Miss AZ has eye on Miss America crown

By Sarah-Jayne Simon
U of A News

Few students have had to take semesters off to prepare for a national pageant.

Piper Stoeckel, a Prescott native and broadcast journalism senior at the University of Arizona, was crowned Miss Arizona last June and will be competing for the title of Miss America in January.

Stoeckel is currently taking the year off from classes to focus on a competition she’s been involved in for a number of years.

“I had my eye on pageants junior year,” Stoeckel said. “I admired the community service and talent. I watched Miss Arizona’s 2011 winner, Jennifer Sedler, and saw her doing the most incredible things, and she really inspired me to get involved.”

Megan Alletson, a senior and journalism major at UA, is one of Stoeckel’s closest friends.

“[Stoeckel] really does adapt to any situation and I have yet to meet someone who didn’t like her immediately,” Alletson said. “She makes a fantastic Miss Arizona because she breaks any negative stereotypes of pageantry. She is one of the most intelligent people I know, is obviously stunning and most importantly really cares about her platform and making a difference.”

Stoeckel’s platform includes child abuse prevention and awareness at the Southern Arizona Children’s Advocacy Center. She is currently on their board of directors and volunteers with them. Stoeckel is also active within the Boys and Girls Club.

“As this year has gone by I want to take the time to empower the next generation in any way I possibly can. During my senior year of high school, I decided that was the one cause that I wanted to work for and improve,” Stoeckel said. “One of my closest friends in high school was abused and I remember thinking, that was one of the worst things that could happen to an individual. I feel like that is what I was caused to serve.”

Stoeckel said she draws much of her inspiration from her family. Her older brother, Karl Stoeckel, was deployed to Afghanistan a week before his sister competed for Miss Arizona.

“He told me, I want you to go into this wanting to serve while I am serving,” Stoeckel said. “He inspires me every single day. I want to use this position to selflessly serve in Arizona. It is an odd dynamic for me this year because yes, I have these amazing things happening, but at the same time I am very humbled that a very important person in my family is in an extremely dangerous and courageous position.”

Laura Lawless Robertson, who was crowned Miss Arizona in 2002, has known Stoeckel since she earned the crown in June. Robertson said Stoeckel’s dedication to her platform is what allows her to fit the Miss Arizona title so well.

“I think she is a woman of character,” Robertson said. “She is hard-working and devoted to what she does. Having walked in those shoes as Miss Arizona before, I know how important it is to be passionate. It is not measured by the fame you achieve but the change you make in the service of the state and she has that quality. On top of being beautiful and having the potential of doing great at Miss Arizona, she is a hard worker and as an Arizona sister, I treasure that.”

After the Miss America competition, Stoeckel said she hopes to finish her classes at the UA and get an internship for broadcast news.

“I’ve joked that I want to be Piper Stoeckel when I grow up, but in all seriousness I think she is a wonderful role model and no better person could represent the state of Arizona,” Alletson said.

Mitt channels Ebenezer Scrooge on 60 Minutes

Romney says that Americans without health insurance can just go to ER. (photo: Laniado Hospital)

By Dr Jen Gunter

Wielding the Lasso of Truth

readersupportednews.org

25 September 12

ast night on 60 minutes Mitt Romney was questioned about health care. When asked if the government had a responsibility to care for the fifty million Americans who don't have health insurance he replied,

"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance, people - we - if someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and - and die. We - pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care."

What Mr. Romney fails to understand is that there is a difference between acute health problems that require an emergency department and, well, the other 99% of medical care. It is true, due to EMTALA if you are uninsured and have a medical condition requiring emergency care that you will not be booted out of the emergency department. Medical professionals don't look at your insurance card before pulling out the crash cart, so you are likely to get excellent emergency care regardless of your ability to pay. 

However, the 70-year-old stroke victim who needs physical therapy can't get that in the ER.

Neither can the two-year-old who needs feeding therapy.

Or the 42-year-old woman who needs chemo for her breast cancer.

Or the 47-year-old man who needs insulin for his diabetes.

Or the 22-year-old who needs a Pap smear.

Or the 6-year-old who needs an influenza vaccine.

What happens when people rely on the ER for their safety net is that they go without care or get a bill that they can't ever hope to pay (and still likely didn't get the care they really needed because an ER can only do so much). Hospitals then have no choice but to either charge health insurances more to recoup their losses or to close their emergency departments.

That is why, Mr. Romney, I have seen and wept over women with breast cancers eroding through their skin. Something that could have been prevented by a mammogram and lumpectomy four years earlier. And I have wept over women with cervical cancers who bled to death for want of a Pap smear and a simple office procedure 5 years earlier.

