The internet can be a wonderful vehicle for communication. It can also be used in negative ways to quickly send out propaganda for millions to read.

Dr. Ron Paul, former U.S. representative from Texas and the self-proclaimed leader of liberty, prosperity and peace, has recently made the rounds on internet to inform everyone that America is financially doomed. The next financial crisis, he predicts, will be worse than 1929 and 2008 combined. The Dow Jones will drop by 50%, businesses and friendships will be destroyed, and a dime won’t be worth a nickel any more, as Yogi Berra would say. (Dr. Paul actually refers to the U.S. dollar as being worthless). The list of financial tragedies goes on and on.

Many marketers are using these same scare tactics to attempt to create financial havoc in the nation, but in the end, their motives are all the same. Each one is promoting something. In Dr. Paul’s instance, it is a book written by Porter Stansberry of Stansberry and Associates.

Dr. Paul was in Congress for 22 years, which means he’s at least had a hand in creating an $18 trillion dollar debt in the nation. The latest interview available on internet and hosted by Stansberry and Associates, (which he just happens to represent), makes a big deal about the fact that he is DOCTOR Paul. This at first may sound impressive, until you realize that he was an obstetrician and gynecologist, and not a finance specialist. This simply means that if you want to get financial advice and have your first baby delivered in the same office, he’s the man.

Porter Stansberry writes a newsletter (he was sued by the SEC for false information) that creates information supporting the fact that the financial U.S.A is going down the tubes. In reading this information, it’s easy to be drawn in to predictions and concerns until you realize the sole motivation of the articles all leads back to one thing- buying his book. If you have subscribed to his newsletters in the past, you no doubt have seen just how inaccurate his predictions have been. And Ron Paul is following in his footsteps.

No doubt the government has not been successful in taking care of their fiscal responsibility to Americans. And this will probably not change as most representatives are more concerned with votes than creating a debt free America, or looking out for our financial best interest. The $4 trillion U.S. dollars printed and the doubling of our nation’s debt over the last 6 years should be some indication that an improvement is not in the near future. But to talk about the government taking over your 401(k), losing your lifetime savings in an hour, massive inflation, substantially increased taxes, and the complete financial downfall of America, in order to sell a book or push a product is unethical, in my view. This does nothing but create a worrisome society- which is exactly their motive.

In his latest interview with a script probably written by Porter Stansberry, Dr. Paul states how concerned he is for people in our nation. So after spending 59 minutes (supposedly in Washington D.C.) talking about the doom and gloom in America, he explains the solution in one minute- BUY THE BOOK! And not to give the entire theme away, but the book tells you to load up on gold and silver. It’s possible that some precious metals may be appropriate for a fraction of your own portfolio, but to use these tactics to promote it is simply not right.

Let’s say you purchase the gold bullion Dr. Paul recommends, because he is successful in scaring you to death. Understand you cannot take this gold bullion to the counter at Wal-Mart to pay for your goods. It will have to be converted back into this worthless dollar bill that Dr. Paul talks about. So now you’re right back where you started. Is there a solution to this? Probably not, but to find out for sure, you have to buy the book! Mission accomplished, Dr. Paul.

Tim Schumacher is a representative of Strategic Financial Partners in Hays. [email protected]

By RON WILSON
Huck Boyd National Institute for Rural Development

The car was damaged in Texas. The repair is being done in a body shop in Kansas. That is one example of the work of an entrepreneurial auto body specialist who chooses to live in rural Kansas.

John Gean is founder and owner of Protown Glass and Body, Inc. in Protection, Kansas. John is originally from Wichita where he took vo-tech auto body classes. Even while in high school, he was working on cars for his friends.

John’s uncle owned a ranch near Protection in Comanche County west of Wichita, and John started spending summers there. He found he enjoyed the country life, so he stayed. After graduation, he cleaned out a small workshop and started doing auto body work. His first business was called John’s Auto and Body.

