John Hult offers a good thorough discussion of the ins and outs of the National Transportation Safety Board's recommendation that states lower the blood-alcohol threshold for DUI charges to 0.05%. The policy and enforcement folks Hult talks to don't sound enthusiastic. But Judge Larry Long tells Hult that back in the 1970s, he had trouble getting juries to convict drunk drivers for exceeding the then-BAC limit of 0.15.

I like this summary of the question from Hult:

We all know people who think they’re okay after a few drinks. We all know people who have a higher tolerance and seem unaffected after drinking enough to lay another person out. Some of us have heard stories about Uncle Joe So-And-So who drank 12 beers a night at Yakadee Smack’s Downtown Pub for 20 years and drove home all the time but never hurt anyone.

Setting the bar at a certain level is society’s way of saying it doesn’t matter how lucky Mr. So-And-So has been. Once a person gets X amount of alcohol in their system, the science says it’s too risky for that person to get behind the wheel.

Let’s put it this way: It’s conceivable that there are people out there who, under the right circumstances, could drive away from a place at midnight with no headlights on and still make it home without a wreck. That doesn’t mean the person gets a pass on a law that says you need to drive with your headlights on after hours.

So that’s what the debate is about on a broader level, but changes to the legal limit have serious, real-world consequences in court [John Hult, "Is a .05 blood alcohol limit a possibility in South Dakota?" Amicus Lector, 2013.05.17].

As a teetotaler, I'm not the guy you want making the rules. I would suggest that if you're driving, you're not drinking. Period. There is no compelling reason to have any alcohol in your system when you're operating the deadliest household equipment in the country. When alcohol is the third-leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. and traffic collisions are seventh, we're justified in drawing a pretty strict line between alcohol and driving.

David Newquist hopes his one-year-old grandson can find his way out of Aberdeen and South Dakota. Dr. Newquist deems South Dakota hopeless for Democrats of ambition and good conscience. As usual, his full essay is worth reading, as it ties many issues together. Here are some key passages:

...South Dakota is mired down by prejudicial, bigoted attitudes, and people who want productive and contributory lives come to the realization that they must either move or resign themselves to hoping that they can make changes that make such lives possible.

...Accomplishments in academics and professional life outside of South Dakota are lethal, particularly if those places carry the aura of prestige. Many South Dakotans hate accomplishment and performance that exceed anything that might raise the level of expectations in South Dakota.  The GOP has been successful in fanning that resentful sense of inferiority into a political rage that wins elections.  If you hold degrees from institutions that demonstrate excellence and you manage to accomplish things in high places, you have committed the unforgivable sin against South Dakota.  Unless the state needs someone of such attainment and accomplishment to go to Washington to bolster the federal subsidies on which the state depends for its existence, it will not elect such a person to Congress.

...And there is the matter of opportunity in South Dakota.  The Governor actually went to the Mall of America to try to recruit young people to the state.   There are number of groups touting life in South Dakota and attempting to lure young people to return.  I spent the past week with  a large number of young people who have left South Dakota.  When telling them of the efforts to lure young people, the inevitable reply is, "To do what?"  One of the emigrants said it was her intention to return, but after the elections of 2004 and 2010, she said the state showed an aspect of life that is simply too discouraging.  She is among those who started her education in the state, but finished out-of-state.  She said there is no opportunity in the state to use her degree, and the fact that she earned hers out-of-state would always be a demerit.  She will build her life where she has opportunity to do so [David Newquist, "Where Are All the Young Democrats?" Northern Valley Beacon, 2013.05.20].

I sometimes feel like we South Dakota Democrats are bowling alone. Can we Dems get a league together when culture and demographics and crony-corporate political money keep busting our balls?

I invite my readers to submit their signs of hope for building a state where Dr. Newquist would not be afraid to see his grandson live and work.

Various South Dakota Tea Party folks (bothersomely anonymous on their website and Facebook page, so I can only assume they are South Dakotans) are raising fuss and feathers over the Common Core standards. I wouldn't mind if they got some traction: the Common Core standards do more to distract my teaching colleagues and my administrators from making your kids smarter than to help us improve our daily practical public service.

But when the opponents' complaints include the fact that the South Dakota Department of Education has changed its Common Core logo from a sort of Howard Johnson's blue-orange spirograph to a snappy red flame with eye-catching text, I can only shake my head.

If the Tea Partiers really want to challenge Common Core, they should focus on analyzing and refuting the propaganda offered by Common Core backers like Pam Haukaas, president of the Associated School Boards of South Dakota. Her May 8 column (part of an increasing flow of Common Core explications and defenses I'm seeing from South Dakota education officials, an apparent effort to counter the surging Glenn Beck karaoke against the standards) cloaks the Common Core standards in all sorts of glowing statements that are really backhanded insults to the work we teachers work hard to do independently of whatever bureaucratic distractions the powers in Pierre impose upon us.

