In December, JCCC attorney Mark Ferguson told four members of the JCCC Board of Trustees — including the board chair and vice-chair — that they broke the open meetings law. In March, JCCC leaders lied by saying that they have always followed the law.
In March, JCCC leaders Shirley Brown-VanArsdale and Lynn Mitchelson gave new meaning to the phrase “the cover-up is worse than the crime” by wasting thousands of dollars on legal fees, when the purpose was only meant to mislead the public. They even asked JCCC Mark Ferguson to get an “unofficial opinion” — whatever that means — from the district attorney and state attorney general, though the public was never made aware about those discussions.
Only Trustee Benjamin Hodge has now asked for an official opinion from District Attorney Steve Howe, who has confirmed to The Kansas City Star that an investigation is under way.
Here are the instances he wants the DA to examine.
He wrote a letter to the editor, which was printed in The Star Nov. 29, suggesting the board might be considering an increase in property taxes. It prompted a December letter signed by four of the six trustees denying Hodge’s assertion.
Hodge believes a letter signed by a majority of the board violated the open meetings law.
He believes the second violation may have occurred during a closed executive session Feb. 19 in which the board met to review the performance of Terry Calaway, college president.
Prior to the meeting, Hodge said he would evaluate Calaway based on a budget proposal that did not raise taxes.
Calaway responded during his closed evaluation with a list of more than 50 budget cuts being considered at the time as administrators worked on a budget proposal that was presented to the board earlier this month.
Hodge said he never asked for such a list to be presented during Calaway’s review. Calaway said he presented the list to show Hodge that he was working on reductions that ultimately would not raise taxes.
MIAMI — While growing up in Serbia, Florida International forward Nikola Gacesa often heard his father talk about the way Isiah Thomas played basketball. “He is a big fan,” Gacesa said. Gacesa will soon have his own stories to tell: Thomas is back in coaching, accepting an offer from FIU to revive his career and their program. Ending a whirlwind courtship, Thomas and FIU agreed on a five-year contract Tuesday — an out-of-nowhere deal that gives the former Knicks coach and president a chance to restore the reputation he built as a Hall of Fame player and tarnished through a series of embarrassments in New York.
NEW YORK — U.S. President Barack Obama wrote a letter to FIFA president Sepp Blatter supporting the American bid to host the World Cup in 2018 or 2022. “As a child, I played soccer on a dirt road in Jakarta, and the game brought the children of my neighborhood together,” Obama said, according to excerpts released Tuesday by the U.S. Soccer Federation. “As a father, I saw that same spirit of unity alive on the fields and sidelines of my own daughters’ soccer games in Chicago.” FIFA’s executive committee will decide the hosts for both tournaments in December 2010. The United States hosted the World Cup for the first time in 1994, and the 52 games drew records for total attendance (3.59 million) and average (68,991).
Just 30% of U.S. voters say drug users in the United States are more to blame for growing drug violence in Mexico than the drug producers themselves.
Fifty-six percent (56%) say the Mexican drug producers are more to blame for the tide of violence that threatens to cross into the United States, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.
Seventy percent (70%) of voters say restricting gun sales in the United States will not reduce drug-related violence in Mexico, but 20% take the opposite view.
The largest U.S. conglomerate posted on Friday a 36 percent drop in net income and warned of some signs that the economy may be continuing to deteriorate.
It forecast that GE Capital would be profitable for the year despite an expected rise in loan delinquencies, but it also recorded about $500 million in order cancellations at its infrastructure units, which make products ranging from electricity-producing turbines to railroad engines.
Paying teachers varying amounts on the basis of how well their students perform is an idea that has been winning increasing support, both in the United States and abroad, and many school systems have adopted some version of it. Proponents claim that linking teacher pay to student performance is a powerful way to encourage talented and highly motivated people to enter the teaching profession and then to motivate them further inside the classroom. Critics, on the other hand, contend that an extrinsic incentive like bonus pay may have unfortunate consequences, including rivalry instead of cooperation among teachers and excessive focus on the one or two subjects used to measure academic progress. In this paper, a researcher from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and another from the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University present evidence on the short-run impact of a group-level incentive pay program operating in the New York City Public School System.
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, embroiled in a budget crisis like many state chief executives these days, may need to be thinking about another line of work.
Just 33% of Massachusetts voters say they are at least somewhat likely to vote for the Democratic incumbent if he seeks reelection in 2010.
Nineteen percent (19%) say they’re not very likely to do so, and 38% say they aren’t likely at all to vote for Patrick, according to a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Bay State voters.
One-third of the state’s voters (34%) now approve of the job Patrick is doing as governor, including only eight percent (8%) who Strongly Approve.
SEOUL (Reuters) - EBay Inc has agreed to buy a controlling stake in South Korean online retailer Gmarket Inc for $413 million, at a 32.5 percent premium, news service eDaily reported on Monday.
The long-discussed deal would help U.S. online auctioneer eBay emerge as a dominant player in South Korea’s customer-to-customer online market by taking control of its key competitor.
EBay would buy a 34.2 percent stake in Gmarket from its current top shareholder Interpark and the Korean firm’s chairman, at $24 a share, eDaily reported, citing unidentified sources.
Spokesmen at Gmarket and Interpark could not confirm the report.
The reported price compares with Gmarket’s latest closing of $18.12 a share. The final contract would be signed on Wednesday, eDaily said.
April 27 (Bloomberg) — Travel restrictions under consideration by the U.S. to prevent the spread of a new flu virus may be influenced by politics more than science, the World Health Organization’s chief said today.
