Category: Ryan Fahrenkamp

The Overton Window and The Jonestown Tragedy: Richard Trumka’s Progressive Push

I’ve said it many times, I read a lot. A whole lot. And over 2010 one of the books that most jumped out at me was Glenn Beck’s The Overton Window. My daughter had bought it for me for Father’s Day and I read it in one day.

I hear people like Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO talk about the “RIGHT WING” and you hear what comes out of his mouth and you have to wonder about his sanity. As far as a union leader, and a person close to the White House, which he says he speaks to daily, I would be ashamed if that guy where my boss or leader. He clearly doesn’t understand basic economics and its people like him that create the message that millions of union workers chant.

Here is Trumka speaking in March of 2009. He has no idea how the bill he’s speaking about will “expand” the middle class, and he doesn’t have any idea how this will drive up the labor costs. He just makes statements that people seem to blindly following without question. Something he accuses Beck and other people primarily on the political right of doing.

You can read here how he believes the best way to expand the middle class is through further taxation. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/afl-cio-boss-raising-taxes-is-best-way-to-create-jobs/

America is supposed to be a group of individuals, not a unified collective sum like Trumka speaks about. The Federalist Papers, which went on to become The Constitution were written to protect American from people like Trumka, and Obama. Those people and people like them taken by themselves are not bad people, but they have a dangerous ideology and they disguise it with a message the masses can understand. So it is not a far stretch to say that when I saw Trumka speak on February 26, 2011 that the best way to create jobs was to raise taxes, which I know from economics is false, yet people chant and cheer in approval, and I witnessed the union protests all across the country, it reminded me of Jim Jones, of the Jonestown massacre from 1978. Jones had several thousand supporters that followed him from Indianapolis Indiana, to San Francisco, then to Guyana South America. Jones was an admirer of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. That’s why they chanted this song at their church rallies in the early 70’s.

Jim Jones is a tough story to swallow. Because it is the extreme example of what collectivism can inflict on people. Jones was a proud socialist. What you are about to hear is the actual death tape from the Jonestown Massacre. Jones turned on a tape recorder and gave a final speech while his thousands of followers drank poisoned drink to their deaths. He calls it “revolutionary suicide” to an inhuman world. You will actually hear people perishing in the background, so if you have a soft stomach, don’t listen to this. This behavior is far from a joke. If you listen you will hear several people step forward and speak about the greatness of Jim Jones, their “Daddy,” and of the merits of socialism and communism.
The following clip is from the film The Guyana Tragedy and is a reenactment of what you will hear below.

Here is the actual death tapes. Now consider as you listen to this, these people speaking are just moments from their death. They know it. Listen to their thoughts and what they intend.



So what is the lesson here? Well, madmen have a way of lying to themselves and distorting the reality of the world around them. And such people are attracted to socialism, communism, progressivism and all those collective “ism’s.” At that point it no longer becomes a simple argument about economics and the best way to handle economic issues. It evolves into a struggle between good and evil.

That’s where I start seeing startling comparisons from people in the modern labor movement. What they are saying are simply the words their leaders speak.  Richard Trumka is a powerful union leader and in this recent case involving these labor protests, what he says in public, over a microphone, ends up coming out of the mouths of his followers.

Trumka, like many people attracted to those “collective ideologies” are prone to climb for power. History shows that it happens in every case. I don’t know of a single instance of a collective society that survives outside of a tribal village. The individuality inherit in the human being seems to break down true collectivism, and social experiments to water this tendency down in our youth have failed with terrible results. This is the reason the Tea Party has risen as a permanent movement, because many people are just tired of the “social experiments.” Many want to return to the original blue print that paved the way for the greatest nation on earth.

The Tea Party is a push back against the tendency of “collectivism” that has gotten out of control.

Whether or not he is aware of it or not, Trumka’s actions show that he is power-hungry and idealistic, and is essentially no different from someone like Jim Jones. It is quite possible that if that congressman from California had not went to Jonestown and been killed, Jim Jones and his followers would have lived for years without a mass suicide. But the scary thing about it is that Jones had to retreat to South America to have his utopian society. And the congressman was doing in that society much of what the Tea Party is trying to do in American Society. They are intervening and attempting to break up the dangerous collectivism that is consuming the nation.

Progressives are insistent in the modern age to not leave the country for their utopian society. They instead are intent to change the country itself. Here Trumka reveals what he is all about, which concerns me a great deal. It concerns me because watching his followers on Saturday; they seem to think he truly believes in this whole “middle class” protection. Yet he states otherwise.

Now this doesn’t mean Trumka is just like Jim Jones. Jones when he was in Indiana seemed like a reasonable guy. Thousands and thousands of people wouldn’t have followed him if they thought the path would take them to their sweaty deaths in a South American jungle within a decade. But Trumka’s followers behave almost identically to the congregation of Jim Jones, and that is what is troublesome.

Watch and listen to these clips from the Saturday Protests. And compare the behavior to what you heard from Jim Jones’s Congregation.







This brings me back to the Overton window concept introduced in Beck’s book. People can say what they want about Glenn Beck, but from what I know about the guy, he genuinely wants to get at the truth. His agenda is the truth. And that’s why he wrote his book, The Overton Window.

As I was reading The Overton Window, I realized that here is a guy that Time Magazine called the most dangerous man in American. Here is a guy hated by all these various progressive groups. Here is a guy that has become massively popular in a very short period of time. Here is a guy that has an agent that is very liberal. Here is a guy that knows a few rich people yet has not forgotten his humanity. Here is a guy that has hit the bottom, and realizes that it’s the little things in life that makes things precious. Here is a guy that would never, ever, under any circumstances be a Jim Jones. He might have the power to be, but he would not sub come to it. Glenn Beck is the kind of man who you could put a pile of gold in his lap, ask him to watch it for you till you come back, and when you returned 2 years later, he’d give it back without anything missing. Since he has a unique insight to how the game is played at the level he’s at now, the book, The Overton Window is a particularly rare opportunity for a reader. And I found the book and its concepts uniquely rich. It may not be the most profound literary work in history. But it is very bold in its attempt and it succeeds. What it is successful in doing is capturing the confusing political landscape that we are currently involved with revealing through a cleaver story what drives all the groups involved in creating their own Overton window that will pull society in their desired direction.
Here is the definition and description of what a Overton Window is as described in Wikipedia.

The Overton window, in political theory, describes a “window” in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on a particular issue. It is named after its originator, Joseph P. Overton.

At any given moment, the “window” includes a range of policies considered to be politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too “extreme” or outside the mainstream to gain or keep public office. Overton arranged the spectrum on a vertical axis of “more free” and “less free” in regards to government intervention. When the window moves or expands, ideas can accordingly become more or less politically acceptable. The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:

• Unthinkable
• Radical
• Acceptable
• Sensible
• Popular
• Policy

The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it. Proponents of policies outside the window seek to persuade or educate the public so that the window either “moves” or expands to encompass them. Opponents of current policies, or similar ones currently within the window, likewise seek to convince people who these should be considered unacceptable.

Other formulations of the process created after Overton’s death add the concept of moving the window, such as deliberately promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous “outer fringe” ideas, with the intention of making the current fringe ideas acceptable by comparison.
__________________________________________________

This site has an interesting twist on The Overton Window by describing it in four planes instead of just left and right, which I like.
http://www.correntewire.com/the_overton_window_has_four_panes

What these extreme left groups have done over time is they pulled the Overton window radically to the left with key phrases like, “workers’ rights” and “tax the rich.” Or “all conservatives are Hitler.” 100 years ago at the start of the progressive movement these ideas were considered radical. But in the election of 1912, Eugene V.Debs had doubled the Socialist vote from 500,000 in 1908 to 1 million in 1912. This wasn’t some guy from Europe; he was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. In fact, the Socialists had their 1912 Convention in Indianapolis; the same place Jim Jones started his socialist church. Ronald Reagan toyed with joining the socialist party when he was a young man in Hollywood. It was after he traveled to England and witnessed what socialism had done to England through the Labor Party that he turned far to the right, out of fear for his country. But those people, those 1 million people who voted socialist in 1912 are out there, and they attached themselves to progressive ideas, they had children, raised families and found themselves drawn to the Labor Movement in America on the backs of the unions. Now many of those people aren’t bad people, but they are attracted to the collectivism of socialist concepts by their family culture and genetic make-up, because let’s face it, some people are more comfortable hiding in the masses and are not inclined to stand on their own.

Those poor, unfortunate souls are the people who end up following someone like Jim Jones in the extreme circumstance. And to a lesser degree, they find themselves repeating word for word what someone like Richard Trumka utters, without any care as to the relevance of his words. Trumka knows he can’t talk to an economist about how he represents the “middle class” or how “increasing taxes on the rich,” “creates jobs.” Those are just buzz words to stir up the followers. What Trumka is really after is moving the Overton window far to the left as was the trend during the entire 20th century. It happened because people weren’t aware of the threat and it just crept into our culture subtly. Trumka said it himself; he’s not in the labor movement for wages and benefits. He’s using the labor movement as a platform to change society, and that isn’t any different from Jim Jones who wanted to change the world through religion.

