University of Southern Indiana men’s basketball players Brandon Hogg (Edwardsville, Illinois) and Ben Jones (Robinson, Illinois) were named to the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) Honors Court for academic excellence during the 2011-12 season. The NABC Honors Court recognizes the talents and gifts these players possess off the court and the hard work exhibited in the classroom.

In order to be named to the NABC Honors Court, an athlete must meet a high standard of academic criteria. The student athlete must be a junior or senior academically and a varsity player; have a cumulative grade point average (GPA) of 3.2 or higher at the conclusion of the 2011-12 academic year; have matriculated at least one year at their current institution; and be a member of an NCAA Division I, II, III, or NAIA institution.

Hogg, a senior guard and a physical education major, earned honorable mention All-America honors from the Division II Bulletin after averaging a team-high and career-best 16.5 points per game. He also was named NABC first-team All-District and Daktronics second-team All-Region, while being selected for the first-team All-Great Lakes Valley Conference squad.

Jones, a junior guard and sport management major, averaged 3.1 points and 2.2 rebounds per contest off the bench during his first year at USI. Jones scored a season-high 11 points twice in 2011-12, while dishing out a season-best four assists against Berea College and grabbing season-high six rebounds versus Saint Joseph’s College.

Source: USI.edu

In response to the “you didn’t built that business” and the aftermath of revisionist interpretations based on nuance, Mark Steyn crafted a very straight to the point article. One of the best quotes was “the stimulus was large enough to build 1,567 Golden Gate bridges, yet for all of that money we do not have one new bridge”.

Excerpts from Orange County Register:

“If this is the best all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can do to put Humpty Dumpty’s silver-tongued oratory together again, they might as well cut to the chase and argue that accurately quoting President Obama is racist. The obvious interpretation sticks because it fits with the reality of the last three-and-a-half years – that America’s chief executive is a man entirely ignorant of business who presides over an administration profoundly hostile to it.

But, just for the record, I did “invest in roads and bridges,” and so did you. In fact, every dime in those roads and bridges comes from taxpayers, because government doesn’t have any money except for what it takes from the citizenry. And the more successful you are, the more you pay for those roads and bridges.
So here’s a breaking-news alert for President Nuance: We small-government guys are in favor of roads. Hard as it may be to credit, roads predated Big Government. Which came first, the chicken crossing the road or the Egg Regulatory Agency? That’s an easy one: Halfway through the first millennium B.C., the nomadic Yuezhi of Central Asia had well-traveled trading routes for getting nephrite jade from the Tarim Basin to their customers at the Chinese court, more than 2,500 miles away. On the other hand, the Yuezhi did not have a federal contraceptive mandate or a Bloombergian enforcement regime for carbonated beverages at concession stands at the rest area two days out of Khotan, so that probably explains why they’re not in the G7 today.

In Obama’s world, businessmen build nothing, whereas government are the hardest hard-hats on the planet. So, in his “You didn’t build that” speech, he invoked, yet again, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. “When we invested in the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or the Internet, sending a man to the moon – all those things benefited everybody. And so that’s the vision that I want to carry forward.”
He certainly carries it forward from one dam speech to another. He was doing his Hoover Dam shtick only last month, and I pointed out that there seemed to be a certain inconsistency between his enthusiasm for federal dam-building and the definitive administration pronouncement on the subject, by Deanna Archuleta, his Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior, in a speech to Democratic environmentalists in Nevada:
“You will never see another federal dam.”

Ever. So the president can carry forward his “vision,” but it apparently has no more real-world application than the visions he enjoyed as a member of his high school “choom gang” back in Hawaii. Incidentally, I was interested to learn from David Maraniss’ enlightening new biography that, during car-chooming sessions, young Barry insisted all the windows be rolled up so that no marijuana smoke would escape. If you can seriously envision President Obama opening a 21st century Hoover Dam, you need to lower the windows on your Chevy Volt.

The Golden Gate Bridge? As Reason’s Matt Welch pointed out, the Golden Gate cost at the time $35 million – or about $530 million today. So, for the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill alone, we could have had 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges. Where are they? Where are, say, the first dozen? If you laid 1,567 Golden Gate Bridges end to end, you’d have enough for one Golden Choom Bridge stretching from Obama’s Punahou High School in Honolulu over the Pacific all the way to his Occidental College in Los Angeles, so that his car-chooming chums can commute from one to the other without having to worry about TSA patdowns.
A stimulus bill equivalent to 1,567 Golden Gate bridges. A 2011 federal budget equivalent to 6,788 Golden Gate bridges. And yet we don’t have a single one.

Because that’s not what Big Government does: Money-no-object government spends more and more money for less and less objects. For all the American economy has to show for it, President Bob the Builder took just shy of a trillion dollars in stimulus, stuck it in his wheelbarrow, pushed it halfway across the Golden Gate Bridge, and tossed it into the Pacific.

