Governor Kristi Noem’s signature policy initiative of this Session, her cribbing of the long-standing Democratic proposal to end South Dakota’s unusual and immoral tax on groceries, hangs in the balance, and where is the Governor?
Evidently not working the lobbies of the Capitol to get balky Republican legislators on board with this practical policy to leave more money in every South Dakotan’s pocket to buy basic necessities. No, this week, Kristi Noem is off feeding her basic necessity, celebrity, in Washington D.C. Yesterday she made a speech to the Trumpy America First Policy Institute in Washington:
And today she’s sharing lunch and covid hogwash with the Cato Institute, just a mile up the street from the White House she’s eying. She’s even so proud of that campaign trip and unashamed of her absence from Pierre that she advertises the Cato event in a state news release that tells us exactly when and where she’s speaking and how we can watch live:
Governor Kristi Noem will highlight South Dakota’s freedom-focused approach to health policy, especially throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, at an event hosted by the Cato Institute on Thursday. The event is titled “Government and Healthcare – A Dangerous Policy Cocktail.” The event will be moderated by Cato senior fellow Dr. Jeffrey Singer.
The event will take place at 11:00 am ET on Thursday, February 16 at the Cato Institute – 1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW Washington, DC 20001.
Governor Noem was the only Governor in America who never ordered a single business or church to close or even define which businesses were “essential” or “nonessential.” In August 2020, she was the only Governor to decline President Trump’s offer of extended unemployment benefits. As a result, South Dakota has consistently ranked at the top of the nation in a wide array of economic measures since the pandemic.
WHAT: Governor Noem to highlight South Dakota’s freedom-focused approach to health policy
WHEN: 11:00 am ET on Thursday, February 16
WHERE: Cato Institute – 1000 Massachusetts Ave. NW Washington, DC 20001
LIVESTREAM: https://www.cato.org/events/government-health-care-dangerous-policy-cocktail [Office of the Governor, press release, 2023.02.15].
Notice that the Governor doesn’t give us a heads up on her in-state appearances where South Dakota press or protestors could show up to trick her into revealing her clueless duplicity. But now when she needs to assert her presence against the superior qualifications and style of the Nikki Haley Presidential campaign, Noem wants everyone to know where she’s playing at Presidentiality.
Rather than taking her 63% victory at the polls three months ago as a mandate to govern, Kristi Noem has instead taken her overwhelming mandate from South Dakotans as a signal that she can freely pursue her self-interest without any concern that the folks back home would hold her accountable. So South Dakotans probably won’t get the sales tax break Noem promised. But Kristi will get a chance to talk with all those Washington insiders she needs to convince that her posturing about TikTok and Chinese farm buyers make her a bigger foreign policy expert than Ambassador Haley.
Rotflmfao.
1) Government and Healthcare – A Dangerous Policy Cocktail. Especially if you’re 10, living in SD, and preggo by your drunk Uncle.
2) She wears her lazy, clueless, hands off approach and lack of covid leadership as a badge of honor. Wonder how she would govern if a virus came about with an 80% kill rate in children? Still have a free for all? This situation would be similar to aborting after birth.
“Government and Healthcare – A Dangerous Policy Cocktail.” Yeah, now there is some serious cognitive dissonance at work right there.
South Dakota could not exist if not for socialism.
My parents were figuratively born in the stone age as evidenced by retreiving their ice from an “ice house” and reading by candlelight and lantern.
This map is a glimpse of electrification in 1921. Find South Dakota.
https://makingmaps.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/brinton_gp_cartograms_1921.jpg
Paywalled unless one subscribes to a free daily email, so pasted here.
What the New Deal can teach us about how to electrify everything
By Nathaniel Bullard, Bloomberg
A century ago, the US electric power industry was well on its way to providing service to every building in every town and city. But even as late as 1936, more than 90% of American farms still lacked electricity.
The magazine Literary Digest published a fascinating cartogram illustrating this disparity in 1921, with US states depicted according to their respective electricity consumption. New York is, not surprisingly, massive, followed by Pennsylvania and then California. By contrast, the rural South is tiny, and states like the Dakotas, New Mexico and Wyoming are practically invisible. In the South in particular, there was a distinct mismatch between state population and electricity consumption: Mississippi ranked 23rd in population in 1920 but 44th in electricity sales.
