Rapid City's Laura Armstrong would be a formidable gubernatorial candidate

Editor's note: In the years after my 1997 vision at Orman Dam, a quest for redemption overtook me. I pursued numerous concepts nearly simultaneously including a recycling initiative that would look much like Rapid City's Material Recovery Facility does today: metals, paper, plastics, glass, the whole schmear. 

Laura Armstrong is a local speech language pathologist who served on the Rapid City Common Council from 2017-2023 serving twice as Council President. This interested party has asked her to enter the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Rapid City residents are being told — once again — to brace for higher waste service fees and reduced recycling pickup. We're told it's necessary. We're told it's inevitable. We're told that someday, eventually, something might improve "depending on market demands."

But let's be honest: this isn't about markets. It's about leadership. Or more accurately, the lack of it.

At the Dec. 1 City Council meeting, City Hall voted to raise waste service fees and cut recycling pickup in half. And they did so while admitting that our landfill is nearly full, the cost of the last waste cell doubled from projections, and we only have about twenty-five years of capacity left. We are running out of room, out of time and- apparently -out of vision.

The city now acknowledges not everything we carefully rinse and place into our blue bins is actually recycled. Plastics labeled three through seven simply end up in the landfill, because markets are unstable. Glass is often crushed and discarded. Shiny cardboard goes straight to the trash heap. Even the city's own outreach staff confirms that major categories of recyclables are landfilled because we lack the local capacity to do anything else with them. If this is the best we can do, then why aren't we doing more to change it?

It appears we have a problem of short-sightedness. The Material Recovery Facility (MRF) does impressive work with the limited tools it has. It is old but functional; and thankfully, staffed with dedicated workers making the most of aging equipment. And yes, it generates revenue: Around $350,000 a year. But the bigger story, the one city leaders seem unwilling to confront, is that our current system is fundamentally reactive, not proactive.

We increase fees instead of increasing capacity. We reduce services instead of expanding partnerships.

We shrug at global markets instead of building local solutions. And all of this in a state that is growing by thousands of new residents every year-people who bring with them jobs, families, energy, and yes, their garbage. Yet our planning for solid waste has not kept pace with our growth. Leadership matters, and on this issue, leadership has been missing.

Years ago, I approached the School of Mines to explore a potential collaboration for local waste innovation, recycling science, and sustainable materials research. That conversation could have sparked a long-term partnership between our city and one of the nation's most respected engineering institutions. We have worldclass minds right here in Rapid City. People from all over the world come to our local university to learn, innovate, and take on the complex problems that shape our future.

Why weren't we leveraging that talent? Why aren't we now? Imagine the workforce development opportunities. Imagine local businesses built around materials recovery. Imagine becoming a regional center for waste innovation, instead of a regional dumping ground.

We could be training engineers, creating jobs, and establishing Rapid City as a leader in sustainable waste solutions across the Upper Midwest. Instead, we are patching gaps and raising rates.

Our landfill is reportedly $8.3 million in the hole. That number will only grow unless we do the work now to rethink our waste stream, engage real partners, and invest in solutions that reduce what we bury in the ground.

Other communities have already moved in this direction: waste-to-energy technologies, reprocessing clusters, advanced sorting systems, and public-private innovation labs. Rapid City has the brainpower, the institutional partners, and the regional role to lead. What we lack is leadership willing to do more than approve annual fee hikes and incremental service cuts.

I believe we can choose a better path. Residents deserve a system that innovates, not one that throws up its hands. We deserve planning, not patchwork. We deserve leaders who understand that waste management is not a burden-it is an opportunity.

Rapid City can either plan for the future or keep paying for the past. That starts with engaging in real, productive conversations with the School of Mines and other regional universities-institutions filled with people who come here to learn, innovate, and tackle the complex problems that shape our future. Let's bring those experts, alongside industry partners and community leaders, to the table. Let's choose meaningful, forward-looking solutions instead of settling for higher bills and smaller bins.

