Dakota Beacon

. . . the name is honorable, not abusive; DSU should be reformed, not punished; there are dark figures lurking in the shadows; your money goes much further in ND; his path to priesthood was not a straight line; three young farm brothers from Starkweather; limited government and more freedom; Are 18:1 grants too generous?  bravos to the Carrington Cardinaires dance team; Consider avoiding ND if you have FCAS; And Corvettes? Yup, those too; failed miserably; DAKTOIDS

No, it's hard to make a melodrama out of a slow process. The government is less like a bank robber who storms in with ski mask and pistol than like a timid little bank clerk who quietly, over the years, embezzles a large fortune without setting off alarms or getting caught.

Tax Foundation memo outlines ways to improve North Dakota's tax climate - will the legislature and governor listen?

America’s convention center business has been declining for two decades. The 126 million attendees in year 2000 fell to 86 million attendees in 2010. Meanwhile, the amount of convention space has increased from 40 million square feet in 1990, to 53 million square feet in year 2000, and to 70 million square feet in 2010. A former member of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority lamented last year that “Logic rarely has a place in the convention business.”

Local officials have changed their sales pitch, saying that convention centers should no longer be judged by how many hotels rooms, restaurants, and local attractions they help fill. Now the expansion of convention center facilities can “demonstrate to the world that we have unlimited confidence in our city and what it can do, not only as a convention destination but as the center of the most important trends in hospitality, science, health and education.”

The US does not live in a vacuum; we do live in a dangerous world fraught with risk. Here are the primary risks facing the US today in relative order of priority but not necessarily in order of occurrence. Multiple scenarios could evolve

“Freedom prospers only where the blessings of God are avidly sought and humbly accepted,” Reagan maintained. “The American experiment in democracy rests on this insight.” He said the discovery of that insight was the “great triumph” of the Founders. Indeed it was.

Have you noticed that most of those people against Measure 2 (Property Tax Elimination) are on the receive and spend side of property taxes.  As far as I can tell, they are the ones that ride in the wagon.  The average property tax payer could be considered the horse that pulls the wagon. 

…. Many of you have been attacked for being single-issue activists or single-issue voters. But I ask: What single issue could be of greater significance?” Reagan said that if one is unsure precisely when life begins, one should err in a way that protects rather than robs life: “If there’s even a question about when human life begins, isn’t it our duty to err on the side of life?”

Discussions will revolve around Measure #2 on the June Ballot

That is to say, just as there is no such thing as "personal" morality, neither is there such thing as the group variety.  To say otherwise is to wax relativistic – as the left will – and implies that morality doesn't really exist; only personal preference does.  Morality, however, if it is anything but a confusing synonym for taste, refers to an absolute, universal and eternal standard for behavior that transcends not only individuals and groups, but man himself. 

 The beauty of our form of government, our Constitution, our law, is that we are “a nation of laws, not of men”, meaning that we are not a personality cult, but a rational people governed by ONE LAW for ALL. The best guarantee of good law is that it is applied evenly across the boards. Bad law, on the other hand, gets to survive if the powerful are exempted from it and it applies only to the weak. If we are to have laws that are acceptable to the “important” or the “strong”, they must apply equally. There is great danger in these special exemptions.

Once again in America we are faced with a choice-it is a time for choosing. Just as Ronald Reagan spoke to a nation with many challenges and much at stake, so there are candidates touting solutions to the situation in this country today.

There is a reason why we have Supreme Court justices who have contempt for the document that is supposed to be their guiding light and a president who wipes his feet on the Constitution as he goes where no statist has gone before: they are following a trajectory that the nation was set on a long, long time ago.  They simply represent the latest version of republican decline: anti-constitutionalism 9.0. 

DSU was a “diploma factory”; the campus was administratively dysfunctional; issues at DSU raise numerous questions; Yah, sure, ya betcha; “Fighting Sioux”; “I kind of like that logo. What do you think?”  the Brazilian Bombshell; A tall tale? If so, it’s a good one; racially-tinged Jamestown murder trials; Cave fingered Howard; Western ND has changed and become a less safe place; Bismarck is changing; DAKTOIDS . . .

