Author Archives: Curtiswselby
They say not to write a blog from a tired space, but I suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, so frankly, everything I do is from a tired space. Likely I'm not doing the greatest job of search engine optimization. But I know there are others like me. Passionate about life.
Two Ways We Have Become Like Antebellum US
The New York Historical Society—Getty Images
I took a long time on the Civil War Post. Then my girlfriend broke up with me, and I haven’t gotten my life squared away yet, but I thought I’d come back to this topic, and see if I can still follow the thread of my own thought. This is the long but interrupted post I made on the topic if you need a refresher: https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/3581
The remaining two similarities of these times with Antebellum times.
- 1) A controversial election is polarizing two different sections of the U.S.
- 2) At least one side, and possibly both, sides of the conflict feels the other is attempting to undermine their very way of life, destroy their livelihood, and subjugate them to a state little better than slavery.
Let’s dig in.
The Controversy of the 2020 Election is Similar to the Division Over the Election of Lincoln.
I’ve written a bit about Lincoln, the mythic status he attained, and how in recent times he has become a source of contention and controversy.
https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/718
There I simply wrote about the controversy of our times. Now I will write about the election of 1860.
The best source I have found on the topic so far has been the book Team of Rivals. This book was in part the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s film about Lincoln.
Modern talking heads often talk as if these were the most polarized times of all, but I beg to differ. I think the Civil War was the time when we were most divided. We could not find a peaceful dialogue about slavery, and that, among other causes, led to actual bloodshed, the bloodiest war for America in her history. The book details the various people who formed the Republican party in response to the terrible injustice of the time. The least of them were men of such greatness, I can only think of one or two politicians today who would even be worthy of changing their chamber pots. Every last one of them sought an eventual end to slavery, but not at the expense of ending the Union. In the short term, they failed. I’ll leave some links here as sources, and I will also be borrowing heavily from Team of Rivals, Carl Sandburg’s Storm Over the Land, and maybe some of Shelby Foote’s iconic narrative history of the Civil War.
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/election-of-1860
https://www.britannica.com/event/United-States-presidential-election-of-1860
https://millercenter.org/president/lincoln/campaigns-and-elections
According to Team of Rivals, several factors contributed in the 1850s to set up this perfect storm. First you had a society that allowed for upward mobility for people of excellence. Most (but not all) of the leaders in the early Republican party had grown up poor, or at most what might be considered middle class. Lincoln was the poorest of the Team, but he was by no means unique in setting his talents on upward political mobility. Second, these upwardly mobile citizens awakened to the truth that slavery was wrong. Third, the North outpaced the South in both economic and population growth, which threatened the South, which was used to being on an equal footing with the North. In consequence, the South became increasingly upset that their power base was eroding. Several compromises had kept the Union together, but at last those compromises were broken in an effort to placate the South. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was an essential negative inspiration for Lincoln himself.
When Lincoln heard the news, “he sat on the edge of his bed and discussed the political situation far into the night.” He could no longer trust that the status quo would eventually, naturally, lead slavery to die a peaceful death. Lincoln became a believer that our nation had to either be all slave states, or all free. Like the parable said, a lukewarm nation would be “spewed out of God’s mouth.”
From this point, Lincoln was determined. He had before been happy to settle back into anonymity and live a life of mediocrity as a circuit lawyer. Now he spent all of his free time in the State Library, studying history and law to seek the arguments he needed to persuade his fellows that slavery was an abomination that needed to be destroyed. Peacefully if at all possible, but destroyed nevertheless.
He began debating at state and county fares with the Democratic candidate for the Senate, Stephen Douglas. The Whig party was largely spent, since that party could never really make up its mind about slavery. Frankly, the Democratic Party never did either till after the Civil War, but they had other principles to unite them and so have continued into our time. Lincoln was the de facto independent candidate (the Republican Party did not yet exist). In an age without internet or TV, he rose swiftly from being a has been and also ran, to being second only to Stephen Douglas in people’s estimation to be the next Senator of Illinois. Frankly, he ran a brilliant campaign, and Team of Rivals paints a picture of a man who almost wins, but is deprived of victory by the shadowy back room deals that all too often plague politics.
