The Fraternal Order of Police’s political action committee has long opposed attempts to streamline government through consolidation, and their statement released Thursday reaffirming that position should come as no surprise. In fact, the group organized to oppose the referendum has for weeks been meeting at FOP headquarters.
While the FOP’s political action committee has taken this stance for quite some time, its full membership is made up of hundreds of members with very diverse views and opinions. Sheriff Eric Williams, the community’s top law enforcement officer, has consistently extolled the benefits of the plan. “Unification is a fantastic tool for our community to use when it comes to new business recruitment, job creation, and youth retention. What’s good for Evansville is good for the FOP.”
Notably, the Plan of Reorganization does not affect the separate functions of the police and sheriff’s department. While the plan does unify many aspects of local government, the police and sheriff’s department will continue just as they are today. The plan also keeps the city boundary as a service district so that taxes, including taxes for law enforcement, aren’t changed or impacted.
Mayor Lloyd Winnecke added, “I have great admiration for the FOP, but on this issue I respectfully disagree. Unification will reduce duplicative city and county services and offers the best chance to contain costs of local government over a long period of time. While I remain a staunch supporter of government unification, I must point out that the plan up for a vote in November includes language that specifically prevents the consolidation of the Evansville Police Department and the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office at least until after the 2024 election.”
The Plan of Reorganization will merge city and county councils, as well as the executive branches. However, taxes, zoning, and law enforcement would remain separate according to current city and county boundaries. Visit www.YESforUnification.com for more details.
This feature is sponsored by Chris Walsh For Vanderburgh County Clerk. Chris Walsh is a veteran county administrator that strongly supports our local law enforcement professionals . Chris is a candidate that possess a non-partisan attitude with a consumer friendly demeanor. Chris also stands against unification of city and county governments.
This ad paid for by the committiee to elect Walsh Clerk, Kelly VANDERBURGH COUNTY FELONY CHARGES
Evansville, IN – Below is a list of felony cases that were filed by the Vanderburgh County Prosecutor’s Office on Wednesday, August 08, 2012.
Joshua Cooper Strangulation – Class D Felony
Battery Resulting in Bodily Injury – Class A Misdemeanor
Anthony Greene Robbery –Class C Felony
Criminal Mischief –Class A Misdemeanor
Daniel Kuebler Possession of Methamphetamine –Class D Felony
Possession of a Controlled Substance – Class D Felony
Maintaining a Common Nuisance – Class D Felony
Michael Mayes Battery Resulting in Bodily Injury to a Pregnant Woman – Class C Felony
Public Intoxication –Class B Misdemeanor
Christopher McGlauflin Burglary –Class C Felony
Theft – Class D Felony
Criminal Mischief – Class D Felony
Jonathan Peltier Theft – Class D Felony (Three Counts)
Battery Resulting in Bodily Injury – Class A Misdemeanor
Public Intoxication – Class B Misdemeanor
Frankie Pollard, Jr. Operating a Motor Vehicle after Forfeiture of License for Life –Class C
Felony
Bridgett Sallee Theft – Class D Felony
Brian Tharp Theft – Class D Felony (Three Counts)
Public Intoxication – Class B Misdemeanor
Heather Young Theft –Class D Felony
For further information on the cases listed above, or any pending case, please contact Carly Settles at 812.435.5688 or via e-mail at csettles@vanderburghgov.org.
Under Indiana law, all criminal defendants are considered to be innocent until proven guilty by a court of law.
SENTENCE CHART
Class Range
Murder 45-65 Years
Class A Felony 20-50 Years
Class B Felony 6-20 Years
Class C Felony 2-8 Years
Class D Felony ½ – 3 Years
Class A Misdemeanor 0-1 Year
Class B Misdemeanor 0-180 Days
Class C Misdemeanor 0-60 Days
FOP ENDOURSES OPPOSITION TO UNIFICATION: DEALS SERIOUS BLOW TO YES EFFORTS
The FOP of Evansville has voted to endorse CORE in opposing unification of City and County governments.
The vote of one idiot can cancel out the vote of a single genius — such is the glory of our one-man, one-vote system. But what about the vote of an illegal alien? The deceased? Or a convicted felon? Should they be allowed to spoil the electoral process — and perhaps change history?
And why — in the name of “civil rights†— is Attorney General Eric Holder using the power of the Justice Department to hamstring states trying to put a stop to voter fraud by requiring a secure ID in order to vote?
The answer is clear: In an election that promises to be every bit as close as Bush v. Gore in 2000, each side is going to need every vote it can get. And one way, historically, that Democrats have been able to swing close elections is through fraud. Consider:
* In the 2004 Washington state governor’s race, the Republican’s early lead was overcome by the miraculous discovery of previously uncounted ballots squirreled away in the Democratic stronghold of Seattle, handing the election to the Democrat.