You miserable bastards

For my family and pals in the Black Hills and northern plains: yep, that’s 60° at sunset in rural Santa Fe County.

Stasi in Brookings, RC

Trump approval in the shitter

Read it all here.

Guest post: DWC is Cream of Bullshit Soup

Editor's note: Speaking of the unctuous Pat Powers, a morbidly obese white man who spews nonsense in support of South Dakota Republicants who with his butt buddy Jason Gant, left a mess at the Secretary of State's office. After bringing order to some of the chaos in the Gant/Powers hack job SDSOS Shantel Krebs said a half million documents were deleted.

"I want to clarify that the corporations system or website was on an outside server. And it was not on the state's information and technology--state sanctioned and state secured--server," Krebs said. "We're sitting at about 90,000 of those documents reviewed so far; we started at the current year and are working our way backwards. We started at 2015 and we're done with 2014 and 2013 and we're working on 2012," Krebs said.

Now, at his Faceberg page South Dakota's most vociferous former teevee anchor, Shad Olson is calling out fat Pat's role in Pierre's culture of corruption.

If Lindsay Graham and John McCain lived in South Dakota, rest assured, Pat Powers and the (South) Dakota War College would be their reading material of choice. Probably on the toilet. And probably when they’re not catching up on Tavistock Institute literature or checking their endorsements from the Southern Poverty Law Center or planning new ways to flip the demographics of the country to benefit the United States Chamber of Commerce and the DNC. Pat would be their boy just like Americans for Prosperity is their Daddy. And Donald Trump would call the whole steaming pile of functionalized fiction, “Fake News.” Next.

For most of 20 years, Pat’s fake blog, Dakota War College, has served as the direct propagandized bully pulpit of a paper mache Republican party that has presided over the most corrupt era of public administration in South Dakota history. Dead bodies and millions of dollars missing in bungled programs and misappropriated grant money frosted with squelched investigations and quashed evidence and a surprisingly missing allowance of a normally perfunctory independent investigation to sort any of it out.

No concern for transparency. No time for explanations, public trust be damned. And certainly not an honest investigative peep about scandals like EB-5 and Gear Up from moderate GOP water boy, Pat Powers, on his smallish web operation that draws fewer daily visitors than a kissing booth at a leper colony.

Instead, readers and viewers are treated to what Pat makes his paycheck for: Personal attacks on any conservative critic of the GOP machine and anyone else who dares dissent from the milquetoast Democrat-lite of the South Dakota Republican bourgeoisie and their cookie cutter assumed line of bureaucratic ascendancy that ensures friends go unpunished and promoted and naysayers feel the wrath of the RINO. And it’s all according to plan. Stamp my pay stub, if you please.

Back in the toddler years of internet journalism just after the millennium, it became apparent even to the pedestrian intellects that serve as the brain trust of the SDGOP that it might be useful to build a standalone blog or news site that could be used to carry water for the moderate elephant against the growing din of independent journalists and patriot voices that were quickly supplanting the mainstream media as the credible scribes and describers of local political theatre. They were right. Hogs and acorns and broken clocks, don’t you know.

In short order, the search was on to find someone of requisite skill, articulate eloquence and credibility to honcho such an effort in captaining the newest set artillery piece in the South Dakota Republican armada. Short of those deluxe prerequisites, the need was for a middling ability “Yes Man,” of any description willing to serve as a mercenary propagandist masquerading as an objective reporter. You get what you settle for. And so it was in that grimy embryonic process on a certain day long ago that my office landline in a local television newsroom chirped to life with the car salesman voice of a party acolyte who tried to schmooze me into accepting a job.

What would it take to lure you away from what you’re doing now? We’d really be interested in making an offer. Let’s make this happen. Yada and yada.

