Posts Tagged ‘Senator Jones’
Making of “Tail of the Dragon” Part IV: The meaning of Freedom and how it’s lost to obligation
In front of a seafood restaurant in Delaware flies the flag readers of this website will proudly recognize, pictured on the left. At the base of that flag pole are items the owner of the establishment greatly treasure, pictured on the right. These pictures were posted by a fan of my new novel Tail of the Dragon. The rum is a reference to an article I wrote about pirates a few weeks ago. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. She has let me know that these are some of her current favorite things, and her idea of an exquisite evening is drinking some of that rum while reading Tail of the Dragon from her nightstand so that she can crawl into the mind of the novel’s hero Rick Stevens and enjoy his rebellious charisma from the greatest car chase in the history of car chases.
About halfway through the first draft I realized that I wasn’t just going to tell the action packed story of a modern car chase, but the philosophic underpinnings of a society struggling under the pressure of “statism” and a rebellion against it. This article is Part IV of a Making Of series for my recent novel which explores the path I took to arrive at its unique philosophy of freedom. CLICK HERE to review the previous installments. I had clear in my mind the locations I was writing about, and I understood the rebellious nature of the main protagonist, Rick Stevens, but one thing that still lingered in the back of my mind was the notion of freedom versus collectivism and how those two things are so closely associated sometimes within the same context. For me, there is no greater example of this duality than in motorcycle riders who claim to be free and independent, yet tend to travel in gangs riding their motorcycles in formation whenever they gather. This trait was as I saw it a failure of American philosophy so I wanted to become more acquainted. This was the reason I joined the Suzuki Owner’s Club of North America and quickly became the Vice President of the Ohio Chapter. One of the tasks of such a leadership position was to organize new membership drives, so the President and I organized a small ride to promote the organization. The President was from Cleveland and I was from Cincinnati, so we agreed to meet up at a McDonald’s just south of Cleveland and head across the top of Ohio to the Fremont Suzuki dealer south of Sandusky and set up a booth to recruit new members. It was a planned day trip that seemed like a simple endeavor on paper taking place just a few months after my wife and I traveled to Key West, from Part III. The trip ended up being a 500 mile adventure that took us to many places throughout the day and would prove to be a memorable escapade that was more epic, than simple.
We left our home at 4:00 AM to meet the President and some of the other Suzuki Owner members at 7 AM. It was not difficult to cover the vast distance between Cleveland and Cincinnati by motorcycle in such a short time. With an average speed of 77 MPH, and just a few stops, we arrived at the designated McDonald’s ahead of the other riders. I enjoyed my affiliation with the Club, but in the back of my mind was the nagging sensation that I felt constrained by my involvement. I knew I shouldn’t feel this way, yet the closer to Cleveland we became, the more tense I was. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the President or his riding partners, but it was the feeling that the closer I came to Cleveland the more I lost my individual identity. I was honored that they invited me to become the VP of the Club after only a few short months, but VP was still a subordinate role, and I’m not a very good subordinate. Typically if I’m not the leader of the pack, I’m not interested in any endeavor. I just can’t stand taking a passive role on anything in my life, no matter what it is.
We arrived at the McDonald’s, ate a well deserved breakfast, and met up with the President and his riders outside. After some brief introductions and typical motorcycle talk, we planned our route to the Fremont dealership roughly 70 miles away across very rural farmland. There would not be any highway access, so we’d be traveling relatively slowly across God’s country of the Ohio north 40 to 50 miles south of Lake Erie. Once the route was established on a map spread out across motorcycle fuel tanks we were off. The President in such groups usually takes the point position on such rides which is slightly off-center to the left of the road. Riders behind the leader take up positions of formation staggered behind. I migrated to the back so I could observe the behavior and noticed that the other riders worked very hard to maintain the closest position behind the leader possible.