The Tea Party wants none of that non-sense. The Tea Party wants people like Trumka off our back, and wants to pull the Overton window back to the far right so that the recoil will leave the political spectrum back in the middle where it belongs. The caution is there because half the nation isn’t drinking the cool-aid of Trumka. Half is, roughly. The problem is that other half are made up of people who have evolved to expect an entitlement culture, so those aren’t the kind of people who will carry a nation by themselves. They’ll need a fanatical leader to lead them. The Tea Party has no such leader. Glenn Beck could disappear tomorrow and someone like Doc Thompson in Cincinnati would just take his place, or maybe the young man in the radio broadcast above. The movement is essentially leaderless, because it is built upon the ideas of self-reliance, which was what America was intended to be.

The real threat and real money being poured into politics isn’t coming from Rupert Murdoch, or the Koch Brothers. George Soros, and all the Hollywood left has poured far more money into political manipulation so there isn’t any room to talk. Yet if Trumka says “the conservative right is for the rich, and we are for the working man!” Look at all these contributors to the radical left! Yet all these people point to the right and say it’s “Wall Street, the rich, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, all are blamed for manipulating the American people when in fact it is these people that have committed the act of their accusations.

“The working man” is another false premise captured by the labor movement and placed into the minds of Americans by the Overton window. In Ohio 655,000 people work for a union, both public and private. That’s only 13.7 percent of the 4,787,000 million people who are employed in the state. That leaves over 4 million people not represented by a union, and don’t particularly want to be represented by a union. And most of those people are not in management. Most of those people are the real workers, and is proof that such extreme rhetoric as exhibited by people like Trumka to an army of people built on entitlement. Yet, because of the Overton window, the media, and the regular everyday people accept that “workers’ rights” represents union work, because that’s how the term was marketed.

The times we live in have these two ideologies colliding before us. And unlike in the past, people will have to choose. One side is the side of life, and one side is the side of doom. So we must choose and choose wisely. Because the time has passed where both sides can’t coexist together now that the radicals have made a move and shown their intentions.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

S.B.5 Would Have Saved $1.3 Billion in 2010: Yet the OEA says it’s teachers will suffer when the average teacher makes 55K?

The picture here refers to a report from the Columbus Dispatch which cites that if S.B.5 had been enacted during 2010, the state would have saved 1.3 Billion dollars. That’s a massive figure!

Darryl Parks of 700 WLW talks about the savings S.B.5 would have saved, and addresses the hypocrites within the Tea Party Movement that are now complaining about some of the budget cuts they pushed for.

You can see the whole article for the Columbus Dispatch here.
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2011/02/26/senate-bill-5-saves-1-3b-study-says.html?sid=101

Most of the savings are not a direct savings to the state, but an indirect cost imposed by “step increases” which is the primary reason I am supporting S.B.5. At Lakota, as I’ve stated many times, the average teacher makes over 62K . When you study the reason Lakota, Mason, Lebanon and all the other large Southern Ohio districts need a levy passed, it is because the districts have to live up to their rising costs imposed by the “step increases” required by state law. So when I asked the question, “why can’t Lakota live within their 160 million dollar budget? Why can’t Lakota cut salaries since they are obviously inflated, and leave busing alone, keep the sports, keep the electives, don’t lay off teachers?” The response was, “we can’t, because we are obligated by state law.”

Step increases are the hidden villain here. I calculated that if the teachers at Lakota took a 30% reduction, which is reasonable considering what they are making, it would save Lakota $29 million a year which would mean the district wouldn’t have to ask for more money in an operating levy.

I’ve written about this elsewhere and if you want to see the other article click the link. All businesses whether they are service oriented or manufacturing oriented have a responsibility to keep their costs in line. One way that businesses do that is to use the 10-80-10 rule as it’s applied to labor. That rule states that 10% of your workforce will be your typical “top” performers, and they will get the most dramatic increases, 4% to 15% depending on the situation. 80% of your workers are average, and will typically get a standard 2% to 3% increase, otherwise considered a “cost of living” increase. And of course every place of business has approximately 10% that are poor performers and they won’t get an increase of any kind. Why? Because those bottom 10% you want to look for another job, and you want them to leave so you don’t have to pay them. It gives you a chance to hire somebody that might want to compete for the top 10% percentile. If you manage things correctly, your bottom 10% are the kind of people who your competition is hiring at the middle 80%, and you want that so you can maintain a competitive edge.

That’s the reason the teachers are protesting. Because their union knows the scam that they’ve been playing against the tax payer is falling apart now that their cost to society has reached a breaking point. Their strategy all along was to continue to push for higher taxes to pay for their scam and they had full confidence based on their track record over the last two decades that they’d achieve that goal. Now, compare what you’ve learned here about step increases, and the imposed cost to the tax payer, and the amount of money teachers are making on average, and then look at Patricia Frost-Brooks, President of the OEA, comments in that same mentioned article from The Dispatch.

“If you lower the wages, and your health insurance goes up, then what does that do to a family? How is the family going to sustain their livelihood?” said Patricia Frost-Brooks, president of the Ohio Education Association.

What planet is she living on? Doesn’t she realize that her teachers are making A LOT more money than the average worker in Ohio? You can read more about Patricia’s view of the world at http://www.progressohio.org/blog/2010/09/lets-revitalize-ohio-not-go-backwards-by-ohio-education-association-president-patricia-frost-brooks.html Notice she doesn’t mention much about kids in that article. Only politics.

Patricia goes into great detail attempting to demean Governor Kasich before the election. The OEA is a lobby group in Columbus where Patricia Frost-Brooks is president of the Ohio Education Association, a statewide union representing 130,000 members in k-12 schools, public colleges and universities and education support professionals. So when you listen to what she says, consider that she has one primary job and that is to protect her members. And in her view, she if protecting her members by driving up their wages, paying them very well, so they will have the expendable income to give back some to her lobby group. It’s that simple.

She accuses Kasich of misleading. She makes that assumption based on her own actions, so she assumes that the rest of the world is playing the same game, and they aren’t. Patricia reveals much of herself in that Progress Ohio Article. She is against school reform, she is against reducing the salaries of teachers to help districts deal with their costs, and she genuinely believes that somehow education costs can continue to expand as they have forever. She is completely out of touch, and if she’s the leader of the union, and is one of the most “rational” minds, then what do the “rank and file” believe? Where do they think all the money comes from? Do they not have a basic understanding of economics?

But Tom Ash, director of governmental development for the Buckeye Association of School Administrators, said school boards may not do away with all automatic pay increases.

“At milestones during their career, I think there should be step increases in an attempt to retain those people because you don’t want to lose them,” he said. “But the notion that you should do it every year, I don’t know that that’s necessary when you’re also providing an increase on the base salary.”

Mr. Ash is speaking my language. That’s the reality of the situation. For some teachers that are exceptional, I’ll use Lakota as an example, like Mr. Duff, who is a science teacher that I think is great, I don’t want to see him go anywhere. I’d be happy to tell the school board to throw money at a teacher like that. He should make 70 to 80K per year. But for every teacher like him, there are 4 or 5 that are just cruising through their careers, and they do not deserve to make more than 55K per year, no matter how much education they obtain for themselves.

You have to understand that this whole thing is a system. The OEA for years has lobbied to create legislation that creates incentives for teachers to obtain a master’s degree. For many teachers, obtaining a master’s degree is practical and necessary. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 52 percent of teachers hold a master’s degree or higher. Although some states require teachers to obtain master’s degrees, teachers often seek advanced degrees to increase their salaries and obtain new skills.

Read more: Requirements for a Master’s in Teaching | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/list_6388286_requirements-master_s-teaching.html#ixzz1FA2fulvD

There is a reason Patricia and the OEA wants its teachers to have a master’s degree. That is because the OEA also represent teachers who work for universities and if every teacher working in Ohio continues their education and gets a master’s degree so they can qualify for the financial rewards of obtaining that degree then the money funneled into the colleges can help pay the salaries of the professors staffed at those institutions. It’s what the “working people” in know would call, “job security.” The OEA knows that their teachers at the K-12 level are likely to seek that higher degree if they can afford it with good wages to begin with, but the promise of even higher wages are at the end of that degree. Here are the tuition costs at Ohio State, as listed at their website.
Estimated Costs for U.S. Students

All costs are subject to change without notice. A complete list of quarterly tuition charges by program may be found at the Office of the Registrar’s website. http://gradadmissions.osu.edu/Costs.html

• $11,298 – tuition cost for a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, aslyee, or refugee and a legal resident of the State of Ohio;
• $28,746 – tuition cost for a US citizen, permanent resident, aslyee, or refugee whose residence is outside of Ohio;
• $13,980 – estimated annual expenses for room, board, insurance, books and supplies

The truth of the matter is it’s all about money. It’s always been about money, and it’s a game played at the tax payers’ expense and it has to stop.

Look at this ad from “Teacher World” which is a teacher recruiting website.

With an average teacher salary of $55,931,* teaching in Ohio is a great career choice. Whether you like bustling cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland or state capital Columbus, or prefer smaller towns or rural communities, Ohio has it all. Learn about teaching in Ohio on Teacher World.
http://www.teacher-world.com/statespages/Ohio.html

 

The OEA knows what it’s doing. It’s a shell game. They manage to obtain for their teachers above average wages so they can funnel some of that money into the higher education system. They also have to create the incentive for teachers to make more than enough money so they won’t suffer when they must pay their union dues, because the OEA needs that money to lobby elected officials and participate in the political system.

During this entire process, the OEA has managed to wrestle control away from school boards all over the state so that this financial balance cannot be upset by local communities not wanting to pay outrageous taxes. The school boards are brought into the shell game each November when they attend the OSBA, (Ohio School Board Association) event in Columbus.
http://www.ohioschoolboards.org/osba-capital-conference

 

Check out this video. This is how they sell it.