According to Millercenter.org “After the historic debates with Lincoln, Stephen Douglas found himself vilified by Southern Democrats. He tried unsuccessfully to argue that his middle way would enable the nation to pass over the momentary issue of slavery in the territories and thus preserve the Union. But Southern radicals would have none of it. When the Democratic convention met in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 23, both Northern and Southern delegates were ready for a showdown. The traditional rule that a two-thirds majority was required for a candidate to win a nomination enabled Southern Democrats to veto the nomination if they voted as a bloc. The first test came when the Southern delegates insisted on a plank favoring a federal slave code for the territories. Douglas, knowing that he would lose every Northern state if he agreed, refused to endorse the plank. When the delegates defeated the plank by a small majority, fifty Southern delegates, led by Alabama “fire-eater” William L. Yancey, walked out of the convention. Even with these radicals gone, Douglas could not win a two-thirds majority. Neither could anyone else and after fifty-seven ballots, the convention adjourned to meet in Baltimore in six weeks to try again.
“When the badly shattered Democratic Party reconvened in June, there was no hope for unity. A raucous floor fight broke out over which delegates from the Charleston convention should be recognized. When the Douglas forces finally established dominance in this matter, the Southern delegates pushed the slave code plank once again. For a second time, the Douglas forces beat it back and managed to nominate Douglas on a second ballot over John C. Breckinridge, the incumbent vice president…The party platform excluded reference to a slave code in the territories and supported the power of federal authority over the territories…
“Furious Southern delegates, including many who had boycotted the convention, then reconvened at Maryland Institute Hall to nominate John C. Breckinridge as the candidate of the Southern Democratic Party for the presidency….The party platform supported a federal slave code in the territories, the acquisition of Cuba, and the construction of a railroad to the Pacific Ocean.”
The long and the short of it is, the dark horse candidate Lincoln came from behind, helped build the nascent Republican Party on an anti-slavery platform, secured the nomination for Presidential candidate, and won the Presidency, in large part due to the drastic disunity of the Democratic party.
This terrified the South to no end.
Carl Sandburg’s Storm Over the Land paints a picture of a world not too different from our modern times. He speaks of “men saying Yes when they meant No and No when they meant Perhaps; of newspapers North and South lying to their readers and pandering to the cheaper passions of party and class interest; of the…ruling classes North and South being dominated…by love of money and power; of the Southern planters and merchants being $200,000,000 in debt to the North…of the Northern manufacturer being able to throw out men or machines no longer profitable while the Southern planter could not so easily scrap his production apparatus of living black men and women…of the …exploitation of man by man North and South; of the…array of propertied interests in the North which would stand to lose trade and profits, land titles, payments of legitimate debts, through a divided Union of States…of the 260,000 free Negroes in the South owning property valued at $25,000,000; of the Southern poor white lacking the guarantees of food, clothing, shelter, and employment assured the Negro field hand; of Northern factory workers paid a bare subsistence wage, lacking security against sickness, old age, unemployment while alive and funeral costs when finally dead…”
Sandburg states that the New York Herald “advised Lincoln to resign in favor of a more ‘acceptable’ man.” The victorious candidate was compared in the same article to Benedict Arnold. Lincoln was heaped with all the execrable vehemence Trump would receive roughly 160 years later.
According to Shelby Foote, Jefferson Davis, who had actually striven so long to assuage the fears of his fellow Southerners, telling them that reason would prevail, gave up all hope when Lincoln was elected. “The argument is exhausted…All hope in the Union…is extinguished.” For whatever reason, the opponent was seen as someone beyond reason. Lincoln was perceived by the South as an inflexible tyrant who would run over the South rough shod. He was a devil. He was incompetent.
There had been so much interest in the election that, according to britannica.com, it is estimated that roughly 80% of all eligible voters turned out. Everyone was afraid of the enemy, and before the shots were fired, the ballot was the cannon that boomed in defense of our liberties.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Britannica.com proceeds with “The 1860 election is regarded by most political observers as the first of three “critical” elections in the United States—contests that produced sharp and enduring changes in party loyalties across the country (although some analysts consider the election of 1824 to have been the first critical election). After 1860 the Democratic and Republican parties became the major parties in a largely two-party system. In federal elections from the 1870s to the 1890s, the parties were in rough balance—except in the South, which became solidly Democratic.”
That dynamic would remain solid for almost a hundred years.
Shall we do a quick comparison with the Trump elections?
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/being-a-democrat-means-never-having-to-accept-an-election-loss/
As I’ve already written (along with a million other folks), the 2020 Presidential election results were heavily questioned by Trump and his supporters, and continue to be questioned to this day. The controversy, chaos, and anarchy have split our country in half in ways Lincoln could barely imagine. So far, thankfully, without erupting into Civil War. Let’s dive in.
NPR gives a timeline of the statements Trump and supporters made at the time of the election.
At the September 29 Presidential debate “moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he was willing to denounce white supremacists. Instead, he told the Proud Boys — which the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified as a hate group associated with white nationalism — to “stand back and stand by.”
