Closer to home, the pipeline presents an immediate threat to drinking water for millions and to the livelihood of farmers and ranchers. To transport via pipeline, the thick tar sands crude must be mixed with toxic chemicals and then pumped at extreme temperature and pressure. This sets the stage for more pipeline failures and spills that create a highly toxic mess.

The existing Keystone 1 tar sands pipeline has spilled more than 12 times in its first 12 months of operation. In July 2010, a spill of more than 800,000 gallons of toxic tar sands crude from the Enbridge pipeline contaminated more than 30 miles of water and shoreline along the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. This created public health problems, threats to groundwater, widespread fish kills, and destruction of wildlife habitat, contamination that is still being cleaned up at a cost exceeding $700 million. Downstream landowners like me are thinking this is a preview of coming attractions if Keystone XL is built [Ted Turner, "Keystone Oil Pipeline Would Risk Disaster," CNN, 2012.02.22].

Turner, a more experienced and successful businessman than I, agrees with me that the economic benefits promised by TransCanada and Republican pipeline boosters are mostly bogus:

Meanwhile, the pro-pipeline lobby is pushing the public to accept Keystone XL with fuzzy promises about jobs and security. ButTransCanada’s jobs claims have been widely discredited, and there is no guarantee the oil transported by the pipeline would remain in the United States for sale. An attempt in Congress to require the oil to be consumed in the United States was rejected just last week, and it has been widely detailed that Gulf Coast refineries plan to export the finished product to Europe and Latin America. How do we become more energy secure under that scenario? [Turner, 2012.02.22]

In other news, a diesel pipeline has ruptured and spilled about 500 barrels of fuel up by Aberdeen. Stuff happens. Let’s minimize the stuff.

Of course, those numbers show that as many people don’t care one way or the other as actually have an opinion about South Dakota. But perhaps remarkably, every one of our neighboring states is viewed apathetically by even larger portions of poll respondents. Call those numbers support for the notion that the upper Midwest really is flyover country.

The full report includes cool state-by-state crosstabs. Here’s the demographic breakdown of South Dakota’s results:

More men than women have an opinion about South Dakota. The proportional like/dislike numbers are about the same.

There’s an interesting U-shaped distribution: a little more favorability for South Dakota among the young and the old, with a drop in favorability among the 30-65 crowd. Hmm… maybe working families with kids in school find it a little harder to make it here? Or maybe the folks taking kids on long car rides along I-90 come away thinking, “We’re not making that trip again until we’re retired!”

Hispanics like us best! Is the dairy industry getting us some good Spanish press? PPP should have included a Native American column on this crosstab.

If this crosstab surprises you, you’re not paying attention.

Ditto here: when they pay attention, liberals and Dems get a less favorable opinion of our state than do Republicans. But they should pay more attention to the war South Dakota Republicans are waging on women, education and science… and send reinforcements!

Cory's Red Bug: Don't ride that clutch!

I just learned I’ve been breaking the law… and the South Dakota State Legislature wants to legalize my bad behavior.

In the past year, I have derived great pleasure from getting back into manual transmission in my little red Beetle. I’ve experimented with hypermiling by dropping the car into neutral and coasting down hills and into speed zones. I haven’t pinned down major mileage differences: if there has been any advantage, it’s been totally outweighed by temperature differences (like me, the Bug runs better in the heat!) and speed (keep it under 60!).

But surprise! SDCL 32-34-2 says coasting downhill is reckless and unsafe driving. Popular Mechanics agrees… and says coasting doesn’t save gasoline, either!

So what does our Legislature do? Repeal SDCL 32-34-2. The full Senate yesterday joined the House in unanimously passing HB 1202, which repeals this statute. Heaven forbid the nanny state tell us what to do with our clutches.

House Bill 1128 sailed over its last Legislative hurdle yesterday, passing the Senate 32-0. Primary sponsor Rep. Jim Bolin has thus finally won a legislative victory against the Common Core Standards he so dreads in our classrooms.

Pending Governor Dennis Daugaard’s signature, the bill will treat South Dakotans to a year-long series of public hearings (at least four) on the Common Core Standards. Expect these hearings to consist of dreary ed-speak riddled slideshows on how the education bureaucracy is recategorizing the curriculum that good teachers already build and teach to their students, punctuated by cries of “New World Order!” from Sibby, “Evil-lution!” from anti-science troglodytes like Rep. Shawn Tornow, and “Tyranny!” from the handful of other tri-cornered-hat wearers who will bother to attend.

