Dakota Today

*** President Obama and SOTU Speech

OPINION: Tomorrow night President Barrack Obama will again make a State of the Union speech.  I hope he remembers that Abraham Lincoln used something like 88 words for the Gettysburg Address which PBS and SDPB-TV are celebrating with contests for classroom videos.

Obama should cut this speech to a few numbered points that everybody can remember.  He and Kerry have the ability to talk on and on and not make a simple declarative sentence that anybody can remember for more than five minutes.

Suggestion:

1.  We will get out of Iraq and Afghanistan.

2.  We will stop illegal immigration.  We will deport illegal aliens.

3.  The economy is improving.

4.  The economy and education could improve rapidly if members of the US Congress would think more about real issues and problems and less about raising contribution money and services from corporations and the very rich.

5.  Taxes must be greatly increased on the rich and corporations which pay absurdly high executive salaries.  Insanely high executive pay both raises consumer prices and reduces corporate profits and serves no purpose beyond inflating egos and increasing the income disparity.

6. President Kennedy got the race to the moon started.  I will start the race to near energy independence from fossil fuels.  Wind, Solar, and hydro energy and greatly improved home insulation are easily possible.  We can improve our security without huge military expenditures and this energy project will stimulate our economy and provide savings for generations. 

Thank you for your interest and time.  Now, get to work. Ask not what you can do for your donors, but what you can do for your country.

But, we all know that he will ramble on for an hour or more introducing every dog and pony in the US and give us a laundry list and a grocery list.

NOTE AFTER SPEECH: And he did ramble on for an hour and a half or so ...something like 7200 Words.  I have a transcript at RAUCUS CAUCUS.  Not anything I could particularly disagree with as he gave the speech, but also by an hour later, I can't remember a single memorable phrase in the whole thing.

*** Stay tuned even if you have much more patience for flim-flam and humbug oratory than I have ever had--- Doug Wiken

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***It is just so, very, very Winnerish

The powers that be in Winner, SD decided the swimming pool that has been here for years had to be demolished. They pushed a bond through so that property taxpayers will be saddled with a couple million of debt and visitors silly enough to stop here will get dinged a bed and booze tax.
I found a company that made pool liners and above ground water pickup and return for filtering circulation which with a 10 year guarantee on materials and workmanship would have cost something between $200,000 and $300,000.

 Anyway, now in typical Winner fashion of trying to find somebody else to pay for the blunders and excess, the "Pool Committee" has gotten approval for a beer garden during the class reunions coming up soon. They hope to sell some booze and twist some arms of alumni in hopes of getting them to contribute to the new pool.

 Since we have lived around Winner several kids have been killed in fatal vehicle crashes because of drunken driving. A beer party to raise money for an athletic and recreation facility sends a wonderful message.

 Oh, and farmers and ranchers will be welcome if they donate grain or livestock in an accountant-developed scheme to have the federal government provide some tax benefits to a local boondoggle.

 It is just so very, very Winnerish.

**Stay tuned, I may yet get around to showing pictures of the demolished two foot by three foot footings under the 1 foot thick concrete pool walls-- Doug Wiken

**First put good cheese in stinky sock. Bury in manure...

I can remember a photo hanging on the wall of the home of my randparents. The photo was of a barn in the mountains of Norway. My grandmother said that as a young girl, she spent the summers up in the mountains milking cows and making cheese. My father told me that was one of the reasons she had such strong hands. Her family's farm in Norway was apparently large enough that a man on a horse could not go around it in a day. But alas, primogeniture in Norway meant a daughter got none of that on the death of her parents.. so off to America and the plains of South Dakota. The begining of the Uff Dah movement in South Dakota which turned into a peculiar arm of the political parties in South Dakota.

One of my other memories was coming into my grandfather's house years after my grandmother had died. We could smell something like a rotting dead animal in the house. Looked all over for the source of the stench. Finally found it in the refrigerator in a small white porcelain-like jar. Gammalost cheese. See the link below for more than you will want to know about this Norwegian cheese. Needless to say, I never acquired a taste for the stuff.

LINK-- More than you want to know about a sock buried in Manure

I am also not a real fan of Lutefisk..although I do like the melted butter that must be poured over it to make it edible. The link indicates the modern versions of the cheese don't stink like the old stuff. As for lutefisk stinking, my father told of dogs pissing on the dried cod on racks in front of the store in Volin, SD during the winter. Delicious stuff.

**Stay tuned even if your taste in exotic cheese runs the full gamut from Velveeta to Cheese slices individually wrapped and "made of American Cheese Food"--- Doug Wiken

**Somewhere in China........

This news just in from one of the 15 million e-mail spammers somewhere in China: Neophyte entrepreneur Flatsong Indauk has worked out a deal to import all the Chinese-made toys now banned and recalled in the US because of lead-loaded paint for recycling the plastic and the paint in a Chinese village specially reserved for brain-damaging industries.. US Investors are invited to get in on the ground floor..opportunities abound and this ain't Nigeria.

