Category: Union

The Flip Flop of Steve Chabot: Who is the media?

There are so many things wrong with the Steve Chabot town hall meeting on Monday, August 22, 2011 where he had the police confiscate the cameras of citizens recording his speech.  Before I get into the details of this listen to Doc Thompson of 700 WLW cover the two videos he put on his blog site, both of them from Progress Ohio which shows the terrible act being committed.

After the whole issue blew up, and Doc was covering it on WLW, Chabot attempted to clarify that in the future, he would make the policy clear that only the media would be allowed to have cameras during a town hall meeting.  Well, that created so much of an uproar on 700 WLW that later in the day Chabot came out and said that there would not be any rules about cameras in the future.  The reason it created an uproar is that the media cannot always be trusted, and politicians for way too long have learned to manipulate the media to make themselves look better.   

One of the greatest benefits of this modern age is that everyday people can also be part of the media.  With all the video cameras out there, and cell phones, and blog sites like this one, politicians can no longer wine and dine members of the media to mold their public image.  People have to actually be what they say they are, and that’s a great aspect of our current age.  This is why schools can’t get away with ripping off the tax payers anymore with fluffy terminology, because it is no longer just newspapers and television that are covering the “feel good” stories that shape public opinion.  Because of the internet and YouTube specifically a political blunder can now be seen, and not pushed under the rug so bad behavior can continue.  Stories like the Stacy Schuler case in Mason can no longer be “controlled” by a public relations media personality, because there are other ways for the public to get at the truth, or at least remember the event.  So politicians like Steve Chabot who are aware that his enemies, Progress Ohio are in attendance at his town hall meeting have tried to control their public image just like the policy shown in the video, of police confiscating the public video cameras.   Progress Ohio clearly was looking to rattle Chabot and get video they could use against him in a future campaign. Chabot has to be a good enough of a politician to stay away from double-talk and not give those people any ammunition.  But no politician has a right to “censor” their public image in a public forum.  That just isn’t something that can be allowed to happen.

Now, here’s the worst aspect of this situation……..it’s the fact that without any knowledge of the law, the police on the whim of a politician, can instruct the police to do their bidding.  Those police officers had no right to confiscate one single video camera.  If Chabot wanted to enforce a video camera policy, it was up to his staff to provide that security.  The police department cannot be used as his personal enforcement service.  And as to the early comments that Chabot uttered about only the media would be allowed to film events, that brings up the question, who is the media?  Is it the media that only the politician likes?  Is it the media that represents the major television stations?  Is it just the media like newspapers who have reporters that are kind to the political entity, of course not.  The media are the people who chose to cover it, so in this day and age, every member of society is a member of the media, and that’s the way it has to be.  So no politician has a right to pick and chose who covers them if they are a public official. 

I’m happy that Steve did the right thing in the end.  I’m sure his intentions were good, because he knew the sharks were in the water.  But this is a perfect example of how good intentions can pave the path to hell, because police powers were abused, private rights were abused, and trust in the government was violated all because a politician wished to control his public image with censorship.  That is the path that has placed our current political system into such a shambles, it is decades and decades of this kind of “censorship” that is just now being challenged because it is only in the last decade that virtually every citizen in America has their own video camera and access to the internet in order to convey the truth as they see it.  So the dynamic has changed for the better, and politicians must adjust to that dynamic because the dishonesty of politics can no longer be shoved under the rug to hide which just mounts up to a hugely expensive government full of dishonest people who stay in office because they had control of the media.

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

Lakota gets a Good Grade: But didn’t they say the world would end without a levy?

Wow, I came home to a flood of email today from parents upset about the busing cuts, and even angrier at the school system for not dealing with the excessively high salaries before taking away busing to their children. It looks like many people are starting to see how this scam works, and that is good to see. I’ll deal with that in another article because I think the bigger story is the recent rating that Lakota received from the ODE. Remember the busing cuts are only around 3% of the total budget, and it is the labor costs that make up 80% of the school budget, so let’s keep that in context.

Before we get into the details have a look at the various interviews from me, and those of the Yes Lakota people prior to the election of 2010 from the clip above. Listen to what the Yes Lakota people say will happen if the levy isn’t passed, then compare that information to the results you will see below and decide for yourself what’s fact from fiction.

As Lakota received news that they received from the Ohio Department of Education an “excellent” rating for the 10th year in a row, I was actually surprised. I fully expected with all the cuts and controversy of the last year to see a lower rating, after all that’s what the pro levy people said would happen if we didn’t pass a levy last fall, and even the school board said as much. But the levy didn’t pass, the district made deep cuts, yet last year the rating was 104.9, but this year the rating went up to 105.9. How did that happen? Below is the article from the Pulse Journal by Steven Mathews. Have a look for yourself.

_______________________
Lakota’s top state ranking 
puts district in elite group
Excellent with Distinction honor draws praise from community, school board members.

By Steven Matthews, Staff Writer 10:16 AM Wednesday, August 24, 2011

LIBERTY TWP. — The Lakota Local School District’s Board of Education met on Monday night, and much of the session was centered around the big news that was announced last week — the Excellent with Distinction honor awarded by the state for the 2010-11 year.

The meeting, which included a PowerPoint presentation from Assistant Superintendent Lon Stettler and praise from community members, lasted about 90 minutes at the Lakota Central Office.

“Despite the challenges that we had last year and we continue to go through, the focus is where it needs to be — in the classroom,” board member Lynda O’Connor said.

Stettler emphasized in his presentation that Lakota — the seventh-largest district in Ohio — was the largest district to receive the state’s highest honor.

It’s the 10th straight year that Lakota has earned the highest possible honor, and its 105.9 performance index is an all-time district high.

“In the last 10 years, we’ve experienced changing demographics,” President Joan Powell said.
“It demonstrates that our staff has risen to the occasion.”

• New Superintendent Karen Mantia said that she has met with several focus groups, which consisted of residents, business leaders, government officials and parents. She also plans to meet with students once the school year gets underway.

“Here’s what I learned,” Mantia said. “It’s absolutely imperative that if we do nothing else, we make sure we maximize our children’s performance, and maximize the staff’s performance and expertise. … Across the board, they all understand the expectation of our staff is high.”

• The board approved a policy to either provide a cell phone or a cell phone stipend of $60 per month for certain district positions. Chris Passarge, the executive director of business operations, said most eligible employees chose the stipend.

• The board also approved the acceptance of a $2,000 eTech Ohio grant that has been awarded to the Lakota East Freshman School.

Tamera Terndrup, a Spanish teacher at the school, will use the grant to purchase four wireless laptops with microphone headsets.
___________________________

I think that’s excellent news about the rating, the rest of those issues I’ll cover in another article, but it proves what the No Lakota people have been saying all along, for the school to do more with less, and you’ll find better results when you’re lean and mean. Oddly enough, Lakota did not even have a superintendent during this rating increase, so what does that mean? Lakota made cuts to their deficit, eliminated positions, cut busing, sports programs and electives and they did all this without a superintendent, yet their rating went up, not down on the heels of a failed levy.

Even more baffling are the comments of Superintendent Mantia in that article where she says after her short time at Lakota, “Here’s what I learned, It’s absolutely imperative that if we do nothing else, we make sure we maximize our children’s performance, and maximize the staff’s performance and expertise…..across the board, they all understand the expectation of our staff is high.” WHAT??????????????????? What does any of that mean? Doesn’t Lakota always maximize its performance and understand that the expectations are high?

The answer is no. Until the No Lakota Levy group came along and started challenging everything that the school was doing in order to defeat the last two levies, the school district and its employees had been cruising along. Once the public in the form of No Lakota Levy came along, that anti-tax group had taken the role of “management” in the community, a role the school board had not been performing. It is because of No Lakota Levy breathing down the neck of all these officials that the costs of education at Lakota have come down, and the rating actually went up from this year compared with last year.

I’m not unnecessarily taking credit for the good work the administrators did in this endeavor. But they knew that they would be challenged so they have tip-toed around trying to be creative in their financing and still perform at a high level, which we all expect as a district. But it is the Lakota School Boards job to do what No Lakota Levy has been doing. I would personally prefer to do something else with my time, but since my elected officials have shown “no fight” in standing up to the organized labor forces that have embedded themselves in public education using tax increases to hide their terrible management of that labor, I am actually angered that myself along with a small army of businessman in the community have to actually do their job for them by showing them what kind of questions to ask, and understanding where that line is in our community of when too much is too much. The school board was supposed to be doing that all along, but they didn’t.

