A dispatch from Franco’s Spain on Delmarva.  Last night I attempted to watch the Democrat’s debate.  Why does this political party have its own cable network?  Is this the balance to the scourge known as Fox News Channel?  I managed about twenty minutes of uninterrupted time before the telephone calls.  Friends, two of them telephoned last night, both Republicans and neither had any interest in the debate.  I was on the telephone until 11:00 and then went to bed and it appears I missed Hillary’s doublespeak and the space cadet remarks from Karl Marx, uh, Kucinich. 

Joe Scarborough filled me in this morning about what was missed.  Then I drove to Georgetown, where I discovered the DMV isn’t open Wednesday mornings.  Is this because the workers there are Democrats and had the night off to toast their candidates?  I’m guessing they got all slopped up and were still leering at the moon at 3:00 A.M.  If the lefties win next year will the DMV be closed for one week in celebration? 

Some folks have telephoned the program and are asking about my hometown.  It figures in a few stories I’ve shared and where people come from can clearly assist in moral formation.  Say, for example, you come from a small insignificant rock dominated by a neighboring second rate power.  Say your homeland could best be described as England’s “bitch”.  A land where men wear skirts and people gorge themselves on sheep bladders filled with oatmeal and the minced heart, liver and lungs of the animal.  Then you’re going to be formed with a belief the world owes you a living and socialized medicine. 

My hometown was a different place.  Settled by people who carved a great power out of a wilderness.  The kind of folks who three times in the past century saved all those second, third and fourth rate morally barren lands.  My people don’t expect much in return.  They rise early and get the job done and they don’t need government to play mommy and daddy and bandage their bruises.   

At some point I’ll post a couple of hometown photographs at the website.  These were taken by a talented young woman.  She operates a photographer’s studio back home and I’d like to alert people to her work.  The young woman’s name is Shannon Halsaver.  The winter photograph is my work.

I’ll note that as a kid growing up in a land nearly as perfect as Andy Griffith’s Mayberry that we lacked multicultural education.  We were all just American’s.  This included people from all ethnic backgrounds.  Most of them never gave any thought to being a hyphenated citizen until someone came along and told them that’s what they were.  Even then most of them would’ve considered the messenger a bit loopy.  It’s funny how that occurs in a small town.  The measure of anyone is how they apply themselves to their work.  There are just 2 types of people, the producers and the leaches.  Color, faith and the spelling of a last name isn’t a relevant factor for judgment.  

Europeans looking for a free ride can’t understand. 

Let me postulate my own scientific theory.  Folks who packed up and left Europe before the comfortable jet age were genetically curious and those surviving the long ocean voyage were physically the best.  No matter what ethnicity they assigned themselves.  Now generations later we’ve the offspring of the best.  Americans are stronger, brighter and far more adventurous than the fearful and weak peoples of Europe.  You could call us the MRSA of the human race. 

The University of Delaware is one of the worst brainwashing institutions in America.  A mandatory indoctrination program at the school as part of the Office of Residence Life Diversity Education Training includes the following:

 

“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. ‘The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination….’”

Totalitarian socialist liberals have taken completely over.  Time to withdrawal the children and your tuition payment, and end any Government funding the school receives.  I’m serious.

A World Net Daily article about this outrage also had this to say

The education program also notes that “reverse racism” is “a term created and used by white people to deny their white privilege.” And “a non-racist” is called “a non-term,” because, the program explains, “The term was created by whites to deny responsibility for systemic racism, to maintain an aura of innocence in the face of racial oppression, and to shift the responsibility for that oppression from whites to people of color (called ‘blaming the victim’).”
The “education” regarding racism is just one of the subjects that students are required to adopt as part of their University of Delaware experience…

U of D requires all of the residence hall students (about 7000) to adopt the official views of the school in regards to racism, homosexuality, politics etc. or face problems with the RA’s.

Read more here

And here. (Foundation For Individual Rights in Education)

Another threat to the future of our great land is brewing in Maryland.  The multi-culturalist goonies are landing in Baltimore this weekend to plant more seeds of destruction:

Check out the website and be very afraid:

http://www.NAMEorg.org/ 

 

 

Looks like we’re gonna say “bye bye” to this…

The Delaware Public Service Commission is deeming Blue Water Wind’s proposed off shore wind farm “not in the public interest” after the company changed it’s original proposal during negotiations with Delmarva Power and Light.

