(
Ron Knecht) – Daunte Wright, 20, the Black father of a two-year old boy, was shot and killed in a police traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, MN Sunday. Kimberly Potter, 48, the White officer who shot him and a 26-year veteran of the local police force, said the shooting was an accident, and she has resigned from the force.
After the stop for an expired license plate, officers learned Wright had outstanding warrants, including carrying a pistol without a permit, and they started to take him into custody. Police body-camera videos of the stop show Wright physically resisted arrest and sought to escape. Potter drew an arm from her side and at least four times threatened to tase him.
Fiddler on the Roof,
It’s A Wonderful Life,
Gone With the Wind,
Excalibur,
Soldier of Orange,
Chariots of Fire and many others are truly about things, events, characters’ growth and change – about something meaningful!
Second, the great majority of the best films are notable for how they were different in some important ways from everything before them and how they changed some part of filmdom after them.
Space Odyssey,
GWTW, and the 1991
Beauty and the Beast certainly broke new pathways and had huge impacts on many films that followed.
In future columns, I’ll discuss some of these films and aspects. No doubt
(
Ron Knecht) Presidents’ Day fell on February 15 this year, and the birthday of our first and greatest chief executive, George Washington, was February 26. The birthdays of two of our other greatest presidents also occurred that month: Abe Lincoln, February 14; and Ronald Reagan, February 6.
So, it seems to me timely to discuss how the preparations of our 46th president, Joe Biden, compares with theirs. (Personal apology: I started this column two weeks ago but was recovering from knee replacement and couldn’t finish it until now.)
George Washington was born in 1732 to a wealthy Virginia family that had made its fortune in land speculation on the frontier. Washington was the oldest of six children of his parents, and his father had three children by a previous marriage. His older half-brother Lawrence inherited the estate that eventually became Washington’s Mount Vernon when Lawrence left it to Washington.
(Ron Knecht) A recent Brookings Institute study on economic growth in Nevada concluded that we must innovate and diversify – which we already knew. I hope its proposals to “unleash” growth produce more than those from previous studies, but only time will tell. However, the study was marred by a high-profile false claim it made […]
Ralston full of sound and fury in defense of failed education system, but short on solutions
(Ron Knecht) – This is the fourth in a series of columns summarizing my Controller’s Annual Report for fiscal year 2018 (FY18).
The first two columns showed that since FY06 state spending has grown faster than Nevada’s economy, thus imposing an ever-larger real burden on Nevada families and businesses, whose real incomes are lower now than in FY06. The third one noted Health and Social Services spending, the largest budget item, has grown most rapidly by far, driven greatly by federal health care mandates and funding.