To kick off the new week, we'll start off by briefly highlighting several letters appearing in yesterday's Standard-Examiner. Each relates to issues fundamental to next week's 2007 municipal election:
First, Lynette Belka identifies "mistrust" as an overriding issue regarding the candidacies of Boss Godfrey, Johnson, Petersen and Eccles. As Ms. Belka aptly notes, both Peterson and Eccles are already demonstrating a troubling pattern of "duplicity" regarding their earlier endorsements of Boss Godfrey's now "defunct" Chris Peterson Landgrab proposal. Imagine people, four more years of governance under the crafty and dodgy "pod people".
Next, we'll highlight yesterday's Dirk Youngberg letter, in which the esteemed former firefighter zeros in on an issue that's cropped up twice in candidate forums during the past two weeks. Specifically, Boss Godfrey continues to argue that the civil service commission is an obstacle to the hiring of more police officers. This is of course an issue that's been previously discussed in this forum; and we've expressed our own differences of opinion regarding Godfrey's true motivations. We strongly urge our readers to check out Mr. Youngberg's letter, in which he sets forth the truth about this issue, briefly and concisely.
Today's Ace Reporter Schwebke front page story deals with another issue which has plagued Emerald City for the entirety of Boss Godfrey's administration: culinary water that has the taste and smell of a poorly maintained fish tank. Ace Reporter Schwebke reports that the city council continues its initiative to address this problem. Infrastructure problems like water and sewer are of course not "cool and sexy" like everything Boss Godfrey prefers to address, however. Thus the council pursues this project without dear leader's cooperation. And as the situation develops, and the taxpayers of Ogden start bracing themselves for the inevitable water rate increase, we hope that more than a few of the lumpencitizens will ponder the wisdom of the "visionary" Boss Godfrey, who diverted Business Depot Ogden lease revenue (which had been earlier earmarked for water and sewer repair and improvement,) to his doomed-to-failure Penny Arcade/Bowling Alley Project.
Finally we turn to this morning's Victoria Johnson story, in which this relatively new face on the Std-Ex staff delivers a remarkably robust and fact-filled examination of "Gunplay in Ogden."
Gunplay is on the upswing in Ogden, if you believe the reported statistics. Of course adminstration spokemen assure us you can't actually rely on the statistics, inasmuch as they've been "tweaked," and are admitted by Chief Greiner to be bogus. For example, if shots are fired by a gang-banger with a revolver, the report will be considered unsubstantiated, because no spent cartridges can be found. And then there's this... as Ms. Johnson reports, victims who have actually been shot... won't find their reports among the "shots fired" category:
However, a shooting where someone is hit will usually be classified by dispatch workers as an assault or something else, potentially taking the most serious shootings out of the “shots fired” pool, meaning the number is actually higher than that given by police.Hooboy. Read the article. We swear we did not make this up.
Such was the case in September, when Jesus Aparicio, 22, was shot and killed in the parking lot of the Phillips Kicks 66 at 30th Street and Washington Boulevard. The report was classified in the dispatch center as “call type not found,” instead of a “shots fired” call.
For more analysis on this latter story, be sure to read Gentle Curmudgeon's expanded comments, which we've uploaded to one of our archive pages.
You're on, gentle readers. If you need to blow out the weekend cobwebs, don't hesitate to do it here.
25 comments:
Don't we have some great writers? Lynnette Belka's letter is right on...and Dirk's, and Ms Johnson is a gem.
As Curm stated.."now that she's committed journalism"...(hope she isn't fired or relegated to the obits!)
One has to wonder how much mischief Griener will commit on the Senate floor as he does the mayor's bidding and bullies himself around the other legislators as he wears his two hats and a badge and a gun!
Some of my acquaintance are wondering if Greiner will attempt to have them fired from their jobs if they speak out too profusely.
The long arm of the law, eh?
BTW, speaking with said acquaintance, we both had the same thot: wonder what the caped crusader paid the poor bicycle thief to break into Godfrey's shed to purloin the bike? Understand the poor kid isn't too well endowed in the smart's dept, and a few bucks, maybe some beer, and the hapless kid is starring in one of Matt's melodramas.
Just when Matt and Greiner are shouting that our crime stats are lower than anywhere on earth, one would think the little hero would not want any more crime stories popping up in the papers just before the election!
