South DaCola

Alex Jensen Christine Erickson Count-cilor Alex Jensen Downtown Sioux Falls Elections Erica Beck Former Mayor Former Mayor Bucktooth & Bowlcut Former Mayor Coors Light & Olives Marshall Selberg Mayor Almost Done Mayor Grump Toad Mayor High Crimes Mayor Hubris Mayor Pants on Fire Mayor Subprime Mike Huether Mayor TenHaken Potsdam Mayor Rich Merkouris SF City Council Sioux Falls Sioux Falls Mayor Race

Who is running for Mayor of Sioux Falls?

l3wis November 11, 2024 3Comments

The guy who runs Dakota Wuss College thinks he knows who is running for mayor. He basically lifted my predictions that I have had since this summer. You are welcome. But Pitty brings up 3 new names that made me laugh so hard I just about passed out. While we know Erickson, Beck, and Huether will probably run, Pitty says that Councilors Jensen, Merkouris and Selberg are also considering. Pitty says they will have trouble raising money, but it’s NOT money they need to worry about, it is their reputations;

• While Alex was city councilor he gutted the internal audit department to one auditor that basically sends emails to an outside firm. This all came about because he couldn’t properly discipline a city council employee for poor attendance and she ran off to the finance department escaping punishment and got a raise from the mayor to boot. If this guy can’t manage ONE employee, he certainly can’t manage a city. If he announces I will probably piss my pants laughing.

• Oh Marshall. This guy ILLEGALLY lived out of his district for a year (verified by one of his friends) and lied on campaign finance forms. He doesn’t belong in the Mayor’s office, he belongs in a jail cell.

• Rich Merkouris has a pretty clean record, but if you dig, just a little, into his past, you will see he isn’t really respected in the clergy community because of past grifting of a church. It’s a long complicated story that happened several years ago, but the wounds are still fresh, and if you ask the right people, you will get the story.

While I think none of these people are dumb enough to run for mayor, they might. And trust me, I have years and years of proof and data on ALL of the candidates and none of it is good. I think Erickson will rise to the top quickly and will be in the runoff, but who is the darkhorse? Huether may run on the great Trump comeback. Which I find funny, he got the same number of votes in 2020 and 2016.

Greg Jamison told me this summer he would likely not run, and it’s not for the reasons you may think. Greg told me he just wants to spend more time with his family and grandkids, and who can blame him?

I told someone recently that I hope a well intentioned rich person runs for mayor with a good record of community engagement and charity and they will run away with the mayorship. Populism is where it is at these days and no one is interested in electing old (corrupt) hats.

I have a feeling our next mayor will be someone no one has heard of.

1st Amendment Open Government Open Meetings Republicans SF City Council South Dakotans

Our fight for Open Local Government just got harder

l3wis November 10, 2024 25Comments

It was no surprise to me that DJT won the presidential election. If you looked at the math, Harris had no clear path since she announced, the numbers got progressively worse as it got closer to the election. On top of that, let’s pretend for a moment she did win the popular vote and it was a tied electoral college, DJT had a majority of the US state houses on his side, he had Congress and the Supreme Court. Even if a tie came to fruition, DJT would have won. All the liberal tears aside, this shouldn’t surprise anyone.

When the DNC gave a parting gift to Howard Dean as chair of the Democratic Party, Dean proposed this age old idea;

Howard Dean pursued an explicit “fifty-state strategy” as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, putting resources into building a Democratic Party presence even where Democrats had been thought unlikely to win federal positions, in hopes that getting Democrats elected to local and state positions, and increasing awareness of Democrats in previously conceded areas, would result in growing successes in future elections. Democrats who supported the strategy have said that abandoning “red states” as lost causes only allowed the Republican Party to grow even stronger in areas where it was unchallenged, resulting in lopsided losses for Democrats in even more races.

Ironically, the Republicans have had this strategy for decades and it finally paid off on Tuesday night. I have been warning the state Dems that if you keep hanging your hat on where people can go to the bathroom and who can wear a dress instead of better commodity prices for farmers and worker rights you will be abandoned by the working class. Guess what happened?

Don’t get me wrong, queer rights and diversity should ALWAYS be a ladder wrung on the progressive agenda, but not at top. Sorry, childcare, affordable food and housing, living wages, a good education, healthcare, and the list goes on, WHY DID WE STOP TALKING ABOUT THESE THINGS!!!!!!!

