Johnny Sauter and the No. 13 Safe Auto/Curb Records Chevrolet Silverado team returns to Darlington Raceway this weekend after a solid fourth place finish at Phoenix International Raceway two weeks ago. He also returns for his 63rd NASCAR Camping World Truck Series career start and second outing at Darlington in the Series. Sauter started 13th in 2010 at the track, powering home for a fourth place finish at the checkers. And for the last “four” – Sauter stands in the fourth position in overall driver points in the NCWTS going into Darlington.
ON DARLINGTON:
“Darlington is such a fun place to run. It’s different. You have to race the race track, not the competition. If you don’t, it will bite you and you’ll be in the wall with a Darlington stripe. I’m not one for off weeks – I like to race as much as I possibly can. So I’m pretty psyched to get back to racing, and Darlington is my kind of track. There is more going on here than a Chicago or a Vegas, and you really have to focus. We have a pretty big Rookie class this year, and I think they are about to get educated by the Lady in Black.”
ON HIS HISTORY HERE:
“I’ve always run so well here, even back to Busch Grand National days – with nothing to really show for it. I’m happy with the fourth place finish from last year with ThorSport Racing – the first Truck race at Darlington for several years – but I want a win here. It’s such a historical track, and you have to show so much respect to it. The win here means a lot to any driver. It’s a fight to the finish every year, and I need a win here. I’m a late model racer until I die, and this is a late model racer’s track. It’s old school at its best.”
ON CHASSIS 23:
“We are using chassis 23, which was used at Homestead last year. We pulled out a fourth place finish there, and it’s a strong truck. I’m pretty confident it’s going to get the job done in Darlington. My pit crew really showed their strength in Phoenix, and it’s a tricky pit road at this track. I know they can dominate to help me get track position, and the ECR horsepower is going to get it done on track.”
ON CONSISTENCY & TEAMWORK:
“It’s great to be fourth in points right now, but Matt (Crafton) and I both say to our guys that it’s early on in the season. We can’t get comfortable. This year, the No. 13 team is about consistent top 5s, top 3s, wins. Of course we’re going to say we’re running for a championship title. Who isn’t? But at the end of the day, we’re just not happy with anything else, and that’s the standard we’re setting for ourselves. Are we competitive within the organization? Of course. Matt and I wouldn’t be real racers if we weren’t competitive with each other. Right now, he’s on top of the boards, and teammate or not, he’s the truck to beat. We have a lot of respect for each other, but we like to race each other hard and let the best truck win.”
Monday, March 14, 2011
Shaw Capital Scam Info:TEAM NEWS: Germain Racing Wears Georgia Boot Sponsorship In 2011 » shawcapitalmanagementscaminfo.com - Shaw Capital Management Scam Information Prevention
Germain Racing proudly announces a new team sponsorship for the 2011 season. The team has partnered with America ‘s Hardest Working Boot, Georgia Boot. The brand is a perfect match for Germain Racing’s strength and competitive reputation in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. “To have a company like Georgia Boot come on board with us is just a perfect fit. Germain Racing is the hardest working team in the Truck Series, I am absolutely convinced of this. Georgia Boot is made for the hardest working folks in America—the kind of people that have a work ethic strong enough that they could be part of our racing team,” said Todd Bodine, the two-time Truck Series champion who will sport the Georgia Boot paint scheme this season.
Georgia Boot has signed on as primary sponsor of the No. 30 Georgia Boot Tundra at Kentucky Speedway in July and the No. 30 Germain Racing team will proudly wear the Georgia Boot logo as an associate sponsor for the entire 2011 season.
“Georgia Boot is a sponsor that’s been in front of the Truck Series fans for years. They know that race fans love the Truck Series because it’s tough. It’s competitive. It might be the best racing around. We love the fact that Georgia Boot is headquartered in Central Ohio , just down the road from Germain Motor Company headquarters. We are looking forward to having Georgia Boot on Todd’s Tundra as he defends his Championship in 2011,” said team owner Bob Germain Jr.
Earning back-to-back titles has proven an impossible feat in the Truck Series. In fact, only three drivers have earned more than one title, and Bodine is one of them.
“We are excited to join forces with Germain Racing for the 2011 season. Todd Bodine and Germain Racing are great examples of consistency, performance, and a drive for excellence that make them a great fit for our brand. The team is coming off a winning season and we are excited to be a part of their quest to win it all this season. We look forward to supporting Todd and the team and look forward to a great year,” said Jared Oviatt, Georgia Boot vice president of sales.
Georgia Boot has signed on as primary sponsor of the No. 30 Georgia Boot Tundra at Kentucky Speedway in July and the No. 30 Germain Racing team will proudly wear the Georgia Boot logo as an associate sponsor for the entire 2011 season.
“Georgia Boot is a sponsor that’s been in front of the Truck Series fans for years. They know that race fans love the Truck Series because it’s tough. It’s competitive. It might be the best racing around. We love the fact that Georgia Boot is headquartered in Central Ohio , just down the road from Germain Motor Company headquarters. We are looking forward to having Georgia Boot on Todd’s Tundra as he defends his Championship in 2011,” said team owner Bob Germain Jr.
