IB editorial
Hey Don,
Great stuff on IB –love the political cartoon. I'm making all of my readers aware: http://truthaboutib.com/breakingnewsopinions.html.
In liberty,
Lisa admin of www.truthaboutib.com
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Reposting your IB story all over my Facebook page …lol
Challenging (really daring, after years of asking nicely) the Garland County Tea Party, The Watchmen of Garland County (including my own pastor-one of 200), The Garland Good Gov’t Group, and the Hot Springs Women of Prayer. Also, several board members on my friends list, so I'm hoping to just piss everyone off enough to look at it. Thanks for the article.
Karen White | Hot Springs, Arkansas
P.S. Our IB program starts in KINDERGARTEN, the only one in the state that does.
For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD,
"Plans to prosper you and not to harm you,
Plans to give you hope and a future".
Jeremiah 29:11
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Pearce article
Dear Mr. Sorchych,
I read your article in Sonoran News about the Pearce recall. You managed to hit all the points I have been waiting for someone to bring to the forefront. It is very interesting to me that so many people in this state seem to want to be oblivious to the writing on the wall. Scare tactics are precisely what the opposition uses to get around a fact. If they don't like it, they lie. If they don't like the outcome, take it to court.
Please continue to publish and print what you see as the truth. Be the counter to the unrepentant liberals who believe that they, and only they, have the answer because everyone else isn't as smart as they are. People recognize the truth when it's presented.
Thanks for your time,
Mr. Ciro Vuoso | Anthem
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Where is the “powerful” Ways and Means Committee?
Where is the “powerful” Ways and Means Committee? Is it not their duty to determine where the money will come from to fund a proposed law? Either the members of this committee are incompetent beyond belief or the congressional leadership simply ignores them. Had they been doing their job the government would not have overrun the legal limit on the national debt. Someone needs to be fired … and soon!
Jack C. McVickers | Scottsdale
"The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced. The arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled. Payments to foreign governments must be reduced if the nation doesn't want to go bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance."
Marcus Tullius Cicero, 55 B.C.
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Jesus, top of Facebook hits
Surprisingly, Jesus Daily and The Bible are the two Facebook pages most visited in our global world. Websites aiming at the promotion of prayer or teaching the content of the word of God get an average of 1.809.810 and 1.018.280 interactions and are at the top of the list against 591.682 hits for Lady Gaga or 608.900 for Justin Bieber, this in spite of their massive and free promotion. Two other Christian websites: Jesus Christ and I’m proud to be a Christian are among the 20 most visited. Strange, isn’t it? Today, when post-modernity would claim that God is dead it would seem that He reappears with intensity in that Network available to people of every class and culture, setting Himself up as a real idol against all those other idols who appear but do not last. Jesus shows the true reality of the essence of man and that is why He is always contemporary, at all times. And we still wonder that there is a need to get to know Him and to love Him, because only his Truth frees and affords happiness to those traveling spirits who roam from one content to another until they find the God who chose to call Himself the Son of Man and who is today the essential idol, at least in the virtual, Anglo-saxon version of Facebook.
Eva N Ferraz | Barcelona, Spain
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City Manager Evaluations
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It's very sad that the decline of the city we knew as Scottsdale has been creeping slowly away from it's deep roots. The decline started with the Manross Administration when we stealthfully moved away from the Scottsdale I moved here to enjoy and the one Mayor Herb Drinkwater built. Then came David Richert to town. Under Richert, the city has been going down hill like a snowball headed for hell (or a mirror image of Phoenix) with the help of the city councils, developer onies, and the Scottsdale Area Chamber of Commerce!!
I could easily write a full two- page single spaced list of all the laws, rules, ordinances and other sneaky manipulations that have caused changes or were illegally abridged under Richert with the help and approval of the unknowing council and very weak, wishy-washy legal department who never listens to the public input OR outside legal council representing the citizens!! All of these actions have effectively circumvented the current voter approved laws, rules, and ordinances.
Bottom Line: Richert needs to be immediately fired and a new city manager from an OPEN CALL for qualified applicants needs to be posted immediately.
If this doesn't happen ASAP, I promise the Scottsdale Activist will come alive and all 83,000 recipients will be fully informed of the obvious legal and other failures of the council, the legal department, and David Richert and ALL of his appointees (ask Mary Manross about the effectiveness of the Scottsdale Activist)!!