The deal has been approved by the Bush administration because the plan is to reexport all the toys to Muslim terrorist areas of the world as part of Bush and China's long-term plan to gain control of all oil-producing areas of the world. It may take a generation or two of course. Chinese beer as a brain destroyer just isn't an option in countries where alcohol is banned, lead and mercury are the new tools.

Karl Rove has been hired by a multi-national corporation doing the publicity work. Chinese officials hope to have their new green world order plan up and running within weeks. The idea is to find new territories to pollute before all of China is turned into a seething, hissing mass of green pollution slime over boiling red pools of pollution.

Oh yeah, if your own e-mail gets bounced by your own unidentified ISP for unknown reasons, it might be because their mystery spam trapper is set to stop all mail with "tiny url" links in them. Just happened to me. Frustrating trying to find out what was going wrong too. And more frustrating than that, is because much of the actual spam requiring the spam filters is coming from China. Maybe more on this or maybe not.

**Stay tuned even if you don't want more news from the Damned Small World Department--Doug Wiken

**Goodbye Rove..Democrats will miss you in the next election

Karl Rove said Goodbye to the White House today...at least his on the record work for the White House.

Can Democrats drag him into hearings now? Can Democrats still campaign against Rove in the next election?

Whoa...there is the question. Good a time as any to slink off and remove one more roadblock to GOP getting anybody elected in the next election.

The happy fact is however that there isn't one Republican running for president who can win anymore than Hubert Humphrey could win as long as he did not criticize LBJ and the Vietnam War. Unless of course that Republican is to stand up on his back legs and tell the truth about the junior Bush and his lies about the Iraq war.

Don't hold your breath waiting. For that matter don't hold your breath waiting for Hillary Clinton to do it either. Hillary may be the only Democratic candidate any Republican running for President can beat. I just don't have any faith in polls indicating how many people will vote for a woman as president. Who is going to tell a poster "I am such a hopeless Neanderthal male chauvinist pig that there ain't a woman alive I would vote for as President." Nope, but what will they do in the voting booth? About the same thing they did when Geraldine Ferraro was the VP candidate.

Howard Dean may be the only Democrat who could not lose. But, he doesn't seem inclined to want to be butchered by the corporate media and banking interests scared plumb shitless of what he would do about media and banking and insurance mergers, and the military-industrial complex,etc.

Anyway, remember when LBJ had HHH "by the balls" and Hubert never said anything critical about the Vietnam war or LBJ and he lost to Tricky Dicky and his "secret plan to end the war".

The war worm has turned. This time it is Republican candidates are all Huberts who can only win if a totally incompetent Democrat who has also voted for the Iraq war runs against them.

Not sure if you heard it here first or not.

**Stay tuned even if you think it is not the worm that turned, but a basket full of rattlesnakes--- Doug Wiken

**How can I resist giving a plug to a blog that "spotlights" Dakota Today?

Well, it isn't a blog by Fargo North, Decoder, but it is really a North Dakota Blog and golly gee whiz, they have "spotlighted" or is that "spotlit" Dakota Today. A blog with a bad pun for a name can't be all bad that does that.

Turnabout is fair play, so take a look at the "North Decoder" blog:

LINK--NorthDecoder Blog..Work Saver for the Media

Lots of good links there too. Look around. In fact, if you check their "About" information, this blog is a reincarnation or stepchild of Bismark Democrats with a more general name. Guess that means more editing to do on Dakota Today.

I may have to steal the "spotlight" idea. I plan to rework the SoDak blog list and the small blog header images may be the way to do that.

**Stay tuned even if you can't tell me the way to go to Sesame Street via North Dakota--- Doug Wiken

**News from the Department of Pissing in the Wind

Oh dear, this seems more than passing strange. The Blogger who calls himself "PP" is referring to former US Senator Tom Daschle as "STD".

The National GOP rings a bell and the SD GOP bloggers respond salivating and panting like Pavlov's dogs and start barking at Sen. Tim Johnson. I guess it is the right of the GOP lapdogs if they think it is a good tactic, but it does seem just a bit tacky as does referring to Tom Daschle as STD. I thought the "STD" crap was the work of some juvenile mind herpes-addled tasteless busybody making tee shirts for juvenile minds in college and highschool who will wear any free tee-shirt no matter what it says.

Frankly, there are better reasons to not letting Daschle and Johnson reenter the Senate and those involve their votes for the Bush war powers. Anybody watching the Moyers "Selling the War" special again last night on SD Pub TV even if it was filled with mind-numbing appeals for contributions for public TV, ought to know that we don't want Senators who ignored the obvious or displayed nothing like a profile in courage. Anybody who can look Bush in the eyes and trust the smirking twit hasn't enough gut instinct or brains to be in the US Senate or the US House. The late Ann Richards and Molly Ivins of Texas had the junior Bush pegged and any politicians who ignored them was failing in their pursuit of information.

