She doesn't speak for the tribe

Star Comes Out accused Noem of trying to use the border issue to help get former U.S. President Donald Trump re-elected and boost her chances of becoming his running mate.

[...]

“Due to the safety of the Oyate, effective immediately, you are hereby Banished from the homelands of the Oglala Sioux Tribe!” Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out said in a Friday statement addressed to Noem. “Oyate” is a word for people or nation.

[...]

Many of those arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border are Indigenous people from places like El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico who come “in search of jobs and a better life,” the tribal leader added.

[...]

Star Comes Out also addressed Noem’s remarks in the speech to lawmakers Wednesday in which she said a gang calling itself the Ghost Dancers is murdering people on the Pine Ridge Reservation and is affiliated with border-crossing cartels that use South Dakota reservations to spread drugs throughout the Midwest.

Star Comes Out said he took deep offense at her reference, saying the Ghost Dance is one of the Oglala Sioux’s “most sacred ceremonies,” “was used with blatant disrespect and is insulting to our Oyate.”

  Politico

Stop electing these people, FFS

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

MAGA to the dark ages

Inmates at an Arkansas prison said they weren’t told that they were treated for COVID-19 with the drug Ivermectin, a known livestock de-wormer, according to The Associated Press.

In an interview with the newswire, three inmates at a Washington County, Ark., jail said they didn’t know they were given the anti-parasite drug as medication for the virus until last week.

Inmate William Evans said that inmates felt that they were being tested as guinea pigs for the medication, saying he was given the drug two weeks after testing positive for coronavirus, the AP noted.

[...]

“I asked what are they, and they’d just tell me vitamins,” Inmate Edrick Floreal-Wooten told the AP.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Stop the presses

Days after South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg fatally struck a man while driving in September, detectives told the Republican official they had found a pair of broken reading glasses inside his Ford Taurus. They belonged to the man he killed.

That was a problem, detectives said, because Ravnsborg, 44, said he didn’t know he had hit a man until the following day, when he returned to the scene and found the body of Joseph Boever, 55, in a ditch.

“They’re Joe’s glasses, so that means his face came through your windshield,” one of the detectives said in an interview released by the South Dakota Department of Public Safety on Tuesday.

[...]

Boever’s cousin, Nick Nemec, told The Washington Post the new videos confirmed what he has always believed: Ravnsborg knew he had struck a man that evening and drove away anyway.

“He knew there was a dead man in that ditch,” said Nemec, 62. “He knew what he hit and he lied.”

  WaPo

Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Number 1) If the guy's face came through Ravnsborg's windshield, why wasn't Ravnsborg's windshield broken? Also, number 2) Reading glasses? The guy was walking along the road at night wearing reading glasses?

The more likely conclusion is that the guy was in Ravnsborg's car, making this a hell of a lot more suspicious than just a panicked hit and run.  

I suppose if Ravnsborg's window was down, the guy's glasses could have flown out of his pocket and against odds landed inside Ravnsborg's car, but it cries out for a deeper investigation.

On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers filed two articles of impeachment against Ravnsborg, who has since been charged with three misdemeanors, and South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) called for his resignation.

But Ravnsborg said that he will not step down. “At no time has this issue impeded his ability to do the work of the office,” Mike Deaver, his private spokesman, said in a statement to the Argus Leader.

[...]

Ravnsborg has said he was driving home from a GOP fundraiser in Redfield, S.D., around 10:30 p.m. on Sept. 12 when his car hit a large figure in the dark. Ravnsborg said he believed he had hit a deer, and said he searched a ditch along Highway 14 with his cellphone’s flashlight.

“All I could see were pieces of my vehicle laying on and around the roadway,” he said in a statement. When the sheriff arrived, he added, they both searched more and found no evidence of anything or anyone in the ditch.

Is the sheriff a buddy of the attorney general?

The next morning, Ravnsborg, who has said he was not drinking the night of the accident, and his chief of staff drove back to the scene. “As I walked along the shoulder of the road, I discovered the body of Mr. Boever in the grass just off the roadway,” Ravnsborg said. “It was apparent that Mr. Boever was deceased.” Shortly after his discovery, he added, he drove to the sheriff’s home and reported the body.

[...]

The family quickly cast doubt on Ravnsborg’s story and said it took authorities nearly 24 hours to notify them of Boever’s death.

[...]