“I was like a sponge,” John said. “I took all the classes I could and asked different body shops how they were doing things.” He continued to upgrade his skills and equipment and went into auto salvage in a neighboring community for a time.

In 2000, he moved back to Protection and founded Protown Glass and Body. Protown sounds like it’s professional, but John said that Protown was simply the nickname for Protection as used by the local kids.

Protown Glass and Body is a full-line autobody shop which offers high quality workmanship, specializing in collision repair, glass repair, and auto towing. Through the Comanche County Economic Development office, John was put in touch with the Small Business Development Center regional office in Garden City. Pat Veesart, since retired, was the regional director.

“She was so much help,” John said. “She helped me understand the numbers and really got me thinking.”

John continues to learn. In 2011, he began a program with Management Success from Glendale, California. “It’s one of the most valuable things I’ve ever done,” he said. “They really taught me to read a customer and make sure I understand what the customer is after.”

Perhaps the best guidance came from his father. “The best advice I ever got from my dad was to treat the customer’s car as if it was your own,” John said. The emphasis on caring for the customer’s car has paid off over time. In 2006, Protown Glass and Body won the Existing Business of the Year award from the Kansas Small Business Development Center.

Today, John’s business has jobs booked several months ahead. In addition to the local market, he has cars coming to him from as far away as Colorado and Texas.

How has this Wichita boy adjusted to living in rural Kansas? “I wouldn’t want to go back,” John said. “I don’t have the hustle and bustle here. It’s friendly and quiet. There are good schools. You know your neighbors and they really are neighbors, people who will help you.”

John and his wife Patricia raised twins here in Protection. “It’s a beautiful part of the country,” he said. “I appreciate the freedoms of living here.”

Protection is located approximately 60 miles from Dodge City, 60 miles from Pratt, and 60 miles from Woodward, Oklahoma. “That makes us dependent on each other,” John said. “It makes the town closer.” Protection is a community of 555 people. Now, that’s rural.

Technology has aided efficiency and helped bridge the distance of rural Kansas. “Most of my jobs are done with the Internet in some way,” John said. “I enter information into my software system and it will create estimates, do invoices and go directly to Quickbooks.”

His advice to other rural businesses? “Find something you love doing. I love Monday mornings. I enjoy coming to work. It’s rewarding to give someone back a car that is even better than it was before,” he said. “Don’t give up, keep it honest, and learn all you can. Forty-some years later, I’m still learning.”

The car was damaged in Texas. The repair is being done in a body shop in Kansas. We commend John Gean of Protown Glass and Body for making a difference with entrepreneurship, lifelong learning, and a commitment to rural Kansas. Sounds like a pro.

The United Way of Ellis County would like to thank all of the generous businesses and individuals that chose to support dedication to youth success, family stability, and community health and safety by giving over $450,000 during the 2014 annual campaign.  While the campaign did come in short of the $490,000 goal, we are, again, humbled by the generosity of those in Ellis County.

Terry Siek, the 2014 campaign chairman said, “The United Way of Ellis County always sets its sights high because we’ve seen local poverty tick up along with requests for help. We stretch our goal to try and meet as many needs as possible.  With the tighter local economy, and the retirement of many loyal United Way supporters, the fact that we were able to achieve the amount we did is just outstanding.”

Your dollars make a difference here at home.  Just a few of the accomplishments reported from last year’s projects included 282 at-risk students meeting or exceeding academic expectation, 527 students improving their attitude towards learning, and over 500 kids actively working for positive civic behavior. From Family projects, over 100 families were kept from homelessness, 117 individuals were helped in gaining new employment, and 30 individuals saw their lives turned around and qualified out of public assistance. Living United creates possibility for many within our community.

If you would like more information about the United Way or would like to donate, please visit our website at www.liveunited.us or stop by our office in the Hadley Center at 205 E. Seventh, Ste. 106, in Hays.

United Way of Ellis County

 

Baseball has spring training, football’s got its training camps. But for a political junkie like me, nothing compares with the opening of the presidential primary season.

