It is my opinion that years of radicalism in the teaching profession have distorted the actual value of the service. This leaves us with the difficult position of discovering what the market value is of a teacher, and that is what these levy defeats all over Cincinnati are all about. We are establishing what we as a community are willing to pay for a teacher.
That teacher radicalism can be seen easily in this recent Letter to the Editor published in The Pulse Journal pointing at me for having a lack of respect for teachers.
It is irresponsible to ask a community that is suffering from record foreclosures, where business owners have to lower their lease rates to keep their business tenets, because the taxes are so unattractive, then you compare that reality to the world of Julie Shaffer and her Pro Levy teachers and one can only wonder how the teachers don’t see it.
One of the No Lakota Members in our group then said, “Those Pro Levy People have 30K in money they raised from last time that has been sitting in a bank since last fall, and it’s burning a hole in their pockets, and we think that’s why you guys are going through with this levy.”
Mantia shrugged her shoulders. “I just got here, gentlemen. I’m trying.”
Naturally I get a lot of email that is derogatory in nature. Taking the positions I have on issues tends to draw attention from the empire builders who drape themselves particularly from the mantles of public service. A good many of those emails I can’t share, because they are too mindless, derogatory, or simply vile. But one email I received and the banter between this guy and myself I would consider to be an interesting study of psychology.
Mike Stefanov has sent you a message On Tue, Sep 27, 2011:
You have some good messages but you really devalue them with statements such as this; “When they want to be paid well, they all stick together. But when one messes up and does something stupid, like the pedophile at Lakota, then the teachers act like he acted alone and they should not be judged because of him. So which is it? All for one and one for all………..or, judged by independent merit?)”
Your insinuation that the pedophile may not have acted alone is deplorable. You should be ashamed to equate other teachers with the trash of a pedophile. Your message is getting lost by some of your attacks on teachers. I think that you would have many more sympathizers to your cause if you did not spew the vile hared that you so often do. Putting all teachers in the same basket with the other pedophiles is classless. It would be like someone putting all Catholic priests together because there have been a few that have abused kids. Pedophiles can be found in every walk of life and in every occupation. Keep spewing your hatred and your message will soon be falling on deaf ears.
On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 12:29 PM, Rich Hoffman wrote:
Don’t count on it but thanks for the comment. In the case of that particular teacher, people knew what he was up to, and didn’t say anything. That doesn’t make them as bad as the pedophile, but they aren’t innocent either. The statement was a general statement on collectivism, but your interpretation is fascinating.
Keep in touch,
Rich
Mike Stefanov wrote:
Rich,
Thank you for the reply back. Just FYI; it was the Lakota SD that brought this particular pedophile to the attention of the authorities. If it were not for some at Lakota that alerted the authorities, this sick teacher may still be amongst the students.
As I alluded to in the other email, some of your messages are good but do not cause them to be viewed as untruthful by distorting the facts that you are presenting. Smart people will see through your distortion of facts. I view myself as a Libertarian but the bending of facts can be construed in the wrong way. Your enthusiasm can be commended but it must be tempered with truthfulness. I do not appreciate your attacks on teachers that actually are honest and hard working. I see through your distorted message. Keep bending the truth and spewing hatred and the message will be lost. History will back me up on this. Ronald Reagan must be turning in his grave when he sees what the GOP has become.
Mike Stefanov
On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 5:37 PM, Rich Hoffman wrote:
Good points, Mike. I’ll keep those views in mind and in perspective.
Thanks,
Rich
(Now here comes the going south portion)
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 7:57 AM, Mike Stefanov wrote:
You do that, Rich. Keep those views in mind. I am one that may have given you support but will not because of the manner in which you degrade teachers. I have been fortunate to have had good teachers. Teachers have made a positive influence on my life and they have had a positive role in the life of my children as well. There are some bad teachers but there are many more that are good. Bad and incompetent workers can be found in every occupation. Education is not alone in this.
I have been blessed that I have had a good life and have been able to afford just about whatever I want to. I have an income that is in the 99th percentile. I have a nice home. A lot of this success can be traced back to having quality teachers. From what I can glean about you it appears that you are most likely unemployed and have had bad experiences in school. If you are employed you occupation is most likely menial and you more than likely have a middling income. This misfortune has caused you to become bitter. If you think that the Lakota SD is so poor and you don’t like it, just move to an area that would be more to your liking and more affordable for you. In the meantime, don’t continue your attempts to lessen the quality of the schools. Additionally, you are having a negative impact on the value of my home and that is not welcomed by me. The amount of additional taxes that I will pay is nothing compared to the amount that my home will depreciate by because nobody wants to move to either Liberty Twp or West Chester due to a school system that is subpar.
