On the heels of the announcement that Nancy Allen moved to Gettysburg and would be resigning from the Frederick County Board of Education, our local Republican party decided to engage in some high theatrics:
Let’s talk about what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot!
Let’s say we lived in a dark timeline in which Michael Hough was the CE, and let’s just speculate for just half a second that Dean Rose decided that he couldn’t maintain two residences in Maryland and Pennsylvania and decided to throw in the towel? What would Hough do? What would this local Republican party do? We don’t need to think too long on that one! Y’all make our heads spin!
However, that isn’t even the main point. Allen decided she couldn’t or wouldn’t serve out the rest of her term. When she did this she knew (or should have known) the process for selecting her own replacement. Let’s take a look at what the law says, and be sure to see who sponsored it because what a treat!
Nowhere do we see that the new candidate needs to match the philosophy of the old. And how would that happen anyway? If anyone thought that was a necessity then the law would have been written to allow the board of education member to appoint their successor. But no one thought that idea made any sense!
We took some time to peruse the letters of intent for the over 50 people who applied for the vacancy:
Most of the candidates wrote about their dedication to education, their qualifications, and their community service experience. Unless some magic rubric exists to weed out those who wouldn’t be akin to Nancy Allen, we can’t imagine how their half-baked idea would even work!
The reality is the County Executive is only obligated to appoint (along with the County Council’s approval) the most qualified individual to fill out the last year of Allen’s term. As it is a non partisan race, there is no reason to only interview people who align themselves with the Republican party. And considering how those who align themselves with the Republican party have been behaving on that board this past year, why would anyone want that?
In the 9 years we’ve been doing this, we’ve tried to keep our focus on the local scene. There’s only so many hours in the day and so much sanity your Lady Yokels can expend, but sometimes we do need to expand our geographic purview. Today we need to talk about some legislation that’s made its way to Annapolis. For as Tip O’Neill liked to say, “All politics is local.”
We’ll start with HB0047, which thankfully (for the second time) was voted unfavorably in committee yesterday. However, just because it was shot down a second time, doesn’t mean that these folks won’t keep coming back. Let’s explore the bill together:
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That may take a couple of readings to really digest. It’s not only a very discriminatory and nasty bill, it’s also an enormous government overreach! Did you notice that this bill applies not only to public schools, but also to private schools and intramural sports?! Which party is supposedly the party of big government again? It’s so amusing to us how situational some people’s values are!
Besides trying to hurt kids, we really aren’t sure!!!
If you follow our Facebook page, you saw the link to this NY Times article we shared this morning:
What kind of world are we living in folks?
The next bill, HB0025 (at least as far as we know as of this morning) has not been voted on just yet. But someone is happy about the prospect of it passing!
Trying to have banned? You were rejected and will continue to be rejected!
Let’s explore the language of this very bad, vague bill!
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Who gets to define sexually explicit materials? Cindy? Here’s the rating system that most of these groups are using these days from the website, https://booklooks.org/ratings-system:
We have never had such a hateful reaction to a chart before! Who defines moderate, explicit, excessive, mild, aberrant, obscene?! Who has the right to tell the rest of us what our children should read? Where’s the evidence of harm in a 3-5 rated book? What studies do they have? What the hell is wrong with these people? Man, we don’t like to get all worked up this early in the morning!
At the bottom of this post we are going to give you a nice list so we can all email our local delegation to make sure they don’t vote for this very bad bill should it come before the entire delegation. Let’s divert, for just a moment, on why it’s so important that kids and adults read books:
See what we highlighted there?
Maybe we should put forth a bill that everyone has to read at least for an hour a day! That’s probably the best way to fix this problem.
It has been a banner evening over at Yokel headquarters as we turned the pages of today’s Reconsideration Committee report! What a treat we have for you, dear readers, as sanity once more wins out in our nice county!
For a long time now we’ve tried to tell Cindy and al. that they don’t understand what the word pornography means. (Here’s the link in which we tried to educate) What we came to see, as we perused this report, is not only were we unable to dissuade her of this erroneous definition, but she and her two minions took their misunderstanding to a whole new level. These books are apparently illegal because of their very poor understanding of the meaning of that word.