The reason for Mantia’s comments being what they are is now that she’s arrived here and got her feet wet, she is realizing that Lakota did really well without her, without a levy increase, and now she really can’t do anything but fail. She has come into a district at the top of its game and she really can’t expect to improve it. So here’s the question, and I’m sure this is bouncing around in her head also, why she should cost the district a quarter million dollars in costs just for her employment expenses? (To see a breakdown of what she costs the district CLICK HERE)

The school board hired Mantia because they are still stuck in an old formula of organized labor education philosophy which is based on the failed economic Keynesian economic models of Europe. But Lakota has proven that it can do more with less, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more savings to be gained if only the school board would “manage” its labor costs and if the community could free itself from the organized labor elements of the teaching profession. This can be done if the people in Ohio will simply vote YES to keep S.B.5 on Issue 2. That simple step would go a long way to allowing future school boards to drive down the cost of education even more than Lakota has, while still maintaining their excellence. (Click here to learn what S.B.5 does for you)

The rhetoric that schools utter when they proclaim that if they don’t get more money is the same old tired diatribes that all labor utters when they are asked to do more with less. The problem with organized labor is they threaten to strike if they don’t get what they want, and will walk off the job like infants who don’t get a pacifier and it is that element in this whole equation that has driven up these labor costs and dictated these levy requests, and that is the hidden message behind Mrs. Mantia’s comments. She has been hired to preserve that empire, not to drive down costs, because the real savings is in dismantling the empire of education so that the children of these schools actually see the money, and not political labor unions attempting to finance their enterprises with a straw into our wallets and purses as a lifeline of finance, as they empty us to only fill themselves.

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

Ronald Reagan was a Communist: Yes, the president was once a union leader

I received a video link from a big-time pro union fellow who thought somehow I would be devastated to learn that the Great Ronald Reagan had been president of the Screen Actors Guild, early in his career. He wrote to me, “Your hero used to be a union leader. The idol of the Republican Party was an actual leader of a union. Do you still hate unions?” Well, the answer to this guy is…………….YES! Here is that video: 

Click the link,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvGMPhBVSI&feature=channel_video_title

 

 

 

This guy exhibited all the reasons why I dislike unions so much in his statement. People like him are stuck in a fixated emotional level of social development, and they will always stay in a kind of stagnate existence because of it. This person believes that because at some point in Ronald Reagan’s life, when he was a young man still unwise to the ways of the world, the fact that he was a union leader would somehow erase all the good the man did as a “Great Communicator” at the end of his life, or that by somehow me finding out about it would invalidate my claims against unions because “my hero” once supported unions so because Ronald Reagan is my leader, I should support unions too.

Here’s the issue, and the big difference between a guy like me, and a guy like this union person, who is very similar to most of the type of people who join a union or even a political party……..I read. Most of them do not.

I did know about Ronald Reagan’s early life because I read about him in the great book Dutch, by Edmund Morris, the very controversial book about Reagan that many Reagan supporters despised because it took away many of the myths about the man and focused on his real talent, which was “communicating,” and I learned all about the communist phase of his life. Reagan when he was an actor in Hollywood wasn’t much different from someone like Matt Damon is now, a naive, idealistic guy who has a decent intellect, but became wealthy and popular at a young age and lacks truly hard work in his life. Reagan coming from the Midwest had plenty of common sense, but becoming an actor and hanging out with starlets and all the powerful people in Los Angeles did go to his head. Communism was migrating into the United States in the 20’s and 30’s and it was the new fad in Hollywood, much like it is today. And Ronald Reagan loved it; he even applied to join the Communist Party of the United States. Reagan’s friends were communists, and even though his wife Jane wasn’t very interested in politics, she did go with the flow of communism because that was what people talked about at dinner parties, so she was too.

And the unions that formed at the time were heavily infected with communists. Several of the entertainment unions took a page of activism directly from the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of 1917. At the Warner Brothers lot set designers had suddenly become aggressive mobs turning over cars and protesting over pay. Reagan was the reluctant leader of these mobs and was a sympathizer.

It was when Reagan had to go to England to film a movie at Elstree Studios that the impact of socialism, which leads to communism shocked him to his Midwestern core. Karl Marx had done much of his work while in London and it is also in London that Keynesian economics was being experimented with. The result was a landscape of culture that had an oppressive sameness to it, and was a dreary environment for the very imaginative young Ronald Reagan. It was during this film at Elstree Studios that Reagan decided that communism was the great evil of the world.

Reagan came back to his Hollywood friends a changed man; it was so noticeable that his wife lost interest in him leading to their eventual divorce. Reagan stayed on as the President of the Screen Actors Guild but had lost interest in the politics of communism. As Reagan’s acting career came to an end due to his age, he used his position within the guild to stay in the loop and carry him to the next phase of his life, politics.

Reagan had a very strong sense of right and wrong and he did name the communist sympathizers during the McCarthy hearings within his union, because he saw that communism was a serious threat to the United States and felt it was his obligation to the security of the country. That doesn’t make him a traitor; it makes him a person who had been sick and had healed through growing knowledge and understanding. By allowing his mind to expand with new information he grew as a person who eventually was able to go from a union president to a President who stood against the unions in the air traffic control controversy where he fired them for trying to strike.


 

The reason Reagan was so good was because he grew in intellect and political theory unlike this guy who sent me that video, as though “Union Brother Reagan” should always behave like a fool with limited perspective like the rest of his brothers and sisters stuck in a communist funk. The assumption was because Reagan turned against the union, he was somehow a trader.

This is another reason why unions always fail. They behave with this tribe-like behavior which limits personal growth. Since their focus is on group oriented, collective behavior they are doomed to fail as individuals and their thoughts will remain fixed on a period of their lives which had their last explosive development, and for many of them that will be high school. I know many adults who are 40 and 50 years old who are still as mentally immature as they were when they were 15, 16, and 17 years old. That is because they stopped growing as people and are “stuck” emotionally in that time period.

In my own life there isn’t a single human being on planet Earth that I’d consider my “leader.” There is no voice that could call to me and demand my time and attention for some task outside of my individual desires. This does not mean I can’t work with people toward a common goal, because I do in many ways, but that form of collaboration is completely foreign to the mind of the “union” type who is “stuck” in some archaic form of thought which belongs to the mentality of a child. Most of my friends are 20 and 30 years older than I am because I relate to those people more than most people my age, because through a life-time of living they have grown to understand what’s important and what’s not, and how to think for themselves instead of some collective group of fools stuck in some static thought pattern craving communism.

This is the triumph of Ronald Reagan, he made the journey from a small-town, clean-cut Midwestern kid, to a Hollywood movie star, a communist leaning union leader, then “learned” that communism was the path of decline and adjusted his thinking which cost him friends and a wife, and to a large extent his career as an actor. But Reagan took what he learned and rebuilt himself as an advocate of capitalism, becoming a spokesman for GE, then Governor of California, then the communist fighting President of the United States. It was the journey of a complete human being who halfway through realized that he was on the wrong path, so he made the corrections and became a great person who helped preserve the United States of America during a tough period of the cold war.

Great personalities aren’t necessarily born straight out of their mother’s womb. Such assumptions are the thoughts of fools hoping for a savior to rescue them from a mundane life because the fool is too lazy to save themselves. Great personalities are forged from the fires of life, through a lifetime of experience that learn which ideas of theirs are good, and which are bad to arrive at a place where it is wisdom that rules, not the diatribes of some mad politician fixated on a set of ideas created by the minds of infantile children.

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

Politicians Damn the Tea Party to HELL: More reasons for voting YES on ISSUE 2

Maxine Waters and many others of her political persuasion are damning the Tea Party to Hell for wanting to undo all the mistakes those progressive politicians have made over the last century. So before I get into Maxine and the rest of this issue please review the following video which I included on my article about WHY PUBLIC UNIONS FAIL (CLICK HERE TO READ AND VIEW THE FANTASTIC VIDEOS ON THAT ARTICLE) This video paints the picture of our current political situation extremely well. So before you do anything else, WATCH THIS!

What is happening in states like Ohio, New Jersey, and Wisconsin are people like myself, who are absolutely sick of politics, tired of the double-talk, tired of new legislation buried in the back of another bill similar to the practice of EARMARKING and PORK BARREL spending, are hiring strong governors who are not in bed with labor unions to bring down the costs of doing business in our states. I don’t care where a governor like Kasich came from, I hired him to do one job, and that’s to balance Ohio’s budget, and I don’t want the public unions to pull him to their side like shown in that video. That has been the problem for many, many, many years and this is the cause of the strong governors we are starting to see emerge, such as Chris Christie in New Jersey who is bringing public sector reforms to his state. Listen to his most recent endeavor here:

In Ohio, Kasich and the House and Senate in spite of being Republican are attempting for the first time in my lifetime to actually fix something in state government. And that something is a tremendous huge fix that to the labor unions may feel far-reaching, but it’s really not. I think Senate Bill 5, otherwise known as Issue 2 is extremely fair and it has infuriated me that people like Bill Cunningham who have claimed to be a Tea Party leaning American have been so critical about S.B.5 and all this so-called “fairness” he keeps talking about. Where was all this fairness when progressives like Maxine Waters, and Barney Frank and Ohio’s own Ted Strickland and Bob Taft have been stuffing new legislation down our throats for years which only strengthened the public sector union against their boss……..the American People! It was a relief to hear Tom Niehaus come on 700 WLW to defend S.B.5 against all the misinformation created by the labor unions to convince busy voters that this bill is somehow “unfair,” that the process from which the bill was written was bad, and corrupt in some way. Listen to that broadcast here:

The facts of the matter are that Tea Party American’s are finally starting to stick up for themselves. They are tired of being pushed around, lied to, manipulated, disrespected, and over-looked because we don’t stuff money in politician’s pockets to get our way. We are sick of it, and people like Maxine Waters doesn’t like it, so she’s doing the manipulative thing and going to her political base, who she is obviously using to her own advantage, taking advantage of a demographic group that isn’t asking the hard questions but is content to sit with their mouths open waiting for someone to feed them. Those are the people who give Maxine power, and make her believe she has a right to damn Tea Party American’s to HELL! What she is really worried about is that those Tea Party Americans are about to discover just how corrupt and terrible her party has been against all Americans under the light of day.

