Dakota Beacon

Instead of arguing about debates and trying to dodge criticism, candidates must fulfill their duty to address the issues.

North Dakota's taxpayers and voters deserve to know each candidate's positions, but the time recently spent on petty arguments has been wasted and discussions about important topics stand idle.  Voters have a right to understand their candidate's ideas and candidates are obliged to share them.

We have to deal with the scourge of arrogant, reality-ignoring, elite theorists in economics, global warming, and the social sciences. The smug "experts" tell us to forget the data. Forget logic. Forget all of reality. They, the great seers of the way that things should be, will tell us the way in which we must imagine things to be. How shall the seers pass on their wisdom? Why, they'll use their "models," of course.

Since the aims of the New Society were fundamentally impossible, resistance continued and partly succeeded. God and human nature still existed and asserted themselves through men like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Pope John Paul II, who struck chords in millions and undermined the legitimacy of the New Society.

The scope of the state must be expanded to include even the inspection of our motives. It isn't enough to ban overt "discrimination," since we may be "discriminating" furtively; and because we may be lying about our real motives, the state must also enforce outward compliance with "civil rights" laws (by imposing racial quotas and the like). Meanwhile, more and more things are said to be "discriminatory," including marriage.

All this must be most encouraging to the sort of people who think of the state as an instrument for the complete overhauling of society and human relations. What better starting point for such a project than a presumption of guilt against -- well, everyone?

When someone is described as having a "career as an environmental activist," you know you are dealing with a lefty ideologue. But for our edification, we turn to the source in which the claim appears.

Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism is a truly amazing scholarly triumph for an author who is only in his early 40s. It demonstrates the highest level of scholarship and is wonderfully written, and by an author for whom English is not his first language. Ultimately, it does what every biography of an intellectual giant should do: It makes the reader want to go back and reread Mises’ own works in light of Hülsmann’s analysis. Anyone at all interested in the life and work of the greatest economist of the 20th century should avail himself of this biography.

Many in the audience were quite surprised that the United Kingdom has no property tax today, later echoing the number one question I received at the state fair in July “How will we fund police and fire without property taxes?” Of course the answer is simple…it is spelled “O” “I” “L”. I’m confident that local officials would prioritize police and fire over, for example, the monorail transportation system proposed last week by a “progressive” to be constructed between the combined campuses of UND and NDSU, which would be perhaps called the University of North Dakota State University. And the media says that tea partiers are kooks!

The news media is quick to point out government waste in the Defense Department and the Pentagon, but tend to ignore waste associated with the Department of Education, the Justice Department and Health and Human Services. Who would ever think a tiny agency like OSHA would pass out billions of tax dollars in walk around money? It flies under the radar.

He anticipates a double-dip recession, Potter again proved to be nimble, ND Norwegians seem more intensely Norwegian than the real thing, 80,000 Somali immigrants live in Minnesota, the road to the island must be raised six feet, The column is a must for ND baseball fans, a harbinger of things to come, Not a good idea, even the, I can never begin to say what I owe to North Dakota, a physically frail urban aristocrat with a Harvard education, NDSU dealt similar shocks to Montana and Minnesota, the bankruptcy of Mexicana Airlines, hallucinogenic mushrooms, DAKTOIDS

I've spent much of this summer with a grandson who, at age eleven, already has, to my dismay, an encyclopedic knowledge of slasher movies. In some obscure way it seemed fitting that he should induce me, one August evening, to watch the video of Gus Van Sant's curious remake of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic, PSYCHO, the direct ancestor of today's epidemic of slasher films.

After telling the state media and everyone else who will listen.....the Burleigh County State's Attorney WILL prove that they did not withhold evidence. Only they can not. Prevarication? Confusion? Deception? You decide.

The saga of the public destruction of Sandy Blunt with nothing but lies, using your tax money continues.

Liberals don't leave morals to locals. And sadly for America, the liberal echo chamber houses nothing resembling traditional morals. Moral paralysis passes for wisdom. Shrewd-sounding dictums earn stroking.

The echo chamber hubbub surrounding the Ground Zero Mosque has at times grown deafening. Preachers preach tolerance while ridiculing anyone who observes that the 9/11 attacks fell in line with more than a millennium of history. The preachers advise kindness while viciously demonizing people who argue that a mosque intentionally located near the site of the deadliest attack is meant as a shrine to the most immoral act imaginable -- mass murder.

Global warming zealots began pushing the human-causation fallacy in the late 1980s. Since then, warmists' echo chamber conditioning has produced shriller and shriller predictions, none of which has, or ever will, come true.

Alas, one saving grace from this sad episode is that it helped produce the death of détente and the birth of the Reagan presidency, but only after an even more painful period, namely four horrendous years under President Jimmy Carter—made possible by Gerald Ford. Ford gave way to Reagan. And with the advent of that sea-change at the head of the GOP, accommodation was out and ‘rollback’—i.e., the goal of undermining the USSR—was in. It was that tectonic shift at the Republican helm that sealed the fate of the Soviet empire.”

North Dakota has been one of a small handful of states that has been able to maintain strong economic growth throughout the national recession.  As leading financial experts warn of the dangers of a double-dip recession, policymakers in Washington are now considering a measure that could bring North Dakota's economy to a screeching halt.

