States trying to get money any way they can

The bad economic news has states scrambling to find "pennies from heaven" (meaning, pick the pockets of the taxpayer) any way they can.

Two cases in point:
My state sent Eldest Daughter a letter informing her that she owed hundreds of dollars in "driver responsibility program" fines from two tickets she got in 2005. She has to pay either the whole thing by November 10, or she can pay 1/3 and the state will helpfully send her a bill for the next two years. She lives in another state now, but if she doesn't pay this bill then our state will notify her state to suspend her license.

A state I lived in from September 2004 to February 2005 sent us a letter and a payment form for a business use tax, saying we hadn't paid it for the last three years. Problem is, we never had a business in that state. The only "business" we had was a consulting job I did after I moved back to HomeState. When I called the state revenue service the agent admitted they sent a ton of these letters out, and that many people who had worked as consultants or who don't live in the state any more were calling to find out why they were being dunned like this. Bottom line, we have to send in the form with a zero amount written in, or we will be audited.

Fun, wow.

That's over, thank goodness

I ended up having three members of the mid-tenure committee come in my Monday night class. They walked in, all wearing black, and sat in the corner. They stayed an HOUR! Ack.

One of my students e-mailed me afterwards and asked who "the three stiffs" were, which made me laugh.

So the next thing is the self-evaluation statement, which is due next Friday. Fun, wow.

In other news, last night was the last data mining lecture of the quarter. Just presentations left!

The unholy trio

First voter fraud. Then buying votes (that refundable tax credit to people who don't pay taxes). Now: credit card fraud.

Change we can believe in--about $100 million worth, from stolen cards, overseas donors, and outright theft. Here's the scary question being asked in the post printed below: Regarding Obama's online donation site: Who ordered the anti-fraud protections turned off?

Is this really what we want governing us for the next four years?

From nationalreviewonline:

Holding all the cards [Mark Steyn]

On the grubby little racket of his online credit card fraud, Senator Obama merely has to run out the clock now. If it's not exposed before Tuesday, no one is going to have any appetite for investigating it once he's won. So he must be relieved that this off-message headline - "Obama Accepting Untraceable Donations" - only gets as far as Page 2 of The Washington Post. (There is an element of art to these calculations: The Obamatron editors in the media want to be able to cover themselves by saying they raised the story, but the trick is to do so at a time and place that prevents it going anywhere before November 4th.) The reporter, Matthew Mosk, filed a bland and perfunctory on the subject a couple of days ago, but he seems belatedly to have woken up and got some of the key points:

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor's identity, campaign officials confirmed.

"Largely" untraceable? "Potentially" be used? No, they have been used to evade limits. But not a bad start. Here's a glimpse of the scale of the operation:

The Obama campaign has shattered presidential fundraising records, in part by capitalizing on the ease of online giving. Of the $150 million the senator from Illinois raised in September, nearly $100 million came in over the Internet.

So two-thirds of Obama's record haul derives from a website that intentionally disabled all the default security checks that prevent basic fraud like fake addresses and no-name matches. The RNC chief counsel says:

"I think they've made the determination that whatever money they have to refund on the back end doesn't outweigh the benefit of taking all this money upfront..."

Lawyers for the Obama operation said yesterday that their "extensive back-end review" has carefully scrubbed contributions to prevent illegal money from entering the operation's war chest.

Not true. Almost every fraudulent donation sails through, and real money leaves real accounts. To give to Obama his fellow "citizens of the world" don't even have to pretend to be American. As detailed yesterday, Mr A Hitler of Berlin, Germany is only the most obvious fake donor to make a contribution and receive shortly afterwards a Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome email thanking him for joining the active community of community activists:

Dear Adolfe,

Thanks for joining this movement...

Check out the resources below — learn how you can connect with fellow supporters, organize in your neighborhood, build our national grassroots organization, and stay informed with the very latest campaign news.

(In fairness, connecting with fellow supporters, organizing in his neighborhood and building grassroots organizations is not something Herr Hitler needs a lot of help with.)

The Fuhrer is only a non-Obama supporter seeking to expose the obvious fraudulence of his online fundraising operation. If you were actively trying to funnel money to the Obama campaign for real, you'd probably choose a less obvious name to hide behind - Frau E Braun, say.

Which brings us to the case of Mary T Biskup of Manchester, Mo, who discovered there were scores of small online donations made to the Obama campaign in her name, even though she hasn't given him a dime. They added up to $174,800, which is a wee bit over the $2,300 limit. This very generous donation was not billed to her own card, but to someone else's - meaning (as the Post says) "someone appropriated her name".