Barney Frank is worried about the same thing; watch him here pretending that he is somehow superior to his bosses, the American People. He knows that it is the labor union empire, that tyrannical beast of complacency that operates like organized crime lords and stuffs his pockets, and those are his masters. And it is his job to eliminate that threat to his bosses. That’s what he’s doing here.

But this game is over. People like me support Senate Bill 5, (ISSUE 2) because I want this empire off my back and out of my tax dollars. I don’t want them infecting my elected representatives in ANY way. I don’t want them manipulating my school board, my trustees, my city councils, my state legislators, my Governor. I don’t want them in my White House. I don’t want them in my life at all; because history has shown me that they are wrong, misguided and dangerous to the American way of life. And already they are declaring that they are willing to go to war with people in the Tea Party. I find that comment laughable.

It is not they who are the silent majority, the sleeping giant as they claim to be with Senate Bill 5. It is the normal people who are in their garages working on their cars on a Saturday afternoon watching NASCAR, it is the farmer, the engineers, the architects, the businessman, the “masses” out there that are the sleeping giant and they are beginning to stir. Senate Bill 5 is just the start of their intentions, and these new politicians are “their” politicians. We are tired of the back room deals; we are tired of being told that more taxes will solve the problem because it never does. We are sick of the light at the end of the tunnel being drug down the hall so we can never catch it. We are tired of the process and Senate Bill 5 (Issue 2) helps us reset the table so real “fairness” can finally play out in government.

Maxine Waters doesn’t know what she just did when she publicly spoke to God Almighty and asked for the Tea Party to be damned to hell because it is desired to take away the corrupt influence of progressives like her upon the states and nation of our political system. What Maxine Waters and her kind are doing is declaring war against America, which reveals what the intentions have always been from her party. So the time for suspicion of their intentions has passed and it is hoped that through legislation we can defeat these foes against our Constitution. But it looks like legislation may not be enough, because these desperate manipulators are willing to fight for all the “progressive” gains they’ve achieved at our expense and that may lead to real violence if it is not suppressed now, before the situation really gets out of control. Because if she will use that kind of language in public, God only knows what she says behind closed doors, and that’s where the real battle plans are constructed.

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

Why Public Labor Unions Fail: The Science of Stagnation

It is one thing to say that communism, or labor unions do not work, that they are bad for American society, and history shows us that the typical result when these collective organizations have a majority rule are either a stagnate society or a declining one. The benefits of collective ideas when it comes to social construction are short-lived and only last a few generations. But the big question is why? What is the science behind this failure?

Well, there is a science to it, a predictable path that can be witnessed and predicted accurately as to why labor unions and other collective organizations are doomed to failure. For such a science I turn to the work of Robert Pirsig, which came to my mind while I was writing another article about the needs for voting YES on Issue 2. Click here to see that article:

Pirsig many years ago came up with a definition, a way of determining the “quality” of something that needs to be understood in reference to what I’m about to say. I created a chart which articulates this definition of quality into two types, Romantic and Classic. So click here to see that chart and learn a bit about these two types. But for the purpose of understanding why unions are doomed to fail understanding that there is a science behind determining the quality of something is important and can be obtained with mathematic certainty.

Once the quality of something is determined then that quality can be broken down into two types, Static Quality and Dynamic Quality. Static Quality tends to be all the rules of society, or the rules of your business. Static Quality is the rules that everything runs off of. One of the reasons that I like Robert Pirsig is that he has done the work of understanding the classic Greek thinkers, but where the classics fall short, because metaphysically, society has advanced, we now know of quantum physics and have an understanding of how the universe works that is based on much better data than the astronomical observations made with primitive telescopes. So our society has advanced, and the force that drives that expansion is Dynamic Quality. An example of Dynamic Quality would be Leonardo Da Vinci, or Bill Gates, people who brought radical changes in thought to the Static Quality of the rules society had previously lived by. Pirsig is the most recent philosopher to take into consideration this Dynamic Quality change with the new science discovered in the most recent century.

Dynamic Quality are the rebels of society, or even of a body. They are the cells of a body that fight off diseases and strengthen an immune system or they are the people who challenge conventional thought and force an expansion of human understanding. Between the two types of Quality, both types are needed. Without Static Quality everything would fly apart, and chaos would rule. Dynamic Quality needs Static Quality to keep some sense of order in existence. But Static Quality also needs Dynamic Quality to allow it to grow. In fact in organizations where Dynamic Quality is stifled Static Quality has shown to actually proceed in an evolutionary decline. Without the presence of a Dynamic Quality regression of an organism or an organization is the natural next process. This could be said to be the cause of aging in human beings, or the decline of cultures the human beings have built. This can also be seen in sports organizations that become complacent and do the same things over and over and why some teams are always competitive because they are always seeking to bring a “dynamic” quality to their teams. Maintaining a dynamic order to anything is the key to any measure of success. But you must do so while still maintaining a sense of order, otherwise known as Static Quality.

Labor unions fail because in order to preserve their Static Quality, which is the focus of all their endeavors, they destroy any chance of allowing Dynamic Quality into their organization to help challenge their beliefs and expand their culture. So instead, they are a culture on decline.

A decline in culture can be seen most evidently in inner cities where the problem is not one of race. It is of losing the aspects of their Dynamic Culture. When welfare and other government care is introduced to the culture and the parents of the children of that culture are no longer pushing young people to become “dynamic” then the individuals who have these tendencies will turn their efforts into a destructive behavior that leads to their premature deaths or they move away from the inner city leaving the Static Quality of the inner city belief system to rule, which leads to the decline that can seen by everyone.

This is also the reason why public education is failing, is because the dynamic individuals are punished by being different rather than celebrated or challenged for the health of confrontation. The dynamic elements are attacked like a cell in a body would attack a white blood cell in the body because the white blood cell is different from the common cell. This process leads to disease in the body the same as it does in society. The result is no different.

This explanation is but a fraction of what I could say on this topic. In fact, I could write volumes of books on the matter, but for the novice in this field, the person who normally doesn’t think about these kinds of things, this should at least suffice to demonstrate that there is an order to all this discussion about central organization from government, or labor unions and understanding why the work and products they produce always seem flat and unimportant. It is because by their very nature; they spend their energy as organizations fighting off their Dynamic Quality competitors in order to protect the Static Quality of their existence.

So the argument is not one of union busting, Republicans or Democrats, or young against old. It’s not the Middle Class against the “rich.” It is simply about the battle between Static Quality and Dynamic Quality being stifled which is the direct cause of decline in any culture, and that is the premier reason why labor unions and government will always fail.

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

Why to Vote YES on Issue 2: Being bold and doing the right thing

Was it the novel Lila that stated, “Once a thief is caught a whole string of crimes is often solved? Yes, it was Robert Pirsig who had articulated my thoughts as I heard Sheriff Jones and Bill Cunningham argue against Senate Bill 5 promoting a repeal attempt. Sheriff Jones as a traditional Republican is working against Governor Kasich with many assumptions that have fed much of the misinformation about Senate Bill 5. Jones was very critical about Kasich offering the unions a seat at the negotiating table which can be seen below. The unions did not show up, and Kasich explains the situation to the press.

On the front of that meeting Sheriff Jones and I both spent a considerable amount of time on 700 WLW debating Senate Bill 5. Sheriff Jones’s position same as Bill Cunningham’s is one to protect the unions who they have either worked for or have done work in other capacities. So their arguments are the same basic union talking points based on party politics, emotion, and obscurity that we are hearing from union leaders like Richard Trumka. That important discussion can be heard here and is well worth listening.

There isn’t much about Senate Bill 5 that a public sector union supporter will like, and this is the cause of much of the misinformation, the protests and the divisive comments. And among the Republicans they are split over this issue, because S.B.5 is not the typical piece of legislation that is rooted in political gains. I have met Senator Jones on a couple of occasions now and several other legislators who were involved in the creation of Senate Bill 5 and I haven’t detected any level of maliciousness among them. It is quite the opposite. In fact, you can CLICK HERE to see a couple of them speaking at a School Choice event on the eve of this very issue way back in January of 2011. They knew then that this was going to be a tough fight because the public union worker, of which Sheriff Jones is a part, have grown too powerful and control too many of the costs. It is too late for elected leaders to “just say no” as Sheriff Jones proclaimed. That time has passed and time is of the essence. And, as I will show you in a clip below, just saying no is not so easy.

When Sheriff Jones says that the public boards of education, trustees and council members need to do their jobs and say no to these unions, that’s an unrealistic answer. Jones has managed to control his costs and lay-off workers depending on his budgets, but he’s done plenty arm twisting of county commissioners to get a good budget for himself, and he’s also openly supported the double-dipping process among his deputies, which is a legal loop-hole created by union lobby power purchased by the union dues paid by members.