Some 19 candidates, give or take, recently swarmed a Republican forum in New Hampshire in search of a kind word and a smile from voters there. They spent much of their time arm-wrestling each other over who hated Hillary Clinton more.

Candidates who couldn’t even spell Benghazi, let alone find it on a map, emerged as experts on the death of our ambassador in a terrorist attack there in 2012. Hillary’s fault, naturally.

I thought it was great.

I have fond memories of covering presidential campaigns in New Hampshire, a state that seems entirely sane — unlike some of the politicians who come seeking its favor.

It was there, for example, that I had my brush with greatness: an exclusive face-to-face interview with Ronald Reagan. Actually, it was more like shoulder-to-shoulder.

It was 1980. Reagan, the former governor of California, was making his run for the Republican nomination. I didn’t think he had much of a chance. He was too old for the part, for one thing, but I thought it might be fun to follow him around for a day.

We went from one picturesque little town to another, always met by friendly, enthusiastic crowds, until we got to a junior high where he was scheduled to speak and where I decided to take a bathroom break.

As I walked to the boys room, the smiling crowd parted before me and formed a lane, as though in welcome.

“I hadn’t realized I was this popular up here,” I said to myself.

I went inside, and moments later in walked Ronald Reagan. He took ownership of the urinal next to me.

Drawing on my experience as a crack political reporter, I said: “How’s it going, Governor?”

And he replied: “Oh, pretty well. I always do well up here.”

And that was it, the whole interview.

I spent the rest of the day following him around. I found him remarkable. He gave exactly the same speech at every stop with exactly the same inflection on every word, the catch in his voice at precisely the same moment.

His theme was essentially that he would bring back that time when respect for the United States was so universal that an American could walk through any revolution in the world without fear simply by putting an American flag in his lapel.

Nonsense, of course, but the New Hampshire crowds ate it up. I was sure, however, that Reagan, charming as he was, couldn’t sail so weak a vessel all the way to the nomination, let alone the presidency. He would be found out as an entertaining fraud and dismissed.

To make a long story short, I was wrong.

Still, I miss New Hampshire when the smell of hypocrisy is in the air.

I judge this group of Republican candidates to be superior to the ill-fated slate in 2012. They are, for the most part, much smarter. There’s no Michele Bachmann for one thing.

Even Texas Governor Rick Perry, another member of the double-digit IQ club, has started wearing glasses to make himself look smarter.

A few of them — Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich — seem reasonable, for Republicans. And no one would call even the more flamboyant hopefuls, like Rand Paul and Chris Christie, dumb.

Even the minor players are substantial people. Ben Carson, who didn’t make the New Hampshire forum, was a brilliant neurosurgeon. And Carly Fiorina, the lone woman in this crowded field, headed Hewlett-Packard.

It’s true that most of the candidates looked more like vice-presidents-in-waiting than incipient commanders-in-chief. But that’s always the case early on. They’ll sort themselves out as the months go on.

To tell you the truth, it promises to be much more interesting than watching Hillary running against herself.

OtherWords columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org.

Time is a fascinating dimension, cinematically and otherwise. The passage of time is a phenomenon that is simultaneously unavoidable and easily avoided. We are, all of us, the oldest we’ve ever been and the youngest we’ll ever be again. What would happen and how would one spend their days if time were no longer a finite commodity?

“The Age of Adaline” takes that intriguing concept and uses it to tell a well-meaning and well-crafted love story. The only major gripe I have about “The Age of Adaline” is its gross negligence regarding its source of dramatic momentum. The time factor, the fact that the main character, played wonderfully by Blake Lively, has not aged a day in nearly 80 years is the story’s catalyst and primary source of fuel – however it is used as the mechanical equivalent of a diving board. It’s a great source of potential energy and it converts that potential into kinetic energy to set the story in motion. Unfortunately, the camera pans away from the still-wobbling diving board to focus on the beautiful girl hurtling towards the water. While the girl certainly is picturesque, the truest story is how the girl and diving board interact and the ripples they create in time.

