© Ron Denton for aRdent Voice, 2011. | Permalink |

© Ron Denton for aRdent Voice, 2010. | Permalink |

In fairness, I have to admit that I do not pretend to know what is in anyone’s  mind. That said,  I just cannot see how someone who says they want to do all this community enrichment would see the county assessor’s office as the place to do it. On the other hand, someone who is a well connected lobbyist and has a land developer in the family could see lots of opportunity at the assessor’s office. It’s not like she needs the income from a county job. Today’s post at BatesLine brings up some other issues as well.

What I do know is that Ken Yazel, as a veteran Marine Corps officer, is a graduate of one of the premier management schools in this country. As a Mustang officer, Ken rose through the enlisted ranks before becoming a commissioned officer. If you can lead Marines both as an NCO and as an Officer, you can manage about anything else.

Ken also has impressive schooling in finance, accounting and auditing. The problem may be that he is just a little too fair and honest for some who want to run Tulsa County as their fiefdom.

At a time when both public and private budgets are stretched thin, the last thing we need for a county assessor is a lobbyist with lots of “special friends and clients” and no apparent background or knowledge that would remotely qualify her for the job.

If fairness and integrity matter to you, keep Ken Yazel as the Tulsa County Assessor.

© Ron Denton for aRdent Voice, 2010. | Permalink |

1. Obama destroyed the Clinton Political Machine, driving a stake through the heart of Hillary’s presidential aspirations – something no Republican was ever able to do.

2. Obama ended the Kennedy Dynasty – no more Kennedys trolling Washington looking for booze and women wanting rides home.

3. Obama is destroying the Democratic Party before our eyes! Dennis Moore had never lost a race. Evan Bayh had never lost a race. Byron Dorgan had never lost a race. Harry Reid – soon to be GONE! These are just a handful of the Democrats whose political careers Obama has destroyed. By the end of 2010, dozens more will be gone. Just think, in December of 2008 the Democrats were on the rise. In the last two election cycles, they had picked up 14 Senate seats and 52 House seats. The press was touting the death of the Conservative Movement and the Republican Party. However, in just one year, Obama put a stop to all of this and will probably give the House – if not the Senate – back to the Republicans.

4. Obama has completely exposed liberals and progressives for what they are. Sadly, every generation seems to need to relearn the lesson on why they should never actually put liberals in charge. Obama is bringing home the lesson very well:

Liberals tax, borrow and spend.
Liberals won’t bring themselves to protect America .
Liberals want to take over the economy.
Liberals think they know what is best for everyone.
Liberals are not happy until they are running YOUR life.

5. Obama has brought more Americans back to conservatism than anyone since Reagan. In one year, he has rejuvenated the Conservative Movement and brought out to the streets millions of freedom-loving Americans. Name one other time when you saw your friends and neighbors this interested in taking back America !

6. Obama, with his “amazing leadership,” has sparked the greatest period of sales of firearms and ammunition this country has seen. Law- abiding citizens have rallied and have provided a “stimulus” to the sporting goods field while other industries have failed, faded, or moved offshore.

7. In all honesty, one year ago I was more afraid than I have been in my life. Not afraid of the economy, but afraid of the direction our country was going. I thought, Americans have forgotten what this country is all about. My neighbors and friends, even strangers, have proved to me that my lack of confidence in the greatness and wisdom of the American people has been flat wrong.

8. When the American people wake up, no smooth-talking teleprompter reader can fool them! Barack Obama has served to wake up these great Americans!

Again, I want to say: “Thank you, Barack Obama!” After all, this is exactly the kind of hope and change we desperately needed!!

November 2nd is HUGE!!!!

Please encourage others to Vote.

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Now I just hope that if there truly is a power shift, that those who come in remember how they got there and why the others were thrown out.

© Ron Denton for aRdent Voice, 2010. | Permalink |

Also some very insightful reporting on the local aspect of this issue and legal costs and who might be representing these districts, see this afternoon’s post by Michael Bates on Batesline.

If you care about how your tax dollars are spent and misspent and who benefits,  you need to read these through to really understand it’s all about control, not education.

© Ron Denton for aRdent Voice, 2010. | Permalink |

The D.C. system ranks among the highest in teacher pay and per-pupil spending in the nation and is at the absolute bottom in quality.  When we see how much wailing and money the AFT spent to get rid of Mayor Fenty and soon his Education Chancellor Michelle Rhee, it is abundantly clear that the only thing the teachers’ union cares about is protecting their jobs  and to hell with the kids, the parents and everyone else.

The one thing connected to sports that actually does have a direct bearing on education is that you put your best people in the game if you want to win, and put the rest of the folks either on the bench or off the team.  It does not matter how much experience they have, what certifications they have or anything else. Whether it is coaches or players, those that put out 110% and don’t make excuses get the victories and those that whine about funding and process and seniority lose. This is the lesson from sports that we should apply to public education.

Piles of money will not get you a winning team if the main criteria for coaches and players is certifications and seniority, regardless of performance. A union will never produce a winning team because “winning” is not what they are about. Unions are about job protection and grievance process. There was a time when they were also a guarantor of a certain level of skill and expertise going back to the guilds, but that has long been eroded by the almighty gods of process and seniority.

The one true thing from the mailer is where it says, “SQ744 takes control of school funding away from lobbyists and government bureaucrats, and puts it in the hands of local parents, teachers and school boards.” The problem is that none of those local parents teachers and school boards are in Oklahoma.  We may as well hand over our school funding decisions directly to the NEA/AFT. The results would be the same.

A new film by David Guggenheim, not exactly a conservative ideologue, called Waiting for Superman, will hopefully help to further drive a wedge between those who want to worship process and protect jobs and those who actually care about educating the youth of our country, regardless of party or persuasion. There is also a good review of the film by Matthew Shaffer at National Review Online, (Rocking the Boat on Education) who saw it at a screening sponsored by Democrats for School Choice.

