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Governor Kristi Noem: Breaking Tourism Records

The headline here comes directly from Kristi Noem in her latest weekly propaganda column, which for once rings profoundly if unintentionally true:

Screen cap from Gov. Kristi Noem, weekly propaganda, South Dakota State News, 2022.10.07.
Screen cap from Gov. Kristi Noem, weekly propaganda, South Dakota State News, 2022.10.07.

Given that she submitted this column from her daughter Kennedy’s destination wedding in the beautiful Red Rock Country of Sedona, Arizona, and given that she’s not letting back surgery keep her from getting back to criss-crossing the country with a trip to Palm Beach, Florida, next Friday, Governor Noem’s claim that she is breaking tourism records is the truest thing she has said all year.

19 Comments

  1. larry kurtz 2022-10-08 09:04

    Yes, and now Republicans are preparing to flee the frozen tundra in their RVs, including to Sedona, ahead of another six-month winter and endless strings of below-zero days.

    In 2019 Mrs. Noem was quick to ask the Trump Organization for disaster cash but when she asks a Democratic president for help, especially after blaming him for an infant formula shortage, she’s admitting she’s dependent on federal aid. And if she doesn’t she risks looking like a miserable partisan. According to WalletHub, South Dakota is tied for first place with three other horrible red states where the loss amount from climate disasters causing a billion+ dollars in damage per capita since 1980. North Dakota has had 45 billion-dollar climate disasters since 1980 and my home state has suffered 38.

  2. jkl 2022-10-08 10:29

    All Mammal – please give warnings to these type of sickening videos in the future for the unsuspecting viewer. I agree with the twitter comment, “I need to wash my eyeballs.”

  3. All Mammal 2022-10-08 10:56

    Jkl- I am sorry. It suddenly occurred to me it wasn’t the best choice to purposely promote a video I would have rather not seen myself. Please forgive my actions.

    Normally, a video like this would spread celebration and gayety. But not this. Gov Noem never looks genuinely fun. Her sponsorship dinners must be crunchy with a heavy oder of aftershave. Just pew.

  4. Arlo Blundt 2022-10-08 13:08

    Well…she’s just too busy to run for Governor of South Dakota. She has other fish to fry. The voters in South Dakota will strongly back her at the polls, so she believes, based on her past record of Conservative nihilism. The Democrats are just being pesky. Her media buys will take care of all that negativity. She’s just going to keep on the sunny side.

  5. Mark Dunn 2022-10-08 13:48

    Apparently high gas prices aren’t hurting the tourists only poor South Dakota’s??

  6. mike from iowa 2022-10-08 14:47

    Only thing Noem Nothing does more frequently than flying is lying. Frequent flyer/more frequent liar.

  7. John 2022-10-08 19:07

    Our governor is a loathsome piece of history.

    Her reported whining about the US immigration is tiresome when South Dakota and the US have a growing 300k/ year deficit in workers.

    Here’s what Ken Burns recent said about immigrants and immigration. It firmly places noem and her party on the wrong side of history.
    Q: The U.S. and the Holocaust is bookended by Anne Frank’s story. I’ve been to her home and read her famous Diary of a Young Girl. But you reveal details I hadn’t known before, such as the fact that her family had applied for visas to be relocated to America?
    Burns: They, like hundreds of thousands if not millions of people trying to flee Nazi Germany, were limited either by the quota system and a very uncaring, unfeeling bureaucracy in the United States that didn’t want to accept them. Or, in the case of the Franks’ application, it was burned in flames when the Nazis threatened to bomb Rotterdam—where the applications were—unless the Dutch surrendered. And they surrendered and the Nazis bombed it anyway, and included was the U.S. consulate in Rotterdam [where] 300,000 or so applications went up in flames.

    Q: In your film, one of your interviewees, historian Peter Hayes, asserts that “excluding people is as American as apple pie.” Given that the United States was founded by European immigrants, why is excluding other would-be residents so commonplace throughout much of America history?
    Burns: It’s commonplace throughout most of world history. “Othering” is an incredibly common human thing. We make “thems” out of people we don’t like [for] various reasons—racial fear, the idea that a new immigrant might take a job or they’re different because they don’t have the same religion or customs and won’t assimilate. None of these things have been true or proven true, but there is periodically “nativist,” anti-immigrant, nationalist sentiments in the United States and lots of countries.