Believe it or not, I like minimal government. I am a Libertarian. I don’t like any more than you do. However there are no free lunches and paying for a quality school system is money that is well spent.
Mike
Rich Hoffman Replied:
You were doing so well, Mike, then you had to come back with that. I am certainly not unemployed, or underfunded. That’s cute that you’d make that assumption. As for school, I don’t think it does enough and gets in the way of the ambitious. I wouldn’t say I had bad experiences or good ones in school. I think it wastes the time of children to create jobs for the adults. I find it hard to believe that you are in the top 1% with your beliefs.
Bitter, me? I’m not bitter about much of anything. Don’t confuse lack of respect for bitterness.
Herman Cain is my pick of the Republicans so far running for the 2012 election and I think he’s black. I didn’t consider his skin color until Morgan Freeman made me think of it. As I watched the Freeman interview I said to the TV, “Hey, wait. That’s not true, Herman Cain is black. The Tea Party is trying to replace a black progressive with a black conservative. It has nothing to do with the word, ‘blackness.’” It’s more like replacing someone who can’t do the job with someone who can. I like Cain because he has more experience than our current president and he seems to understand the concept of limited government. Virtually everyone agrees that our tax system need reforming, including President Obama, and Cain has a plan. It’s called the ‘9-9-9’ tax plan. Check it out!
Saturday Night Live did a skit involving Herman Cain as an “unelectable” candidate. They also made fun of the fact that Cain was the CEO of Godfather Pizza, as if that “small” amount of experience did not qualify Cain for the Presidency. As I watched and considered the two weekend comments together I could not help but conclude that the “Progressive Machine” was functioning with full steam applied. Many in the media are afraid of Cain, because he is a black man, and he’s articulate, quite intelligent and he has a plan to straighten out an actual chaotic situation of government with solutions. That makes Progressives nervous because they need chaos to survive.
I was happy to see that Herman Cain won the Florida Straw Pole. The reason for these debates is to show who the strong candidates truly are over time, and Cain is emerging as one of the stronger candidates even though the orthodox media and political machines wish those candidates to be Mitt Romney or Rick Perry. You see, the static patterns of society know what to do with people like Perry and Romney, and the media has already decided they will not allow Ron Paul a seat at the table even though Paul is a fantastic candidate. But Herman Cain is fresh, and Presidential. And he’s a black man. The only knock against Cain (according to the media) is that he’s a conservative.
Not so, in fact it is this type of radical view of the world, and the public union’s hostile approach toward management that created a system that clearly is one-sided. As far as Republicans giving tax breaks to their “corporate friends,” well, they are doing that in an attempt to bring business to the state, because believe it or not, businesses that actually provide jobs don’t like to pay taxes to a system that wastes their money, and then keeps trying to hose them for more money. Business tends to go to states with low tax rates. That’s why Ohio has to manage its costs better. It’s not just the politicians in Columbus who want Issue 2. I want Issue 2 because it will give me more control of these costs locally, especially at my local School Board at Lakota. I’m tired of levy, after levy, after levy, and this whole idea that we aren’t supposed to manage those costs is ridiculous. Because it’s education, we are supposed to turn off logic and toss money into a bottomless pit. YES, THEY REALLY THINK THIS WAY!!!!
As usual, Glenn Beck does a good job of connecting all the dots. Issue 2 is but one small attempt by the public to fix a lot of nonsense and inequity that has been going on in public service. And the first thing that the “less thoughtful” do when they can’t win an argument based on facts instead of emotion, is they resort to violence or racism, and this has given rise to the declaration of class warfare.
What I found fascinating was the comments accumulated over the first 24 hours. American Thinker is widely read all over the nation, and apparently all over the world so it was interesting to get some outside perspective on how they view Issue 2, so I am posting the comments obtained over the course of the first day, because they say a lot about how a vast majority of the people truly feel. I include those comments in their entirety below. They appear as they do at the link above, but I feel they deserve their own isolation as a study specifically unique to the topic of Issue 2.
That leaves those of us with reason to vote in November to keep a law that will allow us to manage the costs of this massive Empire. Of course the members of that Empire won’t be happy. They would like that Empire to continue forever. But it can’t.