Mr. Romney, what would you say right now to someone suffering from an illness that is inadequately treated (or perhaps not even treated at all) because the have no health insurance or enough money to pay for care. "Are there no emergency rooms?"

What's next, "Are there no work houses?"

Beware ignorance, Mr. Romney.

Dr. Jennifer Gunter is a nationally and internationally renowned obstetrician/gynecologist. She is the recipient of numerous research awards and has published extensively in medical journals and authored many book chapters. "The Preemie Primer" is her first book. Her writing has also appeared in USA Today, the A Cup of Comfort series, KevinMD.com, EmpowHer.com, Exceptional Parent, Parents Press, Sacramento Parent, and the Marin Independent Journal. Dr. Gunter also writes a sexual health column for examiner.com. She has been interviewed by numerous national media outlets and magazines, including CNN.com, More, US News and World Report, Runner's World, Glamour, Redbook, Woman's World, and Shape.

Dr. Gunter was born and raised in Winnipeg, Canada, and graduated from The University of Manitoba School of Medicine in 1990 at the age of 23. In 1995 she completed her OB/GYN training at the University of Western Ontario and moved to the United States to complete a fellowship in infectious diseases at the University of Kansas. After completing her fellowship she continued her studies in pain medicine and currently is the only OB/GYN in the United States who is board certified in both OB/GYN and pain medicine. Dr. Gunter is one of the select few physicians in the United States who holds four board certifications.

TCCA series premiers with tenor/soprano duo

 

Live On Stage, Inc. and the

Tonto Community Concert Association

Announce

Daniel Rodriguez and Marla Kavanaugh to launch their 2012-2013 Concert Season

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - (September 10, 2012) – “America’s Beloved Tenor” Daniel Rodriguez and international soprano sensation Marla Kavanaugh will perform an exhilarating program of vocal works at the Payson High School Auditorium in Payson, Arizona on Sunday, September 30, 2012 at 2:30 pm.

Single tickets are $35 as available.  Children and youth under the age of 18 will be admitted free when accompanied by a ticket holding adult. For more information visit the association website at www.tccarim.org or call 928-478-4363 or 928-474-4189.

“Daniel and Marla both enjoy sharing the gift of their voices. You go away feeling enriched.

The power of their voices is stunning."

—Jonathon Howe, Manawatu Standard

It was fate that brought Daniel Rodriquez, a New York police officer, into the spotlight after September 11, 2001.  While a country in mourning looked for answers, his stirring a cappella renditions of “God Bless America” and the National Anthem brought renewed hope to America and introduced Rodriquez to the international stage.  Since that memorable performance Rodriguez’s touring has brought a myriad of experiences, including the 2002 Winter Olympics, a PBS Memorial Day Concert, regional opera, numerous television appearances and meeting his bride, New Zealand soprano Marla Kavanaugh.  

Kavanaugh is an established opera performer and recitalist, with credits including a performance with Plácido Domingo and the Los Angeles Opera.  The couple now concertize together performing a diverse musical program encompassing musical styles from opera to popular song. 

The Tonto Community Concert Association is committed to bringing quality entertainment to the Rim Country through an annual concert series and support of the fine arts in Payson schools.  This series is intended as an enriching cultural experience for the people of Payson and those in surrounding communities.

Romney video kills American Dream

By Naomi Wolf

Guardian UK

readersupportednews.org

21 September 12

Once, everyone believed they could succeed by hard work and gumption. Republicans no longer pretend to believe the myth.

itt Romney's historic gaffe caught on video - published, with great timing, by the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine - in which he said that his campaign was writing off 47% of American voters since they "depended on government" handouts, was committed in an equally significant manner, as he delivered the remarks to a closed group of potential major donors in Florida. GOP stalwart and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan is calling for an intervention in the campaign, and even some fellow Republicans are scampering to distance themselves from the inflammatory remarks.

But I find the remarks fascinating and important to deconstruct because they affirm - as insider discourse captured for the public often can - the fact that a new kind of narrative for America has taken over from one of our oldest and most cherished national myths. What Romney's comments reveal is that the American Dream is dead, killed off by skepticism from the bottom up - by the 99% of lower-income and middle-class people who no longer believe in it - and by cynicism from the top down - by the 1%, top-earning people who don't believe in it.

What, after all, is the narrative of "the American Dream"? It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era. Slogans, often used by political leaders who wished to court the aspirational, immigrant vote, invoked a promise that America was "the land of opportunity", where hard work, gumption and a bit of luck could make any poor kid a millionaire.