With a couple Emmys to my name and a wall full of hardware from various organizations specializing in self-congratulatory plaques and journalistic trinkets of ego and pecking order, big city job offers were frequent and frequently ignored. But an in-state offer had my attention. I had but one question. “Will I have the freedom to report honestly on the actions and policy and legislative process of both parties, regardless of whose interests are at stake or whose sacred cow is rendered hamburger?” I asked, knowing the answer.

In the Rushmore State where Founding Fathers adorn a mountainside, you’d think that Republicans in charge would be the purest of the lot. Reddest of the Red. Conservative as the day is long. In fact, the opposite is true. As often happens whenever and wherever the Republican label is an automatic 20-point head start at the ballot box or country club cocktail circuit, Democrat name changers are the bulk of the GOP elite and South Dakota suffers as many heavy red states do with an infestation of RINO politicians at every level of government. The present chair of the South Dakota GOP Central Committee was most recently a registered Democrat in Iowa. The GOP Lieutenant Governor nominee this time around voted Carter over Reagan in 1980 and sports one of the bluest legislative records by any ‘Republocrat,’ in state history. In fact, that tendency toward masquerade Republicanism is so pervasive that even the opposing party takes pot shots. At a legislative soiree signaling the end of the 2018 session, South Dakota Democrat Gubernatorial Candidate [Billie] Sutton scored the line of the decade and brought down the house by giving a mock award and open thanks to outgoing Governor Dennis Daugaard, as “the best Democrat Governor in state history.” It might have been tongue-in-cheek if it weren’t so obviously true.

Knowing all of this as I did and do, the telephoned sales pitch that winter’s day left no doubt that expectations would be to promote mainstream party favorites, controlled quantities and compromised political toadies, while bashing independent voices, relegating, ridiculing and suppressing truly conservative grassroots candidates and killing off natural leaders who pose threat to the status quo. Protect the establishment. Destroy conservatives. Ignore reality. Construct fantasy for the benefit of the GOP elite. Provide ample lubrication to the public political shiv job by the marionettes in Pierre and covering fire for the RINO herd. After an uncomfortable silence that reeked of ethical halitosis, my question produced a muddle of stumbles and guttural posturing that sources typically engage in when attempting to prevaricate in real time without a facility for ad lib. I expressed polite thanks for the interest and hung up. I might have sprayed the phone handset with Lysol.

In the years since that conversation I watched with quizzical bemusement as Dakota War College was commandeered to fill that void and has undertaken exactly the prescribed task of protecting the mainstream moderate GOP brand with bonus accoutrement of a meanness of spirit and viciousness at the feast that bely the unhappy blunderings of an operator who found himself rejected by actual media enterprises (when those still mattered) and is taking it out on the people his bosses tell him and pay him to hate. Sources tell me that a salary of $70k a year from benefactors of the South Dakota GOP, plus ad revenue in election years by establishment cronies (or some reasonable facsimile thereof in the same ballpark) is the going rate to get a man to surrender his principles and maintain the pretense of an independent news medium that is every bit as phony-baloney as CNN, MSNBC and the big three and every bit as false as the imitation naugahyde elephant suits that the Dan Lederman’s, Jeff Partridge’s, Dave Roetman’s and Dennis Daugaard’s of the world pull over the eyes of kindly South Dakota folk who are just too polite and trusting not to believe the very best about what their leadership promises and their RINO blogs reinforce.

Bread and circuses to distract from voting records and Pierre chicanery that would make Rod Blagojevich and Al Sharpton blush.

Under Pat’s watchful and twitchy eye and at the behest of those holding his digital leash, people who dare question the establishment narrative are punished, made fun of, shamed and ridiculed in a scene straight out of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, complete with banner headline balderdash and ardent flourish. Conservatives and candidates saying exactly the things that elected Donald Trump in 2016 are tin foil hat conspiracists, UFO believers and black helicopter paranoids deserving of being forever shamed from polite society. Meanwhile, the effete coterie of South Dakota’s Republican blue-bloods (emphasis on the blue) are thrown rose petals and scented kerchiefs and mints for pillows for behaving like an embarrassing political hybrid of Eddie Haskell and Nelson Rockefeller, minus the cash.

