At best, he is confused.  At worst, he is a liar. 

Mitt Romney is arguing that the Buffett Rule will actually be good for Warren Buffett.  Here's his logic:

1. The Buffett Rule provides for an exemption to municipal bonds (which have always enjoyed a tax-free status)
2. Berkshire Hathaway is a "major player in the municipal bond market"
3. Warren Buffett is a controlling shareholder of Berkshire(he holds about 30% of the company's outstanding stock)
4. Warren Buffett would benefit from the Buffett rule!

Huh?

The proposed Buffett Rule applies to individual income taxes, not corporate income taxes.  As a result, Berkshire's tax burden would remain unaffected by the rule.  It would apply to Buffett's personal income taxes.  Given that 98% of his personal holdings are in Berkshire stock, and NOT municipal bonds, I'm pretty sure that the Oracle of Omaha would be paying more taxes as a result of the rule named after him.

The thing is that this is something that is pretty simple.  Anyone who's ever run a business knows the difference between corporate income taxes and personal income taxes.  This is taxes 101.  Romney's run a lot of businesses, I sure hope that as CEO he knew what sections of the tax code they were operating under.  

So which is it Governor?  Do you either not know the first thing about taxes, or are you lying?

In the interests of full disclosure, I do hold a few shares of Berkshire Hathaway Class B stock.  Apparently I'll benefit from the Buffett Rule too...somehow...I think?
-Adam

Also, I should also point out that calling Berkshire a "major player" in the municipal bond market is a little disingenuous as well.  Berkshire's  $4 Billion share of the market is small both in terms of Berkshire's overall size (nearly $400 Billion) or the size of the Bond Market ($2.9 Trillion)

(Cross-posted, with permission, from The Prairie Blog.)

Well, this is embarrassing. Yesterday I finished a long article on the State Land Board and put it on my blog. In it, I congratulated everyone from the Governor to the dogcatcher for teaming up to offer protection to some valuable roadless areas of the North Dakota Bad Lands. When I wrote it, I had been told by the State Land Department that all the parcels of state-owned land within the U.S. Forest Service’s designated roadless areas had been removed from the Land Department’s oil lease sale offering, scheduled for May 1.

Turns out that wasn’t true. Somebody fibbed. I learned last night that the State Land Department (you’ve heard about them—I’ve written about them before) is going to put a full section of state land inside the roadless area—on the west slope of Bullion Butte, one of North Dakota’s most spectacular landmarks—on  the auction block May 1. That’s a huge disappointment. Bullion Butte is one of North Dakota’s highest points, and it’s also the only high butte within a roadless area, making it far more attractive to hikers than a couple higher buttes which you can drive to. To place it, it’s the huge butte you see looking south from the plaza of Medora’s Burning Hills Amphitheatre. It’s so big that it actually changes the course of the Little Missouri River, sending it on a 40 mile or so detour to the east.

If the sale goes forward, there could be an oil well on Bullion Butte. That would be a very bad thing to have happen.

The Land Department says it will attach a “stipulation” to the lease which would allow them to prevent drilling on that section of land. The stipulation, as I shared yesterday, reads:

This tract is within an area identified as essential wildlife habitat. The lessee or lessee’s operator must contact the commissioner prior to any surface activity. Operational mitigation measures to reduce impact, including timing restrictions, location adjustments and reduced or restricted surface occupancy may be required. Habitat or terrain considerations may preclude locating a well site on this tract.

Again, as I mentioned yesterday, the operative word there is “may.” The Land Department is not known for its sensitivity to things like wilderness, or conservation, or scenic beauty, or places for solitude. It is into making money. Lots of money. Here’s one example: Last November, the Department leased out 80 acres for development right up against the fence on the east side of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The company that leased it, Davis Exploration LLC, of Stockbridge, GA, paid the Department a bonus of $14,000 per acre for that lease—a total of $1,120,000. Davis paid that just for the right to drill for oil there. With that kind of money already shelled out, how long do you suppose it will take them to drill a well there, to recover their investment? Bison, elk and prairie dogs on one side of the fence, an oil drilling rig with hundreds of trucks driving in on the other. Well, not for long. Don’t expect to see any kind of critters on the east side of the park this summer. And when you visit Theodore Roosevelt National Park this summer, don’t bother to hike up to the top of Buck Hill. You aren’t going to like what you see.

With that kind of insensitivity already displayed, do you really think they’re going to say “No” to drilling on the side of a butte in the middle of nowhere? Hah! Fat chance.

