Category: writing

End the Department of Education Now: The march to a smaller government should start there

The videos shown on this article I find repulsive. The Department of Education is populated with these types of people, which equates to a lot of talk about collaboration, caring for children, and test scores. The reality is that they are just adults spending a lot of money to pretend they are actually doing something that justifies the incredible amounts of money they expect to be paid. They are good at sounding important but when watching these videos consider if there is any authority, or truth in anything they are saying. There is a disconnect between these people and reality. They collectively believe that “outsiders” shouldn’t tell them how to behave, yet they forget that the “outsiders” are the people who pay the bill, and are therefore their bosses.

The Department of Education is one of those government creations that have no place at all in education.  It shouldn’t exist.  It costs too much, and has lost its way over the years. It has a budget roughly of $107 Billion dollars and has a jaw-dropping 4,800 employees.  By the governments own estimates in preparing for a government shut-down recently roughly 89.4 percent of the employees were deemed non-essential to operations. Yes, you heard that right, 89.4 percent…….non-essential.  That means only 10.1% of the employees at the DOE are needed to operate that whole branch of government. 

In 2009 the average federal employee earned $81,258 where the average private –industry employee made $50,462.  The private-industry employee then garners approximately $10,500 per year in benefits.  The federal employee receives a staggering $42,000 or more for benefits. That means the cost per federal employee at the Department of Education is $123,258. 

Reagan immediately tried to get rid of the DOE, as he promised, but he couldn’t get the democrats in the senate to go along with him, after all, they had already taken money from the NEA, and that was the last chance we had to rid ourselves of this giant government behemoth. 

We have created a government department that costs a lot of money, and is dedicated on taking the country in a direction that is against traditional American values. It’s a progressive branch that does nothing, staffed by non-essential employees, and it is formed to solidify the political power of a strong union, and we pay for it completely with tax money. 

Locally, school boards everywhere blame the DOE for compliance, which takes the anger away from the local districts.  The bureaucracy is created to make the system so large it can never be criticized because problems are too large for any one person to ever deal with.  It’s an organization built to maintain control of the NEA.  As school funding comes crashing down, and more parents are being forced to pay for sports programs, electives, and other extra-curricular activity, teachers won’t sacrifice any of their excessive wages as they stand quietly in the corner and watch parents struggle to give their children options.  Many parents are not only paying for their tax bill, which in my neighborhood is $3000 to $5000 dollars per home per year, but now parents are trying to come up with the extra money to pay for the stuff that used to be free, included in the price of their tax bill that supports the school.  Now parents must include the cost of transportation twice a day in many schools where a bus used to pick up the child.  Now the bill to teach a child has went up because school systems led by the example of the Department of Education have extorted massive amounts of money from the tax payer.  In fact, since the Department of Education was implemented, in just the last two decades the average spending per pupil has went up 44%.  That average salary for a teacher just since 2001 has jumped up 26%.  The cost of education isn’t increasing because the cost of actual education such as books and school buildings is going up.  It’s going up because the teaching profession is unionized and unlike in the private sector when costs go up we can go to Walmart, or buy a car from Japan, in education they have a monopoly, no competition, and therefore no mechanism to bring costs down. 

In many states Medicaid costs have increased and tax revenue is decreasing as industry moves over seas to avoid higher costs of doing business in the United States.  To deal with these financial realities states have decreased education funding by 17 billion dollars over the past two fiscal years.  Funding won’t be increasing, not unless the United States creates more product and exports goods instead of importing them.  So schools rather than change their funding model which is tied up in labor costs are resorting to passing the cost increases off onto the customer, the taxpayer.  In Medina, Ohio school costs have risen 23% over the last 5 years to $75 million in 2010, most of it is wage increases.  To shave costs the Medina school board eliminated 106 teaching position, otherwise 20% of their teaching staff over two years.  Class sizes increased from 25 kids per teacher to 31.  The teachers union agreed to $1 million in concessions taking just a 2.45% pay raise instead of the scheduled 3.45%.  The average cost per teacher with salary plus benefits is about $68,000 per year. 

Medina has tried to close the revenue gap by asking for levies which voters have rejected for three consecutive years.  So the district began charging $660 to play a high-school sport, $200 to join the concert choir and $50 to act in the spring play.  Local tax payer and senior citizen 70-year-old Joyce Harris said, “We can’t afford our teeth fixed because it’s too expensive.  If we have our taxes go up to pay for little Joey’s football, that’s not exactly fair.”

Notice that Arnie says “it will not become a competitive program,” as if that were a bad thing somehow.

So the Department of Education is worthless.  Their education standards have pushed America out of first place.  Click here to see my article on Waiting for Superman.  They are too expensive, and they have paved the way for the expectation that teachers should be making six figures.  And because the Department of Education is really a front organization that provides legitimacy for the teachers union, it has only exceeded in driving up the cost of education, eliminating competition by imposing on tax payers a monopoly that is arrogant, selfish, and grossly out of touch.

Now, this is a video that pulls back the curtain on the rest of the videos from above. This is a video that I have learned is the truth over years of personal experience.

I spend a lot of time talking about these education issues because our future is being raised in this public school system and I see an organization that I am paying good money for, teaching them all the wrong things and it disgusts me.  And because of the scam I am forced to support a union that I find un-American, corrupt, and destructive to the kind of country I want to live in.  So eliminating the Department of Education is something that should have happened the day Ronald Reagan took office.  In fact, it should have never happened to begin with.  It’s unconstitutional, violates numerous issues revolving around the 10th Amendment and is just something that should be removed immediately.  It has no place in American society.  It can’t even justify itself with results.  It’s just a waste of money that stands in the way of reforming our education system to something that is more effective, and it needs to go away.

 

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

Pirates and Politicians, Same Thing: One uses a cutlass, the other uses a pen to force us into serfdom

Doc Thompson of 700 WLW discusses all the various ways politicians are misspending our tax dollars.

This is a rich country. We have plenty of money, and if you don’t believe me, ask Halliburton. There’s plenty of money out there; don’t fall into the trap of this whole deficit argument. The only question is how to spend it.

Van Jones, Former Obama Administration Green-Jobs Czar

It is not a false statement to call people like Mr. Van Jones a simple looter. Comments like what he has made, such as the one in the example, are statements rooted in sheer ignorance. But this is not an article to condemn only Van Jones. This is an article about condemning all those like him that look to the tax payer to fund their looter mentality. I write this on the heals of watching the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, which I liked a lot, but when watching the behavior of the pirates, and their mentality, I fail to recognize the difference between any official that asks the tax payer for more money to fund their “big ideas” when the reality of what they are doing is stealing the money outright. Yes, stealing is the correct term.

Why is stealing the correct term? Well, politicians are using tax money in many cases to buy votes. Lyndon Johnston was doing that as president. He was openly creating government programs that had to be funded with tax payer dollars to care for voter demographics beneficial to him politically. In other words, he took money from people who wouldn’t openly support his programs, but took that money in the form of taxes. If the tax payer refused to pay taxes for the programs he created then the tax payer would be arrested under force and thrown in jail. FDR did the same thing in the 40’s. Roosevelt wasn’t interested in being a president; he wanted to be a king. How is that any different from a pirate stealing the resources of a vessel at sea under a black flag? It’s not. LBJ justified this theft by declaring a war on poverty, which he lost, because if the war on poverty truly wanted to be won, the free market would be more openly embraced. Capitalism would be the goal, making money would be the goal, because if a society desires not to have poverty, it would be more in the business of making money so there is more money to be had. Not just simply printing money, like the Fed is doing now to cover the looting they have been doing for years, but actually producing goods that can be exported to a buyer in another country. That’s how you fight poverty.

Karl Marx spent most of his life in poverty, so it is no wonder he looked with jealousy at the world around him and wanted to steal from them. So he came up with communism as a way for people like him, that didn’t know how to make things, and didn’t want to work for a living, to loot money from those that do make things. Since he was a poor man himself, he didn’t understand the value of money. He thought like Van Jones does, that money just existed out there in the world and he needed to find a way to take it from those that have it and give it to people like him, in other words, outright theft.

Each week portions of our pay are taken from us without our consent. This money is taken under the justification of caring for the government. But if you are a person like me, that won’t use Medicare, that won’t draw a Social Security check, that doesn’t want government to be so big. That doesn’t want to support a system that breeds “legal” piracy, you don’t have a choice. I want government to be smaller, so it can be better managed. I don’t want my money taken and used for such purposes as to the expansion of government. In other words, my money is taken and used for purposes I’m against. It is not for the greater good of government, or the country, it is for the looting and plunder of pirates that instead of dressing as Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean they wear a suit and tie. In function they are no different. I will debate anyone that wishes to challenge me otherwise. If they do they are fools, because they are simply covering for crimes they know to be true and are complicit in that crime either through ignorance or their own corruption.

Want some proof? Of the 62 members of Congress that left office in 2008, 16 of them now work as lobbyists. Of those 16, 13 are Republicans. Between 1998 and 2004 43% of those former lawmakers became lobbyists. What is a lobbyists? A lobbyist pushes law makers to pass laws that give the organization that hires the lobbyist to have a competitive advantage over either the government itself, which is essentially a pay-off to avoided excessive regulation, or to gain an advantage over another competitor. This isn’t happening in isolated cases. This is the law of the land. It’s common practice! Think about it, why do we need so many laws? We already have a constitution. With every new law passed, there is money involved, money for attorneys, money for tax collectors, and a reason for politicians to be in session and not off doing something actually productive. Law makers are no different from a fry guy in a local fast food restaurant. If there aren’t any customers, they don’t have anything to do, so they’ll just shuffle the French Fries around the fry bin to look busy. Law makers create new customers with our money so they can have something to do and a reason to exist. And in the complicated laws they pass, lobbyists will then hire them for the knowledge on how to comply with that legislation. That’s how a thief gives value to nothing using the plunder of our resources.