* In the close governor’s race in Connecticut in 2010, a mysterious shortage of ballots in Bridgeport kept the polls open an extra two hours as allegedly blank ballots were photocopied and handed out in the heavily Democratic city. Dannel Malloy defeated Republican Tom Foley by nearly 7,000 votes statewide — but by almost 14,000 votes in Bridgeport.
* Now a new book — “Who’s Counting?†by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky — charges that Al Franken’s 2008 defeat of incumbent Republican Sen. Norm Coleman may be directly attributable to felons voting illegally.
Coleman led on election night, but a series of recounts lasting eight months eventually gave the seat to the former Saturday Night Live star.
Later, a conservative watchdog group matched criminal records with the voting rolls and discovered that 1,099 felons had illegally cast ballots. State law mandates prosecutions in such cases; 177 have been convicted so far, with 66 more awaiting trial.
Franken’s eventual margin of “victory� A mere 312 votes.
The Minnesota win gave the Democrats their 60th Senate seat, creating the filibuster-proof majority that helped shovel ObamaCare into law.
Democrats’ chicanery extends back to the days of Tammany Hall and other big-city machines. But today, much of the dirty work is done by lawyers. So maybe it’s not so surprising that Holder is either “investigating†or actually suing states like South Carolina, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania that have instituted tougher new requirements, including the presentation of government-issued ID.
Never mind that the Supreme Court by a 6-3 vote has already upheld the constitutionality of requiring valid identification in a 2008 case in Indiana.
Holder, the most politicized attorney general since Nixon’s John Mitchell, has consistently moved against any efforts to protect the integrity of the ballot box in the service of the party that keeps him employed.
Infamously, he dropped prosecution of members of the New Black Panther Party, who were intimidating white voters outside a Philadelphia polling place during the 2008 presidential election. And he killed the case despite the urging of lawyers at Justice and members of the US Civil Rights Commission, which in a 2010 report accused Justice of “open hostility and opposition†to prosecuting cases with white victims.
In a speech last month to the NAACP, the AG charged that Republican efforts to ensure the integrity of the electoral process effectively amount to “voter suppression,†under the absurd premise that minorities are incapable of obtaining proper ID.
Risibly, Holder likened the tougher ID requirements to the days of Jim Crow and the poll tax — despite the fact that, in Pennsylvania for example, the state provides photo IDs free of charge.
Studies show that the cemetery, illegal-immigrant and felon votes tends to break heavily Democratic. Just ask Norm Coleman, who would have blocked ObamaCare and kept circus clown Al Franken away from Washington.
IS IT TRUE CCO Mole #30 tells us that one third of the staff of GAGE have recently decided to seek their fortunes and futures elsewhere?…that a significant expansion of a Evansville grown business known as Sigma Packaging was announced yesterday with no smiling politicians, surrogates, or incentives granted to get this company to expand in Evansville?…home grown businesses are the key to a expanding and prosperous local economy and the sooner that the smokestack chasing folks get that through their heads the sooner Evansville has a chance to have a broad based economy of businesses who are here because they want to be here as opposed to being paid to come here?…that it is no coincidence that the headquarters of Apple is less than 3 miles from the garage that it was started in?
IS IT TRUE the fact that Whirlpool has announced its final departure from Evansville without some accompanying announcement that all of the unearned tax and cash incentives given to them by the City of Evansville has granted them will be paid back has many of our readers profoundly disappointed in local governance?…that Whirlpool was handed deal after deal by City leaders and has not completely fulfilled the requirements placed upon them to earn those incentives?…that if our Mayor, the Evansville City Council, GAGE, and any other parties involved in raiding the City coffers to give the money to Whirlpool do not have the courage or will to collect the money back for the people of this City then they should just hand it over to a collection agency and hope they have the wherewithal to do it?…it has been 3 days since the Whirlpool announcement and not a word about collecting our money has been uttered to the public?…that the question of how many other companies are out there that have not fulfilled their obligations and owe the City of Evansville money has come up multiple times?…that is a question worth exploring?
IS IT TRUE that at the recent joint budget hearings few County Council members attended?…that of those members, only one stayed for the entire meeting?…that County Council members are paid more money than City Council members, but generally have less responsibility? …that this sort of inexplicable city-county imbalance is prevalent throughout local government?…that sometimes having two separate councils makes it twice as hard to hold these councils accountable because of twice the meetings, twice the minutes, etc.?…that regardless of your position on consolidation, everyone should agree there is a better way to conduct business?…that if the County Council’s elected members don’t take joint budget hearings seriously enough to attend them that it could lead one to think that the County Council is willing to hand the reigns of forming the annual Vanderburgh County budget to the City Council?…that the County Council be abdicating their duties seems to be trying hard to prove to the people who elected them that they are irrelevant and uninterested in doing the job they were elected to do?