And even if they did, by leasing the minerals, the damage is already done. The Bullion Butte area is one of those areas that the Forest Service lists as “eligible for wilderness.” One of the major considerations in that listing is the fact that there are no leased minerals inside that area. Once the minerals on the school section are leased, the door is open to development inside the roadless area. The people who make the decisions on designating areas as wilderness get more than a little skittish about that. In spite of the Land Department’s “stipulations,” once the minerals are leased to a private entity, the surface is not protected from development. This could spell real trouble for efforts to get a formal wilderness designation for areas like this. That’s why wildlife groups and others have pressed the State Land Board not to lease these tracts of land.

It‘s not a big area, by the way. Under 10,000 acres, I think, about 15 square miles.  You could walk the whole area in a day.

And so this is just one more reason why I believe the State Land Board should declare a 3-year moratorium on further leasing of State School Lands. If such a moratorium were in place, we wouldn’t even be talking about this. What we could be talking about is sensitivity to things like massive roadless buttes and National Parks. We could have a good conversation about what the responsibility of the state is. Is it just really all about money, or could we be setting an example? We could have public meetings, we could ask people for their feelings about how we should best manage our state lands. I can guess how some of those discussions might go, because I know North Dakotans.  Maybe, for example, they would urge the State Land Department not to lease that land up against the National Park named for America’s Greatest Conservation President, to leave it as a buffer zone, so critters and the visitors who come to see them wouldn’t be disrupted by an oil drilling rig and hundreds of fracking trucks. Maybe they’d say “Let’s not put an oil well on Bullion Butte. We like the view just the way it is.”

Meanwhile, here’s another call for the State Land Board to make another short term decision: take the parcel of state land on Bullion Butte out of the May 1 lease sale. And then, take it out forever. Leave our roadless areas alone. They represent such a small piece of North Dakota’s Bad Lands, let’s leave them for our children and grandchildren to enjoy.

I could say “Thanks” in advance. But I think I’ll wait a little while, just to be sure this time.

You folks in the Bismarck/Mandan area should consider attending an event at Bismarck State College tonight.  Here are the details, first, then I'll talk a little about Chuck:

Chuck Klosterman, North Dakota writer, journalist, essayist, and author of seven books, will read from his latest novel, The Visible Man, and engage in conversation with the audience on Wednesday, April 11, at the Sidney J. Lee Auditorium on the Bismarck State College campus. The free public presentation, “An Evening with Chuck Klosterman,” will begin at 7:30 p.m. Central Time, sponsored by Read North Dakota and ArtsQuest 2012.

Facebook.com

I've reviewed some of Klosterman's essays and books.  You can read some of that stuff here, here, and here.  I generally like Klosterman's writing, though I think he's had some hiccups. 

Kelly Hagen has a piece about Klosterman in yesterday's Great Plains Examiner, too. You ought to read it.  Here's a favorite passage:

He has earned success in numerous genres, as a journalist, critic, features writer, essayist and writer of fiction and nonfiction. Everywhere he has gone in his writing career, he is certainly well-known. Except in his home state.

“My books are more popular outside of North Dakota than they are inside of North Dakota, which I find very weird,” he said. “I mean, ‘Fargo Rock City’ is about North Dakota. ‘Downtown Owl’ is really about North Dakota. And I sold more copies of those books in London than I did in all of North Dakota, and I have no idea why that is.”

He said he understands that, in a state fully content with its branding of wide-open prairies, stillness and pioneer attitudes of a modest populace, he isn’t your typical North Dakotan writer.

“My writing is not like Louis L’Amour’s, obviously,” he said. “It doesn’t have the qualities of a regional writer from North Dakota. I don’t really work as a regional writer. I write about popular culture, which can exist anywhere.”

GreatPlainsExaminer.com

I'm hopeful I'll get to stop in and see Chuck's reading.  If not, maybe one of you can report back.

(Cross-posted, with permission, from the Prairie Blog.)

A few weeks ago I wrote about the activities of the State Land Board, and I said I was encouraged that the board had agreed to remove several parcels of land from a mineral lease sale, parcels that were part of a couple roadless areas in North Dakota’s Bad Lands. “This week we won a little skirmish,” I wrote. “We talked to our leaders. They listened. And it wasn’t so hard, was it? Let’s do it some more.”

Well, I did. I finally got to meet Lance Gaebe, the State Land Commissioner, and he shared with me the process he and the Board go through in leasing minerals that lie under state-owned land. Here’s how it works.