To put the whole looting scheme into terms we can all relate with, lets look at school funding, and something we all must send our children to, so it affects virtually every single one of us. The teachers union lobbies law makers for legislation that protects their members. This is why in Ohio school boards can only negotiate approximately 15% of their total budget costs. The 75% to 85% are completely off-limits because they involve wages and are the largest cost of a school system. This means every time a teacher gets a higher degree, they must be compensated according to state law, because the OEA lobbied for the creation of that law. So when a school like Lakota is told that a $160 million budget is not enough and the question is asked, why? The answer is that labor costs that have no limit in their ceiling value are exploding the budget. Since in Ohio property tax is the primary way of funding schools, a school system has no choice but to ask property owners for more money. For a property owner like me, that thinks an average wage of 63K per year is too much to pay a teacher, I’d favor something more reasonable like 49K to 55K, but that doesn’t matter because the contracts were negotiated with the lobbyist not the tax payer. The politicians made the deal to buy votes from the OEA members in order to secure a deal to put the politician in office so he can collect tax money of their own in a different way. It’s lucrative otherwise they wouldn’t be fighting so hard for the opportunity to loot the public. And all the money used is coming from the tax payer. In this case my property value is looted to support values and education I think are mediocre and too expensive. But I have no choice. If I don’t pay, I would be prosecuted. Yet a prosecutor won’t touch the illegal activity that goes on in schools to pass a levy because a deal is made with the money the members of the teacher’s union supply. The prosecutor won’t touch the issue because they don’t want to deal with the political fall-out involved. The teachers union is too powerful, and not worth the political fight.

Why is the teacher’s union so powerful? Because they have many members and if you want to teach in the state of Ohio, you must be in a teacher’s union. There is no choice. So for every school built, and every teacher hired, a new union contributor is born. Each member contributes money to the union through their checks to feed the system. They do this because teachers know that the union has negotiated a larger than average wage for them, about 30% more than they’d earn in the private sector for the same job. The union knows it must negotiate wage levels that high because teachers are less likely to complain about spending their money on union dues if the teacher has a money surplus each week. As long as the union collects the dues from its members it can then dangle that money in front of politicians to achieve their goals. If teachers made less money, they’d be less likely to openly pay a portion of their check to union dues. But since the teacher is paid with taxes and the dues paid lobby the tax payer’s representatives who then make deals with the unions which then turn around and drive up the costs of the service on both ends, the cost of education goes up, and the elected representative has wasted tax payer’s money. The tax payer is spending money on the politician for making deals and not doing the business of the people. The money is stolen from the property owner and then used against the property owner in the form of higher taxes to support the structure of the scheme.

The tax payers just want their children taught. They want their children to read, write and know how to do math. But educators have made the whole business so complicated that they know in order to rally tax payers behind their cause they must hide the shell game behind local sports, like football, or basketball, things that the whole community values, while the real problems lurk under the façade. That is why sports are the first things districts cut, it’s to loot from the community the thing the whole community values in order to extort a vote in the next election to increase taxes. The message is “you will have something taken from you. You’ll lose your social event, (football games) or you’ll lose money from your property value.” Pick your poison.

But what if I don’t want to pay the extra cost? The answer from them is that “you aren’t patriotic,” or “you don’t like children,” or “are you so poor that you can’t afford the higher taxes.” These are the same games played with our politicians to convince them to work against us. But what if you still don’t want to pay? “Then you will be prosecuted.” The money will be confiscated from you one way or another. That’s why such people are simply looters. They are modern pirates out to loot our wealth. They take from us and give to their whore houses, liquor and other scandalous behavior. And by whore houses, that doesn’t always refer to sex. There is a lot of ways people whore themselves.

That’s just on the local level, in your school. Such things are happening in the building of bridges and highways. In the transfer of property from residential to commercial use, in the creation of every new federal program. If such looting wasn’t going on, K Street and the corrupt activity that goes on there in Washington D.C. would dry up like a mountain town in the Wild West that only exists for the benefit of the gold rush. When the gold went away, the town died. In Washington, the prostitutes that walk the streets with police officers driving by them all day long, the pimps that stand in the middle of the street watching over “their girls” all night, the drugs and bribe money that passes hands across the dinner tables would go away. But all those things are thriving to this very day, at this very hour just steps in front of the White House while Obama practices shooting basketball on the White House basketball court, that we pay for too. Stand on the corner across from the Days Inn on K-Street from 9 to 12 PM and watch the prostitutes standing there with their fish net stockings, their skirts that are so short you can see their panties standing up. Their long high heels force their butts to strut unnaturally as they get into a car, drive off and 15 minutes later that same car comes back around the block and pulls up. The girl gets out, joins the other girls, if any are left, then within 10 minutes, depending on how good she is, she’s back in another car and back around the block. I watched one night the same girl get into 5 different cars over the course of an hour and a half.

Who are the customers, lobbyists out-of-town and away from their wives, spending the money that comes easily for them. They are some of our elected representatives. They are mostly men enjoying their plunder, the same as pirates did in the sinful town of Port Royal. What’s the difference? The plunder was stolen whether it was at gun point on the high seas or under threat of jail. What’s the difference? Very few of us would choose to support this activity. So why do we, because we don’t want to be harassed by the government that we pay for?

Through taxation we have created a political class that believes just as kings and queens did in Europe that they are our rulers. They are entitled to loot from us, to rule us as they see fit. And to pay for their service we are taxed on virtually every movement we make in society. We are taxed for every item of food we eat, every gallon of gas we buy. We are taxed for the cloths we wear and the cars we buy. We are taxed, taxed, and taxed working toward goals that are not our own objectives to sums of money we don’t agree with, to support a public social class that thinks it rules us. There is only one term that describes such a person and that is a serf.

What is a serf by definition?

1. A member of the lowest feudal class, attached to the land owned by a lord and required to perform labor in return for certain legal or customary rights.
2. An agricultural laborer under various similar systems, especially in 18th- and 19th-century Russia and eastern Europe.
3. A person in bondage or servitude.

Doesn’t that sound like what we are? Like with the school systems, I am legally bound to pay for a school system against my wishes? My property is taken from me in the form of money so that I may retain my right to property in the form of land. That is theft. I don’t give willingly to my community, the way I’d prefer it. It is taken from me and spent in ways I find disgusting and sinful, unethical. Yet when I get up in the morning and go to work, I pay over 50% of my earnings as a serf.

The Road to Serfdom:

If we’re only a serf to them why not call them what they are. We may have to pay them as a legal obligation, under the threat of the law that they control with the money we give them, but don’t endorse their behavior with legitimacy. Don’t call them “sir,” or “your honor,” or any respectful designation. Call them pirates, thieves and liars, because they are. It’s not extreme to call them what they are. It’s not out-of-place just because they wear a suit and not a pirate hat and sword. They don’t need a sword, because they have a pen which truly is more mighty and dangerous. It is with the strokes of many pens that we are no longer Americans working for liberty and justice, but serfs working to support giant programs that our citizens are now addicted to like drug addicts that will never get enough. We are now committed serfs that are losing more and more of our wealth to support the extortion of radical pirates with only the mind of a looter. They are willing to take from us everything we have to give until we can’t give any more. It is the same thought process of the master against his slave that only has use for the slave as long as the slave is productive.

We are on the path to serfdom, and we are further along that road than many of us are willing to admit to ourselves. Until we are willing to admit to ourselves the reality of these impositions, and to call the conduct of the looters for what they properly are, we will continue down that path until it runs out. That is the nature of the pirate, they will loot and loot until it’s all gone because they lack the ability to plan from one day to the next. They are only concerned for the prostitute in front of them, or the food about to go into their stomachs. Planning for tomorrow’s sunrise is beyond their capacity, and they don’t need to, as long as they have serf’s like us that will continue to feed them.

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

Pirates of the Caribbean, On Stranger Tides: A Movie Review and Commentary

It doesn’t happen often, where I walk out of a movie theater at 2:30 am and feel as awake as midday. It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve seen a movie I enjoyed as much as the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, On Stranger Tides.

People who read my work frequently know that I cover school levies, political corruption, and legal maneuvering to great extent on these pages. However, I do an occasional story about football, motorcycles, and films also. My very first love in life is mythology, the stories of cultures. Stories tell you the true nature of the culture you are studying. This is why I know so much about the inner workings of politics, is because I understand the myths of the culture. So I can see through the stories politicians attempt to tell to sell the idea they are portraying. I know mythology from books. I know mythology from my life. And I know mythology from actually doing work in the entertainment business on occasion. So I understand all too well the difficulties of bringing a vast mythology to life that reflects more than what visuals can speak of, that speaks to the human heart. I learned when I was very young that some of the most accurate votes cast occurring in human culture is happening at movie theaters with the price of a ticket. What people chose to see at a movie theater is an accurate gage of the psychology of the over-all culture.