As I watch the vote for me dvd that boy mayor has put out, he states that he did not say the civil service makes it hard for them to attract qualified police officers. Last year he said that and this year he said it, his A-Team management staff has also said it. Boy Mayor Godfrey, if you did not say this, then what is your movtitation for get rid of the civil service??? I dont think I should ask that question, I dont want him to have to tell the TRUTH.
Interesting article on public education over on Yahoo News [ Link here.] From the article:
WASHINGTON - It's a nickname no principal could be proud of: "Dropout Factory," a high school where no more than 60 percent of the students who start as freshmen make it to their senior year. That description fits more than one in 10 high schools across America....
Utah, which has low poverty rates and fewer minorities than most states, is the only state without a dropout factory. Florida and South Carolina have the highest percentages.
So, the Republican-controlled state legislature of the only state in the nation whose public school system has not a single "dropout academy" wants to "fix" the problem by shifting millions upon millions of tax dollars out of the public schools into the hands of private school operators instead.
This is what Utah Republicans apparently call "leadership." Happily, most Americans, and even most Utahans according to the polls, call it nonsense.
Myth: Spending $40 million on the Salomon Center and millions more to pay companies to move to Ogden will increase the tax base.
Reality: Much needed money needed for water improvements and other legitimate city functions is now spent and gone. A huge tax increase will be needed to pay for needed improvements. Most of our taxes went way up this year already.
Godfrey's myth-maker police chief Greiner says, regarding all the gunfire in Ogden: “I don’t know that that means anything,” he said. “There’s no way to really compare because we don’t know what their criteria is.” He has also said that crime statistics are all fabricated and can't be trusted.
Reality: Crime in Ogden, especially violent crime, is skyrocketing.
The list can go on almost without end, but these are two blatant cases.
Watch for a continuing stream of myths from Mayor Godfrey as the election nears.
Also note that if Godfrey and his henchmen are elected, Ogden will be a true dictatorship. No public opinion will mean anything, because Godfrey will have four rubber stamps on the council. He will be able to do anything.
Also note that based on past and present comments, the male city council candidates are not honest at all.
Take note, voters. They said Hitler was a great and visionary leader too, in the beginning. Please don't make Ogden a dictatorship by electing the male candidates.
It's time to fix our problems, not just borrow and spend money in continuing to make Ogden into Godfrey's bankrupt, ego-driven sanatorium.
On the water story, and Ogden's water and sewage problems: this is something both the Mayor and the Council will have to share blame on, I think. Ogden's water problems have been evident for a long time now, the result of this administration and previous administrations and several Council's over time postponing dealing with them in order to say they hadn't raise taxes or rates. The result was inevitable, just as it was when the school board followed the same policy for years, postponing building news schools and delaying maintenance until the problems reached huge, and very expensive to fix, proportions.
The result: emergency driven measures to fix the problems all at once which inevitably involve a huge jump in rates or taxes [after years of minor and wholly insufficient rises or no rises at all.]
Part of this can be blamed on the electorate, a portion of which tends to scream "no!" at any and all tax or rate increases. That's why at the moment we are putting about 200 billion dollars a year on the national credit card to fight the war in Iraq --- creating debt that is being bought up in huge amounts by Red China. But it's also the responsibility of politicians... largely on the matter of taxes, but not exclusively, Republican ones, who continue to tell the American public they can have everything they want, without paying for it.
Sadly, Ogden's leadership in this regard has not been much better over time. Take Mr. Godfrey [please, somebody, take Mr. Godfrey! --- My apologies to Henny Youngman.]who has been in office for seven years, who presumably was well aware of the state of Ogden's water and sewage maintenance problems when he came into office, or shortly thereafter, and who has done damn all over seven years to address the problem. Belatedly, it was the City Council that this year, finally began to address the problems, determine their scope, and look for the least onerous to the ratepayers way to pay for them. Only to have the Mayor oppose the Council's actions and tell them they were wasting money. Only very recently has Mr. Godfrey begun to talk about the water problems at all, and then only as an election loomed.
To paraphrase an old BG's song: "Greiner started a joke that started the whole town crying"
It is totally amazing that this bozo and his fearless caped crusading crime fighter boss Godfrey can say the things they do with a perfectly straight faces. Talk about insulting the intelligence of the citizens.
The worst case in this last sorry assed story about non-crime in Greiner-land is when he said:
"residents hear loud bangs and assume they are gunshots. “Any loud noise of a kind, they’ll think it’s a shot fired.”