But notice: the Common Core Standards are an integral part of Governor Dennis Daugaard’s proposed education reforms. The $8.4 million in one-time money the Governor wants to spend on education includes training in those standards.

The Legislature has declared, with just five dissenting votes, that even this relatively benign portion of Governor Daugaard’s education policies require a full year of public hearings before the Legislature will let the policy happen. Meanwhile, legislators are rushing the Governor’s much larger package of education reforms to completion with closed-door meetings and surprise amendments that opponents don’t get to see or study until they get to the committee hearing.

If HB 1128 is a good idea, then canning HB 1234 and convening a task force to hold public hearings and study K-12 education is even better. Call your Senators (who all voted for HB 1128) and tell them to demand the same public participation in the Governor’s much broader education reforms.

Here’s the press release from NARAL and PP:

Health Advocates Gather to Ask Senator Johnson to Help Protect Access to Birth Control

Thursday, February 23, 2012, local women’s health advocates will gather at the Federal Courthouse in downtown Sioux Falls to urge Senator Tim Johnson to continue to support women’s access to health insurance that covers birth control, regardless of where they work. Advocates from NARAL Pro-Choice South Dakota and Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota will thank Senator Johnson for his consistent efforts to “Let Women Speak” – a reference to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing last week on the new women’s contraception policy where the makeup of the panel was all-male and opposed to birth control coverage.

Anti-contraception politicians in Congress are acting to limit women’s access to birth control coverage and other women’s preventive health care. Recently, the White House issued a new policy to ensure women get insurance coverage of birth control without a copay. Employees at religious entities like Catholic universities and hospitals which choose to opt out will receive coverage through their health insurer. However, opponents of women’s access to birth control continue calling for an even more far-reaching exemption that would allow corporations and insurance companies to not only deny access to birth control, but to any essential health care service, including maternity care, HIV/AIDS treatment, mammograms, and cancer screenings.

• What: Women’s health advocates gather to support access to birth control
• Where: Federal Courthouse, Downtown Sioux Falls, 400 S Phillips Ave.
• When: 12:00pm
• Who: NARAL Pro-Choice South Dakota and Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota

One of the men seeking to replace her, Matt Varilek, finds Noem’s California tripping worth mentioning:

Kristi Noem is in the midst of a week-long recess from Congress.  This would be a great time to travel South Dakota, listen to constituent concerns, and learn about ways to better represent working families in Washington.

But she has different priorities.  She’s headed back to sunny California to hear the concerns of her campaign contributors.  And by the way, she’s meeting those California donors in a place with a “no denim” dress code.

Even though she’ll be far from South Dakota, you can still communicate with Kristi. You can help us send her a message that she should be focused on serving South Dakotans, not hob-nobbing with Californians.

Please send a message by making a contribution of $5 or more to help send Matt to Washington.

Everyday, South Dakotans are hard at work to make this an even better place to live, work, and raise a family.  It’s time we have a representative in Washington that does the same [David Benson, campaign manager, Matt for SD, e-mail, 2012.02.21].

Campaign manager Benson also mentions that the Lincoln Club blurb on the event says, “Noem was elected in the 2010 ‘Tea Party’ takeover of the House.” It seems everybody thinks Kristi Noem is a Tea Party member except for real Tea Partiers and Kristi herself. I wonder which attack will get more mileage for Noem’s Dem challengers: painting her as the wingnut radical Ed Randazzo wishes she’d be, or recognizing her as the Establishment California club-hopper she’s morphed into?

I still felt a frisson of anti-corporate joy when a free-wheeling logging trailer whacked the gas line and closed down our Walmart a couple Fridays ago. But for the most part, I enjoy our family shopping trips to Walmart. The place is big. It’s busy. We see people there. It doesn’t feel as depressingly small and anemic as shopping pretty much anywhere back in Madison does. And, unlike in Madison, we can actually find most of what we need.

Sure, Walmart’s still killing Main Streets and exploiting labor, but please, don’t trouble my shopping experience with moral concerns….

If anything bugs me about the Spearfish Walmart, it’s that I have to ride three miles out to get to it (three miles: that’s still just half the distance to Pamida and Lewis from the Lake Herman headquarters). If I have to have a Walmart in my town, couldn’t it be a nice five-minute walk or one-minute bike away, like Safeway, instead of dragging development out to the unwalkable edge of town?