We need a complete house cleaning in our congressional representation. Senator Thune, Senator Johnson, former Senator Tom Daschle, US Representative Herseth all should be relegated to the dustbin of history for their votes allowing Bush to trash the constitution and make a war on the basis of lies of omission and commission, deception and deceit. Those votes will go down in history as some of the greatest mistakes ever made by Senators and Representatives just as the junior Bush administration will be remembered as one of the greatest failures in the history of the United States.

Anybody who actually gives a tinker's damn for the lives of our soldiers should be pushing for getting out of Iraq as soon and as inexpensively as possible. Only candidates committed to restoring the separation and balance of power put together in the constitution, ending this war, and stopping future jingoistic discretionary wars of pre-emptive aggression should be elected in the coming elections.

A vote for the Bush wars is and was inexcusable. Senators Ted Kennedy and Sen Robert Byrd and a few dozen actual reporters made the vote for the Bush wars painfully obvious as wrong-headed or based purely on partisan political expediency. We don't want the inexcusables making any more decisions for us in Congress.

**Stay tuned-- Doug Wiken

**Former Senator Daschle back campaigning in SD

I happened to see the Todd County Tribune today..at least I think it was...didn't buy it because I had already pissed away $2.50 on newspapers today..the news keeps getting thinner and thinner in them.. but that is another story. Anyway, front page had a picture of Tom Daschle smiling on the reservation.

Paper said, "former representative Tom Daschle". I guess the prestige of the US Senate has been forgotten already on the rez. How quickly they forget..or was it a neophyte reporter? Daschle was said to be representing the Washington, DC law firm he is a part of.

Daschle was searching for law clients in the area of wind energy and economic development on the reservation.

Call me cynical, but my guess is that Daschle is providing wind for a new campaign rather than being particulary interested in harvesting prairie breezes for energy production. Even so, with the power lines crossing the reservation and the wind blowing as it does out this way, it might be a good idea.

Guess we will just have to see what comes out of that. He sure didn't stop in to shoot the breeze with a blogger who thinks he should be permanently retired from politics because of his war vote..but I guess given a choice of Daschle or a Republican who still supports Bush, I would without much enthusiasm cast a vote for Daschle.

**Stay tuned even if you are satisfied with Democrats in pink tutus---Doug Wiken

**Zero to sixty in 60 years..or less than five seconds?

A Gregg Easterbrook column in the LA Times makes a point with some statistics on traffic crashes and fatalities and fatalities and expense from terrorism. Below are the first paragraphs. The whole column is worth reading. Thanks to John who posted a comment here with a link to this story. Esterbrook fails to mention the impact of drunken driving that was part of the point of my original post here at Dakota Today

Road kill Why are we so worried about terrorism when so many more people are dying on our highways? By By Gregg Easterbrook August 5, 2007

Suppose 245,000 americans had died in terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001. The United States would be beside itself, utterly gripped by a sense of national emergency. Political leaders would speak of nothing else, the United States military would stand at maximum readiness, and the White House would vow not to rest until the danger to Americans had been utterly eradicated.

Yet 245,000 Americans have died because of one specific threat since 9/11, and no one seems to care. While the tragedy of 3,000 lives lost on 9/11 has justified two wars, in which thousands of U.S. soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice, the tragedy of 245,000 lives lost in traffic accidents on the nation's roads during the same period has justified . . . pretty much no response at all. Terrorism is on the front page day in and day out, but the media rarely even mention road deaths. A few days ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that 42,642 Americans died in traffic in 2006. Did you hear this reported anywhere?

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-easterbrook5aug05,0,1379980.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

http://tinyurl.com/ynknbo

LINK--LA Times Source for Esterbrook story

**Stay tuned even if it has taken you 60 years to get from zero to sixty---Doug Wiken

**Uff da..Scandia Store in Rapid City, SD is closing

A year or two ago, I posted something here about the Scandia Store on Main Street in Rapid City, SD. It was a neat store just to visit and if you had any money and also happened to be of Scandinavian ancestory, had interesting products as well.

Anyway, just got the card in the photo below yesterday. Because of "family health circumstances", the store is being closed...sale is labeled "Bad News-- Good news".

So, take a look at their stuff. The woodworking done in the store itself was interesting and it appears that may be for sale as well. Wish the family running the store well and say goodbye to an interesting idea...Scandianavian commercial outpost in Rapid City.

The store probably wasn't a hot spot of motorcycle activity this time of year...probably no aquavit for sale there.

**Stay tuned even if no posts here from Ms. Rose Maling ---- Doug Wiken