    Q: What did the Nazis learn from the United States?
    Burns: They learned lots of things. Hitler was very impressed with the way we had eliminated or isolated on reservations the Native population. He was extremely pleased by the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which after decades of kind of open borders, restricted [immigration through] pernicious quotas to this country from Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe where there would be a majority of Catholic or Jewish people attempting to come to the United States. It was an attempt to only bring in more Northern Europeans, who were consistently Protestant and white.
    The Nazis looked to [the] Jim Crow laws to help fashion some of their early discrimination laws. They were impressed with America’s embrace of the pseudo-science eugenics, that held there was a hierarchy of races and nationalities. They took that to a barbarous extreme. By the time Hitler came to power, he began to see the United States as weak and “susceptible” to Jewish influences and to the influences of American Blacks. So, Hitler was misguided in every sense.”
    https://progressive.org/latest/stop-holocaust-before-it-happens-ken-burns-rampell-091222/

    Watch Burns’ series, The US and the Holocaust: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/us-and-the-holocaust/episode-guide/#episode-guide

  8. P. Aitch 2022-10-08 19:08

    Somebody fact check her assertions about gains in tourism, hotel stays, airline tickets etc. She has a track record of being misleading and deceptive. Also, illusory, spurious, and evasive.
    Of course, your Governor didn’t write this. Her Hillsdale College comm director wrote it. Don’t you wish he had a handle on the side of his head that we could jiggle when his brain keeps running on like a toilet?

  9. larry kurtz 2022-10-08 19:26

    Visiting South Dakota is poverty porn.

  10. John Tsitrian 2022-10-09 06:47

    Noem’s assessment of tourism in 2022 isn’t supported by visitation numbers in this region. FWIW, Mt. Rushmore has slightly bucked the downside trend of visitations to most NPS sites in western SD, western ND and northeastern WY. Through Sept, Rushmore is up 1.8%, Badlands NP is down 17%, Wind Cave is down 14%, Minuteman Missile site down 3.3%, Devils Tower down 13%, Theodore Roosevelt NP down 16%. Jewel Cave joins Rushmore in bucking the trend, up 40%, but from a very small base that I believe was affected by repair work closures. Also, garbage tonnage hauled out of Sturgis after this year’s rally was down 11%. https://irma.nps.gov/STATS/SSRSReports/National%20Reports/Current%20Year%20Monthly%20and%20Annual%20Summary%20Report%20(1979%20-%20Present) https://www.newscenter1.tv/work-beings-cleaning-up-after-82nd-sturgis-rally/

  11. grudznick 2022-10-09 08:23

    It is highly likely Mr. Tsitrian’s garbage numbers are inaccurate.

    It is known the Sturgis crowd is growing greener and tree-huggier and tend to use more recyclables and re-fillable beer cans. This morning at the Conservatives with Common Sense breakfasting we will debate if greenie-ism is mostly for libbies, or if it makes common sense for conservatives too.

  12. leslie 2022-10-09 08:34

    Examining the “1930s to the 1970s America had a middle-class economy centered in the heartland, feeding and supplying the world with machinery and goods while drawing labor from the impoverished south to the thriving midwest — an economy of powerful trade unions and world-dominant corporations.”

    But it “has become a bicoastal economy dominated by globalized finance, insurance and high-end services on one coast, and by information technology, aerospace and entertainment on the other.

    Finance and technology do not create many jobs, and the conduct of business in those sectors is rapacious and predatory, shading often into fraud.”

    In the US “during the 1990s boom years [the Clinton years following Bush] half the increase was due to income gains in just five counties: Manhattan, Silicon Valley, Seattle.

    There have been other big gainers since, but the fact remains: the largest income and wealth gains in America have become highly concentrated in a few very specific places, sectors – and people.”

    That is a product of red politics, internet proliferation, Republican hate for the Clintons, imo. The major election issues thus continue:

    1. Global warming

    2. Income inequality

    We in Republican SD, led by callous Kristi Noem measure that, risibly, in “garbage tonnage hauled out of Sturgis after this year’s rally — down 11%”

    JOBS

    [Our] new jobs created in the past 30 years have been in services, and most … in “stagnant services” – the profusion of restaurants, retail shops, hospitals and clinics, offices and entertainment venues, fueled by household incomes (and borrowings) exceeding requirements for material goods. Pay in these jobs is mediocre and employment is unstable. Families compensated by having two or more earners, each sometimes holding two or more jobs, where 50 years ago the norm was one earner with a steady job paying a living wage. Then Covid blasted the sector.

    As is glaringly evident Republican leadership’s priorities cut, and ignored the pandemic emergency as policy, callously creating some sort of “warp-drive” nonsensical, killing, “China virus” ignorance resulting in a paramilitary attempt at eviscerating the democratically won election, spreading feces on the national capitol. All on the Republicans.

    DEMOCRATIC POLICIES

    The June 2021 White House Review on the supply chain [failure] made … very clear, using semiconductors, rare earths, batteries and pharmaceuticals as examples. Our advanced sectors need world markets – including the Chinese market – as much as they need access to the world’s resources.

    Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance and Snap already greatly reduce poverty, insecurity and hunger in America. They can be broadened and strengthened.

