Homeless in Arizona

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Flashing school marquees in Tempe upset some neighbors

By Brennan Smith The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Aug 8, 2013 2:23 PM

Tempe residents are voicing complaints over several new marquees placed in front of elementary schools around the city, likening them to Las Vegas-style casino signs that flash and blink obnoxiously.

The marquees, installed at five elementary schools around the Tempe Elementary School District, were paid for through a 2005 capital-override fund and are the first wave of 21 to be installed before the district’s winter break. The marquees cost an average of $33,000 each, though the cost varies.

Jennifer Stephens, who lives close to Ward Traditional Academy near Hermosa Drive and Country Club Way, said the marquee across the street is bright enough to light up the front porch of her house at night.

“It’s like looking at a Las Vegas-style sign next to our home,” Stephens said. “It’s full color, it’s intermittent lighting deep within a residential neighborhood that has no other signs like that anywhere close to it.”

Stephens, who helped raise money for Curry Elementary School to install a marquee in 2005, said the intent of the marquee was a good idea, but that the school district completely underestimated the impact it would have on neighboring homes.

“They pretty much rubber-stamped it,” Stephens said. “Nobody ever said, ‘Wow, would I want this thing next to my house?’ I think it was just something nobody ever thought about. Perspective changes everything.”

In addition to Ward, the new marquees are at Tempe Academy of International Studies, Broadmor Elementary School, Hudson Elementary School and Frank Elementary School. Rover Elementary School has a marquee installed, but it has yet to be energized.

Monica Allread, a district spokeswoman, said she has received three complaints about the marquees and that the district is working on adjusting them.

She said the district has implemented changes that include adjusting the time when the marquee shuts off in the evening, dimming the brightness of the display and using backgrounds and transitions that are less showy. Currently, the marquees are shut off at 8 every night. [Why not just return it to the vendor and use the $33,000 to educate the children!!!]

“We’re trying to make it as least disruptive as possible,” Allread said. “We don’t want it to be flashy and crazy, we want to be able to get messages out there.”

Stephens said Allread has been “superb” in dealing with her complaints, but Stephens takes issue with the placement of the marquees, which circumvent city laws.

“They are totally unaware of what Tempe community laws are, and they really don’t care. That’s what I think is really unfortunate about the entire situation,” Stephens said.

Tempe Code Compliance administrator Jeff Tamulevich said because the schools are on state land, Tempe takes the position that they are not subject to the city’s zoning code based on the Arizona Constitution and state law. For other buildings, the zoning and development code prohibits signage with intermittent or flashing illumination, and marquees are allowed for theaters, museums or places of worship only, Tamulevich said.

Tempe resident Marian Szabo, who lives near Tempe Academy of International Studies’ marquee near College Avenue and Broadway Road, said it’s an “outrage” that the schools are exempt from city codes.

“I feel that they are conveying this message that they can disregard existing protocol, make their own rules, and it’s a shameful and invasive attitude,” Szabo said.

Szabo said the signs are over the top and unnecessary, with other “more subdued” options like e-mail, website announcements and phone calls as better alternatives.

“Look at the age we live in. This is not the way people get messages. It’s just an in-your-face disregard for the rules and for this neighborhood,” Szabo said.

Allread said she traveled to all of the schools with marquees to see how disruptive they are and what adjustments need to be made. She said even though the marquees have been dimmed drastically in brightness since their installation, the district will continue making adjustments to appease neighbors.

“If that’s shining into your house, you wouldn’t consider that dim, so that’s what we’re trying to learn right now,” Allread said.

Ward Traditional Academy Principal Ardie Sturdivant said he was shocked to hear that there were complaints about the marquee in front of his school. “All the parents that have come into the office this summer either to register for school or just to come and get information, it’s all been positive,” Sturdivant said.

Sturdivant said he wants to have an “open door” and work with everyone in the community, including those excited and displeased with the marquee.

“I’m the first one that will listen to people and try to tweak things and make it so it works for everyone,” Sturdivant said.

Szabo, who has been voicing her complaints to the school district, said she’s not planning on pursuing any face-to-face meetings.

Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema takes a junket to Israel

Atheist Kyrsten Sinema sells out to the Jewish Christian lobbyists???

Even though US Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema is an atheist in this article see seems to have sold out to the Jewish Christian lobbyists. And of course she also seems to have sold out to the military industrial complex which supplies Israel with weapons that they use to terrorize the Arabs.

"Sinema and other Democratic lawmakers were in Israel on a previously scheduled trip paid for by an arm of a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group."

Last but not least US Congresswoman Kyrsten Sinema attempted to flush Arizona's medical marijuana law down the toilet by introducing a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.

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Political Insider: Irate Goldwater refuses to answer senator’s questions on its ties to ALEC

The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Aug 10, 2013 10:17 PM

Another assault on freedom ... Or so the Goldwater Institute believes, as it sent an indignant retort to a U.S. senator who asked the conservative think tank if it is associated with the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council.

Specifically, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., wanted to know if Goldwater served as an ALEC member, if it funded ALEC this year and if it backed ALEC’s support of model legislation promoting “stand your ground” gun laws.

The reason for the Illinois senator’s snoopiness? Durbin wrote that he needs the information as he readies a congressional hearing on the self-defense law. He’s also reaching out to other groups that have been identified as ALEC funders.

Goldwater officials fired off a letter that effectively told Durbin to stuff it.

“Simply put, especially in the wake of IRS intimidation and harassment of conservative organizations, your inquisition is an outrage,” wrote Goldwater president Darcy Olsen, litigation director Clint Bolick and policy director Nick Dranias.

They refused to answer, because, they wrote, “as free Americans, that is our right.”

For the record, media reports have identified Goldwater as an ALEC donor.

Sorry, can’t make it, I had other plans ... Wendy Rogers, the tough, bike-riding, Republican Air Force mom who’s hoping to unseat U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema in the midterm elections, was outraged that her potential Democratic rival missed President Barack Obama’s Phoenix speech this week.

“Disrespectful. Self-serving. In it for herself,” Rogers, who ran unsuccessfully in the primary last year, blustered on her Facebook page. “Today the president of the United States came to our AZ-09 district, yet our congresswoman didn’t even show perfunctory respect by at least showing up.”

Sinema and other Democratic lawmakers were in Israel on a previously scheduled trip paid for by an arm of a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group.

Arizona’s Republican members of Congress were in town. And none of them was at Obama’s speech, either.

He’s the president. ’Nuff said ... The state’s congressional delegation may have missed Obama’s speech, but the Legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer’s office were well represented.

The GOP gaggle waiting to get inside the Desert Vista High School auditorium wasn’t exactly thrilled to see Insider and offered different reasons for stepping into the swarm of swooning Democrats.

Senate Majority Leader John McComish said his district includes the Ahwatukee Foothills school, so he was representing his constituents. Senate Majority Whip Adam Driggs said the commander in chief, no matter their party, is a big deal: “It’s out of respect for the office.”

Brewer chief of staff Scott Smith, general counsel Joe Sciarrotta and spokesman Andrew Wilder also attended the speech. But given Brewer’s rather scathing prepared statement that followed — “Our recovery has been made possible in spite of the president’s policies — not because of them” — they apparently weren’t impressed.

State schools Superintendent John Huppenthal arrived early and grabbed a VIP seat with a passel of Democratic lawmakers. He’s the state’s top education official, and the speech was at a school, so that’s a handy excuse if he needs one.

But, really, does anyone need an excuse to see the president?

No resign if I run ... House Speaker Andy Tobin, R-Paulden, is eying a run for the Congressional District 1 seat. And while he won’t say if he’s in, plenty of others in the political-gossip echo chamber are saying it for him.

Tobin said if he decides to take the plunge, he won’t jump out of the pool that is the Arizona Legislature. Tobin said he intends to remain speaker through the 2014 session, which would coincide with the eight-year limit on his term.

It’s bad form to abandon one office to seek another, he said.

Early prediction: If Tobin does jump into the CD1 race, look for a short session. It’s hard to campaign across a vast chunk of rural Arizona when you’re tied up in Phoenix.

Compiled by Republic reporters Mary Jo Pitzl, Mary K. Reinhart and Rebekah L. Sanders. Get the latest at politics.azcentral.com.

Sidewalk chalk could land four protestors in jail for a year

I remember we had an anti-war protest in Phoenix and the government used the same convoluted logic about a chalk drawing made on the sidewalk.

They also said the drawing would cost thousands of dollars to clean up, when in fact 5 minutes with a hose and water is all it would take to clean up the drawing.

Source

Sidewalk chalk could land four protestors in jail for a year

By FRANCIS MCCABE

LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

Four people could face up to a year in jail for chalking up city sidewalks while protesting police misconduct.

Kelly Wayne Patterson, 44, Brian Ballentine, 31, Hailee Jewell, 18, and Catalino de la Cruz Dazo Jr., 20, face multiple gross misdemeanor counts of placing graffiti or defacing property and conspiracy to commit placing graffiti.

If convicted, they could face probation, a suspended driver’s license, community service and up to a year in the Clark County Detention Center.

The four protesters, affiliated with Nevada Cop Block and Sunset Activist Collective, used washable colored chalk in July to write critical statements of police on the sidewalks outside the Metropolitan Police Department’s headquarters and in front of the Regional Justice Center.

Demonstrating against police brutality and officer-involved shootings in Las Vegas, the protesters say they were practicing free speech and should not face charges.

District Attorney Steve Wolfson is taking the case seriously.

“This is not a kid drawing with a piece of chalk on the sidewalk. These are adults who used chalk to draw profanity,” he said. “And there is a law on the books that make it a crime to engage in this activity.”

One statement read: “Not one single cop in Metro’s entire history has been charged after shooting someone. Even if that person was unarmed and/or innocent.”

Another was: “(Expletive) the police.”

Officers on July 13 watched the protesters write statements on the sidewalk and told them they were violating anti-graffiti laws, according to police reports and court documents.

After the protest, Patterson and Ballentine were cited, and police called the city graffiti abatement team, which used high-powered washers to clean the dusty words.

Days later, before a scheduled court hearing on the citation the protesters again used colored chalk, typically made from a composite of calcium sulfate, as part of their protest outside the Regional Justice Center.

One statement read: “(Expletive) Pigs.”

An unknown woman dumped coffee on it, washing it away, according to police who witnessed the protest.

According to documents, Patterson then wrote on the coffee-stained ground, “(Expletive) the police.”

Police documented the evidence, called the city’s graffiti abatement team and began exhaustive research about the perils of power washing to sidewalks, including that it “artificially erodes and abrades the concrete’s surface thereby adding to the unnecessary wear and tear.”

Detailed police reports said the city crew cost $1,550 to clean both crime scenes.

The reports did not include the cost of the coffee used to clean one of the statements. It’s unclear whether it was a small, medium or large coffee.

Lawyer Robert Langford called the case preposterous and is representing the defendants pro bono.

“Under that standard, any kid that does hopscotch patterns on the sidewalk can be guilty of the same crime,” Langford said.

The veteran defense lawyer added, “Justice in this case is that the case should be dismissed. They were engaged in constitutionally protected First Amendment activity. Period. They have the right to engage in that type of protest. This was something that was harmless.”