We traveled across the top of Ohio by many farms and several rain storms before arriving at the dealership right around 9:30 AM. We were scheduled to arrive at 10 AM so we were a little early. Once at the Fremont location the President set up a booth for the Club to promote itself. We spent from 10 AM to 2 PM having lunch, telling biker stories, and talking about various wild adventures. The company was good, but all the while I had a terribly uneasy feeling that was difficult to shake. There were three times in my life prior to this bike ride where I had a similar feeling. The first was in the fifth grade when some girls I knew set me up to “go steady” with the class beauty at the time. She was a pretty girl, but I didn’t want the obligation to have to speak to her every night on the phone like boyfriends and girlfriends were required to do. In the fifth grade I had just won the pull-up contest in the Winter Olympics and many people were projecting me to be a star athlete as I was clearly the fastest kid in the entire school. I could shoot basketball, play hockey, and I was untouchable in dodge ball. But I hated all those group sports, even though I was excessively good at them. This drove my gym teacher nuts as he didn’t understand my reservations. Because I was so good at these sports, this little girl wanted to be my girlfriend so her friends arranged it by nagging me until I said yes. I went steady with the girl for about 2 hours. Once I came home from school and was eating dinner and planning the activities of my evening which involved, reading, drawing pictures, playing war with my brother outside, and building a model car, I did not have time for the little girl when she called and wanted to talk on the phone for an hour. I reluctantly told the girl I wanted to break up. She cried, all her friends were mad at me for years, but I was free—and that made me happy. I was free to read my books, draw my pictures, write my stories, and play outside—and that’s all I wanted out of life. I reasoned that the only reason I wanted to go steady with the girl was because I wanted to see her naked—but that wasn’t a good enough reason to imprison my soul to another person. When I broke up with her I was greatly relieved. The second time was when I allowed myself to be talked into trying out for the Lakota soccer team during my freshman year. I had a reputation as “The Animal,” because I was so vicious when I played the game. I would often head butt other players intentionally to take out their star players. I was good at disguising the effort as going for head balls to avoid the yellow cards, so many of my couches and parents who watched me often talked me into trying out for the school team. The first day of tryouts I was miserable. I thought the coach was an arrogant bastard and I couldn’t stand the body language of the guy. He was clearly looking for butt kissers on his team, and that wasn’t me. He didn’t like my aggressive playing style, or my rebellious attitude. I also didn’t like the girls who seemed attracted to the school soccer players, the girls who hung out around the practice field and were always being passed around by the other players. They were short-legged stubby girls with square faces and potato asses, not the kind of girls I was interested in. So I became more and more belligerent as the tryouts went on for two weeks. During a scrimmage I head butted our goalie who had called off the ball because he made fun of my haircut in the locker room. My mother always cut my hair, but she did it in the classic “bowl cut.” So I sent him home with a bloody nose that day and a loose tooth. The coach made me run laps hoping I’d pass out, but I didn’t. I stubbornly completed his assignment, but our relationship deteriorated. I was relieved to learn that I had not made the team. I knew everyone would finally leave me alone about trying out for all the stupid team sports, and I could go back to my books and stories without the constant nagging from the adults in my life who kept telling me to grow up and do something “productive.” A few years later the high school football coach hinted that I should try out for the football team to direct my “aggression” in a positive direction. But I had a reputation in school as a person who fought way too much, and was utterly unmanageable socially so their urgings quickly ebbed once they saw no light in my eyes over their promises of college football lights and easy girls. I had no problem with girls, and the lights didn’t impress me, so they didn’t have much to offer. The third time was when I was 18 and I had a modeling agent who booked me to do a lingerie show with a stage full of beautiful girls. I had just met my wife and had a choice to go see her for the evening or go to the paying gig that my agent had set up. The money was good, and there was a chance to meet not just a few beautiful women, but several. Not the stubby fingered, potato butt girls, but the kind I liked, with long legs, round lips, eyes just perfectly spaced—the kind of girls who strive to become actresses and fashion models. So I took the job and my future wife cried because she was afraid she’d lose me to the job assignment. I found out prior to leaving my apartment that my task at the show was to “dance” around the girls lip-synching to David Lee Roth’s song, California Girls. I was en route to the event, but instead of taking I-75 south, I took I-275 east and went to my future wife’s house. My agent was furious as she had a stage full of beautiful fashion models but no David Lee Roth impersonator to dance on stage around them. The show tanked, and I never worked as a model again. But I did get married to my wife a year later. She drew a line in the sand and told me that she didn’t care about making money if I had to make money doing stupid things like dancing on a stage to David Lee Roth songs. Once I arrived at her house, I felt free of that social pressure to perform to expectations that the media culture valued, but were at odds with my own beliefs.
