Fort Smith Town Hall on FOIA

The Western Arkansas Transparency in Government (TIGG) will sponsor a town hall meeting to discuss and get public comment regarding the new amendment to the Arkansas constitution known as the “Arkansas Government Transparency Amendment”, which will enshrine the Arkansas Freedom of information Act in our state constitution and provide additional safeguards to protect our sunshine laws.  The meeting will be held on Tuesday, October 24th, at 5:45PM at the Fort Smith Public Library (Community Room), 3201 Rogers Avenue, Fort Smith. The event is free, and the public and elected officials are encouraged to attend and participate.

The Fort Smith Townhall will be the first of a series of meetings across the state. There will be a townhall meeting in Fayetteville (October 26th)  and West Memphis (October 30th). Details will be announced on those meetings soon.

Western Arkansas TIGG founder, Joey McCutchen, will moderate the town hall meeting. The meeting will feature FOIA experts from across Arkansas, who will discuss and explain the substance and importance of the amendment.

McCutchen said, “The language of the “Arkansas Government Transparency Amendment” will make the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act one of strongest, if not the strongest, government transparency and sunshine laws in the entire country.”

See attached copy of the “Arkansas Government Transparency Amendment.”

SC State Library Cuts Ties With Librarian Group That Hired ‘Marxist’ Coordinator, Cites ‘Tone Deaf’ Partisanship

The South Carolina State Library has officially terminated its partnership with the American Library Association (ALA), citing the group’s alleged partisanship, according to a letter shared Sept. 26.

The ALA selected Emily Drabinski — who described herself as a “Marxist lesbian” in a since-deleted tweet — to head the group in 2022. Drabinski said she hoped to use her position at the library to examine the “consequences of decades of unchecked climate change, class war, white supremacy, and imperialism have led us here.

The Montana State Library (MSL) Commission voted in July to leave the ALA, writing that, “Our oath of office and resulting duty to the Constitution forbids association with an organization led by a Marxist.”

“Your organization, the national organization for libraries, has a professional obligation to provide resources that can be utilized by libraries and librarians to serve their patrons,” Aiken’s letter continued. “While this can be challenging, it is possible with inclusion and diversity. My hope is that this letter, the loss of membership, and the additional voices of my colleagues in the field will create reflection and action within ALA to be guided by the mission ‘to provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.'”

The ALA has been working to kill legislation that prohibits librarians from distributing sexually explicit materials to minors. The group has argued such laws would “impair” librarians’ ability to effectively distribute “diverse” materials to community readers. The ALA is using an “adverse library legislation tracker” to target these and other laws, including legislation that seeks to protect parents’ rights. Members of the ALA were encouraged to work with “grasstops advocates who can engage with lawmakers and influencers” to defeat such “adverse” bills.

https://dailycaller.com/2023/09/27/south-carolina-library-cut-ties-american-association/

Finally – Los Angeles Schools Drop COVID Vaccine Mandate

In a 6-1 vote late Tuesday, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education rescinded the district’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement for all district employees. But critics worry the move is an attempt to thwart a lawsuit that seeks justice for the more than 1,000 employees affected by the mandate.

Mary Holland, J.D., president of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), commented:
“People can get discouraged with lawsuits — they take a lot of time and money — but this is an example of the payoff — the authoritarian actor LAUSD backed down. No one should think for a minute that without HFDF [Health Freedom Defense Fund] this would have happened. It would not have. Pushing back against unconstitutional, dictatorial acts is incredibly important. It is a huge credit to the health freedom movement as a whole that there has not been a single COVID vaccine mandate imposed in a public school district in the country that has stuck. This feat would not have been possible without grassroots activism and lawsuits.”

Leslie Manookian, president and founder of Health Freedom Defense Fund, agreed the vote was “another huge victory” for the health freedom movement.
Still, she said, the district’s choice to rescind the order now — more than two years after it was announced and after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admitted COVID-19 vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission — is a “cynical attempt to evade justice as the judges signaled they believed LAUSD’s vaccine mandate was irrational.”

HFDF provides legal representation for LAUSD employees negatively affected by the vaccine mandate. On Nov. 2, 2021, HFDF and LAUSD employees with California Educators for Medical Freedom sued top officials of the LAUSD, including board members, alleging the district’s vaccine mandate violated employees’ 14th Amendment “rights of personal autonomy, self-determination, bodily integrity, and the right to reject medical treatment.”

Lawsuit filed against West Memphis School Board

Fort Smith Attorneys Joey McCutchen and Stephen Napurano announced that they filed a lawsuit against the West Memphis School District and Board of Education for violating the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).   