The writing nibbles very gingerly around the edges of what it means to be immortal. The more complicated, and by extension the more interesting, issues are all but unaddressed. It feels very much like the filmmakers were worried about diluting or over-complicating the story by further exploration. Quite the contrary, their absence was strongly noted by this reviewer.

The production design is appropriate and the journey through time is well-rendered on screen. Furthermore, Blake Lively and Harrison Ford deliver compelling performances. That said, the headline dramatic interaction between Lively and Ford’s characters is too focused on the reveal and not the implications.

“The Age of Adaline” is well-meaning but never lives up to its potential. What could have been timeless is instead relegated to a tried-and-true entry in the time-honored, but easily forgotten pantheon of cinematic love affairs.

4 of 6 stars

I can easily explain my motives for elaborating on all the trepidations and misgivings of Barack Hussein Obama. For one, we might not continue to be an exceptional America going down this same road in the future, and, Obama’s scheme and agenda of “transforming America,” isn’t even close to working. We need a complete turnaround in selecting our next president going back to things that made this country great in the first place.

Has the failure of far left liberalism ever, in our history, shown, so very clearly, this is an ideology that does not work. For example: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics April 3, a record 93,175,000 Americans not working (that’s a 37-year low); record 12,202,000 blacks not in the labor force; record 56,131,000 women not working, and that’s just a small sample of records being set and an administration making history.

In my last two writings, in case you missed them, I mentioned the many ways in which our president is different than other presidents in the past. This column is a continuation of Obama’s extraordinary background and extraordinary governance.

I read where Dr. Ben Carson, retired neurological surgeon, and GOP African-American presidential hopeful, commented about “the ease with which Obama lies.” Our president routinely, at a record making pace, stretches the truth, but you wouldn’t know it, since liberal mainstream media doesn’t mention it. History books will not be kind to him on this score. Polls show there is an all time low by Americans about the trustworthiness of this government. How can anybody believe anything Obama says. Even Iran’s Ayatollah Khameni claimed Obama was lying about the framework for the nuclear treaty.

Another example: No other president would have the gall to announce on TV some 20 times for all to see and hear that no president has the constitutional authority to grant amnesty to illegals then deny ever saying as much, and worse yet, go ahead and unconstitutionally do it through executive authority. Other presidents did it based on a law. There is no law passed by congress in Obama’s case. Previous presidents exercised executive authority but not for the reason Obama does it. Our pres expects Hispanics to vote Democrat in elections and swing all elections toward Democrats.

Obama lied about the Affordable Care Act not paying for abortions.

The most powerful and feared U.S. government agency is the IRS. Can readers ever think of an agency under any other president that clearly set out to put the fear of death in conservatives, called targeting. That scenario, along with many other unethical ones, gave Obama a second term. .

In recent American history no other U.S. attorney general has been in the president’s pocket like Eric Holder. Nothing the president does is in any way a problem for our Department of Justice. There is absolutely no accountability – none. An Attorney General’s job is to ensure “all” branches of government function within the law. Not with Holder.

This administration is setting records for lack of transparency. The Associated Press recently stated “the government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it could not find documents, and refused a record number of times to turn over files that might be especially newsworthy. In nearly 1 in 3 cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law” Another word for this behavior is “stonewalling.” Holder’s Dept. of Justice looks the other way.

Never before, in recent history at least, has there been such anti American sentiment, even by Americans. The accusations of racism have runamuck along with cries, by liberals, of “white privilege.” Far too many no longer believe in “the American Dream.” Christians feel they are being discriminated against. The successful are criticized and the less successful coddled. Polls show the majority of Americans believe this country is on the wrong track.

As a counter argument, instead of name calling, I challenge liberals to show readers how this country is better off in a major way with Obama as president. Liberals will claim our economy is getting better, but it is not, and is setting records as the slowest recovery since World War II.

Les Knoll lives in Victoria and Gilbert, Ariz.

“Seeing is believing,” or so the saying goes.