Ah, but who? And, if just one unwitting front is responsible for 175 grand of the Obama take, how many other Mary T Biskups are there out there?

Here's the bottom line:

Two-thirds of the record-breaking haul Obama raised for the final stretch of the campaign comes from a racket set up to facilitate fake names, phony addresses and untraceable cards. As Bill Dyer asks:

Who ordered the anti-fraud protections turned off?

And as he concludes:

What did the wanna-be president know and when did he know it?

As Victor says below, this is part of a long pattern of behavior by Obama in which the noble ends of the Messiah's triumph justify any means.

Today is the big teaching evaluation

First there was one. Then there was two. Now there are THREE committee members coming to my class tonight.

I need chocolate.

Oh my

Watch

Read

Read

This site just cracks me up

Makes me wonder just how these people got to be so stupid and rude--and how they ever manage to get married, or find (and keep) jobs.

http://notalwaysright.com/

My sentiments exactly

The Obama Temptation [Mark R. Levin, from www.nationalreview.com]

I've been thinking this for a while so I might as well air it here. I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way. There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff. Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama. Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election. I've never seen anything like it. Virtually all evidence of Obama's past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources. The media's role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It's as if the media use the Obama campaign's talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn't hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency. So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we've read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism. And, of course, while experience is crucial in assessing Sarah Palin's qualifications for vice president, no such standard is applied to Obama's qualifications for president. (No longer is it acceptable to minimize the work of a community organizer.) Charles Gibson and Katie Couric sought to humiliate Palin. They would never and have never tried such an approach with Obama. But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization. Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual. Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much of what he demands. The question is whether enough Americans understand what's at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency? After all, it ensnared Adelman, Kmiec, Powell, Fried, and numerous others. And while America will certainly survive, it will do so, in many respects, as a different place.

The deer in the headlights moment

I am in my mid-tenure year, and undergoing the dreaded major review. That means I have several hoops to jump through, from preparing a statement on how indispensable I am to the uni, to providing samples of my publications (complete with reviewer comments). One of the hoops is a teaching evaluation.

We are almost done with our term, and time is short. Next term I am only teaching one course (!) and it's online, so there's nothing to observe. I'd asked if the committee was going to let me know when they were coming, how long they were going to stay, etc. but never got an answer. I did hear that the committee hadn't decided those things yet, and weren't meeting until the 27th anyway, so I thought I had some time.

Well, tonight the committee chair showed up in my class. I saw him come in, five minutes before the class was to start, and I just FREAKED. One of the students (an older guy who is also an adjunct here) was complaining about his midterm in another class, and I just totally tuned him out while I cleaned the board and wrote some administrivia on it. I have no idea what he was saying, only that he was unhappy about some aspect of the grading or whatever. Normally I just interrupt and tell them a worse horror story of my own to deflect any criticism of colleagues, but this time I was so oblivious to anything but sheer total anxiety that I didn't even respond to him.

There's no reason to be nervous because I have really quite decent teaching evals, but the thing was that tonight was one of the few times I was pretty much unprepared for class. I'd spent all day working with a colleague and a student getting a conference paper cut down to two pages, and I hadn't had time to do anything but print out the notes for tonight's lecture. I hadn't looked at those notes since last year.

Thankfully, he decided not to sit in on this class because there are only four students in it. He's coming to my data mining class next week, where I already have two professors sitting in so what's one more? But man, I was totally spazzed out by this whole thing. The students didn't much like it either, they were nervous for me, and the guy who was complaining about his class was worried about how that looked.

I will be so glad when this review thing is over! Which reminds me, I have to start working on my statement. That's the next task on the list.

In other news, Eldest Daughter is having fun at her trade show out in LA. She flies back to the City Too Very Far Away today. I've missed having her on the same side of the continent. Son is stressing over his exams and Youngest Daughter is still juggling classes at three schools and work. She is opening her very first checking account tomorrow!

The perpetrator of this atrocity wishes he could have done more.

and, foolishly, we are about to elect his good friend and colleague President of the United States. God help us.

Memorial recalls Brinks tragedy of 1981

Jenna Carlesso
The Journal News

CENTRAL NYACK - Paul O'Donoghue Jr. was sitting in his Nyack home on Oct. 20, 1981, when he heard what sounded like firecrackers exploding across the village.

Seconds later, sirens followed.