So the process is not nearly as smooth as Sheriff Jones attempts to articulate. When he says all these elected officials have to do is say “NO” he is being completely misleading. To illustrate the reason why Kasich did not initially sit down and attempt to negotiate with the unions in a one on one sit down is for all the reasons heard in this broadcast from Darryl Parks way back in December of 2010 where the police and firefighter unions went ballistic over a PowerPoint presentation. This is not the exception, the kind of yelling and screaming you’ll hear in this broadcast. The only reason the public unions have been quiet in the year of 2011 is because they are afraid of Senate Bill 5 and they are putting on their best face in order to win over the public to repeal the law the November. But the broadcast below happened before Senate Bill 5 was even talked about, and it is because of this radicalism that the authors of Senate Bill 5 did what they thought was right knowing full well they would be relentlessly attacked in a massive public relations campaign and they knew that it was going to hurt. It was kind of like going to the dentist knowing that it was going to hurt, but they just had to put up with it so they could get their teeth fixed. LISTEN TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE POLICE UNION THEN LISTEN TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE FIREFIGHTERS UNION. (By the way, I think John Kasich did exactly as Darryl demanded of the councilwoman in this interview, Kasich does not care if he gets reelected. He’s trying to do the right thing which I’ll show below, and that earns him my support because he’s trying hard to be honest in spite of traditional politics. I judge a man by his actions, not by the spin. (The casino situation and union positions are all spin designed to make him play ball)

Now that I’ve had a chance to understand what finally made it through the final approval of Senate Bill 5 I find it baffling that anyone thinks it’s unfair in some way. As I have looked it over as a neutral observer who recognizes that reforms need to be implemented, Senate Bill 5 is extremely fair and well thought out. The only trouble with it is that it goes against the grain of “traditional” politics. It’s a uniquely bold piece of legislation that does not come about very often in politics. It is the kind of political fix that millions upon millions of Americans secretly yearn for because it is understood how difficult it would have been to do even one of the reforms listed below. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO SHANNON JONES HERSELF. WHO IS SHE? WHAT WAS HER MOTIVE…….FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF.

• I think the greatest aspect of ISSUE 2 (Senate Bill 5) is that it protects employees from unwanted union membership. The practice of government union contracts requiring employees to pay fees to a union has been ended in this bill which means the unfair practice of withdrawing money from their paychecks for union use is over. The bill does not outlaw unions, but provides the option to join or not, which I think is absolutely essential.

• Another thing ISSUE 2 stands for is it eliminates binding arbitration. What that means is that the current system allows an unelected, out-of-town mediator to settle government employee contract disputes. We see this all the time in school districts where a federal mediator is called in to bring school boards and union leaders together, and this is a process that we have all become numb to, but it is highly corrosive. This means that someone with no direct accountability to the voters decides how to spend our tax dollars. Senate Bill 5 says those decisions should be made by the people who answer directly to the taxpayers, which is what Sheriff Jones says he wants. But he left out the process of how a person in his position has to play “politics” smartly to win over the arbitrator. Most elected officials are not as “smooth” at it as he is, or do they have the ability to pad the pockets of county commissioners with their personal “war chests.” That is part of the dark side of politics that get left out of the discussion, and Senate Bill 5 is written to eliminate that type of political maneuvering. IT HAPPENS IN EVERY DISTRICT AND MUNICAPALTIY TO VARYING DEGREES.

• Senate Bill 5 Prohibits government workers from striking. Police currently cannot strike but school teachers can, and Senate Bill 5 eliminates this practice. I can speak from the case of Lakota Local Schools where in 2008 the teachers threatened to walk off the job shortly after the district passed a school levy. The teachers demanded better wages and better insurance rates and they were willing to walk off the job in October of 2008 if those demands were not met. The school board buckled under the pressure and the unions got their way in an undisclosed settlement. Over the next 2 years the cost of labor at Lakota shot up 10.1%, so the teachers got their money then again in the spring of 2010 they were ready to strike again, this time over insurance contributions. A federal mediator came in and helped resolve the issue. If the strike attempt had not occurred Lakota would not need to come to voters for a school levy in 2011, which they are. This practice is happening all over Ohio and it must be stopped. Federal government employees have long been prohibited from striking, a policy upheld by liberal Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama. In fact, it was Roosevelt, an advocate of organized labor in the private sector who was opposed to collective bargaining among government employees so much that he called strikes “unthinkable and intolerable.” CLICK HERE TO SEE THE EXECUTIVE ORDER PRESIDENT KENNEDY SIGNED TO MAKE PUBLIC UNIONS LEGAL, SOMETHING THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN DONE.

• Senate Bill 5 is asking public employees to pay 15% of their benefits. A vast majority of Ohioans pay an average of 31% of their family health care coverage. For too long government employees have paid less than 9% and that type of disparity between public and private sector benefits must end. It’s not only unsustainable, but unfair to the tax payers who pay the salaries of their public workers. As Sheriff Jones says, “But we public workers pay taxes too,” well not exactly. The value of the initial money comes from the original tax payer for the services rendered by the public employee. The government is simply using taxation as a way to keep some of the public workers pay. The value of the money to begin with was created by someone in the private sector. The taxes that a government worker pays only helps prevent some of the slide of declining revenue that is happening around the pension requirements, sky rocketing Medicare costs, and other entitlement programs that are draining state and federal budgets.

• Senate Bill 5 rewards performance rather than longevity. Most Ohioans work under this system in the private sector. They’re retained and rewarded based on the job they do, not on how long they’ve been on the job. Teachers for a long time have attempted to keep any kind of performance assessment out of their pay structures which has simply not worked, leaving the United States far from the top in education placement throughout the world. Much of the reason so many school districts all over Ohio are asking for school levies this upcoming year is because of this very problem. At Lakota, my district, there are over 600 employees who make over 65K per year, and that has driven up the labor costs dictating another levy. If the school board were allowed to manage their costs they could still pay good teachers and administrators that kind of money, but the ones that they know, and everyone else knows are bad could be kept out of the higher rates of pay. Under the current system good teachers and bad teachers all advance at a steady rate under union contract which is what drives up the costs of a school district. It’s a terrible system that must be corrected immediately. Thirty years of this behavior have created such a burden on school districts that have only been fixed with increased taxes which is no longer a fix that people can afford. Reforms must occur before districts like Little Miami become insolvent and under state control forever.

• Senate Bill 5 ends seniority based layoff. This is something that Bill Cunningham, Senator Bill Seitz, and Sheriff Jones are all against and have been very vocal about. Today’s government contracts often require a system known as “last hired, first fired.” Well, this is an insane practice, if forces the newest employees to be laid off first, regardless of their performance. This is especially a problem in our schools, where good, new teachers are let go and bad teachers are kept on the job just because of seniority. Improving government services requires policies that keep the best and brightest not just the longest-serving. It must be remembered that the whole goal of a public sector job is to serve the public. It is not to create a position for a government employee that is secure for their entire lives. S.B.5 puts the public worker in the same situation every private worker in Ohio is in, and goes a long way to helping to get the most out of a work force, which should always be the goal of any employment endeavor. The personalities mentioned who are against this idea are all people who have helped build it, so of course they desire to protect it now. It doesn’t matter if it’s Republicans or Democrats, it is politics that put that system in place to help buy bloc votes in politics, and it is simply a failed system that must be removed.

When opponents of this bill say that Senate Bill 5 is too FAR reaching, that Governor Kasich should have come to the table to discuss these issues, those same people are the types who would have yelled and screamed just like in the Cincinnati City Council meeting played above where the union presidents of the police and firefighters were SCREAMING over two slides on a PowerPoint presentation, let alone the 6 major reforms listed above. Each of those items could have been a bill in and of itself, and under a normal political system they would have been. But in these current days where trouble is erupting everywhere from entitlement programs suffering years and years of abuse, drastic action was needed, and it took a Senator in Sharron Jones who is a newcomer to politics, without a cluster of special interest ties to write the bill and it took a governor in Kasich who could make a lot more money in the private sector, and could care less if he gets re-elected to sign it. After looking into their eyes and peering into their souls, I can say that I believe completely that these politicians wrote Senate Bill 5 because they know it was the right thing to do. They didn’t write it to play politics, or be popular, obviously, because the political machine is in an uproar, which is the primary reason Bill Cunningham and Sheriff Jones, both old political veterans, are aghast at S.B.5. They represent a portion of politics that wishes the train could continue forever, and they believe that if somehow someone could talk to the labor unions, that somehow the problem would be fixed going into the future. But their way still requires “dirty politics.” Their way still requires “war chests” of money to grease arbitrators, or re-elect commissioners so that the budgets will hold and alliances can be built, and that is how this whole thing became a mess in the first place.

Senate Bill 5 is the kind of bill that workers standing around their tractors in a barn in Greenville, Ohio, or the fishing boat in Sandusky Bay, or the McDonalds dining room in Pebbles, Ohio sipping coffee in the morning air all demand why those “damn” politicians don’t do something right for a change. Well, they have for once, and the people who wrote and signed the bill are feeling the wrath of the “political machine” that has suppressed these reforms for decades and allowed abuses to take place that are epic and once removed will show just how far-reaching the corruption really was.

And that’s the real fear behind the chants and the arguments to repeal the bill. The people who have openly manipulated the system of the public worker for years to achieve tremendous financial gain know that they are caught. They were caught the moment that Senate Bill 5 was signed because all the scandals hidden in the reforms listed above will soon be revealed. It will take only a few short months for the light to show just how much money was disappearing from the tax payers once these controls are in place and as stated in the opening line of this article, “many crimes will suddenly be solved.”