Langford accused law enforcement officials of inflating the cost of the cleanup to justify the arrest and incarceration until bail was posted, instead of simply issuing a citation.

Part of his defense will be to show that the chalk could have been cleaned up at a lessor cost.

“My bet is a good stiff broom would have done the same thing,” he said.

By employing the power washing crew at a cost of more than $250, the graffiti charge was elevated from a misdemeanor to a gross misdemeanor, which could mean a stiffer sentence if they are convicted.

Langford said the amount of time, money and other taxpayer resources spent on the case is ridiculous. And all “because the bullies at the Las Vegas police department wanted to hurt people who wanted to criticize them. That’s, in the final analysis, what this case is about.”

Langford added he’s considering filing a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the defendants.

“Public property is being defaced with profanity,” Wolfson said. “That’s what it comes down to.”

A preliminary hearing is set for December.

Contact reporter Francis McCabe at fmccabe@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039.

Ex-cop killed self with nail gun

Phoenix and Tempe cops routinely troll the internet pretending to be horny underage hot girls who want to have sex with older men. And of course anytime they find a horny old man who wants to take them up on their offer the man is arrested by the cops for wanting to have sex with these imaginary underage hot horny women that exists only in the minds of the cops who make them up.

Source

Report: Ex-cop killed self with nail gun

Associated Press Thu Aug 15, 2013 8:49 AM

WISCONSIN RAPIDS, Wis. — An autopsy finds a former Wisconsin Rapids police lieutenant suspected of child enticement killed himself with a nail gun.

Wood County Deputy Coroner Gabe Holczer says 41-year-old Steven Lowe shot himself in the chest with the construction tool “multiple times” just days after being arrested.

Lowe was found dead in his pickup truck Monday morning at his home in Grand Rapids. The deputy coroner tells WAOW-TV (http://bit.ly/19u4DtB) he died of multiple wounds from the nail gun.

No suicide note was found.

Lowe was suspended by Wisconsin Rapids police officials earlier this month and then resigned from the force. Court documents say Lowe was accused of impersonating a teenage girl online to try to get juvenile boys to send him nude pictures.

No formal charges were filed before Lowe’s death.

Most people are in prison for victimless drug war crimes

After victimless drug war crimes most people are in prison for weapons violations

Victimless drug and gun crimes are why most people are in Federal prisons.

51 percent of federal prison inmates are there for victimless drug war crimes. In the above graph the second highest number of people are in federal prisons for weapons violations. The article didn't give a percent for weapons violations.

Source

Eric Holder is cutting federal drug sentences. That will make a small dent in the U.S. prison population.

By Dylan Matthews, Published: August 12 at 2:50 pm

Populations at federal prisons have grown, but state prisons are the real problem.

Attorney General Eric Holder will announce Monday that the Justice Department will no longer charge nonviolent drug offenders with serious crimes that subject them to long, mandatory minimum sentences in the federal prison system. As my colleague Sari Horwitz explains, Holder “is giving new instructions to federal prosecutors on how they should write their criminal complaints when charging low-level drug offenders, to avoid triggering the mandatory minimum sentences.”

He’s also expected to call for the expanded use of prison alternatives, such as probation or house arrest, for nonviolent offenders and for lower sentences for elderly inmates. And he’ll endorse legislation by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would increase federal judges’ flexibility in sentencing nonviolent drug offenders.

The changes Holder wants will likely make a big difference at the federal level. But that won’t be enough to solve America’s mass incarceration problem.

Focusing on drug offenses is a smart way to go about reducing the federal incarceration rate. According to data in Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?, a new book by UC – Berkeley’s Steven Raphael and UCLA’s Michael Stoll, the most serious charge for 51 percent of federal inmates in 2010 was a drug offense. By comparison, homicide was the most serious charge for only 1 percent, and robbery was the most serious charge against 4 percent.

Tougher drug sentencing accounts for much of the increase in the incarceration rate. “If you go back and decompose what caused growth in the federal prison system since 1984, a large chunk can be explained by drug offenses, around 45 percent,” Raphael says. The other big category accounting for the federal increase is weapons charges, such as the five-year mandatory minimum faced by drug offenders caught with guns. Raphael estimates that that accounts for 18 to 19 percent of the increase.

There’s also been an increase in incarcerations on immigration charges, with the rest of the increase in other areas. But there’s no doubt that the biggest category of crime behind the increase in the federal incarceration rate is drugs. Easing up on drug sentencing would make a big dent.

The states are different

But the federal system isn’t really where the action is. The most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimates find that there are 1,353,198 people incarcerated at the state level and 217,815 incarcerated federally. So about 13.9 percent of U.S. prisoners are in federal institutions; the other 86.1 percent are in state facilities. And most prisoners at the state level are not there for drug crimes.

In 2004, about 20 percent of state-level inmates were incarcerated on drug convictions, Raphael and Stoll find. Compared with the federal population, those incarcerated at the state level are much likelier to have committed violent offenses. In 2004, 14 percent were in prison for homicide, 9 percent for rape or sexual assault, 12 percent for robbery and 8 percent for aggravated assault. In 2011, it was much the same, according to BJS stats on state inmates serving sentences of a year or more. Fifty-three percent of inmates were in prison for violent offenses, 18.3 percent for property crimes, 10.6 percent for “public order” offenses such as drunk driving, weapons possession or vice offenses, and 16.8 percent for drug convictions.

Bjs state breakdown

Raphael and Stoll’s estimates of what’s accounting for the higher incarceration rates suggest that violent crimes are a big part of the state-level story. They find that harsher sentencing for violent offenders explains 48 percent of growth in incarceration rates, compared with about 22 percent attributable to increases in drug sentencing, and 15 percent due to increases in property crime and other sentences.

Then again, most people who go through state criminal justice systems do so on drug offenses. If you look at admission rates, rather than incarceration rates, at the state level, drugs become a much bigger part of the picture. For admissions, Raphael and Stoll find “relatively modest increases for violent crimes and property crimes and pronounced increases for drug offenses, parole violations, and other less serious crime.” And while higher admissions for less serious crimes with shorter sentences don’t affect the incarceration rate as much as increases in sentencing for serious crimes, they do dramatically affect the lives of those admitted, who have to find work as ex-offenders and live with the sundry restrictions states impose upon those who’ve served time.

It’s not hopeless

Holder is taking a fairly plausible approach to reducing the U.S. incarceration rate at the level where he can effect it. But that’s not the level that matters most, and if we were to get serious about reducing the state-level incarceration and admissions rates, we need to talk not just about reducing sentences for drug crimes but also about reducing prison admissions for drug offenses, and perhaps also lowering sentences for property crime and even violent offenses, particularly robbery.

There has been growing enthusiasm for reforming state sentencing laws, even backed by many conservatives. The American Legislative Exchange Council has joined the cause, creating model legislation for loosening state mandatory minimum laws. Especially if it’s not just limited to drug offenses, that kind of reform could greatly reduce the state incarceration rate.

Sanjay Gupta: the DEA is a bunch of liars about marijuana???

"Gupta said he had mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency had sound scientific proof when it placed marijuana in the category of the most dangerous drugs"

"I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof"

Source

Sanjay Gupta: I was wrong about weed

By Alia E. Dastagir USA TODAY Thu Aug 8, 2013 3:29 PM

Sanjay Gupta is apologizing for "misleading" the American public on weed.

CNN's chief medical correspondent, whose documentary Weed airs on CNN this Sunday, said he was wrong about the effects of the drug.

"I have apologized for some of the earlier reporting because I think, you know, we've been terribly and systematically misled in this country for some time," Gupta told Piers Morgan on CNN Wednesday night. "And I did part of that misleading."

Gupta has spoken out against the use of medical marijuana in the past, including penning a TIME magazine article in 2009 titled, Why I Would Vote No on Pot.

In an op-ed that appeared on CNN's website Thursday, Why I Changed My Mind on Weed, Gupta said he had mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency had sound scientific proof when it placed marijuana in the category of the most dangerous drugs:

"I apologize because I didn't look hard enough, until now. I didn't look far enough. I didn't review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.

Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have 'no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse.' "

Gupta says he hopes his upcoming documentary will help set the record straight on medical marijuana.

Photo radar bandits terrorize schools????

It looks like our government masters have discovered that they can use photo radar bandits to steal money from people who commit victimless crimes such as going 16 mph in a 15 mph school zone and other trivial crimes.

Let's face it these photos radar bandits don't have anything to do with safety and are just a lame excuse for our government masters to rob us when we commit victimless trivial traffic violations.

Source

Traffic-cam makers eye school-bus safety for new revenue

By Ryan Randazzo The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Aug 16, 2013 3:36 PM

The traffic-camera industry is banking on fast-growing school-bus programs to provide a significant new revenue stream, officials from Phoenix-based Redflex Traffic Systems said.

The company provided a tour of its facilities for the first time since James Saunders took over as president/CEO earlier this year in the wake of a company scandal in Chicago that led to the departure of several top executives.

Among the tour highlights was the demonstration of the Student Guardian, technically referred to as a school-bus stop-arm system.

Like the speed and red-light cameras the company uses to help police issue citations around the country, Student Guardian relies on cameras. These cameras are mounted on the left side of school buses to catch video of people passing while the stop sign is out and children might be getting on or off the bus.

While many people are deeply opposed to speed cameras, the opposition is slightly less intense for red-light cameras. Redflex officials expect even less public opposition for school-bus cameras.

From a business perspective, the stop-arm cameras are a potential high-growth market. Only a handful of states today have workable laws that allow issuing tickets from cameras on school buses, but officials expect that to change fast. Arizona doesn’t allow the cameras.

“We have police in various states pushing for legislation,” said Thomas O’Connor, who ran a company called SmartBus Live before Redflex acquired it last year, putting him in charge of the bus program.

The company’s installations jumped from two states last year to eight today, with 72 contracts for various school districts.

Rival company American Traffic Solutions Inc. of Tempe has a similar product.

The cameras catch a violation and video is sent for review by a Redflex employee. A second employee verifies the footage and finally it is sent to the appropriate police department for verification. If the police agree a violation took place, a ticket is issued.

Capturing violations is trickier on the buses. The cameras get a different angle and different lighting for each shot. The cameras are motion-triggered. That requires a bit more labor to filter out actual violations from false alarms caused by children triggering the camera to record footage. Every segment of film from every stop when the cameras were triggered is sent for review.

But the violations are also quite clear when a driver passes a bus with the stop-arm extended, and more lucrative, too. The average fine in the U.S. for such a violation is in the $300 range. Speeding tickets are less than $100. So the higher revenue makes up for the lower number of violations and slightly higher labor cost of reviewing camera footage.

“That is the business model,” O’Connor said.

Arrangements vary from place to place regarding what percentages of the fine goes to the police, the state, Redflex and the school district (if any).

On average, a bus equipped with the Student Guardian cameras captures one prosecutable violation per day with footage good enough for police to sign off on a citation, O’Connor said.

In Arizona, fines are $250, $750 and $1,000 for the first, second and third violations, respectively.

