Free Republic

Marcus Glass loved to flaunt cash. The 24-year-old child care provider who collected $2.1 million from the taxpayer-funded Wisconsin Shares program posed for nearly a dozen pictures, if not more, splaying thick stacks of big bills across his lap, or fanning them out in various stances. There's no way to know whether the money in the photos is his - his attorney wouldn't comment on the pictures - but what is clear is that Glass and money he reaped from the program are now under criminal investigation. Law enforcement officials say that in his three years in the business, Glass...

"http://therothshow.com/2010/09/day-care-centers-and-sex-offenders-all-living-together/#more-1298 Laurie Roth September 28, 2010 therothshow.com My eyes are still rolling into the back of my head and my head is still shaking at the thought of what I heard this week on my national radio show.   Danny Zanoza of http: www.rffm.org  and Dave Smith,  Director of Illinois Family Institute have discovered through there intense digging that in Illinois there are at least 90 licensed day care centers who have the same addresses as those who are listed on a sex offender registry.  What!DHS is responsible for licensing these child chare facilities which are actual homes,  where over 170,000 children are...

Government Bureaucracy Fails To Protect Children There are many forms of child abuse...verbal, physical and perhaps the most abhorrent is sexual. The stories of teachers who are having sexual relations with their students is a case in point. Just 20 or 30 years ago, such crimes were rare. Today, they are so numerous, many are no longer reported on by the media. Also, children fall prey to sexual abuse from stepparents, foster parents, big brothers, big sisters, even parents themselves (in some cases), and other authority figures. Those who sexually abuse children violate a sacred trust and scar innocent lives....

Sep 3, 2010 10:04 pm US/Central New Trier Daycare Center Raises Eyebrows Some Critics Say Perk For Teachers Is Excessive During Tough Times, But Superintendent Says It Will Help Retain The Best Educators Got A Concern? Send It To Jay Levine Reporting Jay Levine WINNETKA, Ill. (CBS) ― They're at it again, say North Shore taxpayers. The same school district that had its $174 million renovation referendum roundly defeated by voters just spent more than $500,000 on a daycare facility exclusively for teachers' kids. CBS 2 Chief Correspondent Jay Levine went out to see what that kind of money buys...

My wife left her job when we had our first child and has been home for the birth and rearing of all 7. Has it been hard at times? Do we sacrifice some things? Sure. But isn't that what marriage and family are supposed to be about in the first place? What kind of rude, self-centered drones are we thrusting on the world? Ones whose first memories are that their parents didn't love them enough to spend time raising them.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who for more than a year has been nearly silent on her role in the forced unionization of more than 40,000 home day care providers, boasted of her involvement at a national union convention in 2008, Mackinac Center Communications Specialist Kathy Hoekstra reports in a video released today. "In Michigan, because of the partnership between AFSCME and the governor's office, this means that 45,000 new AFSCME members, quality child care providers, will be on the ground providing care to children," the governor said in a speech at the 38th international convention of the American Federation of State,...

A fear that the "stealth unionization" of home-based day care workers could just be the start of a bigger effort was acknowledged in court on Tuesday by a union lawyer. Patrick Wright, senior legal counsel for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, had said months ago that doctors that accept Medicaid, grocers that take food stamps and landlords that take housing assistance could be the next groups targeted in state efforts to unionize anyone who gets state subsidies. The Mackinac Center has a lawsuit that it has appealed to the state Supreme Court about the state unionizing roughly 40,000 home-based...

<p>A Texas day care center is facing a state probe over allegations it took a group of 6-year-olds to see an R-rated movie.</p> <p>Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, confirmed to Fox News Radio that Young Expressions Childcare in Bellmead is under investigation.</p>

"He's got the whole world in his hands?" To one atheist, it's more like ‘He's got the whole world under his thumb." David Smalley, the editor of American Atheist magazine and a self-described "civil rights activist," wrote in a personal blog post June 7 that Christian daycare "a form of child abuse." "In short, by starting your child off in a Christian environment, you are heading them down a path of forced ignorance," Smalley wrote. "At least let your child begin in a secular world, and if he or she chooses Christianity after an age of accountability, then so be...

Perhaps sensing its future may truly be at stake, representatives of the Michigan Home Based Child Care Council (MHBCCC) complied with lawmakers' requests for comment at a legislative committee meeting. It was at least the fourth attempt since last fall to get the MHBCCC on the record about its role in the stealth unionization of Michigan's 40,000-plus home-based day care owners and providers. Sen. Bill Hardiman (R-Kentwood), chair of the appropriations subcommittee on human services, has been particularly interested in hearing from the council. He and his counterpart in the Michigan House tried to eliminate funding for the MHBCCC in...

