Some people drink. Some people cut. I read Gordon Howie’s fake blogroll.

Howie has a new spokesmodel for Freedom and Guns and Kicking the Crap out of Commies. Lynne Hix-Disanto appears on Howie’s latest re-enactment of Wayne’s World to recite the Sixth Amendment. Here’s a screen cap:

That’s darn near cleavage on Gordon’s little TV program. Gord must be wising up and trolling for Google Juice from Babe-raham Lincoln.

I can’t speak to Hix-Disanto’s constitutional expertise; everything she says on camera about the Sixth Amendment appears to come from the cue cards Gordon cribbed from  the 700 Club. Hix-Disanto does know a thing or two about babe-a-liciousness: she runs the Fierce Modeling Agency in Rapid City, which, among other services, provides “promotional models” for the Sturgis rally:

Sturgis Models, Fierce Modeling Agency, Rapid City

Every year hundreds of thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts come to the Hills seeking adventure and their own “wild west” experience. Rapid City based talent agency FM Models has formed partnerships since its inception to provide promotional models for company’s looking to tap into this South Dakota market. If you are looking to hire beautiful ladies that enjoy the rally environment and know how to promote your product, we can assist you in making that connection. Each girl has been interviewed, and is trained on representing your company in a way that is both fun and professional [marketing copy, "Fierce Modeling & the Sturgis Rally, South Dakota," Fierce Modeling, Rapid City, SD, downloaded 2012.04.29].

Beautiful ladies that enjoy the rally environment and know how to promote your product… and we all know that promoting your product in the rally environment is not about Faith & Family; it’s about T & A (and equally obscene attempts to trademark public domain geographical names).

Hix-Disanto’s business got some national attention (well, to the extent anyone can get attention from an appearance on the CW network) on a January episode of Remodeled, in which host Paul Fisher declared Fierce Modeling a scam:

What pisses me off most? Modeling schools. Giving kids false hopes. You want to piss me off? Have a modeling school.

Let me explain to you, you’ve been ripped off. Just so you’re clear, you’ve been ripped off. You can’t train to become five-foot-ten.

They’re paying these schools and they can never become models. That’s a scam to pay the rent [Paul Fisher, "Modeling Agency or Modeling School?" Remodeled, 2012.01.24].

Fisher notes that, despite Hix-Disanto’s four years in the business, “She’s never found one star, ever.” The episode proceeds to show Fisher and company gleefully sledgehammering Fierce Modeling’s runway to bits as a symbol of the triumph of honesty and hope that Fierce can find its footing and rise to Fisher’s standards as a modeling agency, not a modeling school. Alas, a recent Rapid City Journal article on painful fashion trends shows the FM runway rebuilt as of February 27, 2012.

It appalls me to cite “reality” television as a source, but modeling is all fakery, so I’m in the right ballpark. And so is Lynne Hix-Disanto, joining forces with Gordon Howie to peddle his fake outrage for profit in his fake media empire.

Classified Hookah didn’t last long in Rapid City… and there doesn’t appear to be a single government regulation we can blame. Instead, conservatives looking for another smoky cause célébre will have to blame the tyranny of the mob—also known as neighbors seeking to live amicably in community—and a business owner who can’t follow his lease.

Classified Hookah and neighboring hookah lounge Sahara Nights made the news last week for stinking up the Buell Building in downtown Rapid. Other Buell tenants complained. A make-up shop owner found the lingering hookah smell so strong that she didn’t open her doors for business one morning. A weight-loss coach griped that the smoke smell infringed on her ability to sell “wellness.” Contacted by the press, Miami-based building owner Ron Bazac said he had to give the lounges a chance to improve their ventilation, but that creating a nuisance is a violation of the lease. Bazac says Classified Hookah told him they would only be selling hookahs, not operating them in a lounge setting. Oops.

Classified Hookah owner Trevor Schmidt must have reread his lease. He’s getting out:

Classified Hookah in downtown Rapid City closed Wednesday and is selling off its furnishings and hookah supplies, its owner said.

“We’re closed,” owner Trevor Schmidt said. “We’re shut down.”

The lounge at 524 Seventh St. in the historic Buell Building recently raised the ire of its neighbors, who complained that loud music and the smell of hookah smoke were penetrating the building, irritating them and driving away customers.