In other words - "the citizens of Ogden are just too stupid to know the difference between gun shots and any loud noise".
I also got a real hoot over this disingenuous bastard's attributing a lot of the non-gunshots to cars backfiring! Now just think about that for a second. When is the last time any one reading this actually heard a car backfiring? Backfiring cars are really pretty much a thing of the past when cars had points in the distributors and timing chains that tended to slip when they got really old. In this modern day of electronic ignitions backfiring cars are extremely rare. It has been at least twenty five years since I have heard a bonafide car backfire!
The bottom line is that crime in Ogden is epidemic and getting worse, and Godfrey and Greiner are just too lame to get a handle on any of it. They are liars and manipulators and incompetent posers.
Just my humble opinion of course.
OB:
You just refuse to understand that violent crime in Ogden is declining so rapidly under Mayor Godfrey's leadership that Chief Greiner had no choice but to roll his new gang unit out months early in order to get a jump on the violence that he and the mayor say isn't happening.
Clear now?
Apologies for this off-topic question. Does anyone have the statistics on the annual Little Brown Jug football game between Ogden and Weber High Schools, back when they were the only two high schools in town and toxic rivals? I know Ogden won about 75% of the games over the years, if not more, even though Weber won it the last time it was played.
I liked Victoria's article too. Reading it, you can see that she's a hard worker. What a relief from Schwebke.
I had the displeasure of talking to Godrey after he added the 20% extra fee to water users he thinks use too much. I asked him if a decrease in the required green landscaping in the city was being considered, he said "maybe next year".
I have to keep my yard green (under threat of fines of $500 a day) and may again be faced with extra fees for using water-welcome to Godfreyland.
Perhaps the SE's new reporter Victoria Johnson will be new version of Cathy McKitrick. Cathy worked for the SE about a year ago and wrote the blockbuster article "Owing Too Much?" that eventually led to Staurt Reid resigning from nominal city employment and taking a lower-visibility paid coaster position at BDO.
Cathy went to the SLTrib shortly thereafter. Hopefully we can expect at least a few good months from Victoria before she moves on.
She really smoked out Greiner. What an incompetent he is. Quoting him, it is clear the problem is that Ogden residents can't tell the difference between gunfire and say, a screen door slamming. And never mind the recent body count. It's just our imagination. But whatever the reason for Ogden becoming a modern day Tombstone AZ, it's not HIS fault, because, as we know, Greiner does go to a lot of CONVENTIONS.
And we need to realize that if the male candidates win, Godfrey will indeed have a working 4/7 majority on the city council. He will have no more difficulty with that council than Saddam Hussein had with his chamber of deputies.
Please people - if you must have Godfrey, give us the girls on the council, or if you must vote the men on the council, then give us VanHooser. A dicatorship should scare even the Geigers. Let's not destroy democracy in Ogden - one man rule with a rubber stamping city council will be the fear and horror of us all.
Our very own midget mayor has finally brought us national fame. Well maybe not national, but at least state wide.
Yes folks the City Weekly, in their current addition's "The Ocho", lists the least popular Halloween attractions this season. Coming in near the top at number 3 is Ogden's very own "Name that scary smell Gondola ride".
Don't it just make you proud as punch! Why the little feller will be struttin around town all month with his puny little pigeon chest all puffed out!
I know for a fact that Neil Hansen gave Victoria some of the story of the shootings, but for some reason none of that was in the story. They also have a picture of the dots on the map that Hansen has. So why did the editors take that out of the story? He also said that Victoria is a pleasure to talk to and quiet a nice young person with some real thirst for the truth.
Curm,
You have severely dated yourself and your world vision when you refer to "Red China". I haven't seen that in print for some time. A throwback to the red scare days of Nixon and Reagan. Most refer to it now as the PRC. It's, of course, still communist and runs roughshod over it's peoples civil rights but we are fast catching up in those parameters.
Tec:
Having been trained in stoney hearted copy editing years ago by someone who had engraved on her heart, and over her desk George Orwell's advice to writers: "If you can cut out a word, cut it out!", I kind of prefer "Red China" over People's Republic of China because it's shorter, it's accurate [as you noted] and because China is a long way from being a republic in any meaningful sense of that word.
I could have gone with "Chicoms".... but that was just too Westbrook Pegler for me.
Danny,
"Give us the girls on the council"? Excuse me, I think they are totally grown-up and deserve to be referred to as women.