Earning back-to-back titles has proven an impossible feat in the Truck Series. In fact, only three drivers have earned more than one title, and Bodine is one of them.
“We are excited to join forces with Germain Racing for the 2011 season. Todd Bodine and Germain Racing are great examples of consistency, performance, and a drive for excellence that make them a great fit for our brand. The team is coming off a winning season and we are excited to be a part of their quest to win it all this season. We look forward to supporting Todd and the team and look forward to a great year,” said Jared Oviatt, Georgia Boot vice president of sales.
Shaw Capital Management Headlines: Pope-funded groups and the dismantling of public education World Headlines: Shaw Capital Management
One day into the 2011 General Assembly session and conservatives were celebrating their new power over education. “It’s a joyous week in Raleigh!” Dallas Woodhouse said exultantly. The state director of Americans for Prosperity was busy welcoming his guests, who included Republican legislators, to a reception co-sponsored by AFP-NC and the John William Pope Civitas Institute.
Woodhouse crowed about how the N.C. Association of Educators was suddenly in retreat and then introduced the new House majority leader, Rep. Paul (Skip) Stam of Wake County. “He’s a friend who’s been with us from the beginning on charter schools,” Woodhouse said.
Stam quickly endorsed the AFP’s three charter school “principles”: an unlimited number of charters; no minimum or maximum enrollments at the schools; and a separate licensing commission outside of the State Department of Public Instruction—even though charter schools are ostensibly public schools.
Then Stam turned to his own bill to create tax credits for parents who pay private school tuitions or homeschool their children. Always call them tax credits, he warned, chortling at this chicanery, because the phrase “tax credits” does better in the polls than “private school vouchers.”
Within hours, video of Woodhouse, Stam and Sen. Neal Hunt, R-Wake, who spoke in favor of merit pay for teachers, was posted to The Locker Room, a blog with a conservative bent. The blog is maintained by the John Locke Foundation, an Art Pope-funded think tank in Raleigh.
But what of Art Pope? He was nowhere to be seen.
Present or not, Pope was the star of this show, the evening’s events and cast of characters a virtual playbill of his growing influence over education policy in North Carolina and the tools he’s used to achieve it: Locke, Civitas, AFP, the Republican Party—all beneficiaries of the Pope Foundation or Pope himself.
Indeed, Pope’s self-image may well be reflected in a description of the humble man for whom the Locke Foundation’s “E.A. Morris Fellowship for Emerging Leaders” is named.
E. A. Morris, who headed the giant Blue Bell Corp. in Greensboro, was “one of the founding fathers of the North Carolina conservative movement,” the Locke website relates, “known for his leadership skills in his community and throughout North Carolina. [His] generosity extended to the support of many charitable and philanthropic causes that aid the advancement of the human condition. While he received several accolades for his achievements, he remained unassuming, humbly accepting such praise.”
The Locke website also contains some details about the projects carried out by Morris fellows from the Class of ’09. Bill Gilbert of Raleigh helped promote tea party events in North Carolina in concert with Americans for Prosperity. Dan Soucek ran a “reverse raffle” to raise money for his campaign in the 45th District, in western North Carolina.
Soucek, a Republican, is now in the Senate and, as a member of the education committee, played a role in the passage of Senate Bill 8, the GOP’s charter-school bill. Sen. Richard Stevens, R-Wake, the bill’s chief sponsor, credited Soucek with adding key language to the provision about the licensing commission.
There were no accolades, though, for the man behind the curtain: Art Pope.
As a younger man, Pope was elected to the House from a Raleigh district and served alongside his friend Skip Stam. Pope even captured the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor in 1992, losing to Democrat Dennis Wicker. Quiet and introverted, however, Pope wasn’t really cut out to be a frontman. He was appointed to fill a House vacancy in 1999 and served through 2002. Since then, he’s chosen to use the financial assets under his control to build a conservative network of acolytes and elevate them to power.
Nowhere is Pope’s imprint more evident than in education policy. His various organizations have long supported more charter schools, vouchers and cutting funding for traditional schools—especially for elaborate facilities, administrators and extracurricular programs. The groups also support merit pay for teachers whose students get the best test results.
More “market competition” from private schools and charter schools, these Pope-backed groups argue, would force the state-run schools to improve or lose students—and in turn, lose even more of their funding.
In the current budget fight, the John Locke Foundation also supports killing former Gov. Jim Hunt’s Smart Start programs for preschool children and former Gov. Mike Easley’s signature More At Four program for at-risk 4-year-olds. Such programs should be replaced by—what else?—refundable tax credits for private preschool or child care expenses, the foundation argues. Although “for a smaller subset of desperately poor preschoolers who lack functioning parents, the foundation says, a “carefully designed state intervention may be justified.”
Pope says the views expressed by Locke, Civitas and AFP are “not necessarily” the same as his. They have their own diverse staffs, he said, and he doesn’t tell them what to say or write. Sometimes he agrees with them; sometimes he doesn’t.