On November 3 election night “
The president was widely expected to claim victory on election night, when he might be leading in early ballot counts. At a White House event at 2:30 a.m. ET as ballot counting continued, including in crucial swing states, he falsely claimed victory: “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
“In the days that followed, Trump supporters mobbed ballot-counting sites.”
On December 1 “Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia election official, made an appeal directly to the president at an Atlanta news conference: “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt. Someone’s going to get shot. Someone’s going to get killed.”
On December 19 “Trump tweeted about the upcoming joint session of Congress, where the electoral votes submitted by the states were to be formally counted. “Big protests in D.C. on January 6. Be there. Will be wild!” It was one of several times he promoted a rally his allies were organizing.”
On January 2 of 2021 “Trump phoned Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to change the state’s vote total by just enough votes for Trump to prevail by a single vote. “There’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.” NPR and others reported the call the next day.
“Raffensperger stuck with the accurate results.
“Also on Jan. 2, before the call was public, the Proud Boys announced that they would attend the Jan. 6 protest.
“Ted Cruz and other senators released a statement saying they would join Hawley in raising objections to the vote count on Jan. 6.”
Then there was January 6.
At 2:24 pm, Jan. 6 “Trump issued a tweet denouncing then-Vice President Pence, who was overseeing the vote count in the Capitol. Pence had declined Trump’s demand that he disrupt the count, insisting on following his duty under the Constitution.
“Immediately afterward, “The crowd goes wild about calling Pence a traitor,” said Ryan Goodman of Just Security. Goodman’s website compiled time-stamped video of a rioter inside the Capitol shouting on a phone: “Can I speak to Pelosi? Yeah, we’re coming, b****. Oh, Mike Pence? We’re coming for you too you f****** traitor.”
While this is the definitive extreme example of denying the results of an election, there is no question the Democrats have been very guilty of the same monkey business in their checkered past. One of the large reasons I think my fellow Republicans have been so willing and even eager to deny the election is because we have had it done to us so many times.
To me, the lies of the Democrats were at least a part of what built up this hate and tension. Let’s take a look at someone willing to call a spade a spade.
Timothy P. Carney of the Washington Examiner writes in an op-ed piece:
“After Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, she declared that Trump was an “illegitimate president.” As the Washington Post aptly characterized it, she also “suggested that ‘he knows’ that he stole the 2016 presidential election.”
“This was in 2019, after Democrats in Congress and hostesses on MSNBC spent years trying to prove a false conspiracy theory that Russia somehow rigged the election in Trump’s favor.
“The previous time the Republicans won, George W. Bush in 2004, Sen. Barbara Boxer and dozens of House members objected to Ohio’s electoral votes going for Bush, even though he won the state by more than 100,000 votes.”
I personally verified the veracity of the last statement here https://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/06/electoral.vote.1718/
Then he lists several other times Democrats have cried fowl and never recanted:
Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, promoted a conspiracy theory whereby enough votes were switched from Kerry to Bush by voting machines and enough voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls that it “could have been” determinative of the result in Ohio and, thus, the whole presidential election.
And the time before that? Well, famously, Al Gore sued in Florida and in the Supreme Court to overturn George W. Bush’s insanely narrow victory in that state. Democratic congressmen, even after the lawsuits ended, called the result a “coup d’etat.” They also challenged the electoral votes.
Why do I bring up the distant past? Because Democrats continue to peddle the line, which would be called “dangerous” if a Republican made the same argument, that Bush “stole” the 2000 election.
Watch this video of Terry McAuliffe in 2004 , claiming Republicans stole the 2000 election. McAuliffe, who has never recanted that false claim, is now the Democratic nominee for the governor of Virginia and has the backing of the entire Democratic establishment.
That’s because the Democratic and liberal establishment say the same thing as McAuliffe:
20 years later, McAuliffe will not retract his claim that the 2000 election was stolen. Whereas Youngkin said onstage this week that Biden won. https://t.co/NLPyuium6h— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) October 1, 2021
Does your Tired Blogger agree or disagree with these folks. That isn’t the point. The point is, a party that has cried foul on twenty two years of elections does not make Republicans who believe Trump won feel they have any need to relent in their case.
Honestly, as I have blogged in the past, I think Trump lost fair and square.(You can read about it hear https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/161 But whether I am right or whether I am wrong, I can’t unequivocally condemn fellow Republicans who honestly (if in my opinion incorrectly) believe Trump won the election when I am confronted with a Party of Democrats who have been unwilling to face reality for two thirds of my fairly long adult life.
Finally, we get to Politico. I have to say, my Google searches half make me believe the conspiracy theorists. I had to dig down several pages to get through all of the pages proving that Trump didn’t really win to finally get to a page about some honest-to-God election fraud. Feast your eyes!