When it is all-encompassing, especially for people like me and the friends I associate with, to be politically active, to have concerns of George Soros and his “Open Society” of communist thought, or Barrack Obama’s latest faux pas, it is good, and revealing to step into a darkened theater and witness truth in the form of fiction. Even though many in Hollywood are leftists, the good stories they tell are not. Not the ones that sell tickets anyway. There are ideas in stories that contain truth because the mythology of that story has innate value, which transcended the political view points of the actors and directors because it’s the story that matters. It is the story that communicates. The actors are but vehicles that take you to the story.

The success of The Pirate of the Caribbean films reflects a deeper yearning in human society that moves beyond the political direction of power players such as what you might find in politics. The desire for individuality cannot be overlooked when the characters in films ooze such traits, and the recent surge in this last decade in the amount of young people who are getting tattoos is testimony to a social desire to “be unique,” to have something they choose themselves to place upon their bodies that they did not inherit from their parents. Something they decide to give themselves as a way to mark their bodies in an individual way. This is the inner pirate in all people, the desire to be unique, free, and left alone. The human need for this is very strong, and even though I, or anyone in my immediate family do not have tattoos of any kind, I understand the need. Tattoos are something I’d discourage someone from getting, because there are better ways to communicate individuality. But the human spirit craves authenticity. I have seen this same behavior in Key West where women completely undress at the Adam and Eve, the nude bar that sits above the Bull and Whistle and have body paint artists paint their bodies in such a way that they can walk down Duval Street completely nude, yet appear from a distance to be wearing cloths. The women get the sensation of being publicly nude and fearless, without openly breaking the law. This is an act of rebellion brought on by the necessity of an over-regulated society, a perversion of nature where an inner fantasy must be aligned with the living person because in daily life the two aspects function too far from each other.

I have acquaintances that work in show biz that are very liberal and often times they see me as their political enemy in matters of social value, but on a set or at the lunch table over a pizza, we have more in common then they’d wish to admit. I often shake my finger at them and remind them that they are living Doctor Jeckle and Mr. Hyde existences, and they won’t be happy as people until they unify their thoughts with their reality. But they don’t listen. Instead, they get tattoos and paint their bodies in drunken rages on occasion, because the social engineering doesn’t work, and their true natures only come out in drinking binges or in darkened theaters.

And that brings us to the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I know why I love pirates. I’ve talked about it on these pages at great length. I like them so much that when Branden Keefe of Channel 9 News came to my house recently to do a story he asked me, “Are those cannons?”

“Yes,” I replied. He was looking at the cannons I have on my porch that I use to fire off during football games in the fall, or to announce the start of a new meeting at my house. I fired these cannons off at the start of a Tea Party meeting of the State Sovereignty Committee much to the amusement of my guests because they had never seen anything like that before. But my neighbors are used to it. Such things are part of the “pirate’s life for me.” It’s part of living the mythology of existence instead of just being a passive observer.

So am I alone in this love? No. People love The Pirate of the Caribbean movies. They love them for the high adventure. They love them for the spectacle. And they love them for the character Johnny Depp created in Captain Jack Sparrow. I was concerned when I learned that On Stranger Tides was going to have a more toned down budget then the previous film At Worlds End. Well…..in each of the previous three Pirate films, there were moments that I didn’t like. I enjoyed the overall story line, the high adventure, the sets, the visual effects, but I always felt there wasn’t quite enough swashbuckler in the series that should be oozing out of it. I always attributed this problem with too many characters and Disney-like sappy sub-plots that belonged in a different kind of movie. Critics like those sub-plots, but I don’t. A pirate film should be all about the swashbuckler and much less about emotion.

On Stranger Tides I expected to be not so good. I thought that if Disney pulled in the budget, that the franchise would suffer. But then I saw the budget, and noticed that even this scaled down version of the Pirates of the Caribbean series was north of $200 million, I was curious.

My wife and I planned to see the movie on Friday night. But, this is a film we wanted to share with our kids, because my kids grew up with a love of adventure films. I showed them every action film ever made when they were growing up, and they understand my passion for Pirates. Plus, in my family, our favorite past-time that we do together is playing the Pirates Constructible Strategy Game by WizKids, so my wife refused to go without the kids, and they were all working. So finding an open window where we could all get together and see the movie was very problematic, and I was getting irritated at all the various schedules.

During Saturday, May 21, 2011 I started checking the numbers from Box Office Mojo and saw that On Stranger Tides on Friday had pulled in $35 million which was good. Plus it had pulled in $92 million worldwide, so that was even better. The total take up to Saturday morning was $127 million, which is very good. If the film cost just over $200 million and Disney poured another $200 million in promotion, which means by the time everything is said and done, On Stranger Tides will be close to $500 million in total upfront investment, then Friday’s take puts it on target to recover its money, which is important, because for people like me, if a film like this doesn’t make its money back, more films like it won’t be made in the future. Plus, like I said, the amount of ticket sales is to me a kind of worldwide vote on the type of values our culture embraces, so I found such numbers much to my liking.

My wife and I entertained guests from across the pond on Saturday for a good part of the day. I kept looking at the clock all day for an opening that wouldn’t present itself. I told my wife, “We have to see the new Pirates movie this weekend! And we’re running out of time!”

She got on the phone and arranged to get my kids all together after everyone finished work and all their own social engagements were completed and we met at Showcase Cinema Springdale at 11:30 PM Saturday night, the last showing of Pirates for the day.

Again, I expected a fun film. I expected to be a little let down, but to enjoy the over-all tone of the film. What I saw surprised me.

The film was fantastic! It was a lot better than the other three. All the sappy sub-plots, the love story, the social commentary and all the confusing characters, were gone. What On Stranger Tides did was accomplish the perfect swashbuckler that would have made Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks proud. It was the best movie of its kind that I had seen since The Mask of Zorro in 1998. On Stranger Tides had great stunt coordination with the sword fights, and action sequences, it had compelling characters that you either loved or hated, the visual effects were fantastic and not over-the-top and the plot was a simple treasure hunt that had old-fashioned appeal. It was obvious the Pirates franchise had either discovered itself again, or had just re-invented itself into a mature adult. From the kind of film On Stranger Tides is, it is the perfect movie. I can’t think of a frame of film that I did not like. Maybe the sequence with the palm tree, I understand what they were trying to do, but the physics didn’t work for me. But other than that, everything was fantastic.

It was such a good movie, I actually have to place it somewhere between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as far as a film that captured the spirit of high adventure. It was that good of a film.

Those things aside, the move would have been awesome all by itself. But for me personally something else held my heart dearer than anything I’ve seen for years on a movie screen, or even in real life. When it first hit the screen around 12:20 in the morning I thought I had died and gone to heaven, for I had seen something that had only existed in my mind up to that point.

My wife and I have lots of secret places we like to run off to. I’ve talked about Key West, Newport on the Levy, our favorite book store among many things. One of our favorite places is Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers play football. We love to stay in the Hilton on the Bay, eat at the International Mall, and catch a game at Ray Jay when we can get away for the weekend in the fall. Now, I love my wife. But one of my other great loves in this world is the Pirate Ship inside that stadium. I am utterly in love with the big skull that hangs off the bow of that ship, and has red glowing eyes and breathes smoke during the football game. I’ve told the Glazer family myself how much I admire them for building such a thing and I fly the Buccaneer flags they gave me personally every Sunday afternoon during football season in tribute to their pirate ship, because I think it is so innovative, creative, and such a good tool that engages the fans in the game. It certainly raised the bar in the NFL as to the fan experience. So what happened at 12:20 took my breath away, because it was obvious to me that Rob Marshall, director of On Stranger Tides feels the way I do about pirate ships with skulls on the bows.

The Queen Ann’s Revenge is a ship I know from our Pirates Constructible Game. I know the ship from history too, as the ship that Blackbeard died on when getting stuck on a sand bar off the coast of the Carolinas. Well, in this film, Blackbeard is alive and well, which he is fantastic to look at, and The Queen Ann’s Revenge is a haunted ghost ship that is absolutely spectacular. And I don’t mean spectacular with a little “s.” I mean SPECTACULAR! Nothing short of jaw dropping spectacular!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Disney crew actually built a life-sized ship that they filmed on. There was no cheap visual effects shortcut here. They built an actual life-sized ghost ship that oozed pure sinister evil over every frame of film. It is worth the price of a ticket just to see this ship on the screen. It’s that good!

The story worked at every level. It was fun, romantic, thrilling, mysterious, and historically authentic. The costume design was first-rate, and I mean Academy Award winning material. If On Stranger Tides doesn’t get Oscars for best Visual Effects, Sound, and Costume Design, I would hate to see the film that beats it, because those categories were all top-notch, and I mean top.

When the film ended, I felt refreshed, completely rejuvenated even in the small hours of the morning. The film took my family on an unforgettable adventure that is of a quality I have not seen in well over a decade. There have been good movies since the films I mentioned, like the Mask of Zorro, and the first two Indiana Jones films, but On Stranger Tides is the first that comes to my mind probably in the lifetimes of many young people going to see this film to have such an experience.

This was not a tired old recycle of a franchise. This was a stand-alone first film that would be forever remembered if it was part one and not a fourth film. Any fears of not having the characters of Elizabeth and Will in the film are dismissed. The film is about Captain Jack, but the supporting characters such as Penelope Cruz as the old flame of Sparrow and Blackbeard’s daughter was perfect. She fit the role as though she were born to play the part. Barbarossa was still perfectly played as he was in the other three films, but Blackbeard in this film could go down as a classic villain as popular as Darth Vader. He was that good in this film.

