A Knight in Dragonland

On the pages of the Pekin Times and Ed Emmon’s Pekin News and Views, Jim Mangan scribes yet another diatribe, this time with some lovely statistics regarding the expansion of the federal government and taxation over the years. Master Mangan rings forth with much woe … but, yet again, proposes nothing in the way [...]

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Ed Emmons, chronic curmudgeon of the Pekin Daily Times editorial page, has entered the blogosphere. For those who aren’t familiar with Ed’s work, he’s a frequent writer of letters to the editor in the local paper. From the complaints on his blog, we’d see even more of his letters if many weren’t rejected [...]

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Jim Mangan hits a new low in his latest entry onto the editorial page of the Pekin Daily Times.  He apparently felt the need to publicly thump his Bible on the heads of homosexuals.  Mangan even ends his letter with the threat of apocalyptic doom, brought down on us by Democratic presidential candidates “pandering to [...]

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Yet another letter to the editor from Jim Mangan graced the pages of the weekend edition of the Daily Times. Apparently Mr. Mangan was upset by some comments made by outgoing Mayor Frank Mackaman regarding the duties of elected officials.
I’ve been ignoring Mangan lately, but this letter really struck me with the level of [...]

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I’m glad I’m not the only one questioning Jim Mangan’s attack on District 108 teachers. Today’s Pekin Daily Times has a letter to the editor from city council candidate Chad Schmidgall. In the letter Schmidgall praises our teachers by highlighting the hard work that they do for a relative pittance considering the value [...]

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Yet another Jim Mangan diatribe graced the Opinion page of Friday’s Daily Times. This time he’s attacking District 108 for paying their teachers too much.
First off … Mangan’s criticism is blatantly hypocritical. District 303, whose board he sits on, pays their employees nearly the same as 108. Why does 108 deserve criticism, [...]

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The District 303 School Board officially declared the school district consolidation issue dead on Monday night by declining to carry through with an official study of the issue. With a mandate from the state requiring inclusion of the other feeder districts in deciding this issue, and no interest from those districts, most board members [...]

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I had just finished a very good dinner, and I just about lost it when I read that comparison.
“I disapprove of what you say,” the French philosopher Voltaire is reputed to have said, “but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Had Voltaire uttered the first line of that famous quote at [...]

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There was a letter to the editor in today’s Daily Times entitled “Smoke, mirrors.” It was sent in by Tom Frazier of Pekin as a specific rebuttal of another letter to the editor. That letter (by Ray Garber Jr. of Pekin) was written in support of Mike Noyes and his publication of paraphrased [...]

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The Opinion page of the Daily Times weekend edition has an unsigned editorial entitled “Consolidation controversy arises again.” I have to agree with Bill Dennis regarding unsigned editorials in the mainstream media … I’m not a fan. At a paper as small as the Daily Times, it seems especially silly. Come on, [...]

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There were two pieces written in the Nov. 24 Daily Times relating to Pekin Grade School District 108 that provide starkly contrasting views of the situation in the district. I’d like to use this post to compare these views. There was also a letter to the editor by Karin Howland of Pekin urging [...]

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A letter to the editor from James Drainer, president of the Education Association of Pekin, was published in the weekend edition of the Daily Times. This must be the same letter Drainer mentioned to the 108 school board on Monday. Drainer decries Mike Noyes’s use of Mark Sattazahn’s letter of resignation in his [...]

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Until yesterday, I was worried about Jim Mangan. Articles from the Pekin Daily Times printed since the NON-BINDING consolidation referendum (here and here and here) made it seem like Mr. Mangan had gone soft – quoting him in support of a study and saying that he had an “open mind” about consolidation. He has [...]

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The headline story for today’s Pekin Daily Times was “Voters favor District 108, 303 consolidation.” The final vote on the non-binding advisory referendum was 23,605 yes and 11,650 no. Thankfully, the Times reporter Nick Vogel points out the obvious:
There is just one problem: The entire county got a chance to vote on the [...]

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