I hope more newspaper editorial boards will show the courage that the Mobridge Tribune's Katie Zerr shows in this repudiation of Mike Rounds's fitness for public office. Zerr doesn't say whom we should vote for, but she says quite clearly that the spoiled, deceitful Rounds does not deserve South Dakotans' vote:
Despite what the commercials are telling us, Mike Rounds does not have the same values as most South Dakotans. Listen to what those sound bites are conveying. Think about the dishonesty of the Rounds campaign.
This is the candidate that used information about the ACA robbing $750 million from Medicare in order to frighten seniors despite the fact that the information was false and he knew it. He admitted to that.
This is the candidate that keeps changing his story when pressed about the EB5 Program and his role in it.
It is this candidate who vilified federal stimulus then accepted money earmarked for education and used it to balance the state budget so he could claim he worked with a balanced budget all his years in office.
There are other options besides Mike Rounds [Katie Zerr, "Vote for the Candidate, Not the Political Party," Mobridge Tribune, 2014.10.15].
Democrats, you have a true Democrat on the ballot, Rick Weiland. Republicans, you have two honest men on the ballot who might as well be Republicans—Larry Pressler, the throwback to moderate Reagan Republicanism; and Gordon Howie, the modern Tea Party Republican. Indies, those three men represent a remarkable variety of ideological and policy positions. You can dismiss Mike Rounds from your thinking and still find plenty of options to scratch your Senatorial itch.
Katie Zerr is one of the best editorialist in the state (especially now that I am relegated to writing comments for blogs!) Keep up the good work, Katie.
This is a great editorial and far more effective for South Dakota voters than a Huckabbee endorsement.
And than there is Rounds and company purporting that Rick is planning to shutdown the B-1B's and effectively shutting down Ellsworth
I just posted it in The Constant Commoner. Potent stuff.
Great copy, Cory, both Zerrs and yours. Everything you need to know about voting for Smilin' Mike.
Katie Zerr my hat is off to you. Great job and you hit the nail on the head
When will the Argus (I can't bring myself to write "Leader") join the other dailies in South Dakota and give us a truth-based editorial about Rounds' shifting alibis about his role in the Rounds Racketeering Scam? Maybe the state's largest daily can upgrade its staff and hire Katie from an obscure weekly newspaper.
Today is the first anniversary of Richard Benda's sad and violent death. In 365 days, we've learned much how crooks run our state's government and institutions and waste public money stuffing their pockets and bankrolling their pals' doomed projects. We've witnessed a jaded Attorney General selectively prosecute and selectively tell the truth about a man's death by gunshot and selectively "investigate" actions which appear illegal and/or ethical to the vast majority of people who've kept track of the Rounds Racketeering Scam. We've seen the official government auditing committee of the S.D. Legislature, the people's watchdog, turn their heads and let the thieves get away with it in plain view. We see the integrity of the S.D. Board of Regents tossed in the trash, all because Mike Rounds wants to be elected U.S. Senator.
But still nothing from the Argus editorial board. A small weekly newspaper beat them to the punch. Who's paying them off?
Speaking of Weiland. Be sure to tune in to Chris Hayes tonight on MSNBC at 7:40! Rick will be on discussing the race (which, because of all your help, is getting closer everyday).
Okay how dishonest does one have to be, to be too dishonest for office? Is this a quality, quantity measurement?
Francis,
Remember that lies referred in the editorial are just a few that Rounds told and were are nowhere near a full revelation of the investigation.
More lies to come, whether it be before or after the election.
Roger, it struck me as a silly statement, yet it makes me sick to think we could actually election the Marion. So is it possible for someone to be too honest for office?
Francis: "too honest for office?" Not on my watch. Roger, I'm looking hard for that more to come. South Dakota deserves the truth.
This editorial is even more impressive when you understand that the owner of the Mobridge Tribune, Larry Atkinson, is a pretty conservative guy, and Mobridge is the biggest town in the most conservative part of the state.
How much would someone in office get done if they promised to pay off the debt, reduce government employees salaries, balance the budget? Probably not being honest if they think they could do all those things, yet some of these and other things need to be done! Maybe too honest to get elected.
Mr. Schaffer, that sounds exactly like what Governor Daugaard did.
I guess Alabama has now fallen out from under the control of the Black Department of Justice leader. Yes, they have filed charges against the setting speaker of the Alabama House for 23 counts of corruption. In Alabama, I am guessing they do not vote on November 4, 2014 but on some other day way off yonder in the future.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/243731850/Mike-Hubbard-Indictment
In our state, we are proud to listen to the words of whomever Jackley's voices in his head come from to not make any trouble for his old boss. Bless his little heart for being so anal.
Giving DD credit, he did start cleaning the Round's house immediately but I wonder, was there too much of a web to not be part and parcel here and there, Grud?
.
Without MMR, there is reputable choice.
As Daugaard was involved with this from the get go, it was not to difficult for him to "clean up the mess" he himself made. Rounds is a clever little twerp, but to make a ponzi scheme like this one work, it is all hands on deck. Daugaard only shut it down when it got to hot to handle.
