Dakota Beacon

I tell my students that student loans are like power tools. With a nail gun you can shingle your roof more efficiently, or you can nail your hand to the roof. So often when discussing student loans, we hear about the people who seem to have nailed a hand and both feet to the roof—$100,000 borrowed for a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies? Where were the parents? There is no bachelor’s degree from any school that is worth that kind of debt. 

. . . “I think people should think about this as a windfall”; hotel developers are investing in Minot; Buffett likes to zig when others zag; Half the locations are in Montana; “New Hi-Tech Oil & Gas Discoveries”; Chairman Tex Hall gleefully signed the documents; a package of reforms proposed by Hamid Shirvani; long lives and large families; The Lone Steer motel; Nodaks are prosperous, but stingy; The 2012 ACT scores are out; amestown trial of black ex-con Leron "Rah Rah" Howard; media coverage, or lack of it; DAKTOIDS . . . 

. . . “I think people should think about this as a windfall”; hotel developers are investing in Minot; Buffett likes to zig when others zag; Half the locations are in Montana; “New Hi-Tech Oil & Gas Discoveries”; Chairman Tex Hall gleefully signed the documents; a package of reforms proposed by Hamid Shirvani; long lives and large families; The Lone Steer motel; Nodaks are prosperous, but stingy; The 2012 ACT scores are out; amestown trial of black ex-con Leron "Rah Rah" Howard; media coverage, or lack of it; DAKTOIDS . . . 

Friedman once said, "The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the textbooks long after I'm gone."

Despite these intense privations and the incredible hardship experienced by this family and countless others during the period, what I remember of my grandparents growing up in the late 1950s and 1960s was a couple whose dignity and sense of self-worth remained intact.
They wore their best clothing to attend church on Sunday morning and had many friends who would call upon them on Sunday afternoon. The difficulties of the Depression years were stricken from living memory and a modest railroad retirement earned during and after the war along with Social Security allowed them to live a modest, yet comfortable life in retirement. . . Contrast this personal experience with what currently transpires among people living in poverty.

Yes, technology promotes liquidity in markets. However, hubris is Wall Street’s Achilles’ heel, as participants frequently disregard man’s limitations for measuring and predicting future risks. It’s becoming clear that the existing technology infrastructure, i.e., the plumbing of Wall Street, can’t fully support the complexity of high-frequency trading.

Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion told the lawmakers that "conservative messages" are "racially coded" and suggested ways to combat them. In Ms. Wiley's estimation, the facts of matters in question are not important. Rather, she said, "It's emotional connection, nor rational connection, that we need."
She argued, for example, that Newt Gingrich's labeling of President Obama as a "food stamp president" cannot be "a race neutral statement, even if Newt Gingrich did not intend racism." Thus, even though the food stamp program has grown dramatically in recent years, and despite the fact that most recipients are white, to discuss the question is somehow to engage in "racism."

Many in Congress who proclaim their belief in the free market and decry huge government deficits nevertheless seem ready to extend farm subsidies. This tells us, unfortunately, that what we are witnessing is politics as usual. And both parties are in it together. No one needs to wonder why we can't bring government spending under control. This example demonstrates why.

But since everything that begins to exist must have a cause, the universe, too, must have been caused. Its cause must have been immaterial and immensely powerful. This cause is what we normally call God.

“But, then, who created God?” the sceptic responds.

To slow the growth of government debt, the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress want to raise tax rates when the Bush tax cuts expire in January 2013. A tax increase would reduce consumer spending, but the biggest problem with a tax increase is that it reduces the incentive to work, invest and take risks, particularly among entrepreneurs who start and manage businesses.

Because negative campaigning is so effective, Obama employs this tactic to avoid talking about his record. There is no adult conversation on vital issues, only adolescent attack ads from the Democrat super PACs. America approaches a fiscal catastrophe and Obama can only focus on his re-election through attacks and misrepresentations. No solutions, no budget, (Harry Reid and Kent Conrad where are you?). Just trashy attack ads.

Kelly was hardly alone in being burned by the Reds. My political hero, Ronald Reagan, once a self-described “hemophiliac liberal,” likewise was torched by Hollywood’s communists. Reagan, of course, more than redeemed himself. As a result, we remember him for his politics more than his movies.

Port of ND, no place for their employees to live, How ND saved rural Wisconsin, there was a disconnect, It’s not their fault!, ND Indians do better on both counts, a slightly frightening outcome,  ND political blog Say Anything, This year’s winner is Marilyn Hagerty, eight silver carp jumped directly in, Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, Where are the fatties?, new chancellor of the ND University System, the state’s first black-on-black on murder

Obama’s campaign will do anything to discourage opposition voters. Obama must find a way to make sure opponents don’t want to vote. He must demoralize them. He must make their vote appear hopeless, make them want to give up. In a word, Obama must poison the vote for Romney.