After an informed and deliberative review of the Term Sheets, Staff cannot recommend that the State Agencies direct Purchase Power Agreements (“PPAs”) based on any of the long-term generation proposals, including the backup arrangements. Although Staff would like to be part of the effort to pioneer offshore wind power to take control of Delaware’s energy future, such a recommendation is — at this time — not in the public interest and is not consistent with the underlying principles of the Electric Utility Retail Customer Supply Act of 2006 (“EURCSA”).

Staff believes that approval of Bluewater’s revised project is not in the public interest because:

• The revised project, which includes a commercially unreasonable pricing escalator, imposes significant additional risk as well as cost on Delmarva’s SOS ratepayers;

• Bluewater shifts the project’s risk associated with cost increases during construction to Delmarva SOS ratepayers, and thus, the ratepayers – not Bluewater – assume full responsibility for any losses incurred with project delay and/or failure;

• The delayed timing of the revised project results in additional cost and exacerbates the price risk;

• Staff expected that the negotiations would yield a lower price for the wind project, on a per customer kWh basis, but rather the negotiations resulted in a more expensive, less favorable project than the original bid proposal; and

• Other jurisdictions, such as New York and Texas, have determined that offshore wind facilities are not an acceptable solution to energy needs based on unreasonable expense and uncertainty with regard to project viability.

Moreover, the bidders and Delmarva have not complied with the State Agencies’ direction to craft Term Sheets that include the material aspects of the long-term power arrangements because several crucial issues remain in dispute in all three proposed Term Sheets.

And “hello” to another century or so of this…

It bothers me that the PSC is deeming the offshore wind farm “not in the public interest” and using because other states have as one of their reasons. This looks bad for the people crossing their fingers for a clean source of energy for the state, but the PSC has left the door open….

You can read what Tommywonk has to say about this latest twist HERE.

Parents watching the budget problems at Cape Henlopen School District have been asking for the release of the administrator’s salaries and salary histories.  While not hiring an adequate number of fourth grade teachers, “how many administrators are making how much?” is an often asked question.  The board and the district have not responded so we have had to use FOIA to get the info.  Stand by.

This information should be easily accessible and readily available to all taxpayers, and State Senator George Bunting agrees big time!  George took my on air rant about Cape a step further, as you can see in the attached pdf of a letter he sent my way.

George Bunting calls on all State employee salaries to be posted on the internet.

Do you state employees agree with making salaries public on the internet?

All of your Cape School Board coverage located in one convenient, easy to swallow blog post!

Superintendent George Stone and School Board President Dr. Wray.

It’s so hard to decide where to start with Thursday night’s meeting…but let’s start with the fun stuff….

A few meetings ago, board member Noble Prettyman thrilled his fellow board members and the audience of teachers, administrators, parents and press with the announcement that developer Darin Lockwood was donating 30 acres of land to Cape that butts up to H.O. Brittingham Elementary School in beautiful Milton, Delaware.

At Thursday night’s meeting, Dr. Wray asked the board if anyone had heard from Lockwood about the 30 acres and the answer was, “We haven’t heard a word back.” Well, Georgia Leonhart from the Cape Gazette had a smile on her face because she knew that developer Darin Lockwood didn’t own the land he so generously donated:

Lockwood does not yet, and may never, own the 30 acres.

“He [Lockwood] doesn’t own the land, I can tell you that; in no way, shape or form,” said Gerald Reynolds, who added that he owns the land with his brother-in-law, Willard Workman.

Lockwood also doesn’t own an additional 107 acres proposed to be included in Elizabethtown, effectively putting development of the high-density residential community on the back burner, said a Realtor representing the owners of the property.

You’ve gotta love it.

The white brick addition to Milton Elementary School. It looks better now, the fences are out and there are shrubs planted in front of it.

Throwing a bone to tired and worried Milton Elementary School parents, the board voted to not mess with the color of the bricks on the new addition to the school. Parent Sharon Davis, who made a plea last month to leave the bricks alone and let the kids move into the space and start learning, made her case again to the board at the beginning of the meeting:

“What you have in front of you is a list of items that are still desperately needed in each of the new classrooms to enhance the comfort and educational experience of every child. Unfortunately, if the decision is made tonight to spend additional monies to replace the brick on the outside, these items will not be able to be purchased.