Boever’s family told the Rapid City Journal that he had left his Ford pickup truck on the side of the highway earlier that day after driving into a ditch. It is unclear why he returned to his vehicle the night he was struck.

Maybe he didn't. Maybe Ravnsborg returned him to it.

At one point during the Sept. 30 interview, a detective presses Ravnsborg on why Boever’s glasses were found inside his car.

“His face was in your windshield, Jason. Think about that,” said a detective with the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation. The attorney general denied seeing the pair of glasses inside his vehicle or on the man’s body.

Ravnsborg told the detectives he didn’t see “anything” before he struck Boever that night. But detectives noted that Boever would have been hard to miss because he carried a flashlight that would have been like “a beacon of light” in the dark night.

[...]

Last week, prosecutors announced three misdemeanor charges against Ravnsborg. If found guilty of all charges, Ravnsborg could face up to 90 days in jail and $1,500 in damages.

[...]

The South Dakota House is expected to formally introduce [...] impeachment articles on Wednesday. A simple majority vote would be needed to advance to the state Senate, where two-thirds of the senators would need to convict him to remove him from his position.

Nemec, Boever’s cousin, said he is disappointed the lawmaker is not facing more serious charges.

“Deep inside, I was hoping he would be charged with involuntary manslaughter, but that didn’t happen,” Nemec said. “He’s grossly undercharged.”

I think this story needs a little more investigation. 

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Nothing fishy here.

UPDATE:

Hello?

In case you missed it, Noem is the governor of the state that brought you the great motorcycle rally covid superspreader event and who doesn't want to impose any restrictions (including masks) on the people of South Dakota.  Next time she makes another stupid proclamation, you don't need to ask, "Are you high?"

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Remember that motorcycle rally?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Let me correct this headline

"Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was "superspreading event" that cost public health taxpayers $12.2 billion."

If true....

Indeed, the Republican Party needs to be annihilated.  But I'm slightly skeptical of this, because I think if there WERE such a thing, Trump would have made a big deal out of it, and we'd have seen it.

Last year, months before President Trump’s July 4th fireworks celebration at Mount Rushmore, a White House aide reportedly contacted South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s office to inquire about the steps that need to be taken to add more presidents to the national memorial. Noem, who previously said Trump confided in her that it was his “dream” to appear among the former presidents on the monument, apparently decided to encourage his fantasy when she sought to charm him as he arrived in Black Hills for the holiday celebration last month: She even presented him with a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore with his face on it, according to The New York Times.

  Daily Beast

Introducing Mr. Trump against the floodlit backdrop of his carved predecessors, the governor played to the president’s craving for adulation by noting that in just three days more than 125,000 people had signed up for only 7,500 seats; she likened him to Theodore Roosevelt, a leader who “braves the dangers of the arena”; and she mimicked the president’s rhetoric by scorning protesters who she said were seeking to discredit the country’s founders.

In private, the efforts to charm Mr. Trump were more pointed, according to a person familiar with the episode: Ms. Noem greeted him with a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included a fifth presidential likeness: his.

[...]

But less than three weeks later, Ms. Noem came to the White House with far less fanfare — to meet not with Mr. Trump, but with Vice President Mike Pence. Word had circulated through the Trump administration that she was ingratiating herself with the president, fueling suspicions that there might have been a discussion about her serving as his running mate in November. Ms. Noem assured Mr. Pence that she wanted to help the ticket however she could, according to an official present.

  NYT

She had to go to the Whie House in person for that?

The governor, 48, has installed a TV studio in her state capitol, become a Fox News regular and started taking advice from Mr. Trump’s former 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who still has the president’s ear.

[...]

To the surprise of some of her own advisers, Ms. Noem flew with Mr. Trump to Washington on Air Force One late in the evening after his Mount Rushmore speech. Joined by Mr. Lewandowski, she and the president spoke for over an hour privately during the flight — a fact that Mr. Trump and some of his aides soon shared with other Republicans, according to officials familiar with his disclosure.

[...]

Ms. Noem has been a steadfast ally of Mr. Trump and has mirrored his handling of the virus.

She has pushed for schools to reopen for in-person classes, denounced mask mandates and had South Dakota participate in a study on hydroxychloroquine, the malaria treatment Mr. Trump has trumpeted.

[...]

Recognizing the president’s immense interest in [Mt. Rushore], Ms. Noem worked with his Interior Department to ensure there would be fireworks for the [4th of July] celebration, a longstanding priority for Mr. Trump. There had been no fireworks there for the previous decade because of environmental and fire-risk concerns.