The State Land Department—actually its name has been changed now to the Department of Trust Lands—owns about 2 ½ million acres of minerals, and much of the land above those minerals. They’ve actually, over the years, sold off some land, but retained the mineral rights under the land they sold. About 800,000 acres of those minerals are leased to mineral development companies, who pay the state a bonus to get the right to drill for oil, mostly. If they hit a producing well, which is almost always, they pay the state a share of the proceeds from the well. The state came by those acres at statehood, when the federal government gave the state the land and minerals in sections 16 and 36 in every township—two sections out of every 36—making the State Land Department North Dakota’s biggest landowner. Those lands were given by the federal government “for the support of schools,” and they are known as “school sections,” and the revenue derived from them is used to support education in North Dakota.

So along comes an oil boom. Representatives of oil companies are scouring courthouse records looking for mineral rights available for lease, so they can drill oil wells. When they find a section of land which might have oil potential, and under which the minerals have not been leased by anyone, they go to the owner and offer some money to lease the minerals, promising a share of the riches if they hit oil. If it turns out those minerals are under a “school section,” they tell Land Commissioner Lance Gaebe they want to lease those minerals. Lance’s job is to maximize the income from those lands when they are leased, so instead of negotiating a price, he holds an auction. The auctions are held four times a year. The lands identified by the oil companies are considered “nominated” when the companies offer an opening bid before the auction, generally a dollar an acre for 5 a year lease. When the sale starts, the opening bid has been made, and anyone else is free to bid on them. Generally, other oil companies bid against the “nominator” and bidding continues until everyone but one bidder drops out. At the February auction I referenced earlier, the bids on about 68,000 acres of mineral rights brought the state $84 million. Yes, you read that right. 84 million dollars were collected to help support our schools. In one day. Not a bad day for the school kids of North Dakota. But at what price? The net effect is that there will be hundreds of new oil wells drilled in western North Dakota, adding to the confusion and congestion that already exists there. At the same time the state is trying to get a handle on the rapid development, we’re handing out new drilling opportunities like candy (albeit pretty expensive candy) to anyone who asks for them.

Anyway, as you read in my earlier post, and in the news stories in late January and early February, some of those lands nominated by the oil companies for the Department’s quarterly sale this past February were in, or adjacent to, the U.S. Forest Service’s few remaining roadless areas of the Bad Lands, areas that are being considered as additions to the nation’s official Wilderness system. There are not many spots in the Bad Lands that remain pristine, outside of Theodore Roosevelt National Park (most of which is really not pristine because it has roads, campgrounds, picnic shelters and other amenities which allow tourists to enjoy it). Altogether, there are just a little over 60,000 acres of roadless areas left in the Bad Lands, about a hundred square miles, or an area just ten miles by ten miles. That’s it. Out of millions of acres of Bad Lands, only a tiny fraction remains free of civilization. Hikers, horseback riders, backpackers, photographers, birders, and others who just enjoy nature have only those few small spots left where there are no oil trucks roaring past them as they visit these spots.

A group called the Badlands Conservation Alliance (BCA), which calls itself A Voice for Wild North Dakota Places, has taken on the cause of preserving these parcels as Wilderness. Founded in 1999 during the early public planning process for the Forest Service’s Land and Resource Management Plan for the Dakota Prairie Grasslands, BCA’s members speak out for conservation concerns in western North Dakota’s 1 million acre Little Missouri National Grassland, insuring that government agencies and leadership hear the call for ecologically functioning landscapes, protection of roadless areas, and designation of Wilderness in North Dakota’s Bad Lands. (Full disclosure: I am a member and my wife is the founder.)

Well, back in January of this year, a BCA member named Mike McEnroe, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, who keeps track of what is going on in the Bad Lands, noticed that these tracts of State School Lands inside or adjacent to the roadless areas were about to be leased, and asked the Department not to do that. In addition, the State Game and Fish Department was concerned about some wildlife habitat areas on the list as well, and was requesting that some of those areas be pulled off the sale list. After some newspaper stories in the Forum and Bismarck Tribune, which generated some discussion by the State Land Board—whose members are Governor Jack Dalrymple, Superintendent of Public Instruction Wayne Sanstead, Treasurer Kelly Schmidt, Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem and Secretary of State Al Jaeger—those tracts were removed from the February lease auction. At the time, Dalrymple, who chairs the board, said he wanted the board to develop criteria and a process to deal with school lands that have conservation value, and talked of creating an advisory board for that purpose, according to a story in theBismarck Tribune. He later said, at a Conference on the Future of Hunting in North Dakota in March, there will be a “formal review process by Game and Fish, and each and every parcel must be looked at.”