The GOP has been busy across the nation filling school boards, county commissions, judgeships, city councils and dog catcher positions. I have even contributed to this by helping 4 Republicans get elected to the city council (My Bad) and then they were too ‘social’ for the local Repugs so they got booted. This has created a system of one party rule which never benefits the public. I suppose I could write a very scathing post about how ignorant and selfish the American electorate is, but we all knew this coming into the election. Nothing changed on Wednesday it just was an answer to what we already knew; poor white people are mad and they need to blame someone, so they blame colored folks. Things are expensive and people vote with their pocket books.

I really don’t want to make this about Republicans and Trump, this is about something even more troubling. If you watch the playbook played by the GOP over the past 20 years they want a total shutdown of government transparency. Not that we have had much in South Dakota anyway, and Sioux Falls city hall is darker then an opium den, but, a drunk, drugged up reporter can’t even get the state to turn over hair and nail salon receipts. As if knowing what the gov paid for an asshole bleaching is of importance 🙁 While transparency in government is something that doesn’t exist on a state or local level anyway, the fight to get this information out there has just gotten 10 times harder.

I expect the National GOP will have a directive going all the way down to Dogcatcher candidates that open government is a thing of the past and give up NO information.

Now with extremists, they know they only have a small window to wreck sh!t and be on their way, this is why it is more important then ever to shine a light on these TRAITORS . . . NOW! Anybody who would wipe their ass with the Constitution in order to gain power has NO interest in telling you the truth.

Real Patriots use loud speakers, cowards use lies and violence. Now more then ever we need to ask our government to be open, because if they are not, they are just screwing us.

Ben Franks, the greatest founding Father, said it best;

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

He also warned his future countrymen;

“A republic, if you can keep it”

If Ben was alive today, I think he would be extremely nervous, and probably headed for France.

Curt Soehl Downtown Sioux Falls SF City Council Sioux Falls Washington Pavilion

Councilor Soehl the defender of parking!

l3wis November 8, 2024 4Comments

Curtist the Blurtist is at it again, defending parking. Yesterday during the informational where the city turned a regular old ice rink into a $16 Million Dollar entertainment facility (for no reason and for something NO ONE in the community was asking for) Curt didn’t question the extravagant transformation and being $12 million over budget instead he cried about parking.

The rink can take up to 250 peeps at a time and the parking lot holds 45 cars. Now there is on-street parking, a parking ramp next door and plenty of parking at Falls Park. Here’s the other thing, you are going to go ice skate, that is physical activity similar to walking, so why not park a few blocks away and walk there?! There is plenty of parking. When the Levitt has over 5,000 people attend a concert, I never see issues with parking. Where do all those people park?! Also, let’s state the obvious, besides the grand opening, this place will be dead most of the time. The only time you will see people there is if it is decent temps on a Saturday. Great Bear has proven people are winter wimps in Sioux Falls. And if it is below 20 degrees, good luck getting people on the ice especially since we have plenty of options for indoor skating in Sioux Falls at private facilities. I know people who live in SF and work DT and had no clue the place was even being built. I think if the parking lot only had 5 stalls, it would be enough. This place will be bleeding taxpayers for decades! But at least we have another wedding barn in town!!! And that’s the other thing. What if you have 200 people attending a wedding on a Saturday Night during the open skating season? Then you will have a parking issue. I can’t understand why we just didn’t build a simple warming shed and leave it at that? The things we let rich donors cook up with our tax dollars in Sioux Falls is getting ridiculous.

The Romans referred to this as ‘Bread and Circuses’;

In a political context, the phrase means to generate public approval, not by excellence in public service or public policy, but by diversion, distraction, or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a populace, by offering a palliative: for example food (bread) or entertainment (circuses). Juvenal originally used it to decry the “selfishness” of common people and their neglect of wider concerns. The phrase implies a population’s erosion or ignorance of civic duty as a priority.

Taxdollars should never be spent on entertainment. Once Poops bankrupts this city with his Convention Center proposal maybe people will finally come to terms with having all these play palaces while driving over 6 inches of packed ice and potholes like a pimples on a teenagers ass. And if you think the Feds will be kicking anything in over the next 4 years that ain’t happening.

Cartoon Leah Anderson Minnehaha County