ND universities are open to most of the state’s high school graduates, Best Schools for B Students, No, the team is not called Mama Grizzlies, it's Vandals, we all admired the Earl Pomeroy bobblehead, Pop Goes the Weasel, How to win friends and influence people, The Indian and the White Guy, Devils Lake Basin Technical Review Team, We can recount their warts some other day, The sheriff needs a 25 percent budget increase, a person with an expensive medical problem might commit a crime to obtain treatment, DAKTOIDS

Have Your Investments Taken a Hit?  Another Investment Attack Is Coming!
 
If you think that your investments have been hard-hit with the economic downturn, another hit is on the horizon.  And if you are a senior, many of your investments are in the cross-hairs.  Many seniors - 59% exactly - receive dividend income from many companies, including utility companies, as a part of their retirement.  Unfortunately it's not just limited to seniors - working families and their retirement investments are being targeted as well.

Billy Wilder's death at 95 summoned generous eulogies, and most of them rang true. He was an excellent writer-director, one of Hollywood's rare originals. At his best -- in perhaps a dozen of his many films -- he displayed a caustic wit unusual in that sentimental, formulaic medium. And who else in the film industry could have produced movies as different as DOUBLE INDEMNITY and THE APARTMENT?

Private Markwardt and his decorated Vietnam Veteran Grandfather Rollie Port

The recruits were standing at attention.  What a sight to see.  Six companies of America’s greatest and  brightest young men and women who have committed themselves to service to their country.  Soldiers one and all.  Standing tall and proud in their camouflage and black berets, ready to serve when called.   Willing to make the extreme sacrifice for their country.  They are American Soldiers.

Nearly 13.5 million innocents were murdered by Hitler, Stalin, and Pot. Three terrorists voluntarily checked out of Gitmo. No staunch liberal would seriously doubt the equivalence. Size doesn’t matter. America is every bit the monster that those murderous regimes were, simply because a liberal says so.

Obviously, Abdo doesn’t object to “war in any form” — just the American form.  As for the unstated “American values” he mentioned, I hope we resurrect the almost lost American value of accountability in his case.  This would mean forcing him to repay the Army its investment in him and giving him a nice long stretch in a very American prison.



It’s not a stretch to imagine that a government education monopoly that assumes kids’ minds belong to the state reeks of a totalitarian aroma. If true, this idea does not merit respect. Philosophy, theology, logic, music and art may not translate to “jobs” contributing to the Gross Domestic Product, but they do provide a firm foundation for a life well lived.

In the short span between 1607 through the early 1900s, America’s education produced multiple generations that built the greatest engine of democracy and finest economic dynamo the world has ever seen. Today, the progressive program of government pedagogy, the so-called linear path to enlightenment, serves more to confound than to clarify.

Mathematics is an unforgiving discipline. No matter who on planet Earth subtracts a larger positive number from a smaller positive number, the result is still a negative number. This reality stands firm despite wishful-thinking Democrat legislation. So when straightforward arithmetic treatment of today's government finances shows that it is, in Monty's words, "impossible to get out from under the level of existing debt," all clear-thinking, logic-based human brains (non-liberals) take notice.

These economic policies are nothing new. It’s not change. The Great depression was caused by massive tax hikes and government trying to spend us out of a recession. It’s these failed policies of the past that Obama, Conrad, Pelosi and Pomeroy are trying today. The economic policies of Karl Marx have failed every time they have ever been tried because they were designed to fail.

It turns out that that of the actual Program C audit working papers provided by the prosecution are ALL computer-clean, printed from a pure electronically-provided file with NO writing and NO notes.

 Just what if Cynthia Feland has presented to Judge Romanick a document that is NOT as she claims the C99 that she gave Sandy Blunt?

Horrified by flooding in the Devils Lake Basin, rising concern about Devils Lake, Nodaks of Norwegian ancestry can’t stop talking about politics, some landowners on the Ft. Berthold Reservation are not receiving their oil royalties, the policy discriminates against prudent employers, tribal communities need ethical leaders, Center Court is plotting a comeback, Get your Sarah Palin gear!, Bristol who?, hitchhiking hummingbirds, the Forum’s policy of publishing bankruptcy flings, Costs in higher education can and should be subject to cost-benefit analysis, the state has a large number of foreign college students, ND Youth Council, DAKTOIDS

To the liberal, when people mess up, it's one oppressor or another, one victimizer or another, that has oppressed, victimized, and goaded the people into messing up. Stiglitz lays the blame for our economic condition at the feet of "financiers" and "regulators." Foolish people who accepted unaffordable mortgages don't make Stiglitz's list of suspects.

Now that Barack Obama has decided to be for the Ground Zero mosque before being implicitly against it (perhaps), discussion about his faith has once again reached a fever pitch.  To many, his stance proves he’s a Muslim, with a recent poll showing that almost 20 percent of Americans hold that opinion; to others, it just reflects a desire to be faithful to the Constitution (now, that would be change).  The truth, however, is a bit more nuanced.  Obama is not religiously Muslim.  Culturally, though . . . well, that’s a different matter altogether.

Dorgan Says North Dakotan's Want Higher Taxes

Bruce’s knowledge of history, his wry and subtle sense of humor, and his laser targeted analysis of the serious issues make this book intellectual candy most delicious.

This book is GREAT! It has classic written not just all over it! It has classic all inside of it as well!

What a history lesson! What a brilliant look into the mind of the socialists!

Each of the 51 chapters - individual gems of history, wisdom and insight in amusing, bite sized pieces. - A must read.

- Steve Cates