The “Arab Spring” turns out to be a bit more complicated than it looks on CNN, and a CIA that failed to see the bankruptcy of its own pension plan looming is unlikely to be a very useful guide to the various forces in play.

It fits our underdog mystique, united front of state and university officials, unconstitutional invasion, long-held identity . . . for the entire state of North Dakota, Little Shell Pembina Band, Indian Health Service hospital in Belcourt, a lot of verbal double-talk, There are no “watchdogs, EZ Breezy Weight Loss and Wellness, Valley State coed Mindy Morgenstern, he will be too busy sandbagging, cost of lost agricultural production in the Devils Lake Basin, DAKTOIDS

Food prices are rising and often the farmers get blamed for it. However, they are the last ones at fault. So what are the reasons?

American’s supply of fresh fruits and vegetables is now decreased due to frost and cold weather and even some in Mexico is affected. There is difficulty in getting them to the markets and higher fuel costs are added to the price. News in late February claims that prices for these products could double or triple and will last at least a month.  Will the prices then go down?  It makes you wonder.

On March 30, 1981, Ronald Reagan, president for merely 10 weeks, stepped outside the Washington Hilton. What happened next was an image millions would soon witness on their TV screens: America’s 40th president raised his arm to ward off a question from a reporter and then, seconds later, bullets crackled the air.

It was Good Friday, April 1981, and Reagan sensed a feeling of rebirth. He was certain his life had been spared for a special purpose, one that, he discerned, struck at the epicenter of the Cold War conflict: the epic battle against atheistic communism.

A team of Scripps Institute of Oceanography and UC San Diego researchers has released the results of a study indicating the occurrence of “hyperthermal” events that warmed Earth’s atmosphere as much as 5.4°F 50 million years ago.

Rumor has it that horrified Church of Global Warming brethren are holding panic-filled teleconferences to determine how to go about faking the fossils necessary to prove that CO2 released by conservative-run industries caused these “hyperthermals.”

Totalitarian democracy refers to “...a system of government in which the lawfully elected representatives maintain the integrity of a nation state whose citizens, while granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of the government.”

Destruction of public property and death threats against legislators, especially in Wisconsin, is the modus operandi used by those who hold the will of the elected majority in contempt. Americans have seen the true face of a totalitarian democracy with the minority vying to rule by thwarting the will of the majority.

The room buzzes with little voices. Little children engage in “mature, dramatic play.” An adult helps the children “regulate” and “monitor each other’s compliance” with “rules and assigned roles. Each child knows his or her place. Each child does the group’s bidding, nothing else.

Orwell’s 1984? No, a scene played out in thousands of classrooms across America. The drumbeat of collectivism begins in preschool. And a long-dead Soviet psychologist helped define that drumbeat.

In kindergarten and preschool classrooms all over America, tiny young humans are being taught to regiment each other’s behavior. Obedient little collectivists are learning to submit to group wishes in order to be judged “correct” — politically correct. Resistance is futile.

Testimony: Regarding HCR 3046

I am a UND alumni and a retired civil engineer residing in Bismarck. I am testifying today as a taxpaying citizen. I first would like to place some emphasis on North Dakota higher education and K-12 economic parameters.

Summarizing, we spend 2.4 to 3 times more per capita than our neighbors on out-of-state students, spending is increasing 3.6 times increases in enrollment and 3.4 times the rate of inflation, and tuition is increasing at near twice the rate of inflation. And we have more four year institutions per capita than any other state.

Summarizing, during last decade, the number of administrators has held constant while the number of students enrolled fell by 20%.

These facts are troubling to me and should be of concern to every taxpayer in North Dakota. They point out serious economic mismanagement of both K-12 and higher education. So I applaud this effort to change the status quo regarding the administering of education services to the citizens of North Dakota. And I have a few suggestions to make this ballot measure more palatable to the legislature as a whole.