About a half-mile away, a spray of bullets fatally struck two officers at a roadblock near Mountainview Avenue and Route 59.

"It was a horrible day," he recalled yesterday, standing among dozens of people who returned to the crime scene to honor the officers and a fallen Brinks security guard. "They were two really good men."

It was 27 years ago that Nyack police Sgt. Edward O'Grady and Officer Waverly "Chipper" Brown were killed after the robbery of $1.6 million from an armored truck at the Nanuet Mall. Brinks security guard Peter Paige was gunned down outside the mall a half-hour before the Thruway shootings. A bevy of family, friends and Rockland County police officers gathered yesterday to remember them.

"In our lives, there are certain dates and times that present vivid memories," said Detective Sgt. Christopher Goodyear of the Clarkstown Police Department. "On this day the hand of terror thrust us into a nightmare from which we would not soon wake."

Goodyear, the memorial's keynote speaker, was one of many officers working in the area the day of the robbery. Nyack police had set up a roadblock near the Thruway entrance after the Brinks armored car was ambushed in Nanuet by a gang of former Weather Underground radicals and members of the Black Liberation Army. Paige was shot dead and guard Joseph Trombino was severely wounded.

The police stopped a U-Haul near the Thruway within a half-hour of the robbery, and six men jumped out and opened fire on the officers with high-powered automatic weapons. O'Grady and Brown were fatally wounded, and Nyack police Detective Arthur Keenan was injured.

With hands pressed to their chests, supporters recited the national anthem and hummed along to the tunes of "Amazing Grace" and "God Bless America" at yesterday's ceremony. The slain officers' friends and relatives reflected on happier times.

O'Donoghue knew at least one of the officers since he was a boy, he said. A lifelong resident of Nyack, he remembers nights when Brown and O'Grady would stop at his parents' restaurant on Main Street to make sure everyone was safe.

"They weren't just cops; they were friends," O'Donoghue said. "They would go above and beyond what their jobs required."

Former Nyack Officer John Lavelle worked for years alongside the pair. He recalls the department being very small and close-knit.

"They were natural leaders," he said of O'Grady and Brown. "Just by doing what they did, they were teachers."

The ceremony, which was held at the Brinks monument built near the Thruway entrance, mirrored the tributes of previous years. The Rockland Emerald Society Pipes & Drum Corps played "Amazing Grace," while Sheriff's Lt. Gary Bowers played taps. The Clarkstown police honor guard carried flags and gave a rifle salute.

The U.S. Supreme Court's refusal early this month to hear Judith Clark's appeal of a federal decision denying her a new trial brought some relief to the those in the crowd. Clark, a self-proclaimed revolutionary since the 1960s, was one of the people convicted in the Brinks case. She will continue to serve her term of 75 years to life for the three murders and multiple robbery counts.

O'Grady's sister, Mary Crowley, said she is stunned by the turnout each year.

"I would have thought it would have dimmed down over the years," she said. "I have heartfelt angst for everyone who comes out."

My guest lecturer didn't show

I hope he is okay and nothing bad happened. I had to scramble and do something, so I showed them this TED talk which I had planned to do on Wednesday. Oh well.

The white cat who hunts around here apparently got our chippie. The other day it got a field mouse.

My student did okay but not great. His evaluation part was weak, which I knew, and the other profs picked that apart. That's what happens when students have to rush their projects to satisfy their new employers. But he's done, and he got a B, so that's about as good as it will get.

Random stuffage

• The condo society puts out a newsletter each month, and while reading the latest edition I noticed an item that said residents were complaining to maintenance about chipmunks. We have one digging around the front door, and we can hear it now and then (so can Kitty Mama, who stares intently at the door. I pity that chippie if he should ever break through the concrete). I read the item to Youngest Daughter, who remarked: "Cutest infestation ever."
• I tried the "cake in a cup" recipe and it's good but a tad sweet for me. Next time, less sugar, more cocoa, and I need to stir it more.
• Got my second cold in a month. Sneezing, runny nose. Niiiiiiiiiiiiice.
• Week Eight is coming! Week Eight is coming!
• One of my MS students is defending tomorrow--the first one ever that my name is on as chair. I am a tad anxious. I want him to do well!
• I don't have to lecture tomorrow night. Thank God for guest lecturers.
  

Politics intrudes where it does not belong

I just picked up Youngest Daughter from her Intro to Anthropology course at a local CC. The first day of class, this professor went into a 20-minute political tirade (unsurprisingly, he is liberal).