“We’re just looking to end the drama and relocate,” Schmidt said. He said he would probably take the business to Sioux Falls [Barbara Soderlin, "Seventh Street Hookah Lounge Closes," Rapid City Journal, 2012.04.21].

The discussion of the closing on Facebook is, like so much of Facebook, predictably juvenile. One commenter equates the closing to bullying… because expecting your neighbors to follow their lease and not infringe on your rights is bullying. The bullying commenter also flies the race flag, saying her closed-minded neighbors oppose hookah because “it’s not a white past [sic] time.”

Classified Hookah didn’t close because of bullying or racism. It closed because the owner thinks it’s just too much drama to follow a couple basic business rules: respect your neighbors and follow your lease. Downtown Rapid City neighbors and landlord alike can now breathe a sigh of relief.

And for you poor tragic souls who think “hookah is the only thing young adults have to do in this town“… well, try opening your minds. Go out for dinner. See a movie. Go for a ride. You’re in Rapid City, in the Black Hills! If you’re telling me you can’t find anything to do, either you’re smoking something or you aren’t trying.

Poor Gordon Howie. No, really, I mean this: I sympathize with Gordon Howie, who is seeing property he co-owns torn up by thoughtless motorists:

A few Rapid Valley residents are frustrated that freewheeling drivers turned the area near their neighborhood pond into a rutted mess this weekend.

Turtle Pond property manager and part owner Gordon Howie shares the neighbors’ irritations but says the destruction is not a new problem for the undeveloped park, especially after a rainstorm.

“It’s disappointing, but not a surprise,” said Howie, a former state senator. “We’ve tried to put obstacles in the way, huge rocks and other obstacles to keep people off. The people who are intent on being destructive just find a way around them.”

Although privately owned, the Turtle Pond area, at the corner of Long View Drive and Reservoir Road, north of S.D. Highway 44, is open for public fishing. South Dakota Game Fish & Parks has stocked the pond with fish in the past, Howie said.

Neighbor Pat Cromwell said she called the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office four times over the weekend to report mud-bogging ATVs and pickups.

“They are ripping the daylights out of the pond here,” Cromwell said. “People are having fun without thinking about what they are doing to it. It’s mindless vandalism” [Holly Meyer, "Mud Boggers Making a Mess of Rapid Valley Pond," Rapid City Journal, 2012.04.16].

Attentive readers will recall that I’ll have no truck with motorheads who can’t have fun and tread lightly. Sportsmen (and I suspect we have to use the term loosely here) have an obligation to respect the land, whether that land is owned by all of us or by a few private landholders who generously allow public use of their property.

But note that even arch-Tea Partier Gordon Howie has to admit that sometimes he needs more government. It takes a strong man to admit that his philosophy is incomplete.

Give Ifrits Hookah Lounge in Rapid City points for legal creativity. As Police chief Steve Allender prepares to enforce the state’s smoking ban on the establishment, the lounge’s lawyer says its hookah smokers aren’t really smoking:

Hookah smoking, which originated in India and the Middle East, involves using water pipes with burning charcoal to ingest tobacco. Ifrit’s attorney, Stephen Wesolick, said he will take the matter to court for a judgment on whether it constitutes smoking under the state statute.

Wesolick said the position of Ifrit’s is that the tobacco product in a hookah pipe is not ignited to produce smoke, but is heated and dehydrated to produce a vapor.

“It’s not the same as smoking a cigarette or a pipe,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “It’s our position that it’s not a smoke that results from combustion” ["Smoking Ban to Be Enforced at SD Hookah Lounge," AP via Black Hills Pioneer, 2012.04.17].

Right. South Dakota’s smoking statutes do not appear to define smoking, so the court will have to default to common usage. A quick perusal of hookah language finds the practice referred to almost universally as “smoking.” Hookah smoking still poses the same hazards to users and secondhand ingestors (not to mention the added risk of spreading colds, flu, and oral herpes) that undergirded the legislative intent of South Dakota’s smoking ban. A retail tobacco shop can host smokers, but it can’t sell alcohol, and Ifrits sells alcohol.

Open and shut: if Ifrits wants to keep the hookahs, it’ll have to ditch the hooch.