O’Connor said that Redflex is not lobbying in Arizona to amend the law allowing the cameras, though he expects such a proposal eventually will come from either schools or public-safety officials.

School zone photo radar bandits

Let's face it, it has nothing to do with safety and is all about raising revenue.

Source

Traffic-cam makers eye school-bus safety for new revenue

By Ryan Randazzo The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Aug 16, 2013 3:36 PM

The traffic-camera industry is banking on fast-growing school-bus programs to provide a significant new revenue stream, officials from Phoenix-based Redflex Traffic Systems said.

The company provided a tour of its facilities for the first time since James Saunders took over as president/CEO earlier this year in the wake of a company scandal in Chicago that led to the departure of several top executives.

Among the tour highlights was the demonstration of the Student Guardian, technically referred to as a school-bus stop-arm system.

Like the speed and red-light cameras the company uses to help police issue citations around the country, Student Guardian relies on cameras. These cameras are mounted on the left side of school buses to catch video of people passing while the stop sign is out and children might be getting on or off the bus.

While many people are deeply opposed to speed cameras, the opposition is slightly less intense for red-light cameras. Redflex officials expect even less public opposition for school-bus cameras.

From a business perspective, the stop-arm cameras are a potential high-growth market. Only a handful of states today have workable laws that allow issuing tickets from cameras on school buses, but officials expect that to change fast. Arizona doesn’t allow the cameras.

“We have police in various states pushing for legislation,” said Thomas O’Connor, who ran a company called SmartBus Live before Redflex acquired it last year, putting him in charge of the bus program.

The company’s installations jumped from two states last year to eight today, with 72 contracts for various school districts.

Rival company American Traffic Solutions Inc. of Tempe has a similar product.

The cameras catch a violation and video is sent for review by a Redflex employee. A second employee verifies the footage and finally it is sent to the appropriate police department for verification. If the police agree a violation took place, a ticket is issued.

Capturing violations is trickier on the buses. The cameras get a different angle and different lighting for each shot. The cameras are motion-triggered. That requires a bit more labor to filter out actual violations from false alarms caused by children triggering the camera to record footage. Every segment of film from every stop when the cameras were triggered is sent for review.

But the violations are also quite clear when a driver passes a bus with the stop-arm extended, and more lucrative, too. The average fine in the U.S. for such a violation is in the $300 range. Speeding tickets are less than $100. So the higher revenue makes up for the lower number of violations and slightly higher labor cost of reviewing camera footage.

“That is the business model,” O’Connor said.

Arrangements vary from place to place regarding what percentages of the fine goes to the police, the state, Redflex and the school district (if any).

On average, a bus equipped with the Student Guardian cameras captures one prosecutable violation per day with footage good enough for police to sign off on a citation, O’Connor said.

In Arizona, fines are $250, $750 and $1,000 for the first, second and third violations, respectively.

O’Connor said that Redflex is not lobbying in Arizona to amend the law allowing the cameras, though he expects such a proposal eventually will come from either schools or public-safety officials.

Gay to Straight program to be used in all Arizona schools

Source

Arizona schools not implementing gay-conversion therapy

By Alia Beard Rau The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Aug 22, 2013 2:42 PM

Arizona public schools are not implementing a new conversion-therapy program for gay students this fall.

A fictional article posted Wednesday by the staff of the political satire website National Report has gone viral, leaving Gov. Jan Brewer and the Arizona Department of Education scrambling to assure parents that the information is inaccurate.

National Report stated that Arizona would, on Nov. 1, implement a mandatory program for K-12 students “to help homosexual males and women become straight.”

The site indicates that the program is part of People Can Change, a real Virginia-based non-profit with a mission to “support and guide men who seek to transition away from unwanted homsexuality.”

People Can Change posted a large disclaimer at the top of its website declaring the National Report story fake.

“The spokesperson is fake, the interview is fake, the photo with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is fake, the press conference is fake -- and the quotes are fake, rude, and demeaning of gays,” the People can Change site states. “People Can Change does not provide programs or services for minors. We are a peer-led support organization of men who have personally experienced significant change from unwanted same-sex attractions ourselves and who now share our experience and give support to other adults who voluntarily seek similar change.”

The National Report article included fake quotes from Brewer stating that, “I think this will be an amazing opportunity for gay children to finally learn who they truly are for once in their lives ... Can you imagine how much more productive these ‘now-straight’ children will be not... wondering why god made them defective? What we have done here today is monumental. I can only hope and pray that other states follow suit.”

"It’s a completely phony and vile report, and its authors should be ashamed," Brewer spokesman Andrew Wilder said.

The article was submitted as a “press release” and posted on the news release dissemination site www.prlog.com. It gives no indication that it is intended to be satire and lists its source as a Fox News cable network story. There, it was viewed more than 70,000 times.

It’s since been posted on blog sites, popular community forums like cafemom.com and babycenter.com and social media.

Hundreds of comments have been posted on various sites in response to the article, many believing the information is accurate.

Nearly 900 people posted responses to the article on National Report’s website.

OK, this is a hoax, but a funny hoax. For a minute there I thought Cathy Harrod and her nut jobs at the Center for Arizona Policy got another one of their laws passed forcing their brand of religion on the rest of us Arizonans

Source

Gay-To-Straight Program To Be Used In All Arizona Public School Curriculums Beginning November 1st

Phoenix, AZ — Beginning November 1st of this year, the state of Arizona is implementing a mandatory school program designed for all children grades K-12 to help homosexual males and women become straight. The controversial conversion therapy will be used in all of Arizona’s 2,325 public school curriculums and is already gathering a large amount of criticism as well as those who approve of the new program.

Dean Huls who is the brain child behind People Can Change spoke with Fox News about their plan to help all the gay children of Arizona. “Since 2000 ‘People Can Change’ has been helping thousands of children resolve their unwanted same-sex attractions. We bring the gay demons out of these individuals so they can become who god intended them to be. Our success and track record speaks for itself,” Huls said. “Facing the reality that you have unwanted homosexual feelings can cause tremendous turmoil – especially as a child whose feelings conflict with deeply held values, beliefs and life goals. But there is a way out. A path that leads them to resolve rather than fight their homosexual feelings. A path to authentic brotherhood and to our innate heterosexual masculinity.”

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer who signed off on the the ‘People Can Change’ program told CNN she is excited about the program. “I think this will be an amazing opportunity for gay children to finally learn who they truly are for once in their lives,” Brewer said. “Can you imagine how much more productive these ‘now-straight’ children will be not always being bullied or wondering why god made them defective? What we have done here today is monumental. I can only hope and pray that other states follow suit.”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio who runs some of the toughest jails and prisons in the country applauds Brewer’s decision. “Less gays in our jails makes for a smoother running prison system. There will be no more prancing around along with all the other gay activities that homosexuals like to do,” Arpaio said. “More importantly, we as parents can now sleep a little better at night just knowing there will be less gays out there wandering the streets trying to molest our children. I’m excited about this and I know all Arizonans are too.”

Though not everyone from Arizona feels the same way as Brewer and Arpaio. 32-year-old Katherine Morris from Phoenix whose son Daniel is a 12-year-old homosexual said she does not agree with the program. “My son Daniel is one of the nicest boys in the world. He is the most wonderful and loving child you could ever meet in your life. There’s not a problem with him, there is a problem with this conversion therapy,” Morris said. “I urge all Arizonians to fight back before this curriculum takes effect in November. Call your congressman. Call your senator. We still have time to fix this wrong. Tell them we do not want ‘People Can Change’ in our schools! It’s not only a waste of tax payer money but it is fixing something that is not broken.”

The organization ‘People Can Change’ is located in Ruckersville, Virginia and has hundreds of gay-to-straight camps and therapy conversion facilities all around the country. They have been in operation since May of 2000. ‘People Can Change’ can be contacted at 434-985-8551 or by email at lynn@peoplecanchange.com.

National Report attempted to contact the Superintendent of Public Instruction for comment but as of press time had received no response.

Source

Governor Jan Brewer Threatens Lawsuit Against Hoax Author Who Claimed She Supports Mandatory Gay Conversion Classes For Children

Phoenix, AZ — Governor Jan Brewer’s spokesman Andrew Wilder held a press conference this morning with reporters announcing news of a possible lawsuit against Phoenix, Arizona resident 34-year-old Paul Horner. Horner was the culprit behind yesterday’s hoax which had the internet up in arms. The satirical article stated that Brewer signed off on a bill implementing a mandatory school program designed for all Arizona children grades K-12 requiring all homosexual males and women to become straight.

Brewer’s office did not see the humor in such a stunt, and denounced the suggestion that the governor would target young people with such a discriminatory program: “It’s a completely phony and vile report, and its authors should be ashamed,” Wilder told the Arizona Republic yesterday.

“This lawsuit is real and is nothing to be taken lightly,” Wilder told CNN. “If the author of the article in question wants to avoid legal action, we are asking him to immediately remove the story from National Report and cease and desist any further foolishness of this nature against the governor.” Wilder continued, “Governor Brewer also expects a full and sincere apology, no less than 1,000 words long. This is to help compensate the harm and mayhem his ridiculous article caused the great state of Arizona and to the Governor’s Office. Mr. Horner can either post a public apology on his Super Official News website, National Report, his Facebook page located at facebook.com/paulissuperawesome or contact the governor directly at janjanbrewbrew1944@aol.com.”

Tempe Police begin back-to-school operation

Tempe cops shake down ASU students for victimless crimes?

Tempe Police begin back-to-school operation

By Mark Remillard

August 21, 2013 at 8:30 pm

Police officers in Tempe are gearing up for the new school year.

Officers began increasing patrols during the first week of August looking for traffic violations around elementary, middle and high schools. [Looks like the cops are using the schools as an excuse to arrest people for a bunch of petty, victimless crimes, rather then to hunt down real criminals. ]

Now the focus will shift slightly to coincide with the start of the fall semester at ASU.

Operation Safe and Sober will have officers saturating Tempe on the lookout for out-of-control parties, people driving under the influence and minors consuming alcohol [also called raising revenue] and even checking in with registered sex offenders to make sure their information is up-to-date [to justify their jobs], Tempe Police Sgt. Mike Pooley said.

Pooley said the ramp-up in police presence is part of the department’s attempt to send a strong message to new students.

“For the first couple months of the school year, it seems like our calls for service go up,” he said. “So we feel this operation, Safe and Sober, is going to be able to go out … and we’re going to really try and attack these trends.”

The operation will involve some officers working during days off [translation - cops love OVERTIME pay], Pooley said, but it will also include help from agencies across the Valley thanks to a grant from the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety [a government welfare program for cops].

“Our night motors are going to be out here with a DUI task force with officers from all over the local agencies,” Pooley said. “We got people from MCSO, Scottsdale PD, Gilbert PD, Mesa PD all coming out here to help with DUI enforcement.” [Which is how cops and local city government spell REVENUE - each DUI arrest brings in fines of at least $2,000 and fines and surcharges can reach over $10,000 - and that means lots of OVERTIME pay for the cops who which is making sure the cops get a cut of the loot]

The ASU Police Department will also assist with this enforcement, Assistant Police Chief Jim Hardina said.