Now, that nagging feeling was there again in the motorcycle group at Fremont. I was helping to register new members to a group that I was Vice President of, which I became a part of in much the same fashion as in the stories just told. I was a reluctant participant. My talents were desired for various reasons to serve collective institutions, and I have ALWAYS been reluctant to surrender my sovereignty to anybody ever, no matter how beautiful, how lucrative, or under any amount of pressure. I have always turned obligation away in favor of freedom. I often say yes initially because I like to help people, but when things get too cozy in the collectivism department, I always look for a way out.
I pulled my wife to the side and suggested to her that when the event was over at 2 PM that we not ride back to Cleveland with the Suzuki group but instead go up the road to Cedar Point and ride roller coasters the rest of the day, since we were close. She shook her head knowing what was driving me, as after twenty plus years of marriage she had come to understand my decision-making processes. When it was time to take down the tent, I informed the guys that my wife and I were going to Cedar Point, and not riding back in formation to Cleveland. I got some puzzled looks, but they agreed to go on without us. We spoke in a friendly manner as we parted promising to touch base by email when we all returned home. The minute I was back on my motorcycle going north as they traveled east I felt the shackles coming off me and I enjoyed freedom once again. That was the last time I would ever see those guys, and the email messages never came or went either way again. That was my last day as Vice President of the Ohio Chapter Suzuki Owners Club of North America.
My wife and I had fun on the bike trip, but our day really opened up into a wonderful experience once we arrived at Cedar Point about 45 minute later. It was a relief to not have to ride in formation, to recognize a leader of any kind, to adhere to any kind of pecking order, to go where we wanted when we wanted to go, and to have the freedom to make a decision and to act on that decision. We spent the rest of the day at Cedar Point until the closing time of 10 PM that night. Once they closed the doors on us, we got on our motorcycle and headed for home. We arrived back around 3 AM–23 hours and 500 miles later. It was a cold ride home, so we were fairly frozen. We warmed up in our hot tub and I wrote notes on my laptop from the day while they were fresh in my mind as I hung over the side of the Jacuzzi typing madly. The thoughts of that day made it into my opening chapter which went on for nearly thirty pages. My editor had me cut it down to roughly the first 5 pages of the final Tail of the Dragon draft.
Freedom is a difficult concept to understand, especially for those who aren’t nearly as stingy with it as I am. People find themselves agreeing to things they otherwise wouldn’t do because some collective force applies pressure to them to say “yes,” then once they do, they are stuck in rigid confinement. Most people become used to accepting this gradual loss of freedom, so they don’t see the effects of socialism seeking to subtly impose itself upon their lives. I never developed that problem, so it’s easy for me to see. In Tail of the Dragon I had to create in the characters of Rick and Renee Stevens two characters who valued their freedom to such an extraordinary level that they would not yield to those tiny encroachments, so that their refusal would cause the next Civil War in America in an understandable way. I wanted readers to see what freedom was supposed to look like, how it felt, and how tasted, because most people don’t know what freedom is at all—as they are encumbered with too many obligations. Freedom is the essence of what Tail of the Dragon is all about, freedom from clubs, from socialites, from agents, from coaches, from all the pressures of life which desire to steer a human mind in a direction that is not authentic to the individual. My experiment to investigate a collective entity had proved fruitful if it did only last about 2 months. They were two months well spent, because the result found its way into literature for all time, and many years beyond.
And a special thanks are deserved for Kathy. I appreciate her flying that flag in front of her Delaware seafood restaurant, and I appreciate the effort she put into making my day a little better by displaying Tail of the Dragon so proudly. It was for such people I wrote the novel and I am happy to know that Captain Morgan is going on the adventure with her.
