South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley has today joined 14 other State Attorneys General in requesting United States Attorney General Eric Holder to address federal lethal injection policy. The State Attorneys General are requesting that Attorney General Holder review recent federal policy, which may significantly impair the States’ ability to enforce their laws through capital punishment.

“We have educated ourselves into imbecility.” – Malcolm Muggeridge HT: Ravi Zacharias on Just Thinking, May 21, 2012.

A public forum featuring candidates in local Republican primary contests will be held on Tuesday, May 22, from 7-9 pm in the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology Classroom Building, Room 204 E&W. The cracker-barrel style forum will allow attendees to ask questions and learn about the incumbents as well as their challengers.

Remember the hype of the so-called Tea Party Republican freshmen class of 2010, a group that promised to restore fiscal sanity to Capitol Hill? House Republicans pledged in 2010 to “put us on a path to balance the budget and pay down the debt”. A new study by the Club for Growth, “Just how Tea Party are they?”, has found that for many of the freshmen Republicans, promises of fiscal responsibility have proven to be empty.

If the progressives win one more election, they will cement in their transformation of America from a land based on equal opportunity to a land of based on equal outcome. The Progressives who have taken control of America act as if all the money we earn is theirs and the only debate is about how much they will let us keep. And they constantly remind us that the government can’t afford to leave us with too much money. If they did, we wouldn’t be dependent on them. Maybe we should change the motto from E Pluribus Unum to “What’s Mine is Mine, What’s Yours is Negotiable.”

There are many wonderful reasons to get married in spite of the tax code. With all of the difficulties in society today, we do not need policies that dissuade people from marrying. The progressive nature of the tax code has exacerbated the marriage penalty. As Congress has sought to soak the rich, it has increasingly punished the pooling of income within marriage. We cannot simultaneously have a progressive tax burden, equal taxes on families with equal income and marriage neutrality. The best answer, of course, would be a fair flat tax. If Congress won’t encourage marriage, at least it should not discourage it.

Derric Iles, South Dakota’s state geologist, announced at a recent conference that the state has significant potential for oil development, but that potential largely has been unexplored. He noted that while the Red River Rock formation in northwest South Dakota has produced oil since the 1950s, geologists largely have ignored the potential of the Three Forks and Minnelusa formations. The Spearfish conference discussed how to prepare for an oil boom like the one in North Dakota. It is now third in the nation for oil production.

The American Red Cross was organized MAY 21, 1881, by Clara Barton, a schoolteacher who had moved to Washington at the outbreak of the Civil War. Clara Barton distributed relief supplies to wounded soldiers and, at the request of President Lincoln, aided in searching for missing men. Clara Barton helped in hospitals in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and in Europe during the Franco-German war, working with Henri Dunant, founder of the International Red Cross.