The repeal attempt is simply no different from a criminal who would entertain once they were convicted of their crime to evade their sentence through an appeal process. The public unions, and those people who have profited from them, hope that if they can just convince enough people that they are innocent, than they can be set free once again. And since there are so many people in Ohio guilty to some extent of the treachery that has occurred, there are a lot of people who will vote to hide their crimes. There is no shortage of people who will apologize for public union behavior because many of them carry just a little bit of the guilt for allowing it to continue for so long, they will attack the people who are just trying to solve the crime, and they will do anything to save their own skin, even if it means taking that skin off someone else’s back.

To me in this discussion I feel like the musicians on the deck of the Titanic playing one last song before the floods come and whisk everything away. I hope that by writing just one more article, or speaking on the radio one more time I can avoid the inevitable sinking of this entire public union debacle. But like the movie Titanic, the public union workers believe that their ship is unsinkable, and it is their naive arrogance that places all of us in danger.


After the ship has sunk and everyone is stuck in the freezing water the true primal nature of those in peril can be seen for all the ugliness a human being is capable of. That behavior is currently hidden behind the “political machine” but the ruthlessness that many will engage in to survive and preserve their own interests can never be underestimated and can be seen if looked at close enough.

I do not work for the Republican Party in any way shape or form. I am loyal to absolutely no politician. I have never taken one dime of money from a political party and I’ve never given one dime to a political party. I have zero desire to be a future politician for I despise the very term. In fact the only thing I’ve ever received from a politician is a tie from Ross Perot’s family for the work I did for his campaign during the 1992 election. I was tired of this whole process even back then! With that in mind I’m going to say that I not only think Senate Bill 5 is fair and a bold piece of legislation that I have personally desired for my entire adult life, but that I believe it was written in the most fair way possible to assist public workers with the change in political culture that must take place. The riots and protests that have been seen toward S.B.5 would have been witnessed with the same intensity over just one of those issues, and the politicians knew it, and this is the reason Kasich wasn’t willing to “talk” as Bill Cunningham and Sheriff Jones have accused him of doing, to the unions. But to Kasich’s credit the process did allow for input. There were two weeks of testimony where all sides presented their arguments before the Senate. This was not a deal done like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi where they rushed “Health Care” through without anyone reading the bill over a holiday weekend. The Republicans did not do that. They did listen and they acted according to what they believed was the right thing to do. The unions spoke in testimony. They chanted outside and their history of intimidation over just minor issues as heard in the Cincinnati City Council recording are well noted, and the politicians involved braced themselves for the pain that would ensue.

But the authors of Senate Bill 5 did the right, and essential thing in a time of crises even though the task would be extremely difficult.

One last broadcast before I end this. In an interview by Bill Cunningham with his buddy John Kasich right before he was sworn in as Governor; this was about a month before S.B.5 was initiated as a law, provides some interesting insight into the world of politics. Kasich is the same person today that he was then, but it is Cunningham who has changed, because the foundations of the public sector worker are part of his business and these changes are uncomfortable. I’m not sure what people thought was going to happen when Kasich was sworn in, but Kasich is doing the job I elected him to do.

Kasich did exactly what he said he would do. But the people who benefit off the system as it is today obviously turned on him when the unions started their lobby campaign, which everyone knew was going to happen.

The reason I do this blog and have over 200 videos on my YouTube account, is to keep everyone honest and keep the “political machine” from manipulating the tax payers as they have for over 200 years. Since the newspapers and television stations have short memories, and I don’t, I created Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom to bring the truth to people with my opinion behind it. But the history of our existence is fact and is shown here for all to see, and I don’t mean to pick on Bill Cunningham, alliances and friendships only extend to the flow of money in politics, so it can be difficult to understand whose friend or foe. A friend today can be your enemy tomorrow and in a period of just six months a good friend like Bill Cunningham can turn into a Judas for all the reasons history provides, because when it gets hot in the kitchen some just can’t take it.

So I’ve provided you with the truth as I see it. If you dear voter do not vote in favor of Issue 2, you will regret it for years to come. You will see the kind of financial conditions that those people on the Titanic were experiencing. The issue of Senate Bill 5 is not matters of life or death like on the Titanic, but the financial requirements for your city, your schools, and state government will see a similar flooding of the fiscal nature if not passed. School teachers will still teach. Fireman will still fight fires. Police will still serve our communities if you vote YES on Issue 2. It is the financial culture behind those public positions that must change, not the jobs themselves. It cannot continue as it is now, because public workers already make nearly 30% more than the average private sector employee. CLICK HERE to read some stats for yourself and be armed to deal with the facts when a public worker claims they are being treated unfairly. In fact, click on every paragraph of this article to go to another article about S.B.5. This entire article is HOTLINKED to multiple articles.

Ultimately if you do not have the courage to vote in favor of keeping Senate Bill 5, by voting YES on Issue 2, you will be personally responsible for the aftermath of fiscal trouble that will follow. It’s already too late, this repeal process is stalling the needed reforms that school districts everywhere need to avoid going to the tax payers this upcoming November, and the tax payers can no longer afford to pay, even if they wanted to. With costs of everything up, the average taxpayer does not have the extra money, and there aren’t enough rich people to loot in order to balance the budgets the labor unions have negotiated. The radical extortion of the past has no place at the table of the future and if public workers want to be a part of that table, they need an approach different from what we experienced with Cincinnati City Council when the head of the police union refused to “discuss” the numbers on a simple PowerPoint. Instead she attacked the data with yelling and screaming and violent protests, a tactic that Senate Bill 5 virtually eliminates, so that proper negotiations can take place and disparities can be managed with a fairness every citizen in the State of Ohio deserves.

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

Money, Prostitutes, and Libertarian Islands: The history of fleeing tyranny

The Report Card for local school districts in Southern Ohio are out during a year where almost all of these schools have cut back their spending dramatically, reduced their staffing to unprecedented levels, yet still maintained their excellent ratings. Doc Thompson of 700 WLW had some fun with the facts because he is the only media personality who has tackled the hypocrisy of school funding. The same administrators who are now patting themselves on the back for performing well in their school districts are the very same administrators who proclaimed that the school districts would decline if tax payers didn’t pass new school levies. Listen to that broadcast here:

During Doc’s discussion he covered the debacle of college expectations, where the debt for college loans is about to exceed 1 trillion dollars in the United States. Professors and college administrators have marketed their product of education so well that every American believes they must have that product in order to be successful. However, to a person who sees clearly it is obvious what’s going on, those in the education industry share a common thread with unions to communicate their message that more money makes education better, and are manipulating the situation to suit their own financial interests. There is no evidence which suggests that more money poured into education makes education better at all. The entire premise of education is based on a foundation void of results or measurements of any kind, because the real origin of the education culture has a much more cryptic intention.

On my way out to speak with Doc Thompson on his broadcast toward the end, I was engaged in a conversation with a person who was struggling to save enough money to put his kids through college. My comment to him was “why, with the rate that tuition is increasing uncontrollably, and the amount of students coming out of college these days with a degree but no job to work, why does college for your child make sense primarily considering the expense?” All the man could say to me was that he had a moral obligation to give a college education to his kids. (CLICK HERE TO READ WHY THIS IS A BAD IDEA) I felt sorry for the guy, because he was obviously a victim of the marketing machine of education that has been allowed to grow uncontrollably and indicates a problem of a higher nature.

The trouble with America’s colleges as they are now is that they attack the kind of person who traditionally is an American. Colleges are inventions of Europe and were brought to the United States by people who value education a great deal, just as I do. What was mistaken in this process was the failure to recognize just what an America was and why it needed to be protected from foreign ideas.

In the great novel, The Frontiersman, the essence of the American is seen clearly. The very land from which I am writing this piece was embroiled in a wilderness war with the Native American Shawnee Indians against the English frontiersman. The frontiersman who came to America in those days wanted nothing more than a fresh start away from the European hierarchy, which can be seen to this very day not only in Europe, but in virtually every college institution. The Americans who founded this country became something of a hybrid adventurer who craved freedom from political strife more than their fear of death, and America was a “chance” to escape those psychological shackles. The personality of the American adventurer became an interesting mix of the Native American warrior personality merged with the European.

Well, once the frontier battles were fought by people like one of my all time favorite Americans, Simon Kenton, Tecumseh, Blue Jacket who was a white guy adopted by Indians and fought on their behalf, and Daniel Boone, the Europeans moved in droves to this new land cleared for them by the spirit of the adventurers. Those adventurers resenting the migrating Europeans continued to move westward for all the same reasons that Native American tribes were being pushed westward. It was in this wave of people who settled in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and the like who brought with them the university system, and the education methods of their homeland. The trouble is Europe was a broken, fractured land full of conquered people from thousands of years of war. It was this system that poured into the borders of the United States after the frontier wars, almost immediately after the American Revolution.

It is not by accident that John Wayne was born in Iowa; Annie Oakley was born in Greenville, Ohio. Roy Rogers “King of the Cowboys” himself was born just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s because the land of the Midwest, the land of the Frontier Wars, was ignored by this emerging European style culture being established on the East Coast, so the people born in this region still maintained some of the spirit of the brave adventures who fought and died in that part of the country and those traits showed up in those famous personalities who went on to evoke the spirit and adventure of westward expansion, which is an innate desire in not just American culture, but world-wide. Freedom is a universal desire.