Will people go see this movie three, four, ten times like they did in previous films? I don’t know. We live in a pretty cynical age. Film goers are pretty jaded these days, so whether or not they appreciate what at good film On Stranger Tides truly is will remain to be seen. I was just complaining the other day that nobody was making films like this anymore, and Disney actually pulled it off and they did it by trimming down their budget and expectations. They put restrictions on themselves to make their funding model more viable and not attempt to be everything to everybody. They focused on just doing a good job and letting the chips fall where they may. And it worked.

This film should be a lesson to everyone. Sometimes, less is more. Put the money where it counts and decide what you don’t need than make everything count. On Stranger Tides does that very well and will go down in film history as one of the very best films that Hollywood has to offer in a long tradition of evoking modern mythology to reflect the consciousness of the human spirit.

This is Hollywood at it’s best!


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

Oh No, Did I Make Some People Mad…..TOUGH: Letters Attacking Me in the Pulse Journal

What you’ll read below is reflective of the stupidity happening in the City of Cincinnati where massive wastes in tax payer dollars are occurring.

Watch this I-Team Report.

What follows is the response to my editorial in the Pulse Journal which is found here: CLICK TO VIEW

Two letters found my comments in this week’s Journal disturbing about the school board and attempted to refute my statements. I’ll present those letters below with my response in parentheses. These two letters come on the backs of Lakota’s contract negotiation with the teachers union.


The 2 million dollars saved is almost the same amount saved from cutting busing. That’s how much money Lakota is saving just in freezing step-increases, which they should have done two years ago, to avoid the current crises. Because the school board did not act in a timely fashion, there are over 600 employees at Lakota that make over 65K per year. Click here to view who they are and how much they make.

Now the letters:

Wrong qualifications listed for No Lakota group

Rich Hoffman of the No Lakota anti-levy group presented an interesting request in his recent letter to the Pulse-Journal editor. His letter solicited new candidates for the Lakota Board of Education and it was striking for two reasons. It was striking to see what the anti-levy group listed as qualifications and it was equally striking for what it did not consider important.

The No Lakota group determined that ideal school board candidates “should be older than 55, be preferably retired or semi-retired, and not looking to use the school board position as a political platform for higher office or to enhance a real estate profession.” Evidently the ideal No Lakota group school board candidate does not need an education, budgeting skills, social skills, communication skills, or any interest in providing excellence in education for the community. Just say no and you’re elected.

The No Lakota group letter continued to infer that current board members “cave to the unions,” that they “intend to overpay the new superintendent” and they are perhaps guilty of “corruption and abuse of the taxpayer.” Our community is in long-term trouble if many of the No Lakota group actually believe those charges.

Although most area residents moved here specifically because of our quality schools, Lakota could still become the next Little Miami district. Imagine that scenario: one home out of every four for sale, property values decline by more than 40 percent in three years, parents paying thousands extra to educate their kids in private schools, and local school decisions made by the state.

No thank you.

With all due respect, Mr. Hoffman, the ideal school board member should be a local taxpayer, interested in providing quality education to the community, understand school funding mechanisms from both the state and local levels, have excellent two-way communication skills, and have the real interests of students and taxpayers at heart. Care and respect for your community does not have an old-age requirement and it is not necessary to be retired.

Al Miller
West Chester Twp.

(Notice that in this survey by Coldwell Banker that nobody mentions schools as being the decisive factor in buying a home. Kind of interesting.

Al, buddy………where did I say school board candidates do not need an education, budgeting skills, social skills, communication skills, or any interest in providing excellence in education for the community? Just say no and you’re elected? Don’t older people have those skills and do they miraculously lose them passed the age of 40? Is that what you’re saying? Al, I expect all those traits in a school board member. In fact, I expect all that and more. I also expect a school board member to be able to balance a budget. This school board has been tasked with balancing the budget and they aren’t doing it, so they obviously aren’t very good at “budgeting skills” as you put it. I could put a child on the school board and they could do the same job as this school board when tasked with a problem.

“Joan, we don’t have enough money to meet our budget needs,” says the Lakota treasurer.

Joan says to the board, “Ok, we need to ask for more money from the community.”

Now, how is that intelligent, wise, or in any way prudent? Like I said, that is the first response a child would have to the problem. Not any of the skills you listed. So what are you defending? Are you saying that indefinitely higher taxes are the way to go, that every time the school needs money, we just throw money at them no matter how much? And I didn’t say the school could fail either. I pay a lot of money in tax each year to that school and I don’t pay to have a crappy school. If those people don’t know how to balance a budget, then they need to be replaced, because we have provided plenty of money to be an excellent school, and continue to do so.

Now, here is the Definition of CORRUPTION, since you brought it up.

1
a : impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle : DEPRAVITY b : DECAY, DECOMPOSITION c : inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (as bribery) d : a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct

So as to the corruption at Lakota, it is illegal to use teachers while on the payroll of the tax payer to use tax payer resources to pass a school levy. That means a teacher can’t talk about it to students. They can’t pass out literature. They can’t even use a school printer, decorate a bus or design pro campaign literature while on the payroll of the school, yet they ignore the law and do it anyway. The No Lakota Group has statements that some teachers spent entire class periods lecturing their students about the merits of a levy passage encouraging those bright young minds to go home and tell their parents to vote for the levy. We also know of incidents where principals have openly threatened through their PTA organizations to boycott Liberty Twp and West Chester businesses that don’t support the levy attempt. Some of these calls were made during school hours by employees of the district paid for by the tax payer. In fact, I have a letter from a principle that was typed on his school computer and sent to all the teachers that work for him complaining about the community not supporting the levy. This was done during school hours with school equipment, and that is illegal. The school board knows about this activity yet does not do anything about it. That is corrupt. It’s also corrupt to call the token cuts to services as needed when the obvious strategy is to inconvenience parents to extort money from them. When busing was cut to save a couple million dollars under the mask of “needed” cuts when everyone knows that the payroll is simply too high and out of control is an open participation in bribery. Pay the levy or we’ll cut services you need. That is wrong. I actually have many such instances of this behavior that will be revealed should the district choose to pursue another levy. We’ve held back on this information for the sake of the community, but it will not be tolerated from here on out.

And since you seem to not understand economics here’s a free lesson for you. Notice that passing a levy doesn’t figure into the equation here. The value of your home is only worth the value it has to potential people who want it. Most people who bought on the back of the housing bubble bought too high, so you are looking at a collapse that has nothing to do with school funding. In fact, higher taxes make your home less attractive, not more attractive. If the school is expected to still be excellent, and taxes stay stable, your value will stay at market value, which is probably too high because you bought your home on the back of a bubble. Passing a levy will actually hurt your value.

Basically, Al, it is your decision if you choose to not see these things, and you have a mentality to throw more money into a bottomless pit. You won’t be one of the people we’d nominate to put on the school board. We already have too many people who think like you working for the school system already.)

This video could be Lakota, Sycamore, or Mason. The problems are all the same yet nobody wants to deal with the real issue.

Now, the next letter.

DO NOT PLACE BLAME WHERE IT DOESN’T BELONG

Let’s get the full story out there please. The Lakota School Board is acting to deal with teacher contracts the only legal way they can. They have canceled the second year of the two-year contract because it could not be funded. They are going back to the negotiating table with the teacher union to achieve the best result possible.

Do not place blame where it does not belong.

The board said they would deal with the situation through a three pronged approach — reduce expenditures, put a policy in place to limit future expenditure increases, and seek additional revenues. Students and families have given, administrators and staff have given, we need our community now to recognize the need, and participate in maintaining and preserving the investment made by this community in our schools. The fact of the matter is that our school district can not be sustained without a levy. There is nowhere else to cut costs. If we want our communities to continue to be a great place for families to live, a great place to raise children, then we have to pass the levy in November.

Back when the first levy failure happened, the “no” people said they wanted the district to make serious cuts before they would support a levy. The cuts have been made. The cuts continue to be made. What is their argument now?

We must recognize that our school district and the school board are limited by law and mandates. Dedicated and civic minded individuals who genuinely care about the future of this district and these students would be welcome to be a part of the solution. Please be a part of the future of our communities and support our schools.

We must pass the next levy in order to have a sustainable and continuously excellent school district.

Andrea Henderson
West Chester Twp.

(Andrea, those cuts have not been made. The school board cut buses, laid-off some newer teachers, and made sports a pay for play deal. All those cuts are designed by the OSBA to inconvenience parents and force them to vote for a levy the next time. These strategies are taught to school board members at Levy University in Columbus. I know many school board members that have taken this class, so I know what goes on there.

Now, as to the district being limited by law in what they can cut, what you’re talking about is the teacher’s contracts and the protections the OEA have lobbied on their behalf. That is the very reason that Kasich signed Senate Bill 5 into law, to give the school board the ability to control their costs. So technically it isn’t illegal any more to attack those contract costs. Unions are scared to death of this bill, which is why they are trying so hard to get the bill repealed. Notice how these teachers speak in extreme ways. “It will destroy what we fought for, for years.”

We can’t afford their union. We can’t afford their collective bargaining. These rights they are speaking about are a result of FDR and LBJ, and their big government policies. They aren’t rights granted by the US Constitution and we are not required to pay for them as property owners. It should actually be discussed that it’s unfair to property owners to be forced to pay for the high expectations of these union employees.

Once those current teacher contracts are up, school boards can deal with that 85% of their escalating costs that have been illegal. Besides the potential problem with the law restricting control of those employee costs, we also have the trouble with quantitative easing that is about to hit us all hard from the federal level, so asking for a higher taxes will destroy many families. Oh, you don’t know what quantitative easing is. I’m sorry. Here’s a lesson.