He did acknowledge, however, that he supports lifting the cap on charter schools and merit pay for teachers, especially math and science teachers. He supports tax credits for private school tuition in general, though he said he hasn’t read Stam’s bill and has no position on it.
Public aid to private schools isn’t always a conservative position, Pope added. Even the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts liberal, was in favor of tuition grants for low-income kids trapped in inner-city schools.
Pope vociferously denied, in fact, being anti-public schools, saying that as a legislator he supported numerous funding increases, including votes for the Excellent Schools Act, the ABCs of Education Law and additional aid to low-wealth counties.
The Pope Foundation doesn’t limit itself to K–12 public education. The foundation also pays the bills, to the tune of some $540,000 a year, for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy to pump out criticism of North Carolina’s public universities.
The center has been arguing for a decade that the UNC system is too big, too costly to taxpayers and that it enrolls too many students unprepared for academic work—who should attend a cheaper community college.
A perennial complaint from the Pope Center is that the UNC faculty, with support from university administrators, indoctrinates students with radical ideas, including “diversity” courses in which the views of women, minority and gay scholars are considered instead those of the great white male thinkers like, say, philosopher John Locke.
In 2004, Pope got into a tussle with UNC-Chapel Hill faculty members over the use of money he was prepared to donate toward a new “Studies in Western Civilization” curriculum. Faculty said he was trying to promote his conservative agenda in their history courses; he denied it—and continues to deny it.
Since then, Pope’s donated money to several universities—always in response to their request, he said—for programs such as one at N.C. Central University that brings speakers to the law school and another at N.C. State that brings speakers to its program in law and economics. As Pope described them, the programs have a conservative flavor: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was among the speakers at N.C. Central, he said, and Vernon Smith, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, spoke at N.C. State.
Pope’s organizations have long maintained that students should pay more of their own way to a UNC education, with taxpayers paying less. In a May 2000 paper, “A New Model for the Financing of Higher Education in North Carolina,” the center’s George Leef contended that UNC tuitions “[have] been held far too low, and notwithstanding the vague injunction in the state constitution to keep the cost of higher education as low as ‘practicable,’ a substantial increase would be good policy.”
(In fact, the state constitution calls for UNC and other public institutions of higher education to be “free of expense” as far as practicable. )
It would be good policy, Leef contended, because many taxpayers “derive no direct benefit” from educating other people’s children. Thus, students or their parents should pay, with exceptions made for the poor.
Moreover, Leef said, the state should give the private schools more money—in the Legislative Tuition Grant program—as a way of tilting the playing field against the public schools.
Eleven years later, Leef’s title at the center is director of research, and he continues to hold the same views, summarized in his biography as “free markets, minimal government, private property, and individual rights.”
And 11 years later, tuitions and fees at UNC campuses are about triple what they were when Leef wrote his paper. In-state undergraduates at UNC-CH, for example, paid $2,365 in 1999–2000, exclusive of room and board. The current rate is $6,840.
Nonetheless, the Pope Center issued a new paper last month again arguing that, “Considerable savings can be achieved by replacing state appropriations with revenue from tuition.”
On the center’s website, however, Jane Shaw, the center’s president and a regular columnist on its Clarion Call blog, took a dim view of giving the UNC system state funds or student tuition increases. “It’s time to ‘starve the beast’—limit the amount of money that the university system has to spend so that it will make the right changes,” Shaw wrote.
There’s some irony in the fact that Pope-funded groups complain about too many students in too many UNC institutions while they themselves proliferate: Locke, Civitas, Civitas Action, Pope Center, AFP-NC, Real Jobs NC and the list goes on.
But if their messages are redundant (and they are), the methods of the different Pope-backed groups vary greatly, combining for a kind of tag-team or good cop-bad cop politics that is working in education policy.
The John Locke Foundation is the flagship of the bunch. It’s fashioned as a think tank, with a host of staffers churning out enormous volumes of written and spoken words and TV sound bites for any audience that will listen to them. Its president, smooth-talking John Hood, is especially prolific, attacking big government at every opportunity while assuring us that the right-wing ideas he’s promoting are in no way radical, but simply the next reasonable thing.
For example, Hood wrote recently that liberals are wrong when they fear that “parental choice” (vouchers and charter schools) will destroy the public schools—so are any conservatives who happily forecast that outcome. The likely result, Hood said, is that a quarter of students will attend charter or private schools—far fewer than in other countries which, Hood was pleased to note, spend less tax money (emphasis added) per pupil than the U.S.
Locke’s publications are replete with articles extolling the virtues of this charter school, that homeschooling parent or the next tea party movement (headline from the January issue of its Carolina Journal: “North Carolina Tea Party’s Next Objective? Education Reform”).
Civitas, meanwhile, functions mainly as a training ground for conservative activists, including instruction about political uses of the information supplied by other Pope-backed groups. One of Civitas’ new offerings is to supply state-required training to local school board members. Not surprisingly, Civitas got its first such gig with the Wake County school board after a five-member conservative majority took power following the 2009 elections. Money from the Wake County Republican Party helped elect the conservatives; Pope gave $15,000 to the party, according to campaign finance reports, and advised on its election strategy. Pope, in fact, was called the “architect” of the plan to elect Republicans to the school board by then-party financial chair Marc Scruggs.