Once the school board members are taught what they can and can’t cover as board members, the implementations that are put in place by the OEA are safe from scrutiny. This is why the first and only thing school boards are allowed to deal with are the costs associated with direct operating expenditures, which only occupy under 20% of a school district budget. Notice how many times teachers and administrators mention in that video that the only hug a child gets in a day or hot meal they eat comes from the school system. It is ironic that they sell their service and the necessity for the massive amount of money flowing within it by creating the perception that they are the only chance kids have for success in life.

Yet, the message is effective, and the employees believe what they are told from leadership. One person that believed the message was Ryan Fahrenkempt who was teaching at Lakota last year before being forced to resign in August of 2010. As a Lakota educator, Fahrenkamp hosted a science day for students and was featured in a newspaper article about the shortage of male teachers in the elementary classroom.

He was quoted in the 2008 article while he was teaching sixth-grade at the former Shawnee Elementary School.
“I think that boys at this age need that male influence outside just the home,” he said. “In some cases, they don’t get that in the home,” Fahrenkamp said.
http://www.oxfordpress.com/news/crime/former-teacher-in-federal-court-on-child-porn-charges-1044534.html

Oh, he wasn’t the only one. Just one month later the Mason School System had this happen.

How did Stacy Schuler see herself and her role as a teacher? Schuler said she isn’t perfect and she knows of a healthier lifestyle than she is living now. “I used to wake up earlier to come in [to the school] and work out,” Schuler said. “But I just wasn’t getting enough sleep, and as much as I preach a healthy lifestyle, I would say I’m not a good example of a healthy lifestyle right now.”
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/who-is-stacy-schuler-reading-between-the-lines/

What do the parents think about this behavior?  Listen to a mom read a note from her son during the last school board meeting in Mason, Feb 22nd 2011.  Her son went to Mason several years ago, he graduated in 2007.  This proves that the recent news went on for quite some time.  The woman’s testimony is at approximately the 1/4 mark of the video.  George Coates named in this video was the AP who’s genitals were found on Stacy Schuler’s computer upon her arrest and was a direct supervisor to Ms. Schuler.

http://www.icrctv.net/mason-board-of-education-22211

And it’s happening all over the country. That video you saw from the OSBA, about how school is the only safe haven for many kids is completely misleading. Parents have to be more involved in their kids’ lives. Money will not make that issue go away, because we cannot trust our kids completely to school systems. There are a lot of good people who work within the system, but schools are not the utopia’s that the OSBA envisions and tries to sell to its members.

Click this link to visit a page that attempts to capture all the school scandals in the country. Just pick a city. http://www.schoolteachernews.com/scandal.html

Parents must be an important part of a kid’s life. Schools have sold themselves as an option while busy parents conduct their lives, and in the chaos, people like Patricia, of the OEA, and Governor Strickland, pandering to union money has manipulated tax payers into funding their personal social agendas. And the experiment has been a terrible, miserable failure. Not only is the per pupil spending in Ohio at 10k per student that money has done nothing to prepare children for the world marketplace. MTV is proving to be the stronger influence among young people, and kids get that information for free. The education reforms that Patricia fears so vehemently, like competition with school vouchers, and competitive salaries controlled by school boards, are coming because the OEA have been caught not doing what is right for the children and the communities that send their children to their care every day. Public school is a valuable asset, but is producing at a mediocre level. Not at the level that the wages being asked for dictate. The OEA has attempted to cover that fact with smoke and flashy imagery. But they are the failures behind the curtain. Remember the Wizard of Oz? Patricia is the one behind the curtain in this particular case.

What S.B.5 will do is it will save tax money indirectly, with anticipated increases that used to be mandated by the state will now be controlled at the local level, where tax payers can help the school board adjust their costs to the supplied budget. And it will take control away from the shell game that the OEA has been conducting for years.

That’s why S.B.5 is a great bill. And it’s also why the OEA is so steadfast against it. It’s all about control and manipulation. That’s what Kasich means when he says he wants to return “management control” to local communities. That’s how the economics of the state get balanced and why Ohio can be a model for how the United States as a country should function. We cannot allow a central authority driven by union manipulation to drive up the costs of education in our communities, like it is now. That central authority has to be removed as an influence because they are not elected by the tax payer, yet act as a government authority. The experiment has failed terribly, and it’s time to try a method that puts the responsibility on the local community, and allows competition to do its work of driving costs down, in this case up to 1.3 Billion just for the impact of S.B.5 alone, and make the best and brightest employees excel while the mediocre stay in a budget range that does not destroy the ability of the community to fund them.

The question is, will the communities of Ohio allow themselves to see through the smoke screens and do what is obviously right or will they choose to allow themselves to be scammed by a ruthless adversary. Only time will tell.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Union Thugs Protest S.B.5: Explore the mind of a radical union supporter

Here is footage from the testimony over Senate Bill 5 on Tuesday, February 15th.

Why can’t people understand the reason Ohio has huge budget deficits? I cover that issue in the following video. The end of the video has Scott Sloan of 700 WLW reading the teacher contract of a large Southern Ohio school. Is it any wonder collective bargaining has damaged our state budgets. Listen for yourself:


Yet explanations like what I provided in that video are just too simple for the people who have made careers for themselves out of confusing everyone and profiting off the chaos. And that’s what Union Thugs are all about.

Is a thug the right word? The definition of a thug is somebody, especially a criminal, who is brutal and violent, judge for yourself with the following information.

What is the typical union thug like? I’m not talking about good people who happen to work in a unionized organization. I’m talking about the people who organize and participate in protests, strikes and the type of lobbying that goes on in state and federal governments.

As the rhetoric escalates around the S.B 5 bill those organizations that have made a living off the tax payer dollar are obviously concerned, and they should be. It was their union leaders that did not regulate themselves and ran the costs of the public employee to an unreasonably high amount.

I’ve received a lot of nasty notes and emails, which I enjoy. But there was one that I show below which wa clean enough, and hits the important issues that I think it worthy to publish here because it displays the mentality of many involved in protests of S.B 5. This is an organized effort to attack this bill, and the people who support it. These people are being fueled by their leaders through email campaigns, and it is through this type of attempted intimidation that the operating costs were increased to the level they are currently, and the reason we need S.B 5 to help Ohio sort through this kind of rhetoric and solve some budget problems.

Doc Thompson also had a union thug campaign coming at him also. Listen to him discuss it here.

The letter that was sent to me is shown in bold print below; I left the misspellings the way the guy who wrote them sent it. Then my response to each paragraph is in parentheses and italics.  You can see the whole letter in the comment section of this article:  https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/the-sexy-senate-seduction-s-b-5-an-introduction-to-collective-bargaining-reform-in-ohio/

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

I find your lies and destructive intent astounding. You display the outright greed and despicable corporate defender attitude that would make Boss Tweed very proud.

As a greed-first capitalist you are more than willing to complain that we aren’t sucking the Big Business teat enough…MORE for big business! More MORE!

(this is a common strategy for union bosses and radical members. They create an “us versus them” mentality that they are on the side of the little guy, fighting for the working class person. Then they try to paint their opponent, in this case me in a marketable and degrading way. Such as the “greed first term.” This person has no idea that I’m a greed first capitalist. I am a capitalist, but I’m certainly not greedy, never have been. And I’ve fought greedy people all my life. But this person knows that their members aren’t very smart so they have to paint the picture in duality, such as worker versus the evil corporation. And what’s my destructive intent. I think it should be illegal for public workers to unionize and I don’t want my tax dollars spent on that activity. How is that bad? You see, even questioning them makes you greedy. That is a designed strategy to make the mass of the REAL middle-class not to question them, because nobody wants to be called names.)

Oh, but teachers, those greedy bloodsuckers, THEY are ripping us off, robbing taxpayers blind. Right.

(I have been asking our local school board to live within their $160 million dollar budget and to not continue to come back to the tax payer for more and more taxes. Taxes are already so high in our district that it makes it unattractive for real estate investors. When I looked into the reason for the escalating costs it turned out to be “step increases” for teachers that were averaging $62K a year. THAT’s THE AVERAGE! And those same teachers had just threatened a strike in 2010 just before asking the community for a new levy. And in 2008 they threatened another strike and their primary issue was wages and benefits. As a result of that it was discovered that most of the school budget of $160 million was tied up almost 80% in wages. The taxes are already very high for residents of the community, so taxes should not be increased any higher. Yet the school board said its hands were tied because state laws required them to increase the budget size to fulfill the contract obligations. After the levy failed, the union made no attempt to work with the community. It was determined that the unions only care for their own interests, and not how they fit into the economics of the community. So legislation must be introduced to protect tax payers from union greed which shows no sign of ending. It is greed because when an organization expects more and more without caring where the money comes from, they are only thinking with their own needs.)

You are a sick disgusting (several extremely descriptive expletives deleted) who can’t wait to turn Ohio into a wasteland of stupid kids ripe for mindless thankless benefitless jobs that your beloved Big Business is more than happy to provide, especially when you wipe out the minimum wage (damned greedy poverty-level unskilled workers!), sick leave, and as much of the rights and benefits that workers have fought and died for over the history of this great nation as you can. You and your fellow Greed Over People party pals are well on your way.

