This fish agrees: Larry would look even better with a mustache.

My offer to endorse State Senator Larry Rhoden in the GOP Senate primary if he grows back his butt-kicking mustache stands. Senator Rhoden tells reporter Woster nothing of his whisker plans, but says he will decide on challenging M. Michael Rounds next month:

"Now that Kristi has announced and we're getting closer to July, I'll have to make a decision, probably sometime next month," he said. "There are issues we're working on right now, as far as trying to put a team together" [Kevin Woster, "Rhoden Considering Run for Republican Senate Primary," Rapid City Journal, 2013.06.14].

Rhoden says he can out-conservative M. Michael Rounds. (News flash: I can out-conservative Mike Rounds.) He may be right:

1. Rhoden will get plenty of local conservative cred with his pro-gun votes on our school gunslinger bill and easing concealed weapon laws.
2. His willingness to pass bad education policy without evidence should endear him to the conservative enemies of science and public education.
3. His pressure for infringement of property rights via limits on conservation limits should rankle conservatives, but they'll take that measure as healthy green-bashing.
4. He's received much less in farm subsidies than Kristi Noem, so he won't have to worry about  some consistent conservative hanging the "corporate welfare queen" label on his neck.
5. Maybe best of all for the misbegotten Howie-Otten activists to whom any Rounds challenger must appeal, Senator Rhoden can blurt that we are a Republic, not a Democracy, to justify his policy positions. The line is elitist and meaningless, but hard-right GOP primary voters love it.

Note also that Rhoden has not yet invoked God's will, ordered an intern to post fake news reports online, or left pictures of his Che Guevara t-shirt on his Facebook profile. (Actually, Larry's Facebook page is pretty boring... but isn't that true for all of us?) He's just doing what real candidates do: floating the trial balloon and talking nuts and bolts about what it will take to beat the frontrunner.

Suppose you're a doctor running for Senate as a Republican. You know darn well that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act saves money and saves lives, but to get money from Republican donors, you have to ape the expected talking points about repealing ObamaCare. What do you do?

You can sell your soul and pretend to fiercely oppose the PPACA. Or you could adopt truth and integrity as a campaign motto and educate your misunderstanding and over-dramatizing Republican constituents on the merits of ObamaCare.

And you can do it on Republican grounds. Here's how:

1. Remind voters that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act originated with Republicans.
2. Go Jan Brewer (and Kasich, Christie...) and argue that ObamaCare is good for South Dakota's economy.
3. Explain that the PPACA increases economic liberty and entrepreneurship. Eggheads back what I've argued before about job lock: the PPACA will increase entrepreneurship by decoupling insurance from people's jobs. People who are clinging to crappy jobs just because they don't want to lose their health insurance will be more inclined to jump into self-employment knowing that they won't go broke buying their own insurance or get flat-out rejected on the individual insurance market. PPACA's insurance guarantees will create 8,000 more self-employed people in South Dakota and 1.5 million nationwide. More independent entrepreneurs doing the work they love: that's a Republican ideal, isn't it?

The Affordable Care Act is a good idea. It's also largely a Republican idea. Educating Republicans to those facts may be an uphill battle. But it beats lying.

M. Michael Rounds supporters need you to see daylight between the outside interest groups who endorse their guy and the outside groups that want someone else to run for South Dakota's open Senate seat in 2014. When the Club for Growth or the Senate Conservatives Fund say that Rounds isn't sufficiently conservative to deserve the GOP nomination, those conservative groups are pooh-poohed as outsiders with interests disjoint from South Dakota's. But when Senator Jerry Moran from Kansas (which is not a county in South Dakota) and his National (not South Dakota) Republican Senatorial Committee says Rounds deserves your "great confidence and faith," the Rounds spin machine goes all hail holy hosanna, no one can beat Rounds!

Senator Jerry Moran from Kansas? The National Republican Senatorial Committee? Sounds like an outside group to me... and I quote:

"...make no mistake. These outside groups are as canny and political as any political party structure ever could be, except they have a more narrow issue based focus, which is get their guy elected. Empahsis [sic] on their."

—Pat Powers, "From whence sprang forth all these outside groups promoting their point of view?" Dakota War College, 2013.05.31

Now if we're serious about looking at the machinations and endorsements of outsiders as signs that a candidate is wedded to someone's agenda other than South Dakota's, we need to acknowledge that the only other declared candidate for our open Senate seat, Democrat Rick Weiland, has purportedly not won the favor of Moran's Democratic leadership counterparts in Washington. By the logic of Team Rounds, that means Weiland is more in tune with South Dakota interests than Rounds.