IS IT TRUE that it is not just the City of Evansville that has been in the habit of handing out incentives and cash to companies to get them to locate or expand here?…that County elected officials have engaged in the same practice and that we have not heard of the County officials repatriating any of the people’s money that was handed out either?…that if the City and County elected officials can possibly work together on one thing it should be on how to collect the monies owed to them by businesses that took the incentives and ran?…that would make for an interesting meeting to attend if only the County Council would muster the attention span to sit through the meeting?…collecting debts is part of the revenue line in the budget and should be given the same respect as the collection of taxes from citizens?…that every dollar of incentives granted to companies that do not fulfill their obligations is a dollar stolen by our elected officials from the taxpayers of Evansville?…that the thieves in this case are our elected officials and not the companies or cronies that they handed the money to?
Jim Hightower, Progressive Syndicated ColumnistIf you thought right-wing politicos couldn’t get any goofier, take a peek at Texas on “Cruz Control.”
Ted Cruz is America’s latest tea party darling, having just pulled off a political contortion in Texas that few would’ve thought humanly possible: He got to the right of Gov. Rick Perry! The “Oops” governor is himself a former tea party darling who’s such a far-out know-nothing that he’s renowned for putting the goober in gubernatorial. By the time of last week’s Republican runoff election in Texas, however, Cruz had squinched himself Houdini-like into even farther-out political positions than Perry has taken, thus wowing the tealeaf crowd and defeating the guy whom Perry was backing to be the Party’s nominee for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
How far out is he? One of the white-hot talking points Cruz used to fire-up the narrow extremists who now control the Texas GOP is that he will, by God, defend America’s golf courses! You might not have realized that golf course defense is a burning national issue crying out for the attention of U.S. senators, but such keen vigilance on even the most unimaginable threats to our nation is the kind of stuff that makes Cruz a tea party fave.
Defend golf courses against what, you ask? Not turf rot, rampaging moles or those bothersome environmentalists, but against that old right-wing bugaboo: the United Nations. “Stop Agenda 21,” cries Cruz in an alert posted prominently on his campaign website, even taking this war whoop onto talk radio and TV, including an enlightening appearance with the always thoughtful Glenn Beck. Agenda 21 is a 20-year-old innocuous and nonbinding UN resolution (agreed to by then-President George Bush the First). It encourages governments to develop plans for sustainable development of “open spaces” — and that’s what rubs Ted raw. Open space, you see, includes golf courses.
To the barricades, patriots! Grab your putters and mashies and rush to your local links, for the UN is coming over yon hill!
To double-down on his political wackiness creds, Cruz notes ominously (and falsely), “The originator of this grand scheme is George Soros.” Doubling-down yet again, Cruz adds (also falsely) that the hobgoblin Soros is a socialist devil who believes in “eliminating national sovereignty and private property.”
Thus, he concludes, “The real question is will we have senators in Washington who will take steps to stop this nonsense…” Yes, Ted, right back at you. We need some sane senators who’ll stop the nonsense and start dealing honestly with America’s real problems.
Unfortunately, golf goofiness is not the only nonsense this guy embraces. He’s also a Social Security privatizer, a “tenther,” a turn-’em-loose front man for Big Oil, an opponent of extending unemployment benefits to America’s jobless millions, a die-hard champion of deregulating Wall Street greed (his wife, coincidentally, is a top regional executive for Goldman Sachs), a regressive flat-tax acolyte and a shameless promoter of the anti-Islam poppycock that the stealthy spread of Sharia law is “an enormous problem” in the U.S.
Nonetheless, Cruz did win and is now celebrated as “the people’s choice” in Texas, having piled up a whopping 57 percent of the vote last week. The media reported this as politically earthshaking, blaring that “high turnout” by tea partiers created a “surge at the polls” that carried Cruz to his “huge” win. The Lone Star result, concluded many pundits, shows that the people want candidates aligned with “tea party values.”
Hog poop. The “big story” in politics often is not the one trumpeted by the myopic media and political cognoscenti, but the one they don’t report at all. In the Cruz case, we should step back from the hyped results, take a deep breath and look at two big, honking, neon-lit numbers that reveal a stunning truth about the state of our democratic process. First: 631,316. That’s how small the actual vote was for Cruz and his whole kit and caboodle of far-right-wing balderdash. Next: 15,915,758. That’s how many eligible voters there are in the state.
Do the math (which the media failed to do), and the real story turns out to be that Cruz is the choice of no more than 4 percent of the voters of Texas.