This mythology, embodied over those decades in the Horatio Alger stories consumed particularly by upwardly mobile young men and in the phrase "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps", consistently held out that American promise by equating hard work (along with other good Puritan values such as delayed gratification, temperance, saving and self-reliance) with economic success. As new waves of immigrants reached our shores after the second world war, the implicit pledge was elaborated into the idea for immigrants that even if their own hard work did not lift them into a new social class, it would elevate their children into the ever-growing ranks of the middle class.

The promise of the American Dream swept many presidents into power. Reagan offered a rightwing verison of it, with Bill Clinton - departing from leftwing orthodoxy - offering voters in 1992 a refreshingly-worded progressive version of the same promise: "work hard and play by the rules" and success will follow. Barack Obama, too, reprised the phrase in his 2008 campaign.

But now, the injunction to "work hard and play by the rules" is more likely to elicit a cynical cough of derision than a rush to the polling station. Post Tarp, post Libor scandal, post Madoff scheme, post justice department's pass for Chase, post HSBC money-laundering, post Occupy, post the ever-widening income gap in this country, and post the evisceration of civil society and public institutions that protect the middle class, the entire underpinning of the American Dream has been uprooted. And everyone knows it.

It is not surprising that the 99% stopped using the language of the American Dream, but what is notable from Romney's remarks is that even the wealthy have abandoned it. Notable because the premise - that their own hard work and ingenuity is what caused their wealth to aggregate - is a flattering and self-validating narrative. So, the fact that even the rich don't buy a version of what is now self-delusion is striking.

What Romney's remarks show is that the wealthy are handling the corruption of a system that benefits them by assigning blame for the destruction of the American Dream to the have-nots. In the Reagan years, only "welfare queens" and the small percentage of people actually on food stamps were targeted as drains on the system - needing "government handouts" and failing to "take responsibility for their lives". 

Now, as Romney admits, the wealthy deem virtually half the voting public as irredeemably shiftless moochers. Notable, too, is Romney's use of an Occupy-echoing phrase, "the 47%", whom he feels free to objectify and dismiss.

Not especially shocking, though, is the fact that he is explaining to donors that he does not need that half of America. (Anyone who has worked on presidential campaigns knows that strategists all write off the 47% who will never vote for them; they just don't tend to go on camera to do that disparaging.)

I have been noticing, with sadness, that politicians do not even bother invoking the American Dream anymore. They know that we know that everything is rigged against it now, and that the language no longer persuades even the most naive and idealistic; the best you'll get from a politician is a pledge, playing to nostalgia, to restore its lost promise. But what is striking about Romney's remarks is that they have replaced that commitment with a willingness to blame a vast swath of striving, middle-class Americans for their plight.

We thus see a turning-point in American conservative philosophy. This was the moment when the wealthy elite stopped believing its own PR, the self-affirming myth of that economic success can always be had for those who want it and are willing to work. Mitt Romney has told us that it's now simply class war: a struggle to stop the other half getting what "we" have. Thank you for your candor, Mr Romney.

Ann Romney wants Noonan in ring

A Letter from Ann Romney

Posted by Andy Borowitz

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster
 
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The Borowitz Report has obtained the following confidential letter from Ann Romney to members of the Republican Party:

Dear Fellow-Republican,

I’m not a happy camper.

Over the past few days, some so-called Republicans have taken it upon themselves to lob some pretty harsh words in the direction of my husband.

Now, it’s one thing when Mitt gets criticized by the forty-seven per cent of Americans who are parasites sucking at capitalism’s teat. But when former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan calls his campaign “a rolling calamity,” it’s time for Ann Romney to kick some ass.

Which brings me to you. This is not a fundraising appeal. Lord knows this campaign has all the money it needs, especially since Mitt went to Vegas and promised Sheldon Adelson he’d bomb Tehran on Day One. As Mitt’s wife, I’m asking you to pledge something far more valuable:

Your silence.

By signing the pledge form below, you become an official member of Ann Romney’s Circle of Silence, an élite tier of the Romney for President Campaign. As a member of the C.O.S., you will receive priority ticketing to the Inauguration, as well as a collectible “Loose Lips Sink Mitt” ball gag. All you have to do is shut the freak up until Election Day.

That’s right, for the next forty-six days, I’m asking you to bite your tongue every time Mitt says or does something idiotic. If you think that sounds difficult, welcome to my world.

And Peggy Noonan, if you’re reading this: you want a piece of Ann Romney? Then get in the ring, girlfriend, and I’ll mess you up good.

Vote for Mitt,

          Ann

What Mitt Romney really represents

Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)

By Robert Reich

Robert Reich's Blog

readersupportednews.org

21 September 12

t's not just his giant income or the low tax rates he pays on it. And it's not just the videotape of him berating almost half of America, or his endless gaffes, or his regressive budget policies.