We have a real vocabulary problem here folks!
Before we get to some examples of the evaluation of these books, we need to share some more of the written and verbal testimony from both Cindy and current board member (!) Nancy Allen!
Let’s start with why Cindy doesn’t believe that she actually has to read the books:
How’d you like that logic! Let’s keep going….
Does she not know that everyone can read this? Love the characterization of middle schoolers as hormonal, irrational beasts based on one anecdote that we are 100% positive her granddaughter did not want her to make part of the public record!
She continues on her journey…..
UMMMMMMMMM.. This shouldn’t have become political? From the women who strives to make everything political?!
It sure as hell is!
Now, we aren’t just going to focus on Cindy’s misconstructions, as we also have evidence of current board member (!) Nancy Allen’s problems with definitions:
Child pornography!!!!! Remember that when you get to the evaluation section of our post.
Now, let’s talk about that Miller Test because that is the standard the hard working people who spent hours actually reading and discussing these books used to evaluate these books:
Now, scroll back up and see if Cindy’s interpretation matches. If you don’t want to, we’ll save you the time and say it absolutely doesn’t.
Now let’s look at a couple of examples from committee applying The Miller Test to the books Cindy found so offensive.
We read this one over and over and over again. And we laughed and laughed and laughed! The word “mate” really got to us.
Hide your kids!!!
Here’s another one we enjoyed:
“We did not see the above things in the book”!!!! What a colossal waste of everyone’s time this was!
So, the committee gave two recommendations:
And…
The one book they removed had a similar YA version, so the committee felt as though that book would suffice. But it looks like your Lady Yokels need to start reading Ellen Hopkins’ books!
Overall, a resounding victory for intellectual freedom and sanity. So how is our friend Cindy doing on her day of resounding defeat? NOT SO GOOD…..
Well, we know someone isn’t eating from that tree!
Also, FCPS is going to start allowing parents to prohibit their child from checking out books they don’t want them to read. Therefore, if this is really about protecting their children from themes they don’t believe they are ready for and not about marginalizing groups of people and opinions they find offensive, then this case is officially closed.
We’ve been following local politics, and given our very fine commentary about it, for about 7 1/2 years now. In that time no candidate has ruffled our feathers more than Cindy Rose and the minions she finds to run along side her. Our complaints about her are very well documented in this blog, so we are not going to spend a whole lot of time going down memory lane. For there is of course some fresh new hell to cover.
Cindy and her ilk are very proud of an endorsement from the 1776 Project PAC.
Did the ghosts of George Washington and co. come back to choose school board candidates? Sorry to tell you ladies, but women aren’t allowed in politics according to them!
Well, of course we had to look into this organization! And yes, it’s a horror show. Just look at what happens when you click on their website:
WOW! Before they even let you see what they are about, they have a reporting mechanism for ratting out schools for teaching accurate history (since no K-12 schools are teaching critical race theory, we must suppose that truth in education is really what they are opposed to)!
It gets worse, because of course it does:
None of this makes any sense..nor is it true.
Well, they could have left it at that. But their one failed candidate, who is now their communications director, (stop laughing people!) put this out…FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
What these people don’t know could fill the universe!
We unfortunately have too many examples of racism in FCPS. It exists, and the people who say it doesn’t exist are either: a. willfully ignorant or b. have racist beliefs that they are unwilling to acknowledge or work on themselves. We pick b.
Today we unfortunately have yet another example of this problem in FCPS:
There’s a lot of good literature out there that discusses why white people don’t want to acknowledge or discuss issues of race. We’ll delve a little into here, with the caveat that we aren’t experts, but we are white people who are trying to be better.