Thankfully, the present awakening to the media deception of the globalist cabal is not limited to CNN and all the demon voices that President Donald Trump has rightfully identified as enemies to the American people, guilty of near fatal deceitfulness that has sown enough confusion and misinformation to bring us to the divided brink of civil conflict in the United States.

It’s understood that Donald Trump is a third-party President assailed from both sides of the fake binary system by exactly those same type of poseurs that inhabit the South Dakota RINO club, forever interested only in perpetuation of political control and an agenda that has as afterthought the wellbeing of American fortunes. At a time when it has never been more crucial to discern actual members of the populist-conservative team from those who are coopting the name and the brand for fun and profit, add to that list anyone who has sold the luxury of their integrity at auction for a few thousand dollars of ad revenue from the establishment candidates who bash Trump populism, wax neophyte on international trade and then spend their establishment campaign dollars giving the false impression that Dakota War College is anything but Josef Goebbels with a web address and a weakness for super size fries.

If politics is show business for ugly people, being the media show organ for those people must be an assignment from one of Dante’s deepest and most miserable rings of hell. For that, and even as the clock winds down on the neoconservative falsity that gave him his position, Pat has my genuine pity and my thankfulness, for willingly filling a thankless job that one can only guess has filled his pockets and emptied his soul with equal facility. And all of that for what some might make in an average month in the commodities futures trade.

Everyone has a price, I guess. Everyone has a price paid for bargains made.

In the words of President Trump, fake news.

You haven’t been called.

Next.

Guest post: farmers need markets not bribes

South Dakotan Julian Beaudion is the Democratic candidate for US Senate. He heard the frustration with the Trump Organization at the SD Farmers Union annual meeting in Huron.

Yesterday, I attended the 110th Annual South Dakota Farmers Union Convention and spent time with farmers and ranchers from every corner of our state. I heard the same message I have been hearing all across South Dakota. Rural communities need leaders who listen, show up, and deliver.

We talked about rising input costs, tight margins, and the uncertainty many producers are facing right now. We also talked about the urgent need to pass a strong farm bill that works for producers and rural towns, not just corporate interests. While the current farm bailout may provide short-term relief, it is not a long-term plan. South Dakota farmers need solutions that bring stability and certainty so families can plan for next season and the next generation.

I also joined the Farmers Union policy discussion, where producers spoke directly about what is working, what is not, and where the system is falling short. The conversations were honest, practical, and rooted in real life.

Across this campaign, I have heard the same priorities again and again. Farmers want fair cattle markets with real competition and clear pricing. They want strong enforcement of competition laws so that consolidation does not squeeze family operations. Many also raised the right to repair, so producers can fix their own equipment and control costs when time matters most.

There was also strong concern about foreign ownership in key parts of our food system. I heard broad support for moving toward mandatory country-of-origin labeling. These steps protect producers, strengthen our supply chain, and help consumers know where their food comes from.

Farmers also talked about raising families in rural South Dakota. Rural childcare and after-school programs matter so that farm families can work, hire help, and keep small towns growing. At the same time, we should protect SNAP for kids and seniors, stop EBT theft, and make sure these programs are run with integrity.

South Dakota’s farmers, ranchers, and rural communities deserve leadership that focuses on real solutions, not short-term fixes. If you believe in standing up for family farms and small towns, I invite you to join this campaign and help us build a stronger future for South Dakota.

South Dakota farmers warned of collapse

Yes, the grassland fire danger index will reach the very high category again Thursday for much of the chemical toilet, sacrifice zone, perpetual welfare state and permanent disaster area that South Dakota is today. 

Learn more at Bill Janklow's idea of public radio.

Page One in Sioux Falls, S.D.:

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) December 11, 2025 at 4:23 AM

South Dakota District 10 candidate touting New Mexico's child care initiative