It's something that unites all of this, and connects it to the biggest underlying problem America faces - the unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the very top that's undermining our economy and destroying our democracy.

Romney just released his 2011 tax returns, showing he paid $1.9 million in taxes on more than $13 million of income last year - for an effective tax rate of 14.1 percent. (He released his 2010 return in January, showing he paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent.)

American has had hugely wealthy presidents before - think of Teddy Roosevelt and his distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt; or John F. Kennedy, beneficiary of father Joe's fortune.

But here's the difference. These men were champions of the working class and the poor, and were considered traitors to their own class. Teddy Roosevelt railed against the "malefactors of great wealth," and he busted up the oil and railroad trusts.

FDR thundered against the "economic royalists," raised taxes on the wealthy, and gave average working people the right to form unions - along with Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and a 40-hour workweek.

But Mitt Romney is not a traitor to his class. He is a sponsor of his class. He wants to cut their taxes by $3.7 trillion over the next decade, and hasn't even specified what "loopholes" he'd close to make up for this gigantic giveaway.

And he wants to cut benefits that almost everyone else relies on - Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and housing assistance.

He's even a warrior for his class, telling his wealthy followers his job isn't to worry about the "47 percent" of Americans who won't vote for him, whom he calls "victims" and he berates for not paying federal incomes taxes and taking federal handouts.

(He mangles these facts, of course. Almost all working Americans pay federal taxes - and the federal taxes that have been rising fastest for most people are Social Security payroll taxes, which aren't collected on a penny of income over $110,100. Moreover, most of the "47 percent" whom he accuses of taking handouts are on Medicare or Social Security - the biggest "entitlement" programs - which, not incidentally, they paid into during their working lives.)

Money means power. Concentrated wealth at the top means extraordinary power at the top. The reason Romney pays a rate of only 14 percent on $13 million of income in 2011 - a lower rate than many in the middle class - is because he exploits a loophole that allows private equity managers to treat their income as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent.

And that loophole exists solely because private equity and hedge fund managers have so much political clout - as a result of their huge fortunes and the money they've donated to political candidates - that neither party will remove it.

In other words, everything America is learning about Mitt Romney - his tax returns, his years at Bain Capital, the video of his speech to high-end donors in which he belittles half of America, his gaffes, the budget policies he promotes - repeat and reenforce the same underlying reality.

So much wealth and power have accumulated at the top of America that our economy and our democracy are seriously threatened. Romney not only represents this problem. He is the living embodiment of it.

---

Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.

Tax day for Romney comes too late

By Charles Pierce
Esquire
readersupportednews.org

Okay, we all know he's had a very tough week, but how the hell is this stuff supposed to help?

Or, conversely, why the hell didn't they release this stuff six months ago?

That Willard Romney is G.I. Luvmoney, and that the Luvmoney clan generally finds eight bazillion ways around the U.S. tax code, was established long ago. Therefore, that he paid an effective tax rate that was lower than that of, say, the average firefighter, is a surprise to absolutely nobody.

If he'd have released the 2011 return in the middle of the Republican primaries, it would have been a story at most for a couple of days. None of those other buffoons had either the credibility, or the intellectual firepower, truly to make an issue out of it for longer than that.

Now, though, the Romney campaign puts this stuff out in the middle of an ongoing barrage of ridicule based on the stand-up act he did down in Boca and, instead of simply being a minor dust-up in his inexorable march to the nomination, it's another brick in the wall, especially since he and his party seem to be arguing sub rosa that very poor people aren't kicking in their fair share.

Now, smarter people than me are going to pick through the 2011 return, pointing out all the little ways that smart rich people can game the system, and all that information is going to come out, not in the context of an ongoing clown show, but as further reinforcement of everything that's causing virtually the entire political system to cough up a hairball at the mention of your candidate's name.

There's been more than a little speculation that Willard already has checked out of this whole running-for-president business. (Those of us in the Commonwealth — God save it! — can testify that his interest in matters political can wane pretty quickly.) And there's more than a little hilarity being had on the Intertoobz over the fact that the people running the Romney campaign received some pretty handsome incompetence bonuses.

But this little exercise, at 3 p.m. on a Friday, makes me wonder if some people working for this campaign haven't bet on the president and teased the Over. They spent the entire campaign handling the issue of Romney's tax returns badly. And then, at exactly the wrong moment in the history of the campaign — at exactly the perfectly wrong moment in the history of the campaign — they toss a dead fish out there as an obvious distraction, but a distraction that begs to be picked apart and the bones used to beat their candidate over the head a little more.

I'm not kidding. Jack Molinas went to prison for arranging things this way.