That’s not how folks in the Sioux-Farrisburg metroplex feel. A public meeting last Thursday brought out strong protest against locating a new Walmart at 69th Street and Cliff Avenue:

“If I wanted to live next to a Walmart, I would have built a house next to a Walmart. I could drive to Walmart if I wanted to go,” said Clarence Dewald, who lives in the neighborhood. “I don’t think you’re being fair with us citizens who have been living here. You guys come in, run the show and tell us what’s going to happen … I can tell you this, there is going to be a lot of houses for sale, and I don’t think there has to be” [Beth Wischmeyer, "Proposed Walmart Causes Alarm for Sioux Falls Neighbors," that Sioux Falls paper, 2012.02.17].

Sioux Falls Christian Schools want to keep dibs on traffic flow in their neighborhood:

Jay Woudstra, superintendent of Sioux Falls Christian Schools, which is located near the proposed site, said traffic in the area of the proposed site is already heavy and difficult to navigate during key times, such as right before school is in session and after.

“Every day, we have cars lined up forever trying to get on 69th Street, and now I see you’re going to put trucks going west on 69th, and we’ve got high school kids leaving that and parents, and elementary kids every day,” he said. “Traffic does not warrant a Walmart in that neighborhood” [Wischmeyer, 2012.02.17].

I have to suggest that if folks in the neighborhood are really worried about traffic, then maybe Sioux Falls Christian Schools need to encourage more kids to ride the bus.

Another resident raises crime concerns:

As a 24-hour business, customers will be visiting the store at all hours of the night, making safety a concern, said Disraelly Cruz, who lives in the area.

“It makes it, as a female, slightly more dangerous to live in any of those communities because there’s going to be more individuals in that particular area,” she said. “When I come home at 6, 7 or 8’oclock at night from my work, am I still going to be safe?” [Wischmeyer, 2012.02.17]

There’s an interesting price of “progress”: more commerce may mean more opportunity for adjoining businesses, but it also means more targets for crime at more hours of the day. Ms. Cruz’s concerns are not unfounded: a 2006 report (yes, from anti-Walmart activists) found high rates of crime in Walmart neighborhoods.

People expect to drive to Walmart anyway; we always have trouble finding our Bug hidden among the SUVs in the parking lot, waiting to accept the consumer burdens disgorged from packed carts. I wonder: would Walmart find a more receptive audience if it moved just three miles south to the official northern edge of Harrisburg?

But if the Brant Lake Sanitary District has its way, the Krsnaks may find their farm smelling like Millner’s outfit:

Linda says the Brant Lake Sanitary District plans to put another sewage pond about a football field’s length from their property.  She and Jimmy have major concerns about the food they grow — and about the water table.

“Those sewage ponds are in the middle of the skunk creek aquifer,” says Linda.

Linda tells KSFY that under DENR safety criteria, the new pond would be too close to their property, and it would be too deep into the water table.

Dave Templeton with the DENR says the pond can and will be built safely.

“Our design criteria are recommended design criteria, not required,” says Templeton, “We have no evidence of an aquifer under that site or that would be impacted by his facility.”

Jerry Lammers, an attorney for the Brant Lake Sanitary District, says the proposed sanitary pond has met with approval locally and nationally, from the Lake County Commission to the EPA.

“By all accounts, it should improve the situation there considerably,” says Lammers.

Lammers says the new pond will have the latest technology to help with containment, but the Krsnaks say they still don’t believe it will be safe.  Based on a recent assessment they say the current sewage ponds have already lowered their property value by 30%.  The couple says they could lose twice that amount- and even their business- with the new pond.

“I’m too old to start over.  Everything we have, we put into this place,” says Jimmy.

“It is terrifying.  You can’t even describe how it feels to be threatened in such a way that we have absolutely no control over,” says Linda [Denise DePaolo, "Chester Grower's Livelihood Threatened by Sewage Pond," KSFY, 2012.02.17].

Remember: if you develop housing subdivisions right, there’s no need for a central sewer system. Keep houses spread out, build only on land that can properly absorb and break down sewage, and onsite septic tanks can safely dispose of the wastewater that landowners generate.

But when developers want to turn the country into a town, when city folks want to pack houses cheek by jowl like on Phillips Avenue or on Lake Madison, when landowners want to flush their poop away without having to take any responsibility other than paying their sewer bill on time, you end up with a big central sewer system and sewage ponds that make your poop someone else’s problem.

