I happily yield the floor to Lanny Stricherz, who has been known to smarten up this blog’s comment section, who now aptly summarizes the reasons he’s voting for Tim Bjorkman to represent us in Congress instead of Dusty Johnson:
Are you sure that you want Dusty Johnson to represent you in the US House of representatives? As a member of the PUC, he voted to approve the first Trans Canada Keystone pipeline, which leaked within the first six months of its existence and several times since.
He voted to approve the BigStone II coal burning power plant, which was eventually turned down by the Minnesota PUC, because of its potential damage to Big Stone Lake as well as surrounding lakes in both Minnesota and South Dakota.
He voted to approve the Hyperion oil refinery and coal burning power plant in the Elk Point area which eventually failed because the founders could not get investors because they could see the potential damage to prime farm land and the extreme amount of Missouri River water which would be needed for the refinery and power plant.
He has voted to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which Nebraska is refusing to approve, because of possible damage to the Ogallala aquifer as well as other waters and lands.
After standing for re-election in 2010 and winning, Johnson ignored the vote of the people and took a job as Chief of Staff in the Governor’s office even though he had been reelected. Who’s to say that he won’t do the same if elected to the House, and the President wants him to serve in some climate change denier position in the executive branch?
A better option is Tim Bjorkman, who is the Democratic candidate. He refuses to take money from the Democratic Party or any of the PACs including labor unions. He will only take private donations because he wants to represent the people and their interests and help to end the corruption in government [Lanny Stricherz, letter to the editor, originally published in that Sioux Falls paper, 2018.09.28; shared with Dakota Free Press 2018.09.29].
Puts fossil fuel profits ahead of the environment, spurned the voters the last time they hired him—in Trumpistan, we need more enviro-sense and stick-to-it-iveness than Dusty’s record shows. Take Lanny’s advice: vote for Tim!
The Big Stone Plant was more of a garbage burner than a power plant. It burned the worst lignite crap from North Dakota It was a cheap injection system to pump mercury into the environment. Then they insisted they on burning tires and other garbage to “improve” air quality. Well, sure, when you burn the absolute worst lignite even garbage is better. Technical Information Project (me), had to fight that because SD DENR didn’t give a rats ass about making them improve their stack emissions with better pollution control. Most of the the crap fell out in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s lakes were acidifying as a result of Big Stone burning crap.
I thought they were going to shut down. Did that happen?
Yeah, horrible, horrible record on the environment. I remember his grandfather lobbied for the utilities.
Children’s concentration camps like Nazi Germany, will continue to be supported by Dusty Johnson.
“In shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses with backpacks and snacks for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.
Until now, most undocumented children being held by federal immigration authorities had been housed in private foster homes or shelters, sleeping two or three to a room. They received formal schooling and regular visits with legal representatives assigned to their immigration cases.
But in the rows of sand-colored tents in Tornillo, Tex., children in groups of 20, separated by gender, sleep lined up in bunks. There is no school: The children are given workbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.” New York Times 9/30/2018
This is who we have become, what does that say about how we view the rule of law?
That’s a really rotten record for Johnson. It’s not like his blanket and ill-considered approvals crapped the environment but improved the SD economy or some similar type of trade off. Johnson crapped the environment, crapped the local economies, crapped the state . . . . .
I wonder if those stinking approvals did something un-crappy for Johnson?