One of my best friends at age 8 was a Down’s Syndrome child named Jake who, had been conceived today very likely would not exist as the result of an amniocentesis analysis being deemed “defective” and thus should be destroyed. Gary, a homosexual, was my best friend all through college whose mother thought that had she known of his “defect” might of not carried him to birth, and might have had him destroyed in utero. My niece McKenzie, who will be married this fall, who loves animals, and is always the life of the party was born extremely premature, has a beautiful spirit, and has always been human.

The people you love in your life make you who you are. Some people would say that some whom I have loved very much were “defective”, “inconvenient”, “too expensive”, another “gaping mouth” on a crowded planet, a “job taker”. But I ask you, who can know the value of the unborn? The answer is that no human can know. That is why every human being is sacred from the moment of creation to the end of life on this planet. Everyone of them. EVERYONE.

It seems that the Irish government started telling banks they had to make insupportable loans.  Then politicians became a bit greedy, and the next thing you know, we have our canary in the mine.  We have the vision of what will unquestionably happen to America one day in the not-too-distant future.  Of course, when everyone defaulted banks began to fail, and so the rest of the economy.  In two years, Ireland went from the second-lowest unemployment nation to the second highest, with a rate of 14%  Somehow, in 1999, in the midst of their economic boom, Ireland gave up her own currency to buy into the Euro.  Now, this is where they lost me.  How in the world does a people stroll up to the European Union and, without a shot fired or even a threat delivered, offer up its sovereignty – after nearly 800 years of unremitting struggle to attain it in the first place?

Great time to be a Cardinal, courage and conviction, you would be looking for a new job, political groundswell, let all ND Sioux Indians vote on the issue, four related murders in Minot, It’s kind of a unique situation, Earl should not run, ND’s economic success, people didn’t go to Williston or Stanley for the amenities, Trygve Olson, The mail processing system in Jamestown, the Farm Service Agency, oil companies are required by state law to set up trusts, DAKTOIDS

It is tempting and certainly very easy to point out that Obama’s war (or Obama’s “kinetic military action”, or “time-limited, scope-limited military action”, or whatever the latest ever more preposterous evasion is) is at odds with everything candidate Obama said about US military action before his election.  And certainly every attempt the President makes to explain his Libyan adventure is either cringe-makingly stupid (“I'm accustomed to this contradiction of being both a commander-in-chief but also somebody who aspires to peace”) or alarmingly revealing of a very peculiar worldview.

It's never over over there.

Over-the-top exaggeration and vilification of opponents are indeed behaviors flaunted by liberals. The liberal animal will never change. The critter has long been, is now, and will always be in favor of turning the responsibility for running one’s life over to pseudo-intellectual know-it-alls entrenched in a huge, overly-powerful government funded by money earned by people who do not want pseudo-intellectual know-it-alls running their lives.

It’s hard to say what is more irritating about the “Violence is never the answer” nonsense, the stupidity or the insincerity of it.  It’s much like the mantra “Our strength lies in our diversity.”  It’s something people say because it’s a repeated big lie that has become “truth” and is politically correct; it’s a reflexive platitude uttered politician-like because that’s what “experts” are expected to say.

The reality is that, like amputation and many other unpleasant things, physical force has its place.  After all, to paraphrase Chesterton, violence is not the best way to settle differences.  Sometimes, however, it is the only way to prevent them from being settled for you.

Once again we have more declassified files on Ted Kennedy producing yet more unsettling questions. As readers of my previous columns and books know, Ted Kennedy made a confidential outreach to Soviet despot Yuri Andropov in May 1983, evidenced by a stunning KGB memo. The goal was to undermine Ronald Reagan’s defense policies and, in my view, Reagan’s re-election prospects as well.” Now, “[a]nother round of declassified FBI files on Senator Ted Kennedy has been released. Fittingly, in Kennedy’s case, they once again raise all sorts of questions, from the moral to the political to issues of national security.”

At long last, two years after Senator Ted Kennedy’s death, pause to investigate some hard questions? This latest FBI file begs yet more answers on the doings of Ted Kennedy.

