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.”
TOKYO/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Volkswagen AG may have overtaken Toyota Motor Co to become the world’s top-selling carmaker in the first quarter, thanks to government incentives that fueled demand in VW’s major markets.
Although overall VW deliveries to customers fell 11 percent to around 1.39 million vehicles, the Wolfsburg-based group dramatically increased its share of the global passenger car market by 130 basis points to 11.0 percent.
In today’s news from K-State for Tuesday, April 14, 2009:
1) RESEARCH: K-State Senior From Eudora Researches Physics Of Liquid Surfaces (Hometown interest for EUDORA)
2) MANHATTAN interest/ TIMELY:Symposium On Engaging, Energizing And Empowering Communities Through Leadership In Action To Be April 20 At K-State
3) SALINA interest/ TIMELY: NASA Traveling Exhibit To Be Part Of K-State At Salina’s Open House
4) More Than 40 Undergraduate Students Receive K-State Cancer Research Awards (Hometown interest for CHANUTE; CLYDE; DERBY; DODGE CITY; EMPORIA; GARDEN CITY; GODDARD; HALSTEAD; HORTON; LEAWOOD; MANHATTAN; MOUNT HOPE; MURDOCK; OLATHE; OVERLAND PARK; SHAWNEE; STAFFORD; TOPEKA; WAKEENEY; and
WESTWOOD)
5) SALINA interest/ TIMELY: K-State At Salina Receives Glass Cockpit Learning Equipment From Garmin Ltd. (Hometown interest for OLATHE and
SALINA) (more…)
Most lefties claim that “no” means “no,” but not where it concerns unions that have lost the organizing argument over and over again. We can see that refusal to listen to the workers in the case of Unions vs. Wal-Mart. Repeatedly Wal-Mart workers have generally refused to unionize, yet instead of taking that as an answer, the unions continue to push. And they are at it again.
The United Food and Commercial Workers is stepping up its efforts to organize Wal-Mart workers yet again.
Since February, about 60 UFCW organizers have been dispatched to more than 100 Wal-Mart stores in 15 states to get workers to sign union-authorization cards. The cards are attached to flyers that feature a photograph of President Barack Obama and a quote from a 2007 speech he gave to UFCW activists in Chicago. “I don’t mind standing up for workers and letting Wal-Mart know they need to pay a decent wage and let folks organize,” Mr. Obama said in 2007. A White House spokesman said Thursday that the president stands by the statement.
The union is also flying several pro-union Wal-Mart employees to Washington to agitate before members of Congress to force the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) on the country.
ATLANTA - A man who says he desperately needed to use an airplane bathroom after eating something bad in Honduras faces a federal charge after being accused of twisting a flight attendant’s arm to get to the lavatory, the FBI said Wednesday.
Joao Correa, 43, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he had a bathroom emergency 30 minutes into a March 28 Delta Air Lines flight from Honduras to Atlanta, but found the single coach aisle on the Boeing 737 blocked by a beverage cart. He said he asked if he could use the lavatory in business class, but was told no.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A Burger King advertisement for new Tex-Mex style hamburgers, which features a squat Mexican draped in his country’s flag and an American cowboy, has offended Mexican officials who want the spot pulled.
Mexico’s ambassador to Spain said posters for the new “Texican whopper,” a cheeseburger with chile and spicy mayonnaise, inappropriately display the Mexican flag, which is draped over the diminutive wrestler like a poncho.
“This advertisement denigrates the image of our country and uses improperly Mexico’s national flag,” Jorge Zermeno wrote in a letter to Burger King in Spain, the Reforma newspaper reported on Monday.
In the JCCC Trustee race, in which the top 4 candidates (out of 10) won, Peter Jouras came in fifth, and I came in sixth. He didn’t beat me by much, but my guess is he spent at least $35,000 on the race (3 county-wide mailings and tons of signs). Jouras spent far, far more than I did, and he was endorsed by most of the major liberal-socialist-big-government groups (NEA, faculty union, Mainstream Coalition; all but Mission Hills/Arizonian Steve Rose), but he and I fared about the same. When I won the trustee race in April 2005, the turnout was 30%, which is closer to a representative sample of voters. That year, the marriage amendment carried the county 60-40 and Overland Park Mayor Gerlach beat a well-financed Democrat 60-40, and those proportions probably wouldn’t deviate much if held during a higher-turnout election.