When some white people hear the word racist they conjure up an image of a Ku Klux Klan member who calls POC terrible names and sometimes, or maybe often, resorts to violence. Therefore, when some white people are called racist they immediately reject that label, because of course they don’t believe they are on the same level as a member of the Klan. Unfortunately, any chance of a productive conversation is shut down; denials of whatever just happened pooh-pooh away a real problem as though a POC is just overreacting or misconstruing what was actually meant. This is where white people need to change, and it isn’t the responsibility of POC to lead us down this path. We need to examine our biases. We need to think about what we learned in school as children, the TV shows, movies, and books we were exposed to that helped shaped our world view. We need to think about the stereotypes and prejudices that were passed down to us from our parents and our grandparents and then we need to be BETTER.
We wrote a little bit about Critical Race Theory and schools, so we aren’t going to rehash all that again. But we will say this: the way history was taught to many of us as children has not served us well. Many of us don’t understand the past, won’t acknowledge the power structures in this country, and as a result, are causing real harm to adults and children in our community. Of course what happened 300, 200, 100 years ago isn’t the fault of anyone alive today. What is our fault is not acknowledging the harm that our past has brought upon others, and how our past has shaped our present.
So to Cindy and her little hate slate that wants to sit on our school board and pretend that racism isn’t a thing around here we say:
And don’t get back up until you are ready to be a god damn adult!
Here we go, yo. We are entering “you can’t make this up” territory yet again. We are familiar from a safe distance with one of the parents endorsing the ENI Slate on their new web page. That individual is Chris Charuhas. He is an “author” and web content provider. In fact one must wonder for very valid reasons if he is behind this revamped piece of mess (his cottage business is making campaign websites, if you didn’t choose to click the link), but we digress…His endorsement is the second in this list on the Goals page of their site.
It’s probably worth a Google or so to find out what these other individuals’ beliefs may be that could become shared goals with the Hate Slate.
This is where it really gets good, because these are people who are obsessed with personal bodily safety lessons that they refer to as grooming, and they share goals with the person (mythological beast?) who they have cited on their own page in the screenshot above. This man’s concept of individual identity and sexual orientations departs from gender and extends into the range of the mythological. Just get a load of his 2016 publication:
Would this be a part of the proposed curriculum? 16 possible feminine/masculine combinations? Some are goats? Some are mermaids? Mermen? Merfolk?
This is all really very fascinating. We have been really concerned that when they say “education, not indoctrination” that they clearly mean that they only wish to indoctrinate the children to their own closely held bigoted points of view. We had no idea their range was so expansive as to include satyrs & nymphs.
Oh dear, this one appears to be out of print at this time. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe meets sex ed will be unavailable to FCPS, even if this fantastical slate is able to take the reins. (Shudder.)
Won’t it be ironic if they can’t remove his endorsement from their website because he is the only person connected to the campaign who can use a hosting platform? (Yokel quietly crosses fingers…)
We don’t wish to be too difficult with regard to Mr. Charuhas’ creative endeavors, and we do hope those of you with open minds may choose to order one of his fascinating adult resources. It’s a shame the sex toy sales lady didn’t make it through the primary. This could have been such an exciting and innovative time for the Family Life Advisory Committee to explore curricular aids, if it weren’t for the ENI Slate doing all the shouting, none of the listening or helping, and creating impediments to getting any actual advice from those parent volunteers.
P.S. That link above about the way these maniacs behaved at The FLAC meeting is worth reading (Washington Post); this Yokel hadn’t realized that Dan Cox accused Brad Young of preparing children for chemical castration! It is frankly astonishing that anyone believes anything these people say. A Who’s Who of Who not to Vote For: Cindy Rose, Olivia Angolia, and Nancy Allen.
In light of Heather Fletcher’s national news making act of stealing the pronoun pins and checking out all the PRIDE display books from the Brunswick library, we’ve been getting quite a few inquiries as to which candidates should be avoided. This post will revisit some of our election posts (focused heavily on the school board) to get everyone up to speed!
In our most recent post, we did a deep dive to see how our local candidates feel about gun control in the wake of the shootings at Udvale.
We also put out the call for all Independent voters to make their way to the polls this primary season because the Board of Education primary race is open to ALL voters. You’ll also see your Yokel picks for this race!
Please share this information far and wide. We need to make sure our school board and county governments remain sane and functional institutions. And don’t forget to check into our Facebook page as we frequently share what we find on our local characters.