In the weeks leading up to the event, Ms. Noem went on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News to make clear she was expecting to “have a large event” for the president and would not require social distancing or masks.

Yeah, she wants to be VP.

A White House official laughed at the notion that Mr. Trump is open to replacing Mr. Pence, a move that, among other things, would exude desperation.

And your point is?

For a time in 2018, Mr. Trump queried people about Mr. Pence’s loyalty. And officials in the administration, including some close to Mr. Pence, said they believed that Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump were angling to replace him with [Nikki] Haley.

In his memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” the former national security adviser John R. Bolton recounts how, flying to Iraq on Christmas night in 2018, the president asked him for his opinion on jettisoning Mr. Pence.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Sure seems that way.

Headed for a showdown

Thousands of bikers heading to South Dakota’s 10-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally will not be allowed through Cheyenne River Sioux checkpoints, a spokesman for the Native American group said on Saturday.

The decision to prevent access across tribal lands to the annual rally, which could attract as many as 250,000 bikers amid fears it could lead to a massive, regional coronavirus outbreak, comes as part of larger Covid-19 prevention policy. The policy has pitted seven tribes that make up the Great Sioux Nation against federal and state authorities, which both claim the checkpoints are illegal.

A duty officer for the Cheyenne River Sioux told the Guardian Saturday that only commercial and emergency vehicles will be let through the checkpoints onto reservation land.

A number of bikers had tried to enter but had been turned back, they said. Other reservations in the region, including the Oglala Sioux, were also turning away bikers that had attempted routes to Sturgis that pass through sovereign land.

[...]

The clampdown comes as fears mount that mask-free bikers visiting Sturgis for the largest gathering of people since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic could spread the virus to tribal groups that are already experiencing a rise in cases.

[...]

According to reports, many bikers heading for Sturgis expressed defiance at rules and restrictions that have marked life during the coronavirus pandemic.

[...]

During the rally, people are expected to cram bars and pack concerts with at least 34 acts playing. “Screw COVID,” read the design on one T-shirt on sale. “I went to Sturgis.”

  Guardian

May you get what you are asking for.

On Friday, a worker at the event told the Guardian on Friday crowds seemed larger than in previous years and warned that Sturgis attendees were paying little heed to medical advice.

“I’ve not seen one single person wearing a mask,” said bartender Jessica Christian, 29. “It’s just pretty much the mentality that, ‘If I get it, I get it.’”

[...]

Stephen Sample, who rode his Harley from Arizona, told the Associated Press that the event was a break from the routine of the last several months.

“I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to be cooped up all my life either,” Sample, 66, said, adding that he’d weighed the risks of navigating the crowds, but the same thrill-seeking that attracted him to riding motorcycles seemed to win out.

“I think we’re all willing to take a chance,” he said, but acknowledged the trip “could be a major mistake.”

And the rest of the world doesn't give a shit whether you "take a chance." They just don't want you spreading death to THEM.

Over 60% of Sturgis 6,900 residents who responded to a city council survey in May said they wanted the rally canceled.

[...]

South Dakota’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem, has supported holding the Sturgis rally, pointing out that no virus outbreak was documented from the several thousand people who turned out to see Donald Trump and fireworks at Mount Rushmore last month.

Kristi, have it at your house.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Another idiot gets her moment in the spotlight thanks to Trump

When does she think the Civil War occurred?

“Across America these last several weeks, we have been witnessing a very troubling situation unfold. In real time, we are watching an organized, coordinated campaign to remove and eliminate all references to our nation’s founding and many other points in our history,” Noem said at a Fourth of July celebration at Mount Rushmore with President Trump.

“The approach focuses exclusively on our forefathers’ flaws, but it fails to capitalize on the opportunity to learn from their virtues,” she added. “Make no mistake, this is being done deliberately to discredit America’s founding principles by discrediting the individuals who formed them, so that America can be remade into a different political image.”

  The Hill

One without slavery and racial injustice. How awful.

And, yes, Trump's Mount Rushmore speech was the same.

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,” Trump later said. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”

Confederate monuments are "our most sacred memorials"?  Only if you're a bigoted racist.

Well, well, well

"After testing positive, Kimberly was immediately isolated to limit any exposure," said Sergio Gor, chief of staff for the Trump Victory Finance Committee.

