Dakota Beacon

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Without the ability to project and sustain power overseas, we may risk fighting a conflict on our own soil.

Our economy and defense are inextricably linked. Adam Smith understood this when he wrote in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, “When institutions protect the liberty of individuals, greater prosperity results for all.”

The converse could well spell disaster.

North Dakota’s AA+ credit rating is not an economic parameter that North Dakota politicians brag about during re-election campaigns, nor should it be.

North Dakota’s booming oil and gas industry is largely responsible for our credit rating being relatively high by providing for our great state the equivalent of “full employment”.

Action by legislators and our governor are necessary in the near future to reduce North Dakota’s tax backed debt, to decline federal funds in new areas and even reject federal funds in historically federally funded areas, and to change state pension plans from “defined benefits” to “defined contributions”. These actions will require courage and commitment to the well being of future generations of North Dakotans…but the reward will be a AAA credit rating and a state government to be proud of.

In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the zoning and permitting processes are presumably less arthritic than in Lower Manhattan, but the Flight 93 memorial has still not been completed. There were objections to the proposed “Crescent of Embrace” on the grounds that it looked like an Islamic crescent pointing towards Mecca. The defense of its designers was that, au contraire, it’s just the usual touchy-feely huggy-weepy pansy-wimpy multiculti effete healing diversity mush. It doesn’t really matter which of these interpretations is correct, since neither of them has anything to do with what the passengers of Flight 93 actually did a decade ago. 9/11 was both Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid rolled into one, and the fourth flight was the only good news of the day, when citizen volunteers formed themselves into an ad hoc militia and denied Osama Bin Laden what might have been his most spectacular victory. A few brave individuals figured out what was going on and pushed back within half-an-hour. But we can’t memorialize their sacrifice within a decade. And when the architect gets the memorial brief, he naturally assumes there’s been a typing error and that “Let’s roll!” should really be “Let’s roll over!”

The Wall Street Journal nicely encapsulates The One’s newest fiscal absurdity. Obama wants to see “Congress create a ‘bank’ that could borrow huge sums with only a small federal outlay and would be independent of any political interference.” The bank would allegedly “stimulate” the economy by funding public works projects and jobs that would otherwise go unfunded. The WSJ points out that the tactic would result in unions and construction companies benefiting from the same taxpayer largesse–a recipe for another subprime-like economic meltdown. The Journal also observes that an infrastructure bank would end up functioning just as characterized by Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro in 2008, as a “public private partnership like Fannie Mae.”

The reality facing the Obama administration is that its Keynesian tools have failed, and the economic advisers that continue to prescribe more intervention to bolster markets refuse to acknowledge their impotence. Krueger is the master of short-term Keynesian stimulus, … [which may have] provided a minor short-term boost for the economy, but once the delirium of the cheap-cash binge wore off, the hangover sapped away any minor gains that were to be had.

Thrifty ND taxpayers, too much strain, We have a sort of ‘banana republic, Black Eyed Peas, a Plains Art Museum festival, driving conditions have never been worse, MAN CAMP, but banal lives for others, Oil patch Infrastructure grows, a tragic sequence of events, She was thrown from a horse and got back on, the year of the cucumber, local architectural style, Stock up on pasta, DAKTOIDS

Obama, Ayers and Dohrn share many of the same values as indicated by the issues and policies they worked on together including education reform, juvenile justice, community organizing and ACORN. All three went to great lengths in 2008 to mislead voters about their relationship.

Then, under supervision the flock was allowed to roam about a little. At first we were afraid that the cat herd would be the untimely end of the flock. Surprise! It only took a single episode after which the cats were scared to death of the extremely aggressive geese. Then the geese started going after the poor old fat yellow dog. She never knew what hit her. Almost deaf and blind in one eye, the geese would come up behind her and bite her behind.

Though hard to imagine, it is certainly possible that Washington progressives will get sidetracked from this latest effort to legislate or regulate fairness using impractical schemes.  Maybe progressives are already working on an even better fix for the ailing economy than twisting employers’ arms on women’s compensation.  Perhaps someone at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve Bank, or Treasury will suggest that mortgage companies be forced to credit borrowers for payments that would have been made had the borrowers not chosen to not make the payments.  This should improve the economy for sure.

But now I’m probably just being nasty.

Yet one of the curious features of a hypersexualized society is that it becomes paradoxically sexless and joyless. Guys who confidently bellow along with Enrique’s “F**king You” no longer quite know how to ask a girl for a chocolate malt at the soda fountain. It’s hardly surprising that, as Miss Ingraham reports, the formerly fringe activity of computer dating has now gone mainstream on an industrial scale. And, even then, as a couple of young ladies happened to mention to me after various recent encounters through Match.com and the like, an alarming number of chaps would rather see you naked on their iPhones Anthony Weiner-style than actually get you naked in their bachelor pads.  I was reminded of The Children Of Men, set in an infertile world, in which P D James’ characters, liberated from procreation, increasingly find sex too much trouble.

The recent decision by the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in which it “ruled that the key feature of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known by many as ‘Obamacare,’ is unconstitutional reminds us that the Constitution creates a federal government of numbered or enumerated powers. When Congress acts, it must stay within the boundaries of those powers. In other words, the federal government is not unlimited; it is limited. … If Congress exceeds those powers, it is acting unconstitutionally and the Supreme Court must rein it in. Chief Judge Dubina and Judge Hull have done exactly that.