Rounds's deception is obvious and ongoing. Daugaard's is harder to document. He has been much more circumspect in his public statements since EB-5 broke. He did not make political statements in his September GOAC responses that he has had to walk back. Daugaard's advisors appear to be smarter (more cautious? less consumed with hubris?) than Rounds's.
However, Daugaard waited two years and eight months (as Jerry says, until the heat was on) to clean his house of Joop... and he's still waiting to tell his AG to throw the book at Joop.
Owen! Thanks for the note on the MSNBC interview! I find it amusing that Rick got to shoot his satellite feed at the KELO studios... meaning a CBS affiliate gets advertising on MSNBC.
Now while I appreciate the amplification of Rick's message, I wish MSNBC would use their vast resources and outside curiosity to dig into the story and find new news!
96 Tears,
An interesting point you make with newspaper endorsements, we are only a few days from the Argus and Journal making their choices, can these two conservative papers endorse Mike Rounds? Or will they have to follow the lead of the Mobridge Tribune and not endorse anyone.
If they don't endorse Rounds, it will be telling, but I wouldn't be surprised if they dig up a way to support him.
Has anybody heard anything about a Mike Myers presser that was supposed to be held today in Sioux Falls?
Courage.
That's what Katie Zerr has shown. It's the thing that Mike lacks.
He has lacked the courage to stand up and account for all of the EB-5/GOED/Northern Beef scandal.
He has lacked the courage to debate the issues facing South Dakota voters.
He has lacked the courage to be transparent from the start of his political career...beginning with the abuse of the state airplane to hiding who he had the state pay to go on a celebrity hunt to who got to stay in what he considered his own little resort in the Valhalla cabin in our Black Hills.
Editor Zerr has courage.
Mike could have grabbed it...but chose to not admit that mistakes were made. That he failed as an administrator. That while we might disagree that a green card express ticket to citizenship, while at the same time demonize the same immigrant who does the low wage hardback jobs he promised foreign businesses.
Mike is the accidental politician. He relied on his smile and platitudes to be the last man standing when two men of substance went toe-to-toe for the governorship.
He hid behind the skirt of Obamacare and Federal largesse to balance his budgets, and like the rooster who claims his crowing makes the sun rise boasts about being a fiscal conservative.
Well, you get the idea.
I agree with the Mobridge paper of record that Mike has not earned our vote.
No matter how much Mitch McConnell has told the Republican party to spend to advance the agenda of a disgraced Kentucky Senator, we're South Dakotans. We know and respect courage when we see it.
Mr Grudznick, those are the promises he made prior to election? It seems he did those things, but he had nothing to do with the economic impact of $7/bushel corn or $15/bushel soybeans on the sales tax/contractors excise tax or Section 179 of the Federal tax code on equipment sales. It seems that many of his wage cuts were not necessary as agriculture wasn't in an economic downturn when he did a 'chicken little' on the budget. He better be paying attention to the price of grain and the fact that Section 179 has been reduced dramatically.
96 Tears, In answer to your question about the Argus Leader, they won't. I had a back and forth pissing match with editorial editor, Brenda Wade Schmidt, which she of course won, when I challenged her about why she would no publish the My Voice submission which I had sent and which Cory so graciously published on Madville. She had used the excuse that it was too long, even though at just over 600 words, it was well within the 500 to 700 word length that they use as a guideline. After I settled down a bit, it still rankled, so I emailed the executive editor of the paper, Maricarol Kueter with the same questioning. She said that she had instructed Wade Schmidt to choose varied subjects to publish as My Voices. I said well I had submitted something that no one else, including their own editorial writers had written when I covered the long list of failed economic development issues on which the State had spent our tax dollars. I also asked her how Jim Erickson a 28 year old lecturer at Cairo University had 3 My Voices published so far this year on varied subject on the Middle East, from the Arab Spring, to the overthrow of Assad in Syria to his most recent editorial on ISIS. I said just because he is a lecturer does not make him an expert on the Middle East. I also asked how Dr Robert McTaggert from SDSU has had two environment destroying My Voices published this year, one championing the merits of coal and nuclear energy production and his most recent the one where he recommends the expansion of uranium mining in the Edgemont area. These challenges were in the third email that I sent to Kueter. She did not bother to answer this final email. All that crap you read for years when Dave Kranz was the editorial page editor, about the AL being a liberal rag, is just that, CRAP. They are a cheerleader for the frontrunner.
We have to distill DUFFY'S press release for ordinary consumption. MSNBC can't, as duffy can't, obviously.
Katie Zerr was able to write that editorial because Mobridge Regional Hospital is not owned by Sanford or Avera. They not only own most of the media, they also own our politicians. If there was a law passed to make it illegal like it use to be for so called charitable hospitals to advertise, we wouldn't be such a corrupt state.
I do not understand why US government dumping millions into Avera and Sanford don't demand that they reduce charges until they can't squander money on empty ads designed only to buy newspaper silence. Trans-Canada is doing the same thing with half-page ads again and again in newspapers. The papers display shameless silence. Oh, and Sanford bans Dakota Today from all computers in their network.