Rich Hoffman
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George Lang on 700 WLW: Mitt Romney and Kid Rock blast West Chester with an army of freedom fighters!
There is nothing I like more than to hear new people coming out front and speaking on 700 WLW from the land of West Chester defending liberty, and protecting conservatives from the vile ruthlessness of the typical progressive. Over the last couple of months George Lang has been that person, appearing on WLW a couple of times. His latest was an important one as he spoke of the Romney/Ryan visit that he had a very big part in bringing to West Chester as one of the three trustees and the only one who isn’t a typical do-nothing politician. George was on WLW to discuss the actual poll numbers for Butler County in favor of Romney and the direction Ohio would take in the upcoming election. Entertaining, smooth, and articulate, George didn’t forget to mention his support of Sharon Kennedy for Supreme Court which he and I enthusiastically prop up over the incumbent and former social worker Yvette McGee Brown.
The rally that Lang spoke about turned out to be quite dramatic. West Chester—and Butler County more specifically is one of the most intense hot beds for conservatives in the entire country. Critics will look at the crowd who attended and instantly criticize that there was a sea of 30,000 white faces with little diversity among them, or any poor. Those same critics would be part of the problem that is infecting America right now with an emphasis on all the wrong things that make up a successful society. Diversity, fairness, social justice are the policies of the progressive/socialist and the people who attended the Romney event for the most part support all those types of things, but not at the expense of wealth production and the general pursuit of goodness.
I view the typical resident of West Chester as a member of a lost tribe that has had to move away from their city homes in the past to seek refuge in the suburbs to avoid the abysmal taxation that goes on in dense population centers filled with progressive politics. Even in West Chester there are progressives who are currently attempting to turn West Chester into a city so they can collect more taxes to expand government more aggressively with more hyphenated nameplates on the desks of future bureaucrats. They have an unfathomable appetite for more, and more government services built on the backs of irrational emotion. Lucky for West Chester there are not many politicians who embody these traits. Two of the three trustees do, but George Lang by himself off-sets them dramatically. He will need a partner in the next election to win one of those Trustee seats away from the vile progressives that currently out-vote him. And the public school of Lakota has many progressive minded people running it, consisting of the school board, the superintendent and most of the employees which is typical for a government institution. Public school enterprises attract progressive minded people, which is a real problem.
As Kid Rock played “Just the Good Ol’ Boys” opening up for Romney’s appearance on November 2nd 2012 the crowd chanted “FOUR MORE DAYS” repeatedly in a not too disguised battle cry to oust the diabolical, lying, scandalous, manipulative, small-minded, thieving, parasitic, obtuse, puppet progressive President Obama from the seat of much destruction that he has personally ushered in to America on the backs of the “good” and at their expense. West Chester as a community does make more money than other places in the country and Obama’s schemes target them specifically for tax increases to pay for his progressive re-distribution attempts. It is because of many Obama type politicians in the past that most of the people in the large crowd moved to West Chester to begin with, because they want to be away from crime ridden public housing projects, schools filled with parents raising their kids on welfare programs, away from apartment dwellers who can vote property tax increases without actually owning property. So if the crowd is too much of one color, and has more money per capita than the average crowd, it is not the fault of the crowd, but of the progressive politicians who attempted to loot them in the past causing them to take refuge in West Chester.
But like George Lang’s interview on 700 WLW some of the most prominent Republicans in the entire country came to this grand event to partake in a movement that has been a long time and coming. As I watched the participants, Romney and Ryan specifically, on the heels of speeches by Speaker John Boehner, Governor John Kasich, Senator Rob Portman and many, many others I noticed a long—evolving plan that had been many years in the making evolving on stage that was culminating in West Chester.