Everyday life in a flood zone, rampant growth, The town is about to experience acute growing pains, a chance-in-a-lifetime, The Jamestown Sun pleaded to retain the subsidy, what about Fargo?, the wrangling is not diminishing, ND needs to change the status quo, the deepest natural lake in ND, wet weather is unfriendly to barley, one “evil act” a month, DAKTOIDS

Liberals skip through life, ricocheting from cause to cause. All the while, the manifestations of human behavior that they pretend to address simply relocate. In the new locales, other liberals view the same manifestations as opportunities to feel good about addressing the same presumed causes.

At the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, jump-prevention barriers would probably reduce the number of jumpers–specifically, the number of jumpers from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. But sadly, taxpayers will have been tapped to pay for yet another futile effort to wish away ugly reality with good intent.

It is simply unprofessional for members of the Board of Higher Education to attack members of the legislature for ensuring their policies are followed and questioning the accountability of The Board.

The Board of Higher Education is a separate branch of government under the North Dakota Constitution as Lloyd Omdahl likes to point out, but the legislature still makes the laws that The Board lives by.  And that very same legislature could put a measure on the ballot to ask the people to change how The Board is designed.

Change can either come internally or externally, and the way things are going, it will probably have to come from the outside.

Tulsa cannot fail to set a precedent.  One way or another your city will play a part in an important issue.  You will either uphold the United States Constitution and its bar against state-supported religion or you will punish a man for acting in his own good conscience to avoid participating in a religion in which he does not believe in contradiction of his own.  You know full well that you would not require a Muslim police officer to participate in a Roman Catholic “training session” or “sensitivity training” so as to interact well with Baptists.  You know this as well as I do and as well as Officer Fields does.  In this light, you can easily see how truly offensive this punishment is to the rest of America.  Please do the right thing and end this nightmare for Officer Fields.  I do not know him (I might well not even like him if I did) but what is right is right. 

This last legislative session Senator Olafson's dishonest effort to kill the Human Life bill was despicable. Those of you who are regular readers of this publication know that I seldom make such overt statements about anyone in public office except the provably dishonest. I am being very, very specific in this case as dishonest bullies should be extricated from public office and from the Republican Party in North Dakota for the sake of honest governance. These types of people in elective office always bring grief to the party eventually. Strong language I know. But I am not alone in my recognition of this Senator’s arrogance and dishonesty. His reputation is well established in both of the legislative houses.

The bottom line is that the US government of our day – like that of the 1920s Germany – is saddled with financial obligations it simply cannot make good upon. When governments face this kind of predicament, a hyper-inflationary depression is almost always the final outcome.

In light of this, holding onto one's gold would seem like a prudent thing to do.

Democrats are still trying to paint the tea part as “radical”. Let’s review this “radicalism”.

I believe that this analysis applies not just to science, but to American society in general. Whether America is in “free-fall decline,” as our reader believes, can be debated. One thing is certain, many Americans have fallen under the spell of the cultural Marxism machine which the progressive public education system now constitutes. Many of today’s younger adults were never taught the vision of a libertarian America created by the founders. Come next November, we will find out whether our decline is a free-fall that cannot be stopped or only a period of rapid but reversible decay brought on by the rise to power of America’s first truly anti-American president.

These healthcare exchanges are unfunded mandates waiting to happen.  The money is there now, but there is no guarantee it will be there later.

Instead of "jumping through all the hoops to get federal grant money" the State of North Dakota should be looking to limit its exposure to the mess that is being created.

A few weeks ago in a post titled, “Education Dep’t Tells Kids: All You Need Is Global Warmism, So Give Peace a Chance” (originally ran as “Education Department indoctrinates kids in global warming myths” in American Thinker), I noted that government ideologues are pushing climate change falsehoods on schoolchildren in order to spread the doctrine of the Church of Global Warming. To at least one person, the post’s title and message were not enough to identify me as a disbeliever of Church doctrine. I received the following email from one Sven Lilienström of Germany.

The rioters, meanwhile, have a crude understanding of how the system works. The proprietor of a Bang & Olufsen franchise revealed that the looters had expressed mystification as to why he objected to them stealing his goods. After all, he was insured, wasn’t he? So the insurance would pay for his stolen TVs and DVD players, wouldn’t it? The notion that, ultimately, someone has to pay for the insurance seemed to elude them, in the same way it seems to elude our elites that ultimately someone has to pay for Britain’s system of “National Insurance” - or what Canada calls “Social Insurance” and America “Social Security”.

The problem for the western world is that it has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale. For large numbers at the lower end of the spectrum (still quaintly referred to by British reporters as “working class”) the ritual of work - of lifetime employment as a normal feature of life – has been all but bred out by multigenerational dependency. At the upper end of the spectrum, too many of us seem to regard an advanced western society as the geopolitical version of a lavishly endowed charitable foundation that funds somnolent programming on NPR.

One of the most attractive logos in American sports, the idealized vision of small towns is itself a fiction, people must be “weaned” from those programs, USDA programs create a conflict, they wanted the same, “This is War”, 15 to 20 percent of the wheat in the county is drowned, They have no choice, Controversy at the Valley City Times-Record, permanent flood protection, unfit to be on the road, Skunk Bay Road, It’s not the money -- it’s the weather, Watch out, here they come!, national “wellbeing” statistics, “Outstanding CPA in State Government”