Maybe someone should ask Rounds about that when he gets back from Israel.

Former South Dakota Republican Party exec Joel Rosenthal joins other prominent Republicans and a whole bunch of angry South Dakotans in saying that the new Republican-backed policy of giving taxpayer dollars to the partisan, conservative American Legislative Exchange Council is a bad idea:

I like conservative groups and think they can impact the process. I just don’t think it is very conservative that the government augments their efforts with public money.

...Now the GOP majority has extended travel and paying memberships to Legislative Associations. In the case of ALEC, they may have handed the Democrats a political issue. More importantly while they find they may have pulled a fast one on the South Dakota taxpayer (over a $50 annual membership) I question why would those that believe and espouse smaller government want to have the State pay for their non government partisan activity?

ALEC may provide important conservative ideas, some of which I support but the State of South Dakota should not pay [Joel Rosenthal, "Get Real," South Dakota Straight Talk, 2013.05.29].

Dang: more folks who put principle over crass self-interest like Joel Rosenthal might have kept me in the SDGOP... unlike mealy-mouthed corporate welfarists like Mike Rounds, who drove me out.

Rosenthal proposes reasonable alternatives, like giving legislators a partial travel stipend to spend as they see fit, requiring such conference costs to come from documentable campaign funds, or using online technology instead of travel.

Getting their prefab pro-corporate legislation from national groups is bad enough; asking South Dakotans to pay their way to these cushy conferences is beyond the pale. Folks on both sides of the aisle recognize that our Republican legislators are misusing our money for their selfish purposes; we can only hope they will listen to the wise advice of Mr. Rosenthal and put that money back in the public cookie jar.

Governor Dennis Daugaard, Attorney General Marty Jackley, and other members of state government could not make it to Rapid City for this week's three-day summit of South Dakota's nine tribes to discuss South Dakota's non-compliance with the Indian Child Welfare Act.

But now that those pesky Indians are done complaining and heading back to the rez, it's all clear for the Governor, AG, and friends to come to Rapid City to raise money and rub elbows with national GOP chair Reince Priebus:

Pennington County Lincoln Day Dinner

May 18, 2013 @ 5:00pm

• 5:00--Social; 6:00--Dinner      $50 per plate for steak dinner; $15 for kids up to age 12 (chicken strips)
• Ramkota Convention Center (Off-I-90), Rapid City, SD
• Featured Speaker:  National RNC Chairman Reince Priebus
• Also scheduled to speak are Craig Lawrence, John Thune, Kristi Noem, Dennis Daugaard, and Marty Jackley.
• For more information, contact Pat Johnson, Pennington County Republican Chairman  605-348-8396 (PO Box 1306, Rapid City, SD 57709)

Public policy discussion with aggrieved constituents, or $50 steak. Ah, priorities.

I'm not a sports guy, so help me find the right sports analogy: Is Kristi Noem playing zone? Is she holding the ball and running down the clock? Or is she just waiting for coach to call in the play?

According to The Hill via David Montgomery, Congresswoman Noem says she's having "conversations with organizations" about running against M. Michael Rounds for the SDGOP nomination for Senate in 2014. However, she says she "probably won't [decide] for several months yet."

Translation: Noem is in the catbird seat. She gets to keep Rounds guessing for months. She puts a brake on donors who would give their money to Mike only if they knew they wouldn't miss the chance to support the more electrifying Kristi in a Senate race.

And perhaps most importantly, she keeps any other Republicans who are thinking about running from making a solid decision. Stace Nelson, Bill Napoli, Steve Kirby, Dusty Johnson, Shantel Krebs... any of those Republicans who might be thinking about throwing in for Congress have to wonder: Do they want to challenge Rounds for Senate? Do they want to get caught in a three-way with Kristi and Mike? Do they want to run for an open House seat? They can't do that calculus until Kristi finishes hers. And as her academic record shows, she likes to take her time finishing her homework. The longer she makes those GOPers wait, the less groundwork they can lay, the less time they can campaign full throttle, and the weaker any of them will be if Kristi has to face them.

And since all that matters in Kristi's world is Kristi, for Kristi, that's nothing but good. Heh heh heh.

Dang: am I going to have admit that Kristi Noem is pretty darn smart?

70-plus people dropped by the "Constitution Rally" held by the South Dakota Citizens for Liberty (that's the local Tea Party) at Memorial Park in Rapid City yesterday afternoon... including me. Just another day hanging out with right-wing radicals in South Dakota....