Isn’t one pastor in Pierre enough?

The Secretary of State lists Scott W. Craig of Rapid City as a Republican candidate for District 33 House. Could that be Pastor Scott Craig, pal of Rapid City radical right-wingnut Gordon Howie? If so, District 33 can expect Pastor Scott to deliver all sorts of lies about President Obama and other matters mostly irrelevant to the practical business of governing South Dakota. Pastor Scott’s parishioners can also expect the candidate to use his pulpit for his own political gain, since after all, it’s God, not just Gordon, telling Pastor Scott to run and rectify this South Dakota Babylon.

District 33 has just two official candidates (the other is Republican incumbent Jackie Sly). If no one else files by 5 p.m. today, Pastor Scott won’t have to campaign from the pulpit. If he does enjoy a free pass to Pierre, maybe he can one-up the good Rep. Rev. Steve Hickey by proposing a resolution to require students to study the Bible and taekwondo.

Sen. Elizabeth Kraus

Sen. Elizabeth Kraus (R-33/Rapid City) is leaving the Legislature. Kraus was the promulgator of South Dakota’s anti-gay marriage amendment. Bob Mercer notes that this amendment resulted in part from Michele Bachmann’s encouraging Kraus to be an even more ambitious bigot:

Kraus said her original goal was to prohibit gay people from adopting children. She happened to be at an event where she had the opportunity to meet Michele Bachmann, at the time a Minnesota legislator who was a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Kraus told Bachmann her idea. Bachmann suggested Kraus wasn’t trying to reach far enough. She offered that Kraus should look at defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

That’s what led to the constitutional amendment: “Only marriage between a man and a woman shall be valid or recognized in South Dakota. The uniting of two or more persons in a civil union, domestic partnership, or other quasi-marital relationship shall not be valid or recognized in South Dakota.”

Kraus, who calls Bachmann “a hero for conservative women,” crafted the specific sentences of the marriage amendment with the help of South Dakota’s then-attorney general, Larry Long, who would have to defend it in court if necessary, and with the aid of the then-speaker of the House, Matt Michels, R-Yankton.

“Every word had to be right,” she said. “That was a fascinating process” [Bob Mercer, "From the Right, a Quiet Leader Leaves the South Dakota Political Scene," Mitchell Daily Republic, 2012.03.18].

Oh, yes, denying citizens equal rights must be a fascinating process.

We should all be relieved that any South Dakotan who considers Michele Bachmann a “hero” intends to spend future winters in Florida rather than Pierre.

Michael Buckingham

Alas, Kraus’s potential replacements promise little improvement. The two men on the ballot so far are both conservative Republicans. Michael Buckingham served alongside Kraus in the House, and he voted aye on the marriage amendment in 2005. He also supported, along with Kraus, the 2005 legislation that stepped between doctors and their patients and required medical professionals to recite a bunch of non-medical hogwash about abortion. (That legislation is still tied up in court.) The same year, Buckingham and Kraus also supported the abortion ban that voters rejected in the 2006 referendum.

Rep. Phil Jensen

The other District 33 Senate contender, Phil Jensen, has been wreaking his own conservatism on the House since 2009. An ALEC member like Kraus, sponsored an anti-abortion bill last year that would have justified shooting abortion doctors. In supporting an anti-Sharia resolution last year, Jensen revealed he fears both women making their own choices and Muslim men who would dare to marry them. And this year, Jensen proposed both HB 1231 and HCR 1005 to let hydraulic fracturing rush ahead of science and safety regulations. (I wonder: will Jensen and his fellow Republicans let science teachers have bonuses if they promote real science?)

Folks interested in equal rights and good policy may cheer Senator Kraus’s departure, but but District 33 has lots more bad conservative politics to offer… and in a district with nearly 50% Republican voters and under 30% Democrats, no Democrat has yet filed to contend for that empty Senate seat.

My weekend reading juxtaposed the following articles:

The Rapid City Journal ran a batch of articles discussing the impact of the Bakken oil boom on western South Dakota. Barbara Soderlin finds GCC Dacotah Cement in Rapid City trucking cement daily to Williston and Adams ISC hauling equipment all the way down from the North Dakota oil fields to its Rapid City shops for repair. Adams ISC boss Duff Kruse says the Bakken boom will allow him to double his staff over the next three years.