MICHAEL GRAFF and NICK OCHSNER report that Mark Harris had lost his primary bid to be the nominee for Congress by a few hundred absentee ballot votes. He started working with the man who had gotten those votes against him, a man named McCrae Dowless. They worked together over the next 18 months.
“But fraud involving absentee ballots is a real thing. It just looks nothing like the lurid tales spun by people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. The story of what happened in the race for North Carolina’s 9th District shows just how rare and also how basic and local election fraud really is. What happened in Bladen County in 2018 wasn’t carried out by sophisticated computers from a foreign land, but by low-level operatives with handwritten lists and spreadsheets in a forgotten stretch of eastern North Carolina where the median household income is $36,000 a year, where the most prominent employer is a hog-slaughtering plant and where folks were desperate enough to knock on doors and ask for people’s votes for candidates they didn’t know.”
After much detail you can read on the site, it is revealed “Dowless sent a small army of people to knock on doors, convince people to fill out an absentee ballot request form, and then follow up after the ballots arrived to make sure they actually voted. The workers drove down dirt roads and knocked on doors, not out of a love of politics or a sense of civic engagement. They did it for the cash. Dowless paid roughly $200 per stack of request forms.”
“Bladen County saw 647 absentee ballots cast in the 2018 primary. Dowless couldn’t claim credit for all of them, but many came from people in and around Bladenboro, near his house. These were votes from people he knew, and people he was certain would bubble in the circle he wanted them to bubble. There wasn’t any single way folks knew who Dowless wanted them to vote for. It was a combination of techniques: who he talked about when he was hanging around the convenience store and the local barbecue restaurant; who he put campaign signs out for; whose sticker was on the back of his car.”
Long and the short, Dowless seams to have made a lot of money to make sure a certain candidate won, and the methods were not exactly legal.
I relay this so that you know…Trump may be wrong about his election, but voter fraud does happen. Don’t be fooled. While I believe the numbers were vastly inflated in Trump’s claims, it does happen. How often it happens… is hard to tell. There are not many convictions, according to Politico and the FBI website. But it is no unicorn. So I think people can be forgiven their suspicions. What we have to ask ourselves is this. Is what is going on bad enough to make it worth breaking up the Republic?
I’m going kinda long, so I will write about the second point One (Possibly Both) Side(s) Feel as Though the Other is Undermining Their Very Livelihood, as The South Felt the North was Attempting to Impoverish Them With Forced Emancipation, on the next post, which I hope to have published Monday.
So, till the Party’s quit lying to us, make mine Marvel!
Mysandrony
Epic Stitt Confusion
In my last post, I committed to telling you by Friday what Stitt has to do with the Epic debacle. I didn’t even start this post till 10 am Friday, and I fear I spent Friday night feeling pretty poorly, and then spent the weekend in OKC with my friends eating Turkey and watching The Rings of Power.
I spent some time away from the topic, partly from feeling discouraged about some of the dearth of quality coverage on the topic, and partly because I could only get one real reporter (I reached out to several, and only one responded, shout out to Jennifer Palmer with Education Watch btw for giving me some valuable information, she responded to my query very quickly and with the information I requested, she is the real deal). So, my apologies for my unprofessionalism, but I hope this post will be worth the wait. Here goes.
I’ve written in some detail about how the Epic Charter School turned out to be allegedly a pyramid scheme of “ghost students with your child” (and Johnny Cash is no longer around to sing the song) that was getting paid double tax payer money to make a couple clever entrepreneurs rich. I’ll leave that post here if you haven’t read it or wish for a recap.
https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/3883
While spending time with one of my best and wisest friends, I asked him what he knew about Epic. It turns out that is where he takes his son. He had great praise for the school. He said he had asked his son’s teacher about the scandals, and her response was that there are investigations every few years because the state is jealous of their incredible success rates. So, while I’m still going to blog about them, and frankly will likely still write a more negative than positive post, I want to share that at least one parent is a strong fan, and reports that the school has been extremely beneficial to his son. And who knows? By the end of this the Tired Blogger may prove to be wrong.
I gotta admit, this one may end up being over my head. I guess if nothing else I will share what I’ve found in my rather random investigation and hope the readers are forgiving (or better yet, that they know something I don’t and share some information).
The first thing I looked at was the money. People always say if you follow the money you will find the truth, so I started with who is getting campaign contributions.
And yes, Stitt did receive some contributions from them, both in 2018 and 2022. But frankly, he was quite a ways down the list of folks who received money in campaign coffers, and honestly, the person on the top of the list (embarrassingly enough) is Joy Hoffmeister. So if that is the connection, she should be implicated too.