The Krsnaks are working hard to document this threat to their livelihood on the Linda’s Gardens blog. Krsnak says the Brant Lake sewage pond would back up drainage, raise their water table, and potentially flood their fields and root cellar. The sewage ponds could contaminate that rising water table and endanger their crops. They also find themselves already enjoying the stink of Chester poop in the nearby ponds from February on through the growing season; the closer Brant Lake pond could make their farm unlivable.

The Krsnaks report getting no support from the state at all. Funny, considering how eagerly Pierre declares its support for agriculture. If the Krsnaks were a giant dairy, Governor Daugaard would be on the scene protecting their livelihood. But since they are just a little vegetable farm, their fate apparently does not matter in Pierre.

Why would our Legislature and our Governor ignore the facts on education reform? Try ideology. Try ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. The corporate front group supports merit pay for teachers. When it ranks states for teacher quality, it places merit pay higher than actual student performance:

After all, another part of ALEC’s report reads, “…the greatest factor regarding a student’s academic success within school walls is teacher effectiveness.” One would think we must be doing something right when it comes to teacher quality.

Instead, ALEC placed into its report a nonsensical grade assigned to New Jersey by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ): a D+ for Teacher Quality and Policies.

Florida, which scored 12^th on the NAEP, earned a C. South Carolina, which scored 50^th on the NAEP, earned a C-.

Vermont, ranked second on the NAEP, received an F from ALEC on Teacher Quality and Policies. First-ranked Massachusetts got a D+. In fact, no state that ranks in the top 10 in student performance scored higher than a D.

High performing New Jersey, Vermont, and Massachusetts received poor grades from ALEC for the same reason that Ms. Jones scored “needs improvement” on her evaluation: they were measured on criteria that has no basis in research [New Jersey Education Association, "Research with an Agenda," NJEA Reporter, 2012.02.01].

Numerous South Dakota legislators participate in ALEC’s efforts to co-opt state laws to favor the corporate agenda. In a session update to his constituents, Rep. Frank Kloucek (D-19/Scotland) says ALEC “has convinced at least 14 state governors and legislatures to introduce this proven failure model legislation.”

While ALEC preaches accountability for schools, it meets in secret, much like our Legislature’s Gang of Six. While ALEC says it wants good teachers, it doesn’t want them involved in discussions of effective policy, much like the poo-pooing of teacher expertise we hear from legislators. ALEC wants to weaken teachers’ voices by weakening the teacher unions. In South Dakota, where the teachers’ union, like every union, is already weak, one of the few legal protections teachers have left is the due process of continuing contract. Rep. Nick Moser thinks continuing contract is not “germane” to the rest of HB 1234, and from an academic achievement perspective, he’s absolutely right. But ending continuing contract is perfectly germane to ALEC’s anti-teacher, anti-labor agenda.

For those of you wondering why, oh why HB 1234 means so much to legislators that they’ll vote for it even though they share many of the policy doubts of their constituents, ALEC may be the most logical answer. Our legislators are choosing big-money ideological blinders over research and South Dakota values.

Update 06:31 MST: Also fouling up the ed-works: Bill Gates:

Now, he has thrown his support behind the idea that America has too many bad teachers, and he is pouring billions into the hunt for bad teachers. As the Times article shows, he has bought the support of a wide range of organizations, from conservative to liberal. He has even thrown a few million to the teachers’ unions to gain their assent. Unmentioned is that Gates has gotten the federal government to join him in his current belief that what matters most is creating teacher evaluation systems tied to student test scores.

Gates seems not to know or care that the leading testing experts in the nation agree that this is a fruitless and wrongheaded way to identify either good teachers or bad teachers. Student test scores depend on what students do, what effort they expend, how often they attend school, what support they have at home, and most especially on their socioeconomic status and family income. Test scores may go up or go down, in response to the composition of the class, without regard to teacher quality [Diane Ravitch, "Bill Gates: Selling Bad Advice to the Public Schools," The Daily Beast, 2011.05.23].

Oh yeah, and all those new standardized teacher evaluations on which Governor Daugaard wants to base his whole education reform scheme? Really complicated. Really time-consuming. And far from perfect.

Did I mention that Governor Dennis Daugaard’s HB 1234 is a really, really bad idea? Save your school! Sign the petition! Call your legislators!

Update 19:57 MST: KDLT found it worth their while to report on the groundswell against HB 1234 as well. KDLT also spared its viewing audience the sight of my gray whiskers.