A bill which would have attempted to wean the state of South Dakota off video lottery revenue was heard in the South Dakota House Taxation Committee today. HB 1227 seeks to “reduce state government reliance on video lottery proceeds, to revise the distribution of video lottery proceeds, and to dedicate certain deposits and income from the education enhancement trust fund.”

A bill to end South Dakota’s participation the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program was heard in the South Dakota House State Affairs Committee yesterday. HB 1167 was crafted in the wake of last year’s South Dakota scandal involving Northern Beef, the EB-5 program and the South Dakota Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED).

Why do we need an agency to determine whether Verizon can charge Netflix for broadcasting on its server? Or to determine if Comcast-Time Warner will somehow take up too large a share of the marketplace?

Paramount’s upcoming Noah movie has sparked a national conversation on Bible-themed movies and the audiences they seek to attract. People of faith generally, and Faith Driven Consumers specifically, are the core audience forNoah and other films in this genre as Hollywood’s Year of the Bible Movie gears up.

OK. Some say the President was joking. Maybe so. But I tend to think of it more as a “Freudian slip,” which gave us a peek into the state of mind of one Mr. B. H. Obama. Parse it anyway you will, but the fact remains — Obama is making a mockery of the US Constitution.

A question-and-answer session on our United States Constitution, how we got it, about amendments, about an Article V convention, and about the dangers of an Article V Constitutional Convention.

When we consider the rightness or wrongness of any government program – like “Obamacare” – the discussion of its “rightness” must always begin with the question of authority. Does the government have the authority to do this thing in the first place? If we ask this “authority” question first, and we determine that there is no authority for the program to exist at all, then all the evidence of its cost and its benefits is irrelevant.

I’ve heard some comments in the media that Obamacare is not affecting Medicare or health care for seniors. That claim is false! In 2010 in an interview on CNBC, then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi admitted that to finance the Obamacare law over half a trillion dollars in Medicare benefits for seniors would be cut from the Medicare budget.

These are some of the interesting bills on the docket for today in the South Dakota Legislature. Some bills up for consideration yesterday were deferred and are scheduled to be heard today. Among today’s bills of note is one to reduce the state government’s reliance on video lottery revenue, prohibiting abortions due to Down syndrome, dismemberment abortions, election-related issues, petitioning for an audit of the Federal Reserve, rules governing ObamaCare navigators, Common Core education standards and more.