What you advocate is nothing less than a return to sweatshops, eighty-hour workweeks, and non-existent disability or unemployment protection. You’ll do it with a thousand tiny cuts, and in the end the state of Ohio will indeed bleed. It will hemorrhage skilled educators and teachers, administrators and children in search of reasonable compensation or education beyond that needed to operate a drive-thru headset. Soon enough no one will have to worry about school levies in Ohio, because there won’t be a decent school or educator in the entire state to see it voted down.

(Here is the name calling. When someone is out of ideas and can’t argue facts they resort to name calling. And they also profess to be able to predict the future with the direst consequences, using such terms as wasteland, and sweatshops. This person also assumes I’m lock step with a political party, which I’m not. They say such things because it fits their small view of the world. The Progressive Party started in 1910 really, and then progressed in power till 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt took control of the party because Taft had won the Republican nomination. Roosevelt wanted so badly to become president again, and to beat Taft that he took on the platform of the Progressive Party which consisted of minimum wage and workplace standards, compensation for job related injuries, strengthen the pure-food law of 1906, institute a system of social insurance with medical coverage for the poor, an income-tax amendment to the Constitution, a commission to inquire into the rising cost of living, and the ability to regulate interstate industrial corporations along with the new concept of the women’s suffrage movement. Unions take credit for all those things, but it was wealthy Republican defectors that were on a religious crusade that split the party and started those ideas which 100 years later we have a report card of where it took us. Some things were good, some things weren’t. However, when unions attached themselves to the progressive platform they have made it impossible for us to go back and fix the things that were broken from that original ideology, and keep the things we find useful. And yes, religion was the centerpiece of the Progressive Party. They sung “Onward Christian Soldiers” while they had their National Convention in Chicago on August 6th 1912. Now progressives, like the author of this letter obviously is, even if they don’t realize that’s what they are, have lost the meaning of religion where it interfered with politics. They didn’t care if their policies were unconstitutional, because they were on a religious crusade to “change the world.” This author proclaims that society will go back to 80 hour week sweat shops. Such a statement is hardly worth commenting on, only most of these radicals protesting outside the State House, and pleading for the status quo actually believe that will happen, because their leaders, their shepherds tell them that distorted fact. And since they are often young, or over-paid and know they can’t make that type of money in the private sector put on the dunce cap and let others do their thinking for them. Schools will become good, and competitive at a much reduced cost. Bad teachers will be removed quickly and good ones will be inserted without a lot of fuss, which is how it needs to be. Teachers like Ryan Fahrenkemp of Lakota, and Stacy Schuler of Mason were hiding their devious acts behind the security of their very protective contract and nobody wanted to deal with it because it is too difficult. School Boards are toothless. The real teeth are in the unions. With S.B.5 teachers will be paid well because parents show they want teachers to teach their children. But the costs will be managed and not become outrageous such as the teachers that are making over 90K a year. At some point step increases must be controlled so the budgets aren’t broken by such behavior, and that is one of the greatest aspects of S.B. 5.)

I find it hysterical in a profoundly sad way that you think our (state’s) treatment of business outrageous (how can we get business if we don’t allow them to rape our state without lubrication for obscene profit?) but you think teachers should work for the sheer love of it, and the $10 a week you want to pay them. Idiot.

(Here is another common theme from these people; they don’t understand what goes on in the mind of a person that creates a job. Entrepreneurs need the ability to attempt and fail, and attempt again. When too many regulations are in front of business, they are likely to not bring business to the state in favor of a state with less regulation. For instance, OSHA is set up as a safety organization within the state. But like many such organizations the power it wields is subject to abuse. Instead of being a regulatory agency that protects the workers of the state they are known for fining companies as a way to raise revenue. A program started with good intentions ends up becoming just a troll charging to cross a bridge, it’s the cost of doing business as they see it. That’s the reputation anyway, so if you were a company wanting to locate to a Midwest location, would you pick Indiana, Kentucky or Ohio, with Ohio being known for having an extorting regulation arm of the government? High paid unionized workers are discouraging for potential employers because they don’t want to be stuck in the situation that the schools are currently in. Employers can’t go to the tax payers to bail them out, unless they’re a company like GM. So they’ll go to a state without such limits. Now the union bosses seek to impose on every state the same, so business will have no place to go. Currently, SEIU is on a campaign to bring unionized workers to every country in the world, so that companies cannot move their operations overseas. That’s how out of touch those people are. Everywhere they are strong, business looks elsewhere. That is why they are looked upon as a social disease to those that don’t directly benefit. And who’s the idiot here? I’d say it’s the fool looking o the past and clinging to the status quo)

You had better pray I never attain any level of public office, because you, Sir, are a traitor to this nation, a servant of corporate interests at the expense of our education, our health, and in fact our very survival. You would be lucky to escape being shot into the Sun on a fast rocket for your attempts to make our next generation sick, fat, stupid, and rightless.

(Now this is pretty nasty, calling me a traitor. To whom am I a traitor? And I should pray? Sounds like a threat to me. Where in the Constitution of the United States does it state I as an American am supposed to support unionized workers with tax dollars. And we are all servants to corporate interests, because without corporate interests there aren’t any jobs. Secondly, consider the mentality of this person, as the mind of a child. They are proposing that someday when they get to public office that they would be able to shoot me with a rocket into the sun? Just to construct that sentence reveals the mind of a child like presence, and this is a person to lecture ANYBODY on policy?)

You and your treasonous ilk will destroy any landscape, enslave any people, allow American citizens to die and go bankrupt and lose their house and see their entire life’s work utterly destroyed to pay your corporate masters enough filthy profit to build a solid gold garage next to their solid gold house to hold their solid gold Hummer.

(Here is more of that inflammatory rhetoric again. He is proclaiming that voting for S.B.5 will enslave American citizens. He says citizens will DIE, and lose their homes. The fear mongering is so extreme that he says people will lose their whole life’s work if S.B.5 is passed. How preposterous! I know a lot of people who don’t work for unions that are not part of the corporate machine, and do very well for themselves. These union types are so “addicted” to collective bargaining that they can’t even imagine life without it, yet life will go on. There will be more jobs, not less, ironically. Because these people don’t understand the basics of economics, they can’t understand how jobs will appear. It’s like explaining to a child why we have seasons. Children don’t have enough experience to see the difference in seasons let alone understand how they are caused by the earth rotating around the sun in an elliptical orbit. A similar principle is acknowledged in understanding economics. If the basics cannot be understood, all these union types know to do is complain and hold up signs hoping that in mass they can put peer pressure on lawmakers like a crying child screams for a candy bar in a grocery store. And why do these types of people all think rich people drive Hummer’s. I don’t know a single person that has a Hummer. This guy is just showing that he says what other people, union leaders in this case, tell him to think.)

This was not the “liberty” our founders had in mind, the ‘liberty’ to strip American citizens of basic human rights and turn this nation into a desperate, servile and defenseless labor pool much like the one China boasts. You deserve nothing less than to be stripped of your citizenship and deported forthwith for your efforts to undermine the people of the United States.
F*** Y**.

(It is interesting that this guy proposes that I lose my citizenship for not wanting to fund unions off tax dollars. This patriotic slant from unions is an attempt to diminish the influence of Tea Parties. To justify this patriotism Progress Ohio has on it’s site a letter from President Eisenhower from 1955, well before the radical issues of the 1960’s, in a hope that unions would work well with the country in establishing healthy labor policies. This letter was an attempt to reach out to union leaders of the AFL-CIO in good faith.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….
Dwight Eisenhower December 4th 1955
Mr. Meany, Mr. Schnitzler, members of the Executive Council,
Delegates to this Convention and ladies and gentlemen of the
AFL-CIO everywhere in America:
You of organized labor and those who have gone before you in the union movement have helped make a unique contribution to the general welfare of the Republic–the development of the American philosophy of labor. This philosophy, if adopted globally, could bring about a world, prosperous, at peace, sharing the fruits of the earth with justice to all men. It would raise to freedom and prosperity hundreds of millions of men and women–and their children–who toil in slavery behind the Curtain.
One principle of this philosophy is: the ultimate values of mankind are spiritual; these values include liberty, human dignity, opportunity and equal rights and justice.
Workers want recognition as human beings and as individuals-before everything else. They want a job that gives them a feeling of satisfaction and self-expression. Good wages, respectable working conditions, reasonable hours, protection of status and security; these constitute the necessary foundations on which you build to reach your higher aims.
Moreover, we cannot be satisfied with welfare in the aggregate; if any group or section of citizens is denied its fair place in the common prosperity, all others among us are thereby endangered.
The second principle of this American labor philosophy is this: the economic interest of employer and employee is a mutual prosperity.

Their economic future is inseparable. Together they must advance in mutual respect, in mutual understanding, toward mutual prosperity. Of course, there will be contest over the sharing of the benefits of production; and so we have the right to strike and to argue all night, when necessary, in collective bargaining sessions. But in a deeper sense, this surface struggle is subordinate to the overwhelming common interest in greater production and a better life for all to share.

The American worker strives for betterment not by destroying his employer and his employer’s business, but by understanding his employer’s problems of competition, prices, markets. And the American employer can never forget that, since mass production assumes a mass market, good wages and progressive employment practices for his employee are good business.
The Class Struggle Doctrine of Marx was the invention of a lonely refugee scribbling in a dark recess of the British Museum. He abhorred and detested the middle class. He did not foresee that, in America, labor, respected and prosperous, would constitute–with the farmer and businessman–his hated middle class. But our second principle–that mutual interest of employer and employee–is the natural outgrowth of teamwork for progress, characteristic of the American economy where the barriers of class do not exist.

