Steve Hemmingsen "Weighs In" on the issues.

Every time things start settling down a bit at the City Hall cash register, somebody steps to the plate to take another swing at the taxpayers’ piñata.
Surprise, surprise, here comes the Washington Pavilion again.

How I missed this I can’t imagine, but with all the times I’ve been to the pavilion for movies, dinners, and concerts I never noticed the elevators were out of sync.

I promised to do a little writing on woodworking once in a while. Since nobody objected, once in a while is here.
Except for the presence of three women it looked like a meeting of Possum Lodge on The Red Green Show. The wood shop behind Door Q at Sioux Falls Lincoln High School is like this on the first Saturday of every other month as the Siouxland Woodturners hold their bi-monthly get together to show off their works and look for answers to persistent problems in their woodturning projects from bowls to bottle stoppers to duck calls.

You have to give Congress a pat on the back…I suppose…grudgingly…for finally saying enough is enough in this globalization nonsense.
A House committee…controlled by Republicans…voted 62 to 2 to sink that deal under which a United Arab Emirates company would have controlled a good deal of our ocean-going traffic, something the Bush administration first said it hadn’t known about but a few minutes later concluded was a good idea.

Now that it’s had a few days to settle in, the politically squeamish are subdividing over this abortion challenge, trying to be on both sides of the issue. It’s a stand pioneered by those who insist they are against abortion but should have the right…yadayadayada.
You are or you aren’t.

There are few things that can pull me out of my shop on a quiet, non-Viking, sunny Sunday afternoon at the lake. Suddenly, this past Sunday, I felt a tug. Maybe it’s the angle of the newly sprung spring sun through the big windows. Whatever it is, I put down my router and like I’m in a trance, walk to the cabin and grab my camera.

With Governor Mike Rounds signature on that bill making abortion all but obsolete in the state, South Dakota now enters a lull that could resemble what was called the phony war, that few months in 1939 and 40 after Britain and France declared war on Germany but hardly fired a shot.

Our latest cross-border spat with Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton saying "The Mayo Clinic is worth a hell of a lot more than the whole state of South Dakota" points out what a difference a state line and several million people can have on the way a state goes about its business.
For instance, the South Dakotalegislature just went home, mostly accomplishing the usual, business as usual.

"The Mayo Clinic is worth a hell of a lot more than the whole state of South Dakota."Sen. Mark Dayton, MN

A little bit louder and a little bit worse.

Here we are again, another Minnesotan throwing chunks of coal at South Dakota.

Aside from a couple of years in the army Trygve Trooien has lived in the same place since the day he was born, the home place, Oak Lake Farms south of Astoria, South Dakota, the farm his grandfather Ellef bought in 1900. It’s the land his dad, John, farmed until Trygve came home from Vietnam in 1972.