November 2012 will be a great time to remove any council member who continues to work against the wishes and suggestions of the taxpayers and citizens of Scottsdale.
Respectfully,
George Knowlton | Scottsdale
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AZ Sheriff: "wasn’t rabbits or rattle snakes that started this fire"
The Monument Fire blazing across southern Arizona, like the Horseshoe fire of last year, was “man-caused” and started in an area known for "high-intensity, drug- and human-smuggling,” Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever, who is also a co-chair of BorderSheriffs.com, told reporters this week at a news conference.
"It wasn't the rabbits or the rattle snakes that started this fire, it was human beings, and the only human beings believed to be occupying (the area) were smugglers…there’s nothing to suggest it was anything else.” Sen. John McCain backed up his comments earlier this week.
Serving as Sheriff since 1996, Larry Dever patrols a county of 6,200 square miles which shares more than 83 miles of border with Mexico.
Jameson Cunningham | Shirley and Banister Public Affairs
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Offices of diversity are one thing the UNC system can do without.
While I was a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, I occasionally heard about the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs. Sometimes the office was mentioned in the Daily Tar Heel or on message boards, but I never really understood what the office did.
Recently I’ve had the chance to look into it and find out what it does. I’ve concluded that its services—and the services of similar offices throughout the UNC system—are unnecessary.
No budget for the UNC system has yet been finalized for the 2011-2012 school year, but cuts on the order of $130 million to $260 million are expected. The various offices of diversity/multicultural affairs/inclusion/etc. cost millions of dollars to run every year and cutting them would be a substantial step in filling the budget hole.
These offices, such as UNC-Chapel Hill’s Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs, NC State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and UNC-Wilmington’s Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, perform a role analogous to that of, well, a high priest. For the most part, they don’t actually enforce diversity policies in admissions or hiring (i.e., affirmative action), but instead they sermonize on the goodness and importance of diversity (and, by extension, affirmative action policies) and they bestow their blessings on efforts aimed at enhancing diversity.
For example, in its most recent annual diversity plan report, UNC-CH’s Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs lauded those who publicly paid homage to diversity. Recipients of praise included the department of athletics (“held open discussions and elicited feedback on issues related to diversity”), the university registrar (“continued to promote open discussion on diversity topics”), and the school of medicine (“conducted discovery and action dialogue with students, faculty, and staff”).
These offices also sponsor events during which the public can gather to give thanks for diversity or repent of any perceived lack of diversity. An example was the recent February 9th speech by Dudley Edmonson at NC State, “Understanding the Disconnect between African Americans and the Outdoors.” Edmonson, a nature photographer and author of Black and Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places, apparently believes that the conservationist movement isn’t diverse enough. According to promotional material for his visit, he was going to share “his perspective on the causes of the great divide between African Americans, conservation stewardship and outdoor recreational activities.”
All of this we can do without.
As part of their devotion to diversity, these offices sponsor classes and seminars on the desirability and importance of diversity. One such class was Diversity 101, which former Pope Center intern John Eick attended and wrote about last year.
Diversity 101 was a seminar that represented the first step to a certificate as a Diversity Advocate. Eick described the class as “a full two hours listening to Dr. [Melva ‘Cookie’] Newsom lead a discussion exclusively about promoting racial and gender diversity and nothing about fostering or encouraging intellectual diversity on campus.”
Many of the offices also write reports, either annually or once every few years, that monitor current diversity and advocate for more. See, for instance, the following excerpt from the introduction to UNC-CH’s 2005 Report of the Chancellor’s Task Force on Diversity.
[Diversity] matters, too, because the world is a diverse place, and we must all learn to live and work in it. Trade, travel, and the threat of international terrorism show what puny things borders can be. Carolina's students will become leaders in this complex world. Here on campus, we must help them prepare by presenting that world in all its rich diversity of cultures, ideas, and perspectives. We must show them the way, through their studies and through our actions. Like other institutions of higher learning, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill holds huge responsibility for preparing students and for establishing an example that demonstrates the world as it can be at its best.
The same report’s executive summary lists eight recommendations for achieving a more “diverse and inclusive” community, the first of which is that the university “clearly define and publicize its commitment to diversity.”
