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Listening to the fellow who praised and gave all credit to God and at the same time praised himself for trying harder, I get the idea that God must not like all the rest of the people who are still suffering.  Or maybe they are just lazy and not trying hard enough.  His good fortune was brought by something else that he was reluctant to name or describe.

posted 3 years, 7 months ago
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I hear politicians and school administrators speaking about programs that do not directly participate in classroom instruction. I hear remarks that indicate classified  employees can do the job of libratians. This is a  considerable misunderstanding of what librarians do. Librarians are teachers. Media is a major part of all the learning that goes on in schools and is no less important than any other subject. Try again: Libraries are classrooms and should not be reduced.

posted 4 years ago
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The attempts by religious minorities to censor public school teaching according to the standards of their particular sect should be rejected.

Last year the play Higher Ground was censored by the Sherwood SD. The reason given was that the theme , peer bullying, was too mature for middle schoolers. This judgement was considered absurd by the 40 students in the cast who expressed the opinion that the bullying they observed routinely in the school was far more aggressive than the bullying  in the play. The cast voted unanimously to reject censoring the script. They performed the play three times at the Portland Performing Arts Center to standing room audiences. THE TEACHER, MS JENNY BROWN, WAS SUBSEQUENTLY FIRED ON A TECHNICAL PRETEXT BY THE DISTRICT ADMINISTRATOR.

When I spoke over the phone, Think Out Loud did not allow the majority of my comment to be aired .  It is pretty ironic for a program about censorship to censor the on air content.

posted 4 years, 2 months ago
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Attracting venture capitalists is about as healthy for Oregon as attracting a raft of gamblers to our casinos. Building the economy from the top down, the supply-side, trickle-down method hasn't worked and the current international financial crisis is proof of that failure. We need to do what Obama recommends and build the economy from the bottom up by building the middle class and rewarding work and not using our tax structure to reward speculators and gamblers over workers. The boom and bust cycles that are the result of the supply-side methods are crippling to we the people. Continuous growth is a fiction and cannot be sustained in the real world where we all live. The real world is finite and growth cannot go on indefinitely. We live in a zero-sum world game.

posted 4 years, 6 months ago
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