Rapid City economic developers are hoping to cash in on all aspects of the oil boom, from housing for commuting workers, recreation, auxiliary services, and even housing for North Dakota refugees who want to get away from the hectic economic growth in the hometowns they are being priced out of. “Energy is going to be big for us,” says Rapid City Economic Development Partnership president Ben Snow. “…Hopefully we make some new friends in the energy business who want to play with us.”

Meanwhile, Thomas Friedman publishes this curious result of a study on natural resource exploitation and academic achievement:

A team from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., has just come out with a fascinating little study mapping the correlation between performance on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exam — which every two years tests math, science and reading comprehension skills of 15-year-olds in 65 countries — and the total earnings on natural resources as a percentage of G.D.P. for each participating country. In short, how well do your high school kids do on math compared with how much oil you pump or how many diamonds you dig?

The results indicated that there was a “a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their high school population,” said Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams for the O.E.C.D. “This is a global pattern that holds across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment.” Oil and PISA don’t mix [Thomas Friedman, "Pass the Books, Hold the Oil," New York Times, 2012.03.11].

So, the more you base your GDP on oil, natural gas, coal, mining, and forestry, the less your kids achieve on standardized tests. Fascinating!

I’m not ready to take this as an argument to shut down the Bakken or to turn their trucks around at the South Dakota border. The data show plenty of countries, like Norway and Canada, that are able to exploit their lucky pools of oil and invest that money in solid education systems. And our kids still need electricity to power their reading lamps and laptops.

Still, this OECD study fits with familiar work that finds over-reliance on natural resource exploitation may have deleterious cultural effects. Past work has shown that reliance on oil and other extractive industries erodes democracy. Friedman’s and the OECD’s interesting point is that countries that don’t have the good luck of sitting on top of fuel to burn have to use their wits more to figure out how to raise and sustain their standards of living. And if we do strike oil or enjoy other natural blessings, we must studiously avoid falling into a laggardly reliance on such finite wealth and reinvest our current windfall on long-term social and economic improvements.

…the experience of almost all oil-exporting countries to date illustrates few of these benefits. To the contrary, the consequences of oil-led development tend to be negative, including slower than expected growth, barriers to economic diversification, poor social welfare performance, and high levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment. Furthermore, countries dependent on oil as their major resource for development are characterized by exceptionally poor governance and high corruption, a culture of rent-seeking, often devastating economic, health and environmental consequences at the local level, and high incidences of conflict and war. In sum, countries that depend on oil for their livelihood eventually become among the most economically troubled, the most authoritarian, and the most conflict-ridden in the world [Terry L. Karl, "Oil-Led Development: Social, Political, and Economic Consequences," Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law Working Papers, January 2007, Number 80].

Kudos to Rapid City Mayor Sam Kooiker, for vetoing his city council’s move to extend the terms of city commissioners and the mayor himself from two years to three.

Kooiker, who has largely stayed out of the public debate until this point, released a statement Monday saying he strongly believed that the Rapid City Council had erred in not allowing the voters of Rapid City to have the final say on longer terms.

“This action is motivated by a firm conviction that the citizens of Rapid City should decide if those benefits are more important than the benefits of shorter terms,” Kooiker wrote in his veto message. “The town hall meetings confirmed the best course of action is to allow the people to decide” [Emilie Rusch, "Kooiker Vetoes Longer Terms for City Council," Rapid City Journal, 2012.02.28].

Longer-term supporters like the Rapid City Chamber of Commerce are hyperventilating that the mayor’s veto somehow undercuts the City Council and “shows a lack of confidence.”

Um, no, a veto is simply a veto. As Alderman Jordan Mason notes, a veto is simply part of the checks and balances that we write into our system of government. The city council approved the longer terms on a 6-4 vote. The mayor disagrees with that vote. The city council is welcome to overturn that veto.

On the issue itself, I welcome short terms for local officials. The more often those officials have to run, the more opportunities they get to do the first job of statesmen and stateswomen: to lead a public conversation about the issues facing their communities. Elections are great opportunities for conversations. Asking Rapid City councillors to defend their record and advocate their visions for the city once every two years is far from an onerous burden. It is a recipe for engaged democracy.