The third principle is this: labor relations will be managed best when worked out in honest negotiation between employers and unions, without Government’s unwarranted interference.

This principle requires maturity in the private handling of labor matters within a framework of law, for the protection of the public interest and the rights of both labor and management. The splendid record of labor peace and unparalleled prosperity during the last 3 years demonstrates our industrial maturity.

Some of the most difficult and unprecedented negotiations in the history of collective bargaining took place during this period, against the backdrop of non-interference by Government except only to protect the public interest, in the rare cases of genuine national emergency. This third principle, relying as it does on collective bargaining, assumes that labor organizations and management will both observe the highest standards of integrity, responsibility, and concern for the national welfare.

You are more than union members bound together by a common goal of better wages, better working conditions, and protection of your security. You are American citizens.

The roads you travel, the schools your children attend, the taxes you pay, the standards of integrity in Government, the conduct of the public business is your business as Americans. And while all of you, as to the public business, have a common goal–a stronger and better America–your views as to the best means of reaching that goal vary widely, just as they do in any other group of American citizens.

So in your new national organization, as well as in your many constituent organizations, you have a great opportunity of making your meetings the world’s most effective exhibit of democratic processes. In those meetings the rights of minorities holding differing social, economic, and political views must be scrupulously protected and their views accurately reflected. In this way, as American citizens you will help the Republic correct the faulty, fortify the good, build stoutly for the future, and reinforce the most cherished freedoms of each individual citizen.

This country has long understood that by helping other peoples to a better understanding and practice of representative government, we strengthen both them and ourselves. The same truth applies to the economic field. We strengthen other peoples and ourselves when we help them to understand the workings of a free economy, to improve their own standards of living, and to join with us in world trade that serves to unite us all.

In the world struggle, some of the finest weapons for all Americans are these simple tenets of free labor. They are again: mart is created in the Divine image and has spiritual aspirations that transcend the material; second, the real interests of employers and employees are mutual; third, unions and employers can and should work out their own destinies. As we preach and practice that message without cease, we will wage a triumphant crusade for prosperity, freedom, and peace among men.
To close, it is fitting that we let our hearts be filled with the earnest prayer that, with the help of a kind Providence, the world may be led out of bitterness and materialism and force into a new era of harmony and spiritual growth and self-realization for all men. Thank you very much.

Dwight Eisenhower December 4th 1955

…………………………………………………………………………..
That’s how far back unions have reached in an attempt to find a position in which to bring patriotism to their cause. They are using the words of the Republican President Eisenhower as if they used those words on their own. We know the history from that point, which has only diminished as union leaders became drunk with power morphing into the tyrants they sought to protect people from. This brings us to the modern-day, where the unions hold so much power that the public officials elected to positions to do the business of the people, cannot do that business because those contracts formed under collective bargaining are too costly and restrictive that tax payers can no longer out of their good natures, continue to fund these activities at the expense to themselves.

And this uneducated, naïve apologist for organized labor has the belief to actually articulate the words that I should lose my citizenship for questioning collective bargaining motives is completely lost to what America is and has strived to be. These are only the mutterings of a radical that attempts with verbal intimidation in this case, or physical intimidation in others, and with mass protests and strikes to coerce out of employers a job with decent wages.

I have never wished to have a union position or the wages that are associated with them, because I always wanted the freedom to think and bargain for myself. I would never trade away that freedom for some collective herd mentality. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the money can’t flow forever. Collective bargaining is really just a hot potato game and when the music stops, nobody wants to be holding the ball. Union members for years have been hoping that they can intimidate the people who have their finger on the button to keep them from stopping the music. But the music has stopped, not because anybody pushed the button, but because the song finally ran out. And the people holding the ball now are scared, angry, and ill prepared because what was promised to them isn’t coming true. And they are so mindless that they only know to lash out at the people who point out to them what should be easy for them to see.

Instead they carry signs, make phone calls and try to intimidate anyone they can hoping the music will begin again, and they can return to their life of security under the umbrella of collective-bargaining. But that song will never play again. Not because the republicans are a bunch of “big mean people.” Not because the Tea Party people are “tea baggers” or because the corporations are out to kill Americans and all their babies. But because American society has been burnt by the greed of those union minorities, and the scam they pulled over the eyes of our constitutional obligations.

If anybody should be cussing people out it should be those of us that were lied to, an manipulated by the type of rhetoric leveled at me in letters like this. Because in those words is the heart of a thug that only care for themselves at the expense of taxpayers everywhere.)



https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

An Act Suitable for Las Vegas: The Public Education Money Scam

On February 8, 2011 Stacy Schuler will resign from the Mason School District at the 7 pm school board meeting. Kevin Bright has made the announcement that he will recommend Stacy be fired, and the board will of course act on that request.  And to make matters easier on herself, Stacy is resigning, much the way George Coates did.  George so far has stayed under the radar even though his actions may be technically much worse. 

Now, it would seem that the firing of Stacy Schuler should be a forgone conclusion. It shouldn’t even be a question.  George Coates the assistant principal felt bold enough to take cell phones from students, apparently in search of nude pictures of the student body from text messages sent to boy friends and girl friends known as sexting. And we know that the assistant principal was sending Stacy nude pictures of himself, at a minimum. These employees felt so untouchable that they abused their positions audaciously. The union provides an unprecedented level of job security, and that leads all too often to various degrees of abuse.

So the announcement of firing Stacy Schuler sounds all too similar to me. The proceedings from superintendent to school board are extremely reminiscent of how levies are introduced to a ballot issue, or how busing and other services are reduced. The formal proceedings are only formalities designed to make the public feel like they are a part of the process, when in fact the real decisions have already been made.

And that’s what’s wrong with education broken down into its most simplified form, and why many people are looking to School Choice as an option to this kind of tyrannical monopoly. It’s the kind of issue I’ve spent thousands of words discussing here in a hope that this chronicle can provide others questioning public education, some sense of support, and a blueprint to defeat their own school levies in other districts.

The things I’ve brought up for years are not only coming out of my mind however. Traditionally the union strong-arm methods have successfully isolated dissent to a defensive position and used the press to radicalize those dissidents in the eyes of the public. Meanwhile those same political thugs capture the high ground of “defending the children,” and use that platform to negotiate lucrative contracts from the public. Doc Thompson had on a guest from the Kato Institute that validates with a professional opinion what many of us in the trenches are feeling. It’s a great interview so enjoy it.

This whole public education game works until someone like Stacy or Ryan Fahrenkemp from Lakota get busted doing something despicable and are caught abusing their positions under union protection. Because the existence of the union is so formidable, it prevents the kind of probing that common sense would naturally question. So questions that might be leveled at a teacher goes by the way side because the perceived fight to act on such questions would be too great and not worth the wrath of the union.

When Stacy goes to court, it will be revealed that the activity within the Mason School System should be on a nationally syndicated soap opera of provocative tradition, not taken as a serious institution that has the aim of educating our students. When board members are engaged in affairs that are publicly known, and other teachers are caught doing despicable, and immoral acts that are known by many in positions of power, the public faces the moral dilemma as to what to do.

What often happens is parents kick the can down the road because their kids are only in the school system for a relatively short time and those same parents just want the system to stay in tact long enough for their children to get what they need from the system. The union knows this, and they calculate that each year some kids leave, and new ones enter and since nobody cares truly for the health of their neighbor, and their communities, unions use that sense of selfishness to conduct a stage play full of smoke and mirrors.

So when Kevin Bright makes his announcement, and publicly chastises Stacy Schuler for her terrible behavior, know that he and the school board are aware of much worse than what Stacy has been involved with. But they will throw Stacy to the wolves like a Roman Emperor throwing a thief to the lions in a gladiator arena to appease the crowd. Their intent is to get past this terrible episode so people forget and get back to their lives, and the school can put another levy on the ballot in November to cover the step increases that the union contract requires.

Ironically, and this gives you an idea how big this story is, this is a video from China showing the Mason School System attempting to distance itself from Stacy when just months ago all was well, cover ups and all.

I say cover ups because these stories were very well-known, and for the superintendent to not know about it is one of two things. He’s really out of touch and isn’t listening to anybody. Or he is just trying to keep the bad stuff hidden so there isn’t any interruption in revenue flowing into the school system. Both options are bad.

We do have choices. It’s up to us to see them and act with courage for the benefit of our children, and leave the adults that have built empires off our tax dollars to find a new scam, preferably in a venue more suitable to their natures, somewhere like Las Vegas.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

So What are you Going to Do About it? Sex, Money and Public Schools

In the face of such scandals as what is being dealt with currently at the Mason School System, and one month ago at the Lakota School System, thousands of rank and file participants within the teachers union crave to put these episodes of unpleasantness behind them. The worst thing in their eyes is for public debate to occur beyond a two-day news cycle. If a story lingers for too long, the value for the service they want to offer diminishes in the eyes of the taxpayer.

But that’s the real problem, isn’t it? For decades public debate has been limited and it was easy for spin doctors and spokesman to proclaim that “it’s just sex, these things happen in every workplace. We’re taking precautions.”

The downfall of those status quo protectionists however is technology. No longer can a spokesman tell a group of friendly reporters a controlled diatribe of manipulation intended to diffuse a crisis till it falls from people’s minds as their busy lives consume commitment to a righteous cause. Now with text messaging, and blog sites like this one, information moves freely without the control mechanism of political machines, and is why the FCC is pushing Net Neutrality.

