The churn continues on the Second Floor. Bob Mercer reports that Governor Kristi Noem’s lawyer Tom Hart is leaving the Capitol for a better job today, while her replacement media director is bailing after just five weeks:
Patrick Callahan spent about five weeks as the governor’s media director and left in early August. Seidel said Callahan hasn’t been replaced. “(I)t’s unfortunate things didn’t quite fit what he was looking for,” she said.
These changes follow others on the governor’s senior staff since Noem took office in January 2019. Others who previously left included two chiefs of staff, a press secretary, a media director and a lawyer [Bob Mercer, “Gov. Noem’s Staff Loses Two,” KELO-TV, 2020.08.20].
Perhaps Callahan left because there’s really no need for someone in the office to direct the Governor’s media. The Governor has Maggie Shields to direct fire and obstruction at the local media, and she has Corey Lewandowski telling her to keep heading down to her private video bunker to answer softball questions from Fox News, so who needs anyone else to coordinate actual communications with the members of Callahan’s previous organization, the South Dakota Broadcasters Association?
The most damning part of the post is the very last. Kruel Kristi is not serving the good citizens of SD. She is spending their hard earned tax $ pandering to Demented Donny via Faux Noize.
Isn’t Kristi busy planning SD’s future? Policy? People’s lives that matter? Or just political careers?
Her plan for SD is like this. In Central Valley, hedge funds buy up ag lands because they can afford million dollar deep wells to water them. Crops bring $1000 an acre while high water consumption crops like pistachios and almonds bring $10,000 an acre. But they use ten times the water. And aquifer levels are dropping 10 feet a day, a week or a month. And if rains don’t refill the aquifers, and climate change is making that happen, then trouble is coming. It is a race to drill deeper wells. The aquifer is an unregulated public resource. So the entire valley grows only pistachios and almonds.
Trump is using Kristi. Kristi is using up public resources out the wazoo, for free—well for the GOP, her benefactor. She doesn’t want to spend money on infrastructure, on a safety net protecting people. Health care. “No masks for my state!” She doesn’t care enough to stop tar sands pipelines running under Oahe Reservoir. She must not think leaks would damage the water resource that feeds and waters the state, or would cause the state to suffer like the Mauritian Islands right now.
She puts us at risk. She rolls the dice. “Will I get caught speeding the 80th time?”—was her mantra. Will Trump pay off? Will rallies at Mt Rushmore and Sturgis pay off? Will SD schools in Sioux Falls, Rapid City and smaller population centers create disease spreaders, asymptotic, daily cloistered hot spots that infect teachers? Will Trump deem teachers essential employees? No regulations for profit makers but regulate human capital.
Its not her money, her resources, or her human capital that she is spending. It is ours. In the GOP race to use up all our public resources for the benefit of its billionaire benefactors, their lobbyists, to hold onto power.