“We have officers that participate in the party patrols,” he said. “So we’ll also have four officers on the weekend riding with Tempe officers working the parties and those kinds of things around campus.”

Hardina said his officers will focus on traffic violations, aimed mostly at pedestrians and bicyclists.

“Typically, we have every year someone on a bike hit by a car or a pedestrian hit by a car, and it’s almost always the pedestrian’s or the bicyclist’s fault, and it’s typically a right-of-way violation,” Hardina said. [Yea, while every year in the same span of time there are hundreds of automobile accidents]

Hardina said officers will use the first week for warnings and passing out informational flyers, but then officers will begin handing out citations.

For alcohol, though, strict enforcement begins right away. [translation - we love the money we raise shaking down students for the victimless crime of drinking]

“We enforce immediately,” Hardina said. “We have our youth alcohol detail (that) will be out the first couple weekends of school and plain-clothes officers in and around the resident halls.” [don't these pigs have any real criminals to hunt down????]

Pooley said Safe and Sober includes education in addition to party patrols, DUI enforcement and the strict focus on alcohol laws. [but the cops could care less about the safe part, DUI enforcement is all about cold hard $cash$!!!! - As I said before each DUI bust is a minimum of $2,000 in fines.]

The Tempe Police Department’s Downtown Unit will be heading to local bars to educate workers on how to spot fake identification and inform them about alcohol laws, Pooley said.

“Every year, it seems like they get new staff at these bars so our bike squad goes out, they educate them and make sure they understand the current laws,” Pooley said. “(We want) to build that relationship, so they don’t feel they’re doing something bad by calling the police.” [Cops love to brainwash us to think that it's OK to arrest people for victimless crimes that hurt no one - after all it creates jobs for cops! Safe jobs for cops. It's dangerous hunting down real criminals like armed robbers]

Part of the education process is also about teaching the students about alcohol, laws and safety. [Translation - we could care less about the safety part, we LOVE the cash from those $2,000 DUI fines]

Detective Jeff Lane with the Tempe Police Department’s Crime Prevention Unit said he will be out with officers over the next two weeks meeting with fraternities and sororities to educate them.

“We’re going to actually talk to all the fraternities (and sororities) in small groups and then in a larger group to talk about working with them (and) not against them,” Lane said. “How they can call us ahead of time, getting the proper permits if they’re going to have a party and doing the right thing.”

Detective Dan Brown, also with the Crime Prevention Unit, spent Saturday at ASU’s Wells Fargo Arena meeting with students and parents during move-in to answer questions and pass out information on everything from bike safety and registration to avoiding sexual assault.

“This is our biggest program of the year, Safe and Sober,” he said. “We’re just one part of it doing the booth today. This is a great opportunity to speak with the parents.”

Tempe Police is not the only agency readying itself for the new school year and the influx of new students.

In a statement, Phoenix Police Lt. Jeff Lazell said his Downtown Operation Unit, which oversees the Downtown campus, will provide public safety talks, education on traffic and jaywalking enforcement and some drug recognition training for ASU staff. [jaywalking enforcement????? Don't these pigs have any REAL criminals to hunt down????]

Each campus has its own issues, so campus police will try to tailor enforcement to each campus’s individual needs, Hardina said. [Wow that sounds really professional!!! But if you ask the cops they are mostly interested in those $2,000 fines each DUI ticket bring in]

Operation Safe and Sober went into full swing on Aug. 15 and will run through the end of the month.

Reach the reporter at mark.remillard@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @markjremillard

NSA Surveillance - Lady Liberty Raped

NSA Surveillance - TSA goons destroying America

Standardized tests are flawed measuring tool

Source

Standardized tests are flawed measuring tool

Sun Aug 25, 2013 7:39 PM

Parents have been sold a bill of goods in regard to the use of standardized tests to determine the quality of a school.

Standardized tests may have their place, but they have their limitations. They do not measure imagination or curiosity. They do not measure creativity or artistic talent. They do not measure effort or hard work. They do not measure the value of a school’s extracurricular activities.

Certainly we want our children to learn age-appropriate English, math, science and her/history, among others. However, don’t we also want our children to be imaginative and to ask questions? Don’t we want to encourage them to think creatively and to develop their artistic talents? Don’t we want our children to work hard? Don’t we want our children to learn the importance of team work and fair play? Or do we want our children to be proficient only in filling in bubbles?

Standardized tests have some value in assessing students’ academic knowledge, but they do not measure the intangibles that are integral to academic and career success. They should never be used as the sole criteria to determine whether a school is failing. It is a flawed system of measurement and should be viewed as such.

— Jane Liljedahl,

Scottsdale

Collection of student data raises questions

Collection of student data raises questions

By Cathryn Creno The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Aug 25, 2013 11:29 AM

Rose Fletcher, a Mesa mother of two, agrees that schools need to keep track of some basic information about her children — their grades, standardized-test scores and attendance from year to year.

“I also understand that the state needs to compare schools’ test-score data,” she said. “I don’t mind that.”

But mirroring the concerns of a growing number of parents, Fletcher worries schools are collecting too much data about her kids, ages 7 and 9. She and others worry about identity theft as well as invasion of their families’ privacy.

“I got a letter from my 7-year-old’s school asking whether I am Hispanic and what is the primary language I speak at home,” she said. “That bothers me. Why are they so concerned about the culture I practice in my home? My demographics, race or background should not determine my children’s future.”

She wonders if she will be asked next about her family’s politics or religion.

Another Mesa mom, Brenda Martin, is concerned about the security of the data that schools collect about her sons, who are in junior and senior high school.

“I don’t think they need to know all of the things that they ask,” she said.

Information-technology officials at the Arizona Department of Education say student information is as safe as it has ever been — and will get even safer as they continue to develop a more streamlined and centralized data system in the next few years. [Hey Edward Snowden is in Russia and he won't be leaking any data from Arizona schools!]

In addition, Arizona has a Data Governance Commission that permits state officials to collect only student information that directly relates to education.

Still, many parents have confronted State Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal with fears that his department will either sell their kids’ data or use its new computer system to pry into their finances, politics, religion — even gun ownership.

Because of the questions Huppenthal is regularly asked, the state Education Department developed a five-point fact sheet for him to share when he speaks publicly.

“Will the system track a family’s political affiliations or firearms ownership? Absolutely not,” Huppenthal’s fact sheet states. “The system is intended to do three major things: provide teachers data so they can better instruct their students, simplify the administration of the school system and reduce the burden of required reports.”

In June, about 90 parents from around central Arizona met with Huppenthal about the new Arizona Common Core Standards. Many challenged him with questions about whether the state will collect more personal data from families as the new academic standards and the centralized data system are rolled out.

Reports about data

News reports about weaknesses in the current data system, as well as commentary by conservative figures like Glenn Beck, have raised the suspicions of many parents.

Beck, for instance, recently told a National Public Radio interviewer that he believes the federal government is developing a national education data system to support testing the new Common Core standards.

He said it “calls for massive amounts of personal data on students, including health-care histories, income information, religious affiliation, blood types, ... how are your parents voting.”

Not factual, state officials say.

“People are afraid we want to collect information about politics and firearms — but we are only collecting the data we have always collected,” said Chris Kotterman, the state Education Department’s deputy associate superintendent for policy development and government relations.

Kotterman and other Education Department officials confirmed that they do, and most likely will continue to, collect information about students’ gender and racial background, languages spoken at home and whether their families have incomes low enough to qualify for free or reduced-cost lunches.

That information is used by state and federal education officials to determine whether all students are being properly served by school districts. Officials also sometimes use demographic data to make sure standardized test questions are fair.

“But the data is collected and looked at in the aggregate,” Kotterman said. “We don’t include individual student names in the reports.”

How information is used

Kelly McManus, government-affairs director for the advocacy group Stand for Children Arizona, said she has observed “a tremendous amount of misinformation and fear-mongering around (student) data right now.” [Parents, trust us royal government rulers, we are smarter then you, and know what we are doing, and we would never let you down. Didn't Edward Snowden's boss say something like that!!!] She has developed a fact sheet similar to Huppenthal’s that she uses to dispel myths. “The primary type of data that is being collected is academic in nature,” she said.

“As a former teacher, it was so important for me to know where my students were academically, who had a history of absenteeism and who I needed to be prepared to provide additional supports to. I think people who are concerned should talk to their school and find out what is really being collected. There are state and federal laws protecting individual student data,” McManus added. [Yea, like the ones that stopped Edward Snowden from leaking all that data!]

Kotterman suggested parents keep in mind that the laws regulating the privacy of student data are similar to those that make medical records private. [Well, they didn't work very well in Edward Snowden's case. Nor do they do much good stopping bank robbers who could care less that they are committing a crime]

“We can’t sell your student’s data,” he said. “We can’t give it away.” [Well legally we can, but if some bureaucrat decides to sell your student's data, there ain't much you as a parent can do about it.]

RELATED INFO

About the education data system

Although it received less than a third of the funds it requested for the project, the Arizona Department of Education is moving forward to streamline and centralize the state’s student-data system.

The state Legislature allocated $7 million this year for a program to replace a piecemeal system of data and coding that officials use to track everything from standardized-test scores to students who receive federally funded meals.

The funds also are being used to develop pilot programs in 11 Arizona school districts and charter schools: Balsz Elementary, Deer Valley Unified, Eloy Elementary, Kingman Unified, Nogales Unified, Paradise Valley Unified, Phoenix Elementary, Tolleson Elementary, Vail, the Arizona State School for the Deaf and Blind and AmeriSchools. The program helps the districts instantly connect with student data that is housed in state Education Department databases.

Teachers can access student data through “dashboards” in their classrooms and find out immediately if their students are gifted, need remedial work in certain areas or have had attendance problems.

Department officials hope that as many as 200 school districts will connect to the new system in the next two years.

ASU’s tobacco-free policy — what a conundrum

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Malecka: ASU’s tobacco-free policy — what a conundrum

Corey Malecka is a junior studying journalism at Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and an intern with the East Valley Tribune.

Posted: Saturday, August 24, 2013 7:14 am | Updated: 11:03 am, Sun Aug 25, 2013.

Guest commentary by Corey Malecka | 13 comments

Arizona State University has banned the use of tobacco products on its property, and its enforcement is something difficult to imagine in the bustling university towns at the heart of communities like Tempe, southeast Mesa and Downtown Phoenix.

The “Tobacco-Free Campus” ostracizes users of tobacco products – namely easy-to-spot smokers – off the Sun Devils’ four primary campuses, as well as other property owned, rented or leased by the university.

The move is aligned with the Tobacco-free College Campus initiative, a national program under the guise of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ASU is now among the nearly 800 educational institutions that have implemented such a policy, according to a tally by the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation.

But of that number, only about 100 universities have a similar enforcement policy at ASU, said Kevin Salcido, associate VP and chief HR officer.

So how exactly is the university prepared to enforce and discipline violators?

Enforcement at ASU is dependent on student, staff and visitor participation in a voluntary peer-to-peer model.

ASU Police Department officials have made it clear that it was never the university’s intention to have its police department enforce it.

