Caterpillar employees in the Black Hills will surely take their kids to see Wall Drug Store. When we visited last year, I found the cinder and tax street of the mid-1950's was now asphault. Funny what one remembers of junior high years. We ate across the street and heard some of the stories about the store after the second generation took over.

When a engineering design center gets opened in South Dakota and not expanded in Illinois, this tells you how unfriendly the Democrats and their union bosses have made Illinois for a company with worldwide headquarters here.

And they shouldn't miss the Mammoth archeological dig at the south edge of the Black Hills in Hot Springs.

Of course if you didn’t see this covered by Dem-biased reporters and editors in Illinois, then you weren’t alone.

Across the road from the Mammoth Site is Wooly's Mammoth Family Fun. Great place to eat, especially in off-times. We a former train engineer who was home schooling her kids on heer husband's family ranch. We learned about the fears that ranchers have about ID chipping each steer will lead to carbon taxes.

You can find the whole press release here.

While we talked for over an hour with the rancher's wife, my son shot gophers ("inferior meerkats") in a virtual shooting range, which was FREE!. He was second highest scorer. The rancher's wife approached us when she saw Steve having fun on the shooting range. She asked if we were the family who had paid her husband to shoot gophers on their land.

Explaining how some commercial office space could be rented by now and hiring underway is the excerpt below. If CAT wanted to build their own facility, there would be construction jobs in place of an office space rental.

“The Black Hills Engineering Design Center will initially occupy 3,100 square feet of office space within the Black Hills Business Development Center in Rapid City and, when staffed at full capacity, will employ up to 100 people. Construction is expected to be complete by the end of the third quarter of 2010; hiring is planned to begin at that time and ramp up over a five-year period.”

Governor Pat Quinn and “Boss” Mike Madigan couldn’t care about these kind of jobs. They are lawyers and willing accomplices to the union bosses who run Dem politics in Illinois.

Surely the new South Dakota CAT employees will take their kids to see the buffalo in Custer State Park. This cow was leading her calves across Route 89, just a short drive from Rapid City. Buffalo burgers are common and I find them better tasting than hamburgers.

It’s their failure and one Dems’ Melissa Bean and Bill Foster can share for not putting in the effort to attract these thinking-type jobs to this area. All are so much more interested in keeping their own jobs than getting jobs for their constituents.

The cavern with the most publicity is Jewel Cave. It's a real workout. It claims to be the second longest cave in the world--150 miles of passages. The public one has 723 stair steps.

Local Dem Jack Franks couldn’t care about putting in the effort to land these jobs for Woodstock, where a Super Walmart now occupies the site of the former Morton research center.  (Think about the difference is salary levels.)

There are 723 stairs in Jewel Cave. Fortunately, more of them are down than up. At 49 degrees, the cave rangers suggest wearing a jacket. I took their advice and wish I had not. I carried it most of the way.

You also may read about 600 new jobs at a new CAT plant in North Little Rock, AR.

That’s in addition to the new 500-person plant in Victoria, Texas.

Having union acolytes running the State’s Executive and Legislature branches, plus the U.S. Congress, is costing plenty of new jobs by companies already here in Illinois.

Have a happy Labor Day Weekend.