The excessive spending that has resulted from the evolution of the “tax revenue trough” demands consideration of removal of enough “legs” to return the levels of taxation to a “stool”. The first choice of many residents of North Dakota, as reflected in the last legislative session, is to shorten the property taxation leg. But a group of imaginative North Dakotans is securing signatures toward the elimination of property taxes, a move felt by big-spending legislators that are hell-bent on re-election, to be too much, too fast.

We all know the king was a fool – no, actually insane.  While standing there naked he allowed himself to believe he had been given a beautiful suit.  Sadly it existed only in his imagination.  America’s voters have fallen for the same swindle Grimm’s tailors sold the king in this famous fairy tale.  America’s politicians are nothing but swindling tailors.  The tragedy is what’s happened to America isn’t a fairy tale.

In the last seventy years regulating risks to health and safety dominated public policy debates. Lamentably, pursuit of improving our lives generally entails risks.

Contrary to the sentiment of moral do-gooders, living in a technologically advanced country that uses industrial chemicals, nuclear energy and a lot of carbon fuels is healthier than living in a poor, non-industrialized country that uses little technology, few chemicals and a minimum of carbon fuels.

Unfortunately, risks which cannot be prevented (earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes), happen. Sadly, those risks which can be prevented (multiple stimulus packages, overwhelming debt, printing money to pay for excessive debt), aren’t.

In 1964, federal handouts to needy Americans constituted a mere 1.2% of our gross domestic product. Only 7% of babies were born into broken families.

Indeed, a staggering 71% of black babies are now born out of wedlock. That’s a Black culture-killing 218% explosion in illegitimacy over four decades.

The “war on poverty” must be phased out. Otherwise poverty may score an overwhelming victory.

The quake was felt hundreds of miles away and the tsunami rippled south to North Africa, north to England, and all the way to North America. Modern studies rate this quake at 9 on the Richter scale—the same as the revised magnitude of the one that just hit Japan. Records show that … the Lisbon earthquake on All Saints Day in 1755 ranks as one the worst natural disasters in modern history when measured by loss of life and destruction of property. As with all great events, natural or otherwise, people always seek to explain its cause and meaning. The Lisbon event is no exception. Yet, there was something unique about explanations of it at the time, and strikingly, for generations to come.

By the time you read this, President Obama will be taking a well-deserved break from the 54^th hole of today’s scheduled golf game and the grueling responsibility of picking out his Final Four priority high-speed rail projects on ESPN by relaxing on a beach in… Libya? Japan? No, Brazil. Oh, here he is now:

“Tall and tan and young and lovely
The boy from Spendaholica goes walking
And when he passes
Each one he passes
Goes ‘Aiiieeeeee…’”

The 2010 census data for ND, African immigrants arriving in Fargo and Grand Forks, sensible thinking, average compensation is on the rise, BNSF Railway, a Texan murdered a Texan in Minot, The F-M Symphony, Minors shouldn’t be in bars, proposal to abolish the Board of Higher Education, a loud, politically correct minority, UND President Robert Kelley, Dry Lake Township

On February 23, 2011 the Fargo Forum published reporter Patrick Springer’s article entitled “Family Planning Faces Funding Cuts”. I would contend that this article was either poor reporting or propaganda. The article begins with the subheading “Advocates: GOP playing politics”. In so doing the author has set the predicate that Republicans are not serious or perhaps are manipulative and want to make family planning unpaid for by the Federal Government.

Does Patrick Springer not know that this is all about abortion and just has not done his homework before contacting and interviewing? Or, is he a propagandist who purports to be a journalist? My experience and the evidence presented above indicates to this author that it the later case.

In a word, homosexual special interests focus on sex and benefits first, and mission accomplishment second.

Lost in the conversation is the current segregation of heterosexual service personnel. If practicing homosexuals should not be segregated, then why segregate heterosexuals in separate facilities? Why not combine everyone into single facilities and save money?