Then there’s Americans for Prosperity, a national organization that has an especially active North Carolina chapter, thanks to the Pope Foundation. AFP-NC’s job is grassroots organizing and agitation. AFP-NC State Director Dallas Woodhouse, whose pugnacious personality is 180 degrees removed from John Hood’s, is prone to calling the state teachers association “sworn enemies” of school reform. According to media reports, Woodhouse threatened to punch out a Georgetown University professor (a “moronic professor from some distant school,” Woodhouse complained) who debated him on the radio about the Wake school board’s turn to the right.
On any given day, Woodhouse, Hood, Leef, Shaw, Bob Luebke—the education analyst at Civitas—or a multitude of other Pope-paid pundits may appear on your TV screen or in The News & Observer, commenting on education issues. Each supposedly represents a distinct group, a “different” point of view. In fact, they are voices in the Pope chorus.
You may encounter Lindalyn Kakadelis, head of a group called the North Carolina Education Alliance. Kakadelis is a former teacher and Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board member and one of the founders of a charter school in Charlotte.
Kakadelis counts as a “key achievement” voting as a school board member to end Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s school diversity policy, leading to a neighborhood-schools plan that critics say has wrecked Charlotte’s inner-city schools—shades of Wake County.
Her education alliance isn’t an independent organization, though. Rather, it’s a “project of” the Locke Foundation.
Even groups that are independent, like Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, benefit from the Pope empire’s warm embrace. PEFNC President Darrell Allison says his organization receives no funding from Pope (and the Pope foundation records show none). But when Allison’s group hosted a forum on school choice featuring Milwaukee charter schools guru Howard Fuller recently, John Locke and the other Pope groups lavished it with publicity, helping turn out an audience of 700—which made for a positive story in the Carolina Journal: “At Meeting, Charter Struggle Compared to Civil Rights.”
Recently, Art Pope has been attacked by pro-diversity groups in Wake County (“a villain to those who value the public sector and public education, the youth group NC HEAT said) and by the N.C. Association of Educators, which posted a video called “Money & Privatization: A Love Story.” That video accused Pope of supporting the resegregation of Wake’s schools and “anti-public education legislation” in the General Assembly.
And in the House, Rep. Rick Glazier, D-Cumberland, ripped Senate Bill 8, the charter-school bill, as a radical assault on public education itself. “There have always been critics of public education, as there should be, but their goal has always been to improve public education,” Glazier said. “It seems, however, that the sponsors and the folks behind Senate Bill 8′s answer to public education is to get rid of it and replace it with something that is wholly different and not subject to any democratic participation or control.”
Such attacks infuriate Pope, who insists that parental choice and other elements of the conservative reform agenda will strengthen public education, not cripple it. The political left, he said, want to “attack the messenger” by demonizing him rather than confronting head-on the points he and his fellow conservatives are making.
“Speaking for myself,” Pope said, “I am strongly committed to improving the public schools.”
It also hacks him off, he said, that the media is obsessed with the money he pours into conservative causes, but never looks at progressive organizations and their funding: Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation in Winston-Salem and moderate business leaders like Jim Goodmon of Capital Broadcasting. Amass all these groups, plus the N.C. Justice Center and the others “on the far left” he said, outspend Pope-funded groups. (According to Philanthropy Journal, the value of two trusts operated by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation totaled $470 million in 2007, but dropped during the recession.)
Woodhouse crowed about how the N.C. Association of Educators was suddenly in retreat and then introduced the new House majority leader, Rep. Paul (Skip) Stam of Wake County. “He’s a friend who’s been with us from the beginning on charter schools,” Woodhouse said.
Stam quickly endorsed the AFP’s three charter school “principles”: an unlimited number of charters; no minimum or maximum enrollments at the schools; and a separate licensing commission outside of the State Department of Public Instruction—even though charter schools are ostensibly public schools.
Then Stam turned to his own bill to create tax credits for parents who pay private school tuitions or homeschool their children. Always call them tax credits, he warned, chortling at this chicanery, because the phrase “tax credits” does better in the polls than “private school vouchers.”
Within hours, video of Woodhouse, Stam and Sen. Neal Hunt, R-Wake, who spoke in favor of merit pay for teachers, was posted to The Locker Room, a blog with a conservative bent. The blog is maintained by the John Locke Foundation, an Art Pope-funded think tank in Raleigh.
But what of Art Pope? He was nowhere to be seen.
Present or not, Pope was the star of this show, the evening’s events and cast of characters a virtual playbill of his growing influence over education policy in North Carolina and the tools he’s used to achieve it: Locke, Civitas, AFP, the Republican Party—all beneficiaries of the Pope Foundation or Pope himself.
Indeed, Pope’s self-image may well be reflected in a description of the humble man for whom the Locke Foundation’s “E.A. Morris Fellowship for Emerging Leaders” is named.