The sad thing is, and I don’t mean to pick on you, there are thousands of people who think the same way you do, and they’re all wrong; that you are willing to write these people a free pass. For a district to be forced by law to incur further taxation is insane, foolish, and pure extortion in the simplest form. Anyone that supports such measures has an education that has failed them completely. Supporting your school does not mean tossing money out the window of a runaway bus. Supporting your school means solving problems when they come up. Squeezing the property owners for everything they have while an aggressive teachers union has negotiated a scam on us all, to maintain an average wage of 63K per year is insane. People who say “good” and “money” in the same sentence do not understand the value of things, and are ignorant to what makes something better than something else. You cannot rape and pillage a community of its resources and expect it to last.

The No Lakota people have different degrees of resistance. For me, I want education reform completely. I don’t like the current system, and I want to see major changes. It’s not worth 10K per kid. The senior citizens in our group are on a fixed income, and they can’t afford the tax. And the business owners in our group are people who have been hit hard by the recession. They are sitting on property that they invested in years ago that should have been paying them back by now, but are currently sitting vacant. Further taxes on that property only drain more money from them. So when people who don’t value money say these people are rich, and should pay their fair share, they sound like fools because they aren’t the people who are building up the community. The people supporting these tax levies are typically people who have kids in the school, they moved to Lakota to be a part of a good community, they want sports for their kids and all the electives of a large school, but they also want it cheap. They want the “shared” costs of the entire community that pays these costs year after year. These are the same people who will move out of Lakota when their kids grow up and leave the community, and those parents will downsize to another home in Florida or someplace else. Meanwhile, they’ll leave people like me with the bill they racked up. So don’t lecture me about what makes a good community. The people who want this levy are people who want something good cheaply and you want it for your own selfish reasons. When your kids are done with the system, chances are you’ll move anyway. )

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

Changing a Flat Tire in the Wasteland: Those who take away S.B.5 will be responsible

We have a real problem. Public officials have paid themselves too much. They don’t want to surrender any of that funding now that they’ve looted our tax money for everything that has been sent in their direction, so their solution is to increase taxes to pay for their “public service.” This is true of mayors, city council members, coroners, teachers, superintendents, virtually every public official. Listen to Doc Thompson of 700 WLW talk to a Lance Burton from Channel 9 about their latest investigation into public employee salary problems.

Toward the end of this broadcast I came on with Doc to give an update to the new contract concession made by the Lakota School System with the LEA. The LEA still needs to vote on the concession, but the process has started.

This is one of the key reasons that Senate Bill 5 was passed by the Ohio House and Senate and signed by Governor Kasich just over a month ago. Public employee costs have sky-rocketed in recent years. There is no management control of the public’s money, and the only solution those public officials can come up with is higher taxes. This is the primary reason school districts all over Ohio are failing.

They all have one thing in common; their labor costs are too high, and when those labor costs are analyzed, it is clear that the public officials have paid themselves 30%, or more, above the average wage of the non-public sector employee. It was their lack of discipline that led to the budget shortfalls, not a shortage of cash supplied by the community. Public officials seem to all share the same mentality, tax more to pay for their big spending.

Look at all the police cars escorting Joe Biden to a fundraiser for his boss. Seems like a waste of money to me.

This is certainly Todd Portune’s solution to the stadium shortfalls in Cincinnati. Portune is a commissioner of Hamilton County. He was warned years ago of the potential problems with the stadium deals, but everyone just kicked the can down the road. Now it’s time to pay up, so Todd wants a sales tax on the fans, as if the cost for a professional sports ticket wasn’t already high enough. Todd does this because he doesn’t understand any other option, tax and spend. Or spend then tax. Same difference.

It is on the back of all this news that a recent Quinnipiac poll of 1,370 voters reported that 54% of Ohioians support repealing S.B.5 as opposed to 36% that support keeping it the law of the land.

I am proudly one of those 36%. I think S.B.5 is the only hope for the future of the state. It is the only tool on the horizon that will allow citizens to get these out-of-control costs under control. It is because of the passage of that bill that Lakota and the LEA even met at the table in record time and made a deal to eliminate the step increases. It is the LEA through the OEA (Ohio Education Association) that decided that S.B.5 would destroy their grip on politics and communities so they made a concession now to take the edge off. Because not only do they seek a new levy in November, but they also want to put on a softer face so enough Ohioans will see things their way and vote to repeal S.B.5. But consider that without S.B.5 as a threat, nobody would be talking. The LEA, the OEA or any government employee wouldn’t even consider negotiating. They haven’t in the past, and based on the rates of pay they have given themselves under the generosity of Ohio’s communities they won’t in the future.

I can only conclude that of that 54% those are the people that either work in government or want to. They are the type of people who look to some “jack pot” to solve their problems in life. They are those types of people that crave a “government job” because of the high compensation and security that is unheard of in the private sector. They are the reason that having too many people work for government is dangerous. Having a government that is too big means democracy, or even a representative republic dies, because people will not vote against themselves, and if government is the way they make their living, they aren’t going to cut their own throat, even if that is what’s best for the state or nation.

It really comes down to this, if S.B.5 is repealed, and everything goes back to the way things were, then the situation we are seeing, where schools are going bankrupt, cities are struggling to avoid bankruptcy, and deficits are percolating in every government position for lack of tax money, yet the society paying the taxes are already spending 50% of all their income on taxes in some for or another, and it’s not enough, only bad things can happen. Those bad things will happen soon, before the 2012 presidential election. And when those bad things happen, if the state of Ohio does not have S.B.5 to protect ourselves, Ohio will fail miserably. It will push out its residence and business community with excessively high taxes to meet the greedy public employee expectations, or those public employees will bankrupt the whole system. And the devastation will be on the backs of those 54% who voted to repeal S.B.5.

It won’t be on my back or the back of the 36%. We are trying to fix the situation. Those who want to take away S.B.5 essentially want to take away the tool we have to fix the problem.

Imagine that you were trying to change a flat tire. And our funding problem is flat. People can’t afford higher taxes so the air is out of the tire. So you want to change the old tire to a new tire, one that doesn’t require so much air to fill it. Air of course is the taxes we pay. So we jack up the car to change that tire. Senate Bill 5 is the jack we use to raise the car and replace the flat tire with a new one. And along comes a bunch of people that want the tire to stay flat, because they don’t want the car to move. They want to be stuck, because they benefit from the car being stuck. So they take away the jack.

Without the jack, how do we change the tire? You can’t. The tire will remain flat.

That’s what’s at stake. There are a lot of people like me that are willing to change the tire so we can move the car down the road. But if the car stays stuck, and stranded, broke and useless, it will be because of the fools that took away the tools to fix the car.

If that happens, the blame will be solely on the backs of the idiots that took away our jack. (S.B.5) People like me will survive. I’ll do like a lot of productive people will do; I certainly won’t look to open a new restaurant or business. I may not even want to live in the state. I might move to another state like Texas or Florida that doesn’t have such high taxes. Or I might just do the minimum to live so I don’t get taxed too much, because what’s the use in doing the extra work if some scumbag, politician is just going to pad their pockets with my hard work. Meanwhile, the public officials striving to do almost nothing to earn a six figure income all off tax money will find themselves far worse underfunded than they do now. And it will be their entire fault. They will be kings of their own wasteland, a kingdom of their own bankrupt making left scratching their heads and crying about how they arrived there. That’s when I’ll laugh in their face and remind them that they took the jack, so the car couldn’t move. Now they are stuck and rotting along the side of the road in a wasteland of parasites and will only have themselves to blame.

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

Who Loves Authority, Not Me: Why it’s considered radical to dislike being told what to do

How much do public officials make? How much are they paid to move paper from one desk to another, to vote on new laws for us to obey, and to assert their authority over us? Find out with this fantastic Channel 9 report.

How much do we pay officials to send out letters like the one described below?

When I opened the envelope from Butler County Court of Common Pleas I was mildly excited, because the letter turned out to be what I thought it was; a notification for Jury Duty.

Now, I don’t mind such things. I see it as a civic obligation and I recognize the service in the spirit it was intended. I enjoy court because of the human theater. I usually learn a lot about human society in such places, so it would not be a difficult thing to ask me to participate.

However, I became infuriated at the wording of the letter: Dear Prospective Juror, You are COMMANDED to be available to appear and serve on the petit jury of the Butler County Common Pleas.

Now, wait a minute. Nobody commands me to do anything. Who do these idiots think they are? They serve me, I don’t serve them. Who has the right or obligation to command me to do anything? Who did I give permission over my sovereignty to command me to do anything? Nobody! I give no authority to any man on the face of this planet to have authority over me. No man, woman, child, spiritual entity, nobody on Earth. I recognize no leader over my family but myself. I seek no services from any resource but my own skill and labor, and I authorize no human being to have authority over me.

So what fool government worker sitting down at the Butler County Court House shoving paper around each day and getting paid excessively well to do so think in their wildest dreams that they have authority over me and my family?

The answer to this comes from the broadcast of Doc Thompson of 700 WLW about an Indiana Supreme Court issue that enables the police to enter a home without any warrant, under reasonable suspicion. Residents are not allowed to resist any search from the police of their homes.

Now, many will read my comments and think that my view is radical. That’s only because as an American, you are too far gone. Your perspective is skewed too far to the progressive thought process. Now this past week, there was an officer killed in the line of duty by a crazed maniac in Lebanon, Ohio. That is a very sad story. I feel terribly for the officer’s family. After all, the guy was just throwing down stop sticks, and he didn’t deserve to be killed by a lunatic.