The lawsuit arose following the termination of former West Memphis School District Superintendent Richard Atwill’s contract during a Board meeting in April 2023. During the April meeting, the Board entered executive session to discuss a “personnel matter.” After returning from executive session, the Board voted to terminate Superintendent Atwill’s contract and approved a $350,000 severance package. According to Board Member Dr. Kimberly Wolfe, no explanation was given for Atwill’s termination. The Board then named Willie Rhoades as interim superintendent nearly a day after terminating Atwill’s contract.

The Board announced in May 2023 that Dr. Terrence Brown was selected as the new superintendent after the Board conducted interviews. No notice of these interviews was given to the public or media in clear violation of FOIA. Emails obtained through a FOIA Request showed that the Board secretly interviewed four candidates for the superintendent position. The candidates were Terrence Brown, Wyonia Scott, Toriano Green, and Rodriguez Broadnax.

The suit alleges that the West Memphis School District and Board of Education violated FOIA by not providing notice of the interviews to the public and media.

McCutchen said, “There appears to be complete lack of transparency by several board members beginning with the termination of Dr. Richard Atwill, the payment of $350,000 of taxpayer money, and concluding with the secret hiring of the new replacement Superintendent Terrence Brown.”

A copy of the Complaint is attached.

Top Canadian politician apologizes to unvaccinated, “we were wrong…” she makes unprecedented promise…

“Danielle Smith, the current premier of Alberta in Canada, has done something remarkable.

She took the bold and unprecedented step of apologizing to unvaccinated Canadians who’ve faced unfair treatment from the government throughout the “pandemic.” But Ms. Smith actually went beyond just issuing an apology, Danielle actually made a promise: anyone who was terminated from their job due to their refusal of the COVID-19 vaccine will be reinstated.

Wow. That’s not the type of humility you hear from politicians everyday, is it?

This apology and promise from Ms. Smith sends a powerful message to globalist elites: you were all wrong, and everybody knows it.

Thanks to her humility, Danielle Smith has set a new standard in political leadership. Her acknowledgement of the horrors faced by the unvaccinated and her willingness to take responsibility for the government’s disgusting actions during the pandemic show she has the potential to be a good leader. ” https://revolver.news/2023/06/top-canadian-politician-apologizes-to-unvaccinated-we-were-wrong-she-makes-unprecedented-promise/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Vaccinated more likely to be hospitalized

“COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization turned negative over time, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data presented on June 15.

The effectiveness against hospitalization plummeted to negative 8 percent for people who received one of the old COVID-19 vaccines, according to data from a CDC-run hospital network.

A dose of one of the updated bivalent vaccines moved the protection above zero, to 29 percent, but the protection fell back to negative 8 percent beyond 89 days, the data show.

The protection estimates were for adults without a compromised immune system from Jan. 23 to May 24, when the XBB strain was dominant in the United States. The data came from people hospitalized at one of 25 hospitals across 20 states that are part of the Investigating Respiratory Viruses in the Acutely Ill network. Both cases and controls were hospitalized with COVID-like illness but the cases tested positive for COVID-19 and the controls tested negative for COVID-19.

The bivalent vaccines, made by Moderna and Pfizer, were introduced in the fall of 2022 with the hopes of improving protection against hospitalization and death after the old vaccines proved increasingly incapable of providing sustained shielding.

Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the messenger RNA technology utilized by the vaccine companies in their vaccines, said that the negative effectiveness is consistent with prior data such as a study from the Cleveland Clinic that found each successive vaccine dose increased the risk of infection.

Other papers have also estimated that protection against infection turns negative over time. Some datasets haveindicated that vaccinated people were at higher risk of hospitalization, long seen as a surrogate for severe disease.

Researchers in one recent paper said that repeated vaccination—some Americans have received a half-dozen COVID-19 shots in under three years—weakens immune systems, potentially making people susceptible to life-threatening conditions such as cancer.

The estimates were negative even after CDC officials made adjustments for factors such as age, sex, and ethnicity. The median time since the last dose for the people who only received one or more doses of an old vaccine was 464 days. For the group who received a bivalent vaccine but saw effectiveness turn negative, the median time was 137 days.”

https://substack.com/redirect/e2672fcc-af74-47bb-912a-91e3a80e6f9d?j=eyJ1IjoiMmUxY2FsIn0.aGROOmEuAH_toaDS2kmmHKY2uItOgHjCq2qfbI9HWXs