Well, then, imagine everyone’s surprise when the list of tracts to be auctioned off at an upcoming May 1 sale, released by Gaebe’s office in March, contained the very same parcels. When I asked Gaebe about that, he said that the sale of minerals under these tracts would go ahead, but that each lease document would contain language with “wildlife stipulations” in it. The blanket stipulation phrase read:

This tract is within an area identified as essential wildlife habitat. The lessee or lessee’s operator must contact the commissioner prior to any surface activity. Operational mitigation measures to reduce impact, including timing restrictions, location adjustments and reduced or restricted surface occupancy may be required. Habitat or terrain considerations may preclude locating a well site on this tract.

Sure enough, the parcels on the list Gaebe gave me were coded in such a way that anyone buying a lease on those minerals would know that there is the possibility that there could be some restrictions on what they could do with that lease once they owned it. The problem, of course, is the word “may.” The stipulation really doesn’t require anything, except a conversation with the Commissioner. The wildlife folks I talked to say there’s no teeth in the policy.  They suggest that each individual tract contain specific language, like “not appropriate for leasing,” or “development must be at least 1500 feet (or some other arbitrary distance) from the woody draw, the lek, the lambing area, or the eagle’s nest.”

A couple of weeks after I received the list, I received an e-mail from Drew Combs, the Director of Minerals Management for the State Land Department (and one of the most helpful and respectful state employees I’ve met in a long time) that directed me to the Land Department’s website for the final, up-to-date list of tracts to be sold at the May 1 sale. In the two weeks between the time I received the preliminary list from Gaebe and Combs’ e-mail, the tracts in or near the roadless areas, as well as the wildlife habitat areas identified by the Game and Fish Department, had been removed from the list. So I inquired of Combs what had happened to make them disappear from the list. He replied that because of all that had taken place regarding those parcels, and with the new wildlife stipulations being placed in the leases, he thought he better call the company that had nominated those tracts and see if they were still interested. Well, it turns out they weren’t interested any more. Combs said the company who nominated those 2,500 acres, Blanca Peak LLC of Dickinson, had submitted an opening bid of $100 per acre when they sent in the nomination, and they had decided to save the $250,000 it would cost them for the leases.

“Hmmmm,” I thought. “Funny what a little wildlife stipulation in a lease will do.”

Well, it turns out it may not have been that simple. Blanca Peak is fronting in North Dakota for Chesapeake Energy, the notorious Oklahoma-based oil and gas firm that is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in lawsuits around the country (read about them here) for fraudulent leasing practices (You can read how they screwed a 92-year-old widow here).

It’s hard to tell from my research just who owns what, but it looks like a company called Redsky Land out of Edmond, OK, which does mineral leasing for Chesapeake, put together a storefront operation in Dickinson called Blanca Peak, which leased a couple thousand acres, mostly in Billings County, in February (and would have leased the 2,500 acres we’re talking about here if they had been offered). Another company which I believe is also fronting for Chesapeake, Clear Creek Resources, has leased nearly 10,000 acres of state school lands, mostly in Billings, Golden Valley, Stark and Dunn Counties, spending more than $10 million here. I asked Combs if he had received payment from the two companies, and he said he had. That’s a good thing, because a lot of people who leased land to Chesapeake or one of its subsidiaries got screwed, and one of the biggest screwees is a fellow named Harold Hamm. You might recognize that name—owner of Continental Oil, the biggest player in the Bakken. Hamm didn’t get screwed for long, though. Forbes Magazine reported that the billionaire Hamm took Chesapeake and its own billionaire owner, Aubrey McClendon, to court, and won a $20 million settlement. You can read about it here. Hmm, hard to choose a side in THAT fight, eh?

Chesapeake made news in North Dakota recently when it announced it was essentially stopping its drilling activities here and cancelling most of its private leases in southwestern North Dakota. There’s going to be lawsuits over that as well—just not quite as big as the one filed by Hamm. A lot of landowners did not get their lease money, and they’ve banded together and hired an attorney to try to get it for them.