That spirit was captured I think pretty accurately in St. Louis at the arch. They have a nice little museum at the foot of the arch that shows this whole process pretty well, from the objective standpoint of history. But what doesn’t get dealt with is why; what were the motivations of the frontiersman in the first place to brave a strange new land laced with danger. Well, the progressive history education in this European mindset of the universities will say that it is greed that the white man was after, greed for more. But as history now shows, that greed of which they speak is the same greed that we are hearing about today, from the same segment of the population which looks to Europe as the secure hand of a parent and thus explains they way they think. They are the same people who say that people who do not wish to pay more taxes are greedy, because those Americans do not support the social mechanisms of the tax hungry progressive. Europeans since the start of America viewed the type of person who founded the county with distaste. American’s were considered “uncivilized ruffians, and “undisciplined slobs.” The idea of the cowboy, and the Indian were terms of terror in the eyes of the European noble, and they did not have a hard time convincing a conquered people, and let’s face it, all of Europe contained conquered people at that time that life in America was for the fool and downtrodden. The European nobles had to market America this way to keep all their people from being tempted to flood into America to flee the tyranny of Europe.

Karl Marx and other European types like John Mayard Keynes, both residents of London came up with their own solutions to the European problem of declining economic gain, as America seemed to accelerate at a frightening rate under the flag of freedom. Those ideas were of course Marxism and Keynesian economics, and England adopted these methods more with an eye to America than at themselves. Through the university system, which American universities were attempting to duplicate from the European model of places like Oxford, English nobility infected American education with the notions of those types of European thinkers. In this way they were able to slow down the growth of America and prevent the new nation from getting too far ahead of Europe.

Another philosopher more than a century before Marx named John Locke who had frequent correspondence with my favorite pirate of the Caribbean, Henry Morgan was learning through Morgan’s exploits the merit of valor and freedom for the first time. Morgan was the ultimate frontiersman and it was the work of Locke who influenced the American intellectual rebels like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin to cast Europe away, keeping the good but scrapping the bad, and this worked for over a century. Morgan had been hired by the king of England to roam the Caribbean for one reason, to keep Spain from accumulating too much wealth from the sacking of the Mayan and Aztec cultures of what would become Mexico. It was fear of Spain gaining too much wealth which provoked the whole pirate era. It was this same fear which caused Europe to infect American education with subversion tactics of an ideology which would suppress the culture for generations to come, and thus prevent America from growing out of the reach of the rest of Europe, intellectually, philosophically, economically and worst of all, as a world power.

It is this European system of education that our public schools are built around. The goal of these public schools is not to teach kids about Daniel Boone, or Simon Kenton, or Henry Morgan but about all the things they need to know so they can get into college. And once they are in college, radical European sympathizers will then teach the social principles of European nobility so that the American citizen will be “cultured” and not emit the kind of radical frontier independence that was so dangerous to the mind of the European when they had to confront the stories coming back from America in the adventures of Lewis and Clark. (I’ve been to college, my wife has, and I have many friends who teach in college, so I speak with firsthand knowledge)

When Teddy Roosevelt had captured America’s imagination with his exploits out West as a cowboy, and a rough-rider, it was Europe who seduced him under their wing. Roosevelt, being born of wealth in a European oriented culture in New York always had in him a kind of yearning to please the parent country of Europe, which was no different from a child wishes to please their own parents. After Teddy’s presidency and subsequent tour of Africa on his great year-long hunt, Europe begged Teddy to visit every noble family of their lands where they took him under their tutelage. Saul Alinsky many years later would call this process The Delphi Technique. (Click here to read all about it) It was during this trip through Europe that the monarchs seduced Teddy Roosevelt into “Progressivism.” Teddy still the rough and tumble adventurer of the Dakota’s was still mentally present, but he used the Progressive platform to split the Republican Party away from his former friend but now political rival, the President of the United States, (his successor) William Howard Taft. (also from Cincinnati) Teddy wanted to be President again, for a third term and it was the Europeans who planted the seeds in his power-hungry head. It was Teddy who then paved the way for progressives like the educator, President of Princeton University Woodrow Wilson and later Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Teddy’s younger cousin.

It was education that was used during this whole process to tie America’s wild spirit to the motherland of Europe with a yearning for European culture that survives to this day. London is a dank, compact city that is terribly crowded and rigid. Paris, the city of lovers is much the same. They are no different from any American city; in fact some of my European friends were shocked when I took them to the top of Carew Tower in Cincinnati. “My goodness, you have such high buildings here!” this coming from a guy who goes to London for everything he needs in a city. When I say that Carew Tower may be the tallest building in Cincinnati, but places like New York and Chicago have many, many more that are much taller he would just look at me like I was speaking from Mars.

Education costs too much because it is based on European models of thought which of course are failing. It is the European that threw American adventurers into the path of the Indians and created westward expansion. It was not greed for land to steal from the Native American, but a thirst for freedom that had always been there, but was suddenly released upon the discovery of the New World. Within a few centuries oppressed Europeans could leave the stifled political climate of Europe and run into the dangers of settling America, and they did.

Today American’s still love their cowboys, their NASCAR, their straight shooting Midwesterners who are descendents of those original Americans. But Americans are truly confused. The European plan to infect generations of these crazy, individualistic Americans has worked by using education institutions to halt the growth of America and turn its citizens back to the monarchs of Europe, which is what they always wanted, and yes, they do think in terms of centuries, where the typical American does not. People like the guy I mentioned at the beginning of this are dedicating their lives to sending his children to an education institution that is designed to turn his child against everything he thinks he likes about America, but has forgotten in the chaos of living. The man does not question whether the value of the tuition is even worth the money, because his mind has been trained by the education system itself to support the system blindly.

This led me to wonder about the mind of human beings. Why would they openly support a tyrannical system when they can see with their own eyes that it is bad for them? Well, all one has to do to understand that is to study the behavior of a prostitute who will sell her body for sex, subject herself to tremendous danger then turn around and give the money she’s earned to a pimp out of fear that the pimp will beat her. The woman is perfectly free to roam the entire Earth, and she could easily escape the pimp’s power which is usually only relevant for a few city blocks, maybe even a portion of a town. But the woman will not leave the territory of the pimp because she knows her surroundings and lacks the spirit of adventure to exceed beyond those limits, like a typical European. She will gladly walk into the violent abuse of her pimp because she knows him. This is similar to the guy struggling to pay for college tuition for his children. He does not question the validity of the money needed, he will just prostitute himself out in some blind pursuit to support a structure he knows and trusts without regard to whether that structure is right or wrong.

The conflict of the age of which we are all a part is no different now than it has always been. There are still those who know better who are looking to flee the confines of this cancerous European monarch system complete with nobility and political corruption that we are all taught to trust. Recently Peter Thiels the founder of PayPal placed over a million dollars of seed money into a manufactured island off the coast of San Francisco to give people a place to flee the corruption of government. I have met many of these types of people. You find them on obscure mountain trails in the middle of West Virginia, lonely roads in the middle of Tennessee, sitting at a bar in Key West, and on island paradises all over the Caribbean, people who just want to be left alone. They want freedom from the looters and thieves of monarchy, or European social structure, and they’ll do just about anything to have it.

So when Doc covered the report card for area schools, it is quickly revealed that it isn’t about results that the schools are really after. It’s money, and the money feeds the machine invented by Europe to suppress culture, not to expand it, so that no country on Earth would exceed the development of mother Europe. Institutional control is more persuasive than all the missiles, tanks and guns of all the worlds’ armies, because if thought can be limited and controlled, then conflict isn’t needed. And in a territory such as Europe, who has been at war with itself for several thousand years, they know very well how to wage a war whether it’s with literal troops, or thoughts in a mind. (Just read Shakespeare) But make no mistake about it, war is the objective even if the warlord who is the enemy shakes hands with a smile on their face and appear to be “cultured” and “civilized.” Such manipulations are designed to keep the mind fixed on the past so innovations of the future can be suppressed for fear that those who currently hold power can keep it.

Click here to read about all the successful people who did not go to college and make your own assessment to the validity of my content.

Remember, Einstein came up with his Theory of Relativity while working in a low-level position of a patent office, and William Sidis spent the rest of his life after predicting the existence of Black Holes 47 years ahead of their conceptual theory, working odd jobs and writing for his own amusement in obscurity. He could have owned the world with his mind alone, yet he chose to turn away from it. What does that say?????????

Education does not create intelligence; it simply passes on what others have done to share with the class the exploits of those who do things. In all the billions of hours of classes taught universities have not produced another Einstein, Sidis, or a George Lucas. It is the individual themselves who make their own way which cannot be purchased with money, and it is typical of the European noble to loot the achievements of their “subjects” to their own benefit. And this is the answer as to why schools even in cutting back their funding were still able to produce at a high level. Because it is the parents of a community who send their children to the school who make the school good, and if the child is good, then the school will be good. Social engineering with a European mindset will never change this as much as they’d desire too. The answer to this equation is contained in the Metaphysics of Quality, seen at this link.

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

Meet Lakota’s Mrs. Mantia: Is a superintendent of a school system the same as a CEO?