How did we let this happen folks? Those of you older than 40 know that things weren’t always like this. We didn’t always have this obsessive of a gun culture. There was a time when we wouldn’t have dreamed of allowing regular citizens possess these types of weapons. It all comes down to greed. When gun manufacturers’ market dried up in the the U.S. and foreign military markets ,they turned to the American public. And some of you lapped up their advertising manipulations and scare tactics to the point that this country is broken. This has nothing to do with the Second Amendment anymore (read the whole thing: the parts about well regulated and militia count just has much as the part the NRA posts in their entry way) , it’s all about an easily manipulated American public who helped ( and continue to help) unscrupulous, greedy gun companies get rich. It’s all so stupid and sad.
We’ve been thinking a lot about what we can do to change things. We keep wondering if this will be our George Floyd moment when it comes to gun control. It’s not as though a majority of us don’t already believe change needs to come. Just look at these polling results that historian Heather Richardson recently posted:
A Politico/Morning consult poll out Wednesday showed “huge support” for gun regulations. It showed that 88% of voters strongly or somewhat support background checks on all gun sales, while only 8% strongly or somewhat oppose such checks. That’s a net approval of +80.
Preventing gun sales to people who have been reported to police as dangerous by a mental health provider is supported by 84% of voters while only 9% oppose it, a net approval of +75.
Seventy-seven percent of voters support requiring guns to be stored in a safe storage unit, while only 15% oppose such a requirement, a net approval of +62.
A national database for gun sales gets 75% approval and 18% disapproval, a net approval rate of +57.
And take a look at this clip from conservative Supreme Court justice Warren Berger regarding the 2nd Amendment:
This clip of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Berger, a conservative, destroying the modern day Republican Party's 2nd Amendment fraud needs to go viral pic.twitter.com/Q4NtMM97v5
So what’s stopping us? First of all we need to stop electing people to office who hold unreasonable and uncompromising viewpoints on gun ownership. And that’s where we come in. We did a deep dive on some of our local candidates and their views on gun control. We discovered more than what we set out to look for, and we’ll share that with you as well.
Let’s start with our old pal Cindy Rose:
We know it’s a lot to take in, and man oh man she is so wrong on so many things, but here’s one more hot take for you to remember her by:
😳🧐🤯
Let’s move on. Running alongside Cindy is Nancy Allen. Look at the hot garbage we found on that one!
Sure that’s the ticket!Sigh!And you want to run for school board because…”Correct, so tell your running mates to stop banning books!This is really special from a school board candidate.Why don’t you just give the teachers a script? Many of our teachers talked about their families. Ha ha ha! Comparing us to a communist country is so rich.What about history, art, PE, music, computers?
Next under the microscope is Tiffany Nobel, a school board candidate who thinks arming teachers is the solution to this issue.
The Scarface gif is really special. Every single time these people come out with the arm teachers bullshit. Do they ever stop to think of all the problems that could lead to? Or recognize the well-documented fact that most teachers, parents and students do not want this to happen?!
It would take hours, if not weeks, to sort through all the pro-gun stuff on Dan Cox’s page, so we’ll just send you a little taste.
There are those on the other side of Dan who would like to see him win the primary because all polling shows that he would get trounced by whomever wins the Democratic nomination. And while we think that is true, we still wouldn’t be able to stomach the fact that he even garnered that much support. (If you are behind on how terrible Dan Cox is, just click here.)
Last but not least is NRA darling, Michael Hough. The man who is running unopposed in the Republican primary and thinks we should let him be our next County Executive.
This was proudly posted the day after the shooting at Marjory Douglas High School.
Yes I do support the @NRA, have an A plus rating. You never answered me, did you read either of the two bills that you are tweeting about? Seems like you haven’t which is kind of embarrassing. Maybe you can have Soros or Bloomberg send you talking points
This was posted in response to someone else letting the world know how insensitive he is to gun violence. It’s also nice to know that he subscribes to the ridiculous notion that Soros and Bloomberg are paying everyone off and couldn’t have possibly come to these conclusions on their own. Imagine how this ability to discuss other ideas would transfer to our top executive office.