Although it was arguably unjust to make Catholics pay for two school systems, the policy was a blessing in disguise. The parochial schools took nothing from the government, and so they remained free to teach the whole truth without restraint from it.

Have “abortion rights” become so sacred to liberals that they are willing to sacrifice conscience exemptions at the altar of Roe v. Wade? Do they really want to head down this road? I suggest they stop and think hard about what they’re advocating.

It is wrong to think that Obama caved in to political pressure when he announced an “accommodation” at midday on February 10. In fact, he has no authority to either mandate or compromise. In reality, he is hacking away at our First Amendment liberties to promote the “change” he envisions.

A law against homosexual marriage today is no more an instance of bigotry or prejudice than the laws against polygamy that the United States enacted in the 1800s.

96 percent of blacks supported Obama in 2008.  Although, few are as honest as Jackson, who clearly is proud that he never lets politics get in the way of his bigotry.

If History consigned the founding era to a status of historical irrelevance, who can say that progressivism, which is also a product of historical evolution of ideas, will not suffer the same fate? In short, why should we not believe that progressivism was simply the product of a bevy of severely misguided statists who, at the beginning of the 20th century, believed that a sort of benevolent totalitarianism was the wave of the future?

The North Dakota University System is accountable to no one, especially taxpayers.

What’s frustrated people is that I have not been able to force Congress to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008. Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change that I would like sometimes. But what I have been able to do is move in the right direction. And what I’m going to keep on doing is plot away, very persistent.

Sen. John Hoeven “picked the right issue”; WDAY meteorologist John Wheeler punctured several myths; $1 billion of public; the faltering pace of economic development on Indian reservations; NDSU is suing nearly everybody; deaths and injuries in the oil patch; they’re looking for jobs, not women; bent out of shape about the Oil Patch; Two factors drive farmland prices; The government will make you healthier? DAKTOIDS

I finally caught up on my reading and ordered three great books; “The Myth of the Robber Barons”, “New Deal or Raw Deal”, and “FDR Goes to War”, all by Burton W. Folsom Jr. who is a professor of history and management at Hillsdale College in Michigan. Folsom has written numerous books and countless journal columns.

After excessive taxation of all tax venues forced venture capital into municipal bonds immediately following the war, and after increased estate taxes further drove venture capital into tax exempt foundations during the roaring twenties, it was probably the extensive excise taxes of the early thirties that put the final nails into the coffin of the Industrial Revolution, spawning The Great Depression.

An old adage is a spin-off of the Golden Rule and it goes like this: He who has the gold makes the rules. Towns and counties relying upon one major source of revenue to be distributed by a legislative committee or, worse yet, by a state agency implementing a sterile and impersonal formula drawn up by another legislative committee is something each voter should think through very carefully before voting for or against Measure 2.

Of all fifty states, not one was simply established and imposed by the federal government. Each one entered the union by virtue of its voluntary application. The first Congress proposed a Constitutional amendment - one that was rapidly adopted - which made it express and explicit that every power not specifically delegated by the states to the federal government was "reserved to the states, respectively, or the people." This language is clear: Sovereignty is in the people of the respective states, not of some conglomerate.

Judge Feland’s exclusive defense against suspension of her law license for ethical reasons is that it was all an accident. Inadvertent. Mistake. “I’m sorry, I don’t recall.”

Watch the video.

THE TRUTH WILL NOT SET HER FREE.

During the ethics trial of Feland the Panel examined a primary aspect of the prosecution of Sandy Blunt related to Mr. David Spencer and the fact that charges specific to Spencer were added without establishing probable cause because Feland lied to the trial judge about Spencer issues always being part of the criminal investigation. “From Day One”. This was never true and the hearing panel does not seem to be swallowing this WHOPPER.

Judge Cynthia Feland was found guilty of withholding evidence that the North Dakota Supreme Court Disciplinary Board Panel found to be “so reckless as to constitute a knowing disregard of the discovery requirement contained in Rule 3.8.”.

“It is simply the idea,” said Reagan, “the basis of this country and of our religion, the idea of the dignity of man, the idea that deep within the heart of each one of us is something so God-like and precious that no individual or group has a right to impose his or its will upon the people so well as they can decide for themselves.”