So why are so many news articles jumping up and down insisting Stitt is connected? Is this just partisan politics of the papers? Has your Tired Blogger been duped (again)?
I’ve talked at length about the negatives of Epic, and I won’t add more here unless it pertains to Stitt. Nothing is perfectly bad, and I can tell you my friends discussion and finding their website for their student news web site truly impressed me. So…while there is (allegedly) racketeering, fraud, and some horrible accounting, there is also some high quality teaching going on (even if only in these instances). Here is that website if you are interested in looking: https://epicnewsnetwork.org/
Lets see if we can figure out why so many are angry with Governor Stitt about Epic.
https://corruptkevin.com/epic/
The first site is admittedly biased, but the facts quoted are valid. The piece focuses mainly on how Stitt received about $20,000 in campaign contributions from them. I don’t see this myself as important evidence against Stitt, 1) because the dollar amount is fairly small on the scale of lobbying, 2) my candidate Joy Hoffmeister received significantly more money than that, and 3) both Stitt and Hoffmeister returned their contributions to the troubled school district to avoid accusations of conflict of interest.
Here is the information salient to corruptkevin.com.
“Nearly $46 million in taxpayer dollars were sent to Epic Youth Services – even though it had zero employees besides its two founders during most of the time it was receiving funds. A scathing state audit of Epic found that the company had even sent $200,000 worth of Oklahoma tax money to one of its schools in California. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation further alleged the company was a vehicle for owners Ben Harris and David Chaney to illegally take profits from taxpayer dollars, receiving $10 million in profits from the company that managed the charter school.
“What was the response from the governor? Stitt protected Epic Schools by removing John Harrington as the president of the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board after he initiated contract termination proceedings against Epic and challenged two board members about their conflicts of interest with the company. (One of the members on the oversight board Harrington was trying to remove was a family member of Epic’s founder.)
“After Harrington’s removal, the termination proceedings against Epic were delayed for months and ultimately abandoned in April following a settlement agreement that required Epic to be more transparent. It did not do nearly enough to punish the company or hold it accountable for its misuse of taxpayer dollars.
“Only months after Epic was let off the hook, the company is embroiled in controversy again. In her December 2021 resignation letter, the vice president of Epic’s governing board, Kathren Stehno, accused the company of improperly withdrawing students for truancy, failing to notify board members of key information and handing out “extremely large and unapproved” staff bonuses.”
My analysis of all this needs to be put into context with what I have already written. In case you need a refresher or just want to read it for the first time, I’ll post it here. Go ahead and read it! I’ll be here when you get back.
https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/3747
https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/3715
https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/3797
https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/3883
I’m especially proud of the last one. I really felt I was getting close to the smoking gun. But I believe most of the people I shared the post with just thought I was a spammer I don’t know why.
The Oklahoman gives more detail on the situation after the arrest of Epic’s founders:
The Oklahoman sheds some light on the subject. Back in July, Stitt and Hoffmeister were butting heads over who was responsible for the debacle. Hoffmeister had called a state school board meeting for Nov. 13, 2020. Days before, she received a phone call from Stitt chief of staff, Bond Payne.
“Bond Payne called directly … he was notably agitated about my recommendation to put Epic on probation,” Hofmeister told The Oklahoman when asked about the call. “He expressed confusion, concern, asked why I would do that, (claiming Epic) might lose students.”
Why should the governor care if they lose students? Surely he doesn’t have a political agenda? Isn’t the mantra that we want parents to have school choice? And how can they make intelligent choices if they aren’t informed? What do these people have to hide? Surely a Tired Blogger isn’t the only one asking these questions.
The Oklahoman goes on to state that this is not merely “he said/she said.” The conversation was verified by “One Education Department staff member who was in the room during the call, which was on speaker phone at the conference table in Hofmeister’s office, confirmed the details to The Oklahoman. Two other department staff members confirmed Hofmeister told them about the call shortly after.” On top of this, a staff member in the governor’s office verified the conversation speaking anonymously for fear of retribution.
I wish I had an inside source of my own that was willing to speak anonymously…
“About the time Hofmeister says Stitt’s office asked her to hold off on her push to put Epic on probation, the governor also removed a member of the state virtual charter schools board who was advocating for termination proceedings against the school.
“John Harrington, the removed board member, had also recently raised concerns about two other board members who had personal ties to the founders of Epic.
“At the time, the governor’s office said Stitt had simply decided not to renew Harrington, who was a Gov. Mary Fallin appointee after his term expired. The governor wanted to select his own person, his office said.”
