Elections

2012 Referred measures and Constitutional questions on the ballot

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Guest Poster and I are in agreement on the measures and questions, he has written a review of them and the recommended choice.

These referred measures are just bad policies, poorly thought and will be executed to detriment of future South Dakotans.

NO – Referred Law 14– An Act to establish the Large Project Development Fund.  A slush fund with abuse written in every word.

NO – Initiated Measure 15-An initiated measure to increase state general sales and use taxes for additional K-12 public education and Medicaid funding. Bad on so many levels I could write pages.  This needs to be addressed with thought and information.  This becomes a vehicle to replace future funding from the regular budget with special interest projects.

NO – Referred Law 16 – An act to establish a teacher scholarship program; create a program for math and science teacher bonuses; create a program for teacher merit bonuses; mandate a uniform teacher and principal evaluation system; and eliminate state requirements for teacher tenure. If passed, it would destroy any chance for a well-rounded, thinking person’s education.  It rewards teaching with limited room to reach out to children with special learning skills.  Encourages the voucher based private school programs being proposed nationwide at the expense of the society need for public education.

Three of these Constitutional Amendments appear to be designed around special interest abuses of the system for their benefit.

NO – Constitutional Amendment M-An Amendment to the South Dakota Constitution regarding certain provisions relating to corporations.  This reads ALEC model legislation to abuse stockholders in business relationships.  Without a CON statement to be found or issued by SOS Gant’s office, it is a strong NO.

YES – Constitutional Amendment N-An Amendment to the South Dakota Constitution repealing certain reimbursement restrictions for travel by legislators to and from a legislative session.  Travel by legislators on official business still is $.05 not actual cost, this it wrong. Constitutional Amendment N failure would allow undue personal budget strain on ‘everyday’ legislators driving to Pierre for session.  This inflation adjustment could be done through law not Constitution.

NO – Constitutional Amendment O-An Amendment to the South Dakota Constitution exchanging the method for distributions from the cement plant trust fund.  I can read trust fund abuse in this amendment.  They need to tighten the measure up and try again next time. Without a CON statement to be found or issued by SOS Gant’s office, it is a strong NO.

NO – Constitutional Amendment P-An Amendment to the South Dakota Constitution adding balanced budget requirements.  Our current Constitutional provisions are very strong now and giving us budget surpluses.  Voting NO retains the very workable budget locks of the 1880’s which still work.

Reason #27 why the Charter Revision Meetings need to be recorded

Well the CRC didn’t waste anytime to propose ridiculous things now that they don’t have to discuss the charter in front of a studio audience;

How easy it is to get an initiated measure or referendum on the ballot.

City Attorney David Pfeifle said that Thursday during a Charter Revision Commission working session discussion on how frequently people are getting signatures on petitions to take measures to public vote.

Board member Dick Gregerson is concerned about how often Sioux Falls citizens are doing it.

“In Florida it takes 28 minutes on the ballot to go through things, and we’re getting to that point,” he said. “There’s too many issues on the ballot.”

“South Dakota is one of the most liberal states in the whole nation,” when it comes to that, Pfeifle said.

I have often said if the city council or the state legislature would do the work we elected to do (providing public services in a prudent manner) we wouldn’t need these petition drives. Trust me, they aren’t no picnic, sit down with Ms. Stehly sometime and she will fill you in on the hundreds of hours it takes just to get something on the ballot. Rick Knobe also continues to blab about the petitions and mislead the public;

Let’s take a time out. Do we really want a costly public vote ordering the city to buy snowgates for every blade?

Costly to who? I know it is costing the petitioners time and money, but there will be barely any additional cost to voters. If both petition drives are successful, they will be on the Spring ballot with the school board election. No extra elections, No extra ballots.

Both of these petition drives, if sucessful at the polls, will drive up the cost of city services(i.e. raise taxes) with no cares about how much.

No they won’t. There will be an initial cost from the capital fund to buy snowgates, but the operation of the gates will come out of the operational penny. THAT TAX CANNOT BE RISEN! It will come down to budgeting, not higher taxes. As for the outdoor pool at Spellerberg, we actually will be saving money by building an outdoor pool there. Millions of dollars, I might add.

What are we thinking? Or are we not thinking, but feeling powerless, and we want to have some control so let’s take it out on our own city government?

You are right, we are powerless to the city government. Raising the second penny tax just a few years ago comes to mind. While citizens like myself warned of an economic downturn and that the developers will never put in their fair share (both of which happened as I predicted) the citizens who pay the tax were ignored and the cry baby developers got their way. So YES Rick, we want to control some of the things that go on in the city.

. . . both of these initiative efforts are at least premature and at worst, selfish and self serving.

Selfish? Self-serving? You mean getting a public service for the taxes we pay is SELFISH. Shut your pie hole and go back to talking about buffalos or whatever.