Probably not a bad thing denying empty Internet from work machines as more should evidenced by other blogs as well.
.
Sanford has a sports arena, what else have they non profited into Sioux town Lanny?
Here's another one the Argus will ignore or bury: Rounds says he doesn't have records of his EB-5 activities. And he doesn't remember. Maybe he's getting his legal advice from Bollen who made the EB-5 records disappear.
This is the latest from news service reporter Todd Epp, http://npntestfeed.blogspot.com/2014/10/breaking-rounds-daugaard-et-al-file.html .
Huff Post nabs Rounds today with this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryancasey/would-rounds-indictment-l_b_6013346.html
In addition to the Pentagon, the sports arena to which you refer Les, They have money in the scoreboard at Howard Wood Field, they have a huge chunk in the new Events Center named the Denny Sanford Premier Center, but one wonders if some of that money didn't come from the healthcare side, and also in both SDSU and USD in various ventures. But Avera is in the same boat, just to a lesser extent than Sanford.
I personally admire what T Denny is doing albeit with dollars reaped from those who can't handle their credit properly. I do abhor what our "non profits" in the healthcare arena are doing to show their largesse.
96T, ouch! Looks like the national press is catching up. Now if they wold just give up on their Pressler fixation. Geeze. The guy looks good in one poll and the national Dems start thinking he walks on water. Rick did a nice job on Chris Hayes show last night. I think the MSNBC crowd is a little shell shocked to see a real, no-kidding, Elisabeth Warren style progressive running on a left-of-center platform from (what they think of as) hard right-wing South Dakota.
Mr. Wiken, you were probably banned from Sanford computer systems because you published 2 of Michael Myers articles on health care. They banned Myer's USD students from doing any research on hospitals and they banned his radio show on one of the Sioux Falls stations because he talked about how unethical it is for hospitals to spend millions of dollars on advertising. They own us.
There's been two hurdles, Bill. One is South Dakota's Senate election has been affected by one big local issue, not the national narrative on Obama's performance (and that means the national press has had to learn about the Rounds Racketeering Scam). The second is educating the press that voters have a better choice than Mike Rounds and Larry Pressler, who officially became a has-been in 1996.
I agree that Weiland has been a far better candidate than folks had expected. He's done everything right so far. He doesn't waffle his positions and backs them up with explanations that have meaning to most people. If he hadn't been creative and aggressive with voter contact and if Rounds didn't have his racketeering scam as a ball and chain, Rounds would crossing the 50 percent mark right now. Instead, he's flat-lined with a base of GOP uber-loyalists.
How'd that Mike Myers presser go on Monday?
Mr. Cornelius,
Mike Myers is South Dakota's best option when it comes to getting to the bottom of the issue, with where the money is coming and going, from hospitals like Avera/Sandford. Mike was the CEO/COO of the best hospital in the US and has a resume that pales the resume of the three other candidates.
Katie Zerr had the guts to stand up to Rounds in this article, and thank God she works for a hospital that is not owned by the media or the politicians, because she would be out of a job. Mike Myers would be the best choice to get laws passed to prevent hospitals from raising medical cost even further and preventing the non-profit hospitals form advertising.
Since you didn't attend the presser Sir, why don't you surf on over to his Facebook page and watch the videos.
Thanks for the info, Tara. I have posted information which would be interesting to Sanford Hospital employees, etc. but their employees can not read them. And, to Les, Dakota Today is blocked, but not DWC, Sibby, or Madville Times unless they have been added to the banned list recently. I find it both amusing and irritating that a giant organization like Sanford fears for the virgin eyes of their employees from the tiny dangerous Dakota Today.
Emily,
Please call me Roger.
Sandford and Avera health have little or no impact on western South Dakota voters. I can understand easterners that have concern with the two, but I can't see a candidate for statewide office hanging his hat on this issue.
Emily, You appear to be confused. Mike Myers is running against two other candidates for Governor, not three other candidates for US Senator.
Are they not half the options for ACA health in SD, Roger
Lanny,
I'm not confused. I was answering Roger's question about Mike Myers.
Roger,
You are correct, it probably is not a state wide issue, but it's not the only thing Mike is "hanging his hat" on.
I'm certain west river voters can appreciate the other issues Mike is campaigning about. But I guess we'll save that for another discussion, as Lanny wants us to stick to senators.
Oh, pardon me Emily, I guess I was confused by what you wrote, "Mike was the CEO/COO of the best hospital in the US and has a resume that pales the resume of the three other candidates."
There are four candidates for US Senate, but only two besides him in the race in which Mike Myers is running. So being it would be hard for there to be three other candidates in his race, I presumed that you thought that he was running for the US Senate. Sorry, that I was confused.
Lanny,
That was a typo on my behalf. Sorry for the confusion.
huff post-hard hitting journalism gives rounds and daugaard a taste of what is to come. the other national media, except fox, are now gonna be all over the EB5 aspect of these SD races. Wow