaign strategies. Both candidates are mixing different traditional campaign strategies with new social media strategies. But they are pursuing very different courses in trying to reach and build a South Dakota base.

Weiland is taking his message straight to South Dakotans. Since July, Weiland has been touring the entire state, vowing to visit every town in South Dakota … twice. Just today (March 5) Weiland launched an eight-day, 57-town tour with morning stops in Platte, Dallas and Wood. He’s doing a town hall in Martin, then looping through the Black Hills and all of West River.

Weiland’s campaign team regularly posts notes and photos of his peripatetics online. Weiland is taking advantage of social media to document his travels and engage his supporters. Jumping on the suggestion of a Bowdle backer, Weiland crowdsourced (one of those fancy new Web words, meaning getting a bunch of people to do stuff for you) a video montage of regular folks all over the state saying “I met Rick!” The video is hokey, homey, grassroots fun. In a minute and change, this social media clip captures both the techno-with-it-ness a modern campaign needs and the “I am South Dakota — all of South Dakota!” message a candidate must project to win in this state.

Annette Bosworth started her campaign with a similar but “exploratory” tour of the state in June. Since officially entering the race, she seems to have scaled back her travels. Bosworth has made a few forums and other public events (most recently, she was spotted seeking signatures at the Sioux Falls Sportsmen’s Show). But Bosworth has spent less time working the cafes and front porches and more time working the Web. Her social media accounts offer an endless barrage of conservative hot-button blurbs targeting a nationwide audience for online “Likes,” contact info and donations.

Bosworth is mining that nationwide market for support with old-fashioned direct mail. Working with the well-known Washington direct-mail firm Base Connect, Bosworth has engaged in a nationwide mailing campaign that uses a massive GOP mailing list and arguably predatory tactics to raise money. Bosworth’s strategy earned her an impressive $315,314 in the fourth quarter of 2013, more than Rick Weiland, Larry Pressler, and every other Senate candidate besides Mike Rounds combined. Most of that money came from out of state, from folks who won’t be around to sign a petition or vote for her. Bosworth’s strategy cost her serious overhead: 81 percent of that Q4 take is already obliged to debts she owes to Base Connect and the folks sending her team’s beg letters and doing other work for the campaign.

Bosworth is betting on big spending to distinguish herself from the primary crowd. Weiland is happy to take your money, but he’s more likely to ask you for that money face to face, here in South Dakota.

Bosworth thinks she can buy your vote; Weiland is trying to earn it. We’ll see whose strategy South Dakotans buy.

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.

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Selectively Desperate

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

In my last column I got hot and bothered about Senate Bills 67 and 128, bills that sought to protect discrimination against homosexuals as religious free expression. Neither bill has survived, and I’m hoping House State Affairs rejects a similar bill this afternoon (February 19).

While the Legislature is showing some good sense in foiling the proposals of its less temperate members, I’m hearing some cognitive dissonance on how the values of some South Dakotans stack up against our desire for economic development.

First, consider the gay-discrimination bills. In Senate Judiciary testimony on February 18, Sen. Mark Kirkeby (R-35/Rapid City) asked if SB 128 would allow a religious pharmacist in a small, one-pharmacy town to refuse to fill a prescription for a gay customer. SB 128 advocate Mark Chase said he didn’t think SB 128 would apply to pharmacies and restaurants. SB 128 refers pretty clearly to “private businesses,” and pharmacies and restaurants are private businesses. One can conclude, then, that backers of SB 128 were encouraging pharmacists and other South Dakota businesspeople to stop doing business with gay customers.

Business owners, help me out here: how many of you doing business on Main Street Yankton, Sisseton or Lemmon can tell one in 23 of your customers to take a hike? I could be wrong, but I’m willing to speculate that South Dakota pharmacists and bakers with too many customers are few and far between.

I didn’t hear economic development discussed much among legislators on SB 128 and similar anti-gay bills. But economic development was a primary reason House State Affairs killed HB 1176 today (February 19). Rep. Stace Nelson (R-19/Fulton) brought his bill to block South Dakota’s use of the EB-5 visa investment program. Rep. Nelson presented documents suggesting EB-5 investment poses national security risks by placing U.S. economic assets under Chinese Communist control. Rep. Bernie Hunhoff (D-18/Yankton) responded that not using EB-5 would put South Dakota at a disadvantage to every other state that uses EB-5 for economic development, and down went HB 1176. Mention economic development, and other concerns disappear.