This is what America’s politics has become: so empty and asinine that a guy wins a nomination to a U.S. senate seat with a pathetic 4 percent of the vote — and then is hailed as the choice of “the people.”
These nationally syndicated cartoons are sponsored by Guthries Pharmacies
Our sponsor, Guthries Pharmacy, offers Free Prescription Delivery. Visit at one of their 2 locations:
520 West Lincoln
Chandler, IN
(812) 925-3347
and
100 Lawrence Drive
Mount Vernon, IN
(812) 835-5000
Keynote Speaker will be civil rights and peace activist Diane Nash
(Evansville, IN) – The Evansville-Vanderburgh County Human Relations Commission will hold
its Annual Dinner on Wednesday, September 19, 2012, at 7:00 p.m. at The Centre. The keynote
speaker will be civil rights and peace activist Diane Nash.
Mayor Lloyd Winnecke will present the 2012 Mayor’s Celebration of Diversity Awards at the
Annual Dinner. The awards recognize businesses, organizations and individuals that embrace
and celebrate diversity. Nominations will be accepted through Friday, September 10, 2012. To
make a nomination, please go to www.evansvillegov.org/diversityawards or contact the Human
Relations Commission at (812) 436-4927.
Ticket donations are $30 per person. Corporate sponsorships are also available. Please contact
the Human Relations Commission at (812) 436-4927 before Friday, September 7, to make a
reservation.
About Diane Nash
A Chicago native who had never experienced segregation in public accommodations before
moving to the South, Diane Nash went on to become one of the pioneers of the Civil Rights
Movement.
Nash’s involvement in the nonviolent movement began in 1959 while she was student at Fisk
University. In 1960, she became the chairperson of the student sit in movement in Nashville,
Tennessee- the first southern city to desegregate its lunch counters-as well as one of the founding
students of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee.
In 1961, she coordinated the Freedom Ride from Birmingham, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi,
a story which was documented in the recent PBS American Experience film Freedom Riders.
Her many arrests for her civil rights activities culminated in Nash being imprisoned for 30 days
in 1961, while she was pregnant with her first child. Undeterred, she went on to join a national
committee – to which she was appointed by President John F. Kennedy – that promoted passage
of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Nash later became active in the peace movement that worked to
end the Vietnam War, and became an instructor in the philosophy and strategy of non-violence
as developed by Mohandas Gandhi.
Diane Nash is the recipient of numerous awards, including the War Resisters League Peace
Award; the Distinguished American Award presented by the John F. Kennedy Library; the LBJ
Award for Leadership in Civil Rights from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum;
and an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Fisk University, her alma mater. More
recently, Nash delivered the 2009 Slavery Remembrance Day Memorial Lecture in Liverpool,
England.
Her work has been cited in numerous books, documentaries, magazines and newspaper articles,
and she has appeared on such TV shows and films as The Oprah Winfrey Show, Spike Lee’s
Four Little Girls, and PBS’s Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954-1965.
III. Old Business – Greenway Update
a) Industrial Corridor – Boberg
a.Phase 4
b) Review Quote for New LED Lights at Shirley James Gateway Plaza – Boberg
c) Annual Greenway Inspection Tour – September 10, 2012, 1:30pm – 4:30pm. – Boberg
IV. ETC Report – Roberta Heiman
V. New Business
a) Approval for Cleaning Graffiti at the Sunset Park. – Boberg
b) Review Alternate Light Systems for Riverfront Corridor. – Boberg
c) Review Quotes to Install New Gate at the Entrance to the Heidelbach Canoe Launch. – Boberg
d) Any Other Business the Advisory Board Wishes to Discuss
Evansville, IN— Join us at the Victory Theatre for this month’s “Movies on Main Street “!
Family friendly, FREE and fun for all ages! This month “The Three Stooges†will be showing on
Friday, August 17th and “We Bought A Zoo†will be presented on Saturday, August 18th. Doors
will open at 6:30pm with the show starting at 7:30pm.
Full concessions will be available with food specials including $1 hot dogs fresh from the gril.
Thank you to all of our sponsors that have made this FREE movies program a 16 year success!
Pick up your passes for FREE admission at any of these sponsor locations: Wesselman’s
Supermarkets, News4U Magazine, The Centre, WABX, Hot 96, WIKY, 93.5 The Wolf, JackFM,
WEVV-CBS44, FOX44, Bunny Bread, Garrett Printing and Graphics.
We look forward to seeing you August 17th & 18th at the Victory Theatre and once again, this
event is family friendly, FREE and fun for all ages! For more information, call 812-435-5770.
Passes will be available for pick-up at all of the sponsor locations.
