YOUR AD HERE »

Wisdom from the Web

Compiled by Daily staff

On the Vail Daily Web site, you can comment on each story or editorial you read there.Here, we publish excerpts of those comments:Re: CSAP boycott basically a no showI have a question about the Teacher Advancement Program. The district is scoring and ranking teachers using CSAP test scores, NWEA test scores and their own evaluation rubric of each teacher. They then give each teacher a score (based on a combining of the three scores previously mentioned), place these scores onto a bell curve and then award a certain percent of these top scorers bonuses. My question is this: Why are parents not told whom the top-ranking teachers are? Why are the teachers not told who they are, either? How can the teachers learn from the best if they are not allowed to know which teachers are the best? How can the parents have faith in the TAP program when it does not publicly celebrate its star teachers, and in fact hides them from the parents?Re: Share the wealth I doubt most people who move here come with the expectations of becoming fatastically rich or making a lot of money. We are here for a quality of live that exceeds most parts of the country. Part of this comes from nature and our suroundings, and part comes from our employer. …Re: More on waterWhen Commissioner Menconi talked about chilhood issues in his address to the county, we should all understand that he is using code for a TAX INCREASE. Now that he has children, he wants us to pay for them. Forget it, Menconi, because we will not pay to raise your children! Re: Letters to the editorBeth Slifer talks about the new green building regulations using terms like “encourage” and “reward.” More accurate would be “penalize” and “less punitive.” Sounds like a PR campaign to me. …Re: ‘Vail is not a real town’The continuing threat to our sense of community in the Vail Valley is the constant, persistent outsourcing of the real estate in our towns to time shares, fractional ownership, or any other form of selling our towns core real estate to people who don’t live here, nor have any other ties to our community other than the piece of paper that says they can visit us one week a year. Those among us with clouded vision sees the greatest threat to our sense of community caused by arrival of the big box stores. This is false. Look no further than the town of Gypsum, which seems to be helping big box stores help the town via increased sales tax. Now, how many upvalley families can you find that refuse to move to Gypsum from Avon and Vail or even Edwards because of the big box stores? Have you seen Gypsum’s new rec center? It’s at least twice as big as Avons. Ask yourself how many time-shares or fractional ownership units Gypsum has. The best place to raise a family or run your retail business or shop for the things your family needs will not be in Avon nor Vail. For that you have to move down valley. Until the town councils of Vail and Avon wake up, the downvalley communities will continue to draw our best and brightest families.Re: TipslineJust you wait, Tipsliner, as Glenn Harakal’s negative energy bears fruit. Glenn Harakal has already done more good for our district than anyone in years. He has single handedly begun a discussion. He has been a lightning rod for attacks in order to help all our kids get the education they deserve. If you are satisfied with the education your children receive, than allow us to share in that by helping the schools to diversify to meet more needs. Your kids can still attend a school functioning exactly as is, while mine attend something different that will finally meet their needs. They have languished for six long years. Fair enough?Re: Editors’ Blog: Terror insuranceThousands of innocent people die every day because of pointless wars, the cruelty of an uncaring government, or by genocide. All over the world there are things occurring that are travesties. Our involvement in trying to prevent or stop these travesties doesn’t necessarily always “benefit Americans.” Our desire to try to give people the basic human right of freedom is a cause I support, even if there are no clear benefits to myself.I think we went to war arbitrarily and under false pretenses, of course. The war is being fought in the wrong place and should be moved to Syria and Iran, but we dare not invade these areas yet. Perhaps Iraq is some grand practice run at the battle yet to be fought.Terrorists are programmed from birth, taught the anger and hatred of egocentric thinking, taught that killing in the name of religion will earn them a special place in heaven with a multitude of virgins at their disposal. This kind of craziness must be addressed. We’re not making any friends in the world, that’s for sure, so why not continue to be the world’s police?Better safe than sorry with removing crazy dictators, I always say. If we had intelligence, false or not, of atrocities such as occurred during Hitler’s reign, I would hope we would do something even before concrete proof of atrocities were handed to us.Any way about it, it would be difficult to impeach the president, vice president, along with the secretaries of state and defense. President Bush has been blamed for everything from the price of oil to natural disasters. If a Democratic president were in office, I guess the water temperatures would be lower and there would be less severe hurricanes, as well.I’m an independent. I think Bill Clinton did an excellent job with the economy, but not was so hot with abstaining from committing adultery and perjury.George Bush is avenging his father’s attempted assassination while looking like a great Western world hero. Regular, honest-living, hard-working Americans can never be elected to the presidency because we can’t afford the TV spots.So there, that’s what I think. Your blog was filled with the same old crap we’ve all read a billion times.Vail, Colorado


Support Local Journalism