  CNN

Too late.

Guilfoyle tested positive in South Dakota before she was set to attend the President's event at Mount Rushmore.

[...]

"She's doing well, and will be retested to ensure the diagnosis is correct since she's asymptomatic but as a precaution will cancel all upcoming events. Donald Trump Jr was tested negative, but as a precaution is also self isolating and is canceling all public events."

[...]

Guilfoyle had not had recent contact with the President, but she was in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was backstage for his rally there and, was also at his event in Phoenix.

Somebody else in Tulsa has tested positive: Herman Cain. They're not the only two. You can bet on that.

All of Trump's campaign staffers who worked on the rally in Tulsa were quarantining last week after interacting with several colleagues who later tested positive for coronavirus

[...]

Guilfoyle and Trump Jr. had been in the upper Plains region hosting high-dollar fundraisers for several days, people familiar with the matter said.

[...]

Guilfoyle was not seen wearing a mask during the events.

There are currently a number of high-dollar donors getting tested and worrying.

Also....the woman who broke guidelines in the early days of the coronavirus by jetting to infested New Jersey for Passover has this to say:

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Trump's states that can "open" early

The whole notion that there are wide-open spaces that are somehow virus-proof—which the president* apparently believes—is, of course, dangerous nonsense. South Dakota is now a hotspot because of one processing plant. Idaho, which was the last state to have a COVID-19 fatality, is getting hit now as well, especially on the Nez Perce Reservation. Nez Perce county has had 10 deaths among its 40,000 residents. Ada County has had nine deaths among its 500,000 residents. One wrong sneeze and you have a hotspot.

  Charles P Pierce

South Dakota is home to one of the largest single coronavirus clusters anywhere in the United States, with more than 300 workers at a giant ­pork-processing plant falling ill. With the case numbers continuing to spike, the company was forced to announce the indefinite closure of the facility Sunday, threatening the U.S. food supply.

  WaPo

The company, Smithfield, is closing more plants now.

Trump has been eager to get the economy on its feet again by the beginning of May after record rises in unemployment claims and dramatic falls in the stock market.

Yet as South Dakota’s experience shows, no part of the country is immune to being ravaged by the virus.

[...]

“A shelter-in-place order is needed now. It is needed today,” said Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken, whose city is at the center of South Dakota’s outbreak and who has had to improvise with voluntary recommendations in the absence of statewide action.

[...]

Reopening the country by May is “not even remotely achievable,” said TenHaken, who, like Trump and Noem, is a Republican. “We’re in the early innings of this thing in Sioux Falls.”

[...]

But the governor continued to resist. Instead, she used a media briefing Monday to announce trials of a drug that President Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential breakthrough in the fight against the coronavirus, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

“It’s an exciting day,” she boasted, repeatedly citing her conversations with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.

[...]

[O]ver the course of last week, the numbers surged as the virus ripped through the city’s Smithfield Foods production plant, a colossus that employs 3,700 people — many of them immigrants — and churns out 18 million servings of pork product per day.

On Monday alone, 57 more workers were confirmed to have positive diagnoses, bringing the total well above 300 — and making it one of the country’s largest clusters.

[...]

The factory, like other food production facilities, had earlier been deemed essential by the federal government.

[...]

Before the closure, workers had complained that they were not given sufficient access to protective gear, such as masks. The company said Thursday that it had taken steps to reduce the spread, including “adding extra hand sanitizing stations, boosting personal protective equipment, continuing to stress the importance of personal hygiene.” But workers said they were required to work so closely together that it was impossible to stay healthy.

[...]

Sioux Falls, home to nearly 200,000 people, is the state’s largest city. TenHaken, the mayor, said in an interview that he has done everything within his power to enforce social distancing, including using a “no lingering” ordinance to confine restaurants to takeout and delivery service and strongly recommending that all nonessential businesses close.

He has little power of enforcement, however, and no ability to control what happens in nearby jurisdictions. Restaurants within Sioux Falls may have shut down for in-person dining, but the rules don’t apply outside city limits.

[...]

The South Dakota State Medical Association wrote Noem a letter April 3 warning the governor that the state “may soon face the challenges and hardships currently being seen in New York and other large cities across the country if a shelter in place order is not issued immediately.”

Noem is one of five governors representing relatively rural states — North Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska and Arkansas are the others — still resisting such calls. All are Republicans, and all have used similar justifications for going against the national grain.

