A South Dakota Moderate

What has happened to it? It has now been put on the broad shoulders of the South Dakota Legislature. The latest hot “catch phrase” being bandied about in the blogosphere is how we are becoming a so-called “Nanny State”. Why has that term become so popular? Just take a look at some of the bills [...]

It seems the newly minted Congressman from Minnesota is already making friends on Capitol Hill.
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) believes it is his right as a Muslim to be sworn into Congress with the Quran. But apparently, the freshman lawmaker doesn’t believe it’s Rep. Tom Tancredo’s (R-Colo.) right to smoke a cigar in his congressional office.
Ellison’s [...]

Choice, what a magical word. The latest “choice” to be attacked is a business owners choice on whether to allow smoking. In 2002 our legislature mandated that smoking would no longer be permitted in most public places and because of a loophole that I am sure was intentionally left in the bill because of the [...]

If you are looking for a break from all the heavy reading regarding world events and politics I came across a really cool site called RetroJunk that would be of interest to those of you like me that grew up in the 60’s/70’s/80’s.
Do you remember Sigmund & the Sea Monsters? How about Inch High Private [...]

In other Legislative news, issues other than abortion actually got discussed as the Senate passed Governor Rounds’ minimum wage bill yesterday 29-6. The bill would raise the minimum wage paid to, by some estimates, up to 20,000 South Dakotan’s to $7.25 by July 2009.
Of course the all too common hypocrisy, as seems to be [...]

Update Below
As was expected, the latest incarnation of our legislator’s attempt to ban abortions passed through the House State Affairs Committee yesterday by a 10-3 vote which means that it is now headed to the full house. It did end up getting changed slightly as the committee members made things just a bit easier on [...]

Did anyone catch the 60 minutes interview last night with Barack Obama? I have very little knowledge about his ability to lead our country this early on nor am I saying that he should be considered a viable candidate so soon into the 2008 election cycle but what I found refreshing and to be honest [...]

South Dakota legislators are again hard at work this session trying to dictate to us what we should do. This morning at 10am the House State Affairs committee begins the process of getting this year’s version of the abortion ban going. Only a few month’s after voters turned down their last attempt, they have added [...]

From the email bag:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
From:
State Representative Thomas J Van Norman, District 28A House of Representatives State Capitol Building Pierre, SD 57501
SAVE OUR BOOKS BILLS-”DEFERRED BY HOUSE EDUCATION COMMITTEE”
PIERRE-House Bill 1215 referred to by some as the Save Our Books
bill was deferred to the 41st day by the House Education Committee
Friday, February 2, 2007. The [...]

Screw me once shame on you, screw me twice shame on me. What about the 3rd time? My old web host again suspended my site saying that my small little blog was using too many server resources yesterday morning and instead of going into it here I posted about it elsewhere. In my case the [...]