The only question is when the Empire gets dismantled, do we get the opportunity to manage it or does it collapse under its own weight? If Ohio votes to keep Issue 2, then we can avert a major economic disaster this year, while there is still time to save the structure of the services we employee in those sectors. If we do not maintain Issue 2, and lose it to the Public Union Empire, then financial catastrophe is on the horizon for every single tax payer in Ohio, because it will either require massive layoffs of public sector jobs, or major tax increases. There isn’t any middle ground.
So what will it be? I can say for myself, I will vote YES, and regardless of the outcome, I will know that I did the right thing, even if it is hard to do.
What? The President said he’d veto any proposal that did not include tax increases……oh, I mean “revenue.” I thought this President was all about “compromise.”(Auh Oh, I better be careful. Someone might send this article to Attack Watch.)
People like Barry Obama, and many in his party and some from the Republican Party are not acting in our best interest. For many years there has been a plan to turn The United States Republic into something else.
That small example could be greatly expanded to include Medicare, Social Security, The EPA, the entire Department of Education, and Homeland Security. In fact I could probably put down a whole book just on the wasteful programs built by liberalism, as a subtle march toward socialism, that simply cost too much money and don’t deserve my hard-earned money.
The President mentioned again that people “like him” should make a sacrifice, to dig deep into their pockets to pay their fair share of taxes. Well, no WE shouldn’t. First of all, Barry Obama became wealthy because of his public service. Without politics, Barry would still be organizing rallies in Chicago and smoking joints like a lot of his union brothers. He certainly wouldn’t be a millionaire, because he doesn’t make anything or manage anything that can produce a profit. Second, what is a “fair share?” Why is it fair to require me to fund programs I think are ridiculously foolish and are weakening our society, in my opinion? I have no intention of ever receiving a Social Security check, so why should I continue to pay? How is that fair, that some absentminded fool politician came up with some looting law for me to work extra hard to pay for, when if I kept the money, could have done something more productive? The tax to me is just legalized robbery. It’s going to groups I don’t believe in to fund philosophies I have no faith in, to support an agenda I find detrimental to the future of the country. So why do I have to pay again? How is it my obligation, because some incompetent manager like Barry decided I had to pay?
To provide testimony for everything you will read and see in this article I would like to present to you a simple game called, “The Answer is C,” presented by Doc Thompson of 700 WLW. Listen to this short little contest and study the questions and answers by the public.
When Van Jones talks about the success of Germany and China taking care of their people what he fails to mention is that China is not exactly a free country. They do not share the same values as the United States. You are not even allowed to have more than one child per family, let alone decide all other aspects of their life. And Germany is just now recovering from the fall of the Berlin Wall where the West was finally able to merge with the Soviet controlled East. Once capitalism was able to work in Germany their country began to produce again. In China it was when Hong Kong was transferred back to China from the Capitalist tendencies of England in the year 2000. Back then there was a lot of fear as to what would happen to Hong Kong under Chinese rule. Would China bring down Hong Kong into a communist province or would the communists attempt to accept Hong Kong and the great economy that was flourishing there? China decided to adapt, reluctantly, and their economy is flourishing.
But not everyone is falling for it. More and more young people are leaning in the direction of conservatism. I would say that in social representation, they are the 2 out of 5 who answered right. These people have the ability to see that there are serious errors to the social patterns that have formed around them and they are beginning to emerge, which was the topic of a recent discussion on GBTV.
This is the terrible condition people like Matt will always suffer from. Matt is a smart young man, but so are people who are progressives. I would venture to say that George Soros is smart, after all he’s a billionaire so he did something right. Van Jones is smart. Barack Obama is probably smart taken one on one. But all those people are suffering from a failed understanding built within their static patterns. Their failure comes from their education to begin with. So it’s not a matter of intelligence. I know a lot of smart people who are really, socially stupid. Some of them suffer from having traditional parents and a stable household, but try desperately to merge those values with the values they learned in public education and college and what happens is a mess of personal ideology which prevents them from seeing the obvious, because their static patterns are fundamentally broken.
Matt Clark however managed to come out of college recently much like the young people on GBTV, and they are fully aware of what is wrong and can see it clearly even if the rest of the world can’t. Even without a life of experience behind Matt, he can see the error of what Nancy Pelosi’s progressive philosophy is advocating, even though Nancy seems oblivious to her hypocrisy even as she says it.
The trouble here is that many police and firefighters seem to lean in a conservative direction politically, unlike teachers who overwhelmingly are liberal, yet all fall under the category of public service and are all guilty of the kind of explosive growth shown by Nick Gillespie from Reason Magazine.