We find a similar attitude down the road from Pierre in Winner. Mayor Jess Keesis says the Keystone XL pipeline will be great for his town. Mayor Keesis laments that Winner’s strip clubs have had to shut down. Keesis says TransCanada’s planned nearby workers’ camp will bring business back to town, at least for a couple years. Never mind the predictable man-camp crime, wear on roads, and increased energy costs Keystone XL will bring; Keesis says South Dakotans can’t pass up any economic development opportunity:

Out here on the prairie, you know, we’re a tough people …. We deal with drought and 8-foot blizzards and all kinds of stuff all the time, so anytime we can get something like this to give us a shot, it’s a good thing. [quoted in Rob Hotakainen, “American Indians Versus the Pipeline,” Governing, 2014.02.18].

In one breath, South Dakotans are tough! In the next, we’re too weak to oppose any chance to make a buck, no matter how risky. That’s cognitive dissonance.

The conservative proponents of anti-gay legislation in South Dakota seem oblivious to the economic consequences of discrimination. Yet on other issues, South Dakota politicians of many stripes reach a little too quickly for “economic development” as the justification for their actions without considering the full impact of programs and projects on South Dakota’s interests.

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.

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It’s Time for Keystone

By Ken Blanchard

It says a lot about the environmental movement that the opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline is judged a success whether or not it actually stops the pipeline from being built. The New York Times has this:

Although some critics say the environmental movement has made a strategic error by focusing so much energy on the pipeline, no one disputes that the issue has helped a new breed of environmental organizations build a mostly young army eager to donate money and time. The seven-year-old email list of 350.org, an organization that focuses on climate change, has more than doubled to 530,000 people since the group began fighting the pipeline in August 2011. In addition, about 76,000 people have signed a”pledge of resistance” sponsored by seven liberal advocacy groups in which they promise to risk arrest in civil disobedience if a State Department analysis, expected this year, points toward approval of the pipeline.

The Keystone XL project has also raised the profile of a diverse generation of environmental leaders, like the activist Bill McKibben, a former writer for The New Yorker and founder of 350.org, and the billionaire venture capitalist Thomas F. Steyer, who is estimated to have contributed at least $1 million to the movement and has starred in four 90-second ads opposing the pipeline.

So all the delays in the approval process, all the folks standing around with Stop Keystone signs, all the passionate bloggers, appalled pundits, and concern Congresspersons served this purpose: increasing the email list of 350.org and raising the profile of an activist and a billionaire.

It has accomplished little else beyond delaying the inevitable. The most recent State Department review of the environmental impact of Keystone XL confirmed what the last recent State Department review concluded: building and operating the pipeline won’t make any appreciable difference.

The reason is obvious. Oil is energy and energy is valuable. If Canadian tar sands oil is worth more than it costs to separate the tar from the sands, then the oil will flow. If it doesn’t flow into a pipeline that runs toward refineries on the Gulf Coast (entering South Dakota in Harding County and exiting southeast of Winner), it will flow somewhere else. A pipeline toward Canada’s west coast might carry it. Otherwise it will be loaded on trains. According to the Washington Post, 180,000 barrels of Canadian Crude are moving on trains every day.

The trains don’t run on wheat grass extract, they run on fossil fuels. And they occasionally leave their tracks. In July 2013, a runaway train derailed in the town of Lac-Mƈgantic, Quebec. The resulting explosion killed 47 people, destroyed 30 buildings, and necessitated the evacuation of the entire town. Pipelines may occasionally leak but they do not run off on their own in the middle of the night.

To see that building Keystone XL makes sense, all you have to do is consider the arguments against it. The New York Times complains that the pipeline will not create a lot of long-term jobs. That may be true if one considers only the people directly employed in servicing and operating the pipeline. However, that oil will flow to American refineries, which employ a lot of folks. Meanwhile it will create a lot of jobs while it is being built, and right now is when a lot of people need jobs. Others have argued that the refined oil will be sold abroad, perhaps even (horrors!) to China. Okay. Refining crude resources and then selling them is one of the chief sources of national wealth. The U.S. will not be better off, economically, if the oil doesn’t cross our borders.

The Keystone project has been under review for five years, longer than any similar project. It has passed every review. Even the Washington Post recognizes that it is time to get on with it. Environmentalists are certainly right that we ought to be concerned about the natural environment and that we ought to take climate change seriously. It is not enough to be concerned, however. What we need are solutions that take reality into account. The reality is that our civilization will depend on fossil fuels for some time to come. When the environmental movement measures success by the increase in their email list instead of policies that actually benefit the environment, it is squandering its resources.