That’s why what happened on 700 WLW February 4th of 2011 was unique as a story broke on that station throughout the day preceding a major indictment from a prosecutor’s office. It started with Sharon Poe speaking about the crises with Doc Thompson and ended 9 hours later after the indictments were announced and attorneys started to chime in with legal discussion. The story is basically this, a teacher Stacy Schuler of the Mason School System was indicted for 16 counts of sexual battery with 5 students. She is also involved in a sexual way with a separate issue involving the assistant principal George Coates. George called in his resignation on February 2, 2011. The story arch was fascinating and is captured in the video below. It is recommended that you activate the video and finish this article while listening if you are fortunate enough to be able to do both. If not, then give yourself some time. It’s a video that is 2 hours and 7 minutes long but condenses 9 hours of radio news breaking evolution over the day and is a compelling story in itself. So turn off the TV and let the video play and enjoy the theater of the mind without commercial interruption for the drama is as good if not better than any movie available to rent.

Sharon (the woman in the interview) and I have known, as most in the Mason community and in neighboring Lakota have known for some time that serious sexual allocations were transpiring in Mason. In fact I have the list of many improprieties, most of them taking place with consenting adults within the system and not directly effecting students. But the number and rank of the participants is alarming for any workplace. This teacher is just the most obvious participant because she got caught. Her actions since they involved students that posted information on Facebook and other online forums could not be quieted by the spin doctors and the info got out into the community.

Check these links for information on all the soap opera issues going on in Mason. There are several articles on those pages. Scroll down to the “Sex and Drugs for All” School Districts section to read the information. This information was published by Charles Foster Kane.

Here are the links:

http://thecincinnatusstandard.com/Whistleblower_Newswire_Friday_February_4_2011.mht
http://thecincinnatusstandard.com/Whistleblower_Newswire_Thursday_February_3_2011.mht
http://thecincinnatusstandard.com/Whistleblower_Newswire_Wednesday_February_2_2011.mht

Home for Kane’s work can be found here: http://www.thecincinnatusstandard.com/The_Whistleblower_Newswire.html

Scott Sloan came on after Sharon and had been working with the same information we all had but Scott had the guts to act on it. After he went off the air with Doc, a caller from Mason came on and defended the district and proclaimed that WLW was behind on the story and it wasn’t a big deal. WLW was in fact the only news organization running with the story. All the other outlets were waiting for the indictment to come down and reacted predictably once the story broke. That particular caller reflected a huge part of the population that just doesn’t want to deal with bad news.

It is because of people like the caller that these problems in schools have continued. They empower the perpetuation of illicit behavior in public institutions with the same careless abandon that a large portion of the population accepted the seductress explanations from former President Clinton.

The target audience of complacency which Clinton, Obama and teachers unions, along with others, speak to know what they’re doing. They hope to solicit more recruits to their thinking by encouraging public drunkenness, sexual exploits and other forms of decadent behavior because in such personalities are future apologists that won’t have the courage or fortitude to confront difficult issues when they present themselves. And on the backs of such weak souls were built the corruption we are finding in public education. In fact, as I was writing this article I received this comment from a reader which fits in the category just discussed.

Author : thompson (IP: 72.173.182.116 , 72-173-182-116.cust.wildblue.net)
URL :
Whois : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/72.173.182.116
Comment:
you’re nuts. Salaries have nothing do to with morality. And for the record, teaching salaries are NOT I sugges you collect your thoughts before you put them out there to be read. Hope I don’t stumble onto anything else you rant, I mean write.

That is a guy that doesn’t see how things connect. The misspellings are because that’s how he wrote it, I duplicated it the way I received it. And to respond to that guy, being nuts is to take things at face value, like he obviously does.

You see, it’s not just the sex that is going on with some of the teachers, and administrators. Or principles and assistants that think it’s acceptable to send naked pictures of themselves to co-workers on computers owned by the school. Or child pornography obsessed teachers taking pictures of kids with their shirts off in the classroom. This is about the wholesome advertising of public education services to the community to justify extraordinarily high salaries negotiated by public sector unions. It’s like most things in life, in the end it’s about money.

During the levy campaign back in September after I had made a couple of appearances on WLW the Pro Lakota Campaign had flooded the station with protest letters and accused the station of being disingenuous to teachers and rationalized my questing of the amount of wages being imposed on our community budget as hateful. Their assertion is that because of their educational background and the fact that many of them have master’s degrees that they are better positioned to teach our children and that spending more and more money on public education will yield increased results. Or in the case of Lakota and Mason, it was to keep those districts excellent by approving a tax levy on our properties. We were told, “Wouldn’t you spend just 20 bucks a month to keep your kids safe.”

However, what we are finding is that these people in public positions are just as human as anybody. And these teachers and administrators in these schools are no more qualified to raise our children than our average citizens. This whole issue comes back to the topic of wages and whether or not public education officials should be paid so much and communities should be required to supported collective bargaining agreements.

My day on this historic date started as one of my employees told me about his experience of dropping off his son at Lakota because of the busing cuts. Lakota had stopped using police to guide traffic at the entrance my employee was using as a drop off. Instead a school official named by his son as an assistant principal was directing traffic. That assistant audaciously knocked on my employee’s window and told him to use a different entrance. “You can’t pull in that lot. You have to go to the other side.”

My employee told him that they had a paid parking spot in that particular lot and he had a right to be where he was.

The assistant principal directing traffic told him again to use the other lot.

My employee asked what he was supposed to do about his paid lot, the assistant said; “you should have passed the levy.”

I have instance upon instance given to me about principles at Lakota taking active roles in creating an environment of hostility that if they occurred in my work place, I’d be obligated to address the issue before the behavior corrupted my workforce, but not in public education. They live by different rules than the rest of us. And that becomes evident when you get to know some of them.

That’s why the sex scandals in Mason are important. Even if the teacher is innocent of all 16 counts we know that there is inappropriate behavior that went on between the teacher and the assistant principal at a minimum. As a society do we put up with it, because the taxpayers are the boss in this situation? Or do we just look away? Do we just approve the next levy while the bloated, corrupt monster of public education lingers on under collective bargaining agreements negotiated under school board members trained by the OSBA to carry out to the letter policies created by the teachers unions which are bankrupting communities?

I remember specifically when Lakota threatened to go on strike in 2008. What was their sticking point? Wages. They tried the same general tactic floating the strike word around back in March of 2010. It wasn’t about kids. It was money. Watch that video here. They got what they wanted. It didn’t matter to them if the community could afford it or not.

For those that don’t want to discuss the issue of cost and whether we get the value for the money we spend, I put the blame squarely on your shoulders for the current state of things, public education being just one, but very costly issue. When I hear stories like this sex case, and again, I know there is a lot more to the story which will be revealed, I get angry. I can’t understand why stories like this wouldn’t make people angry. But I also tend to view the world from the perspective of an employer. People that just want to punch their time card and cruise through life tend to look the other way when trouble comes or when taxes are too high and harming the community.

The underlining issue is arrogance. These Mason school employees that are currently in trouble have so little appreciation and respect for their community and where the money comes from that supplies their income that they participate in these reckless sexual activities. That behavior speaks volumes of how public education views the public they serve and it comes out when they are pressed.

The ultimate audacity is revealed in the Mason spokesman Tracy Carson when she was on with Tracy Jones and Scott Sloan putting on a happy face for the Mason District on January 26th, the same day that Stacy Schuler was put on leave. No doubt Mrs. Carson will say that she didn’t know about the teachers coming legal trouble, but what kind of spokesman wouldn’t know about this story, because I was hearing about it, and it’s not even my job to know. I find it hard to believe Tracy didn’t know. The story was out well before implementing the leave and if the spokesman knew anything about what was happening in the school, she’d know about this teacher, because everyone else did.

Yet, listen to her words on WLW. Do you think she actually thought the Mason school system could contain this story? Depending on how you answer that question will determine your ability to think critically. Because the bet from these people is this, you can’t think critically even when the evidence is right in front of you.

So, what are you going to do about it?

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Sex, Murder, Teachers, and the Taxpayer: Ryan Widmer and the Mason Teacher

A Mason assistant principal resigns while Ryan Widmer proceeds through his third murder trail and a Mason Teacher is under police investigation all within Warren County.

While Jennifer Crew testified against Ryan Widmer, Mason’s High School Assistant Principle resigned his position. Read the article below while you listen to the testimony of Jennifer Crew as reported by Bill Cunningham. Click here:

The rest of this story unified in its nature and occurrence in the same county proceeds in this article from the Cincinnati Enquirer, February 2, 2011

MASON – An assistant principal at Mason High School who was recently placed on paid administrative leave has submitted his resignation from the Warren County district.

George Coates, a nine-year veteran of Mason Schools who makes $88,000 a year, was placed on leave last week for undisclosed reasons, Mason officials said.

Though Coates’ leave began days after a Mason High School teacher – Stacey Shuler – was also placed on leave and is being investigated by Mason Police for inappropriate e-mails, Coates was not part of that investigation.
Coates cited “personal reasons” with his last day of work being Feb. 28. He was unavailable for comment.

What do the stories of George Coates and the relationship that will be revealed with Stacy Schuler the Physical Education teacher also at the High School have in common with Ryan Widmer? Sex

SEX, SEX, and more Sex!