 

Meet the Legislative Candidates

I sent this letter out to over forty legislators (all party affiliation) running for the state legislature in the Sioux Falls area (entire document); southdacola

Greetings,

Candidate for the 2012 South Dakota Legislature,

The election is quickly coming upon us, and I want to extend my political blog out to you. I run a political website called southdacola.com, you may or may not have heard of it. I have approximately 10,000 individual readers a day, 7-days a week. I cover mostly Sioux Falls area politics (city government, school district, Minnehaha county commission and state districts in the area).

I want to give you the opportunity to profile yourself on my website at NO CHARGE. I am sending this letter to candidates for the state legislature in the Sioux Falls area, Democrats, Republicans and Independents. I am a registered independent myself and support candidates in both parties, this is not a partisan trap.

 

The ‘Bubba’ Question (Guest Poster)

By now you have heard many GOP speeches and TV talking heads extolling the virtues of giveaway programs to the rich and powerful while stripping the rest of us of the few remaining morsels available to keep us going.  The ‘religious’ based prosperity gospels promoted would have had both the atheist Ayn Rand and St. Ronald Reagan excommunicated from today’s GOP.  Even the Randian disciple, Paul Ryan, only uses Ayn Rand like a Perkin’s menu, “I’ll take a little of this with a bit of that, but make it look like a dessert so it will go down easier.”

Every person I have known who claims to be a Libertarian has no idea what the term ‘Libertarian’ means. To sum up it up a true Libertarian society think in terms of these current Libertarian societies, Haiti and Rwanda. These governments are in place to only protect property rights. Having a government with any more power than protecting who owns what, only gets in the way of raping the land and people.  Is this what we as a society want for America? None of these fake Libertarians understand they would not be allowed to vote or own property in the land of their Randian dreams.  If you do not own property in Randian land, you have no rights to anything.  We have a land of returning to the middle ages of privileged landed aristocracies.  The landed aristocracy will dole out to the serfs the leftovers.

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Former President Clinton has been asking many questions during recent speeches. The most important one has been this, “Do you really want to live in a country where one party is so desperate to win the White House that they go around trying to make it harder for people to vote if they’re people of color, poor people or first generation immigrants?”  The Clinton question could not even be allowed in a Randian controlled society much less addressed.  We are expanding this question to include South Dakota.

We are asked why we are exposing the Koch Brothers, John Birchers, ALEC, RSLC, TeaBaggers and more.  This massive campaign money question now has the Bubba Answer:

“Do you really want to live in a country where one party is so desperate to win the White House that they go around trying to make it harder for people to vote”.

The massive money flowing into the special piggy banks of Gant, Jackley, Nelson, Fiegen, Daugaard and more, must be exposed.  This allows us see who owns our pretend Libertarians and powerbrokers masquerading as GOP officials.

Just to let you know, a state like South Dakota is where elective offices can be bought ‘cheaply’.  They who gain office through this money, is bought and owned by the givers of the money.  We all know many of our local money changers who have ‘owned’ offices in Pierre.  The demise of Bill Janklow has caused a power vacuum in South Dakota.  We now have ‘out of state’ groups filling the money pool in order to own Pierre.  Much of this money is given through covert methods and through PACs giving to candidates who in turn give to other candidates.

The givers of the money want to make this state another incubator for their ideas of ownership because you know, ownership has advantages.

AND if you don’t think the voting tabulation companies, such as ES&S are not concerned about keeping us as clients, consider this.

Last year Minnehaha county paid $9,000 for 100,000 BLANK ballots. What are ‘Blank’ ballots? See, you have to use a certain type of ballot when using a certain type of vote tabulation machine. These companies print millions of them. They simply have a special corner cut and a barcode on them. The local auditor is responsible for the final ballot. 9 cents for a blank piece of card stock is highway robbery, and that is why these companies give so dearly to campaigns.

E-Poll books, too much room for corruption

While SOS Gant and other state auditors are pushing for E-Poll books (purchased from the same companies that give money to their campaigns and PACs) I am a bit leary after reading stories like this;

State election officials plan to look at the histories of voters who participated in the Republican primary in Davidson County this month to help determine if voters were routinely given the GOP ballot by default.

Mark Goins, the state’s elections coordinator, said Tuesday that he wants to figure out if Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall’s experience was isolated or common. Advocacy group Tennessee Citizen Action announced publicly Monday what Goins had known for 11 days: that Hall, an elected Democrat, had voted in the Republican primary after poll officials failed to give him a choice.

While they go on to talk about how this may have been ‘operator error’ I say ‘hogwash’. If we implement E-Poll books you could see all kinds of wiggle room for election officials to manipulate the vote. You must also take into account that the very companies that sell this computer equipment and software give money to elected officials that run our elections. That in itself is scary as all-get-out.

H/T – B.J.