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Presidential race gets local focus as Obama, Romney supporters weigh in on jobs, deficit

CARSON CITY -- While Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were campaigning elsewhere today, Nevada Democrats and Republicans took up the battle for the presidency on their behalf.

Rep. Joe Heck, R-Nev., held a telephone conference call to talk up Romney’s credentials as a “turnaround specialist” who will get the country back on track. He also criticized Obama for failing to get spending or the national deficit under control as he promised early on in his presidency.

Nevada labor officials, meanwhile, attacked Romney’s business practices while with Bain Capital, a private equity firm he headed that has been criticized for cutting jobs.

As the Las Vegas Sun reported today, between 2000 and 2002, Stage Stores, a clothing chain, shut down three stores in rural Nevada as part of a bankruptcy. The stores’ closures came after Bain Capital had sold off its interest in the company in 1999.

Romney’s time at Bain Capital and his jobs record is the subject of a new ad by the Obama campaign.

In a Reno press conference featuring Todd Koch, president of the Northern Nevada Central Labor Council, Romney’s economic philosophy was defined as: “CEOs and wealthy investors prosper by any means necessary – even when it means companies fail and workers get left behind.”

“No one here today is challenging Romney’s right to run his business as he saw fit,” Koch said. “However, this is about whether the lessons and values Romney drew from his time as a buyout specialist are the right lessons and values we want in our president. In deal after deal, Romney and his partners’ first priority was to make a personal profit regardless of the cost to others.”

Paul McKenzie, secretary treasurer of the Northern Nevada Building Trades Association, said: “The bottom line here is that Stage Store’s workers really lost out, and Romney and his partners did not. This was the quintessential case of two different sets of rules, and that’s not the kind of economy we want. Romney economics aren’t a prescription for a stronger economy and they aren’t a prescription for a stronger country.”

In his remarks, Heck said Obama’s recent comments on same sex marriage are an example of a campaign effort to avoid the real issue, which is the national debt.

“Unfortunately President Obama has no rationale to offer for his own reelection, and no record of achievement to run on in the area of debt and deficit. All he has is a record of broken promises,” Heck said. “As Mitt Romney said it’s still the economy, and we are not stupid.

“You probably remember that when he first was elected he pledged to cut the deficit in half, stating that if he was unsuccessful that this would be a one-term proposition,” Heck said. “Well instead, we’re on track to have the fourth, greater than a trillion dollar deficit this year, all under this president’s administration.”

Obama was actually referencing the economy when he made the one-term proposition comment in February 2009. But he also promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.

Heck said Romney’s record of accomplishments in business, creating a successful Salt Lake City Olympics and cutting spending as the governor of Massachusetts makes him one of the most qualified candidates for president in modern history.

“This country needs a turnaround specialist, and Mitt Romney’s career has been about taking things that are failing, and turning them around, and making them successful,” he said.

Romney will simplify the tax code and cut corporate tax rates to bring business and manufacturing back to the U.S., Heck said.

In response to a question, Heck addressed Romney’s time at Bain Capital and the fact that there were some job losses.

“There will be some pain and suffering in trying to turn around the economy,” he said. “And while there may have been some jobs lost during some of those reorganizations of companies that Gov. Romney brought back from the brink, the ultimate end point was that there was a creation of more jobs than jobs actually lost,” he said. “Now those jobs may have been in a different area, and certainly that is no consolation to the person who lost the job in their home town if the job was created somewhere else.”

But he pointed to Romney’s successes with the retailers Staples and Sports Authority.

Nevada lost more than 70,000 construction jobs in the current downturn, and many of those workers have left the state and are not likely to return, Heck said.

“And that’s part of the process in trying to turn around the economy,” he said. “And I think that is what we’re going to see nationally as we try to stimulate our economy and go back to a pro-job growth economic outlook.”

_{Wed, 16 May 2012 11:37:15 -0700}

BLOG: Nevada newspaper goes behind the wall…to die

 

The Reno Gazette-Journal recently decided to lock themselves behind a wall and it will cost you at least $12/month to see what they have hidden. Does anyone else see the problem with this business model?

Allow me to reconstruct the history of news media in America to understand why this is a death sentence to the RGJ.

1700-1900
In the 1700s, newspapers became the source of community news. These newspapers often portrayed a political view, but were THE source of information in a society where travel was limited and information scarce. Writers and editors often became key figures in the social and political structure as the gatekeepers of what would be printed.