The work rests on the 2 out of 5 to do all the work anyway. They must carry the whole burden of this failed philosophy called progressivism and replace it with what worked before progressives brought their nonsense to the whimsical Victorians of early New York City, to culturally launch the nation into a static pattern of degradation much to the pleasure of our enemies.
One of the great things about Glenn Beck is that he’s spent the money he’s made off his books, his subscriptions, and his shows and reinvested it back into the message he’s been committed to. You won’t find Glenn Beck running around with some stripper in a New York hotel,or find that he has used any of his money to abuse anybody in society. Regardless of whatever mistakes he may have made in the past, I sincerely believe the person he is today is a good person who just wants the truth, the same as me, and millions of other Americans who simply don’t like the progressive direction of our country.
A sign that Beck is achieving that success can be seen in President Obama’s new Attack Watch website, which I find disgusting, but also revealing, for it shows just how juvenile politicians as high-ranking as The President of the United States truly is. Listen to Beck discuss it from the set of his new show, totally free of any editorial censoring, which I believe has triggered this move by the president and his staff.
After I saw this episode with Beck I checked out the website for myself and the very first thing that came to my mind was the way that East Berlin used to engage in similar propaganda to prevent its people from trying to escape over into West Berlin. Obama is actively looking for dissidents to his administration so those dissidents can be targeted. Of course people like Beck will be targeted, but as I read the intent of that website it became clear that the goal of Attack Watch wasn’t so much after Glenn Beck, but it’s intended to target people like me and the material I publish on this site, which I stand behind proudly. But the nature of this type of information set my blood into a boil, so I contacted Attack Watch and turned myself in with the note shown below, which is the exact text that I sent to Barack Obama and his minions running Attack Watch.
Dear Attack Watch:
I will have to report myself. I am embarrassed at this administration and his support of public unionized labor. And he has put himself on the front line of Ohio’s Issue 2 and is very responsible for his own attacks and false information. The fact that he supports this site says everything about the guy.
Rich
Shortly after I did this I heard that Doc Thompson was covering this very issue on 700 WLW so I called in at about the 11 minute mark and confessed what I had done, that I had turned myself into Attack Watch. Doc and I had some fun at the expense of the President over his Jobs Bill and this tyrannical Attack Watch website, which the President deserves. CLICK TO LISTEN:
Why is it our obligation as a tax paying base to subsidize bad decisions made by politicians who have long since left office, leaving in their wake a turbulent chaos of bureaucracy, so that their puny minds could relish in the creation of a job, when in fact the merit of those jobs add little to the overall society? It would seem that politicians like Obama are so emotionally attached to certain jobs like teachers, police, firefighters, BMV workers, administrators and the like that they never measure the productivity of those positions against the taxes it takes to maintain them, and that is a catastrophic error.
The trouble with government is every time someone like Obama wants to make a name for himself, and history has produced millions of those types, they “create” a job and expand government just a little bit more. And the cost of that expansion is what drives our taxes higher and higher in order to maintain the growth. This is why politicians are in such a panic over the sudden desire from the public, of which I am a proud part, to reduce government, because those expansions are part of a politicians “legacy.” To a politician removing a government program is similar to taking away their tombstone once they’ve been laid to rest in a cemetery.
My family explored a cemetery hidden away in the hills of Eastern Ohio a few years ago which was supposedly haunted. As we sat in the dark with cameras and other recording equipment waiting for a ghost to come up out of the ground and dance with the evening mist which engulfed us, I looked at the tombstones laying all about, mostly eroded away beyond recognition. The cemetery itself was about 150 years old and the town which housed the residents had long ago disappeared. This cemetery no longer had relatives who came to visit. These people were simply forgotten by a town that no longer existed. (TO SEE SPECIFICS ON THIS TYPE OF STORY SEE MY ARTICLE ON THE GHOST TOWN KERR CITY) CLICK THE LINK:
To the people of a ghost town, all the activity of the town seemed so important while the town lived. My daughter and I looked at the tombstone of “The Brakeman” in the misty, haunted night where civilization wasn’t even remotely connected. The night air called out no hints of mankind’s existence from this place, as we waited for the ghost ofThe Brakeman to walk the cemetery at night, as legend said he does occasionally.