[...]

Citing scientific modeling, the [South Dakota] governor acknowledged this month that up to 70 percent of residents in her state may ultimately fall ill with covid-19. But, she suggested, it wasn’t up to government to tell them how to behave.

“The people themselves are primarily responsible for their safety,” she said. “They are the ones that are entrusted with expansive freedoms.”

[...]

“In rural areas, there’s less access to health care,” said DenYelle Kenyon, director of the public health program at the University of South Dakota. “And all it takes is one case to spread to a small community.”

During a media briefing Friday afternoon, Gov. Kristi Noem said the latest analysis of data by state healthcare officials projects that South Dakota will experience its peak number of coronavirus cases in mid-June.

“But when we’re looking at our data and our numbers and the number of people who could get infected, we anticipate it will be 265,000 people to 600,000 people in the state of South Dakota,” she said of the state’s total population of 882,235 people. “What this means … is we will need at our peak infection date, sometime in the middle of June, about 5,000 hospital beds dedicated to COVID-19. We will also need 1,300 ventilators to take care of the people in our state who will need them.”

Those numbers represent 30 to 70 percent of the state’s population.

[...]

/“The number of ventilators in our state is currently at 525,” [Kim Malsam-Rysdon, secretary of the Department of Health,] said. “That includes both ventilators and related equipment that currently is available in hospital settings as well as what we have available in our state cache. We have requests in to FEMA as well as private suppliers to help bridge the gap of ventilators needs.”

[...]

>Noem was asked by a reporter later in the briefing if South Dakota has the extra hospital beds and ventilators needed for the projected COVID-19 patients.

“We do not, but we have a plan to get there, and we will get there by the time we reach our peak infection date in June,” she said.

[...]

The statistics Noem shared Friday show that “we have cut the number of people at our peak infection rate who will be sick at one time almost in half,” she said, “which is fantastic. By looking at these charts, you will notice that we have pushed our peak infection date out. We still have a long road in front of us.”

The governor said South Dakotans will need to practice its current mitigation efforts through August.

She also described the state’s current projections as dynamic and not static.

  Vermillion Plain Talk

And yet, no shelter in place order.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Exactly what Native Americans and others were protesting

The Keystone pipeline system, an addition to which has been the subject of environmental protests for years, leaked about 383,000 gallons of crude oil in North Dakota, covering an estimated half-acre of wetland, state environmental regulators said.

[...]

“It is one of the larger spills in the state,” [Karl Rockeman, the director of the state Department of Environmental Quality’s division of water quality] said in an email on Thursday.

There are no residences near the site and the wetland is not a source of drinking water, he said.

[...]

The leak occurred along a stretch of the existing Keystone pipeline system, not the 1,179-mile-long addition to that system known as the Keystone XL pipeline, he said. Keystone XL has been the subject of environmental protests for years. President Barack Obama denied it a permit in 2015, but just days after taking office President Trump cleared a path for its operator, TC Energy, formerly known as TransCanada, to proceed.

[...]

“We don’t yet know the extent of the damage from this latest tar sands spill, but what we do know is that this is not the first time this pipeline has spilled toxic tar sands, and it won’t be the last,” [Catherine Collentine, an associate director with the Sierra Club] said.

[...]

In 2017, a spill along the Keystone pipeline system coated a stretch of grassland in South Dakota with more than 407,000 gallons of leaked Canadian crude oil, which was nearly twice as much as originally estimated, according to the company. The pipeline also leaked about 16,000 gallons each in spills in 2011 in North Dakota and in 2016 in South Dakota.

[...]

The system contains 2,687 miles of pipeline.

  NYT

Meanwhile, in the land of the less and less free

Prosecutors and defense attorneys have only just begun to wrestle over the facts in an unprecedented series of felony trials stemming from the mass round-up arrest of hundreds of protesters on Inauguration Day. The federal government is arguing that everyone charged was an active participant, provoking alarming notions of collective punishment, but video evidence and media reports indicate that many caught in the mass arrest were not organized Antifa disrupters but rather onlookers caught in a dragnet.

[...]

A serious felony case against someone who says he was conducting constitutionally protected journalism puts the whole of the reporting profession at some real risk, with years yet to go in a presidency that’s already galvanizing unusual levels of street unrest.

[...]