Way back in 1993 there was a special election for an emergency House of Representatives seat that was coming open that spring and Portman was on 700 WLW fighting for it. He was on-air debating seven other candidates in the studio at Mt. Adams back when the station was located down in Cincinnati, but left to avoid the terribly high taxes—(see a common theme here.) I spoke to the radio host for permission to film the Sunday prime time event for my friends within the Reform Party which was a group that Ross Perot had started. Out of all the candidates Portman was clearly the most qualified and honest and I took an instant liking to him. You could tell upon meeting him for the first time that he was not the typical scum bag politician and that he sincerely cared about becoming a member of the House. I told my friends within the Reform Party that if Washington had more politicians like Rob Portman that America would explode with prosperity and goodness. Portman after the debate actually came to some of our Reform Party events, most notably the one at Longworth Hall where my friend and I hung a giant American flag off the top of the building that extended all the way to the bottom. It was half as big as a football field and it took all our strength to tie off such a large flag without it pulling us off the roof. In 1996 when I was manufacturing t-shirts with the logo, “TAKE AND AX TO OUR TAX” Rob Portman sent me a $7.50 check to buy one, which is what they cost me to make at the time. Over the years Portman had never really buckled as a pinnacle of goodness in the cease-pool of Washington politics, and I always admired him for it.
To see Portman on stage with Romney, Kasich, and Boehner along with all the rest who can all tell similar stories of their own, I saw assembled a great climax that was 20 years in the making. For the first time, Republicans had assembled a group of politicians who could actually push back against the progressive, ever-imposing impositions of parasitic existences, and do it without being equally scummy. The people gathered on stage under the flag of Mitt Romney were generally decent people who had built their lives around good family principles and stood for the values of the people gathered hoping that these men and women could stop those progressives because the planet has become so small that there isn’t anywhere else to run. West Chester is the product of good people running away from parasites—people who insist they must live at the expense of someone else. And for those who don’t wish to get picked apart any longer by such people, they flee, just like WLW did from Mt. Adams to Kenwood, and almost every one of the 30,000 people who showed up in the cold to see Romney and friends speak on a breezy November evening.
For the first time in a number of years I am waking up in the morning after such a rally and I can actually see a light at the end of the tunnel. Under a Romney administration it won’t take much to work with Governor Kasich to get the oil fields in Ohio flowing again, and coal will become a major industry bringing great wealth to Ohio. And I know that technologies like thorium will get a serious look as a future alternative to the dirty fossil fuels. Education will be reformed, because it has to be. And it won’t be the methods of old, which Romney made very clear in his speech, but one that embraces competition between schools to raise the performance and lower their costs to the community, which is what I have personally been fighting to help usher in. Just two years ago School Choice was a dirty word, and teacher unions attacked anybody who criticized them. Now politicians like Romney can give a speech without even caring if it makes the unions angry, because they have been neutralized and seen for what they really are. Their masks have been ripped off, and they will have to adapt to a new way of thinking, and Ohio will play a central role in that change. The best way to avoid the extortions of the past, the strikes, the busing cuts, the sports fees is to give parents the power to pick their child up and move them to another school that isn’t playing that kind of game. I believe that within one year of a Romney/Ryan administration the economy will dramatically improve, because in their case all they have to do is turn on the facet, where Obama and his gangs of thugs have turned it off deliberately to induce wealth redistribution on a global scale.
Listening to George Lang on WLW, then seeing the Romney event for myself, I have the feeling that the angry contentions that I have been a part of for many years may finally be coming to an end. There will always be a need to be vigilant. Even Rob Portman voted for the NDAA Act which is a major concern for me, but like most things, good intentions that are actually quite bad are not so obvious to the people who are up close and personal with such issues. They are only obvious in the long view, which I have made something of a living framing for some of these same people for quite a long time now. But finally, there appears to be a day when we can wake up on the morning and not think about what a scum bag is in The White House, or what kind of looting governor is trying to steal money from the rich and give it to the poor just to get himself re-elected again, or that politicians like progressive trustees would embark on a well-planned smear campaign to lash out at Lang for going on WLW to speak his mind. The momentum is shifting—finally for the better and for the first time since the 1992 election when I sat on the steps of a plush Cincinnati hotel and watched with grimy anger a speech by Bill Clinton that was going to be in The White House, I have the kind of hope that I last felt in 1980 as a young 7th grade student at Lakota who had campaigned openly for Ronald Reagan in my class rooms, giving speeches on how the Soviet Union could be crushed with a military build-up and how Jimmy Carter had screwed up the magic of capitalism. Those same youthful eyes watched on that election in 1980 state by state a national election that was a landslide win for Reagan I have wished for a return to that kind of America—the kind of America that brought hope to the 80’s, made a lot of people rich, and crushed global communism. After watching Mitt Romney and the rest speaking in West Chester, I had the feeling that Mitt Romney was more qualified to go well beyond what Ronald Reagan accomplished and that the reverberations of those actions will propel America in a direction of goodness that hasn’t been seen or felt in well over 100 years.
