Stronger DUI laws are needed
drunken driving crash has taken the life of a second victim in Oklahoma, foreign exchange student Nhu Huong. Her parents were by her bedside as she was taken off life support.
Huong passed away just weeks after the wreck killed her host mother, Amanda Starkey-Carson of Yukon, on New Year’s Eve. The incident shed light on the need for tougher DUI laws.
Craig Maker, the driver investigators say caused the crash, was arrested and charged with drunken driving. Court records show Maker was a repeat offender who has pleaded guilty four times previously to driving under the influence of alcohol.
As a personal injury attorney, I’ve seen too many families torn apart when loved ones became victims of drunken driving.
Following the New Year’s Eve tragedy, state Rep. Mike Sanders, R-Kingfisher, vowed to investigate what statutory changes may be required to further protect the public and to prosecute repeat offenders appropriately. Sanders is working to update where DUI offenders are prosecuted, and more work needs to be done.
Deafening hypocrisy
U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia recently stated that he consider Donald Trump an illegitimately elected president due to the Russian interference.Now there is outrage from the political pundits.Where was this outrage when Donald Trump implied the same about President Obama?The hypocrisy is deafening.There is no moral consistency among our elected officials nor among the citizenry. This is what President Obama spoke about in his farewell speech.Each person must be able to discern right from wrong, moral from immoral, and a lie from the truth and call it for what it is. We must never stop progressing toward that more perfect union and morality must lead the way.Our children are watching and waiting.
Troubling decision
Regarding “Job well done” (ScissorTales, Jan. 14): Congratulations to the first-grade teacher at Hilldale Elementary School in Putnam City Schools who was named a recipient of the prestigious $25,000 Milken Educator Award. “Her success helped shift Hilldale’s grade on
Criminal penalties serve as a strong deterrent to DUI. Clearly, Oklahoma’s repeat DUI offender laws need to be strengthened. But civil penalties are an important tool as well.
Until society can eliminate senseless and selfish acts, we hope victims realize they have rights and are entitled to compensation. Without knowledge of who to ask for help or legal representation, the victims and the families involved could be left in a challenging situation without any financial assistance.
People who are injured or who lose a loved one should call an experienced attorney who can serve as a strong advocate on the family’s behalf. If threats of jail time don’t make drunk drivers think twice, maybe seeing more severe judgments will do the trick.
The Yukon crash didn’t have to happen. One person’s dangerous and careless actions hurt two small children and took their mother. Now a family from Vietnam is also mourning the death of their child. Two lives were lost too soon. We must use all legal tools at our disposal to try to stop this from ever happening again. state school report cards from a D in 2012 to a B in 2015,” the editorial said. The state Board of Education’s A-F grading system has been under constant criticism, but most critics would even likely agree that grades assigned within a school district are comparable. The 2016 grade for D.D. Kirkland Elementary, 6020 N Independence, was also B; the school has been rated in the B category for three of the last four years. Just to put this in perspective, there are 18 elementary schools in Putnam City, and D.D. Kirkland’s grade was in the top seven of the 18 for 2016. The decision by Putnam City’s administration and school board to dismantle and begin closure of D.D. Kirkland, one of the elementary schools that is actually working well in the district, is concerning to say the least. m. Well, huh.
For those unfamiliar with David Gelernter, he essentially created parallel computing, which sounds like witchcraft to me, but I’m told it’s a really big deal. He was also one of the first people to see the internet coming, in his 1991 book “Mirror Worlds.” Bill Joy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, described Gelernter as “one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time.”
Gelernter, who teaches computer science at Yale and has degrees in classical Hebrew, has written books and articles on history, culture, religion, artificial intelligence and philosophy. His acclaimed paintings don’t do too much for me, but that’s probably because I’m a bit of Philistine about these things.
Regardless, saying that Gelernter is “fiercely anti-intellectual” is a bit like saying Tiger Woods is fiercely antigolf. So what on earth could the Washington Post mean with that headline?
Science reporter Sarah Kaplan gives a few clues. First, Gelernter is a fierce detractor of Barack Obama and has “made a name for himself as a vehement critic of modern academia.” True enough, I guess. Also, he has “expressed doubt about the reality of man-made climate change.” The evidence provided for this assertion is a bit tendentious, but we’ll let it pass because I don’t think this is primarily about climate change.
It has to do more with two things: liberal tribalism and the guild mentality of a certain subset of the scientific community. There’s a long progressive tradition in America to think that intellectuals must be liberal, and therefore intellectualism equals liberalism.
Indeed, Kaplan seems a bit bedeviled by this point. The headline of her story says Gelernter is anti-intellectual. The first sentence notes that Gelernter has “decried the influence of liberal intellectuals on college campuses.” A few paragraphs later, Kaplan suddenly informs us that his “anti-intellectualism makes him an outlier among scientists.”
If you believe that intellectualism requires being loyal to a certain political agenda, this all makes some sense. The problem is that decrying the influence of