WHO doesn’t recommend closing borders or restricting the movement of people or goods, Margaret Chan, director-general of the United Nations agency told leaders from health groups around the world in a conference call today. The disease, which may have caused more than 100 deaths and sickened more than 1,000 people, has spread too far and would be impossible to contain by closing borders, she said.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than three months into a medical leave from Apple, Chief Executive Steve Jobs remains closely involved in key aspects of running the company, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook runs the day-to-day operations, but Jobs has continued to work on the company’s most important strategies and products from home, the newspaper said in a story on its website.
This report analyzes data from the 2008 report on Pennsylvania’s Local Government Pensions prepared by the Public Employee Retirement Commission. While our previous report examined the pension plans of the state’s ten largest cities, this report segments pension data by employee classification police (963 plans), fire (79 plans), and non-uniformed (1,524 plans).to determine whether differences among the three types as gauged by the ratio of retirees to active members and the ratio of assets to plan liabilities. The study examines the data with Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the total and with the two cities removed. It also looks at home rule municipalities as compared to the non-home rule municipalities in terms of pension plan measurements.
On Wednesday, over 200,000 ordinary Americans gathered at nearly 1,000 locations around the country. Fed up with high taxes, increasing debt, and expanding government encroachment into their private lives, they gathered to express their displeasure with the Obama administration’s policies and to rally around conservative ideas to push for a new way forward for America.
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Four men behind The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s biggest free file-sharing websites, were each sentenced to a year in jail on Friday for breaching copyright, and ordered to pay $3.6 million in compensation.
Analysts said the guilty verdict in the closely-watched test case could help music and film companies recoup millions of dollars in lost revenues, though they doubted it would stem the tide of illegal downloading.
“Twitter is the side project that took,” says company co-founder Biz Stone, 35. “Now it’s our chance to do something transformative.”
When I arrive at Twitter’s headquarters on a recent morning, Jerry Brown is waiting in the lobby — just another day at the world’s hottest high-tech company. “It’s pretty bizarre,” says co-founder Evan Williams, 37. “At least once per day we look at each other and say, ‘What the hell?’ It’s like we’re living out the script of the ultimate start-up company story.”
But other than the familiar face of California’s attorney general standing near the steel front door, you would hardly know that this little company of about 30 employees is the epicenter of the Web, used by an estimated 20 million Americans on a daily — even minute-by-minute — basis. Just how fast Twitter is growing is a company secret, but its traffic appears to be more than doubling every month.
1. “Obama criticized pork barrel spending in the form of ‘earmarks,’ urging changes in the way that Congress adopts the spending proposals. Then he signed a spending bill that contains nearly 9,000 of them, some that members of his own staff shoved in last year when they were still members of Congress. ‘Let there be no doubt, this piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business, and the beginning of a new era of responsibility and accountability,’ Obama said.” – McClatchy, 3/11
2. “There is no doubt that we’ve been living beyond our means and we’re going to have to make some adjustments.” — Obama during the campaign.
3. This year’s budget deficit: $1.5 trillion.
4. Asks his Cabinet to cut costs in their departments by $100 million — a whopping .0027%!
5. “The White House says the president is unaware of the tea parties.” — ABC News, 4/15
In contrast, here is Minnesota Congressman John Kline:
Rep. John Kline knows the earmark process is broken. That’s why he has sworn off earmarks completely instead of accepting them and trotting out the vacant excuse that he has to because “everyone else is doing it.”
Unfortunately, he’s under pressure back home from people who want their pork. But in response, Kline is courageously holding firm. I love this quote:
“We’re on the side of the angels,” said Troy Young, the congressman’s spokesman.
And what’s even better is that Kline has the perfect explanation down pat to those who are hungry for pork. Excerpt:
[Kline] said the problem is that some 30,000 earmark requests are submitted each year, making them impossible to scrutinize. House members abide by an unwritten rule, Kline said, not to attack each other’s submissions. The result looks a lot like silent vote trading and back scratching, and both parties are guilty of it.
“It’s very arbitrary,” Kline said. “They just allocate money to members of Congress, sometimes based on political reasons, like are you vulnerable in the next election or not, or are you a committee chair.”
Well said. With a message like that spread broadly, earmarks can be a thing of the past.
April 29th. As reported earlier, today the United States Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Kansas Supreme Court in a 7-2 decision. The case of Kansas v. Ventris revolved around whether prosecutors could use evidence gained in admitted violation of the 6th Amendment right to counsel to impeach a defendants testimony at trial (i.e. where a defendant claimed one thing in their testimony, could the prosecution bring otherwise inadmissible evidence in to show that the defendant was likely lying). The Kansas Supreme Court had said “No”, the U.S. Supreme Court said “Yes”.
– Thirty-five perecent (35%) Strongly Approve while 31% Strongly Disapprove of his performance as president. This is the finding for Obama’s 100th day in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.
– Seventy-three percent (73%) expect government spending to go up during the Obama years. This marks one of the biggest changes in perception about the president since he was elected. Last November, just 54% expected Obama would preside over a growth in government spending. On Inauguration Day, 63% held that view.
– Twenty percent (20%) expect their taxes to go down during the Obama years while 36% expect a tax increase.
– Sixty-nine percent (69%) now say Obama is politically liberal.
– Forty-nine percent (49%) say the president is doing a good or excellent job on the economy. Thirty-four percent (34%) say he is doing a poor job.
NEW YORK — Black players accounted for 10.2 percent of major leaguers last year, the most since the 1995 season. The sport had reached an all-time low of 8.2 percent in 2007, according to Richard Lapchick, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports. The percentage of black pitchers rose to 5 percent from 3 percent and the percentage of black infielders went up to 9 percent from 7 percent. “I feel encouraged. It’s not a huge leap, but it’s a step forward,” said Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson. “I think we have to feel encouraged, not only feel encouraged but feel inspired by progress so that we can not only sustain what we have, but work harder to see that we get that number up in future reports.”
