Barre for board
This week's Urban Tulsa Weekly column is about the race for a seat on the Tulsa school board. Incumbent Gary Percefull, a PR consultant, is being challenged by Brenda Barre, a retired teacher with nearly 30 years of service at Tulsa's Booker T. Washington High School. The election is next Tuesday, and every voter in Tulsa school board district 1 should make plans to turnout and vote for Brenda Barre.
Blogger Jeff Shaw adds his own testimonial as a comment on the column:
Ms. Barre would make an excellent school board member. I'm confessing, she was my homeroom teacher at BTW, so I am a bit biased. She was a tough as nails educator with a soft heart for what's best for the kids. Since she taught at BTW, she knows all about excellence, which is what TPS needs; not a pack of legal eagles.
(By the way, Jeff's got a lot of new and interesting items on his blog, including an update on the proposed "East End" development. Be sure to click that link. And here's his blog entry endorsing Barre.)
Also in this week's edition, a cover story about Clifton Taulbert, author of Once upon a Time When We Were Colored, The Last Train North, and Eight Habits of the Heart. He'll be speaking on those eight habits this coming Tuesday at Holy Family Cathedral School, 8th and Boulder downtown.
There's some in depth local news coverage as well: A story on the management mess at Gilcrease Museum, interim City Attorney Deirdre Dexter (also cleaning up a mess in that office), and Senator Jim Inhofe and his stance on global warming.
Interesting point from the story about Dexter:
While Dexter was asked to serve as the interim city attorney for up to six months, she's currently in the middle of a process that city officials hope will make the legal department more effective for the people they represent. The first step in the search process for a new city attorney is to have all city department chiefs and city councilmen participate in a client survey."We want to know how they think the city attorney's office is doing, what can be done better and their ideas to fix problems," Dexter said. "We also want to be sure that our clients, who are the council and any city department, understand their relationship with the city attorney's office."
Some of the surveys, which were due back in Dexter's office last Friday, have shown a disconnect between the legal department and other city offices, she said.
"We've received good information that confirms some areas where we can better serve our clients," she said. "This survey information will also be helpful for whoever is hired to fill this position and it allows me to take some steps that would make their transition even easier."
It's seemed to me that the City Attorney's office long ago forgot who its client was, so I'm encouraged that this process is underway. (There are some very good individual attorneys in that office, I hasten to add, but I don't want to shorten their careers by praising them.) I was surprised when Mayor Taylor named Deirdre Dexter to this position, but she's an excellent choice.
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My litmus test for election of a School Board Member is simple:
I do NOT vote for the candidate with the most yard signs, paid advertisements, mass media buys or direct mail.
Simple reason:
That candidate is in all likelihood being fronted by either the militant teachers union, and/or by the favored contractors (Flintco appears to be at the nexus of the school construction cartel), favored vendors, favored education consultants, and favored suppliers that feed off of our school system budgets.
It's one big MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY of Favors-Trading, i.e. electing their "boy" to dole out the Tax-Gravy to the Favored-Few.
And, the taxpayers pay the toll for hauling this burdensome freight.
That's why they arranged for the local School Boards to have ONE election EVERY YEAR, so they can marshall their forces and funds to make sure that their one candidate gets elected/re-elected annually. Then, they repeat the process the next year.
They simply add the election cost to their bid-rigged, Good-Old-Boy contracts.
That's the way that school board business has been done here for a long, long time.
The essay on Inhofe disappoints greatly. It leaves too much out.
How is it not common knowledge that the phrase "global warming" nearly always involves a hidden assertion? No, I do not mean "It's actually happening". Instead, I mean "People have caused it". Any HONEST essay on the topic should clearly, explicitly specify the distinction between warming and its causes. Any discussion which does not make that distinction I dismiss as either technically unaware or espousing an unstated agenda or as both.
Perhaps warming has occured. But if so, here are relevant facts. 1) We're talking about 1 degree F (5/9 degree C) over the course of the 20th C. 2) The hottest year? 1936, before, uh, the majority of the so called green house emissions. 3) Most of that 1 degree occured before 1940. 4) Historically, increases in atmospheric CO2 preceeded global cooling, not warming.
2,3,and 4 ought give pause to the idea people provided the major cause of warming. In FACT, there is another culprit: the Sun. Here are more relevant facts. 5) There exists a one to one correspondence between global temperature and sunspot activity cycles. More activity (as has been the case over parts of the 20th C), more warming. 6) There is also another one to one correspondence connected to the sun, namely the earth's spin and orbit include precession and nutation. Tho technical terms and perhaps harder to visualize than sunspots, think of their combined effect as long period cyclic either moving the earth slightly in its distance from the sun or slightly changing the earth's angle with respect to the sun. These changes also change how much solar energy gets stored on the earth or in its atmosphere. In short, it has been both hotter and colder on the earth, and that in even the limited span of human history.
Some other facts. Pollution does exist and both can and does cause harms to people. Dealing with it is not free, but there are benefits to lessening pollution. (I grew up in the L.A. basin and know this experiencially as well as technically.) Places where people have most successfully responded to pollution are, well, places where people can practice free enterprise. Newspaper knowledge discussion about pollution assumes the contrary. One hint of that assumption: such discussions do not openly and honestly wrestle with either the cost v benefit struggle nor with the approaching reality of China and India each soon becoming greater polluters than the rest of the world combined.
The campaign ethics filings for this campaign should be available. Maybe we could get Michael to post them so voters who cast their ballot based on their campaign funding sources like yourself can make an informed decision.