The City County Observer has just learned that State Representative Gail Riecken will be holding a news conference on January 10 at the CK Newsome Center,to officially announce if she will be a Democratic candidate for Mayor of Evansville in 2015. The time of the news conference is 11:15 am.

This announcement could open the door to an historic election in Evansville, as her candidacy will give Evansville the chance to elect its first woman to the Mayor’s office in the 202 Year history of this great city. Mrs. Riecken has served as the District 77 Representative in the Indiana Legislature since 2009, and was also on the Evansville City Council early in her political career

We hear that local rank and file Democrats are looking to State Representative  Riecken to help unite their party, which has been splintered since the last City election. At that time, a group of Democrats broke off from their party to support Republican Lloyd Winnecke over the Democrat, the late Rick Davis. The party “rebellion” and low voter participation allowed Winnecke to win the now financially  embattled Mayor’s office.

State Representative Riecken has earned a solid reputation as an effective office-holder who is highly responsive to the needs and wishes of her constituents.

She is a graduate of Bosse High School and Indiana University, and is a licensed Marine Pilot. She has served as a Neighborhood Coordinator for the Community Action Program of Evansville and Executive Director of the Evansville Department of Parks and Recreation, as well as piloting the Winnie Mae on the Ohio River.

Gail has been involved in too many community service projects to list, but she has a special interest in protecting our children and in historic preservation. She is a co-founder of Ark Crisis Nursery and has served on the board of Family and Children’s Service. She has been a coordinator of the Riverside Neighborhood Association and sat on the board of the Evansville Preservation Alliance and Hope of Evansville.

Gail has been married for more than forty years to Ron Riecken, who built Inland Marina with his brother, Carl in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. He served three tours of duty in Viet Nam, as well. She and Ron are the parents of two daughters, Julia Belle Riecken Langerak and Katie Riecken. Parker. They have three (3) grandchildren, Joey, Martha and George

If State Representative Gail Riecken decides to run for Mayor of Evansville we predict this will be the most expensive and spirited Mayoral race in Evansville 202 year history. We are looking forward to see if the voters of this great city will elect its first woman mayor in our 202 year history.

Please take time and vote in todays “Readers Poll”.

Copyright 2014 City County Observer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

What part of “Hey, Kids! Steal your parents’ guns and bring them to school!” sounds like a bad idea?

If you answered, “All of it,” you may be a conservative.

A San Francisco production company, Sleeper 13 Productions, created what they call a “Public Service Announcement” video in which a young boy sneaks into his parents’ bedroom, steals a handgun out of a dresser drawer and hides it in his backpack.

He then carries the gun onto the school bus and into a classroom. After class, he shocks the teacher at her desk by taking the gun out of his backpack and slamming it onto her desk.

“Can you take this away? I don’t feel safe with a gun in my house,” the boy pouts.

The “public service” ad then wraps with the tag line, “Our children deserve a safe world. Stop gun violence now.”

The company’s president and this ad’s producer, Rejina Sincic, has replied to outraged viewers on Twitter that she’s “entertained” by their comments.

Liberals are not “entertained” by police in schools or military recruiting in schools and have promoted zero tolerance laws that have outlawed skeet and trap club students from having unloaded shotguns in the trunks of their locked vehicles on campus.

Students have been expelled and denied graduation for such offenses.

Now, this “progressive” gun control idea is to encourage children to commit felonies by stealing weapons from their parents, carrying them onto school buses and tossing the guns onto their teachers’ desks.

According to the credits, the video was shot with permission from a local school in Oakland.

Brilliant.

This exhibition of liberal dysphoric mania over guns is also apparent in the recurrent exercise in futility known as “gun buy-backs.”

The faulty logic is that criminals will give up their guns for a hundred dollars each and this will permanently eliminate guns from the hands of evil-doers.

How quaint.

The real result is that hundreds of old, useless guns are dumped for more than they’re worth along with the occasional AR-15 that some widow’s husband never fired.

A 1999 article in the journal “Law and Order” reported that some people sold guns to police during buybacks and then used the money to buy new guns.

How reassuring.

University studies around the country have found gun buy-backs do not reduce gun violence or gun suicides. Not even a little.

Jon Vernick, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who has co-authored two studies on the question, says there is no evidence that buybacks reduce gun violence.

A 2004 report by the National Academy of Sciences called “Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review” said, “The theoretical premise for gun buy-back programs is that the program will lead to fewer guns on the streets because fewer guns are available for either theft or trade and that consequently violence will decline. It is the committee’s view that the theory underlying gun buy-back programs is badly flawed and the empirical evidence demonstrates the ineffectiveness of these programs.”

“The continuation of buyback programs is a triumph of wishful thinking over all the available evidence,” Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis, told a reporter.

No fewer than a dozen studies performed by universities, police and newspapers have revealed the same result.

These facts won’t stop the liberals who also tell kids to steal their parent’s guns and turn them in at school.

Gun buy-backs are very popular with liberals who know their true value: enabling left-wing politicians to gather more votes from a constituency that truly believes the politician using tax dollars for the buybacks is helping them.

The real truth is that the politicians know the buybacks are useless in fighting crime and very profitable in getting votes from people ignorant of the buy-back’s failures.

Let’s hope American school kids haven’t been propagandized by the left to the point of actually stealing their parents’ guns and carrying them to school.

They’ll find the same treatment liberal policies have given to innocent kids with an empty trap gun in their locked vehicle: a police record and likely expulsion.

© Copyright 2014 Rick Jensen, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Please take time and vote in todays “Readers Poll”.

Copyright 2014 City County Observer. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.