With all that said, Kid Rock was the perfect musical artist to perform on the cusp of such a moment in a land created out of reaction to the imposing policies of progressives for an offensive that will soon flatten them with their stubborn refusal to see reason through the actions of American goodness that is about to turn from blue states to red states on a massive scale. I’m not saying that everything will be fixed on November 7th 2012 when Romney is the next president. But, it is a step in the right direction. The next steps that meander off into the darkness are ones that will require a whole new way of thinking, but that will come in time, and I’ll help usher it in. But to see where the country has a potential to go in a fight that we have all been involved in for over 20 years is wonderfully exciting, and the “Good O’ Boy’s never sounded so good. This is not the Republican Party of the Lawrence Welk days. These are the days of Clint Eastwood passing the torch onto Kid Rock, Mitt Romney and the rest of us who are sick and tired of progressives who want to ruin our lives by giving our freedoms away to the same idiots who cloaked Europe into 1000 years of darkness. It will not be tolerated and will be met with peaceful elections, and if that doesn’t work, then something else. Hopefully Romney will give us the former, so the latter won’t become needed.
In the games of politics however, I am happy to let George Lang take the high road path of Mitt Romney in the arena of elections. George is very good at it, and it has its place. I on the other hand will be in the dirt with Kid Rock where the blood is spilled because it takes both to win a movement, and is what conservatives have been missing for most of a century. But no longer, and it is good to see both elements finally present at the same conservative rally!
Read what I said about all this one year ago by CLICKING HERE, to see how the plan has evolved.
Rich Hoffman
Richard Lugar Lost his Seat, and his Mind: That’s what happens when politicians “compromise”
Richard Lugar is upset that he lost his long time senate seat to Richard Mourdock, a position Lugar’s held since 1977. Lugar lost the primary election by more than 20 percentage points so it wasn’t even close. This has sent shock waves of fear through the political establishment of both parties leaving the White House to voice its concern that the GOP is taking an “extremist” turn in Indiana with the election of Mourdock.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/09/lugar-rival-credits-tea-party-with-victory/#ixzz1uNjPCf5K
Here’s what Lugar said after the election.
He and I share many positions, but his embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate. In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.
Well, here’s how it is Richard Lugar and every other establishment politician who has made a career out of politics. Many people are just tired of “compromise.” That word has no place in American government any more. “Compromise” means a right answer has made concessions to a wrong answer to get some weakened idea that is corrupted by stolen value.
“Compromise” means that two sides did not fight it out to find the truth. Compromise means that two political parties decided how to divide up the loot stolen from American citizens in order to pad their own pockets, or political ideology. It is because of that idea of “compromise” that Richard Lugar fought against, is why he lost his seat. He was not fighting for what was right—his vision of right and wrong has been corrupted by too many years in Washington. He should have left the Senate in 1981 and let somebody else serve in his place. It is not the job of American citizens to elect a man into a Senate seat and to hold that position for 20 years giving the GOP a majority in voting, and to “compromise” with looters like Barack Obama, to keep the peace. It’s that type of mentality that has brought America so much trouble and caused our current 15 trillion-dollar budget deficit.