Independents please don’t forget to vote in the Board of Education primary on July 19th. Here’s a few links to give your our thoughts on this upcoming election.
Make sure all your friends and families pay attention to our local elections. Just imagine a world in which Dan Cox is governor, Michael Hough is our County Executive, and Cindy et al. run our schools. It’s enough to give you nightmares.
This is how things will be if we let these folks onto the school board.
We know there’s a lot going on in the world today.
Amongst the chaos that is the world today, we still need to remember how important it is to vote smartly when it comes to our local affairs. The school board election may not seem that important, but it is gravely important. The school board helps determine what is taught, what books are used, which books are banned, and regulations that determine what kind of treatment and rights students and staff have in public school buildings. They literally help shape our children’s future. What’s more important than that?
If you’ve been a frequent reader, you know we aren’t a fan of Cindy Rose. (If you are new click thislinkfor more info). We’ll touch on her and her slate, but here’s a couple of more pieces of evidence as to why her logic “skills” would not be a welcome addition to our school board:
This morning Cindy and her slate (who we will discuss soon) decided to pen an LTEto the Frederick News Post about why the search for the new superintendent should wait until after the next election. Here’s our favorite part:
On second thought, maybe that’s exactly why they are in a hurry? What better way to sabotage a joyful, hope-filled, student-focused and traditional vision for Frederick County’s students, parents and teachers than to saddle them with a progressive superintendent who may not be in lock-step with a new majority’s vision?
And so do the rest of us!
And this is all so rich coming from a group of people who belong to a party that justified Mitch McConnell’s blocking Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court while rushing through one in the last few weeks of Trump’s administration.
This LTE reminded us that we need to get to the rest of the candidates. We did some research, and since we adhere to the philosophy of letting people show us who they are (and then believing it), we will let their words and pictures speak for themselves.
We’ll begin with the rest of Cindy’s new hate slate
First up, homeschool parent Mark Joannides:
The good of humanity? Locking who up? WOW!And you received your medical degree from where? Why should we believe you?!
We know this is a lot to take in, but there’s more…
Nancy Allen, who doesn’t appear to have had any interaction with the FCPS until now also has some thoughts:
Poor dog.Huge eye roll.
And the last one to grace Cindy’s bandwagon, Olivia Angolia, whose qualifications are that she used to be a student:
There’s still three more to go. The next on our list is the first defector from Cindy’s slate, Ashley Nieves. Let’s visit what she thought was suitable to mail out to Frederick County voters:
Where is she getting the evidence for these statements she’s making? Show us the proof and give us concrete ideas, not platitudes.
Next up are two candidates that are out walking around with Ashley. The first one is Tiffany Noble a person who associates with a Florida based group,Moms for Liberty. The local chapter of this group posted a few things asking all “Mama Bears” to join their call.
We feel the need to call out this Mama Bear tripe. All of your Lady Yokels are moms. We all feel the need to stand up for our kids when necessary, but more importantly teach them to advocate for themselves. This Mama Bear vibe gives the impression that my kid’s needs are more important than yours. It’s aggressive, combative, and serves no real purpose other than to make someone feel as though they are being a good parent. The rest of us are not impressed.
Let’s leave the Mama Bear stuff with the bears
Tiffany Noble is our Moms for “Liberty” candidate. Here’s her philosophy:
Not one? We know for sure that isn’t true. So, our first introduction to her is a lie. And how is it a good look to call teachers and staff bullies? Good luck with that sista!Define CRT please! Another statement with no proof!Thor help us with these public education destroyers.
Last one on our list (for now) is April Montgomery:
We are going to zoom in on the next screenshot so you can really see how she put a Confederate flag collar on her dog. And yes, that date stamp is 2021, not 1921.We don’t even know what to say about this.
We’ll leave you with a post she made this morning to round it all out:
Trust people when they show you who they are. We’ve provided commentary, but edited nothing.
Don’t worry, happy fun time post of who you should trust your children’s future to is on the way soon!
frederick local yokel 