Listen to Doc Thompson discuss the endemic problem that is rampant all over the country involving teachers that seem enticed by young students. If there is any lesson to be learned, it’s that teachers that we’re paying extraordinary amounts of money cannot seem to overcome their all too human frailties. This issue in Mason is going to be very disappointing as the facts percolate to the surface. Lakota just recently had its own embarrassing scandal in the Ryan Fahrenkemp case involving the FBI and that teacher’s obsession with child pornography. These cases in Mason, and Lakota probably have more to do with why those two districts elected not to attempt another levy until these stories fade from people’s minds.

 

George Coates, high school assistant principal made $85,311 in 2010 with 20 days vacation, full retirement and Medicare paid. Stacy Schuler, Physical Ed teacher at High School made $58,520.00 in 2010 and worked 185 days. (These numbers from Buckeye Institute website.) Why would these individuals risk these well-paying jobs to indulge in “inappropriate” behavior?

Well, ask Ryan Widmer who wanted to have a three-way with his wife so badly that he ruined their young marriage. Widmer obviously wasn’t ready to be married and was very immature in his thinking, having an adulterous relationship even so early in his marriage. Sounds like they were having normal marriage issues, but his sexual perversions were too much for his wife to forgive, and he couldn’t handle the rejection of her leaving, so bad things happened when their tempers got away from them.

The reason this Widmer case is so compelling to so many people is that Ryan sitting on that stand reveals the fool in many people that actually let their primal energy, sexual, and predatory, get away from them. Many people fear in themselves the same uncontrolled passions, but most will never completely release to the extremes that Widmer did.

What all this has in common is this, people that take for granted the fortunes in their lives which come their way are all too tempted to abuse those fortunes. Sounds like Ryan Widmer took his wife for granted and thought he could “nudge” her into fulfilling some of his fantasies that were obviously sexual. And these teachers, they are well paid, protected by powerful unions, those nasty little voices that call out from the deep recesses of their minds have the luxury of time and finance to act on their fantasies unlike other people who work from pay check to pay check and don’t have the spare time or the means to embark on “sexual deviancy.” Ryan Fahrenkemp resigned from Lakota in August when it became obvious to him that he was going down in flames, and now George Coates is fleeing the scene of the crime hoping to avoid the fall-out from the case with Stacy Schuler when her investigation is revealed. These stories have in common varying degrees of human fault anchored in sexual exploration and abuse of their specific powers.

Then there is Jennifer Crew in this whole, seemingly unconnected soap opera of warped minds and freaks. Jennifer cringed in her chair during cross-examination and revealed much about her true motif in this trial. There is no doubt that Widmer called her, sent her texts as he did with several other women when he thought she was an attractive woman, and could use his celebrity status to fulfill the fantasies he couldn’t get from his deceased wife. But once he found out that Jennifer was not very attractive, he cut off the relationship. And Jennifer wanting revenge let out some of what Ryan had told her. But her mind took liberties with some of those truths because her own lustful fantasies of being held by a killer would go unfulfilled, and it’s likely that only somewhere deep inside her own mind does the truth reside. Even loved ones near her will want to see everything in her motives but the truth.

The mind is a strange arena. Be careful what you allow in it because the ramifications can lead to various degrees of misery and human decay. That’s what all these stories have in common, human decay of the mind and that they are happening in Warren County, Ohio.

Oh, and for those that think I am making a distant connection here, and that this texting issue at Mason is a new and isolated issue regarding administrative abuses at Mason? No. Check out this video from way back in 2007, which is a precursor to the story that is about to explode upon the Mason School District scene.


It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a teacher, or a murder, if the personalities are up to no good; they deserve to be called out for their bad behavior. The Widmer trial will cost taxpayers over $50K, and I already told you what those two Mason employees cost the residents of Mason. Their bad behavior ultimately cost our society, because they chose to engage in that bad behavior without any respect for the taxpayers that end up having to pick up the mess in their wakes. They deserve the anger that is unleashed upon them.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Yes Lakota is Misleading People: Painting over the dirt

Georgetta
voteyeslakota@aol.com
75.185.0.41
Submitted on 2011/01/20 at 11:14 pm
Evil prevails when good people do nothing. I am a good person and I am about good education. I am doing something: speaking out. Rich Hoffman is misleading people. Teachers teach children so they DON’T end up working themselves into an early grave and barely making payments on a lot in a trailer park. The good teachers will go elsewhere in order to make a living wage. Rich Hoffman raised children and his wife didn’t work. Apparently he is making too much money. Yet, I hear no one attacking him. Some of us have to have both parents work in order to put food on the table.

Georgetta here reflects many of the comments that I get from people who think just like her. The premise is this, that education is a right, they hide the actual numbers in the scribble of government bureaucracy, and if you show that you don’t support it, or if you even question their reasoning, they use “peer pressure” to shape the community to their will, just like kids on a playground. That’s the mentality. They end up sounding like children with their minds wrapped up in extreme assertions to make their points seem to carry more weight.

The first thing they do is attack you “the tax payer” and your ability to pay the increase in tax. They’ll say, “Public education was there for your children, but now that you don’t have children in the school, you don’t want to pay.” They do the same with business leaders, “We built the good schools and you provided the homes, and now you don’t want to pay.” What doesn’t get said is that as all this growth was going on, the LEA, the teachers union at Lakota, negotiated an aggressive contract in October of 2008 that was focused on wages and that contract is bankrupting the community because at the same time, indications were that state funding was on a decreasing trend. So the contract was irresponsible, and what is happening now, is the community is establishing the parameters of future contract negotiations, because we can’t trust school officials to do the job, otherwise it wouldn’t have gotten this far out of control.

These pro levy people will attempt to proclaim that nobody but them can look at the numbers and understand the situation. They sadly put out apologist groups to plead the case like what you will hear in the below interview. What they don’t want to discuss is why there is a financial crises. They simply discuss finance as if it were beyond their control. When listening to this interview ask these questions, if cutting only a million here, or there isn’t much because the numbers are so large, then why is it such a large savings that cutting busing to 9000 students will only save $600,000, then why cut busing? And how has Lakota done everything it can do before cutting busing. Did the LEA come to the bargaining table to renegotiate their contract? And how does the tax dollars stay in the district when the union spends the union dues on political candidates. One of the reasons the LEA wants its teachers to make so much is so that the teachers will want to pay their union dues without hardship. But nobody talks about any of that here. The sum of this discussion is that there isn’t an answer. These are nice parents that just want the system to work long enough for their children to get an education. Nobody wants to play the hot potato game when the music stops, and the music is stopping. All they can really do in an interview like this is paint over the dirt.

All businesses whether they are service oriented or manufacturing oriented have a responsibility to keep their costs in line. One way that businesses do that is to use the 10-80-10 rule as it’s applied to labor. That rule states that 10% of your workforce will be your typical “top” performers, and they will get the most dramatic increases, 4% to 15% depending on the situation. 80% of your workers are average, and will typically get a standard 2% to 3% increase, otherwise considered a “cost of living” increase. And of course every place of business has approximately 10% that are poor performers and they won’t get an increase of any kind. Why? Because those bottom 10% you want to look for another job, and you want them to leave so you don’t have to pay them. It gives you a chance to hire somebody that might want to compete for the top 10% percentile. If you manage things correctly, your bottom 10% are the kind of people that your competition is hiring at the middle 80%, and you want that so you can maintain a competitive edge.

What you don’t do is uniformly advance everyone in your place of business with some socialist “everybody is equal” policy like what we have in school systems, and unions advocate. That’s a disastrous concept and gives employees like Ryan Fahrenkemp time and the luxury of job security to participate in an evil deed like child pornography. I would argue from experience that if Ryan had to fear for his job, and didn’t feel comfortable hiding in the muddy 80%, he probably would have not indulged in his warped perversion while at school. He might have done it in hiding, or in his mother’s basement, but not with his students, and not with school equipment. And he certainly wouldn’t have been making 70K at only age 42 no matter how much experience he had with the amount of tenure he’d accumulated in a relatively short time.

I used Fahrenkemp as an example because he belonged in the bottom 10% and somebody didn’t do their job in the review process of weeding him out. And that didn’t happen because he was protected by the complicated process created by the OEA which the president of the LEA had been a big part of, and knew how to manipulate the system to the advantage of her members.

So I’d say to you Yes Lakota people, who say that I am misleading people. Who is doing the misleading?

I’d say you are, by telling the tax payers that the budget just “grows” on its own. That the school system had no way to deal with people like Fahrenkemp, and that all teachers are worth over 62K, and if the community doesn’t pay it, those beloved teachers will leave the district for another one.

I would say any teacher that would leave Lakota is only in it for the money, and those are personalities that I would rate low on a review, and may be tempted to put them on the bottom 10% anyway, so for them to leave would be desirable.