But this doesn’t track with a report from The Tulsa World.
“Gov. Kevin Stitt on Friday removed the president of the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board who recently led the initiation of termination proceedings against Epic Charter Schools and challenged two other board members about potential conflicts of interest with Epic.
“John Harrington was notified Friday morning by Stitt’s newly appointed secretary of education that his service on the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board was over effective immediately.
“Stitt’s office told the Tulsa World on Friday evening that the governor has appointed the former president of a private Christian school in Edmond in Harrington’s place.”
Even if what Stitt claims is true, the timing is terrible. Harrington had just called for the recusal of two board members who had ties to Epic.
“This fact is disturbingly ironic given that two days later I am now the one no longer on the Board or voting on Epic-related matters. Whether by design, or mere coincidence, I do not believe this will help restore the public’s confidence in this matter,” Harrington said in a written statement.
“I am concerned with the direction that we are headed. It is widely known that there are concerns about the relationship between Epic and two of the virtual charter board members. However, despite these concerns, these individuals remain on the Board.”
“In Harrington’s place, Stitt has appointed Brandon Tatum, former president of Oklahoma Christian Academy and now founder and CEO of CONNECTedu and chair of the National Christian School Association Board of Trustees.”
“Asked about whether Stitt is concerned about the potential conflicts of interest on the board, Walters responded: “We’re not going to comment on that. Those are appointments that are out of our control. We have one appointee to the board.”
“Asked whether Stitt’s office had spoken to Tatum about Epic before his appointment, Walters said: “We just made sure there were no ties there, and we wanted to make sure everything is transparent and there’s accountability there and everything is carried out in a fair manner.”
Last of all, the most damning thing I’ve been able to find. Education Watch gives one tiny detail that, connected with all the other “coincidences,” leads me to believe that either there is criminal collusion between the administration and certain Christian private schools, or incompetence amounting to criminal negligence.
“The call for an audit stems from a finding in the 2020 Epic audit which showed the online charter school was miscoding expenses to avoid penalties for exceeding the state’s 5% cap on administrative spending.
“Stitt, in his request, asked auditors to identify all sources of revenue flowing into the department, determine if the revenues were properly allocated and expenditures were legal, and determine whether the department and school districts are properly coding items in the Oklahoma Cost Accounting System.
“It’s likely to be one of the deepest dives into the department’s finances, ever. However, Hofmeister says the department has undergone “more than 20 financial, compliance and programmatic review audits” in the past 6 1/2 years. And, she said, Secretary of Education Ryan Walters approves each expenditure over $25,000 on a weekly basis.”
So…audit after audit, many of them specifically geared to find the dirt on public schools, especially Tulsa Public…and everything over $25 k for the department has to run across Walter’s desk and be approved? Then, how could he NOT know what was going on with Epic? Is it possible that he was so distracted with his other three full-time jobs he just let slip that HALF A BILLION DOLLARS of Oklahoma taxpayer money was slipping through the cracks? What would we find if we audited his grade books?
https://togetherok.okpolicy.org/issues/restore-education-funding-2/
Between 2008 and 2015 we cut Oklahoma education by 33%. No, that isn’t on Stitt. But I read about all this money changing hands, while we are spending less on education. If it was producing results I’d laud our state for efficiency. But the numbers don’t add up. Where is all the money going? Who is getting rich off of all this graft?
Your Tired Blogger Fighting for Freedon
Questions Don’t Make You Disloyal
The Collusion of the Powerful Against the Powerless
youtube.com/clip/Ugkx7zSczlV4Tcy2q28gxDYaBb4J_CoCDA_d
The definition of “fascism” is to bind together.
Hole in One
I’ve been threatening my friends to do this for several years…now I’m going to unleash the beast. Your friendly neighborhood Tired Blogger is mildly sick on top of being profoundly discouraged. I’m frankly just tired of blogging about Stitt. I am almost certain there is a smoking gun somewhere, but I’m just a blogger, not a reporter, and if the reporters don’t care to smoke him out, why am I bothering?
So getting back to writing about something fun, the stunning beauty imaged above from Crystal Chatham’s website (check that place out, the photo’s are awesome, and maybe she won’t try to nail me on copyright violation if I send a bunch of viewers her way) is the “Golfer” Jacqueline Gagne.
I’ve been writing and railing about the abuses of big government and big corporations for quite some time. And lately, I’ve been adding another category: the demise of educational excellence in this nation. I may get back to railing about Stitt and the struggle to improve education in the state of Oklahoma, but for this post, I’m just going to write about what I’m going to call the Dilbertization of education.