E. A. Morris, who headed the giant Blue Bell Corp. in Greensboro, was “one of the founding fathers of the North Carolina conservative movement,” the Locke website relates, “known for his leadership skills in his community and throughout North Carolina. [His] generosity extended to the support of many charitable and philanthropic causes that aid the advancement of the human condition. While he received several accolades for his achievements, he remained unassuming, humbly accepting such praise.”
The Locke website also contains some details about the projects carried out by Morris fellows from the Class of ’09. Bill Gilbert of Raleigh helped promote tea party events in North Carolina in concert with Americans for Prosperity. Dan Soucek ran a “reverse raffle” to raise money for his campaign in the 45th District, in western North Carolina.
Soucek, a Republican, is now in the Senate and, as a member of the education committee, played a role in the passage of Senate Bill 8, the GOP’s charter-school bill. Sen. Richard Stevens, R-Wake, the bill’s chief sponsor, credited Soucek with adding key language to the provision about the licensing commission.
There were no accolades, though, for the man behind the curtain: Art Pope.
As a younger man, Pope was elected to the House from a Raleigh district and served alongside his friend Skip Stam. Pope even captured the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor in 1992, losing to Democrat Dennis Wicker. Quiet and introverted, however, Pope wasn’t really cut out to be a frontman. He was appointed to fill a House vacancy in 1999 and served through 2002. Since then, he’s chosen to use the financial assets under his control to build a conservative network of acolytes and elevate them to power.
Nowhere is Pope’s imprint more evident than in education policy. His various organizations have long supported more charter schools, vouchers and cutting funding for traditional schools—especially for elaborate facilities, administrators and extracurricular programs. The groups also support merit pay for teachers whose students get the best test results.
More “market competition” from private schools and charter schools, these Pope-backed groups argue, would force the state-run schools to improve or lose students—and in turn, lose even more of their funding.
In the current budget fight, the John Locke Foundation also supports killing former Gov. Jim Hunt’s Smart Start programs for preschool children and former Gov. Mike Easley’s signature More At Four program for at-risk 4-year-olds. Such programs should be replaced by—what else?—refundable tax credits for private preschool or child care expenses, the foundation argues. Although “for a smaller subset of desperately poor preschoolers who lack functioning parents, the foundation says, a “carefully designed state intervention may be justified.”
Pope says the views expressed by Locke, Civitas and AFP are “not necessarily” the same as his. They have their own diverse staffs, he said, and he doesn’t tell them what to say or write. Sometimes he agrees with them; sometimes he doesn’t.
He did acknowledge, however, that he supports lifting the cap on charter schools and merit pay for teachers, especially math and science teachers. He supports tax credits for private school tuition in general, though he said he hasn’t read Stam’s bill and has no position on it.
Public aid to private schools isn’t always a conservative position, Pope added. Even the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts liberal, was in favor of tuition grants for low-income kids trapped in inner-city schools.
Pope vociferously denied, in fact, being anti-public schools, saying that as a legislator he supported numerous funding increases, including votes for the Excellent Schools Act, the ABCs of Education Law and additional aid to low-wealth counties.
The Pope Foundation doesn’t limit itself to K–12 public education. The foundation also pays the bills, to the tune of some $540,000 a year, for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy to pump out criticism of North Carolina’s public universities.
The center has been arguing for a decade that the UNC system is too big, too costly to taxpayers and that it enrolls too many students unprepared for academic work—who should attend a cheaper community college.
A perennial complaint from the Pope Center is that the UNC faculty, with support from university administrators, indoctrinates students with radical ideas, including “diversity” courses in which the views of women, minority and gay scholars are considered instead those of the great white male thinkers like, say, philosopher John Locke.
In 2004, Pope got into a tussle with UNC-Chapel Hill faculty members over the use of money he was prepared to donate toward a new “Studies in Western Civilization” curriculum. Faculty said he was trying to promote his conservative agenda in their history courses; he denied it—and continues to deny it.
Since then, Pope’s donated money to several universities—always in response to their request, he said—for programs such as one at N.C. Central University that brings speakers to the law school and another at N.C. State that brings speakers to its program in law and economics. As Pope described them, the programs have a conservative flavor: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was among the speakers at N.C. Central, he said, and Vernon Smith, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, spoke at N.C. State.
Pope’s organizations have long maintained that students should pay more of their own way to a UNC education, with taxpayers paying less. In a May 2000 paper, “A New Model for the Financing of Higher Education in North Carolina,” the center’s George Leef contended that UNC tuitions “[have] been held far too low, and notwithstanding the vague injunction in the state constitution to keep the cost of higher education as low as ‘practicable,’ a substantial increase would be good policy.”
(In fact, the state constitution calls for UNC and other public institutions of higher education to be “free of expense” as far as practicable. )
It would be good policy, Leef contended, because many taxpayers “derive no direct benefit” from educating other people’s children. Thus, students or their parents should pay, with exceptions made for the poor.
Moreover, Leef said, the state should give the private schools more money—in the Legislative Tuition Grant program—as a way of tilting the playing field against the public schools.
Eleven years later, Leef’s title at the center is director of research, and he continues to hold the same views, summarized in his biography as “free markets, minimal government, private property, and individual rights.”