Rep. Stace Nelson was the first speaker of the event. He gave his standard stump speech—country boy and highway patrolman's son turned Marine cop/prosecutor turned reluctant politician; Christian, conservative, Republican, in that order;

Rep. Nelson held out to his Tea Party adherents this endorsement of non-partisanship:

I went to all the campaign schools and I listened to what they had to say on how to run for office. And they tell you don't tell people where you stand on the issues. Don't talk about religion. Give vague statements that, hey, you're a good guy, yadda yadda yadda, you should vote for me. And only knock on those good Republican doors.

Well, I never served overseas all those years as a partisan. I served my fellow South Dakotans and Americans without regard to their party affiliation. And I'll be doggoned if I was going to ask them to serve them as a representative and become all of a sudden worried about what the party wants [Rep. Stace Nelson, speech to Tea Party rally, Rapid City, SD, 2013.05.04].

As Rep. Nelson railed against omnibus bills and the lack of fealty among his SDGOP leaders to the Republican platform, his youngest daughter worked the crowd, handing out her dad's pens and business cards. His friend and fellow challenger of the GOP status quo Daniel Willard followed with Nelson bumper stickers.

Rep. Lance Russell (R-30/Hot Springs) took the show further into campaign mode. He arrived late and came to the podium to express his regrets for missing his ally Nelson's speech, which he called "the most important speech of today." But politically speaking, Russell's was the most important. He got a little distracted, as Tea Partiers are wont to do, with abstractions and high-sounding Revolutionary irrelevancies as he waved his copy of the Federalist Papers (which he almost forgot at the podium when he finished). But then he turned his speech to what every faintly attentive observer should characterize as the first public "Stace Nelson for Senate" campaign speeches of the 2014 primary season.

Rep. Russell threw numerous rhetorical punches at declared GOP Senate candidate M. Michael Rounds. He reminded this Tea Party Audience that as Governor, Mike Rounds twisted arms to get the Legislature to reverse itself and pass the current onerous driver's license requirements to satisfy the federal government (a Tea Party trifecta: bureaucracy, federal power, and ID!). He tied Rounds to ObamaCare. He lambasted Rounds's fiscal policy, saying he coasted on the legacy of fiscal prudence left him by Governors Janklow and Mickelson, spent more money than the state took in in seven of his eight years in office, and left the state with a $127 million deficit. He called Rounds a "collaborator" (that's a Tea Party code word, playing to the assumption that something like Nazis have taken over the country and that the folks in the audience are members of the Resistance) and advocated Nelson's candidacy for Senate:

Our country is on the precipice of bankruptcy because of poor policy and going along to get along. We do not need to send another collaborator to Washington DC. We need a fixer. We need somebody like a Ted Cruz, or maybe a Stace Nelson [Rep. Lance Russell (R-30/Hot Springs, speech to Tea Party rally, Rapid City, SD, 2013.05.04].

(The applause to that campaign cry was so strong it knocked my camera out of alignment. Sorry about that!)

Playing again to the Tea Party's historical delusions of grandeur, Rep. Russell noted that the Tea Party crowd at this rally outnumbered the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, and five them were tortured and killed (now there's a recruitment pitch). More relevantly, Rep. Russell noted that there nearly as many people came to hear Rep. Stace Nelson yesterday as came to hear Governor Dennis Daugaard at the previous night's Custer County GOP dinner. (Yeah, but Lance, the people celebrating Old West Republican values at Sylvan Lake Friday wrote bigger checks.)

Nelson hasn't updated the banner on his website to read "Nelson for U.S. Senate" yet. But the tenor of the Nelson-Russell Tea Party tandem tells me the odds of that declaration are higher than 50%.

Lawyer and friend of the GOP powers that be Joel Arends  got Gary Dykstra to say that Rep. Stace Nelson had something to do with last year's illegal campaign robocalls targeting GOP leaders for weak support of veterans' issues. Rep. Nelson points out that Arends doesn't give us Dykstra's actual words; he gives us his version of what he heard Dykstra say in an "interview" rather than a formal deposition to which defendant Dan Willard's counsel would have had fair access.

But here's my favorite point from Stace's response:

Of particular note, these hearsay vague claims come on the heels of statewide discussion on my considerations of entering the 2014 US Senate race.  A race in which Lederman and his Rushmore PAC (parties to the civil case) have publically came out in support of Mike Rounds [Rep. Stace Nelson, quoted by David Montgomery, "Stace Nelson's Robocall Response," 2013.04.25].

Perhaps this move by Arends makes clear whom the GOP considers the greatest threat to M. Michael Rounds' nomination in 2014. Don't be fooled by the GOP spin machine's gentle rhetoric and faux compliments: they want Stace Nelson politically dead.