Speaking for myself, I have no desire to maintain the political order of the day, because it has been bad for America. It’s been good for looters and thieves in government who steal public money to build their palaces of worship to themselves, to create their immortality in more and more needless regulation—I don’t want anything to do with more of what’s wrong. If the political establishments who occupy a kind of European nobility in this country that they maintain with looted tax money want to call that “extremism,” then so be it. We have a president in the White House who was mentored by Bill Ayers and many other communist advocates, and are as extreme as the word can be properly defined. So I’ll wear the title proudly, because I want what’s right for my country and my state, not for some corrupt politician seeking “compromise” over what’s reasonably correct.
That is why you lost Richard Luger, and why many others will lose in the upcoming months. Prepare to be shocked. If Indiana does not vote for Richard Mourdock this upcoming fall, then the fault for what follows will be on the voters. But electing a politician into office who will simply compromise with various degrees of socialism to make everyone happy is not the solution of the future, and that kind of nonsense must end quickly. It’s good to see that conservatives like Mourdock no longer care if they are called “extremists” by a bunch of looting Democrats (socialists). Once they no longer care to be called names, then the real fight can begin, a fight that Richard Luger did not participate in, because his goal was to get re-elected to office, and maintain the peace—not to preserve the liberties and freedoms of our nation. His tendency to surrender these principles to the radicals of government over the last 20 years has made it so that liberty and freedom are now considered, “radical.” That’s why he lost his seat, deservedly so.
There is no “compromise,” CLICK HERE to find out why.
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Rich Hoffman
http://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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Lakota Superintendent Mantia: The employement contract
My anger at Superintendent Mantia of the Lakota School District is not some unwarranted diatribe incited by a simple disagreement. There is a history which is shown at the beginning and ending of this article where I gave two public presentations, one for Educate Ohio in June of 2011 and again for the West Chester Tea Party in October of 2011 shortly before the election. One of the reasons the pro levy people think my arguments are combative, vitriolic and harsh are because they typically only speak with people of their own kind. They do not associate often with the 18,000 people who voted against the tax hikes, so are ignorant as to how the other side thinks, and they make no attempt to understand. This is why both groups that I spoke to about Superintendent Mantia and my high hopes that she would get the Lakota budget under control were greater in number than those who attend the typical school board meeting. We have a lot of supporters in the No More Tax Effort. If more levies passed in this recent election it is not because people support those schools, it’s that the schools wore out the resistance, which is by design. The message the schools send is that if a levy does not pass, it will be back. So resistance yields to the oppressive tactics of union controlled public schools.
For those levy supporters who think I’m some lone wolf who simply doesn’t want to pay taxes because I can’t afford it, keep indulging in that fantasy as you stay in your little circles of pro levy supporters thinking that you are good because you don’t know how to say NO. No Lakota Levy as an organization and our supporters are deep, and active, as you can see in my public presentations over education. In my presentations I defended Mantia hoping that she would do as those of us in No Lakota Levy do routinely, and that is make hard decisions to balance our budgets. And I feel like she made me look bad for giving her the benefit of the doubt. In fact, every core member of No Lakota Levy has had to work with budgets in the millions of dollars, had to fire, hire or ask employees for wage freezes or reductions, and have had to spend many sleepless nights rolling around over those decisions. That is why we have no sympathy for Superintendent Mantia. She has turned out to be not what she sold to the community, and we are disappointed—me specifically. Residents from Pickerington warned me how Mantia was, and they were right.
I know the tricks of school superintendents. I know what they learn in Levy University in Columbus because I’ve read the same books and material they have. I got this material from my friends who are current school board members and have attended this class. My information also comes from former school board members who want to blow the whistle on the corruption that goes on in public education. The tricks are standard for every school and are designed by the Ohio School Board Association and the Ohio Education Association to extort from the public using Saul Alinsky’s methods of consensus, money if communities refuse to increase taxes on themselves. Those methods include, cutting busing to increase the burden on parents and force them to pass a levy. If that doesn’t work, schools take away liberal arts electives. If that doesn’t work they make sports pay-for-play. And if that doesn’t work they lay-off teachers at the bottom of the seniority ladder to scare parents into a declining school district and plummeting property values. These methods are used in every single school in the entire state of Ohio because they all share a connection to the OSBA in Columbus.