In reality, anyone can enforce it — even chain smokers if they felt so compelled. Because the program is voluntary, no university official can make someone enforce the tobacco ban; but if you respect the rule of law, then it would make sense that you would be obliged to.

Yet, while the intent to promote a healthy student body is valiant, the idea of having those on campus serve as the sort-of-but-not-really-official enforcement arm is troubling.

To patrol the university grounds by moral authority, rather than legal authority, is – pun intended – just blowing smoke.

With around 73,000 students enrolled, according to the university, enforcement would include trial-and-error, noted Justin Zeien, chair of the Health and Counseling Student Action Committee and Well Devils member

And, chances are, there will be sufficient errors.

Maricopa County Community College District’s Breathe Easy Initiative has a tobacco-free policy that began July 1, 2012. The MCCCD police handle compliance, said Andrew Tucker, district manager of communications for MCCCD.

Tucker asserted MCCCD does not punish violators on a first offense, but neither will ASU. It must be successful because MCCCD has had no write-ups in violation of its policy, only reminders by public safety.

But at ASU, say someone oversteps the purview of the policy’s “soft” enforcement by means of threats or harassment; Salcido admitted that abuse and misconduct of enforcement is a possibility. And to the same end, smokers may even be noncompliant just for the sake of turning their noses up at those attempting to shoo them to the borderlands.

Though, with only a handful of resources and one of the largest university communities in the nation to watch over, a smoking policy shouldn’t be left to university law enforcement, either.

So if the peer-to-peer system isn’t the way to go, and the policy would have been too much weight on the shoulders of an understandably busy ASU police arm, what’s the solution?

The American College Health Association conducted a survey at ASU for the 2011 National College Health Assessment, finding 86.4 percent of students do not smoke cigarettes. Basic arithmetic reveals only 9,928 ASU students smoke cigarettes. Sure, nearly 10,000 students seem like enough of a sample to invoke a tobacco-free policy; but that’s spread over four large campuses, numerous other properties, and not all students are on campus at the same time – nor lighting up together.

With those numbers in play – again considering the sheer size of ASU as a whole – wouldn’t a series of designated, conspicuously-marked smoking zones on each corner of each campus, allowing a compromise between smokers and non-smokers, be a better option? A campus libertarian group, Students for Liberty, fought against the policy change and supported such a move as a best-case consolation. The group’s logic: it would localize littering, and anyone who chose to could avoid the vicinity at will.

Surely $38,700 could have been a good starting point to help zone out smokers. That amount is what the university preliminarily allocated for small regulatory signage around ASU facilities, according to a facilities development and management official.

Or how about another $8,130? That’s what ASU’s Office of Wellness and Health Promotion had requested to spend on “Well Devils” T-shirts over the past three years from IGNITE – that’s Influence, Guide, Network, for Intercollegiate Tobacco Education, a county program for area colleges and universities to promote the dangers of smoking and to help tobacco users quit. Well Devils is mainly a student organization advocating for a healthy mind, body, and community, and the funds were devoted as such “because Well Devils live and breathe tobacco-free,” said Karen Moses, director of ASU Wellness.

In explaining the new ASU policy, director of ASU Health Services and HCSAC adviser Allan Markus said “mostly it’s for students, faculty and staff who made the life choice not to smoke.”

That’s a telling statement. It’s OK that the majority stands to benefit from such a decision, but in this case, it didn’t have to be at the expense of the minority – that being the tobacco users.

What’s clear is that the ASU community missed an opportunity to foster actual engagement between differing viewpoints on a controversial issue, and that the community could have come up with a solution that benefited all parties involved.

I might have been one to help enforce the policy if it were truly at the benefit of the entire student body. But as it sits now, I plan to keep a clean nose, and hope to find an ashtray off campus.

• Corey Malecka, a junior studying journalism at Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, was an intern for the East Valley Tribune this past summer.

Obama’s higher ed fix won’t work

Yes, the "war on drugs" is also a "war on Blacks"

City elections are corrupt????

1) When it comes to increased college costs the Federal government is the cause of the problem, not the solution to the problem.

2) The "war on drugs" is a racist "war on drugs" where police selectively enforce drug laws in the neighborhoods of minorities.

3) I suspect that city governments prefer their elections to be held on oddball dates, because it's easier for the special interest groups that control city governments to win with smaller voter turnouts.

Source

Obama’s higher ed fix won’t work

From the political notebook:

* Last week, President Barack Obama took what his office described as a “college affordability bus tour.” During it, he proposed that the federal government start evaluating which universities and colleges offer a greater value and direct proportionally greater federal aid to those with higher rankings.

That’s just what the country and higher education needs: another busybody federal program.

Think the federal government is having difficulty coming up with a Volcker rule to limit the investment risks banks can take with their own capital. Wait until it gets into the business of defining “value” in college education.

There is something the federal government could do that would dramatically reduce the cost of a college education: stop financing it.

If the federal government wasn’t massively subsiding higher education, colleges, universities and trade schools would have to sharply reduce the cost or go out of business. There’s room to do it. Higher ed costs have increased largely in administration, not classroom instruction.

They would also have to increase their value proposition far more than would be necessary to game whatever scheme Obama’s federal value apparatchiks come up with.

Students would also benefit from having to rely on private financing. The federal government has a difficult time differentiating between institutions and degrees. Private lenders wouldn’t.

The federal government can’t really say that it will give a loan to attend Virtuous State but not Diploma Mill U or to get an engineering degree but not one in English Lit. With private lenders, there would be money available for degrees from institutions that would result in jobs with incomes sufficient to pay back the loan but not when that was in doubt. Imagine that.

Students wanting to go on to college would have to buckle down more in high school, even if they weren’t aiming at getting into a prestigious school. That high school record is part of what private lenders would be looking at.

There is significant malinvestment in higher education. It won’t be solved by setting off a feeding frenzy among college administrators and federal bureaucrats over what constitutes “value.”

* When Attorney General Eric Holder proposed sentencing reform, state Rep. Bob Thorpe tweeted to the effect that Holder was doing it because he was Black and Blacks make up a substantially disproportionate percentage of those incarcerated in the United States.

Thorpe was lambasted by Democratic politicians, and rightfully so given his crudity. Thorpe sort-of apologized and then restricted access to his twitter account.

But here’s the irony: Race is very much an issue in sentencing reform, particularly with respect to drugs which was part of Holder’s focus.

Drug laws are far more vigorously enforced in low-income, minority communities, for reasons both good and bad. As a result, drug convictions for minorities, particularly young black men, are hugely disproportionate to what the statistics say about their relative drug use. Obviously having a criminal record sharply limits their future prospects. This is a big social issue in the United States.

There are many reasons to change our drug laws. The disproportionate effect on young minorities is one of them.

And, in the ultimate irony, Holder said as much in the speech to which Thorpe responded.

* A superior court judge recently held that Phoenix and Tucson didn’t have to follow a new state law and change their candidate election dates to coincide with the state’s primary and general elections. I doubt that this is the last word. The ruling completely ignored a 1997 Court of Appeals decision saying that the state could dictate municipal election dates, a decision the state Supreme Court referred to approvingly in a 2012 opinion.

However, the ruling did cheer some and occasioned a reprisal of an argument in favor of the current low-turnout, by-invitation-only city elections that is both astonishing and amusing.

Based upon Scottsdale’s experience, moving to the state schedule can double or triple turnout. The smaller turnout is nevertheless better, some claim, because the electorate is focused just on city issues.

So, the judgment of 20 percent of the electorate is to be preferred to the judgment of 60 percent because the 60 percent are making other decisions at the same time?

Really?

Uncle Sam's "healthy lunch" program is a dismal failure????

Some school districts quit healthier lunch program

By Carolyn Thompson Associated Press Tue Aug 27, 2013 2:37 PM

After just one year, some schools around the country are dropping out of the healthier new federal lunch program, complaining that so many students turned up their noses at meals packed with whole grains, fruits and vegetables that the cafeterias were losing money.

Federal officials say they don’t have exact numbers but have seen isolated reports of schools cutting ties with the $11 billion National School Lunch Program, which reimburses schools for meals served and gives them access to lower-priced food.

Districts that rejected the program say the reimbursement was not enough to offset losses from students who began avoiding the lunch line and bringing food from home or, in some cases, going hungry.

“Some of the stuff we had to offer, they wouldn’t eat,” said Catlin, Ill., Superintendent Gary Lewis, whose district saw a 10 to 12 percent drop in lunch sales, translating to $30,000 lost under the program last year.

“So you sit there and watch the kids, and you know they’re hungry at the end of the day, and that led to some behavior and some lack of attentiveness.”

In upstate New York, a few districts have quit the program, including the Schenectady-area Burnt Hills Ballston Lake system, whose five lunchrooms ended the year $100,000 in the red.

Near Albany, Voorheesville Superintendent Teresa Thayer Snyder said her district lost $30,000 in the first three months. The program didn’t even make it through the school year after students repeatedly complained about the small portions and apples and pears went from the tray to the trash untouched.

Districts that leave the program are free to develop their own guidelines. Voorheesville’s chef began serving such dishes as salad topped with flank steak and crumbled cheese, pasta with chicken and mushrooms, and a panini with chicken, red peppers and cheese.

In Catlin, soups and fish sticks will return to the menu this year, and the hamburger lunch will come with yogurt and a banana — not one or the other, like last year.

Nationally, about 31 million students participated in the guidelines that took effect last fall under the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

Dr. Janey Thornton, deputy undersecretary for USDA’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, which oversees the program, said she is aware of reports of districts quitting but is still optimistic about the program’s long-term prospects.

“Many of these children have never seen or tasted some of the fruits and vegetables that are being served before, and it takes a while to adapt and learn,” she said.

The agency had not determined how many districts have dropped out, Thornton said, cautioning that “the numbers that have threatened to drop and the ones that actually have dropped are quite different.”

The School Nutrition Association found that 1 percent of 521 district nutrition directors surveyed over the summer planned to drop out of the program in the 2013-14 school year and about 3 percent were considering the move.

Not every district can afford to quit. The National School Lunch Program provides cash reimbursements for each meal served: about $2.50 to $3 for free and reduced-priced meals and about 30 cents for full-price meals. That takes the option of quitting off the table for schools with large numbers of poor youngsters.

The new guidelines set limits on calories and salt, phase in more whole grains and require that fruit and vegetables be served daily. A typical elementary school meal under the program consisted of whole-wheat cheese pizza, baked sweet potato fries, grape tomatoes with low-fat ranch dip, applesauce and 1 percent milk.

In December, the Agriculture Department, responding to complaints that kids weren’t getting enough to eat, relaxed the 2-ounce-per-day limit on grains and meats while keeping the calorie limits.

At Wallace County High in Sharon Springs, Kan., football player Callahan Grund said the revision helped, but he and his friends still weren’t thrilled by the calorie limits (750-850 for high school) when they had hours of calorie-burning practice after school. The idea of dropping the program has come up at board meetings, but the district is sticking with it for now.

“A lot of kids were resorting to going over to the convenience store across the block from school and kids were buying junk food,” the 17-year-old said. “It was kind of ironic that we’re downsizing the amount of food to cut down on obesity but kids are going and getting junk food to fill that hunger.”