Students won’t just memorize facts, but will be able to master increasingly difficult problems and text [Pam Haukaas, "What Is Common Core?" ASBSD: Open Forum, 2013.05.08].

This statement fails on three levels:

1. It implies that we teachers are just making students memorize facts right now. That implication is wrong.
2. In addition to the problem-solving and critical thinking that we teach regularly without Common Core, we do teach a fair amount of memorizing facts. What's wrong with memorizing some facts? For instance, on page 60 of my French 2 textbook, I give my students a list of sixteen French verbs that use être instead of avoir has their past tense helping verb. I don't need them to think critically about that; I need them to memorize that list so they can get on with building sentences, telling stories, and engaging in conversations.
3. The Common Core standards don't magically make fact-memorization go away or make kids better at reading tougher texts. Good teachers will keep doing that, as we have been since before Common Core was born to recodify our professional practices.

As districts begin to implement these standards, professional development time will be required for teachers to become familiar with the standards and to collaborate with peers to design district appropriate curricula [Haukaas, 2013.05.08].

Translation for Tea Partiers: Your school district will spend time and your money pulling teachers away from your kids and your classrooms to spend time reinventing the pretty good curriculum wheels they already have.

The Common Core will focus on the student as learners with teachers teaching for understanding and mastery of core areas [Haukaas, 2013.05.08].

Focus on the student as learners—not only does that sentence lack number agreement (one student is multiple learners?), but it doesn't say anything new. Did we not focus on students as learners pre-Common Core? Hasn't learning always been our main enterprise? Don't we always teach for understanding? Haven't we already built our curricula around mastery of core areas? This isn't a brave new world forged by Common Core; this is the kind of fluff folks in education (including, sometimes, we teachers) start saying to ourselves when we have to make the latest, greatest education reform sound like some new and useful revolution.

No longer will a text be followed from page one simply plodding through until the end; teachers will use multiple resources so that students will experience a curriculum which has meaning as well as depth and rigor. Students will develop the ability to apply learned knowledge to solve new problems and think critically [Haukaas, 2013.05.08].

Again, the insulting implication is that teachers right now plod through their textbooks, and that Common Core standards will save your children from such dull incompetence. Au contraire: I get the distinct impression that the whole point of Common Core is to make curriculum more uniform across the state and across the country. Common Core is supposed to make it easier for children to move from school district to school district without discontinuities in their learning. That advantage accrues only if different school districts align the scope and sequence of their classes more closely to standards. Publishers will provide textbooks closely aligned to the standards, complete with recommendations for and links to multimedia resources to satisfy Common Core. To thus prove their fidelity to Common Core, teachers and administrators will stick even more closely to their new textbooks with the little tabs on each page proving exactly which standards we are teaching in each lesson.

See, Tea Partiers? That's how you tackle Common Core. Forget the logo; attack the logos.

Andrew Sullivan posts the following chart of real GDP showing that by April 2012, the U.S. economy had recouped its losses from the recession, while the U.K. and Europe had not:

Europe has pursued austerity. President Obama has tried to block the GOP's push for similar policies.

So Mitt Romney was right while being wrong: we most certainly don't want to be like Europe.

South Dakota has a higher rate of births to unwed moms than any neighboring state. We have more people, but fewer are getting married: from 2000 to 2011, the marriage rate dropped from 9.1 per thousand residents to 7.5.

And in the middle of that period, in 2006, we narrowly passed a constitutional amendment to protect marriage from those darned homosexuals by banning same-sex marriage.

Let's look at two maps. First, from the Census Bureau report on unwed moms, here's a map showing whether each state's percentage of unwed moms is above, below, or statistically indistinguishable from the national average of 35.7%:

Now here's the latest Wikipedia map of states' policies on same-sex partnerships:

Hmm... that gay-marriage-loving block in the Northeast has about the same or lower rates of unwed moms as God-fearing South Dakota. All those West Coast hippies are having babies within marriage more frequently than South Dakotans, as do those libertines on South Dakota's eastern shores.

So explain to me again how telling a bunch of our friends and neighbors that they can't make a lifelong commitment to each other to raise children helps promote the sanctity of marriage?

Another factor raising the rate, ironically, could be the moral conservatism that intends to keep it down, said Barbara Donaldson, a case worker and former teacher in Sioux Falls. A viewpoint insisting marriage is the one and only path for sexual relations closes off opportunities to discuss responsibilities and consequences, she said.

