Dakota Beacon

With a 76% increase in ongoing state funding since 2003, the only reason that universities think they need to stick it to the students with higher education is because there is no one in the system to protect the student's financial interests. 

NDTA views students as Future Taxpayers, and as such will continue to track this situation.   

Lawyers didn’t win the battle of Yorktown or Gettysburg. Lawyers didn’t land on the beaches of Normandy. In times of war, it’s best to put our freedom in the hands of soldiers rather than in the hands of condescending lawyers who sit in the lap of luxury in air conditioned rooms while try to convince us of how brilliant and compassionate that they are.

It’s time for Democrats to apologize to our troops and veterans and leave our military alone.

 “The president is targeting more than the wealthiest. In fact, in his desperation, he is apparently now prepared to impose heavier tax burdens on middle-income Americans as well. How? In a recent speech he stated that he wants to raise the ‘cap’ on Social Security.”

American conservatives’ problem with RomneyCare is the same as with ObamaCare – that, if the government (whether state or federal) can compel you to make arrangements for the care of your body parts that meet the approval of state commissars, then the constitution is dead. For if conceding jurisdiction over your lungs and kidneys and bladder does not make you a subject rather than a citizen, what does?

United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck has an annual budget of $30 million and about 340 full-time students -- that’s an annual cost of about $88,000 per student.  To put it in a harsher light, the two-year college graduates about 110 students annually -- roughly $270,000 per graduate.  Don’t worry, it’s only federal money.

The runoff will be “sensational”, one of the lengthiest high water events in history”, Sen. Kent Conrad cried foul, Call it what you want, This is a huge issue for the Bakken, We have nothing left to cut, Each newspaper highlights its own awards,  Bismarck says Kingsbury is the chosen one, GF area population has flattened, Under this proposal two districts will adjoin ND, USDA is giving the Standing Rock Reservation $5 million, formula for allocating oil tax revenues, growing number of Somali immigrants, "I'm from Siberia, but it's the same." 

The solution to the problem of soaring prices of food and fuel lies in Washington,” he concludes. “If Congress, the president, and the bureaucracies would restore free markets in food and fuel markets, prices would come down. If Bernanke and the Fed would quit expanding the supply of Federal Reserve Notes, upward pressure on prices would be diminished. It’s that simple, economically.

The average taxpayer doesn't mind spending so much when they know that it is saving someone else money, especially students.  These corporate welfare programs end up costing both taxpayers and students, and have very little to show for the money. 

It is the job of educators to “change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students.”[1]  So proclaimed psychologist Benjamin Bloom, originator of Outcome-Based Education.  The U.S. Department of Education was created in 1979, setting the stage for Bloom’s decree only two years later.  In the 1980s, the already ugly transformation of America’s schools gained momentum.

Many of today’s K-12 and university classrooms serve as laboratories in which instructors breed minds poor in knowledge and logic but rich in political correctness.  Morally bankrupt values like “tolerance” and “diversity” are recurring themes.  Such conditioning often aims to create “citizens of the world,” despite there being no planet-wide entity of which people can become citizens.  But educators wedded to utopian visions have no time for such mundane reality.  Time is precious.  Students must be conditioned to join the “global community.”

"When you go to Washington to serve the people who elected you, you'd better be sure of who you are."  - Michele Bachmann

Great music isn’t here to make us smarter, it’s here to give us pleasure. There is an endless variety of great music to encourage the soul, to cultivate the love of the beautiful.

My purpose in listening to great music is to explore, cherish and savor something I enjoy and not be distracted from that pleasure with detail or disruption.

Diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice zealots, as well as other self-appointed fairness police think it their job to force very different people to interact with one another. In other words, voluntary, profit-motivated interaction is bad, even if the profit motive really does bring very different people together. High-minded forced interaction is good, even if the high-mindedness really does set people at each others’ throats as a result of focusing on differences which would otherwise have remained utterly irrelevant.

So goes the “reasoning” inside the head of the typical progressive social engineer.

What Would Jesus Cut?’ That is the question asked by the left-leaning Christian organization, Sojourners, in its campaign of the same name. It is a most appropriate question given the battle over the budget and given this time of year, not long after the most holy holiday of the year for Christians. A fundamental problem with Sojourners’ program is the assumption that what ‘we’ do must be done by the state. It is a large and not logically necessary leap from ‘We are called to be charitable to the poor,’ to ‘A righteous society will have an extensive welfare state.’

A growing number of people think the UN is nothing more than a group of pointy headed numbskulls and a statement overnight does nothing to refute that claim.

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You simply cannot make this stuff up.

The only funding crisis at NDSU is a crisis of priorities.  The mission of the universities should be to find ways to live within the 10-20% budget increases they have been getting from the legislature.  The continued effort to build little empires on college campuses on the backs of both students and taxpayers should have been examined more fully this legislative session.