    A federal minimum wage at $15 per hour would provide a raise to at least 20% of all working Americans. It would solve in a stroke the supposed problem of “labor shortage”

    A federal job guarantee is well-prepared proposal that would eliminate involuntary unemployment, set a basic wage standard, and provide willing workers with continuous employment on useful projects, giving private employers a labor pool from which they can easily recruit the workers that they need.

    Oil and gas [should no longer] be run by private equity on a boom-and-bust basis? Stabilize energy prices and supplies – with regulation, quotas, price controls (as in Germany right now), long-term contracts and public utilities.

    Cut military commitments and spending. The main job of infrastructure is to improve the quality of life, with clean water and air, good transport and communications, and – urgently – to change the resource mix so as to mitigate…global warming.

    In the 1980s [Reagan, Pac Man], taxes were shifted away from personal and corporate incomes and capital gains and toward payrolls and salesTax accumulations and the associated rents – land values, mineral rights, technology “quasi-rents” – to bring the new plutocrats back to earth. A stronger estate-and-gift tax can spur the transfer of great fortunes to foundations and non-profits, such as hospitals, universities and churches, while working to prevent the emergence of dynasties, financial and political.

    The Glass-Steagall Act protected the middle class – the ordinary depositor at a commercial bank – from the speculative whims of the elites. Today big money is back in charge, despite the great financia – and much of the American public as well as the larger world is sick of it. [The most] necessary reform is to reduce debts, student debts, to shrink the banks, to restore effective regulation, to prosecute frauds, and to discipline finance to serve the public good.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/07/us-economy-growth-inequality-james-k-galbraith

  13. leslie 2022-10-09 08:40

    7th para DEMOCRATIC POLICIES

    …sales. Tax…

  14. leslie 2022-10-09 09:10

    I love All Mammal’s initial comment. Soggy bread!

    The fact that 3 billion people use less energy, on an annual per capita basis, than a standard American refrigerator gives you an idea of how far away from global equity and climate justice we currently are.

    That bread is breakfast for some!

    The climate and ecological crisis is not happening in some faraway future. It’s happening right here and right now.

    Until now, Earth’s natural systems have been acting as a shock absorber, smoothing out the dramatic transformations that are taking place. “We have enough ice on Earth to raise sea levels by 65 metres – about the height of a 20-storey building – and, at the end of the last ice age, sea levels rose by 120 metres as a result of about 5C of warming.” We are dithering at 1.5 C. Trump and wagging heads of Republican ignorant followers call it “a hoax” (Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement). Like the great “witch hunt” Al Capone might have complained about when finally taken down by the IRS. It is soap operatic to hear Mitch McConnell/Thune recently smeared with Trump’s racism (Coco Chow, his former loyal, until she wasn’t, cabinet member).

    GRETA THUNBERG
    (1st lady Melania “I don’t really care—do you?” refers to Greta’s cause as the teenager with anger management issues)

  15. Cory Allen Heidelberger Post author | 2022-10-09 10:34

    Mr. Tsitrian’s numbers come from the National Park Service and from the City of Sturgis as reported by local media. Grudz’s critique comes with no sources. Mr. Tsitrian’s numbers stand unrefuted.

  16. All Mammal 2022-10-09 11:36

    I am glad Leslie keeps reminding us of the actual crisis we are not dealing with. It makes me constantly aware and unplugging things and milling over alternatives. I cant stand eating out anymore at places who provide me a larger heap of packaging waste than food I consumed.

    As a Marcel Vogel fan and crystal-loving goddess wannabe, I wonder: why burn coal for energy when we have enormous quartz crystal caves humming with the juice we need in steady, consistent flows at all times.. For Free! Almost all time pieces say quartz on them and use crystal energy from the vibrations of the good earth to keep time ticking. The more expensive watches use ruby and sapphire crystals. All crystals hum with energy, that’s why the ancients built titanic pyramids with trapezohedral shapes because sacred geometry is known to generate gobs of free energy. That is also why obelisks are found all over- placing quartz crystals on energy meridians lets that juice flow without obstruction for free! They didn’t have any use for fuel stations or oil refineries.

    Why shouldn’t we use that same frequency to warm homes? Get rid of the juice burning appliances. We are going to wind up all sharing a communal fire again anyways if we don’t stop this consumption frenzy now. Unless we each assume the responsibility we owe to our species and our home, we’ll have nothing left but Trump’s non-biodegradable wife.

  17. scott 2022-10-10 13:09

    So Gov. Noem, if SD is breaking records better blame Biden, right? If everything that happens under Biden is his fault, then this must be his fault as well that SD is having another great tourism year.

    So, if everything that happens under a president is the president’s fault, then Trump is to blame for Covid. Bet those words will never come out of Noems mouth.

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