And 11 years later, tuitions and fees at UNC campuses are about triple what they were when Leef wrote his paper. In-state undergraduates at UNC-CH, for example, paid $2,365 in 1999–2000, exclusive of room and board. The current rate is $6,840.
Nonetheless, the Pope Center issued a new paper last month again arguing that, “Considerable savings can be achieved by replacing state appropriations with revenue from tuition.”
On the center’s website, however, Jane Shaw, the center’s president and a regular columnist on its Clarion Call blog, took a dim view of giving the UNC system state funds or student tuition increases. “It’s time to ‘starve the beast’—limit the amount of money that the university system has to spend so that it will make the right changes,” Shaw wrote.
There’s some irony in the fact that Pope-funded groups complain about too many students in too many UNC institutions while they themselves proliferate: Locke, Civitas, Civitas Action, Pope Center, AFP-NC, Real Jobs NC and the list goes on.
But if their messages are redundant (and they are), the methods of the different Pope-backed groups vary greatly, combining for a kind of tag-team or good cop-bad cop politics that is working in education policy.
The John Locke Foundation is the flagship of the bunch. It’s fashioned as a think tank, with a host of staffers churning out enormous volumes of written and spoken words and TV sound bites for any audience that will listen to them. Its president, smooth-talking John Hood, is especially prolific, attacking big government at every opportunity while assuring us that the right-wing ideas he’s promoting are in no way radical, but simply the next reasonable thing.
For example, Hood wrote recently that liberals are wrong when they fear that “parental choice” (vouchers and charter schools) will destroy the public schools—so are any conservatives who happily forecast that outcome. The likely result, Hood said, is that a quarter of students will attend charter or private schools—far fewer than in other countries which, Hood was pleased to note, spend less tax money (emphasis added) per pupil than the U.S.
Locke’s publications are replete with articles extolling the virtues of this charter school, that homeschooling parent or the next tea party movement (headline from the January issue of its Carolina Journal: “North Carolina Tea Party’s Next Objective? Education Reform”).
Civitas, meanwhile, functions mainly as a training ground for conservative activists, including instruction about political uses of the information supplied by other Pope-backed groups. One of Civitas’ new offerings is to supply state-required training to local school board members. Not surprisingly, Civitas got its first such gig with the Wake County school board after a five-member conservative majority took power following the 2009 elections. Money from the Wake County Republican Party helped elect the conservatives; Pope gave $15,000 to the party, according to campaign finance reports, and advised on its election strategy. Pope, in fact, was called the “architect” of the plan to elect Republicans to the school board by then-party financial chair Marc Scruggs.
Then there’s Americans for Prosperity, a national organization that has an especially active North Carolina chapter, thanks to the Pope Foundation. AFP-NC’s job is grassroots organizing and agitation. AFP-NC State Director Dallas Woodhouse, whose pugnacious personality is 180 degrees removed from John Hood’s, is prone to calling the state teachers association “sworn enemies” of school reform. According to media reports, Woodhouse threatened to punch out a Georgetown University professor (a “moronic professor from some distant school,” Woodhouse complained) who debated him on the radio about the Wake school board’s turn to the right.
On any given day, Woodhouse, Hood, Leef, Shaw, Bob Luebke—the education analyst at Civitas—or a multitude of other Pope-paid pundits may appear on your TV screen or in The News & Observer, commenting on education issues. Each supposedly represents a distinct group, a “different” point of view. In fact, they are voices in the Pope chorus.
You may encounter Lindalyn Kakadelis, head of a group called the North Carolina Education Alliance. Kakadelis is a former teacher and Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board member and one of the founders of a charter school in Charlotte.
Kakadelis counts as a “key achievement” voting as a school board member to end Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s school diversity policy, leading to a neighborhood-schools plan that critics say has wrecked Charlotte’s inner-city schools—shades of Wake County.
Her education alliance isn’t an independent organization, though. Rather, it’s a “project of” the Locke Foundation.
Even groups that are independent, like Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, benefit from the Pope empire’s warm embrace. PEFNC President Darrell Allison says his organization receives no funding from Pope (and the Pope foundation records show none). But when Allison’s group hosted a forum on school choice featuring Milwaukee charter schools guru Howard Fuller recently, John Locke and the other Pope groups lavished it with publicity, helping turn out an audience of 700—which made for a positive story in the Carolina Journal: “At Meeting, Charter Struggle Compared to Civil Rights.”
Recently, Art Pope has been attacked by pro-diversity groups in Wake County (“a villain to those who value the public sector and public education, the youth group NC HEAT said) and by the N.C. Association of Educators, which posted a video called “Money & Privatization: A Love Story.” That video accused Pope of supporting the resegregation of Wake’s schools and “anti-public education legislation” in the General Assembly.
And in the House, Rep. Rick Glazier, D-Cumberland, ripped Senate Bill 8, the charter-school bill, as a radical assault on public education itself. “There have always been critics of public education, as there should be, but their goal has always been to improve public education,” Glazier said. “It seems, however, that the sponsors and the folks behind Senate Bill 8′s answer to public education is to get rid of it and replace it with something that is wholly different and not subject to any democratic participation or control.”