Another OSBA strategy is to form good relationships with realtors in a community so that home sales will be directly connected to school levy support. That’s why Joan Powell, former president of the Lakota School Board and current board member is so involved at Lakota—her full time job is that of a realtor. And one of Lakota’s biggest pro levy supporters is another realtor, Pam Perrino. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW HER INVOLVEMENT AGAINST MY GROUP. This is all by design at the Ohio School Board Association (OSBA). It’s a system designed to stack the schools and labor unions against the community. Both of those women will tell you they do what they do because it’s in their heart to do so, but they were brought into the circle of power because of their status as realtors. They may not be aware of it because they are only looking at their small piece of the pie, but they are part of the overall strategy, and they play their roles in levy advancement as expected.
And this is the reason for the disappointment in Superintendent Mantia. No Lakota Levy thought that Mantia should have proposed a wage reduction to the school employees in order to sustain the district far into the future. That way everything the public expects from the school could have still been maintained, busing, sports, electives and so on. But Mantia chose to preserve the system designed by the OSBA and imposed hardship on the residents just as the OSBA teaches at Levy University. In fact, she followed the text-book of levy passage taught at Levy University word for word. And this is simply unacceptable.
So this is the reason for the anger. We are not a stupid group of people at No Lakota Levy. In fact, we’ve seen it all, done it all, and could perform many of the decisions we are asking Mantia to make in our sleep without breaking a sweat. The solutions are so obvious and so easy that it doesn’t even require thought. But Superintendent Mantia is taking up a quarter million dollars in compensation from the district’s tax payers and she has not done the job we expected. She instead stood up for the teachers union that she started in as a teacher herself, and she knows as a double-dipper that she would never receive such a high salary with such poor performance in any other occupation but school superintendent. She is standing up for the system that has made her wealthy by employing these extortion measures taken straight out of the OSBA Levy University Class given every November the week after elections in Columbus, Ohio.
So I’m putting up the contract for Superintendent Mantia here for the residents of Ohio to see, so they can see what a juicy deal she has—a deal she would get no place else in any field of work. If Superintendent Mantia were in the private sector she would not stay employed for a single week making the level of income she currently is. I wouldn’t mind paying for a token superintendent job if it wasn’t filled with so many perks and loaded as if she were a celebrity on a Hollywood film; it deserves close scrutiny from a public that must fund her lifestyle for performance that is lackluster in only 6 months of employment. I would encourage you dear reader to watch these videos completely, especially the radio broadcast, and read this contract. If you are interested in understanding the scoop of the problem, you can at least do that much. I’m making it easy for you.




Use the tools I’ve placed before you! This is a very serious problem that is much larger than just passing a tax increase or not.
This will determine the kind of world we chose to live in for the foreseeable future.
Now, to be fair, I had several friends who attended the school board meeting on Thursday, March 9th, and below is the report from one of them to me from that event, which does involve Superintendent Mantia. Her response is one that I believe a person of her caliber should be able to handle over the position of a lawyer, because lawyers are in the pocket of the unions. With the kind of contract Mantia has, I expect her to be smarter than the lawyers. They make a lot less than she does. But here is the final word as spoken from her mouth to my friend.
At 10:50 I stood and asked why they DIDN’T DO ANY CUTTING ANYWHERE and simply lowered salaries and benefits until they were BELOW the budget?
After the four of us who stayed to ask questions at the close of the evening were finished, Karen Mantia answered my suggestion.
She took about 15 minutes and said that solution had been considered, but she was warned by the lawyers that it was illegal and therefore OFF the table.
They are going to chop the Hell out of the Lakota School District to meet the budget.
SIMPLY lowering salaries is OFF THE TABLE, when the alternate is to virtually destroy the school system in Lakota?Ms. Mantia said she and the Board DID NOT HAVE THE POWER to lower salaries and benefits.
She said WE had that power, referring to the NO Lakota Levy Group.
Rich Hoffman
http://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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