To make the point, Grund and his schoolmates starred last year in a music video parody of the pop hit “We Are Young.” Instead, they sang, “We Are Hungry.”

It was funny, but Grund’s mother, Chrysanne Grund, said her anxiety was not.

“I was quite literally panicked about how we would get enough food in these kids during the day,” she said, “so we resorted to packing lunches most days.”

Teachers unions screwing up schools in Mexico - Just like in the USA!!!

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In Mexico, teachers fight tooth and nail against reforms familiar to those north of the border

By Stephanie McCrummen, Published: August 28

MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government is trying to overhaul the nation’s public schools in a way that might ring familiar in the United States: changing how teachers are hired, fired and evaluated.

But if American teachers unions were resistant to the idea, some in Mexico are openly hostile. A woman lays on a puddle of tomato juice during the annual 'tomatina' tomato fight fiesta in the village of Bunol, 50 kilometers outside Valencia, Spain, Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2013. Thousands of people are splattering each other with tons of tomatoes in the annual 'Tomatina' battle in recession-hit Spain, with the debt-burdened town charging participants entry fees this year for the first time. Bunol town says some 20,000 people are taking part in Wednesday's hour-long street bash, inspired by a food fight among kids back in 1945. Participants were this year charged some 10 euros ($13) to foot the cost of the festival. Residents do not pay. (AP Photo/Alberto Saiz)

Proposals call for periodic evaluation, shifting authority away from traditionally powerful union.

Hundreds of ski-mask-wearing, rock-throwing, stick-wielding teachers have smashed windows and set fire to the offices of the major political party in the southern state of Guerrero, and thousands are flooding Mexico City, blocking national TV networks, subway lines and, on Wednesday, swarming the roads around Los Pinos, the official residence of the president.

In what has become a fairly common event here, at least 8,000 teachers have set up camp under a sea of nylon tents in Mexico City’s central Zocalo square, where Gumaro Cruz Lopez, an elementary school director from the southern state of Oaxaca, explained his fear that the changes will turn kids into globalized robots at the expense of indigenous culture, free thought and possibly homemade tacos.

“They want to create one prototype of individual for the sole service of the global socioeconomic system,” said Lopez, 51. “They say private companies like Coke, Pepsi and Bimbo” — one of the world’s largest baking companies —“can help to better our schools, but soon they’ll start bringing all their sodas and snacks and all the little pastries of Bimbo!”

The angry invoking of trans­national soda and snack-food companies has to do with the fact that Coca-Cola has built model schools in Mexico, as corporate giants such as Microsoft have gotten involved in U.S. education reform. Union leaders have turned that into a symbol for their fear that some distant authority will soon be telling them how and what to teach.

Political analysts say the fierce resistance also has to do with the fact that the changes directly challenge long-standing union power over jobs.

The overhaul that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is pursuing keeps with ideas championed in recent years by former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and others who argue that raising teacher standards is the key to fixing failing schools.

In February, Peña Nieto signed into law the framework for his plan, which would shift the power to hire, fire and evaluate teachers to the federal government and away from Mexico’s main teachers union, which has been accused of rampant corruption and presiding over a system of awarding jobs in ways that have little to do with merit.

A new system of periodic teacher evaluations is intended to identify incompetent teachers, reward good ones and set professional standards, with the hope that Mexican students will become more globally competitive.

“In principle, the reforms have a positive spirit,” said Miguel Szekely, director of the Institute for Education Innovation. “They are going in the right direction, but implementing them will take time.”

Additional legislation is required to spell out how the system will work. And that is what the massive teacher protests here have stalled, along with traffic.

The emphasis on union corruption — almost universally acknowledged as a huge problem — has to some extent obscured other concerns of the teachers who traveled to Mexico City from some of the poorest states in the southern part of the country. The union that holds sway there is not the one directly targeted by the new education law, but a smaller one that controls jobs and state education budgets and is among the most radical in Mexico.

Rosalia Alonzo, a director of an elementary school in Oaxaca, said any new measures should recognize the disparities between the poorest schools of the south and wealthier ones elsewhere.

“A lot of schools don’t have power or technology, or even books,” she said. “The people who come up with these reforms, their kids go to Harvard. They don’t know what it’s like for us.”

Pilar Palma, a teacher at the protest, said she suspects that evaluations will be used unfairly. “I agree I should be evaluated,” she said. “But give me the tools and the ways to get better.”

Lopez, the elementary school director, noted that many students and teachers in his area speak native languages in addition to Spanish. He worries that such particularities will be obliterated by standards handed down from Mexico City.

“Those languages are close to our own customs, to our own environment,” Lopez said. “They want to make our children useful as labor for the future of the private sector — to teach them only to work and obey and not to reflect, not to liberate their minds.”

It was early afternoon Tuesday, and thousands of teachers were heading from the plaza to protest a national TV network they said has been unfairly describing them as a nuisance.The station broadcast interviews with Mexico City residents fed up with the road blockages, people who described the teachers as “dirty” and “those Indians,” a reference to their native background. “We are going to block Televisa!” Lopez said, undeterred. “We will be here until the authorities answer us.”

It's not a "bribe", it's a "deferred prosecution fee"

Shooter gets a bye (or maybe buy?) on prosecution

Posted on August 27, 2013 4:22 pm by Laurie Roberts

Shooter gets a bye (or maybe buy?) on prosecution

Sen. Don Shooter dodged a bullet late last week. Or rather, he bought the ammo before it could be used to zap him.

Shooter is one of the more colorful characters at the state Capitol, a two-term tea party patriot best known for his penchant for wearing weird hats. Mention his name around the Legislature and you’ll be regaled with the tale of the time he showed up in costume for a special session held to extend unemployment benefits.

His duds: a sombrero, a serape and a half-filled bottle of tequila.

OK, so the guy – who is also chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee — has a few judgment issues.

Which is perhaps how he came to be barging into a Yuma high school classroom in March, confronting a teacher and demanding that she stop everything to answer his questions.

Shooter has said he went to the EOC Charter High School that morning to find out why his grandson’s teacher had “repeatedly bullied and humiliated him in front of the class.”

That’s a commendable quest, right up until the moment he ignored the front-office staffer who said she wasn’t available and went barreling down the hallway and into the teacher’s classroom.

According to a Yuma police report, Shooter angrily confronted the teacher as class was in session, pointing his finger in her face and demanding that she answer his questions.

The report says the teacher felt threatened and Shooter was asked to leave three or four times – including once by a student and by an administrator who asked someone to call 911. He finally left when the teacher began recording the incident with her cell phone.

After the confrontation, he met with the school’s counselor, the report says, telling her he is “a very influential person in Yuma and the state of Arizona.”

In June, Shooter was charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass, disorderly conduct and interference with or disruption of an educational institution. He hired Ed Novak, one of the state’s elite attorneys, a lawyer whom I imagine doesn’t spend much time in municipal court.

Apparently, it was a good move because on Friday, the Yuma city prosecutor dropped the charges. This, provided Shooter stays out of trouble for a year, pays $1,500 in restitution to the school and forks over a $1,000 “deferred prosecution fee” to the city of Yuma.

No admission of guilt and no penalty – other than the payoff required in order to buy his way out of a prosecution and possible conviction.

Since Shooter’s coup, readers have been asking me how many mere mortals – we, the not very influential people — could storm into a school, disrupt a class then buy a dismissal of criminal charges.

The answer, apparently, is a lot of us. If we live in Yuma, that is.

Yuma City Prosecutor Jay Cairns says deferred prosecutions have been in use since before he took the job 12 years ago and that Shooter was treated no differently than anyone else would have been in those same circumstances.

“Who and what title he had was of no consequence,” he said.

If so, then Shooter’s use of a $500-an-hour – or more — attorney seems a tad overkill.

Cairns says he requires payment of a fee to the city in order to defer a prosecution, both to recover the costs of handling the case and to inflict a little pain on the formerly, but no longer charged.

“A deferred fee is to be significant enough so the individual realizes you’re getting a benefit here,” he said. “At the same time, you had a consequence and the fee should be significant enough so hopefully there’s no recidivism.”

Several other city prosecutors I’ve talked to say it’s not unusual to let someone avoid a criminal conviction if they have a clean record. But they said their cities generally require an admission of guilt and some form of counseling or community service or even a donation to a relevant charity before they will drop a case.

While it’s within a prosecutor’s discretion to do it, they raised their eyebrows at the idea of allowing someone to avoid prosecution by simply paying the city a fee.

“I don’t even know how the state bar allows that to be ethical,” one former prosecutor told me. “That’s literally, I’m giving the city money so I don’t get prosecuted.”

In this case, it was money well spent.

No conviction gives the Senate Ethics Committee just the cover it needs to avoid a hearing into whether Shooter’s conduct met the ethical standard we expect from our leaders.

That is, the ethical standard we should expect from our leaders.

Judge in rape case criticized for light sentence

If it was statutory rape and they had consensual sex I think the sentence is too harsh and that Stacey Dean Rambold should not have been charged with a crime.

On the other hand if it was a real criminal rape where Stacey Dean Rambold forced the woman to have sex with him the American criminal injustice system certainly isn't fair. In most other rape cases the criminal usually gets a harsh, draconian prison sentence.

Montana District Judge G. Todd Baugh gave Stacey Dean Rambold a 30-day sentence for rape.

Well technically Montana District Judge G. Todd Baugh gave Stacey Dean Rambold a 15 years prison sentence, but suspended all but 31 days.

Source

Judge in rape case criticized for light sentence, remarks about victim

By Christine Mai-Duc

August 28, 2013, 5:09 p.m.

A Montana judge has come under fire after handing down a 30-day sentence to a former high school teacher convicted of raping a 14-year-old student and for making statements in court that the victim was "older than her chronological age" and "as much in control of the situation" as her teacher.

Outrage is particularly sharp in Billings, where the crime took place, because the girl committed suicide in 2010, just shy of her 17th birthday, as the criminal case was pending. A protest was planned for Thursday, and organizers have called on Montana District Judge G. Todd Baugh to resign.

The uproar began Monday when Baugh sentenced Stacey Dean Rambold, 54, to 15 years in prison on one count of sexual intercourse without consent, but then suspended all but 31 days and gave him credit for one day served. Prosecutors had asked for 20 years in prison, with 10 years suspended.

Baugh said that after reviewing statements made by the girl before her death, he concluded that she was a troubled youth. He then made the controversial remarks, including that he thought the girl had been "as much in control of the situation" as Rambold. The girl's mother, Auliea Hanlon, was in the courtroom and screamed at the judge before storming out, according to the Associated Press.

On Wednesday, Baugh apologized in a letter to the Billings Gazette newspaper, conceding his words were "demeaning of all women." He also said that while a 14-year-old "obviously" cannot consent, "I think that people have in mind that this was some violent, forcible, horrible rape.… It was horrible enough as it is just given her age, but it wasn't this forcible beat-up rape."

Under Montana state law, minors under the age of 16 cannot consent to sex.

"I don't believe in justice anymore," Hanlon said in a statement. "She wasn't even old enough to get a driver's license."

