There I go talking to Republicans again.
Rep. Tona Rozum (R-20/Mitchell) doesn’t share Rep. Tom Brunner’s (R-29/Nisland) heartburn over Senate Bill 1, the big road bill the Legislature passed Friday. Rep. Rozum says SB 1 is the best thing to come out of the 2015 Session (followed by juvenile justice reform and the prospect of that Blue Ribbon panel doing something for education):
Rep. Scott Munsterman (R-7/Brookings) agrees that roads and juvenile justice are big deals and adds his not-exactly conservative autism treatment coverage mandate to the list of top achievements for the 2015 Legislature:
Rep. Roger Solum (R-5/Watertown) was also eager Friday to see the road bill pass:
Remember, for all this cheering for the transportation bill, we’re still doing much less than meeting the needs identified by the interim committee that studied South Dakota’s transportation infrastructure.
Funny that not one of them is lauding their collective brilliance with this kick-the-can-down-the-substandard-road to future generations!
Hey kids, move to South Dakota! You’ll come for the low wages and stay for the bill to repair the roads!
“Remember, for all this cheering for the transportation bill, we’re still doing much less than meeting the needs identified by the interim committee that studied South Dakota’s transportation infrastructure.”
True Cory but it’s still a hell of a lot more then what they did for education.
I think that “summer study, committee, task force” must make all reasonable people grit their teeth. It does for me, and I’m eminently reasonable. Really.
Deb-plus one and a big smiley :)
Owen, not “true, but”; “True… and…” :-)
I say what this bodes is that the blue ribbon task force will determine that education needs $150M more and tries to raise taxes on all of us for just them, then the legislatures bat the ball around for a long time and come up with a $50 tax increase on me for you, and then they call it success and education whines so much the next year it gets taken away from the ungrateful fellows and turned into bonuses for just good teachers.
What’s a good teacher Grud? Whine? Teachers have been fighting for a long time. My wife has and my father before that. The only ones whining are big business and they found an ear that listens in Daugaard
Sorry Cory…. :)
Good teachers are the ones who are not bad. Even Mr. H has admitted there are different levels of teacher. Who better than to delineate the good from the bad than teachers themselves? They don’t want others to do it for them, so like every other profession they should step up and sort themselves out. Then, the good ones get raises.
And whining? My goodness, what else do we hear all the time in the legislatures but whining from the education committees? If people would just step up, shut up, and show up to do their jobs without whining can you imagine all the money that would flow their way?
I blame the unions.
Mr. H, do Messrs. Munsterman and Solum have offices in dank dingy places? I like watching the backgrounds in your movies and most of the legislatures have nice offices or even these huge marble palace looking places they are working in but those two seem to be in broom closets or something. I suppose they are low on the pole, eh?
Grudz, you’re as bad as Sibby with your hobbyhorse irrelevancies.
The Pabst Blue RIbbon Task Force will come up with no recommendation for any such astronomical number. It will shift blame, focus on discussing all the money we could have saved if we had done the Governor’s plan in 2012, and recommend resurrecting the worst bits of that plan. Teachers will be dog-and-ponied to listening sessions, then ignored in the crafting of the niggly legislative proposals the task force will recommend.
That said, I’m eager to serve on this task force to try defying pre-determined outcomes. Pick me, Governor!
My friend Grudz said: “$50 tax increase on me for you”
I’m all in favor of that! Woo-hoo! $50 from Grudz for each of us! Thank yoooooooo!!!
I say this PBR, which I may or may not be a part of, comes up with a big number.
Mr. H, I am seriously interested in your take on the office space or the artistic framework in which you posted your TV shots. It seems important to me. If it was not important to you to frame them with some background just say so and I will understand. I am simply curious as to your journalistic intent with the movies because those movies can convey more artistic things than just a blogging, like this one, does. For instance, if you let Mr. kurtz do a movie back at you we would see some interesting framing and I think he could contextually put his movies into the mood he is seething at the moment. You seemed like a calm, albeit repetitive “Mr. smith, what did you thing was the crappiest lunch you got” questioner. I simply wanted to know the reasons behind your choice of location, assuming it had some artistic merit. Perhaps our common friend Bill is just full of it and you just randomly interviewed whatever slobs would talk to you.
It was just a question on my part. I guess I overthought your intentions.