Such attacks infuriate Pope, who insists that parental choice and other elements of the conservative reform agenda will strengthen public education, not cripple it. The political left, he said, want to “attack the messenger” by demonizing him rather than confronting head-on the points he and his fellow conservatives are making.
“Speaking for myself,” Pope said, “I am strongly committed to improving the public schools.”
It also hacks him off, he said, that the media is obsessed with the money he pours into conservative causes, but never looks at progressive organizations and their funding: Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation in Winston-Salem and moderate business leaders like Jim Goodmon of Capital Broadcasting. Amass all these groups, plus the N.C. Justice Center and the others “on the far left” he said, outspend Pope-funded groups. (According to Philanthropy Journal, the value of two trusts operated by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation totaled $470 million in 2007, but dropped during the recession.)
Shaw Capital Management Headlines: Domino’s Pizza Opens First New Store in Poland Residents of Warsaw can now get Domino’s Pizza delivered to their door
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/03/08/3459393/dominos-pizza-opens-first-new.html
By Domino’s Pizza
SOURCE Domino’s Pizza
ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 8, 2011 – /PRNewswire/ – Domino’s Pizza (NYSE: DPZ), the recognized world leader in pizza delivery, has opened its first store in Poland, with the promise of hot, delicious pizza for the residents of Warsaw. The new store is located in the Mokotow district of Warsaw, which is an area with a high density of apartments and a vibrant business district.
DP Polska SA is the Master Franchisee for Poland and is wholly owned by DP Poland plc, a publicly traded entity on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange. The company’s management has extensive experience in consumer brands, retailing, marketing and finance. Their broad business experience makes them well-positioned to develop Domino’s into a leading brand in Poland.
“This first store is world-class and the quality of the pizzas is outstanding,” said Peter Shaw, chief executive of DP Poland. “We have now taken our first step in realizing our vision to transform the pizza delivery market in Poland, Europe’s sixth largest economy. I would like to pay tribute to the incredible energy and professionalism of our team that has made this first store open on time and on budget.”
Domino’s Pizza now operates in 70 markets worldwide, with nearly half of its global retail sales coming from international stores, generating roughly a third of its operating income.
About Domino’s Pizza®
Founded in 1960, Domino’s Pizza is the recognized world leader in pizza delivery. Domino’s is listed on the NYSE under the symbol “DPZ.” As of the fourth quarter of 2010, through its primarily locally-owned and operated franchised system, Domino’s operated a network of 9,351 franchised and Company-owned stores in the United States and over 65 international markets. Domino’s Pizza had global retail sales of over $6.2 billion in 2010, comprised of over $3.3 billion domestically and over $2.9 billion internationally.
In June 2010, Pizza Today named Domino’s its “Chain of the Year” – making the company a two-time winner of the honor. In late 2009, Domino’s debuted its ‘Inspired New Pizza’ – a permanent change to its hand-tossed product, reinvented from the crust up. Helped by the launch of its Domino’s Smart Slice school lunch pizza in late 2010, Domino’s Pizza is collaborating with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation to serve healthier school foods and beverages in the United States. In 2011, Domino’s was ranked #1 in Forbes Magazine’s “Top 20 Franchises for the Money” list.
Twitter - http://twitter.com/dominos
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/Dominos
Order - www.dominos.com
Mobile – http://mobile.dominos.com
Info - www.dominosbiz.com
By Domino’s Pizza
SOURCE Domino’s Pizza
ANN ARBOR, Mich., March 8, 2011 – /PRNewswire/ – Domino’s Pizza (NYSE: DPZ), the recognized world leader in pizza delivery, has opened its first store in Poland, with the promise of hot, delicious pizza for the residents of Warsaw. The new store is located in the Mokotow district of Warsaw, which is an area with a high density of apartments and a vibrant business district.
DP Polska SA is the Master Franchisee for Poland and is wholly owned by DP Poland plc, a publicly traded entity on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange. The company’s management has extensive experience in consumer brands, retailing, marketing and finance. Their broad business experience makes them well-positioned to develop Domino’s into a leading brand in Poland.
“This first store is world-class and the quality of the pizzas is outstanding,” said Peter Shaw, chief executive of DP Poland. “We have now taken our first step in realizing our vision to transform the pizza delivery market in Poland, Europe’s sixth largest economy. I would like to pay tribute to the incredible energy and professionalism of our team that has made this first store open on time and on budget.”
Domino’s Pizza now operates in 70 markets worldwide, with nearly half of its global retail sales coming from international stores, generating roughly a third of its operating income.
About Domino’s Pizza®
Founded in 1960, Domino’s Pizza is the recognized world leader in pizza delivery. Domino’s is listed on the NYSE under the symbol “DPZ.” As of the fourth quarter of 2010, through its primarily locally-owned and operated franchised system, Domino’s operated a network of 9,351 franchised and Company-owned stores in the United States and over 65 international markets. Domino’s Pizza had global retail sales of over $6.2 billion in 2010, comprised of over $3.3 billion domestically and over $2.9 billion internationally.
