...Says Bosworth Spokesman Peddled Porn
When Annette Bosworth was a useful story to distract from Mike Rounds and to attack me personally, Pat Powers cheered the fake U.S. Senate candidate, heeling to her beck and call and peddling her propaganda as gospel. When my team discovered irregularities in Bosworth's nominating petition that signaled violations of law that should have disqualified her from the primary ballot, Powers yawned at those findings.
But now, when Team Bosworth responds to felony charges for petition violations with a media campaign attacking Pat's Republican patrons, including a late-to-the-party exposé of corruption in the foster care system titled "South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley's Big Pedophilia Problem," Powers finally gets off his ideological backside and asks real questions.
Two months after the initial petition challenge that led to the charges on which Bosworth was arraigned Monday, Powers decides to look at the petitions (or perhaps is encouraged to look at the petitions by his maligned GOP pals?) and finds, lo and behold, even more signatures that Bosworth said she witnessed but apparently did not. Only Pat Powers is surprised... but notice also that, at this point, Powers does not substantiate his claim by pointing to specific names or on-the-record testimony.
Powers also raises a question about the validity of signatures on a group of petition sheets dated March 20–22. Powers finds it suspicious that Bosworth claims to have collected signatures from a bunch of folks from Minnehaha and Lincoln counties on the same days that other sheets show her collecting numerous signatures from folks from Pennington and other Black Hills counties. My petition review team raised the same questions about petition sheets like #31, #42, #190, and #196. We considered including those suspicions on our petition challenge but, wanting to keep the petition challenge on solid legal and evidentiary grounds, chose not to. We saw at least reasonable doubt in the fact that State AA basketball was taking place in Rapid City March 20–22. (I attempted to explain this to Pat and his readers in his comment section, but he still can't bear to publish evidence that suggests I was right all along about Bosworth while he front ed for her.)
It is conceivable—not certain, but conceivable—that Bosworth, who was in Rapid City buying folks beer that weekend, went to the tournament, sat with a bunch of Sioux Falls fans, collected a few sheets of signatures, then went around town and collected a bunch of locals' signatures. But now, with more time to investigate than the ridiculously brief one week given for petition challenges, investigators may well find that some of those East River–West River signatures were indeed not witnessed by Bosworth, which would only add to the felony charges she already faces.
Powers also goes for another seamy underbelly of the Bosworth story. Enjoying character assassination, Powers takes up numerous online allegations that Bosworth's new BFF Lee Stranahan peddled porn with his wife. Powers finds Stranahan's behavior more scandalous than the child abuse allegations plaguing the state's foster care system. Stranahan hasn't shot any nude photos of Bosworth yet, but his naked opportunism threatens to harm real efforts to unearth corruption in South Dakota government. Stranahan brings up the Schwab-Taliaferro-Mette foster care issues in Aberdeen, not because he really cares about them, but because that story adds to the media smokescreen he is fanning for his client. IN doing so, Stranahan makes it easy for GOP apologists like Powers to portray such stories not as real issues about which South Dakotans should be concerned but as the mere ravings of untrustworthy outsiders.
We may take some small comfort in the fact that Powers is finally exposing Team Bosworth for the frauds and exploiters that they are. (Of course, he's inkled that way before, only to back off when it served his pruposes.) Alas, Powers is doing so quite late, and not for truth and justice, but merely as favors for his friends.