Editor’s Note: Ken Blanchard is our political columnist from the right. For a left-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Cory Heidelberger every other Wednesday on this site.

Dr. Ken Blanchard is a professor of Political Science at Northern State University and writes for the Aberdeen American News and the blog South Dakota Politics.

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Anti-Civil Rights Bills Bad for Business

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

I’ve written previously on these pages that the South Dakota Legislature doesn’t do a great job of building South Dakota’s brand with a broader audience. The 2014 Legislature continues its poor performance, making South Dakota sound like a haven for folks who want to erase the Civil Rights Act.

First this session came Senate Bill 67, a bill intended to protect religious bakers from the terror of having to make wedding cakes for homosexuals. As worded, SB 67 would have permitted shopkeepers, lawyers and perhaps public officials to deny services to any married couple whose union somehow didn’t square with their religious beliefs. Got divorced and remarried? Sorry, I’m an old-school Catholic, and divorce is a sin. You’re a white woman, and you married a Lakota man? Sorry, St. Paul tells me no miscegenation, so you can’t stay in my motel. Yeesh!

After some public outcry, prime sponsor Sen. Ernie Otten withdrew SB 67, not because he saw the light of equality, but because he concluded that the discrimination he craves is already legal.

Worse, some of his conservative colleagues quickly followed up with Senate Bill 128, which goes beyond the wedding-cake homophobia of SB 67 to allow bosses to fire employees because of their sexual orientation, to nullify federal civil rights laws, and to impose legislative restraint on the judicial branch.

Responding to criticism from a young constituent at a Rapid City cracker barrel on Feb. 1, SB 128 author Sen. Phil Jensen farcically called his bill an “anti-bullying free speech bill.” The only free speech SB 128 protects is the speech of bullying businesses that want to hang signs on the door reading “Straights Only.”

Technically, South Dakota law already gives Senators Jensen and Otten the right to discriminate against homosexuals as their bills advocate. We already ban same-sex marriages. Our public accommodations law does not include sexual orientation as a protected class. That law does ban sex discrimination, and the federal government does interpret sexual orientation as an expression of sex.

But South Dakota’s law and these proposals from our legislators make our state look bad. SB 128 has drawn negative out-state attention. Some Republican legislators are backing away from this civil rights black eye. U.S. Senate candidate Rick Weiland calls SB 128 a return to Jim Crow. Independent candidate Larry Pressler has warned that SB 128’s retrograde attitude toward civil rights could cost South Dakota jobs and Ellsworth Air Force Base (why would Uncle Sam keep a military installation in a place where its soldiers’ gay spouses couldn’t get jobs?).

Senators Otten and Jensen can swing their religious fists all they want. But their rights end when their Bible-clutching fists start hitting other people’s noses. SB 67 sought and SB 128 seeks to drive certain people out of South Dakota businesses. Unfortunately, such proposals will drive even more people away, and drive some South Dakotans out of business.

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.

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Can We Shoot for Second-Worst?

By Cory Allen Heidelberger

I have made this argument before. Sandy-eared ostriches in the Legislature require that I make it again, and again….

The South Dakota Legislature this week considered a resolution–not a practical, policy-changing bill, mind you, just a resolution–that acknowledges a shortage of teachers in South Dakota due in part to low teacher pay. HCR 1002 passed the House over some objection from Republicans with poor reading comprehension. No Senators spoke against the resolution, but the Senate killed it Tuesday 15ā€šĆ„’19.

Evidently some problems are too brutal for a majority of Senators to talk about, let alone solve.

The teacher shortage resolution didn’t explicitly call for raising teacher pay, but it should have. Recent data show South Dakota is last, last, last in teacher pay, stunningly last, 30 percent below the national average, 10 percent below 48th-ranked Oklahoma, and six percent below 49th-ranked Mississippi. According to 2013 Quarter 3 data, South Dakota’s cost of living is only 0.5 percent below the national average.