The serial tech hang-ups gave the proceedings an air of farce. But what’s going on in that room is no remedial IT lesson. The government’s case puts the protections embedded at the very top of the Bill of Rights under serious duress.

[...]

Lawyers from each side struggled Tuesday to work up any kind of rhythm in their questioning because of the repeated interruptions necessary to navigate the gigantic pile of video evidence the government is relying upon. One might expect a serious felony trial involving thousands of gigabytes of video data covering hours of chaos in the streets to have some state-of-the-art system for playback — or at least the kind of pre-cut clips common on sports highlights shows.

[...]

Wonky HDMI cables, rechargeable wireless headsets and frozen laptops repeatedly left the well-meaning but often confused attorneys to spar with technology more than with each other.

[...]

A glitch in the courtroom systems caused the volume to automatically snap back to zero each time a user switched from one video to another or turns the screens off and back on.

[...]

Lawyers examining witnesses consistently shut off the courtroom’s half-dozen large video screens when they weren’t needed.

Or at least, they tried. The glowing rectangles didn’t always cooperate. At one point when the screens were supposed to be dark, the Microsoft Windows lock screen showed up on all the monitors. The background image was an artsy stock photo of small loaves of bread cooling on a drying rack.

[...]

The system befuddled defense attorneys just as much during their attempts at cross-examination. When one of the six defendants’ lawyers sought to play back video for a Metropolitan Police Department officer, her colleague’s computer froze up and only played sound. As the team tried to figure it out, Judge Lynn Leibovitz leaned toward their table and suggested they all “might want to get a tech person.”

  Think Progress

And to think, innocent bystanders and journalists in danger of being sent to prison for decades are what's at stake.

And in other "free speech" news...

“An Act to preserve the use of public land, to ensure free travel, to enhance emergency response, and to declare an emergency” passed both chambers of South Dakota’s legislature and was signed into law by the governor in March 2017. This legislation allows him to establish “public safety zones,” in which protest activities can be limited and violators could face jail time.

[...]

“My administration brought this bill to protect those who want to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights, as well as the people who reside in and travel through our state,” the Governor said in a press release. “Legislators on both sides of the aisle voted to support this bill and I appreciate their recognition of the urgency of this issue.”

  Free Speech Project

Legislators on both sides of the aisle should be ashamed of themselves.

SB 176 allows the governor to establish “public safety zones,” in which gatherings of more than 20 people are prohibited. [...] [A] first offense carries a minimum of 10 days, and a second offense within two years would be considered a felony. [...] “The governor respects the rights of peaceful protesters and he knows the vast majority are not violent or dangerous.”  [...]  “The reason for bringing this legislation is the protests in North Dakota and the upcoming construction of the Keystone XL pipeline in South Dakota. Governor Daugaard wants to learn from North Dakota’s experience to be prepared.”

No doubt he'd like to avoid those images of company thugs turning canons of freezing water and vicious dogs on a group of peacefully protesting Native Americans.

Twenty people. "For their own good."  If that doesn't pull the teeth out of a protest, I don't know what will.

Until George W Bush instigated "free speech zones" for protesters, this whole country used to be a free speech zone.  I can't understand what happened to the American people.  What are we so afraid of that we roll over to the continuing march of laws that impede our freedom and shut down our rights? 

But I'm predicting there will be some backlash to this law.

No, Our Police Are Not Out of Control

Why do you ask?

A woman is suing a South Dakota city, its former police chief and four other officers for shooting her 8-year-old daughter with a Taser.

[...]

An officer fired the electric shock device’s darts into the chest of the girl, who weighed 70 pounds, the lawsuit said. “The force of the electricity shot through her body, lifted her and threw her against a wall,” it said. “After the officers had stunned [the girl] into high voltage submission, they pulled the fishhook-like Taser darts from her chest, gave her emergency medical attention, bandaged the holes left by the razor-sharp hooks and called the ambulance.”

The incident occurred in October 2013, when the girl’s babysitter called police after seeing the girl holding a knife, with unknown intentions.

[...]

Authorities said the girl was suicidal and had turned the knife toward an officer. State investigators concluded that the officer’s use of the weapon was justified because it was the safest method to defuse the situation.

[...]

The former Pierre police chief told CNN news that police may have “saved this girl’s life.”

  alJazeera

And, in case you're wondering... yes, there was a racial element.

Stenstrom and her daughter, both members of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, have since moved back to the tribal reservation, CNN said.