But the emotion of the moment doesn’t change my opinion that police have no right to perform as a military device against the citizens. They have no right to sit perched on the sides of roadways like stalking hunters only to pull over random victims to raise revenue for their departments. They have no right to tell me to wear a seat belt. They have no right to impose themselves on me in any way.

I tend to take charge of the situation around me, and I don’t need a police officer to intercede. If I see a wreck on the highway, I’ll stop and help. I may even help direct traffic. If someone tries to rob me, I have the second amendment. I just need the officer to take the statement for my court appearance. About a month ago I was stuck in traffic in front of the Middletown Mall because of a major accident on I-75. The cops at the incident were way above their heads with the issue. They were holding up traffic for miles in front of the mall, while the police diverted highway traffic off the ramp and back onto the wreck up on the highway. I was parked right in front of the police holding up the traffic for over a half hour. People behind me were getting upset and were beeping their horns letting the cops know that they needed to relieve some of the traffic. It’s not the poor decisions of the cops handling the situation that I found offensive, it was the look on the officer’s faces that made me angry. The lead officer on the scene was strutting around arrogantly and was going up to cars and knocking on their windows angrily to tell them not to beep their horns. I saw on their faces the eyes of bullies that didn’t like to have their authority challenged. They were struggling to maintain their control of the situation.

I have a long history with police. When I was younger, I got pulled over all the time. Before my 18th birthday I had been to court more times than I had years on my birthday, just for traffic violations. Every time I went to court, my parents told me to wear my school jacket, because then the judge would go easier on me. Besides the traffic tickets, I had police altercations for fights, for deaths, for trespassing, thefts, just about everything you can imagine. Yet, I was not a bad kid. I didn’t drink. I didn’t do drugs. I didn’t treat people badly. But I did stick up for myself. I did have a hard-line where I refused to concede to authority and that made me a target.

As a man I’ve been to court for all those same issues, but add to those law-suits, various disputes, and employer-employee issues. I’ve watched a judge enter a room dozens and dozens of times to be told by the bailiff, “all rise, the honorable court so-and-so presiding,” only to have everyone in the court room sit back down. Somewhere when I was very young I saw the process as a scam, I lost respect for the whole ceremony, and I stopped wearing my school jacket to court, and instead wore my leather jacket. I learned that the people attracted to the profession of law enforcement in general are attracted to power, so to make a blanket statement that police are all honorable and above criticism is naive and foolish. I have seen these people from every angle, and that is my opinion. I respect whatever oath they chose to take for themselves, and in the context of society, I respect their rules. But my property, my sovereignty, intruding on it is an act of war from a foreign entity. An attack on me in any way, an improper entry to my home, even stepping on my property is an act of war by a domestic enemy. If we are on the highway, “neutral” territory, and they turn on their little lights and pull me over, I pull over. I consider such encounters as getting caught by a tax troll. But I don’t respect their law enforcement because I don’t respect the laws created by corrupt politicians who write those self-serving laws.

I feel so strong about this issue that I wrote an entire book about it that is currently under contract review with a publisher. For those that think my anger at school systems is extreme, or misplaced, it doesn’t hold a candle to my anger at law enforcement. I have a lot of stories I could tell. I have already told some of them at this link, CLICK HERE.

I do not give honor to a uniform blindly. I know police officers personally and they are not the kind of people who I’d trust with making a decision to enter my home because some scumbag politician passed a law that decided I was a threat to the law. Such things are subjective, and I choose to not be included in the little game.

As if my impression toward police officers were not cemented at an early age, I have a rage that continues to this very day over an incident that occurred in Sharonville when my wife, a fashion model at the time worked at her parents business as a receptionist for part-time money. Her and I were newly married. I don’t even think she was 19 years old yet. Well, her parents needed the police to take a statement about something, one was an older guy in his late 40’s, and was very over-weight and had a classic cop mustache. His partner was a skinny young man fresh out of the military, in his mid-twenties. So these cops came into this business and my wife greeted them. “Wow, you’re pretty,” said the older cop smiling at his partner. “And married too. What’s a pretty young girl like you doing married?”

“Oh, I met a great guy, and I’m very happy,” my wife said.

“Would you ever cheat on your husband?” the older guy said as both cops laughed.

“No,” my wife said becoming serious.

“Well,” said the old cop, “would you lay still while I do.” Both cops erupted into laughter.

My wife didn’t know what to do. Her parents had heard this, but feared to say anything, because they didn’t want to be on the bad side of the cops. When I came home from work that day, she was crying, feeling helpless. I called the police station, talked to the supervisors of those officers and let him know how I felt.

“Do you want to file a complaint?” he asked me. “Just come on down and fill it out.”

My wife begged me to drop it, because I had already lost my driver’s license at the time till I was like 26, and I was only 20 at the time. So she wanted no more court appearances and no more trouble. So we had to drop the case. But as I drove around Sharonville I looked for those cops to confront them myself which I never saw around town again. Police are no better than average people. They only have the authority we give them. They are not qualified to make decisions on our behalf. Politicians are not qualified to make decisions on our behalf, obviously. So unless other citizens start questioning these police actions, these police agencies and government officials will continue to encroach themselves into your sanctity.

That lady who wrote me the letter COMMANDING me to appear in court is out of her mind thinking such a statement has any justification in my life. Jury Duty is something I WANT to do. Commanding me to do so makes me to not want to do it.

Just some things to consider in relation to law enforcement. I’m happy to have them around. I think having police is important to keeping the peace. But, I see all too often that they abuse their power, and it goes to their head like everyone else that works in public service. They forget who they work for. And if left to their own devices, these intrusive stories will get worse and worse over time, and we’ll pay for it with our taxes and freedom.

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

Mark Mallery Sues the City of Cincinnati: Looters, thieves and scum bags strike again!

Who are the modern looters of our society? Doc Thompson of 700 WLW explores that concept in this fantastic broadcast.

It is a disturbing trend that we are seeing, which has been occurring for a number of years. There are two kinds of Americans. There are those that desire socialism, where a cradle of collectivism will provide a utopia of love, understanding, fairness, and collective salvation. The other kind of American looks to the traditional values that made the United States successful in the past, and believe that the same traits that made the United States great then can do so in the future. The first type of person believes that for collectivism to work, society must rid themselves of all desire for violence and personal property. The second type understands that conflict is part of the human condition, and that by harnessing that conflict in a positive way, capitalism will bring great inventions and production capacity to society. They honor property as a way to measure themselves and their achievements and as an incentive toward competition. Property is like a scoreboard in a football game. It lets people know the score of the game.

Spirituality, which both versions of living struggle with is knowing that the game you’re playing doesn’t matter in the long run. It only matters on the field of battle. When death comes, the games of life matter very little. The scoreboard only reflects the status of the game.

Now playing all these versions of existence against each other are looters, and thieves. In an uncivilized society, looters put on a mask and rob people in side alleys of their wealth. In a civilized society, the looters put on masks too, but they are the masks of authority, and they rob you without threats of violence, not openly. They rob you with the threat of potential violence inflicted by some random act beyond your control, which they as an authority figure can protect you from. So what they do is basically extort from the unknowing, naive victim, “protection money.” These are looters. They are anybody that makes a living off the public. Anyone that takes, but does not give back. For instance, Barrack Obama is a looter. Not because he’s a black president, or even a democrat, a progressive or a socialist. But he is a looter because he could never have personal success without public work. He’d not sell one book if he wasn’t running for president or if he wasn’t the current president. And none of the money he earns is for the personal worth of what he produces. He earns money for what he won’t do to a company, such as GE. Companies throw money at Obama and his progressive friends in congress and the senate to avoid regulation, and to create regulation against enemies. Obama earns his money by this process. Not by creating a product, or even working a punch press. He simply loots off the public to facilitate a process favorable to thieves. Without public office, his ability to produce in society would be non-existent. That makes him a looter.

This does not include the one or two term politician that just wishes to contribute something to their community. This term of “looter” does apply to the career politician who just takes, and takes and takes. They spend their time making new laws with the money they’ve looted so that the new laws will make it easier to loot you.

A good example of this is Mayor Mallory of Cincinnati. He reveals his true intentions. When the city cut his car allowance, as heard in Doc Thompson’s broadcast, he sues the city to recover those costs. His actions show that he ran for mayor, so he could put on the mask of authority, and therefore openly rob anyone he chooses. It’s no different from a thief.

Other examples are school superintendents. They are retiring from service to the district, then being hired by the school board just two days later, which is legal, and taught to them by the OEA. The OEA lobbied for that legal precedent so they could dangle the greed carrot in front of school superintendents and buy them off. Click here to see the I-Team report. It’s a very common practice. With superintendents, the money flows easily and all that is required of them is to maintain an “excellent” district which requires lobbying the Ohio Board of Education, and to secure funding when it’s needed. So when the teachers unions present “looter” style contracts, the superintendent signs off on it and gets the levy passed to pay for it. That’s the game, and they are looters.

When I have to spend the day in court on occasion, it never ceases to amaze me how many people are employed in positions that are simply “looter” positions. The only contribution they give society is in the handling of a driver’s license, or the processing of a court document. Most of the activity that goes on, including the issuing of tickets, the legal maneuvers of lawyers, the process of issuing permits and every form of “red tape,” the grandparent of apathy, are positions created for the thief and carnival con artist to lift money from you and place it their pocket. The role of the teacher that proclaims that their master’s degree merits 90K per year is no different from the fast talker at the county fair that asks you to step right up and try to throw the ring around the pop bottle. After he’s scammed you from your money you realize that the rings were weighted so it was nearly impossible to get the ring on the bottle. The same with schools and balanced budgets, the levies are weighted against the community, so the money tree can keep on growing, thriving off the money looted from that same community. The looters use fear to keep you from seeing what their hands are doing, or what their hearts truly desire.