Over at the Washington Examiner, Mark Hemingway highlights a case which shows just how the Employee Free Choice Act might work in practice if it were ever enacted. The act would make union organizing radically easier by replacing federally monitored elections with alternate methods, such as the following: One day last fall, approximately 40,000 private day care owners in Michigan woke up to discover they had become members of a public sector union. Most had no idea what was coming. Here’s how it happened: The United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees worked with...

Video at link Stossel: Michelle Berry runs a day-care business out of her home in Flint, MI. She thought that she owned her own business, but Berry's been told she is now a government employee and union member. It's not voluntary. Suddenly, Berry and 40,000 other Michigan private day-care providers have learned that union dues are being taken out of the child-care subsidies the state sends them. The "union" is a creation of AFSCME, the government workers union, and the United Auto Workers.

Michelle Berry runs a private day-care service from her home on the outskirts of this city, the birthplace of General Motors. "The Berry Patch," as she calls the service, features overstuffed purple gorillas, giant cartoon murals, and a playroom covered in Astroturf. Her clients are mostly low-income parents who need child care to keep their jobs in a city that now has a 26% unemployment rate. Ms. Berry owns her own business—yet the Michigan Department of Human Services claims she is a government employee and union member. The agency thus withholds union dues from the child-care subsidies it sends to...

The barren economy of this rustbelt state is weakening the labor movement, but well-connected unions continue to shape Michigan's politics. So it's not surprising that some are willing to take extraordinary measures to help repopulate union ranks--even to the extent of making the state an accessory to a scheme to shanghai more than 40,000 home-based day care entrepreneurs and providers into a government-employee union. This development was first brought to the attention of the Mackinac -Center for Public Policy, where we work, in early 2009, when the center was approached by Sherry Loar, owner of Baby Steps Childcare Center in...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - Authorities have charged a North Carolina woman with selling moonshine out of her day care center. The Charlotte Observer reports Tuesday that North Carolina Alcohol Law Enforcement arrested 57-year-old Gwendolyn Brown-Johnson last week at Parkview Community Center in Charlotte. Agents say children were in the day care center when they sent in an undercover agent to buy two gallons of moonshine. Brown-Johnson told the paper she was set up by a neighbor. She says she was just holding a package for a man in exchange for $80 and didn't even know what was in it. Agents...

Officials say a sport utility vehicle that may have been involved in a police chase has crashed into an Indianapolis day care center. It's unclear whether any children were injured. According to television reports, multiple ambulances were called to the scene of Stepping Stones Child Care on the city's north side around 12:15 p.m. Tuesday. Police Sgt. Matthew Mount says it appears that the SUV was involved in an armed robbery and was part of a police chase before crashing into the day care center.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Al Qaeda's umbrella group in Iraq claimed responsibility for the twin suicide bombings in the heart of Baghdad that killed at least 155 people, including 24 children trapped in a bus leaving a day care center. The Al Qaeda branch, known as the Islamic State of Iraq, said in a statement posted on the Internet late Monday that its "martyrs ... targeted the dens of infidelity."

Julie Powell was furious. Her 18-month-old son, Carter, whom she had dropped off at a Billings child care business, had wandered into traffic on Central Avenue, where he was rescued by a passing motorist. Worse yet, Powell said, no one at the business mentioned the incident when she arrived later to pick up Carter and his brother Konnor, 3. "The police called us to find out if we knew what happened," Powell said. "I went and picked up the kids and nobody told me about it. They let me pay for the day." The name of the business: Toddler Escape...

Apparently baby-sitting, bomb making and growing marijuana could be one big family activity in Lake Elsinore. Benjamin Kuzelka, 23, walked into a hospital Wednesday with a severe hand injury, possibly due to an explosion, police said. Hospital officials tipped off law enforcement, and deputies went to his home on Audelo Street. That's where they found materials used to make explosives, as well as a sophisticated marijuana grow, police said. Kuzelka was arrested at the hospital. His mother, 55-year-old Rebecca Kuzelka, and brother, 21-year-old Grey Kuzelka, were also arrested. All three were arrested on suspicion of felony child endangerment, possession and...

They are from the government, and they don’t want you to help. Lisa Snyder’s neighbors in Middleville, Mich., left for work every morning before the school buses arrived. So she told her friends she’d watch their three kids at her house before school. She didn’t get paid for it. She didn’t get reimbursed for Cheerios or juice boxes. So what did Lisa get for her trouble? Threatened with prosecution. The state declared her yard an illegal day-care operation. She either had to stop, get licensed or go to jail. “We’re just friends helping friends,” Lisa says. But that’s not good...