The Brakeman worked the railroad of the nearby town and had an affair with the wife of his card playing friend who was in charge of all the freight which left the town. When the friend found out about what the brakeman had done with his wife, he challenged his friend to a card game where he got The Brakeman drunk to the point of passing out. At that point the estranged husband laid his friend “The Brakeman” across the railroad tracks to be killed by the passing train, which happened within the hour, decapitating completely The Brakeman. Now legend has it that the ghost of the headless Brakeman roams the cemetery at night, and that’s what we wanted to see for ourselves in spite of all the reports from people who did exactly what we were doing, but suffered from being driven insane by curses that the angry Brakeman casts upon anyone who disturbs his grave. That’s the story anyway.
Strange things did happen that night, but not the expected “strange stuff.” But as we sat there waiting I thought about how important sleeping with that man’s wife had been to The Brakeman. How important all their jobs had been to the people of the town, even how important the man’s marriage to the cheating wife had seemed to the killer. Now here we were 150 years later waiting for a ghost to appear from that time and show us some hint to a mystery which occurred so long ago. And all the things that seemed so important to the people of this graveyard back when they lived were no longer even relevant to the order of the universe. The people were all decayed away and forgotten. Even the tombstones proving their existence was nearly gone. In another hundred years nobody would even know this graveyard ever existed.
This is the secret behind government expansion, and what is truly behind the words of politicians like Obama. Government programs and created jobs are the “tombstones” of the politician. They hope that when they are long gone, dead to the world that society will remember that they were good people once, and that their legacy will live on in some way. Social Security is the tombstone of FDR. Medicare is the tombstone of LBJ. I am 100% convinced that when those presidents signed those government programs into law that they thought to themselves, “people will remember me when I’m gone. These programs will outlast a tombstone.”
That is what is behind almost every government program created. It’s behind nearly every law created, every building built, every bridge that spans a river; it is in the infantile mind of the spiritually cumbersome which seeks some measure of immortality in the form of something that will carry their memory beyond the tombstones of a cemetery. And this is the mentality behind the President’s Jobs Bill, and the anger of many who think like him that people would “dare” to reduce the size of government by eliminating government programs, or even entire branches of it, because to them, this would be equivalent to desecrating the grave of the dead, for the impact, is the same. The fear is to be forgotten so nobody ever knew they lived. People like Obama understand this at a primal level and will protect those who came before him in hopes that someday someone will protect his tombstones in the form of created legislation. Isn’t that what Obama Care is after all, a memorial to Obama for all eternity?
When I was a very small kid, I actually took a tombstone from a graveyard and hid it in the basement of our house. I wanted to study it. My mother was aghast and demanded I put it back where I found it, which was an old cemetery I had found deep in the woods near our house. She told me the ghost of that man would track me down all my life, that God would be angry with me for desecrating the grave of this poor man. I was confused by her anger so I drug that tombstone the 2 miles back to the graveyard and put it back the best I could, wondering why my mother was so upset about it. I found out later that she had done the same thing when she was a little girl and her parents, my grandparents had put the fear of God into her, and she never did such a thing again. I asked her if she actually believed the Earth would swallow her up and she’d be damned to hell for all eternity if she took a tombstone, a simple rock with writing on it that the process of natural erosion would destroy within a few hundred years anyway. Why did human beings think such things are actually sacred?Well, the only answer she had was that it was wrong to do such a thing. And the rationality is just as simple when speaking about reducing a government program, or a law. All those things are just memorials to the deceased when taken down to their most elementary function.
I’ve explored graveyards all over America since then and seen and done things that many would consider sacrilegious to the religions of the Earth. I have done these things with the view toward science, not just belief, and this lends itself to the proper perspective in understanding the nature of a problem. And this is the case of government. It grows and expands not out of necessity, but out of fear……..fear of the lives that make up that government growing old and dying off to be forgotten by the world. This is the fundamental error behind many of the human beings who roam this Earth. They are living their deaths by planning for it their entire lives, wondering how they will be remembered instead of living the life that is before them one day at a time and when the time comes to leave this world of the living honorably to join with the greater mysteries of existence, most of mankind clambers with the fingers of both hands dug deep into roots of the living and while they hope that there is an afterlife, they don’t truly believe it. So they seek to be remembered for “something.” And this is the catastrophe of politics. It allows the small-minded to use tax money to build memorials in their honor, and that is not the role of government. And it is not the responsibility of the tax payer to make people who view themselves inwardly as “worthless” to project an outward appearance of “worth” long after death robs them of life and confines their Earthly bodies to a cold, decaying grave.
Every politician ever known or yet created will suffer the same fate as The Brakeman, and no amount of money, of government program can protect them from the fact that they are living a death and their ghost will soon come to claim their bodies erasing their footprint from the mind of mankind forever.