Education is the single biggest factor that can liberate young people  from a dysfunctional, troubled or just loveless home into a functional, productive and fulfilling life. I think that is more important than guaranteeing the job security,  grievance process and pensions of so-called “teachers” that will never make the starting lineup.

© Ron Denton for aRdent Voice, 2010. | Permalink |

In the labor-management transaction, there needs to be a deal that both sides can live with and that will neither break the firm nor take unfair advantage of the worker. The problem is that in many cases, the unions have come into play only after a history of abuse by the employer, so neither side is really bargaining without an axe to grind. Once in place, unions frequently continue to push for more and more concessions, regardless of the net effect on the health of the employer and because of the employer’s attitude towards workers, the negotiators cannot really trust or believe each other.

Some of the unions themselves are unwilling to deal fairly and openly with their own employees as detailed in this piece by Deroy Murdock in National Review. Here again, it’s all about a few people not being able to distinguish between being CEO or President and being King.

Clearly there are major abuses on both sides. The “rubber room” where some union teachers spend years whiling away the day at the taxpayer’s expense because it is so complicated and expensive to just discharge them is a current example.  But, for every example of a union procedure or benefit that seems unbelievable to the rest of us, there is a negotiator somewhere that agreed to it for that employer.

In the public sector, those seen as “management” may agree to nearly anything as they have no vested interest in the “business” anyway, since revenues are based on taxation and legislation rather than a free-market. For this reason I have some real problems with unions in the public sector, unless the union contracts are subjected to a public vote by either the people or by their elected representatives. Otherwise it is just one government employee making a deal with other government employees while no one really has the responsibility to look after the public interest.

On the other side, I once worked for a firm that kept changing the bonus criteria every other month because someone in the home office decided they were paying too much out in bonuses. The net result was that it became essentially impossible to meet the bonus requirements and the very things the bonus was set up to encourage disappeared. At the same time, pay rates were frozen and the employee share of the benefits plan shot up. Needless to say, productivity suffered greatly and absenteeism became a problem. Disappointed with that outcome, management went for the stick instead of a better carrot and several workers, myself included, started to investigate union representation. It had become clear that the firm’s priorities had changed from encouraging productivity to controlling labor expense within very tight parameters.

Republicans would have us believe that all unions are evil and that business owners and managers are all fair and honest folks who just want to make an honest profit from their efforts. Democrats would have us believe that every worker, whether in private business or on the government payroll must be protected from the evils of management and owners. Like so many other issues, neither tells the whole story. Neither side wants to tell you that most things are not black and white, because then you might actually start evaluating candidates as individuals instead of by party affiliation. To paraphrase, the fault lies not in our unions or employers, but in ourselves.

© Ron Denton for aRdent Voice, 2010. | Permalink |

These are starting to get bothersome as I pay many of my bills online. The thing now is to have the default button when you login or complete the transaction to enable paperless billing because they know that many of us will just continue to hit the highlighted button or return key.

There have always been some businesses that operate right on the ragged edge of fraud and frequently needed scrutiny by prosecutors and consumer advocates, but it is rapidly becoming the “norm.” Rigging web sites to push people into things that they would not otherwise accept is just the latest trick. I very much prefer the free-enterprise system to anything else that has been tried or proposed — but there is a dark side to it as well, simply because it is run by humans.

© Ron Denton for aRdent Voice, 2010. | Permalink |

The one thing that should be abundantly clear from all of this is that Washington does not control the economy, no matter how much they borrow from abroad to throw at selected industries in the name of spurring economic growth or recovery or whatever.  It doesn’t matter whether the administration is controlled by either party, the whole economic engine of the country is just too big and too complex for the goofballs in D.C. to do anything more that twiddle around the edges and drive the national debt to new heights. The only difference in the two political parties is who they give our tax money to in order to pay back campaign contributions. No amount of government spending whether on missiles and ships or teacher unions and road construction is  going to bring back a middle-class with jobs and futures and realistic hopes of retiring some day.

© Ron Denton for aRdent Voice, 2010. | Permalink |

OK, I’m no fan of BP. Their safety and deferred-maintenance record has not been very good in North America in the last decade or so and the continuing mess in the Gulf of Mexico is just the largest and latest.

The White House and the Dems on the Hill are behaving predictably – “Something must be done!” – even if it has little or no effect on the real problem. Not ones to let an opportunity pass, they now propose to have BP escrow billions of dollars in funds and then set up a “third party” to administer the claims on these funds.

I can only imagine how this “claim processor” will be constituted. First we’ll need a big name chief for the Wesley Mouch role, and a blue-ribbon panel of former office-holders, technical experts, legal experts, financial experts, then lots of administrative paper-pushers to build and monitor “process.” This “FreddieSpill” will almost certainly set new records for overhead eating up the available funds.

No doubt Congress will pass some special enabling legislation for FreddieSpill that puts it beyond the normal legal-judicial process so no one will be able to appeal or contest the rulings of this “third party.”

Once an entity like this is created, it will never die, so this will become the de facto liability oversight agency for the oil and gas industry in the U.S. Since this agency will be outside the normal legal process, its determinations will be impossible to predict since it is essentially a political animal, thereby dramatically cranking up the risk for US exploration and production at the very time we desperately need to find and produce energy here.

So, the net result will be lots of jobs for friends of those in the administration, a rapid whittling away of the escrow funds, arbitrary and capricious disbursement decisions that cannot be appealed in courts and a frightening risk variable on the domestic oil and gas industry.

Wow, do these people know how to make lemonade or what?

© Ron Denton for aRdent Voice, 2010. | Permalink |