1900s
The invention of radio and television gave new options to the public on how they accessed news. The radio offered broadcast news that reached more people faster; however, newspapers remained the source of news because it existed in corporeal form. News transmitted on radio waves disappeared if a person wasn’t in front of the radio during the broadcast. Newspapers; however, almost always gave more a more in-depth account of the events.

Television came shortly after radio and added the exciting features of seeing the reporter and moving images of events; however, newspapers continued to be the best source of significant events.

1980
CNN was the first real threat to newspapers. It offered news 24/7/365 and it often relayed events in progress. People no longer had to wait for a newspaper’s version that would come the next day. The newspaper still had the corporeal advantage because CNN would eventually move on to the other news while newspapers could be read anytime. Newspapers also still gave more in-depth reporting on local news issues.

1995
It wasn’t until the creation of the Internet that newspapers faced a challenge that would threaten their existence. The public use of the Internet stripped newspapers of almost every advantage they held. News was not only reported, it was discussed and people reacted in real-time. With the development of the Google search engine topics could be accessed and researched at any time anywhere there was Internet access. The news was no longer filtered and limited to what an editor thought people should know, but rather raw information reached individuals who made their own decisions on what was significant to them.

Reporters who spent years in college and thousands of dollars in tuition and books now found themselves competing against bloggers who had no editors to please. Reporters might get the story and accurately report it to their community, but in a real-time world their information was just following up to what people already knew. Newspapers have adapted by presenting an online version of the information that will be in the next day’s paper and that has helped writers compete and be read; however, investors want profit and that is the heart of the dilemma.

The Reno Gazette-Journal has decided that they will create demand and increase revenue by limiting access. That is a rational position to take if you have a product that has significant value and demand, but newspapers and their value appeals to a diminishing demographic. Older white males are dying off at an incredibly rapid pace and newspapers have little demand or value to younger, non-white, non-male demographics. How does RGJ expect to gain new readers by charging for access who have free access to local online news through three Reno television news station’s webpages?

There is another problem with RGJ’s decision that may impact the quality of writing. A writer for RGJ has to accept that their audience will be extremely limited. Blogs will exist for decades and are be searchable to anyone in the world. An RGJ reporter’s work is locked away behind a wall forever. Who wants to dedicate their life to writing and have it unread? Over time writers will have to decide how much damage RGJ is doing to their career by locking their work behind a pay wall. Once the good writers are gone, what value will the Reno Gazette-Journal have to anyone, paying or otherwise?

_{Wed, 16 May 2012 11:29:01 -0700}

U.S. Dept of Education extends arts grant for school district

RENO -- The Washoe County School District has received a one-year extension of the Professional Development for Arts Educators (PDAE) grant from the U.S. Department of Education, allowing the District to continue teacher training, promote arts integration throughout the school district, and ensure sustainability of the program.

The three-year grant provides teachers at six at-risk schools with high-quality, ongoing professional training to teach their students about the arts and arts standards. These students receive arts-integrated lessons which are used to enhance their understanding and engagement in other core academic areas including math, literacy/language arts, science, and social studies.

“This program has been extremely beneficial to our at-risk students because it has allowed us to integrate arts into other areas of learning,” said Heather Bowman, a fourth-grade teacher at Rita Cannan Elementary School. “The program provides a way for teachers to learn from arts professionals and to incorporate new methods of teaching that are ‘outside the box.’ It directly aligns with Common Core standards, increasing rigor, improving student engagement, and, ultimately, student learning.”

“As teachers, we can now incorporate our arts-infused lessons into the academic areas, increasing retention and providing more well-rounded instruction for our students,” said Cherie Kuykendall, who also teaches fourth grade at Rita Cannan Elementary School.

According to Martha O’Neill, program director for the Arts Infusion Project, the funds awarded for the coming year will be used to complete the original goals and objectives laid out in the initial grant, which was awarded in 2009. The District will continue its partnership with Sierra Arts Foundation to provide advanced training of teachers already trained through the PDAE grant. Teachers also will continue to participate in the Partners in Education program from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Stacey Spain, interim executive director of Sierra Arts Foundation, and O’Neill just returned from an intensive four-day training at the Kennedy Center. There, they studied ways to effectively utilize the partnership to lay a foundation for arts integration by providing professional development workshops over the course of the coming year.

_{Wed, 16 May 2012 10:36:51 -0700}

News Source: MedleyStory More Local News Stories