Protest organizer Sheena Rice called the judge's language "horrific."

"Judges should be protecting our most vulnerable children … not enabling rapists by placing blame on victims," she said.

Rambold was first charged in 2008 with three felony counts of sexual intercourse without consent after the girl reported to a church counselor that she had been sexually assaulted by a teacher, court documents show.

After the girl's death, Rambold admitted to one rape charge and entered a plea agreement in which the case would be dismissed provided he complete a sex-offender treatment program and meet other conditions, including having no unsupervised contact with children.

Prosecutors re-filed the charges in December after learning he had been terminated from the treatment program for having unsupervised visits with family members who were minors, according to court documents.

Jay Lansing, Rambold's attorney, had argued that Rambold had "already suffered as a result of his conduct," losing his career and his standing in the community. Lansing, who argued for the same sentence Baugh ultimately delivered, declined to comment Wednesday.

Prosecutor Scott Twito said his office was reviewing the sentence, which relied on an exception in state law that gives the judge latitude on sentencing in cases of sex with minors.

"I think the outcome could have been very different if the judge didn't have the freedom to make those choices," said Marian Bradley, president of Montana's National Organization for Women. Bradley and others are asking the governor and attorney general to review Baugh's actions.

In a statement to The Times, Gov. Steve Bullock said Baugh's comments left him "angry" and "disappointed," but that the Judicial Standards Commission handles complaints about a judge's actions.

christine.maiduc@latimes.com

Dick Foreman wants a TAX INCREASE for the Tempe Schools????

In this editorial DICK FOREMAN seems like a double talking politician who is trying to convince us that a TAX INCREASE isn't a TAX INCREASE!!!!

Source

Continuation of override does NOT mean tax increase

My Turn by DICK FOREMAN

If I had a nickel for every vote that ultimately defeated last November’s maintenance and operation budget override request for the Tempe Union High School District, I still wouldn’t have enough money to buy my wife and daughter a ticket to the movies, popcorn and drinks.

That campaign lost in 2012 by 811 votes. Other Southeast Valley school districts had similar fates. Chandler Unified lost; Higley lost. And Gilbert didn’t just lose, its override was crushed.

In fact, half of all schools throughout Arizona lost in their request to budget the legislatively approved, authorized rate. But in the Southeast Valley, we outdid the state average. We managed a 100 percent failure rate. [Well for us taxpayers that is a 100 percent success rate at crushing overpaid school bureaucrats.]

Couple these losses with multiple years of state budget cuts to school funding, and the reality is stark, humbling and demoralizing for most educators.

So, where are we now? Many taxpayers believe we need a plan for our schools that doesn’t raise taxes. Many education advocates are now simply seeking to maintain current spending without any increases in tax rates, too. And here’s the good news for both sides: IT CAN BE DONE! [If you ask me it sounds like you are asking for a tax increase that is called something else, so you government bureaucrats can pretend it isn't a tax increase, while at the same time shake us down for more money!!!]

Recently, I joined a representative group of Tempe Union parents, civic leaders and concerned taxpayers to review the M&O Override, the 10 or 15 percent options, and what we would recommend to the governing board. For the typical taxpayer, the difference is only about a buck and a half a month between the two options; a couple nickels a day. [a couple nickels a day sounds like a con mans way of saying a dime a day, or $3.10 a month or $37.20 a year which I want to keep myself instead of giving to some under worked over paid government bureaucrat that is always whining asking for more money!!!] The same is true, more or less, throughout the Southeast Valley.

In Tempe, community leaders such as Angie Taylor Thornton supported a 15 percent override. So did Mel Hannah from Tempe Union’s Desert Vista High School site council.

But Rosalie Hirano, whose passion for education takes second place to nobody, joined me in urging a Tempe Union Citizen Finance Committee recommendation of 10 percent. [that sounds like a 10 percent tax increase, which you will probably say isn't a tax increase and call by some other name] While our citizens committee was about equally split between a 10 percent and 15 percent override recommendation, the governing board chose the lower amount. [Look Dick, a 10 percent tax increase is too much, so is a 15 percent tax increase. Why don't you guys just shut up and try to educate the kids with the money we gave you!!!]

Message to taxpayers: “We heard you and we’re holding the line on spending. Will you support us now?” [Dick, I think you are asking for more money??? Or a TAX INCREASE????? You didn't hear us!!!! We don't want a stinking tax increase!!! Now shut up and go back to work!]

In Tempe, failure to support a continuation of the current 10 percent override would cut nearly $6.5 million per year from existing budgets. [I think way your saying is you want a 10 PERCENT TAX INCREASE????] About 85 percent of that money will come out of the classroom.

I do believe taxpayers want schools to tighten their belts and not ask for an increase. I do not believe Tempe, Gilbert, Chandler or Higley taxpayers wish to lay off teachers, increase class sizes or put our children literally in the streets as we scale back or eliminate many after-school programs to enable further, massive cuts.

My message today is simple. Your yes vote will NOT increase your current tax rate on any proposed Maintenance and Operation Override if the school district is asking for a “continuation.” It will simply maintain it exactly where it is. Not one penny more. [Well Dick, it sounds like you are a double talking politician!!!! A yes vote won't increase the current tax rate, but IT WILL INCREASE NEXT YEARS TAX RATE.]

So, if your local school governing board, such as Tempe Union, asks your permission to continue an existing override, they are respecting the taxpayers’ wish to hold the line on spending. They are NOT proposing an increase in taxes. [That is 100 percent BS Dick. It is too a TAX INCREASE. It's a tax increase for next year or next semester, next session or what ever you government school parasites call it!!!!]

Let’s keep that in mind. And if we’re still short a few nickels a day, may I suggest checking the creases in the couch before we cut classroom spending again?

Dick Foreman is an education advocate and community volunteer who lives in Tempe.

Tucson principal accused of assaulting student

Tucson principal accused of assaulting student

Associated Press Tue Sep 3, 2013 4:46 PM

TUCSON — The principal of a Tucson high school is accused of assaulting a teenage boy who’s dating his stepdaughter.

Tucson police say Sahuaro High School Principal Christopher Bonn was cited and released Tuesday afternoon.

Police say the 40-year-old Bonn reportedly discovered his stepdaughter sneaked out of the house sometime late Sunday or early Monday and waited for her to return home.

Bonn allegedly saw the pair park near his home around 4 a.m. Monday and walked up to the vehicle.

Bonn says he thought he saw the boy reaching for something in the center console and believed it could be a gun, so he punched him to prevent that possibility.

Tucson Unified School District officials say Bonn has been “assigned to home” while they review the incident to determine appropriate action.

Mass. court hears Pledge of Allegiance challenge

Mass. court hears Pledge of Allegiance challenge

Wed Sep 4, 2013 7:52 AM

BOSTON — A lawyer for an atheist family has asked Massachusetts’ highest court to ban the practice of reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in state public schools.

In arguments before the Supreme Judicial Court on Wednesday, a lawyer for the Acton family argued that the words “under God” in the pledge discriminate against atheist students.

The lawyer argues that the reference defines patriotism as someone who believes in God.

Lawyers for the school district and another family who want to keep the Pledge of Allegiance in schools say reciting it is voluntary and students can leave out the reference to God or choose not to participate.

Last year, a state judge found that the rights of the atheists were not violated by the words “under God.”

The family appealed the ruling.

Files show NSA cracks, weakens Internet encryption

1) I have always suspected that the NSA can use it's supercomputers to crack PGP and other public key encrypted messages. But I suspected it took some effort to decrypt the messages. Is that still true??? Or it is now a trivial inexpensive task for NSA to read messages that are encrypted with PGP and other public key??

2) Just what are these "secret portals" or "hooks" that the NSA has created??? I suspect they are hooks that tell the encryption software used by HTTPS encryption to create encrypted data that is easily decrypted by NSA and other government agencies.

3) This shows that it is really not safe to put ANYTHING that you would like to keep secret from anybody, especially the government on the internet. Same goes for putting the data on telephone lines, radio waves or any public communication method.

Files show NSA cracks, weakens Internet encryption

By Michael Winter USA Today Thu Sep 5, 2013 4:51 PM

U.S. and British intelligence agencies have cracked the encryption designed to provide online privacy and security, documents leaked by Edward Snowden show.

In their clandestine, decade-long effort to defeat digital scrambling, the National Security Agency, along with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have used supercomputers to crack encryption codes and have inserted secret portals into software with the help of technology companies, the Guardian, the New York Times and ProPublica reported Thursday.

The NSA has also maintained control over international encryption standards.

As the Times points out, encryption "guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world."

The NSA calls its decryption efforts the "price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace."

A 2010 memo describing an NSA briefing to British agents about the secret hacking said, "For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies. Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable."

The GCHQ is working to penetrate encrypted traffic on what it called the "big four" service providers ---Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook, the Guardian said.

N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web

The article says the NSA has been getting makers of ICs or integrated circuits to put back doors into their products so the NSA can read or listen to your data before the chip encrypts it.

The article says the NSA is also working with software vendors like Microsoft getting them to put back doors in their software products, again so the NSA can grab the data before the software encrypts it.

Goldwater Institute accuses Scottsdale district of campaigning

Goldwater Institute accuses Scottsdale district of campaigning

By Mary Beth Faller The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Sep 6, 2013 3:28 PM

A new state law goes into effect next week that tightens restrictions on how school districts can discuss bond and override elections.

School districts have long been prohibited from using public resources to influence the outcome of an election, but the new law more specifically restricts how they present information, as well as increases the penalty.

On Thursday, the Goldwater Institute accused the Scottsdale Unified School District of creating a presentation that goes beyond neutral information, and “uses language that appears to solicit a ‘yes’ vote in the election.” The institute asked the district to change the content.

Scottsdale is asking voters this fall to renew an override, which is a property tax that produces revenue for the school district.

Besides Scottsdale, nearly a dozen other Valley districts are seeking bonds or overrides this fall, including the Paradise Valley, Chandler, Dysart and Deer Valley unified school districts.

School districts have long been prohibited from using public resources to influence the outcome of an election. They are allowed to present only neutral, factual information and are not allowed to say “vote yes.” But the new law more specific about information presented on websites and at community forums.

David Peterson, superintendent of the Scottsdale district, said district officials carefully vetted the content of the presentations, but would review it in light of the new law.

“We’ve been doing bonds and overrides for a long time and are always very careful to make sure we follow the rules,” he said Thursday. “But we have a week to look at the new law. If something needs to be changed, we’ll change it. We want to be in compliance.”

Christina Sandefur, an attorney with the Goldwater Institute, said the organization worked with sponsor Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, crafting legislation during the last session.

She said that under the current law, as long as school districts didn’t explicitly say “vote yes” or “vote no” on a ballot issue, any other content was allowed to slide.

The new law also:

-- permits citizens to file a lawsuit over a violation. Previously, only the state attorney general could pursue violators and Sandefur said that never happened.

-- increases the fine for violators from $500 to $5,000.

-- specifies what constitutes a public resource, including web pages, software and telecommunications.

“Before it wasn’t clear if a website was a public resource,” Sandefur said. “Now it’s updated for the 21st century with electronic resources.”