John Halase is a frequent contributor to the West Chester Tea Party and since he attends many school board meetings for the Lakota School System, and has a technical background, he is the perfect candidate to take some of the obscure fiscal information dressed up in the legalism of education terms and explain them in a way everyone can understand. John is one of the most neutral human beings I know. His only goal is fairness, but a firm understanding of the facts involved in any particular situation. This can be seen clearly in his presentation of August 16, 2011 to a crowd of approximately 200 to 300 people eager to understand why Lakota has placed another levy on the ballot. Central to this new discussion was the new superintendent Karen Mantia and the justification of the one-quarter of a million dollar annual cost she is to the district.

My argument when it comes to costs, which dictate to the tax payers whether or not more funding is needed to fund a school is how much is the public supplying, and if it’s sufficient, then why is there still a requirement for more funds. If the revenue is insufficient, then what criterion determines the level of funding? Well, that answer is what the community can afford, and that is determined in a vote. If the people of the district vote no, then it is the school boards job to go back and trim the budget to the level of revenue that the tax payers approved. It’s that simple.

But how it is currently is a ridiculous situation. If the community votes no, then the district just puts the issue on the ballot. Most school boards do as Lakota did, and that’s drop some staff through attrition, cut small costs like busing and sports programs because it punishes the people for voting no, and they’ll keep putting it on the ballot however many times it takes till it passes. That is a foolish business model. Lakota is on its third attempt in a two-year period, and Little Miami is on their 9th over a four-year period. Most of the schools in Southern Ohio can tell a similar story.

That’s why it becomes necessary to look at just what the costs at a school like Lakota are, what they are spending their money on. Lakota has a total of 1,976 employees at an average wage of over $62,000 per year. 600 of those employees make over $65,000 per year. Of that employee matrix there are 1,192 teachers, 712 support staff, and 72 administrators serving 18,458 students. In 2010, Lakota brought in $157 million and it spent $167 million.

Now to regulate those costs, which were obviously at a deficit even though the revenue coming in is over 150 million dollars, which is nothing to balk at; it is the job of the superintendent to manage those costs. I keep hearing that it is the superintendent, who often makes over six figures and deserves to be paid like a CEO at a corporation, should be paid so much money because as in the case of Karen Mantia, she is responsible for over 24 buildings and 2000 employees with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars. Ok, fine, but with all that responsibility I see a trend with these superintendents where they don’t behave like CEO’s at all. They behave like spoiled union workers where there’s never enough money coming in, and that’s the big difference.

Karen Mantia is no different. She started off as a teacher at Northmont City High School where she worked for 24 years as a law/economics and government history teacher. While there she was a principal, Director of Curriculum, then Assistant Superintendent. She took a job at Sycamore Community Schools as Superintendent from 2000 to 2006 for 100K per year overseeing 5,710 students. In 2006 she retired when she turned 55. She then took a job at Piqua City Schools double dipping from her retirement at Sycamore while making 117K per year managing 3,750 students. She wasn’t at Piqua long, because by 2007 she took the Superintendent position at Pickerington School District making $144,000 managing 10,500 students. It was from this position that Lakota spent $42,266 to recruit Mantia from her Pickerington position where Lakota paid her $165,000 to manage 18,458 students.

Mantia’s contract pays her a base salary of $165,000 a year plus an annual deferred compensation of a $30,000 annuity. She gets an annual performance award, retirement contribution and STRS Membership “pickups,” health and dental along with vision insurance, “known as a Cadillac plan,” Life insurance based on 2.5X her base plus annuity. She is required to work 227 days a year, she gets 23 vacation days, 15 sick days in addition to 3 personal days during that span of time. She also gets all the administrator paid holidays. She is also paid for any professional membership meeting expenses. The over-all cost of Superintendent Mantia is one quarter of a million dollars, ($165 + $30K + $61K (31.7% benefits) per year. Mantia also has a severance package that is 3 years her base salary plus annuity up to the 5 years or less remaining on her contract for contract termination.

Now, to me, those are wonderful benefits. I think it is extremely generous. And what I expect a person so well compensated to do is to manage the district costs like a CEO, because she is currently paid higher than the Governor of Ohio.

But already, the indications are that she will provide a “business as usual” approach. On her first meeting as a superintendent, was the meeting where the school board voted to go for yet another school levy this November. So why?

The problem is, Mantia like all the other superintendents come from a teaching background and seem to be sympathetic to the union. In Ohio, because by law every teacher must be in a union and as a teacher Mantia was a union member, and she will not choose to take a hard-line against union demands, because it is because of those union demands in the past that she is able to receive the tremendous benefits she has received at Lakota. This is the big difference between superintendents and CEO’s. Mantia is a functionary and not making hard decisions about labor costs and management of them. Her primary function is that of a politician, not a cost reducer. Her job is to secure more revenue from the community, and make cosmetic cuts to convince the tax payers that they are doing everything to reduce costs, when in reality she is protecting the integrity of the union contracts which just continue to grow without any mechanism at reduction, which is needed.

If a superintendent could promise the community that the revenue needed by the district could decrease year after year, and at a certain point when we realize that we’ve minimized staff, wages, and contracts to a level that actually jeopardizes an excellent school, it is only then that any tax increase should be explored. But with education currently it is perceived that every year an education budget will increase and that just isn’t going to work as a long-term sustainable model. That is the reason why there is so much fuss about what Mantia makes as far as compensation. The education industry sells the superintendent position as a CEO, and in comparison to other CEO’s she holds a “lame duck, powerless” position that is carefully regulated by union contracts. It would be the CEO’s job to operate the corporation at a profit, which would be met with an increase in sales, and a decrease in costs. With a school superintendent, they are regulated to only dealing with 20% of the costs that are not covered by a union contract which means they cannot control their costs, and can only ask for more revenue in the form of taxes to cover the disparity. That is why such high compensation for administrators in education positions are considered too high, and why Lakota should have looked for a superintendent that was much, much cheaper.

It is decisions like those made in acquiring a new superintendent at Lakota that drive up the cost of education for everyone, and display vividly for all to see where the real problems truly are.

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

RICH HOFFMAN NO LONGER RECOGNIZES THE AUTHORITY OF ANY PUBLIC UNION

There are few things that truly anger me, and this whole issue of the attempt to bargain with the unions over the repeal of Senate Bill 5 is one of them. Because, the comments of We Are Ohio, a union backed group articulates the entire problem when they said, “we view the repeal of Senate Bill 5 as only the beginning.” It is that attitude which has virtually bankrupted the State of Ohio in order to pay for the services public sector unions have manipulated for themselves. For the unions to even proclaim for a moment that they are somehow innocent of any wrong doing in the whole budget crises of the age, that they are victims in some warped universe, is the ultimate denial from a group of people fighting to cover-up over 50 years of political mistakes instigated by their little “clubs.”

It is in the type of fury that I feel right now that I feel compelled to do something similar to what one of my favorite writers Robert Pirsig has done, and that’s to buy a sail boat and retire traveling the world without a care, because as Pirsig believed in frustration when people had difficulty understanding his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. It was the same frustration that Ayn Rand experienced after Atlas Shrugged came out, when people were slow to understand the material. Those two writers are part of modern philosophy. The trouble with our society is that it is believed that philosophic growth ended with Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Voltaire, Marx and the several others from the “old days” of philosophy. They forget that modern philosophers like Pirsig and Rand are continuing along the traditions of thinking based on the evolution of society.

Well, I’m a person who understands the work of Pirsig without any difficulty. He matches my own thoughts which have been forged from a full life of experience. I can honestly say that I have seen every type of human deception, witnessed every type of scandal, and experienced the most brutal forms of violence first hand. I have to say that as a qualifier for what I will now say, because my feelings are harsh in regard to public unions.

I am not a supporter of unions of any kind. In private industry, we have seen unions drive up the cost of a product, and if the demand for that product can support it, then fine. Having a union should be an option to people who want them. To date, unions for entertainment and sports are the strongest surviving unions, because people have shown they will pay the extra money for a ticket, or sports memorabilia to support sports unions, and buy movie tickets for all the entertainment unions. But in manufacturing, once NAFTA was signed into law in the early 90’s, jobs have fled the United States because the labor is simply too expensive. Only large manufacturing jobs who rely on government contracts have truly survived. It is unions that have killed manufacturing jobs in the United States and I resent them for it.

But the public sector union has absolutely no place in modern society. I personally don’t even recognize their right to exist. A union is simply a club of like-minded people, just like any club. It’s no more complicated than that. However, the make-up of this club tends to be, unless compelled by law to join, the very weak. They are the type of people who fear sticking up for their own rights to an employer. They are the type who prefers to cower behind a group of friends where courage only comes to them in mass. Unions have achieved what they have through violence, extortion, intimidation and other methods which lack personal valor. Unions allow the complacent and average to be equal to the best and that is a crime against society.

It is in the pursuit of being the best that makes one the best. One cannot be the best just by being paid wages that are high. The short-term sense of fairness and antagonistic relationship these types of employees have with their employers is culturally deficient and socially destructive. Unions kill culture the same as deforestation and drought killed Mayan, Aztec and Native American Cultures, just as war and territory wars have held back European society. Unions have their roots in Europe and are products of the Dark Ages. They should be despised in American culture like cancer is despised in the human body.