“When you have a morally conservative base that says you need to be married — end of discussion — most kids these days are going to make their own choices, and that ‘one path’ isn’t the one they’re going to choose,” Donaldson said [Jon Walker, "Births out of Wedlock up in South Dakota," that Sioux Falls paper, 2013.05.06].

Oh, that's right: it doesn't.

The good folks of Chamberlain held their high school graduation ceremony yesterday. Students sat through the standard White/Western formalities organized by the majority culture inside the high school. After that ceremony, students received a second ceremonial recognition from members of the minority culture. Members of the Crow Creek and Lower Brule tribes, who said they were forbidden from assembling on school grounds, stood across the street from Chamberlain High School and drummed out their Lakota honor song, not just for the one third of the graduating seniors who are Indian, but for all of Chamberlain's graduates.

Maybe I'm just a colonialist poser, but the sound of Lakota voices raised in sincere, passionate, and defiant song stirs me more than any mechanical, occasionally flat rendition of Edward Algar's orchestral work. It's more authentic and dignified than marching students out to a recording of the Black Eyed Peas. (Such were the processional and recessional music choices here at Spearfish Sunday.) The Lakota honor song is music from the land we inhabit/occupy. It is a powerful reminder to the graduates of the challenges their home state faces and the reconciliation they must work to forge as they join us as full adult members of South Dakota society.

Meanwhile, Spearfish graduates, teachers, family, and friends, were treated to a different show of majority culture arrogance. There was no controversy leading up to the Spearfish graduation. Salutatorian Samantha Sleep came to the podium to make a speech with fellow salutatorian Elise Reid. After thanking Mr. Pat Gainey for his excellent Constitutional Government class, Miss Sleep called on everyone in the public school gymnasium to bow his or her head in prayer with her. With her father, school board member Jeff Sleep, duly bowed in his seat behind her at the podium, Samantha invoked the Heavenly Father (just one, just male). She quoted Jeremiah from the Christian Bible. She thanked that Heavenly Father for "granting us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," thus conflating the Bible and the Declaration of Independence.

Most of the audience applauded this public display of majority piety, giving Miss Sleep that collective, smug, winking pat on the back that says, "Boy, you showed them!"... where the only them being showed is decent folks who recognize the wisdom of the Founding Fathers in protecting the integrity of both church and state by keeping them separate.

The Lakota honor song can include all students. The tribal members who offered their voices in praise of Chamberlain's graduates could have broken the rules, brought it inside, and interrupted the graduation ceremony with an act of civil disobedience. Instead, they respected the stated policy of their school board and offered their song afterward, off school grounds.

A Christian prayer excludes some students. The graduate who snuck her prayer (and she had to sneak it through, without school review, for it to have a chance of being legal) into the ceremony took advantage of public resources to engage in the sort of subtle psychological coercion that, if conducted by school officials like her dad at the very same microphone would have violated the Constitution.

We don't need more prayers in school. We could use more Lakota honor songs.

Gordon Howie and his pal Mike from Breaking Bad call for government action against religious folks down in Custer County:

It's good to see that even Gordon Howie can recognize the danger religious fundamentalism can pose to civil order and human rights. If the ten-year-old Pringle compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints has been holding people captive, not filing birth and death certificates, and forcing women into polygamy, then there is most certainly good cause for state and local government action against these yahoos. It's just funny to hear anti-government theocrat Gordon Howie calling for such government action against true believers of a different stripe.

I read that the United States is producing as much oil as it did in 1992. By 2018, we're on track to produce as much oil as we did at our previous peak in the early 1970s. We're also learning to squeeze a lot more GDP out of a barrel oil than we did twenty or forty years ago, so our demand is going down. That means we can kiss the Middle East goodbye and stop subsidizing oil with trillions of dollars of military spending, right?

[Energy expert Michael] Levi warns against overestimating the political and economic benefits of lower U.S. imports, however. Because the oil market is global, a supply disruption in the Middle East would send prices higher everywhere — including for U.S. consumers — even if the U.S. imports no oil from the Middle East. For that reason, the U.S. will still need to help maintain stability in the region ["Growth in US, Canadian oil production reducing imports, pushing Middle Eastern oil to Asia," AP via Fox News, 2013.05.14].

Sometimes I wonder if there's just no winning against Big Oil. They to take our land and water for pipelines and fracking, promising that their projects will bring us energy independence. But then as we make concrete steps toward that independence (still slurping, mind you, their addictive, poisonous potions), we still have to send our kids to fight and die for Middle East oil, for the sake of the stability of the global petro-economy.

So what's easier: disengaging completely from fossil fuels, or remaining the global corporations' volunteer security force?