Scottsdale administrators have held several forums at which they showed a 54-slide PowerPoint presentation called “Got MOO Facts?” for “maintenance and operations override.”

The presentation, including a video, is also on the district’s web site. It lists what the money will be spent on, tax-rate comparisons among districts and what programs will be eliminated if the override property tax is not renewed.

Sandefur said the wording of the presentation goes beyond just factual, citing the phrase “academically excelling schools increase property values” as an example.

Goldwater also cited as “persuasive” a district flier about the override with the phrase: “This is how SUSD and you will accomplish it — together!”

“It’s totally fine to give voters facts about how they’ll use the money,” Sandefur said. “But if you’re going to be persuasive, you can’t use taxpayer resources.”

Sandefur said she has received letters about the district’s forums.

“We would urge them to be particularly mindful during those forums to keep it neutral.”

School districts must allow equal time for others to present differing views during the forums, she said.

In many districts that seek bonds and overrides, independent political action committees are created to advocate for passage of the measures. In Scottsdale, Yes to Children is posting signs and holding community meetings.

Kavanagh said he was prompted to sponsor House Bill 2156 after a father in Scottsdale complained that during a back-to-school night in 2010, the classroom video monitors showed a message urging people to pass the district’s bond. When the man complained, school officials said they had rented the facility to Yes to Children for that time.

“That was the last straw in a whole series of school boards going over the line in using school facilities to advocate for their elections,” he said Friday.

The new law specifically prohibits political groups from renting a facility during a school event.

“This battle with groups, especially school groups, is like playing ‘Whack-A-Mole.’ Every time you think you’ve closed a loophole, they find a new way.”

Peterson said that he was attending a seminar on the new law at the Arizona School Boards Association law conference on Thursday when the e-mail from the Goldwater Institute arrived.

Chris Thomas, director of legal and policy services and general counsel for the school board association, said his group also worked with Kavanagh on the legislation.

“I think what could be misconstrued with this law, and we hope it doesn’t, is that people who care about education — and some of those people work in the schools or are on school boards — can’t play a role. Nothing can be further from the truth.

“They still have First Amendment rights and can work on elections,” Thomas added.

“They just can’t do it on school time or use school resources.”

Journalist Facing Prison Over a Link

Placing a "link" or an "A tag" to a document is a Federal crime???

"By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities ... are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it"

I guess that is just a cockamamie, convoluted, lame excuse to flush the First Amendment down the toilet by Obama's federal goons.

Source

A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link

By DAVID CARR

Published: September 8, 2013

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent. He has served in the past as a spokesman of sorts for Anonymous, the hacker collective, although some members of the group did not always appreciate his work on its behalf.

In 2007, he co-wrote a well-received book, “Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny,” and over time, he has developed an expertise in the growing alliance between large security firms and the government, arguing that the relationship came at a high cost to privacy.

From all accounts, including his own, Mr. Brown, now 32, is a real piece of work. He was known to call some of his subjects on the phone and harass them. He has been public about his struggles with heroin and tends to see conspiracies everywhere he turns. Oh, and he also threatened an F.B.I. agent and his family by name, on a video, and put it on YouTube, so there’s that.

But that’s not the primary reason Mr. Brown is facing the rest of his life in prison. In 2010, he formed an online collective named Project PM with a mission of investigating documents unearthed by Anonymous and others. If Anonymous and groups like it were the wrecking crew, Mr. Brown and his allies were the people who assembled the pieces of the rubble into meaningful insights.

Project PM first looked at the documents spilled by the hack of HBGary Federal, a security firm, in February 2011 and uncovered a remarkable campaign of coordinated disinformation against advocacy groups, which Mr. Brown wrote about in The Guardian, among other places.

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern and a fan of Mr. Brown’s work, wrote in The Huffington Post that, “Project PM under Brown’s leadership began to slowly untangle the web of connections between the U.S. government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and infosecurity consultants.”

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.

Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents. The credit card data was of no interest or use to Mr. Brown, but it was of great interest to the government. In December 2012 he was charged with 12 counts related to identity theft. Over all he faces 17 charges — including three related to the purported threat of the F.B.I. officer and two obstruction of justice counts — that carry a possible sentence of 105 years, and he awaits trial in a jail in Mansfield, Tex.

According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.”

Because Mr. Brown has been closely aligned with Anonymous and various other online groups, some of whom view sowing mayhem as very much a part of their work, his version of journalism is tougher to pin down and, sometimes, tougher to defend.

But keep in mind that no one has accused Mr. Brown of playing a role in the actual stealing of the data, only of posting a link to the trove of documents.

Journalists from other news organizations link to stolen information frequently. Just last week, The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica collaborated on a significant article about the National Security Agency’s effort to defeat encryption technologies. The article was based on, and linked to, documents that were stolen by Edward J. Snowden, a private contractor working for the government who this summer leaked millions of pages of documents to the reporter Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian along with Barton Gellman of The Washington Post.

By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities in the Northern District of Texas — Mr. Brown lives in Dallas — are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it. In the news release announcing the indictment, the United States attorney’s office explained, “By transferring and posting the hyperlink, Brown caused the data to be made available to other persons online, without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor and the card holders.”

And the magnitude of the charges is confounding. Jeremy Hammond, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to participating in the actual hacking of Stratfor in the first place, is facing a sentence of 10 years.

Last week, Mr. Brown and his lawyers agreed to an order that allows him to continue to work on articles, but not say anything about his case that is not in the public record.

Speaking by phone on Thursday, Charles Swift, one of his lawyers, spoke carefully.

“Mr. Brown is presumed innocent of the charges against him and in support of the presumption, the defense anticipates challenging both the legal assumptions and the facts that underlie the charges against him,” he said.

Others who are not subject to the order say the aggressive set of charges suggests the government is trying to send a message beyond the specifics of the case.

“The big reason this matters is that he transferred a link, something all of us do every single day, and ended up being charged for it,” said Jennifer Lynch, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that presses for Internet freedom and privacy. “I think that this administration is trying to prosecute the release of information in any way it can.”

There are other wrinkles in the case. When the F.B.I. tried to serve a warrant on Mr. Brown in March 2012, he was at his mother’s house. The F.B.I. said that his mother tried to conceal his laptop and it charged her with obstruction of justice. (She pleaded guilty in March of this year and is awaiting sentencing.)

The action against his mother enraged Mr. Brown and in September 2012 he made a rambling series of posts to YouTube in which he said he was in withdrawal from heroin addiction. He proceeded to threaten an F.B.I. agent involved in the arrest, saying, “I don’t say I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his (expletive) kids ... How do you like them apples?”

The feds did not like them apples. After he was arrested, a judge ruled he was “a danger to the safety of the community and a risk of flight.” In the video, Mr. Brown looks more like a strung-out heroin addict than a threat to anyone, but threats are threats, especially when made against the F.B.I.

“The YouTube video was a mistake, a big one,” said Gregg Housh, a friend of Mr. Brown’s who first introduced him to the activities of Anonymous. “But it is important to remember that the majority of the 105 years he faces are the result of linking to a file. He did not and has not hacked anything, and the link he posted has been posted by many, many other news organizations.”

At a time of high government secrecy with increasing amounts of information deemed classified, other routes to the truth have emerged, many of them digital. News organizations in receipt of leaked documents are increasingly confronting tough decisions about what to publish, and are defending their practices in court and in the court of public opinion, not to mention before an administration determined to aggressively prosecute leakers.

In public statements since his arrest, Mr. Brown has acknowledged that he made some bad choices. But punishment needs to fit the crime and in this instance, much of what has Mr. Brown staring at a century behind bars seems on the right side of the law, beginning with the First Amendment of the Constitution.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

Susan Anable wants government welfare for Cox???

Anable: Closing the digital divide for Arizona students

She seems to think that if a child's parents can't afford an internet connection at home that the tax payers should pay for it. And of course that will bring her business boatloads of government welfare, which the rest of us will pay for.

Source

Anable: Closing the digital divide for Arizona students

Posted: Monday, September 16, 2013 8:10 am

Guest commentary by Susan Anable

Arizona students are back in class and in addition to notebooks and lunch boxes, some parents are packing smartphones or tablets in their kid’s backpacks. Some school districts are even requesting that kids bring their own technology to school to enhance their learning.

A recent Pew Internet & American Life study found that more than 80 percent of teachers agree that today’s digital technologies are leading to greater disparities between affluent and disadvantaged schools and school districts. When 76 percent of teachers assign online homework, teachers increasingly find themselves in the difficult position of either leaving behind students without Internet at home or holding back the other “connected students.”

What is truly troubling is that many kids throughout Arizona, even those with Internet-enabled smartphones and tablets, have no access to Internet in their homes. While the majority of Arizona homes have access to a broadband connection in their neighborhood, due to cost, some economically challenged families choose not to connect in their homes. Internet access and digital literacy are essential for today’s students to succeed and ensure that they have the tools to compete in our 21st century workforce.

Connect2Compete (C2C) was created by community leaders, the private sector and foundations to bridge the digital divide to ensure affordable access to the Internet for low-income families. As the largest Internet provider in Arizona, and a company that has a strong history of supporting broadband adoption through programs such as the Boys and Girls Clubs technology centers, it was a natural for Cox Communications to be part of this effort to ensure that affordable Internet access is available to those students most at risk of falling through the digital divide.

While the main goal of C2C is to improve student engagement and increase graduation rates, it also benefits other members of the household. Just consider this:: in the U.S. today, more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies post their job openings online only and require online applications. The same is true at Cox Communications.

So how does it work? Families who have at least one child enrolled in the national free school lunch program are eligible for low-cost access to high-speed Internet through Connect2Compete. A consortium of hardware and software partners provide low-cost computers and digital literacy training, and Cox Communications provides a two-year commitment of Internet service for $9.95 a month, free installation and a free modem rental.

Cox Communications believes that all kids in Arizona deserve to have the same tools for learning and Connect2Compete is one important way we can do our part. For more information, visit connect2compete.org/cox/.

• Susan Anable is the vice president of public affairs for Cox Communications Arizona and is the mother of two school-aged children.

Boy forced to remove 'Duck Dynasty' shirt

Source

Boy forced to remove 'Duck Dynasty' shirt

WWBT Fri Sep 20, 2013 12:23 PM

DINWIDDLE, Va. - A mother says her son got in trouble for wearing his Duck Dynasty T-shirt to school, according to video from WWBT.

The popular show featuring a group of bearded millionaires is a hit on the A&E network, but the mother says her teenager was told the shirt was threatening to other kids at Dinwiddie High School.

"For this to be considered as a threat to the school ... I couldn't understand it," Edna-Jo Spain tells WWBT.

Spain was outraged when teachers at Dinwiddie High School forced her son to remove the shirt, which shows a character from the reality television show Duck Dynasty clinching his fist.

"It says, 'I will hurt you physically and metaphysically,'" Spain says. "Anybody that ever watches Duck Dynasty knows that Si Robertson is famous for his little funny slogans."

The school superitendent tells WWBT that those unfamiliar with Duck Dynasty could think the shirt implies violence, adding that "we would like to keep our slogans on student shirts as non-violent as possible."

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