In 2016 Trump started to raise a ruckus about how we need to run our country more like a business and less like an empire. He’d gotten the idea from reading a Michael Savage book, I’ve already written enough about that. And I don’t want to debate the idea. On paper, it sounds incredible. Let’s make education efficient. Let’s make it productive. Let’s make education excellent. Let’s make education great again.
It sounds so good, I can feel the tingles. I want to dive into the battle and git ‘er done. But I don’t think, at least in Oklahoma education, that is what has happened. And the practices I’m hearing about, far from making the schools more efficient, productive, or excellent, seem to be leaving us instead with a dumbed-down population that is easily manipulated. So sit down my friends and I’ll tell you a story of deception, intrigue, and lust. Ok, ok…maybe just a story of deception and stupidity.
Several of my friends have been computer techs for as long, or longer than I have been in retail. Several of them ended up employed as techs in the University of Oklahoma Medical Network.
Things went very well for a bit. The Dean was ex-military, he was very much into live and let live. “You know you did you know you did you know you did.”
Say live and let die! Bwahhhhhwahhhhhhh……
Yeah, you knew it. No good thing lasts forever. The good boss was replaced by a dumbass (yeah, I said it out loud…I won’t even say “alleged,” you’ll see why in a bit).
Anyway, said dumbass hired Jacqueline Gagne to supervise the IT team. Her strategy, according to two sources, who until recently worked in that department, was to insult, degrade, and infuriate the staff in the hopes that they would quit and she could replace them with her cronies.
In this case (and maybe just in this case) the strategy failed. You see, when you have an internet trail, techs can dig up the dirt on you (as I’ve attempted but failed to do with some folks myself). Allow me to introduce Gagne (not Lacey) to you folks.
https://www.golfdigest.com/story/gd0711kindred_gagne
https://deadspin.com/jacqueline-gagne-is-as-good-at-commenting-as-she-is-at-309266
https://deadspin.com/jacqueline-gagne-is-as-good-at-commenting-as-she-is-at-309266
This is from the Golf Digest about her purported umpteen holes in one.
“We are to believe that a Pro V1 disappeared into a Southern California palm tree, fell to earth, ricocheted across a green, made its way into the hole, and nobody saw it until the woman who hit it asked someone to look in the hole.
“OK, Julia Roberts married Lyle Lovett, so strange things happen. Happens once where a palm tree kicks you into the hole, OK, you’re living right. Happens twice, it’s a minor miracle. Can’t happen again.
But in 2007, Jackie Gagne insists, it happened for her seven times. Seven times she hit par-3 tee shots that could not be found until someone went to the hole, looked in, and expressed one more version of Elvira excitement.”
The Digest continues.
“She’s practically a neophyte, new to the game five years ago, and now at age 47 has reported more holes-in-one in six months than most PGA Tour players make in a career. By one count, she did the 16 in 118 rounds this year. That comes to a hole-in-one once every 30 swings on par 3s, a rate of success that causes Dean Knuth, creator of the U.S. Golf Association’s Slope Rating System and a Golf Digest contributor, to blurt this assessment: “That’s impossible.” David Boyum is a math guy with a Harvard Ph.D. and co-author of What the Numbers Say. He puts the odds of Gagne’s feat at “1 in 2,253,649,101,066,840,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.”
“Gagne lapped up the attention. Her website, jacquelinegagne.com, carried 39 citations of national and international media outlets reporting on her, including Golf Digest, Golf World, USA Today, The London Times and The Wall Street Journal. She hired a Los Angeles public-relations firm. She planned a book, Turning Up Aces. She posted a Titleist feature bragging that she used the Pro V1 ball on every hole-in-one. She waxed enthusiastically about Cobra clubs (the company sent her a set and a staff bag). She did a testimonial for the Q-Link pendant (over the signature, “Jacqueline Gagne, World Record Holder, Most Hole In Ones in One Year”). She agreed to play in certain events as a national spokesperson for a breast-cancer charity.
“Gagne twice appeared on CBS television’s “The Early Show.” Co-anchor Harry Smith began the first segment saying, “Oh, do I love this story.” Later he brought her to New York, where he enlisted golf analyst Peter Kostis. When Gagne revealed that she reads the green from the tee, Kostis declared that “the first clue” to the holes-in-one. Then she made a few swings, and Kostis liked what he saw. His conclusion: “It’s the real deal.”
At the time of the article, Tiger Woods had not had a hole-in-one in five years.
The Digest continues: “The Palm Springs newspaper, The Desert Sun, said in its monthly magazine that she had been vice president of operations for Microsoft in Boston. (But Microsoft says no record confirms her employment.) After moving to the desert, Gagne told friends, she had built a computer company, sold it for a lot of money, retired and took up golf. (Other sources say it was a small company, operated briefly, and then closed.)”