The white brick on the outside of the addition is a “decorating mistake,” one that was approved by the School Board at the implementation of the project. That was the time to make color changes; not now when the school budget is suffering, and these items are still needed to complete new classrooms INSIDE.” - Parent Sharon Davis

Some of the items on the list were bookcases, area carpets, and cork strips to hang the Sound Spelling Cards from.

Little brick section in front of the elementary school where someone tested some kind of fix other than tearing the bricks down.

The cost of replacing the bricks was well over $100,000 and the cost of staining the bricks a red brick color would have cost over $10,000.

The parents of many Milton Elementary School children would like to thank the board for giving them this one win, (though they would still appreciate smaller 4th grade class sizes so their kids grow up smart enough to know how to balance a budget without cutting desperately needed staff).

The field may have been christened by the Cape Henlopen High School soccer team last Tuesday night, but the big night for the new “Legends Stadium” was supposed to be Friday night’s Homecoming football game against Sussex Central.

Unfortunately it was cancelled due to the weather, moved to Saturday, then cancelled due to the weather. The next Homecoming attempt will be Sunday the 28th at 2:30 p.m. and the game will be broadcast by WGMD 92.7 FM.

Cape Principal John Yore spoke at the school board meeting Thursday night and wanted to let fans know that it’s going to be muddy for the game and there’s a “bit of a walk” to the field. If you’re going you’ll want to enter the stadium from the gymnasium and the agriculture building side. Handicapped parking is accessible from the Savannah Road entrance and the 9th grade campus will have parking and a shuttle going back and forth to the field. You can also park at the Administration building on King’s Highway or the high school parking lot also off of King’s Highway. Just don’t park on the circle.

As a child, Halloween was always one of my favorite times of year! I would help my Mother decorate our front windows with cardboard ghosts, pumpkins, skeletons and more with such care and precision you would think I was in charge of sculpting a scale model of the Eiffel Tower out of stone. My goal was to frighten the younger kids who would be sure to stop at our home for treats on the 31st.

The older I got, the more sophisticated my attempts to strike fear in all who passed 1524 Market Street. One year I created and built a flying ghost effect. I would sit in the window of our attic, waiting for some unsuspecting person to walk past our home. At just the right moment I would activate a motorized pulley which would send the white-sheeted ghost down the line as a ghoulish sound effect completed the illusion. This would keep me busy for hours.

Today, most of the Halloween decorations are smiling pumpkins and goofy, green Frankensteins which are so cartoonish they make Scooby and Shaggy look like masterpiece artwork.

Now who is THIS depiction of Frankenstein going to scare? And Oooooooh, what a scary ghost! NOT!
Well, whaddya gonna do? I understand that kids today are often shielded from the evils of a witch on a broom by over-protective parents. My question is; Why bother protecting them from such an obvious night of Tom-foolery then turn around and buy them First-Person Shooter games for their Playstation? Which is more dangerous to your child’s well-being, Grand Theft Auto or The Mummy?

Oh, well.. Just thinking out loud, I suppose.

The South Side approach as well as the North Side approach to the alleged new Indian River Inlet Bridge have to be taken down.

I wrote about the obvious problems with the approaches to the new Indian River Inlet Bridge project just last week, and here we are, 10 days later, learning that a lot of what DelDot had to say about the issue was…well…I’ll be nice and say “inaccurate.”

Here’s what Darrel Cole from DelDot had to say about the approaches when I spoke with him 10 days ago:

I spoke with Darrel Cole from Deldot and he explained that judging how much settling will occur during a project like this is an “inexact science,” and that there is certainly a “settlement issue” with both the approach and the road running next to it. On October 22, work will begin to level the road, but the question is, when will work begin on the new bridge?

According to Cole, the state expects to announce the new bidding process for the project “within a month,” and the contract to be awarded “within a year.” Construction on the new bridge should begin shortly after that. And to answer a question that has been posed on the air a few times, whatever bridge ends up being built should work just fine with the new approaches. *Whew!*

So last week the bridge approaches were just “settling” (For the record I used the word “sinking” with Cole and he took pains to correct my wording to “settling”), and this week we’re being told they have to come down:

The massive dirt ramps built as approaches for the new Indian River Inlet Bridge took more than a year to build, but soon most of the material making up the ramps will be removed….

The embankments are drifting and leaning toward the west, according to a Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT) document.

The approaches are “leaning toward the west.” Other than the article we had here on the blog last week by a non engineer or road expert whose expertise in bridge approaches can be summed up in the word “SQUAT,” who could have ever imagined that there was a problem?