That news prompted Governor Dalrymple a couple weeks ago to tell sportsmen gathered at the Conference on the Future of Hunting that “in southwest North Dakota, (oil) development is not going to be what people thought.” That was part of his reassurance to hunters that the oil impact on hunting is not such a big problem. Well, translating Chesapeake’s bailing out into a clear sign that oil activity in the part of the state in which Chesapeake was working is a real stretch. It’s likely more about Chesapeake and its problems than it is about the future of the oil industry there. And it may also be why they have decided not to lease the school sections in the roadless areas.

But I have strayed a long way from where I started this story. The real issue here is the State Land Board’s practices, and, by extension, the activities of state government vis a vis looking out for our land and its critters as the oil industry marches across the landscape. In his speech a couple weeks ago, Governor Dalrymple said “Through the Industrial Commission, we’re going to have a more formal process (for analyzing the impact of oil development on wildlife and habitat) on private land. We will now formalize that process and every single parcel that’s permitted will have a process to determine impact on that terrain.”

Everyone listening to the Governor took that to mean that when the Industrial Commission’s Oil and Gas Division is issuing drilling permits on private land in North Dakota, they will first check with Game and Fish and see if a newly-drilled oil well would affect wildlife. Wow. That’d be something. Except it’s not what it sounds like. What it turned out to be, at least so far, is that on private land under which the state owns the minerals (land that used to be owned by the state but was sold to a private landowner, with the state retaining the minerals), there’s going to be a bit of a process to see if wildlife is affected. That’s a tiny, tiny fragment of the drilling permits to be issued.

And besides, wildlife experts tell me that the process, outlined in an agreement and formally signed by the Governor, Lance Gaebe and Terry Steinwand, the Game and Fish Commissioner, has holes in it big enough to drive a truck through. At any rate, it’s going to be very difficult for Game and Fish to look at—to physically get out and walk on—every parcel of state-owned land and decide whether or not there should be an oil well there. And so, the blanket statement that there “might be problems here” will just get attached to leases, and then some oil company, who paid good money to the state for a lease, will say “Are you kidding me? We’ll see you in court.”

So, what now? What should the state be doing in the face of this mad march across our landscape? I read a month or so ago the report the Governor issued about the tour his agency heads took across the Bakken, and how we’re going to address that by appointing an Energy Impact Coordinator and spend some money helping with roads and schools and housing and law enforcement and social services (it does not address landcape, wildlife or environmental problems). You can read the report here. The problem with that report is that it addresses the effects of unmanaged oil development, not the cause of the problems. The cause is too much development, too fast. Pretty much everyone agrees with that.

So let me offer a modest proposal. Let me suggest that it is time for the State Land Board to quit leasing its minerals for a while. Let me suggest that we could slow down development just a little bit if we didn’t keep making more land available for drilling. I think a three-year moratorium on further leasing of state school lands is in order.

If you’ve read this far, you are getting the picture that what is happening here is just too much for anyone to keep track of. It took me a week to write this story, and I wanted you to read this whole story in one big gulp to get some idea of what is happening in our state, and how fast those things are happening, and how interconnected everything is. I just went back and re-read it and I am shaking my head in near disbelief.

A moratorium on leasing of state school lands doesn’t immediately stop any of the problems we face. But it is a sign of good faith on the part of our government that we recognize we have a problem and we need to try to get a handle on it. There are some natural ecological benefits to doing it—school lands in oil country are pasture lands, mostly native prairie, and so the effect would be to preserve some native prairie, which is wildlife habitat. A moratorium will give the Game and Fish Department time to go out and physically inventory the school lands and determine which should be protected and which should be drilled in the future. My guess is that they would welcome that timeout. Their job is to take care of our wildlife, and state school lands are home to a lot of wildlife.

But it’s the bigger picture that is more important. It’s government expressing its concern, telling its citizens that we see a problem and we’re going to start taking some steps to address it.

We’re not going to lose any money over it. The oil isn’t going anywhere. It will still be there in three years, or whenever we decide to renew our lease program. Besides, we don’t need the money now anyway. We’re rich. The state’s bank vaults are overflowing with cash. Leaving the oil alone for a few years is just like more money in the bank. It’ll be there when we want to go get it.

And so, thanks to Mike McEnroe. He spotted a problem, he called attention to it, and he got results. For those of us who value those precious wilderness areas, he’s a hero. Thanks to Governor Dalrymple and the State Land Board and Lance Gaebe and Drew Combs and the North Dakota Game and Fish Department, especially Conservation Division Chief Greg Link, and yes, even to Blanca Peak LLC and Chesapeake Energy. So far, we’ve got a happy ending to this one small story. Now, let’s deal with the big story.