1921 cartogram of US states according to electricity sold. Source: Energy Central
The federal government had a solution. The Rural Electrification Administration was created in 1935 with the express purpose of bringing electricity to farms. It was a success. Per the US Department of Agriculture, thanks to REA work and loans, by 1950 almost 80% of U.S. farms had power. Since that effort, “generations have heard the stories about ‘the night the lights came on,’ a significant date for farm families,” a USDA account notes. (The REA was later absorbed into the Agriculture Department’s Rural Utilities Service.)
A significant part of the REA’s work was education on the benefits of electrification. Un-electrified farms were not without illumination or energy: Liquid fuel had been available at country stores for decades (it was kerosene, after all, that built Standard Oil). Kerosene and gasoline were both used widely on farms, and not just for agricultural processes. That said, kerosene was an expensive and inferior option for light, and Maytag’s gasoline-powered washing machines were already three decades old by the time the REA began its project.
So the REA invested significantly in communicating the benefits of electric power, and it did so in an artistic way. Lester Beall, a Midwest graphic artist, created a series of posters crisply capturing what electricity could bring to the farm: light, running water, labor-saving devices, light industry, entertainment. Most of all, Beall’s work touted the fact that life with electricity could be easier; it could be, simply, better.
I am thinking of the REA and Lester Beall as the world begins another great wave of electrification as part of its decarbonization efforts.
The first part of that wave must be to extend access to electricity to everyone. There are still 770 million people worldwide without reliable access to power, for whom electrification hardly needs a strong pitch. Off-grid solar could provide electricity to more than 600 million people by the end of this decade, according to the Global Off-Grid Lighting Association. But not only will off-grid solar not provide power to absolutely everyone, it will still not provide the entirety of what even a 1930s-style rural grid in the US could: consistent, always-on power not just for lighting and cooking, but for pumping water and industrial activity.
The second element will be akin to what Beall and the REA pitched to Depression-era farmers: offering better options than what we have today. We should look past the inane politicking around gas versus electric stoves, and to the top end of fine dining, where renowned chefs have been using portable induction cooktops for 15 years.
That logic will need to extend upwards from the home. It is already happening in road transport, thanks to electric vehicles (including minicars and bikes — more than 30 million electric two-wheelers were sold in 2022). It will need to happen with industrial processes and with heat as well.
There, the sell is a bit harder. But there are still key persuasive elements. Lower emissions is paramount, but so too are local benefits such as reduced air pollution and relief from variable fuel costs. We need the equivalent of the REA but for industry, everywhere: a global electrification agency, so to speak.
It might all sound a bit aesthetic for a global energy matter. Lester Beall, though, might have seen the connections clearly. The artist “bore in mind the powerful connection between public art and political activism,” according to the industry publication for rural electric cooperatives. In Beall’s words, “Applied good taste is a mark of good citizenship.” Perhaps that lesson, with reduced environmental impact as an element of taste, applies today and tomorrow, too.
“South Dakota has consistently ranked at the top of the nation in a wide array of economic measures since the pandemic.” I guess that becoming familiar with operating in a continual state of such dissonance is what enables lies like the above to be repeated endlessly without shame.
It’s probably worth all your tax dollars to get Noem on that socialist airplane and out of South Dakota for as long as possible. She can do less damage to South Dakota that way.
Those Chinese Communists are surely shaking in their balloons at the prospect of President Kristi Lynn Noem.
What derogatory term can you come up with to describe a part time, at best, Guv that sucks at being a part time, at best, Guv? Worthless is overused.
If doing NOTHING is considered “freedom-focused approach to health policy,” why don’t we just close all hospitals and be totally free? This dim wit is a total embarrassment to SD… then, again, we keep asking for it.
e Platypus, she isn’t Governor. We are the Governors. Now.
She resides in a one Party semi autocracy.
The electorate is asleep, not voting , voting R, or voting the Republican wing of the Democratic Party (100% of the Party votes for Republican stuff in Pierre).
Criticize. Does nothing.
Build better. Outside of the 2 parties
Build better if you’re hungry for change.
We are the Governors.
Every morning, we get to decide what will happen in South Dakota.