Public Unions should be illegal. They are not the back bones of the middle-class as they are sold by the complacent, the small-minded, and intellectually deficient. Unions are a short-term solution to the jealousy of those who lack ability, or ambition. To those who are too lazy to push themselves to reach beyond their limits to earn a sense of pride in their self-reliance. Unions, as a club of such lazy types have attracted the masses, because it is true that many people are born with a natural inclination to follow, but should look with eagerness at those around them who are strong and strive to be strong too. Unions kill this process. It forces the strong to be average and the weak rule in mass, so whatever enterprise is created under this arrangement is less than it otherwise would be.

Unions are a fix for the human sense of insecurity to have and maintain a sense of extended family. It is common for union members to refer to each other as a “brother” or “sister” as though their unity is bound by flesh and DNA. The only unity of such types is one of poor mental evolution. These people share in common a sense of basic functioning from the food that goes into their bellies, and the sex they can achieve with their reproductive organs. They are what the Kundalini Yoga refers to as the beings of the lowers states, those of Chakra 2, maybe 3 at the highest. Their only concern for existence is what goes into their bellies or comes out of their penises. They lack any sense of history but what occurs in their lifetimes, and they care not for what the waste of their lives produces in the future.

Unions are the inventions of fools, miscreants, socialists, the weak-minded, the violent, the power-hungry, and the empire builder. They are the mechanisms of fantasy for the social reformer, the corrupt magpie wishing to undermine society with a smile but a hand on the knife concealed under their clothing, (metaphorically speaking).

The gains public unions have made over the years they achieved through either the threat of violence or the threat of work stoppage, not the merit of their arguments. Not on the strength of their ideas. They gained respect through fear and are no different from a street gang fighting over turf in a city, or a drug cartel leader establishing a trade route over a rival cartel. They are no different from the organized crime habits perfected by Al Capone, and evolving to this current day in various enterprises where a baseball bat and a threatened loved one halts any intrusion into their business practices.

If I were the governor of Ohio, this is what I’d be thinking when a group of public unions struggling to maintain their business monopoly on the tax payers of Ohio wanted to meet. And when the Governor refused to meet with these people he spoke as my representative, because I did not want to even give those people the merit of an audience. They should be illegal, not legitimized with even an acknowledgement. By sitting down with those union leaders the governor gives them a strength they do not deserve, that was taken in the first place by violence and manipulation, and represent the kind of America that Karl Marx envisioned, not the one of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, or John Locke conceived.

But don’t mind my opinion dear reader. My view of America is that the Federalist Papers were too imperialistic, if I lived in the time of the founding fathers I would without a doubt be an Anti-Federalist! But today I shake my head at the lost souls around me who have such a shallow understanding of history to actually believe they have a “right” to special privileges because they are a member of a club funded by the tax payer. My anger becomes paramount in my personal philosophy. The anger is from the kind of frustration one might feel toward a child who you are trying to teach to read, yet can’t even read the first word in a sentence.

These people against Issue 2, these union leaders, and blind followers have been taught all their lives all the wrong things. It is those wrongly taught things that are the sources of wrecked lives, health problems, broken marriages, and children who dislike their parents, because looted money from the tax payer cannot fix the mind that drives the bodies of these union people. They are on a path of personal destruction and do not have the eyes to see that it is their fault the foundations of modern society is failing. They fail to understand because they are stuck on the fixed idea of fairness created by philosophers long dead, and refuse to accept the new data which is arriving to our minds in great abundance in this very modern age that indicates mankind is doing all the wrong things for the sustenance of the human race.

A destructive class of people have the right to be stupid. But they do not have the right to dictate to a governor a seat at the table of power, a power they stole from the tax payer and did not earn with their personal merit of strength and intelligence. By sitting down with a simple club which is what a union is, the governor and his staff will only appease a mob hell-bent on personal destruction and have no interest in negotiation of any kind unless that negotiation involves the sacrifice of someone else. History has taught us this, and if we have not learned by now, then hope for intelligence to rule ever, appears unrealistic.

I understand now why Pirsig sails the oceans of the world on his boat, because the masses do not understand his words, because they waste their time in groups like these unions, reducing their minds with false philosophy and sit with their mouths open for society to feed them like some little bird in a nest waiting for a mother to drop food into it’s mouth. The more I think of it, the more Pirsig’s solution to society’s foolish behavior seems rational and actually evolutionary preservative. Because it is only on the open sea void of politics and the rules of mankind that the nature of existence makes sense. Thus the source of my anger is not at myself for choosing not to join Pirsig on the open waters, but it is in my belief that people are worth the fight, to help them become better than they show an inclination to become themselves. Such a task at this point seems pointless in the wake of a deal with the labor unions over repealing Senate Bill 5.

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

The Truth about Issue 2: Meet Shannon Jones in her own words

As I wrote this article there has been talk of a deal on Friday with the labor unions to back off their repeal. If such a thing is true, it is extremely unfortunate, and weak-kneed. It would represent everything that is wrong in politics, which would not be surprising. But lets see what happens.

Shannon Jones came to the West Chester Tea Party to speak about the merits of Senate Bill 5, now known as Issue 2 for the November ballot. The video below is the complete version of her presentation, including the Q & A session where a union president confronted her. The video is long, understandably, but well worth a viewing so that the contents of that meeting can be shared with every Ohioan, because it is worth every single tax payer’s time to understand just what Senate Bill 5 does for them.

Issue 2 (Senate Bill 5) does a lot of things that are very, very good for the average tax payer. Without it and this is not fear mongering, Ohio will struggle to pay its bills for the foreseeable future. In fact, every day that Issue 2 is prevented from being a law is equivalent to running up your personal credit card debt.

Issue 2 does not get rid of unions, or collective bargaining. It allows those things to continue. It does not cut salaries or hurt police officers and firefighters with unsafe work practices. What Issue 2 does do however is make it a choice for public employees to join a union. It does prevent public employees from being able to go on strike to extort higher wages and bring to a halt the services those public sector employees are expected to perform. And it does base compensation on performance rather than seniority. To me, and most everyone who can breathe air, those are very needed and common sense necessities that should be obvious to everyone.

So why are the public unions against it? Well, it takes away the monopoly status that unions currently hold over public employees. Think about it this way. If you are a teacher and you want to teach in the State of Ohio, you must join a teachers union to be employed. The unions know that if they can lobby to create more teaching jobs, then they are guaranteed a fixed amount of union dues that they can budget around. If it is questioned just how important union dues are to a public sector union, just study the actions of Diana Frey, who was considered extremely legitimate until she was accused of stealing over $750,000 from her members. Union dues are how unions buy and wield power, so those dues are very, very important to them. But not all employees want to be a part of that type of thing, and should never be compelled by law to be in a union. It should be a choice, and if the unions truly have something valuable to offer, then membership in a union would be lucrative and a choice.

Unions are terrified of Issue 2 and have spent a lot of time and money trying very hard to pull every emotional string they can to hide their true intentions. This is the source of all the misinformation coming from the unions, and the reason they are attempting to hide behind police and firefighters, as a way to appeal to the public and hide the scandalous nature of their desires. And scandalous is the correct word.

The State House and Senate acted quickly with Senate Bill 5 for one primary reason, it wasn’t to bust unions, or hurt union workers; it was to stop the bleeding that is primarily going on in schools all across the state of not being able to control their costs. Unions have nobody to blame but themselves, they have successfully through legislation prevent elected management, (school boards, trustees, and city councils) from being able to regulate their costs with the radical extortion methods like strikes and manipulative work practices in binding arbitration. Years and years of this behavior has completely eliminated any management of tax funds which have driven up the costs and expectation of education and every person who pays taxes should be furious about it! It is solely because of this union monopoly problem that tax levies on Ohio property owners seems to come every couple of years with no end in sight. Issue 2 was created quickly to get the problems exacerbated under 8 years of governorship by Bob Taft and 4 years of complacency by Ted Strickland under control. It’s true that the financial meltdown did not occur over night, it took 12 years. But starting a couple of years ago, the costs of public employees started to spiral out of control which brings us to the current crises where schools are out of money, cities are going bankrupt, and the only fix anybody can come up with is to raise taxes on taxpayers who are already taxed too high.

Anyone who votes NO on Issue 2 is responsible for hurting our school systems, bankrupting our cities, and allowing practices that are highly corrosive to the lives of every resident of Ohio. Anyone who votes NO is guilty of putting off a problem that is already out of control and needs to be dealt with immediately.

When Issue 2 finally becomes law, police will still be on the streets. Fire fighters will still be there to put out fires and help provide emergency medical treatment. Teachers will still be teaching kids. The only thing that will change is those employees will have to adjust their lives just a bit, but elected officials that tax payers put into office to manage their tax dollars will actually be able to do the job they are supposed to be doing, which is something that must happen.

A YES vote on Issue 2 is the only responsible thing to do in order to ensure a positive future. If you have any doubts, just watch the video from the author of Senate Bill 5 herself. At over an hour of real information from a true source, the truth cannot be missed unless the viewer is one of those who want to maintain the monopoly of public union rule.

The control is in the hands of you, the voter. You cannot say this time that your vote does not matter, because with this issue, it matters more than it ever has and the implications will resonate though the scholarship of history.

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