According to my sources, she was still using the same resume years later when she was hired at OU. I guess it makes sense, when I hire someone I don’t think to google Golf Digest about them. But I’d think a simple Google search would behoove most HR dopes on the prowl to hire another incompetent. When the workers revealed to the employees that they had fumbled the ball, and badly, she was terminated. I have the OU information that was given to the public, which only says she was discharged, but my inside sources (who, admittedly are no longer there, but I believe them) tell me she was conducted off the campus in handcuffs.
Dave Kindred of Golf Digest started out as a skeptic, and the more he dug, the more he doubted. When he began his investigation, she had an already stunning seven holes in one. As the year progressed (this was 2007, in the halcyon days before the 2008 market crash, when I still believed my career at People Enraging People Sadistically Ineptly was a road leading somewhere), she ended up reporting ten more.
With each report his skepticism mounted. He strove to get an interview, she kept putting it off with the passive aggressiveness of my ex wife. By her sixteenth hole in one, he had begun to investigate with a vengeance. If Muhammad would not come to the mountain, the mountain would come to Muhammad.
She had wracked up eight claims on holes in one by the time Kindred hit the road. Every place he stopped failed to provide information that convinced Kindred of her veracity. He interviewed a club pro, Dan Brown at La Quinta’s Mountain View Country Club where she claimed to have hit the eighth hole-in-one. Dan Brown stated there was nobody there who could verify she had hit that, she had golfed there, according to her score card she had played two under par, but no hole in one was recorded there.
“Numbers 10 and 11 came in one round, at SilverRock Resort’s eighth and 14th holes. SilverRock general manager Randy Duncan thought it curious the way he found out about the rare two-in-one-round feat. “Not that day, but later a friend of hers sent a fax,” he says. “She requested two plaques for holes-in-one. I said, ‘Holy cow, this lady is amazing. Do you mind if we share this with the media?'”
Her friend provided six names, but no contact information for any of them. Duncan (McLeod of the Clan McLeod) sought to verify the information for two months with the passion of the Kurgan seeking the Prize. But he succeeded no better than the Kurgan (and without any pithy lines about it being better to “burn out than to fade away”).
“Gagne was disqualified from the Mission Hills Johnny Revolta Match Play Tournament in February. She failed to turn in her group’s master scorecard. Instead, she produced a card showing the Gagne/Kreedman team with scores lower than opponents believed they had signed for on the master. Shortly after, Gagne resigned as chair of the membership committee of the club’s women’s golf association.”
Kindred talked to ten witnesses who claimed to have been with her for eleven holes-in-one to verify the validity of their testimony. He believes only one of the witnesses is actually credible, because none of the other witnesses actually saw the ball land on the green, they simply saw a ball in the hole after the shot was made.
“Only one of 10 witnesses saw a Gagne hole-in-one tee shot to land on a green. Twice it happened for Don Balletto, a friend from Canada. His is the most plausible supporting testimony—the only plausible testimony—but even he expresses surprise. He saw Gagne’s ball slide over swales and disappear. “We’d go up there,” he says, “and the damned ball would be in the hole.”
So Kindred believes it is possible (but not verified) that she made two. He never got to interview Gagne, but he did interview her girlfriend psychotherapist Barbara Kreedman. She shared that she never, ever, actually saw the ball go in the hole. She saw the same thing everyone else did. Ball getting lost somewhere, but then ending up in the hole. She even admitted that she “was uncomfortable” with one of the claims. Evidently that was not all she was uncomfortable with. The relationship ended dramatically with a domestic disturbance.
Kindred ends his report with this information: “
“Witness affidavits described an angry confrontation at the Kreedman/Gagne home, followed at the address three days later with what Riverside County Deputy Sheriff Herlinda Valenzuela told me was closed out as a “disturbed subject” call; Gagne, in a voice mail to the Golf Digest office, said she had suffered an epileptic seizure.
“That day late in August, Gagne was hospitalized. When I heard that she had been discharged and had been to lunch at Mission Hills, I asked her friend Judy Scrafford to relay a message that if she wanted to talk, I wanted to listen.
“Gagne’s call was a voice mail in which she proposed a deal of the sort that no reporter can make. She would sit for an interview if I first faxed to her lawyer the name of a source in my reporting along with what that source had said.”
Ok, I had fun, but now I’m done. I just want to drink tea and forget the world is so full of incompetence for a while. Till I get a job supervising my friends at OU, make mine Marvel. Ah heck, make mine Marvel anyway.
Tired Midnight Blogger (What Blogs at Midnight) 