Four pages later, however, the report’s authors explicitly refuse to give a clear definition of diversity: “For its own work, the Task Force elected not to apply a narrow definition of the term, one that could become limiting or outdated, but to adopt a framework for understanding the concept of diversity relative to the work of the university.” The irony of refusing to give a clear definition of diversity after making a clear definition of “commitment to diversity” priority number one is apparently lost on the authors.
In addition to advocating for more diversity, clear definition or not, the offices of diversity track statistics on the state of diversity in the colleges.
Despite some lofty rhetoric about diversity including “differing social backgrounds, economic circumstances, personal characteristics, philosophical outlooks, life experiences, perspectives, beliefs, expectations, and aspirations,” it’s clear from recent reports that the only differences these offices care about and track are the standard racial and gender categories. In the reports, such as NC State’s latest one here, there are no categories for liberals, conservatives, rich, poor, Christian, Jew, etc. Predictably, there are just male, female, white, Hispanic, African American, Asian American, Native American, and “other.”
Moreover, the monitoring done by these offices of diversity/inclusion/multicultural affairs/etc. is already being done elsewhere, several times over.
Consider: UNC-CH’s Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs is at least the fourth group keeping tabs on racial and gender representation at the university. It follows the admissions office, the human resources department, and UNC-CH’s Office of Institutional Research. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is also responsible for making sure certain groups are sufficiently represented, though it generally acts only in response to specific complaints.
Another function of the various offices of diversity/inclusion/etc. is to help pick up the pieces of race relations smashed by affirmative action policies. Cookie Newsom, UNC-CH’s director of diversity education and research, told John Eick that the number one complaint brought to her office is the fear expressed by black students that others will think that they were admitted to UNC because of their skin color rather than their abilities. When I asked her about this, Newsom backed off a bit, saying that such sentiments are a “persistent problem” and represent “certainly one of the more troubling issues” she deals with.
Viewing such fears as stemming from a lack of appreciation for diversity, Newsom, along with the Diversity Education Team that she chairs, seeks to produce a more “inclusive climate” through diversity education. “We have lots of programs and workshops and presentations,” she said, “designed to help campus community members understand diversity of all kinds better.”
The UNC students I knew were quite aware that people are different in a number of ways. These programs and workshops seem to belabor the obvious.
Finally, as the chart below reveals, all of these services provided by diversity offices—lectures on diversity’s importance, numerous reports tracking diversity, and the comforting of affirmative action’s victims—are costly. To produce the table, I added up all the salaries of the diversity office employees for whom salaries were available in the Raleigh News & Observer database.
Judging by NC State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion (for which I was able to obtain more extensive budget data than salaries alone), the total tabulated above probably represents only a fraction of the total money spent on diversity offices. At NC State, salaries added up to $586,063 whereas the total amount allocated to the office was $1,644,283, or almost three times as much. It also costs at least a little in terms of lost productivity for the rest of the university to pay lip service to diversity.
The system wouldn’t necessarily have to lay off all of these people. They could potentially fulfill other, more productive roles at the university. Dr. Jose Hernandez of UNC-W’s office of institutional diversity and inclusion, for instance, told me that the three directors of his office teach one course per semester; perhaps they could teach more. In any case, they certainly should not continue doing what they’re doing now.
UNC schools need to cut about $200 million in spending. The several million we could save by cutting the diversity offices would be a good place to start.
Duke Cheston | The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy
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Another ObamaCare Mess: Medicaid Dumping
Among its many problems, ObamaCare expands Medicaid, the beneficiaries of which are almost twice as likely to die in the hospital than those with private insurance, according to recent studies.
In an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal, American Enterprise Institute scholar Dr. Scott Gottlieb – a practicing physician – recently highlighted some of the problems with Medicaid and how ObamaCare expands the program by dumping more Americans into it.
According to Gottlieb, “Half of those gaining health insurance under ObamaCare will get it through Medicaid; by 2016, one in four Americans will be covered by the program.”
ObamaCare accomplishes this primarily by raising the income thresholds at which individuals are considered eligible for the program, ensuring more Americans will be designated ‘poor.’ It is estimated that this change will push an extra 25 million people into the program.
This creates numerous problems, especially since Medicaid is ineffective in its current form, and rife with problems. Simply ‘dumping in’ millions more Americans is hardly a solution to our nation’s health care problems. In fact, as Gottlieb demonstrated in his op-ed, the policy is likely to do far more harm than good.