The Fargo Forum has this silly little series where they give out "prairie roses" to people who've done something good and "leafy spurge" to people who've done something bad.  Here's today's "leafy spurge" award:

To North Dakotans, mostly of the conservative stripe, who revel in cursing the federal government from one side of their mouth but ask for federal aid from the other. It’s common political gymnastics in the state among elected leaders and just plain folks. It’s especially evident when assessing major damages after floods, or when seeking money for flood protection projects, or when justifying preservation of military installations that might have outlived their national security purposes, or when farm bills are cobbled together. They hate the feds, but when a federal agency comes along with millions to build say, a hospital, their hands are out. They hate the feds, but when it comes time to build and rebuild roads in say, oil country, they squirrel away state money and happily grab federal dollars. A tortured double standard? A peculiar contradiction? Hypocrisy?

Fargo Forum

So what are readers supposed to think about whom these unnamed editors are talking about?  Well... apparently we're "mostly" talking about people of a "conservative stripe." And it's people who curse the federal government but ask for federal aid. (And that's a lot of non-conservatives, right?) And we're talking about not just "elected leaders," but "plain folks" too. It might be people talking about flooding or about the farm bill. It might be people talking, hypothetically, about using federal money to build a hospital. They might, hypothetically, be talking about federal money for roads.

Gosh. Who could we be talking about?!?

I'm really, sincerely trying to read between the lines here.

I have no idea who they're talking about. Do you?

The beautiful thing is we can guess all day, and the Forum has plausible deniability.  "Oh, we weren't talking about THAT guy! How dare you accuse us of that."  "We were talking about some OTHER guy!"  

If they're talking about socialist banking president John Hoeven -- who was for the stimulus (e.g. like the Jamestown Hospital project [pictured above]) before he was against it -- then they should grab a spine and come right out and say so. Sure, he's a dangerous, violent criminal and all, with a bunch of thugs on retainer, but newspapers should be couragious and write about dangerous, violent criminals and their thugs, too.

Or maybe they're talking about Rick Berg, who recently "urged Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, during a visit to Fort Berthold, to help secure federal funds for rebuilding and maintaining roads impacted by the oil development on the reservation"?   (Minot Daily News)  Yeah, Berg might come after the Forum's editors with a pickaxe, as he's known to do, but they need to be a couragious bunch at the Forum.

Or maybe they're just talking about a bunch of scary old guys sitting around the table in the cafe in Hettinger every morning, or the Donut Hole in Bismarck, or the Atomic Cafe in Fargo.  Those guys are really scary.

Because surely the Forum would never say an unkind word about elected Republican officials in North Dakota, if that's who they're talking about. So it must be the scary guys at the cafes.  

Right?

We'll just have to guess.

Or not.

And Romney is completely out of touch with reality.

I don't mind when people reach different conclusions based on the same set(s) of facts.  Where I give up on people is when they abandon the facts, make up new ones and establish opinions based upon their new, made-up "facts."  I get that some people just don't like Barack Obama; I just wish they could point to facts to back up their opinions.  Without facts, their opinions look... questionable.

You know what I mean.

North Dakota's right wing media establishment is getting caught up in the Republican Party in-fighting in North Dakota. Roger Bailey, the Executive Director of the North Dakota Newspaper Association recently circulated a note to association members.  Here's what he wrote:

NDNA Publishers/Advertising Managers:   

NDNA has received an e-mail from Mariah Madsen at Flint Communications, representing Brian Kalk, requesting information on how much advertising Kalk’s primary election opponent Kevin Cramer has placed.

NDNA reminds you that newspapers are not under the federal laws and FCC rules that govern broadcast which require radio and television stations to provide such information to the public. Newspapers are not required to provide this information although you may provide it if you desire.

Legal Counsel Jack McDonald generally advises newspapers that information such as rates and buys are their proprietary information and as such should not be shared.

___________________________________

Roger Bailey

Apparently, Brian Kalk wants to find out what kind of advertising buy Harold Hamm and his good ol' boys from Oklahoma have Kevin Cramer has made at some of the state's newspapers?  

Here's a tip, Mr. Kalk:  Harold Hamm and his billionaire friends Kevin Cramer's owners have more money than your owners have.  Spend as much as you can, and not a penny less.  The oil company executives who have bought and paid for Kevin Cramer have more money than the oil executives that have bought and paid for you.  

Just do the best you can.