In June 2010, Pizza Today named Domino’s its “Chain of the Year” – making the company a two-time winner of the honor. In late 2009, Domino’s debuted its ‘Inspired New Pizza’ – a permanent change to its hand-tossed product, reinvented from the crust up. Helped by the launch of its Domino’s Smart Slice school lunch pizza in late 2010, Domino’s Pizza is collaborating with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation to serve healthier school foods and beverages in the United States. In 2011, Domino’s was ranked #1 in Forbes Magazine’s “Top 20 Franchises for the Money” list.
Twitter - http://twitter.com/dominos
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/Dominos
Order - www.dominos.com
Mobile – http://mobile.dominos.com
Info - www.dominosbiz.com
Shaw Capital Management Headlines: Work begins to make way for new Earthquakes home | World Headlines: Shaw Capital Management
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/03/04/3450457/work-begins-to-make-way-for-new.html
The Associated Press
Published: Friday, Mar. 4, 2011 – 3:18 pm
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Demolition is under way on an old factory that will eventually become the permanent home of the San Jose Earthquakes soccer team.
Team officials, local leaders and soccer fans gathered Thursday as an excavator made the first tear into the former FMC plant near the Mineta San Jose International Airport.
The Earthquakes plan to build a $60 million stadium at the Santa Clara site. The proposed complex also would include office space, retail space and hotel rooms.
The San Jose Mercury News reports that the team still needs to get a building permit approved by the city.
The Earthquakes returned to San Jose in 2008 after briefly relocating to Houston. The team is playing home games in Buck Shaw Stadium at Santa Clara University until their new stadium is ready.
The Associated Press
Published: Friday, Mar. 4, 2011 – 3:18 pm
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Demolition is under way on an old factory that will eventually become the permanent home of the San Jose Earthquakes soccer team.
Team officials, local leaders and soccer fans gathered Thursday as an excavator made the first tear into the former FMC plant near the Mineta San Jose International Airport.
The Earthquakes plan to build a $60 million stadium at the Santa Clara site. The proposed complex also would include office space, retail space and hotel rooms.
The San Jose Mercury News reports that the team still needs to get a building permit approved by the city.
The Earthquakes returned to San Jose in 2008 after briefly relocating to Houston. The team is playing home games in Buck Shaw Stadium at Santa Clara University until their new stadium is ready.
Shaw Capital Management Headlines:How to be a Brit in Kansas City | World Headlines: Shaw Capital Management
Break out the bitters and pass the crisps. The royals have landed in Kansas City.
Princess Diana’s wedding gown has taken up temporary residence at Union Station. Anglophiles around town pinched themselves when they realized the famous dress would be right here when Diana’s first-born, Prince William, gets married next month. Blimey! A harmonic convergence of royal proportions! British wannabes are more excited than Ricky Gervais hosting a celebrity rehab session.
So we wondered: How can a non-Brit be British in Kansas City? We went straight to the Brits themselves, who told us where to find their food, a cup of good tea and other Brits in Kansas City.
The accent?
You’re on your own, bloke.
Meet the Brits
When love for an American woman brought him to town a few years ago, Ray Caraher wanted to find other British ex-pats, so he started a social club called Brit’s International.
Since 2005 he has attracted 200-some members, people who sound an awful lot like him, like to eat what he does. They know his accent is Wimbledon, not Ireland. They know what pork cracklings are and the proper way to fry up a banger.
But more important, they get one another.
“There is something fundamentally eccentric about Brits, which unless you start to look below the surface goes unnoticed,” London native Neil Ryall says.
“It gets waved off as being simply ‘foreign.’ Whether it was George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Whistler who said of Brits and Americans, ‘Two nations divided by a common language,’ (they) should have added an addendum — ‘and the Brits are nuts!’?”
Princess Diana’s wedding gown has taken up temporary residence at Union Station. Anglophiles around town pinched themselves when they realized the famous dress would be right here when Diana’s first-born, Prince William, gets married next month. Blimey! A harmonic convergence of royal proportions! British wannabes are more excited than Ricky Gervais hosting a celebrity rehab session.
So we wondered: How can a non-Brit be British in Kansas City? We went straight to the Brits themselves, who told us where to find their food, a cup of good tea and other Brits in Kansas City.
The accent?
You’re on your own, bloke.
Meet the Brits
When love for an American woman brought him to town a few years ago, Ray Caraher wanted to find other British ex-pats, so he started a social club called Brit’s International.
Since 2005 he has attracted 200-some members, people who sound an awful lot like him, like to eat what he does. They know his accent is Wimbledon, not Ireland. They know what pork cracklings are and the proper way to fry up a banger.
But more important, they get one another.
“There is something fundamentally eccentric about Brits, which unless you start to look below the surface goes unnoticed,” London native Neil Ryall says.
“It gets waved off as being simply ‘foreign.’ Whether it was George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Whistler who said of Brits and Americans, ‘Two nations divided by a common language,’ (they) should have added an addendum — ‘and the Brits are nuts!’?”
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