For instance, Gottlieb examined a 2010 study published in the medical journal Cancer, which concludes Medicaid beneficiaries with head and neck cancer were “50 percent more likely to die when compared with privately insured patients – even after adjusting for factors that influence cancer outcomes.” He also highlighted a 2010 study published in the Annals of Surgery, which shows that “being on Medicaid was associated with the longest length of stay, the most total hospital costs, and the highest risk of death. Medicaid patients were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as those with private insurance.”
Another report cited by Gottlieb, a 2011 study published in theAmerican Journal of Cardiology, “found that people with Medicaid who underwent coronary angioplasty (a procedure to open clogged heart arteries) were 59 [percent] more likely to have ‘major adverse cardiac events,’ such as strokes and heart attacks, compared with privately insured patients.” And finally, he pointed to a 2011 study published in the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation, which concluded “Medicaid patients [undergoing lung transplants for pulmonary diseases] were 8.1 [percent] less likely to survive 10 years after the surgery than their privately insured and uninsured counterparts.” In other words, in some cases, having Medicaid is worse than having no insurance!
These are serious problems, and point to major flaws in Medicaid. Yet, rather than proposing common-sense solutions to fix this fundamentally broken program for the neediest Americans, President Obama’s new health care law simply dumps millions more Americans into it.
So why move forward with this expansion of Medicaid? Gottlieb proposed an insightful theory: “[T]he liberal solution to these woes has been to expand Medicaid. Advocacy groups like Families USA imagine that once Medicaid becomes a middle-class entitlement, political pressure from middle-class workers will force politicians to address these problems by funneling more taxpayer dollars into this flawed program.” This makes sense: after all, ObamaCare is full of provisions that are disastrous policy but politically advantageous to the Administration’s friends and allies.
Dr. Gottlieb offered an interesting solution, one that I believe could free up more resources by tailoring the program to help the sickest and poorest Americans in need: “We need an alternative model. One option is to run Medicaid like a health program – rather than an exercise in political morals – and let states tailor benefits to the individual needs of patients, even if that means abandoning the unworkable myth of ‘comprehensive’ coverage.”
Medicaid was not created to provide comprehensive coverage to the middle class. It was intended as a safety net for the most vulnerable Americans. We should re-focus our efforts on providing them quality health care rather than dumping more people into a flawed program.
U.S. Senator Jon Kyl
www.kyle.senate.gov
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Oh my – Promiscuous, corrupt politicians? What a surprise!
THERE are at least 2 things that trouble me concerning the growing number of politicians who get caught cheating on their marriages and their jobs; one is that they actually get to have any choice in the matter of whether or not to resign and the other is in most if not all cases, they are having these affairs on our dime.
When your average spouse in the “real world” gets caught cheating, having an affair or even just planning one it usually leads to divorce-end of conversation. The offending spouse does not get to refuse the divorce so why does a public employee like Weiner have any say so whatsoever in whether or not to lose his office?
The other really offensive piece to me is that most, if not all of the covert promiscuity of our officials involve the use of our tax dollars. ”Honey, I’m going to be working late at the office tonight so don’t wait up for me.” Thank you Mr. Clinton.
Most of us who get caught screwing around on the job get fired or at the least get docked pay and given a last warning. Most of us who get caught using other peoples money for our own selfish purposes are accused of stealing and are arrested and sent to trial and then prison. So how come when Senator Mark Sanford of S. Carolina got busted not only for cheating (on the job) but for using public monies to fund his flights to S. America, his hotel rooms, and other seduction expenses he was not arrested?
Why are politicians seemingly exempt from breaking the laws and rules that the rest of us ordinary folk would go to jail for? Why do they have any voice at all in whether or not to resign from their job?
It’s real simple to my way of thinking. I am Weiner’s boss. I pay his salary. Mr. Weiner, you screwed up. You are now fired!
What’s that? Oh, you were texting and sex chatting on company time? In that case you are fired and fined x amount of dollars paid to you for doing a job that you weren’t doing. Don’t do the crime if you can’t pay your dime and do the time.
Enough is enough, is it not people? Why do we put up with this type of behavior? Is it because half of us are guilty of the same behaviors and their is a part of us that justifies and acquits us of any wrong doing? Hmmmm?
Tune in next week for more on the way you and I support political corruption in this Proud Land of Liberty and Justice for All....
Harvey Rabichow | Anthem
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