When in doubt, remember the school superintendents that say, “money doesn’t matter to me, I am committed to the children,” yet retires from their job one day, and two days later is rehired so they can collect a full retirement pension, and a full salary. Or the mayor that proclaims that they are doing what’s best for the city he runs, while at the same time suing that same city over a car allowance.

These scum bags are thieves, creeps, and losers that only gain power because you empower them to take it from you with your desire for peace, which they use as a weapon against your sovereignty.

Yes, there are two kinds of Americans. The first kind desires socialism, and it is under this system of government that the thieves also desire, because it creates a society of easy victims that will empty out their pockets in a desire for peace. The second kind of American is the enemy to the thieves, because they aren’t so easy to fool. The thieves under that second type of American have to use a literal mask to do their looting, because they are forced to hide from the mainstream.

It’s important to know who you are, the first or the second, because there is no in between. There is no gray area in this matter. To know the answer, you must know your heart, are you a looter that wants something given to you without giving back, or are you a producer that just wants to live your life free of being robbed?

You better know which you are because America will not survive both. We can’t be home of the brave and home of the coward and thief at the same time.

Rich Hoffman

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

Lakota Hopes to Freeze your Memory: The LEA and the school board freeze step increases

BRIAN COMBS OF 700 WLW ANNOUNCES A CONTRACT CONCESSION AT LAKOTA SCHOOLS

I’m convinced that today the majority of Americans want what those first Americans wanted: a better life for themselves and their children; a minimum of government authority. Very simply, they want to be left alone in peace and safety to take care of the family by earning an honest dollar and putting away some savings. This may not sound too exciting, but there is something magnificent about it. On the farm, on the street corner, in the factory and in the kitchen, millions of us ask nothing more, but certainly nothing less, than to live our own lives according to our values—at peace with ourselves, our neighbors and the world.

Ronald Reagan, 1976

Matt Mayer of the Buckeye Institute talks to Doc Thompson about union indoctrination in public school. This is a big problem lead by the OEA and the LEA. Listen to that very informative interview here:

The 1,190 member Lakota teacher’s union is set to vote on approving a contract that will eliminate step increases which will be a true “freeze” on wages, which is considered by many to be an unprecedented move. Many consider such a “sacrifice” by the union as a reasonable concession. As I watch the union’s movements closely, what they are doing is showing that government doesn’t need S.B.5 to create an environment of reasonable negotiation. They are using this negotiating strategy to point to in the fall when they are going to attempt to repeal S.B.5, and proclaim that the unions have been reasonable and worked with the school board.

The only reason they are doing this now is because it has now become evident that the unions have pushed things too far. Teachers are only working 9 months a year, 8 hours a day with some take home work on occasion, and they are being paid about 30% more than everyone else who pays their wages and are working longer hours each day and working 12 months out of a year. People are aware of the scam, and now the teachers union knows that S.B.5 could end their grip on local politics, so they are doing the only thing they can do, and that’s attempt to put on a softer face and appear to be “working” with the communities.

My opinion on the step increase removal from the contract is that it is a nice gesture that is about a year and a half too late in Lakota. It’s probably about 5 years too late in economic reality all across the state. Teachers showed no restraint in negotiating their contracts with lap-dog school board members, leaving the average wage at Lakota to be over 63K per year. About half of that 1,190 member organization makes over 65K per year going as high as six figures for a teacher. (For a review of what step increases are listen to this broadcasts between Darryl Parks and I from way back in September of 2010.)

The trouble is that these teachers believe they are entitled to this amount of money because they have, “seniority,” “specialty certifications,” and various degrees. They have the same mentality as those that have grown to accept Medicare and Social Security as “entitlements” instead of calling them what they really are, and that’s welfare programs for the elderly. Politicians for years have been successful in convincing Americans that they have a “right” to other people’s money regardless of how much they’ve paid into the system. And history shows, especially in regard to Medicare that if the money is on the table, coming from the invisible hands of tax payers, then there is no shortage of people willing to over-charge for services, or to go to the doctor for every ailment, because they can. And doctors are all too willing to prescribe medication to a patient to help out the pharmacist, and to help his patient. After all, all it takes is a doctor’s note to get out of work, so the doctor wins both ways. He helps a colleague make a few bucks, and he gets to get the patient out of some work so everybody wins. That’s what you get out of Medicare. It’s a big pot of money that everyone wants to stick their hand in and fill their pockets. Being human nature, it’s all too tempting to take more than is needed, because it’s there. So the more you put in front of people, the more they’ll want to take. Using Medicare and Social Security as an example, of the $31,406 Washington has spent per household in 2010 $9,949 will go to just Social Security and Medicare. And it was like that from the very beginning. This quote from the Harford Courant, July 2nd 1969. “Social Security officials conceded Tuesday that the cost of Medicare and Medicaid are running way over original estimates.” The more we put in, the more thieves there are to take it out.

This is what teachers have done. Communities have put a lot of money in their community pots by way of property taxes, and teachers using tenure, step up and have taken as much as they could carry. The newer teachers are all too happy to wait in line behind those with seniority because their leaders in the unions have made good on their promise that if the money ever gets too low, they’ll just go back to the community and refill the pot. They do this because they believe they are entitled to the money. They believe that their degrees, or their years of service make them “qualified” for a certain amount of money. Well, their degrees don’t mean anything to me. Why do we need a teacher with a doctorate, or even a masters to teach 1st or 2nd grade. I’ve seen home-school moms do a better job in their kitchens. So why should a school district have to pay wages that are excessively high for a teacher that is over-qualified? The teacher with their hand in the pot will say they “earned” the “right” to that amount of money because they did the work at college. Well, I didn’t ask those teachers to go to college. I didn’t ask them to get a master’s degree. Those types of deals were made by crooked politicians with OEA lobbyists to create laws that allowed those classifications of teachers to take more of the pot away quicker. It’s a little scam they’ve worked out in Columbus. I didn’t agree to be robbed of my property tax to participate in such a foolish system. That kind of deal was done behind my back and I don’t like it!

In the private sector the teacher would be paid based on the value of their service, not some arbitrary figure come up by politicians from 30,000 feet that haven’t a clue what education is supposed to be. They are only in office so they can take from another pot provided by the tax payer. These people with their hands in the pots, teachers unions, politicians and the like are simply moochers. They rely on a producer, such as myself, and most likely a majority of the people reading this article, to put money into that pot. I have no respect for a moocher.

Is moocher too strong of a word? What other word is there? That’s what they are. The OEA is doing what kids do when they play house, they are coming up with a set of rules that they negotiated with themselves, and values that they created for the confined little world that exists only to them in their bedrooms. They are moochers because they don’t contribute anything useful to society. Parents are paying these people to watch their kids while the parents work. And the moochers have invented all kinds of titles and regulations to make their little game seem relevant. They are doing the job that parents are too busy to do themselves.

When my kids were going to school, my rule was that if the teacher cared enough about teaching as I did, I let my kids listen to that teacher. There were a few teachers that my kids had that were very passionate, and I admired those people. Not because they had a degree, a title, or tenure. But because they had passion for life. For the rest, the majority, that just lived an idealized life, just waiting for school to let out for the summer, that took every personal day they could, and was just doing their time waiting by the pot of taxpayer money to come available so they could reach in and take all they could, I told my kids to watch out for people like that. Watch out for sinners dressed as “saints” I’d tell them. Be careful of the con artist with the smile on their face waving you into someplace they want you to go. I warned them about such teachers with the same caution that I’d warn them of a strange old man trying to get a young girl into their car. Whether the danger is physical or mental makes little difference to me. “Watch out what people try to pour into your minds. For every negative that someone tries to give you, you must off-set it with four positives. If someone tries to give you an ignorant thought, cleanse yourself with a book before you go to sleep. The process of reading will help your mind work out corrupt thoughts the same as water assists in the digestion of food.” That’s the kind of talk I had with my own kids. And my advice to parents and children everywhere is the same. “Be careful what you let people tell you, especially moochers like the OEA that are only out to build a financial empire for themselves with money from the pot we created.”

So what are the teachers at Lakota giving up in voting away their “step increases?” They are agreeing to not take away money the community hasn’t even put into the pot yet. They are agreeing to keep all they’ve taken already, but not to take too much of what we put in next time, since the pot is empty again, after the community just filled it.

We all know the answer to this. We’d tell our children who drank too much Kool-Aid and came back to the kitchen crying after the pitcher was emptied, “I want more.” We’d say to them as reassuring as possible, “You should have thought about that before you drank it all up.”

What the Lakota teacher’s union is essentially saying is “we’ll keep drinking just as much Kool-Aid as we always have, but we won’t ask for more, so long as you keep the pitcher full” Now it’s our responsibility to tell the children, “we can’t afford to give you so much Kool-Aid. You need to drink less.”

Rich Hoffman

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

Pirates, Freedom, and Key West: What’s more important, order or happiness?

A week ago I shared a private family secret, our love of pirate ships, the constructible strategy game. Everyone that knows me well knows that I love pirates. It’s not the lawlessness nature of them that I like, but it’s the romantic idea of freedom that they represent.