We certainly can “see” more than ever in this era of 24/7 news, omnipresent street surveillance, police “body cams” and cell phone video — and that fits nicely into the First Amendment’s role in providing for both press and citizen “watchdogs on government.”

Technology now makes us all possible “witnesses” to close-up and often shocking video images of inebriated and staggering motorists stopped by police, dramatic high-speed pursuits through traffic, cringe-inducing accident clips, and officers in confrontations marked by injury or deadly force.

In earlier times, it was rare for most of us to experience any of that except through news media interviews, eyewitness accounts or through news reports taken from carefully worded official documents or courtroom testimony — most with far less drama and emotion.

Legal battles swirl from time to time around the extent to which citizens or journalists can photograph or take video of uniformed or undercover police in public confrontations or violent episodes. Court decisions generally favor the public — but sometimes that means a long wait or an expensive legal battle during which news value evaporates.

But new issues involving freedom of information, privacy, media ethics and fair trial concerns are popping up as quickly as the latest video clip challenging police actions. And while there’s no obligation under the First Amendment on what we can say or write once we “see,” the flood of video imagery creates some questions for us and our fellow citizens as well.

The Associated Press reports that legislators in at least 15 states are considering ways to exempt from opens record laws the video recordings of police encounters with citizens, or to limit what can be made public. Officials say the proposed laws are needed to protect the privacy of people being videotaped and to ensure fair trials — while others fear such moves are just attempts to place the brakes on a new and effective way to hold police accountable.

The impact of citizen video may never have been more immediate or effective than one showing Charleston, S.C., police officer Michael Slager shooting an unarmed African American man who appeared to be moving away from Slager. The officer was charged with murdering Walter Scott after a video of the April incident, taken by a passerby on his cell phone, disputed a written police report about the shooting, which followed a traffic stop and a struggle in a park.

As a nation, we had the opportunity to see portions of that video, repeatedly, on all major networks. The New York Times posted on its website about two weeks ago what appears to be a longer, 4:09 version that the newspaper said was provided by an attorney for Scott’s family.

The graphic nature of the shooting, the effect of repeated national showings and even the placement of the video higher or lower in the news story’s text and nature of the information that accompanied the clip, all raised concerns among legal and First Amendment experts.

Clearly, posting a video is not just a simple matter of presenting a bit of news for us to “see.”

The Scott clip was just one of an amazing range of videos since last summer that have sparked protests and public outrage. In just the last few days, we’ve seen a deputy U.S. Marshal appear to seize and shatter a phone being used by a woman taping police action; an Air Force veteran, videotaped by her daughter, attempting to wrest control of an American flag from demonstrators in Georgia and then scuffling with police; and multiple video clips from a Baltimore incident in which a man appears to have been fatally injured just before or as he was being transported in a police van.

So far, the most controversial videos seem to raise issues around the morality and legality of the incidents involved rather than simply accuracy of what the videos show. But inevitably, those issues will — and should — come up, as in the flag protest where some say publicity more than patriotism motivated the videotaping and the veteran, who has posed nude in Playboy and for an animal rights poster draped in a U.S. flag.

We should expect from both news media and from citizens who post directly to the Web the kinds of context and explanation around dramatic videos that we’ve come to demand from journalists and others who publish polls, provide politicians with a public platform, and present detailed investigative reports.

We need to know the motives and mission of those who take and those who post the videos. And at times, we should seek the kind of intensive scrutiny and skepticism about particularly impactful videos that might — at the furthest extent — would approach the level of dissection and examination of a written article by an expert team that led Rolling Stone magazine to retract a highly-controversial report about a gang rape at a university.

Questions are being raised about a supposed ISIS video purporting to show mass executions in Libya, and many Western news organizations regularly refuse to show videos that have more to do with recruiting new terrorists than documenting atrocities.

Granted, there’s no requirement in the First Amendment’s protection for free speech or a free press that what we see online or in the news, will be fair or accurate or even complete. But there’s also no First Amendment prohibition against holding to those standards.

Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. He can be reached at [email protected].