All the Yes Lakota people have to argue with is emotion,
• “The money is for the kids.” No it’s not, if it was, the LEA wouldn’t have threatened to strike in 2008 to get more money, and again in the spring of 2010.
• “We have to offer top pay for top teachers or they will leave.” No they won’t because the other districts are broke too and are getting ready to go through the same process Lakota is.
• “We have to protect property values by voting for the schools.” No you don’t. If taxes keep increasing that will kill real estate values anyway, tax payers in the district already pay $11 per $1000 assessment on their property.
• “I’m for education.” No you’re not. If you were, you’d keep the budget under $160 million. Throwing money at something doesn’t mean you’re for education. It means you don’t value the source of the money but want what the money can buy.
• “We have had explosive growth and must adjust to it.” Growth, like budgets can be controlled. If the cost is too high, growth will slow down, and growth will slow down because of the economy. Growth will also slow down from parents wanting to go to Lakota who aren’t willing to pay for the extra things they want, too. One of the reasons Yes People want sports and extracurricular activities is so enrollment will increase, so parents looking for those items can move to the district and participate cheaply. It’s all about job creating and getting parents used to programs that the district tax payers fund collectively. No different from colleges with NCAA programs that are nationally known for their sports, will see increases in enrollment. It’s always about increased enrollment so money can be justified.
• “The state is forcing us to all-day kindergarten.” No, the OEA lobbied to get all-day kindergarten passed, and the Republicans in the state house are getting ready to eliminate that unfunded mandate along with many other mandates lacking funding. So that anticipated requirement will be taken away from district budgets.
• “We have to spend $50,000 dollars to get the best superintendent we can get.” No, you are throwing money at the situation like you do everything else. It’s that kind of mentality that locked us into the contract with the LEA that is causing the current financial crises. Money does not equal quality. It seldom does. Money can be used to create competition, but it is useless without competition. If money is not getting you dramatic results, it is simply killing your budget.
• “Paying for a school levy keeps your money in the community.” No it doesn’t. The union dues collected by school unions are directly applied to liberal politicians that further perpetuate the bureaucratic mess creating expensive economic necessity. The OEA had revenue of over $62 million dollars in 2008. Where did that money come from? They don’t make any products that they can sell? Check the info for yourself here. http://teachersunionexposed.com/state.cfm?state=OH All that money comes from union dues, paid from the salaries of teachers that are paid exceptionally well by the local tax payers. The average pay at Lakota for teachers is 62K per year. So the money doesn’t stay in the community.

Those are just some examples of how the Yes Lakota people are misleading the good people of the Lakota District. And they will continue to treat the voters like the fools they believe they are as long as it works.

Get ready for the next levy announcement for May. They’ll do it because they don’t know how to do anything else but ask for more money.

And you Yes Lakota people go ahead and leave your comments. I’ll post them, and I’ll use them. People need to see your thoughts. For those of you wanting to see some of them, read the comments here. I am quite aware that there are many people at many levels reading all the posts I’ve put up here and you’re looking for a way to spin it to your advantage. For an example, have a look at the work David Little from Progress Ohio attempted. I’m happy to fight your sloppy facts with the truth and if you want to spin the community around and make them so dizzy they can’t tell which way is up or down, I’ll continue to prevent it, as I have. And I’ll do it because I love my community, and I want to see education continue to be an option for families in the future. But it won’t be in a form controlled by organized labor. Those days are over.

Don’t believe me; read this from your parent union the OEA, this is how bad the financial situation is. Even the union staff is threatening to strike and the union itself is participating in union busting strategies.

The Ohio Education Association and Its Goose

The executives of the Ohio Education Association sent a memo informing local presidents that if the union gave in to striking staffers’ demands, it would require an $80 to $90 dues increase per member. Such an increase would raise roughly $10 million. That sounded familiar to me, so I checked the archives and found this, in the May 8, 2000 EIA Communiqué:
Ohio Education Association in Severe Financial Straits. The last time the Ohio Education Association negotiated a staff contract, in September 1997, it resulted in a two-week strike, restraining orders against picketers, and a lot of bad publicity. That contract expires this year and it’s bad financial news all around for OEA, its members, and the staff. OEA recently informed its local presidents that the union is facing a projected deficit of $6.3 million for next year. The union is asking staff to accept benefit cuts totaling $4 million. The rest of the deficit would be eliminated through a dues increase of up to $25 per member.

“Specifically, and regrettably, we can no longer afford to sustain the current number of OEA employees at their current level of compensation and benefits and continue to provide the expected level of services and programs without significantly raising OEA dues for you and every other member,” reads a memo from OEA President Mike Billirakis and Executive Director Robert Barkley.

Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.eiaonline.com/intercepts/2010/09/03/the-ohio-education-association-and-its-goose/

If our community is going to continue to be a “great” and “excellent” district, we have to get in front of this problem. Not avoid it by tossing more money at the problem. And the Yes Lakota people need to listen to the No Lakota People, because the solution is in good business strategy. The same tired old bullet points won’t be valid any longer. I’ll make sure of it.

Now, these video links exist elsewhere on this site, but I’ll put links here for your convenience. These are radio spots specifically dealing with education issues. Feel free to listen to the hours and hours of debate so you can form your own opinion about things. There are many radio personalities here, so the view points are varied. But the topics and discussions are fantastic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sIDwFW6tFA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxd5XO54o68
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPwhFbsTmww
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXEIUPRRxAQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r09fAoSAQhM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJETAE1iXw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAX20OsiIS0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHPjBY8UY98
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7f6iBfFxV0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDvFo_v24Y0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG9vYWHO6OM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RynERHb3jBU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU57EDXLxtw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhAeyuLovtk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoviASrmQBw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDW98mhSyPQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vtoC9QosaA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w9zXhNdw_M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrblE1gu4lU

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

The Taxpayers Deserve Better: Evil Prevails When Good People Do Nothing

It was a busy weekend and there was a lot of mud getting slung on the eve of the busing cuts. Once the owner of the Starkerz Bar and Grill, discussed in the audio clip from the Darryl Parks show on January 17, 2011, stated that she was willing to provide a statement that she’d stand behind, I felt comfortable to tell the story.

Even so, telling that story made me sick, because the whole event seems so petty. I don’t like being in the middle of that kind of thing, “mudslinging” but I am often reminded of how the Pro Side came after me when David Little was hired to attempt to smear my name with obvious attempts at slander. For instance, in that now famous six paragraph letter, there were 4 complete lies about me proclaimed in the body of the letter, along with several statements not even closely rooted to the truth, but designed to anger the people reading the letter.

I confronted Little about what he wrote, and he lied to me again, telling me that he hadn’t sent that letter to anyone. What he didn’t know was that I was tipped off by more than one person in the press, and Little confirmed my suspicions when he assumed the leak was WLW, which it wasn’t.

But that’s the game these people chose to play and every time I see them perpetuating the games progress, it reminds me of why these out-of-control budgets need to be brought into a realistic expectation.

Darryl mentioned that I did the Lakota Levy all by myself. It feels that way some of the time, but that’s not the case. There are lots of good people behind me. Most of them wanted to think about something else after the election, and to enjoy the holidays. The outrage over the bar and grill story brought many people’s minds back into the subject lately because that story is a very personal issue with many involved and is so openly wrong.

I’ve stayed with this topic all this time because the education system needs to be fixed, and the people getting in the way are bullies. They may wear perfume and dress nice. They may have a smile on their faces when they do the bullying, but the behavior I keep seeing has no other name.

And tax payers deserve better. And they are going to have it…………………………………….

So those of you that are up to no good, and want to play these games, remember, there will be leaks. And when I get them, I’ll post them. I won’t do it until someone is willing to stand behind the statements. There has to be proof. But I will hold those accountable that wish to bully others into turning a blind eye to the disingenuous behavior exhibited toward our community tax payers.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

“B” Day is Coming!!!!!! Lakota’s dreaded busing cuts!

“B” Day is coming! “B” Day is the day that the school busing cuts are implemented.

On January 18th, Lakota will proceed to cut busing to students K through 8th grade within a mile radius. And all high school students will lose their busing.

I remember in 2005 when the same program was implemented except it was only half as tough, the radius was only a half mile. My wife had already been driving my kids to school each day so we didn’t think life would change much.

On January 7, 2011 I went on WLW to talk about this experience with Doc Thompson along with a number of other issues that center around the growing budget problems regarding school funding. We had a great discussion that covered a lot of ground. Worth listening to!

Instantly, the day of the “B” Day in 2005, the roads filled students trying to get to school, and what used to take 15 minutes turned into 30 to 40 minutes of roads loaded with the extra traffic. Accidents happened and my wife was an unfortunate victim. She had a collision with an inexperienced young driver that was cast into a situation he wasn’t prepared for. The boy didn’t have enough experience to be driving, and had been rushed through his licensing process because his parents couldn’t drive him to school.

The airbags deployed in the collision to our beloved Jeep Grand Cherokee which was paid off and a wonderful vehicle which totaled the vehicle even though it only sustained a damaged bumper. Because of the air bag deployment the cost of repair exceeded what insurance agreed to pay for the repair.

That Jeep Cherokee was an unfortunate victim to the “B” Day of 2005.

The “B” Day of 2011 will be equally devastating for some unfortunate victim, because when you put that many people on the road at the same time, bad things are bound to happen. And when it does, remember that cutting busing which only saves $600,000 this year, and 2.8 million next year only represents a fraction of the overall operating budget. For every bus they keep off the road the school system saves $70K.

Also remember that the school system was paying Ryan Fahrenkamp, the Lakota teacher busted in January for child pornography with a school computer involving students of his class, 70K a year. That teacher cost the same as operating a bus for one year. I think a bus is more valuable than a pervert teacher that stayed hidden behind layers of union protections for the last 2 years. But that’s just my opinion.

The leadership of Lakota thinks it’s more efficient to take away buses. That’s why we have budget problems.  Just so everyone remembers the last levy attempt and the numbers numbers involved, here is a collection of the media blitz in the final days prior to the vote.

It’s important to remember how we got here, and the smoke screens that get put in place to make you forget.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com