I’m not normally a fan of liquor commercials, but I think I may have just seen the best one ever produced in this Captain Morgan advertisement. The makers of this commercial got it right. It may as well been ripped straight out of my mind. I LOVE IT!


The only thing I would have done different is the French vessel would have been sunk, the treasure looted, then Morgan’s crew would enjoy the drink. But, close enough.

Needless to say, I immensely enjoy the marketing strategy of Captain Morgan Rum. The key is to be honest with the sign stimuli that moves your heart to beat, and for me, this kind of stuff does it.

Pirates are one of the reasons that I ride motorcycles everywhere I go, its part of the attitude and culture of motorcycle riding that you can’t get when you just drive a car around. Here is that same woman from the Captain Morgan sword fight commercial doing the next natural thing, doing a motorcycle shoot for Harley Davidson.

That’s why I’ve said it more than once, progressives can attempt to ruin America through the schools, through legislation, through television and other social media, but deep within the human heart is a desire to be free. Motorcyclists today have a taste of that freedom, like the original pirates of the Caribbean did or the open range cowboy or frontier fighter. So in the end, progressives, socialists, communists, Marxists, and every group that wishes social control, will fail, and the reason they will fail is for the same reason the Captain Morgan ads work as visual eye candy, for the same reason that a man, or woman will spend all their extra money to buy a motorcycle, and will flock to a large motorcycle rally like Sturgis or Daytona.

The real Henry Morgan is one of my favorite historical characters. Now this might seem like an odd selection to people who read my work and think I’m a moralist. Morality to me is being authentic. Hiding one’s desires behind a drunken splendor does not take courage. To say that I did what I did because I was drunk is weak. To say I did what I did and I don’t care what you think about and I did it with full knowledge that you would not like it is more the proper attitude.

This is why I like modern-day Key West so much, because it is the closest thing on earth to Port Royal in Jamaica during Henry Morgan’s time. Here is a great documentary on Morgan and Port Royal. Again, I don’t enjoy debauchery, drunken acts, or illicit sex, but I do enjoy honesty, and there is a lack of politics in Key West and an honesty that comes with it that I enjoy. And Port Royal is what it was because it was free of politics and represents what people truly want and desire for themselves without government engineering.

We are at the point, as of this writing, just a week away from the release of the 4th Pirates of the Caribbean film, which of course my wife and I will be seeing on the opening day. Pirates of the Caribbean as a concept of course started as a ride at Disney Land and the interesting thing about the ride Pirates of the Caribbean, Walt Disney was making children films, yet he was obsessed with pirates. Why do you think that is? Listen to Walt Disney talk about his concept for the ride, where he talks about the crimes pirates committed in heroic ways. Nobody these days could get by with talking about this kind of stuff. Progressives have made everything so “touchy—feely” that creative types can’t even discuss the violence committed by a group of people like pirates, or frontiersman in any context by in feeling compassion for the victim of the violence. This is why the closest thing we have today to Walt Disney is George Lucas. Our society today would sue Disney for trying to corrupt children with this broadcast.

The key to Walt Disney is he understood that for imagination to work in the human mind, which is what he hoped to inspire in young people, is that they can’t get too hung up on rules. But young people needed to have their own set of values that they’d build with the mythology Disney gave them with foundation stories.

Modern business executives or politicians don’t understand how Disney thought. In fact, nobody does, because people get so hung up on the rules of living instead of the joy of it. Heck, even people in his family, friends and company don’t understand. We all understand the situation on a subconscious level, but people are unable to reach that understanding under conscious thought.

Oh, by the way, Walt Disney didn’t go to college. He didn’t even finish high school, only had one year. Maybe that’s the key to success. Tests do show that kids seem to become less innovative and imaginative with each year of public school. We seem to teach imagination out of kids.

So when Johnny Depp puts on this costume to play Jack Sparrow again, people will flock to see it, even though many of the people who work at Disney don’t really understand why. They are still milking Walt Disney’s ideas that are over 40 years old now without creating anything new, because the key to success is in the essence behind the myth.

If you follow progressive ideas, and a lot of young people do because it’s taught to them in their public schools and colleges, they hide the lie of their movement behind emotional truths, which then disguises the essence of any given thought. They seek to re-engineer what it means to be human by eradicating the desire for freedom. That desire for freedom to my relief is still able to reach young people. In fact, the new Lego Pirates of the Caribbean is something my wife and I are looking forward to playing with our young nieces and nephews where even those under the age of 10 can get that small taste for freedom manifested in the enjoyment of a game.

It is unlikely that any of the people working on the Pirates film including Johnny Depp understands what Walt Disney understood clearly when he came up with the idea for a Pirates ride in his children’s themed amusement park. Here at the premier, all the participants appear able to feel the energy evoked by the film, but aren’t sure how it translates to the art of living life. To them, the movie realm is a separate fantasy to be lived only with the price of a ticket and viewed in a darkened theater. To me, the movie realm is a reflection of human consciousness and represents the true desires of mankind.

That art is all about freedom, and not waking up in the morning worried about a government telling you what to do, what to eat, what to learn, or how you’ll make your money. It’s a genuine love of freedom, the right to succeed or fail to live or die in the pursuit of it. That’s the magic!

And it was nice to see that the director of the Captain Morgan commercial understood that freedom which he captured so wonderfully in that new clip. It’s one thing to copy off something you like and admire. It’s a whole other thing to understand it, and that commercial does.

These are my kind of people!

Rich Hoffman

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

Becki Villamagna crossed the LINE: The Empire of Education and Money

The following note is what public education ran by teachers unions is all about. The following letter was intercepted from Becki Villamagna of the Ohio Education Association. This was the email message sent to EOA members.

__________________________________________________________________

A teacher from Springboro is having a petition signing event this Saturday from 11 AM till 1 PM. She lives right across the street from Kelly Kohls, a Springboro Board member who is tight with Shannon Jones, testified in favor of SB 5, the new president of the Warren County Tea Party, and a founding member of Educate Ohio – an anti public education, teacher and union group.

Would put out the word to your contact list? Even if all they do is drive over and clog the street, that would be great.

The address is 4188 Belle Terrace in Lebanon which is off of Pekin Road between St Rt 48 and St Rt 741.

Thanks!
Becki Villamagna
Communications/Political Action
Ohio Education Association

______________________________________________________

The email is a call to action to harass anyone that is for education reform. The union uses an aggressive strategy like this email to radicalize members against anyone that questions how much money is being wasted on public education.

This email is a perfect example of why we must have S.B.5. The more I learn, the more I am convinced that the OEA needs to be completely dissolved as a publicly funded organization. And it is publicly funded by tax payers. The members are radicals that are dedicated to preserving a destructive monopoly.

Glenn Beck did a wonderful show with college students who provided testimony to the radicalization of education, which reveals the true behavior that is behind public, and college education.

Here John Stossel does his own investigation into the public school system government monopoly that is being run by people like Becki Villamagna. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want one cent of my money in any form to go to people of such low quality.


Here’s another show by Glenn Beck. The teacher’s union and radical leftist groups do everything they can to smear Beck for shows like this, but the guy is exposing them. So Beck gets attacked the same way as Becki Villamagna is doing on behalf of the OEA going after Kelli Kohls of the Springboro School Board. This issue particularly angers me because I know Kelli, and she is one of the most sincere people on this issue that there is. She is trying to bring sanity to a monopoly of thugs, and they hate her for it, just like they hate Glenn Beck. Listen to some of the stories taking place all over the country.

If you think that Glenn Beck is pulling your leg, and is the crazy loon the unions want you to believe he is, then listen to John Stossel again, in yet another show on the education monopoly.

People like Becki Villamagna will tell you that this is a FOX News conspiracy against the working people! That is a line straight out of the Communist Manifesto. I have followed John Stossel for a long time. I loved his work on ABC’s 20/20, but he left there to work for Fox News. Listen to him explain why he left ABC to go to Fox. He’s a great reporter. He left ABC to be a reporter. That’s why Fox News is a good network, because they are actually doing the job of reporting.

Stossel reminds me a bit of the local reporter in Cincinnati Brendan Keefe, whom I have the pleasure of knowing. Check out Brendan’s work here if you haven’t seen it already. These stories have been going on for a long time. It has been people like Becki Villamagna that has singled out anybody that speaks out against their monopoly with thug-like tactics.

Click here to see when David Little of Progress Ohio was hired to come after me in similar way, which only ticked me off. In fact, the day they came after me, was the day I decided that the OEA was no longer valid as an organization. They no longer had any credibility in my mind and I would fight tooth and nail to see that they no longer loot anymore tax money. They revealed to me what education is to them, and they confirmed to me that people like Glenn Beck, and John Stossel have been telling the truth. But nobody wants to hear it, because it’s inconvenient for them. After all, most parents see public school as a day care facility, otherwise they’d take a more active role in their children’s life.

Milton Friedman has been speaking about the education empire for years. This empire of terror and money isn’t new.

Kelli knows that the union will be out in force to attempt to intimidate her and the other board members as they vote on the next union contract. The meeting is at Springboro High School May 24th at 7 pm. The best way to end this reign of thugs is to counter what it is they intend to do. So if you are sick and tired of this kind of behavior, show up at the school at that time and at that place and let those union thugs know they have no power to coerce, intimidate, antagonize, manipulate and twist the arm of your elected officials with fear. Because if they were planning to “clog the streets” over just a petition, imagine what they will try to do over a new contract.

Rich Hoffman

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