My Buddy sent me this email the other day after reading the sore loser School Board’s indictment of Art Johnston after the Federal Court treated the Rice Report as though it was not worth the toilet paper it was written on:
Harry:
From http://lincolndemocrat.com/?p=13583:
. . . the brutally nasty series of Whereases promulgated by the Whereasses on the School Board.Where did the Board find the constipated lawyer to put all of those Whereases in the resolution?
[your Buddy]
I’m balancing on the edge of a tightrope right now that has on one side “magnanimity” and on the other “vengeance.” Since I’m not all that much of a Christian I have no more concern than my School Board colleagues with any fussy show of the former. Consequently, I sent my Buddy the following reply referring to the only attorney on our current School Board:
To: [My Buddy] 05/20/2015 9:04 AM
Bill Westholm?
Maybe it was there [sic] Public Relations Person.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smart[ass] phone
We were asked to vote up or down, with no discussion, on a witless collection of balderdash whereases. We were denied our say even after the Chairperson’s incompetent rush to adjourn the meeting; restart it (possibly illegally); and then vote on the Censure Resolution’s whole pile of manure.
Of all the whereases the one I found the most galling was the one extolling the Board majority’s efforts to find a compromise short of “laughingstock.” It was a claim that an attorney courting a malpractice suit or a visit to the Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board would have written:
Motion 4: I move that we strike the sixth Whereas in the resolution which reads: WHEREAS, representatives of the School Board and District Administration made multiple good-faith, but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to resolve Member Johnston’s claims against the District;
Of course I was unable to read my rationale either:
Rationale: This assertion is a bald faced lie. At no time has the majority attempted to show any good faith attempt to find a resolution short of a court room hearing for the eleven months after it approved the investigation of Member Johnston. Attempts by Member Harry Welty to initiate some other result were rebuffed by then chair Michael Miernicki as early as December of 2014.
Subsequent appeals for a different resolution have likewise fallen on deaf ears and an effort by Duluth’s Speak Your Peace organization attempting to bring the different parties together were dismissed by the Superintendent who explained that such an attempt to find common ground would be “disingenuous” because the two sides were so far apart.
I spent about six weeks during the Christmas Season (while awaiting the School Board’s imminent censure of me) stilling my blog criticisms in the hope someone would take the bait for a kinder gentler resolution to this judicial travesty. I made a dove of peace out of the almost negligible snowfall this winter and watched it degrade to a dirty heap rather like my futile gesture of peacekeeping. If you weren’t reading Lincoln Democrat in December 2014 take a look now and weep with me.
Do I sound a little bitter? Oh perish the thought.
Perhaps the only hopeful sign I saw last night of any future rapprochement was when my seatmate Mike Miernicki, who puffed and grunted and winced through the meeting to the point I had a hard time hearing the conversation jumped at something Art said without asking the Chair to speak. Our youngest member, Annie Harala, who had taken over for the Parliamentary Procedure phobic Seliga-Punyko (who left after the damage was done) actually cautioned her ally Mike to hush up.
That is a pretty slender reed to build my hope on but it’s a start.