Otherwise, good post.
More on education:
Interesting story on the McClatchy news website:
WASHINGTON — For the first time in more than 40 years, the majority of children in public schools in the South are poor, according to a report released Tuesday....
Twenty years ago, Mississippi was the only state in the country with such a high percentage of poor public school students [and in 2000, when G. Bush became president, only four states had majority poor school populations]....
Also hitting the South disproportionately were federal cutbacks in anti-poverty programs, the region's higher rates of underemployment and the increased birthrates of Hispanic and African American children — who are statistically more likely than their white peers to be born into poverty.
Now, a majority of public school students are considered low income in a total of 13 states, including 11 in the South....
According to the report, public schools in the West may face similar problems in the next five to seven years. Already 51 percent of public school children in California and 62 percent of those in New Mexico are considered low income.... [In Utah, it's 34%.]
And naturally, as more and more of its people sink into poverty, the South returns thumping Republican majorities in national elections. It must be all those family values guys on the Republican ticket, like Senator Vitter of Louisiana.... Of course, being a New Deal Liberal Democrat, I would have thought providing living wages to working people so their children could eat decently, and get medical care, and so not be disadvantaged when they to to public schools are "family values" as well. Ah, well....
The McClatchy news story is well worth reading. It can be found here.
I wonder what would lead greiner to assume that any time some hears a load noise, it could be a gunshot? Wouldn't be because of the nightly gunfire in Ogden would it? By is own numbers, almost 500 in one year, how many days are there in a year? Welcome to the wild west, high adventure in every trip to the corner store.
Curm:
I guess I'm just old-fashioned (I mean really old-fashioned, like early 19th century) but I had always thought that public education was one of the great inventions of the Founding Fathers and their successors.
The idea of a commonweal, the sort of resource that is a benefit to the entire society, seems to be lost on the current generation of NeoCons with their Social Darwinian ethos.
I think public schools should be free, available to all, and effective at providing both a basic education and a social cohesion that cannot be created any other way.
I can see that the current system is not working, and I wish I thought vouchers were the solution. But I don't.
Jim:
You wrote: I guess I'm just old-fashioned (I mean really old-fashioned, like early 19th century) but I had always thought that public education was one of the great inventions of the Founding Fathers and their successors.
Couldn't agree more that a free, sound public education was one of the things that created and maintained a middle class America which emerged out of and following WWII. [We were not mostly middle class until then.] And public education was definitely the way up for the children and grand children of immigrants. But, sadly, the public education system was not the gift of the Founding Fathers. Most states on July 5, 1776 did not have public education systems. Many of the southern states didn't have them until Reconstruction --- the planters who ran things before then were damned well not going to tax themselves to educate the children of piney woods poor whites. [Educating blacks was illegal widely across the south.]
One of the most disturbing things about the Republican ascendancy of the past seven years is the loss of that sense of commonweal. It's been replaced by a devil-take-the-hindmost to-hell-with-you-jack-I'm-all-right range of welfare for the wealthy programs, and the concomitant underfunding of programs for the lower middle classes and the poor. A good measure of how mean spirited and downright foolish [in the long run] that is came a few years ago when Republicans in the Texas legislature pushed for a law to prevent children who could not prove their parents were citizens from entering Texas schools. So, a seven year old shows up at a Texas school to learn to read, and they want to tell him "no, kid, you can't come in. Hang out on the streets instead, because your parents are criminals." In my country.
And Utah, of course, spends less money on public schools per pupil than, I think, any other state in the nation. Or did until recently. Even less than Mississippi, which is usually taken as marking the rock bottom of public education systems in the US.
No, the current system is not working as well as it should. But it's not as bad as the doomsayers say it is either. And if we could just sink all the damn standardized testing that now determines not only what, but how, our teachers are to teach, we'd be better off. I've talked to teachers now in several states [I work with a family literacy program for the NEH and ALA around the country], experienced ones, who are getting out now because "they won't let me teach." They now have to follow these hellishly expensive packaged learning programs... to the letter, day by day. I was on an elementary school text review committee once, and a major publisher sent a rep to sell us on their new "reading program" for the elementary grades. He touted it as "teacher proof," assuring us that no matter how ill-educated or bad a teacher was, if she followed the program, day by day... what to say, what to ask, what to put on the board, etc.... she couldn't screw it up. [No, we didn't recommend buying the program.] Such decisions, however, are now made statewide in most states, and the programs [in reading, math, science] imposed from above.