Instead of roads and bridges, Obama-sized government funds stasis and sclerosis: The Hoover Dam of regulatory obstruction, the Golden Gateway to dependency. Last month, 80,000 Americans signed on to new jobs, but 85,000 Americans signed on for Social Security disability checks. Most of these people are not “disabled” as that term is generally understood. Rather, it’s the U.S. economy that’s disabled, and thus Obama incentivizes dependency. What Big Government is doing to those 85,000 “disabled” is profoundly wicked. Let me quote a guy called Mark Steyn, from his last book:

“The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people. Tony Blair’s ministry discovered it was politically helpful to reclassify a chunk of the unemployed as ‘disabled.’ A fit, able-bodied 40-year-old who has been on disability allowance for a decade understands somewhere at the back of his mind that he is living a lie, and that not just the government but his family and his friends are colluding in that lie.”

Millions of Americans have looked at the road ahead, and figured it goes nowhere. Best to pull off into the Social Security parking lot. Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. As the president would say, you didn’t build the express check-in to the Disability Office. Government built it, and, because they built it, you came. In Obama’s “visions,” he builds roads and bridges. In reality, the President of Dependistan has put nothing but roadblocks in the path to opportunity and growth.

That he can build. That’s all he can build.

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/obama-364707-build-golden.html

This article, written by nationally syndicated conservative columnist L. Brent Bozell, is sponsored by OXFORD MORTGAGE, EVANSVILLE, IN. SCOTT KLUEH, PRESIDENT. CALL (812) 476-9740.

Network television is a pretty dreary place in the summer time. It’s somehow the perfect time for Hollywood executives to throw millions of dollars at ever-dumber sexualized content. It’s hard to tell what offends more, the raunch or the sheer stupidity of it all.
The network calling itself “the CW” is barely noticed at any time of the year, if quality were a determinant. So instead they seem to be competing for some kind of Nobel Sleaze Prize this summer with a Miami-based “reality” show called “The Catalina.”
Hotel owner Nathan Lieberman developed the show simply to promote bookings at his own hotel. That is how pedestrian our “entertainment” media have become. Illogical, too: Lieberman told one interviewer his audience is too young to book rooms with him. “The CW is a good fit for us because their demographic is very young. Even though at The Catalina the rates aren’t inexpensive enough for the spring-break-type crowd, eventually they will grow up and have memories of the place they would like to visit again.”
After watching the show, it is fair to suggest it’s Lieberman and his oversexed employees who have the growing up to do. With only a limited run of episodes, “The Catalina” had to make an immediate impact, so they ramped up the raunch from the debut episode. Viewers were introduced to staffers such as David: “I love David,” said one female employee. “He’s just a big ball of horny energy.”
Apparently, he’s competing with Eyal the bartender, who explained his sexual preference thusly: “What’s my preference? My preference is very, very pretty. In any form. I do men, I do women, I do couples. … If you’re pretty, it’s good.”
The Parents Television Council tagged this show as “Worst of the Week” four times in six weeks. In the third episode, as the hotel prepared to promote a book called “Sex in South Beach,” Eyal proclaimed, “This is a sex weekend. I think we should all have sex with each other.” He asserted, “Sex cures the world. It’s the answer to your problems. It’s the answer to everything.”
It certainly wasn’t the answer for the CW. The show debuted to almost a million viewers, but quickly dropped to an average of about a half-million viewers. Even hormonal teenagers can see the stupidity.
Lieberman relentlessly tried to locate the wildest vibe possible, rewarding a couple with free shots for tonguing and groping each other on the patio furniture so everyone could watch. He explained the vision for his hotel (and the TV show): “Basically, it’s my personality turned into a rock n’ roll (bleeped f—) palace.”
The “C” in “CW” does not stand for class.
Lieberman also attempted to use a pair of panties allegedly given to him by a guest as a pocket square, which he called the “pocket panty.” The hotel was so wild in the legend Lieberman was building that he implied the staff was asked to provide contraceptive room service. One female staffer re-enacted one apparent phone call: “He was really horny and he needs a condom. ‘I need a condom. I need a condom, like right now.'”
The second episode celebrated Gay Pride Week, and it was more of the same. Hotel manager Stephanie insisted the male staffers were there almost as sex workers: “I don’t care if they have to shake a tail feather, take their shirts off, do body shots, whatever it is to increase the sales for the hotel, they better do it.”
Two of the female staffers went to a gay club and felt accosted by a stripper, who thrust his pelvis at close range. One said, “What the (bleeped f—) just hit me in the face? We still have bruises on our faces!” The other replied: “Next time, I’m wearing a helmet.”
Maybe this is why God gave us (SET ITAL) scripts (END ITAL)?
Another plotline in that episode featured Stephanie, the 30-something hotel manager, flirting with Renaldo, the wine salesman. This is the woman Lieberman told the audience has “A-plus cleavage.” Later, a hotel employee explained how awesome it was that Lieberman let them copulate in the empty hotel rooms. Viewers were “treated” to an “unintentional” walk-in on Stephanie in the midst of implied glorious coitus with Renaldo.
Corporations actually paid money to be associated with this gunk. To be precise, that’s businesses selling products to young girls: Verizon cellular phones, L’Oreal and Maybelline, among others. These companies are paying for soft-core porn to be peddled to children via a network that redefines imbecility.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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The packet for the Evansville City Council was distributed today and money is being shifted around to cover at least two of the salary increases recommended by the Salary Review Committee last week. The details are on the following link.

F201210_amended