Misleading poll question sets up obvious answer

The local newspaper, the Verde Independent, has been under attack by various member of the Verde Valley Community College Citizen Advocates group for its failure to accurately report on information about Yavapai Community College and for withholding information that shows a disparity between the treatment of residents of the West County and those on the East County. The newspaper has stated that its readers are “becoming a bit burned-out over the `Prescott vs Verde Valley’ dynamic.”

IIn what some may see as retaliation, the newspaper began running a poll asking readers whether the Verde Valley Community College Citizen Advocates should be allowed to ban people from their meetings?  This is the result of the group asking one member of the public to leave the meeting who the group believed was not making positive contributions to its mission.

What is left out for obvious reasons was asking a proper question. For example, a proper question would read something like this:  “Should an independent, citizens group, not subject to state open meeting requirements, be allowed to bar persons who may publicly attack the group in newspaper editorials, at public gatherings where members are speaking, and or disrupt regularly scheduled group meeting?”  Should members of the Rotary, Kiwanis, or YMCA have to tolerate such persons at their meetings?  Or welcome them to their meetings after they are publicly attacked and disparaged?  Or called names at public meetings such as liars?

That, of course, would have been an honest poll question regarding this particular group. However, the newspaper, as you can see from below, was not interested in that type of question or response to it.

Should a Community College website promote and support indirectly political programs not associated with the College and student education?

The Republican Women of Prescott invited radical right wing speaker Dinesh D’Souza to attend a political program at the Yavapai College Performing Arts Center that features  Dinesh D’Souza on Tuesday, July 28 at 7:30 p.m.  While the College has a right to rent to any political party, should it promote the political event on its web site and collect tickets for the showing?  Common sense suggests it should not.  In today’s political world, it should stay completely neutral.  Furthermore, if it invites a radical right winger, then it should offer the same opportunity to a radical left winger.

According to Reuters, the right-wing media star who will speak at the Performing Arts Center  “was sentenced [in September, 2014]  to spend eight months in a community confinement center” as part of five years of probation for violating federal campaign finance laws. In January, 2014 D’Souza was indicted for arranging excessive campaign contributions to the Senate campaign of his friend, Wendy Long. After spending several months protesting the charges and claiming he was being unfairly targeted for his political beliefs, D’Souza pleaded guilty in May, 2014.

In a May, 2015 article,  Evgenia Peretz writes that  after D’Sousa made “wild arguments about race, he would make even wilder arguments about 9/11, in the 2007 book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11—whose title summed up its thesis. The real reason terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers, he wrote, was anger stirred by the left—Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Planned Parenthood, Brokeback Mountain, and The Vagina Monologues.”

Peretz also wrote in the article that in a book D’Sousa titled,  “In The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010),”  he wrote that President Obama “had a single goal: to avenge the injustices inflicted by colonialism upon his father’s Kenyan homeland, by intentionally weakening America’s economy and power in the world. The book was written in two months, he boasted in the introduction. And with sentences like these, it showed: “The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dream of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s—a polygamist who abandoned his wives, drank himself into a stupor, and bounced around on two iron legs … raging against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions. This philandering, inebriated, African socialist is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.” The conservative Weekly Standard called the book “lunacy.”  You may read the entire Vanity Fair article by clicking here.

The following shows how the College website is being used for this program.  One would think that the Administration would exercise better judgment.

Letter to editor suggests renaming Community College to “King George College”

Cottonwood resident Beatrice Keeber suggests that the Community College be renamed “King George College.”  She says that it would be a more fitting name and asks: “Is it time for Verde Valley to rise up as did the colonists in 1775? Is there another way for this entire valley to be heard in Prescott?” 

Her letter to the editor in the Verde Independent where she made this suggestion may be read in its entirety by clicking here.