HCR 1002 mentioned the drop in young people choosing to work in education in South Dakota. Who can blame them? Our perennially low teacher wages make it harder for South Dakota graduates to deal with another ongoing problem, our high rates of student debt. A new report confirms reports from 2010, 2011, and 2012: South Dakota college graduates lead the nation in student debt, with 78 percent of our graduates carrying student loans. Their average debt is “only” $25,121, a middling amount compared to other states. But for those hardy young souls who go into teaching, why would they pass up the chance to move one state in any direction and pay off their student loans much faster with an average $8,000 to $18,000 pay hike?

Why won’t we invest? Why have we let ourselves be this cheap for this long?

Why don’t we rouse a campaign to erase our shameful status of stiffing our teachers? Let’s see teachers, parents and students marching down the streets arm in arm, crying “Forty-Ninth! Forty-Ninth!” Let’s see candidates for governor and legislature vow, “We’re not shooting for the moon, just Mississippi!” Pegging a minimum wage for 9,200-some South Dakota teachers to Mississippi’s next-worst in the nation would take $22.4 million a year. It would take $42.1 million to beat Oklahoma. (Get out the Saturn V to reach Minnesota: we’d need $154.4 million, a 39 percent increase in Governor Dennis Daugaard’s proposed state aid to K-12 for FY2015.)

Money doesn’t grow on corn stalks. But South Dakota found a million dollars to hand to a floundering beef plant, even as the state faced a crushing $127-million deficit. This year the Governor is finding $30 million to pour into his economic development fund sooner than planned.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. The debate over HCR 1002 shows that South Dakota lacks the will to even talk about being better than worst in paying teachers what they are worth.

Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.

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If We Could Just Talk…

By Cory Allen Heidelberger


We South Dakotans can create good laws, if we just talk to each other.

After discovering a neighbor’s dog locked in a shed and starved to death, Shari Kosel of Lead got some fellow South Dakotans together and worked to toughen South Dakota’s animal cruelty laws. Last winter, she and her group South Dakotans Fighting Animal Cruelty Together (SD FACT) got legislators to consider Senate Bill 171, a measure to make willful cruelty toward dogs, cats, and horses a Class 6 felony.

As Senate Bill 171 gained publicity, Kosel got a phone call. A man asked her if she was going to put him in jail for baiting his fish hook with a worm.

Crazier charges flew on the Web and in the press. Kosel was a front for the Humane Society of the United States, the b’te noire of ag industry groups. Out-of-staters would use SB 171 to hamstring South Dakota agriculture.

Nutty talk prevailed, and a Senate committee killed SB 171.

But then a funny thing happened. Instead of talking about Kosel and SD FACT, some folks decided to talk with them. In August, state veterinarian Dustin Oedekoven invited Kosel and fellow campaigner Sara Parker of Sioux Falls to a face-to-face meeting with representatives of the Farm Bureau, Ag United, the Cattlemen’s Association, the Stockgrowers Association, the Pork Producers… a big, scary array of the ag industry voices who had been saying those nutty things about Kosel’s proposal last winter.

Kosel faced her political opponents and said she and her group are “not going to tell a farmer how to do his job.” She said she just wants to protect animals from acts that any South Dakotan could agree are vicious, horrible crimes deserving serious punishment. And she said she and SD FACT really are South Dakotans, just like everyone else in that room.

The state vet listened. The ag lobby listened. And this week, Dr. Oedekoven announced that the folks at that August meeting have worked together to produce an animal cruelty bill that is just as tough as last year’s SB 171 and possibly broader. An initial draft makes animal cruelty a Class 6 felony, expands the ban on dog fighting to prohibit training any animals to fight, and, just like Kosel’s SB 171, protects agriculture, fishing, and other normal activities from prosecution under this proposed statute.

South Dakota is the only state that does not make animal cruelty a felony. North Dakota left us behind last year, upping its animal cruelty penalties while South Dakota’s Legislature wallowed in wild innuendo and outright lies about the supporters of such penalties here.

If we end our embarrassing last-in-the-nation status on animal cruelty laws this session, it will be because Big Ag lobbyists Michael Held and Lorin Pankratz and other South Dakotans were able to step out from behind their propaganda, recognize Shari Kosel and her colleagues as fellow South Dakotans, and recognize their common interest in doing right by our four-legged friends.


Editor’s Note: Cory Heidelberger is our political columnist from the left. For a right-wing perspective on politics, please look for columns by Dr. Ken Blanchard on this site.

Cory Allen Heidelberger writes the Madville Times political blog. He grew up on the shores of Lake Herman. He studied math and history at SDSU and information systems at DSU, and has taught math, English, speech, and French at high schools East and West River.