Make a blog post with your thoughts about who you talked to and facebooked on the internet and why you had them in those offices. It would be enlightening to those of us not there lobbing for money for schools like you were doing.
grudz-you hear about flamboyant ex-GOP rep. from ILL; showed his architectural appointments in his RED RED RED gift-decorated congressional office, and HE IS GONE!? didja vote for his pal Kristi? couple of numbskulls those two.
perhaps am overthinking your intentions thou that would be rare :) you are still not funny
(Sigh.) Location chose itself. On a busy, unpredictable day, I caught legislators in the hall between meetings and squeezed in one or two questions. Some legislators took coaxing even to answer one simple, non-provocative question from a blogger. Most were gracious enough to do so; some honestly did not have time.
Now go count how many legislators KELO spoke to on the last day of session, or AP, or Mercer. (I’m sure Mercer spoke to more; I’m curious how the rest of the press corps did… but that’s your assignment to figure out.)
Rep Solum this would have been a good opportunity for you to admit you made a mistake with your motion to send Jolene’s Law to the 41st day. Or at least explain the politics that were involved with your vote. Roads are important but I argue that our children, the most vulnerable around us are more important. Appears Rep Solum has his priorities mixed up.
Admit they were wrong? Heck, you’re talking about South Dakota Republicans. They only admit they are wrong when they need to do something to benefit themselves, like repealing the Daschle rule. ;-)
Probably 99 percent of the extra revenue for roads will come from citizens and drivers who cause the least damage. Driving on I-90, there seem to be almost as many semi trucks and other heavy loads as there are cars. By now all of us should know how much more damage those trucks do.
The big problem is that there is not a lobby that will pay off the legislators like the trucking lobby that destroys the roads in the first place. The Chamber of Commerce depends on the products the trucks deliver to keep us rubes happy with our Chinese junk we purchased at Hobby Lobby. The truckers all say that they are taxed enough already (where have I heard that before) so they throw lobby money around and poof, there you go. Already, the new part of the Interstate between Wall and the turn off to the badlands going east bound, is taking a beating. There is a bridge crossing just before the 127 exit that is failing now and has a big ole bump jump there. In just a year, the trucks have beaten it to a pulp. Rail service would take care of that in short order, but hey, it is more fun to look at one’s belly button.
99%? The wheel tax, if counties take advantage of it, could bring in a lot more revenue from trucks, now that we’ve raised the tax from $4 to $5 per wheel and raised the maximum per vehicle from $16 to $60. The extra six cents on the fuel tax will also come from truckers. Any idea what percent of vehicles on the road are truck and what percent of fuel they buy?
Jerry, I’d love to see more rail shipping. Would that take a state investment? Taxes?
SB 1 better do some good, because I suspect after years of Senator Vehle’s lobbying for action, the Legislature just used up all of its will to raise revenue for roads for several years.
I think if the wheel tax on trucks were raised further, the tax could be used in conjunction with the federal money to make it happen as an example. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-one-sensible-budget-in-washington/2015/03/18/14b3169a-ccf2-11e4-a2a7-9517a3a70506_story.html
We want to keep military spending up, while denying VA care for our neediest veterans and their spouses. We want to keep shelling money to the failed apartheid state of Israel that could be used here for our people. There are many ways to find the money to make a rail system work here in South Dakota by simply looking in the cushions of the couch. The money is there if we have the politicians who care about it.
“Good teachers are the ones who are not bad.” What????
Sure teachers can help evaluate other teachers and people like you Grud will say that they’ll go easy on the teachers.
The only ones whining are people like you.
Unions are the problem? What union-SDEA? They don’t have any power. If this wasn’t a right-to-work (for less) state then SDEA might have some power.
Here is news in the Federal Register about passenger rail. We could have that here as well as grain and freight. https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/12/14/2011-31990/alternate-passenger-rail-service-pilot-program
Think of what it could do the economy here with freight, grain and tourism. The places it would traverse would have stops in them for overnight accomadations like they have now for the automobiles. The trains would not need to be high speed either, but respectable. A trip across South Dakota could take a day or longer if you wished to stay in Wall for example to tour the badlands or Kadoka for that matter. If we only had the representation in Washington that cared about our state, we could make it happen.
The first thing we do, is to start and initiative to sell the airplane that Iran Mike purchased with Amtrack money. We then start the ball rolling for rail service. Why do we need an state air force when we have Ellsworth?