When you treat teachers as barely above morons, and lock them into rigid pre-programed materials, you often make it impossible for the good ones to teach well, and from what I can see, the claim that the programs are "teacher proof" are bogus anyway. NCLB just took what was already undermining the best teachers in states and took it national.
I'm a product of the public school system of Brooklyn, NY and Farmingdale, New York [a bedroom suburb of the city]. I got a good educational grounding there. Our kids today deserve no less. But too often they are getting less. And as you note, shunting millions upon millions out of the public schools so the public taxes will pay for Brother Jehosephat to explain to his charges in the Holy Roller Christian Academy that three plus two makes five because "God wills it so," is NOT the way to make things better. [By the way, no, I am not making up that explanation of why three and two make five.]
I had a colleague in another state who got fed up with public education, pulled his kid, and enrolled him, in HS, in a Christian Academy private school, figuring it'd be worth it for the "better education" he would get. First day, the kid comes home, his father asked him about his classes, one of which was Chemistry. Dad asked who the teacher was. His son said "Mr. Smith. He said he was a banker until a few months ago, when God called him to teach chemistry." The kid was back in the public high school the next day.
Siphoning multi millions out of public schools to pay for private tuitions is a very bad idea. Naturally, the Utah Repbublican Wingnut Troika [Curtis, Bramble & Buttars] think it's just grand.
It's time for a change. Godfrey won't get my vote!
Seems to me like this voucher hoodah is all about Hobin Rood. Sort of the opposite of Robin Hood in that the rich NeoCon Republican power brokers are attempting to steal from the poor and give to the rich. It's all about getting the tax payers to pony up more taxes to pay for rich folks kids to go to private schools. This is of course on top of the huge property tax bill we get hit with to fund public schools in order to educate the multitudinous product of the breeders in our midst. It appears that the rich breeders don't want their litters going to public school with those of the poor breeders!
viktor:
Well, I wouldn't disparage families with chidren as "breeders," but the rest of your post is right on the money. The Republican NeoCons running the joint these days favor welfare programs only for the rich and corporations. Federal give-aways [at taxpayer expence] for agribusiness [subsidized water for example and various other farm subsidies that go overwhelmingly to agribusiness like Archer Daniels Midland, and not the iconic "family farmer" the NeoCons like to say they have closest to heart] come to hundreds of millions a year. And maybe more. The Voucher plan, for all of the crocodile tears the Wingnut Troika are shedding for the poor children of Utah in their ads, is primarily a welfare program for the upper middle classes and the wealthy, designed so that all of us will pick up part of the tab to send their children to private schools. From the polls, their little game of three-card monte with the public's money seems not to be working this time. Keeping my fingers crossed....
I wonder if the private schools will turn out better educated kids when all is said and done? Kids with self discipline, civility, respect for self and others?
Kids who can actually read and comprehend....how about that?
Jest Wonderin:
That question has been asked over and over, in state after state, and study after study has been done, and the results everywhere are that private school students do not do better, as a group, or worse, than public school students on standardized tests or other objective measures of educational performance. No statistically significant difference at all.
Part of the reason is that private schools include not only the Choates and Exeters and Emma Willards that charge $30K a year plus, but also the most degraded segregation academy in backwoods Mississippi and the most extreme bible literalist school that [you should excuse the expression] "teaches" that the sun goes around the earth, not the earth around the sun, because the bible says the "sun stood still" to aid God's chosen in a battle once.
Similarly, public schools' overall rankings include special education students and classes, and marginal public schools in neglected ghettos, as well as the premier public schools that exist in each state and top ranked schools in wealthy suburban districts.
And it all balances out so that private school students perform, overall, no differently than public school students. So the argument that private schools, as a group, provide better educations than public schools, as a group, do is not sustainable on the evidence. However much the Utah Republican Wingnut Troika [Bramble, Curtis and Buttars] want to pretend otherwise.
And considering that the public schools cannot cherry pick their students as many private schools can and do, but must take whoever walks in the door... including say Somali refugee children who cannot read in their own language, but will be tested on a variety of subjects on tests written in English which they neither read nor speak, and children who came into the world as "crack babies" and ... well you get the idea... I'd say the public schools ranking even with the private ones overall constitutes evidence of the superiority of the public system, myself.
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