Moran-Tiahrt: you’ll hear at times from supporters of one campaign or the other about how their candidate is better-known in Kansas’ Third Congressional District. I haven’t seen any evidence to verify that statement.
Thornburgh: I didn’t test Brownback’s name, because I had been told by a reliable source that his name ID was virtually 100% state-wide. One could certainly argue that it’s not a good thing for Thornburgh that Tiahrt and Moran have competiting name recognition levels, when Johnson County voters have never seen the congressmen’s names on local ballots.
I am reassured by the general accuracy of my own poll after looking at another poll taken on April 17 by the well-respected firm SurveyUSA. HT to Bagyants.com, which first made me aware of this poll that tested likely 2010 voters for the Republican primary (not all voters, therefore). Part of the poll’s breakdown includes region: NE, SW, and Western; though, I don’t know exactly how they define these terms.
Innovation is the lifeblood of the pharmaceutical industry. Over the last century, that industry has been responsible for thousands of new drugs, based on hundreds of thousands of smaller incremental innovations. The breakthrough “blockbuster” drugs taken by millions of patients today were not produced from thin air. Most represent the combined weight of seemingly small improvements achieved over time. The advantages of incremental improvements on existing drugs are paramount to overall increases in the quality of health care. As the pharmaceutical industry developed, classes of drugs-those with similar chemical composition and which treat similar conditions-have grown to provide physicians with the tools they need to treat diverse patient groups. Still, critics have been highly condescending about what they call “Me-too” drugs-drugs within the same chemical class as one or more others already on the market-which they claim add little or no therapeutic value and are nothing more than an opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to fleece unsuspecting consumers.
GREENWOOD, S.C. Her cordless phone stores 17 voice messages, and tonight the inbox is full. Edith Childs, 60, grabs a bottle of water, tosses her hat on the living room floor and scowls at the blinking red light. A county councilwoman, she spent the past 12 hours driving rural roads in her 2001 Toyota Camry, trying to solve Greenwood’s problems, but only now begins the part of each day that exhausts her. Childs slumps into an armless chair and steels herself for a 13-minute confessional.
On February 12, the Arkansas General Assembly passed legislation to increase the state’s excise rates on all tobacco products. As required by the bill, on March 1 the cigarette tax went from 59 cents to $1.15 per twenty-pack. But the same tax rate will not be enforced statewide. In a novel provision, the legislation, Act 180 of 2009, included a lower, variable rate for certain towns and stores located near the Arkansas border.
This paper will explore how Maryland got into its current deficit and will suggest what might be done about it. It builds on the extensive work of Senior Fellow Cecilia Januszkiewicz, who detailed many of the deficit problems in 2008 papers and op-ed pieces and proposed procedural solutions. This paper will take a complementary approach, looking at the operation and policy rationales relating to specific programs in greater detail.
A federal judge on Tuesday denied former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’srequest to travel to Costa Rica to participate in a television reality show.
“I don’t think this defendant in all honesty … fully understands the position he finds himself in,” U.S. District csaid, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Blagojevich, a Democrat, is awaiting trial on federal corruption charges, including allegations that he tried to sell President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat. He faces up to 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted. The former governor has pleaded not guilty and denies any wrongdoing.
Blagojevich had requested that the judge loosen his bond agreement after signing on to the NBC reality show “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here.” The network describes the show, set to air in June, as a “Survivor”-like program in which 10 celebrities are dropped in the jungle to “test their survival skills.”
(CNSNews.com) - The spending bills approved for fiscal 2009 by the Democratic Congress include 10,160 earmarks that will cost taxpayers $19.6 billion, according to the Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW).
CAGW, a watchdog group that monitors federal spending, released its “Congressional Pig Book” Tuesday listing the earmarks in the appropriations for 2009.