So then, a fundamental question is whether or not conservatives generally, and Republicans specifically, will prove themselves free market advocates or reveal themselves as unabashed market manipulators? Will Republicans play to the emotional reactions of voters just like Democrats do? In order to behave in a purely principled manner, conservatives would have to admit that reducing favored companies’ costs with taxpayer money is a bad thing. To behave in a brutally honest manner, conservatives must acknowledge that allowing government to pick marketplace winners and losers in any market segment is a losing economic game plan in the end.

Here’s hoping that conservatives follow free-market principles. Having a strong, rational, conservative Republican party to counterbalance the strong, irrational, liberal Democrat party is a must for America’s wellbeing.

True ND values, the governor thought they made “good choices, They have Democratic legislators, sees the Nonpartisan League portion of the party, One sows for the benefit of another age, a 18-year-old Somali was murdered, There’s Moe to come, Green for green cards, Amtrak is planning an alternate route, Blizzard stops Bakken, twisted the blades of two windmills, Hairball, Let’s face it the “curse” is horrible, DAKTOIDS

Back on the home front, every small-town airport has at least a dozen crack TSA operatives sniffing round the panties of grade-schoolers. Meanwhile, at the UN, the EU, at the Organization of the Islamic Conference, in the “Facebook revolutions” of “the Arab spring”, the Islamization of the world proceeds: Millions of Muslims support bin Laden’s goal – the submission of the western world to Islam – but, unlike him, understand that flying planes into buildings is entirely unnecessary to achieving it. Will being high-flying Jetsons with state-of-the-art gizmos prove sufficient in a Flintstonizing world? The Pakistanis are pretty sure they know the answer to that.

The free market is powerful. Because profit is the motivator, private-sector-funded research also occurs with far less waste than government-funded research. There is no objective evidence to support the argument that government must keep money flowing into scientific research in order to maintain the pace of worthwhile discovery.

Where did Gingrich make his ”investment” pitch? Why, at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution, a progressive think tank?

Far from being a new-fangled idea in 1861, the right of secession was implicit in the very language of American politics - in the words state, sovereign, and federal - from the beginning. It was also positively asserted many times, even in the North, before 1861. And an act of secession was neither "rebellion" nor "insurrection," but the act of the same sovereign states that had ratified the Constitution in the first place.

It was not secession that was unconstitutional, but the suppression of secession. The North fought the Civil War by allowing its chief executive to exercise dictatorial powers, raising armies and money and suspending civil liberties without consulting Congress, and even arresting the Maryland legislature and installing a puppet government. This was "government of the people, by the people, for the people"? What happened to "the consent of the governed"?

For President Obama, it was a refreshing and surprising expression of American exceptionalism. More than that, President Obama’s words read like a punctuation, an exclamation point, on what President George W. Bush had said on September 14, 2001, during an unforgettable 9/11 memorial service at the majestic National Cathedral. Bush himself had organized the service. He picked the music, selected speakers, and carefully chose the words he delivered that afternoon.

Richard Mack notes that the county sheriff is the ONLY elected law enforcement officer we have.  His boss is the people, he should seek to serve the people, not federal agencies.  Sheriff Mack is more than a successful plaintiff.  He is a Constitutional hero.  He travels throughout the United States educating law enforcement personnel and the citizenry about the rights and responsibilities of government in a constitutional republic.  Should the opportunity come your way to hear him speak DO NOT FAIL to listen!  If you are not fortunate enough to meet him in person, read one of his several books and visit his website: http://www.sheriffmack.com.

Recently, CNN’s Money.com posted an article bearing the title, ‘U.S. Millionaires Population Expanded by 8 Percent in 2010.’ According to the article, there are now approximately 8.4 million millionaires in the United States, and last year’s increase was due primarily to rising stock prices, following a 27-percent decline in the number of millionaires in 2008 due to the stock market’s plunge that year. What is one to make of this information? There were only a few thousand millionaires in the United States in 1900. Adjusting for the increase in the Consumer Price Index, it would take a net worth of about $25 million today to be the economic equivalent of a millionaire in 1900. Clearly, being a millionaire today does not support the lifestyle that it did a century ago.

What must it be like to sit atop Mount Olympus, actually in a Time magazine office cubicle, and nod approvingly at costly federal edicts slapped on taxpayers by taxpayer-paid government employees who sit in taxpayer-funded cubicles of their own? Verily, what gratification must planet-saving, icemaker-loathing brethren know? And all based on the dubious belief that humans cause “global warming.”

When my kids were little they used to discover all kinds of things in the back yard. One day, our 5 year old daughter found a dead bird, and she got very upset and started to cry. We did everything we could to comfort her and make her forget about the dead bird. My wife said that she should think about pretty flowers and swimming at the swimming pool. I said she should think about the little calves down at the farm and of riding motorcycle out in the badlands. She wouldn’t eat her supper, and we kept it up with happy thoughts about caterpillars, and butterflies, and thoughts of our upcoming trip to Denver. Finally, she started to eat and was much happier. Then her little 3 year old brother came up with something she could think about –