Today, he openly advocated for Obama in a class supposedly on archaeology and physical anthropology. He made fun of McCain's supposed 8 houses and 13 cars, Joe the plumber's salary and licensure status (Why does that make any difference? The guy's "crime" was to ask Obama a question that revealed Obama's socialist agenda and for that the liberal media and netroots are tearing him apart). He said women should be terrified at the consequences of a McCain victory. Men should be concerned about their wives, daughters, etc. He equated a McCain victory to "widening the divide" between rich and poor across the globe.

Sound like archaeology and physical anthropology to you? It doesn't to me.

Professors say they don't discuss politics inappropriately and laugh at conservative concerns about bias in the classroom. They are lying. Pure and simple, it's a lie. They KNOW they advocate for one viewpoint, in positions of power, in inappropriate venues. They lie and come up with studies to disprove what we all know really happens. It's happened to me in the classroom, it's happened to my children, it's happened to my friends.

Let's tell the truth for a change. Admit the bias, and make it clear to everyone that it won't be tolerated. Or admit the bias and make it clear you don't have any intention to change. But for Pete's sake, stop lying.

This week was better, except for the money

Even though my students did so-so on their midterms, we had good post-test sessions to go over what they didn't get right. Youngest Daughter feels much better. My hockey team won their first game of the season. I handed in the first of many mid-tenure review tasks.

The second task is to make a list of all the courses I've taught over the past three years, a list of people outside my college, a list of people outside my university, and a list of students to contact. I've taught 13 different classes! That doesn't include supervising four independent studies. Wow, that is a crazy amount of course preps. No wonder I always felt like I was behind.

As for the external evaluations, I e-mailed all the people on my "outside the uni" list and they all wrote back that they would be glad to write a letter and several included very complimentary remarks which was extremely nice of them. Of the "outside the college" list I only need to hear from one more; the rest also said very very nice things. I still have to contact the students; then I can cross that task off my list.

I was worried that my time would be so taken up by these demands that I wouldn't be able to get much done this next month. The next task, the self-evaluation statement, will take a little while to write. Gathering up student evals will be a pain, as I don't know that I have them all. I tend to not read them until the following quarter (or year). It seems we are being constantly evaluated; every time I teach a class, I get evaluated. In industry, we get a formal evaluation once a year and the rest of the time we're left alone (unless we really mess something up badly). In academia, we get evaluated several times each term, plus the yearly formal evaluation. If I teach a 3-2-3 load, I am evaluated NINE TIMES in a year. That's nuts. So, no wonder this mega-evaluation called the mid-tenure review feels like such a burden.

But God is good and He will see me through it even though I may whine here now and again-- well, basically every week until it's over. Especially once the committee starts showing up to observe my classes. Yuck.

In other news, AlmaMaterU's football team is winning their game (what a pleasure to see them playing on TV!). Last night's hockey game was awesome--I could even see the skate marks on the ice.

My friend A has another job but it's substantially less money than her former job. Please pray for a better situation for her.

The retirement fund has taken quite a hit, thanks to Chris Dodd and Barney Frank and their Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/ACORN cronies. I've lost all the interest growth and then some. YD's college fund lost some also, but it's not that big anyway. Looks like instead of working until I'm 90, I'll have to go to 95. Longer, if the Dems win big this year -- my taxes will shoot right through the roof. Fun, wow.

On to Week Seven!

Just slogging along

There's not much interesting stuff going on that merits writing about. I'm just plodding on, doing all the things professors (and moms) do. Trying not to be too gloomy about the election, although I think we are in for a very rough, very miserable four years if it goes the way I think it's going to go. On the other hand, if the election goes the way *I* want it to go, I worry about the safety of my house and possessions in HomeCity--especially for the first few days after the results come in.

The voter fraud crap really makes me angry. If you can't win honestly, how can we expect you to govern honestly? Well, actually, I don't expect them to govern honestly. I expect lots of corruption and more fraud and more lies.

Sigh.

On other fronts, prayers for E. , who just lost her husband, and her family. For A., who still needs that new job. Also for Youngest Daughter, whose sinus infection isn't quite all gone yet.

Is this week over yet?

It's not been a good week. Youngest Daughter has had some bad things happen to her this week, and on top of it all has a sinus infection. I wrote down the wrong time for a key meeting. My classes did badly on their midterms. Today in my campus mail I got a fat letter from the mid-tenure committee with three pages of things I have to provide them--by November 7.

If ever I needed Oreos, it's now.