So now we have $20 million wasted, and who knows how much more it will cost to tear down the approaches and fix the surrounding park land.

Meanwhile, the people who use the facilities at the Inlet have lost access to Haven Road and the good North Side parking lot (which makes the walk to the North Side beach a total bummer), the people who drive over the Inlet will get to enjoy the world’s most expensive speed trap indefinitely while simultaneously experiencing the thrill of wondering if the old bridge will last until they get to the other side, and Delaware taxpayers are once again bent over.

UPDATE: DelDot held a press conference at the Indian River Inlet Bridge today and here’s the press release in PDF form. Some highlights:

Due to the types of underground soils in this area, settlement was required in advance before the roadway was opened. Projects with such geotechnical issues can be difficult to predict even though estimates are based on soil samples from the site. As of August, approximately 60 percent of the settlement of underground soils had been achieved. DelDOT estimates it could take an additional seven years to achieve the desired 95 percent settlement. As a result, we have the following issues:

* Current settlement of the underground soils has exceeded original predictions. Additional fill would be needed to achieve the correct grade for the approaches to meet the proposed bridge elevation.

* Roadway embankments are shifting and leaning toward the west, and it has been difficult to estimate the magnitude of this problem.

* As result of the weight of the embankments and their unexpected westerly shifting, nearby roads have been impacted, requiring Route 1 pavement repairs and Road 50A reconstruction.

* Bridge construction would be delayed until the problems with the settlement are resolved.

These issues of settlement were expected but not to the degree we are seeing now.

So the approaches, in their current form, would be “settling” for the next seven years. Whoops.

Here’s DelDot’s Q & A pdf, and here’s a highlight:

Yes. The need for replacing the bridge is due to the severe scouring in the Inlet adjacent to the bridge substructure that has taken place over the decades. The velocity of current in the inlet is very high and unique. However, the existing bridge is in no immediate danger of failing, and in fact it is the most monitored bridge in the state.

The bridge deck is made up of five spans of steel girder beams, each approximately 250 feet long. This is considered a redundant system (not fracture-critical), meaning that if one span failed, other spans would be able to carry the load allowing the bridge to remain standing. In the department’s most recent bridge inspection (August 2007), the deck and superstructure are rated in fair and satisfactory condition. More significantly, our yearly (most recently took place September 2007) dive inspection of piers under the water show the piers are stable, that the rip-rap placed in 1989 is intact.

And that is from the same people who told us that whatever bridge design was chosen would work just fine with the existing approaches.

Sussex County Delaware does not have the luxury of a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Photo courtesy of BMS

If he isn’t at an activity with his children, Dr. Jay Ludwicki can be found at the Pediatric and Adolescent Center in Lewes, Delaware. I had the opportunity to speak with him a few weeks ago on the sidelines of a soccer field about a troubling problem in Sussex County, the length of time a newborn in distress has to wait for emergency transportation.

As it stands now, if you have a baby in one of the County’s three hospitals and there’s a problem, you have to wait for the state’s only transport team, located at the Christiana Hospital, to come and take your baby to a higher level of emergency care. That would be either Kent General in Dover, a Level 2 facility, or Christiana, a Level 3 facility. The wait can take hours and hours.

“We are at the other end of the state and what I’ve dreamt of seeing is that instead of having transport centered from Wilmington that we would have transport possibly centered out of Kent…” - Dr. Jay Ludwicki audio

And yes, the state has only one transport team. One. And that team could be in New Jersey transporting a baby when a baby with serious health issues is born here in Sussex. The team does have access to a helicopter, but a number of weather factors and the cost make the ambulance trip the more usual method. audio

While the baby waits to be transported out of Sussex County and to a higher level of emergency care, the hospital staff will “use a bag and mask” to keep air in their little lungs.

Dr. Ludwicki would like to see the transport team centered at Kent General Hospital in Dover to lessen the wait. He’d also like to see neonatal nurses at Kent General who can come to Sussex to assist with the baby, and even neonatal nurses on staff in the more “remote” County hospitals who could deliver drugs like surfactin to the newborn. This kind of fast, emergency care can mean a lot.

“There are babies you give immediate care to and they turn around very quickly and you might not even need to transport them in the first place if that care is given.” - Dr. Jay Ludwicki audio

But with an anticipated “17% increase in women of their maternity years” here in the County over the next 10 years, Sussex could someday see its own Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and Dr. Ludwicki can dream about other things….

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1024/p09s01-coop.htm