What are we building today?
As Governor; you choose every day, what you want to experience.
Don’t give away your power with a negative attitude.
Dream Big. Dream Big. You can do it
Mrs. Noem has chosen Washington DC as the site of her announcement of a Declaration of War by the State of South Dakota on The People’s Republic of China. It is not clear exactly how this war will be conducted, other than we will ban a service called Tik Tok from State Government funded telephones (cell phones) and the Governor will propose legislation regarding Government of China ownership of rural land. Chinese business interests, which include significant ownership by government institutions like the Chinese Army own many other business entities serving South Dakota including the Smithfield Meat Packing company. We do not know how many Red Chinese Nationals have money invested in Sioux Falls Banks nor their investment in various credit card companies. No doubt, Mrs. Noem will reveal this information in her address.
e platypus onion- flamboyantly benign? Semi-buoyant? Styrofoam sculpture with cosmetics? Mean green spleen? Cream-colored curtain jerker? (per P. Aitch;)) Flat pop and bones? Loose balloon knot? Silly string shoe lace? Brazilian butt-lift lips? Fat-head bubble-brain? Solo see-saw rider? No claim to fame lame dame? Puss in boots? Starry-eyed stool pigeon? Queen LaQueefa? High mile plane pony? Sorry, you asked and now I can’t stop:O
Mr. John- Mr. Beall’s theory is exactly the passive strategy we need. It is so much smarter to change something by making the old way obsolete, as opposed to actively fighting it. Buckminster Fuller showed how well it works, too. Aside from saving the good earth and all, it would help to make an ad campaign with good tastes just so we don’t only leave fugly, cheap, busted, poorly made crap behind from our time.
Noem Nothing is all that and less, Gang. Thanks.
Thanks Cory for the livestream link today (02-16) of KN at Cato Institute.
How insightful to ‘learn’ that our largest town of 500k ‘over here’ w/ regards to covid response. Guess she needs some fact checking. I didn’t know SFalls has 500k population yet. If you listen to around the 48 minute mark you can catch it on the ‘stream’.
It was also interesting to hear her ‘nature is to not be in conflict’ and would rather be fishing, sitting in the tree stand or chasing cows.
Well KN you may have alot of ‘conflict’ on the nat’l stage soon if you announce.
She failed to mention the 14 Covid deaths in SD per the weekly report. Dang.
https://kbhbradio.com/news/fourteen-news-deaths-among-cases-listed-in-weekly-covid-19-report
Hoeing in the cash one trick at a time is what White Jesus preaches!
You go, girl!
“The best thing you can do is wash your hands.” ??????????
Not saying washing hands isn’t helpful, but come on, it’s the best thing to do for a respiratory virus? Where did this come from?
Didn’t Kristi fight Mayor TenHanken to keep China owned Smithfield Foods open during the pandemic so they could make money and buy bigger balloons?
No, you can’t get a Red Rider BB gun for Christmas cause you’ll shoot your eye out.
While all the raging NDS is entertaining, don’t you fellows really ask yourownselfs a couple of questions? And then you say to yourselfs:
And you would be righter than right. She does have some fellows, maybe almost a dozen, to manage the legislatures for her.
FYI Kristi, while you were in DC, SD covid deaths are up, cases are up, and hospitalizations are up. Careful, because your approach to handling covid makes zero sense.
For all the complaining about how inaccessible politicians are, when arrangements are made to have one of them make an appearance at a forum, meet & greet, coffee & conversation, luncheon, or cracker-barrel, and the event is advertised in the local paper etc, you’re lucky if 50 people show up.
Given that over 99% of the population would rather complain that our elected officials are MIA than actually get off the couch and trot down to the Pizza Ranch to meet them, fussing about the Governor being out of state for any length of time is pointless.
You wouldn’t go talk to her anyway. So shut up.,
Ms. Beal-Never!
Trust me, we scour for praiseworthy deeds from any elected official, no matter how small. It is like playing teeter totter with a sherman tank, soooo maybe that’s why it seems a little one-sided. Even our meek press can’t get a comment or basic information. And when a discussion is promised on national news channels….it doesn’t mean squat. Expect people to be hostile when you blow them off. It is a lesson on rules without relationship: it causes rebellion.