To do this, the Obama campaign must convince people that Romney hates them. Obama is still counting on class warfare to work its magic. Here is where advertising propaganda prevails. Many of Obama’s TV ads intend to suppress voter turn-out by portraying Romney as hurtful to the middle-class. Convincing the opposition that Romney sneers at them, that he resents them, that he is in politics for personal gain, that he loves closing plants forcing people to lose health care and die. Obama must convince the opposition they are already defeated and have no chance. They might as well not even show up at the polls.

Do the under-30s really want a president who has tried and succeeded in raising the price of electricity and gasoline; who has hastened the day of Social Security’s insolvency by cutting the revenues to that program; who has raised future taxes on young Americans through the reckless addition of trillions of dollars to the national debt; whose policies have pushed food prices higher; who has tried to keep home prices from falling to levels that would make them affordable to younger Americans?

The Romney Ryan ticket will challenge the Obama Biden record of abysmal failure. The national talk will now turn to economic growth, jobs, free enterprise, and most importantly--leadership.

There is no alternative in 2012.  And whether you are satisfied with the Romney ticket or not, it is clear that while he might not move fast enough to restore  the  America we grew up in, he WON’T lead us into Marxist slavery.  He will not destroy our economy.  Obama WILL.  The choice is clear.

Consider the matter of women in combat.  Whether it is or isn’t a good idea, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know if we’re confused about sex differences.  And, really, whether you’re for it or against, we should all be able to agree on one simple proposition: our decisions should be informed by fact, not fantasy.  We should agree to tell the truth.

The Budget Control Act adopted by congress and signed by the president last summer will cripple America’s national defense. Congress is now on vacation, will return for a few weeks until the November elections, then lapse into a lame duck session. On January 2, 2013, our national defense begins its rapid decline unless congress somehow takes action to stop it.

But this is just the start of the gutting of the military.

So perhaps Chick-fil-A’s values are not Chicago values.  But they can only be an improvement.

What we can do is control the environment in which they will necessarily occur, so as to make it more difficult for them to act out and harm the rest of us.  That means eliminating killing fields.  That Cinemark movie theater in Aurora was a oasis for a killer - a gun-free zone in an otherwise well-armed society, providing an audience of sitting ducks for an insane killer (apparently policy for all Cinemark theaters).  Does any of this ring a bell? 

The point is that we never treat saving lives as the only imperative when devising policy. 

It’s clear what kind of legislation would save lives—and it has nothing to do with gun-control.

You and I are protected every day by the Second Amendment, whether or not we own a gun or carry one, from the assumption on the part of the would-be criminal that someone would be. It’s sort of like the “herd immunity” you hear about regarding vaccinations. You probably owe your life to the Second Amendment and never even knew it.

Polls consistently report that Americans want their presidents to have a strong faith in God, which encourages our chief executives to stress their religious convictions and practices. Many Americans feel more comfortable when they know (or at least believe) that presidents pray about the decisions they make and the policies they adopt.

Liberals have been trying for ages to get the goods on the TP, but the most their sleuthing has uncovered is an allegation that a black politician was targeted by one or two TP attendees with a racial epithet that, curiously, wasn’t caught on audio or video despite today’s ubiquity of electronic devices.  And it must be frustrating. 

When not otherwise justifying poor or lazy thinking, clichés in their more sinister form are a way of dismissing dissent or opposition.

"Education is the one best hope black Americans have for a decent future," he wrote in a 1989 column. "The civil rights leadership, for all its emphasis on desegregating schools, has done very little to improve them."

Interpretations like this lurk beneath the Obama administration’s recent non-enforcement of federal law. For instance, President Obama’s Department of Justice declared in 2011 that it regarded The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)—duly enacted by a majority in Congress, to use the president’s sophomoric constitutional reminder—to be unconstitutional and would no longer defend it in court. Oh, really? What happened to Article Two, Section Three of the U.S. Constitution, the part that enjoins the president to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed?”

. . . ND is in a period of “headiness”; Sanford moves with surprising speed; “a blueprint” for the rest of the country; a little state is being stretched to its limits; Oil Patch business trickles back to eastern ND; Great Plains states barely help national consumer spending; federal grants are being announced; almost no regulation of child farm labor; doubling the chancellor’s staff ; 3,200 Minot residents shared $4 million; the cash is for me; DAKTOIDS , , , ,