Letter: Democratic Writer Out of Touch With Reality

Letter to the Editor07:00PM / Thursday, February 15, 2024Print Story | Email Story

To the Editor:

Let me start by saying that I have zero expectations that this will be published on iBerkshires because any messages against the favored leftist narrative are not allowed on your platform.

After reading his letter to the editor entitled "Contrast Between Parties," I'm struggling to determine if Michael Wise is merely out of touch with reality or if he's intentionally attempting to gaslight people. My guess is that it's the latter.

He claims that "Only one of our national political parties cares anymore about good government," and asserts that is the Democrats. Is our wide-open southern border an example of that "good government?" What about the skyrocketing inflation that continues to grip our economy due to the Biden admin's reckless spending? Or is the rampant crime and homelessness in blue cities now made worse by surging illegal alien populations? Or the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan? Or the spectacle of our clearly diminished president stumbling and bumbling through his presidency? Or is our affirmative action VP spewing another meaningless word salad while waiting in the wings for an obviously frail octogenarian to break a hip? Or the weaponization of our intelligence agencies and DOJ against political rivals? That's good government?

Then there's the biggest whopper of them all: President Joe Biden, like President Obama, is running a no-scandal administration.

A no-scandal administration? Joe Biden is facing an impeachment inquiry for the blatant corruption he engaged in with his son Hunter and his brother James. Polls show that 60-70 percent of Americans think that Joe is dirty. His family clearly took money from China, Ukraine, Romania, and others. That's the biggest of many scandals. What about his mishandling of classified documents which the special counsel labeled as "willful," only escaping prosecution because Hur thought Biden demonstrated diminished mental capacity? That's not a scandal? How about Biden's DOJ labeling concerned parents at school board meetings as domestic terrorists? Are these not scandals?

I won't even get into the myriad of scandals from the Obama admin. Lois Lerner anyone? Fast and furious? Benghazi? Hillary's email server? Iran nuclear deal? Solyndra? The list goes on and on, no matter what Mr. Wise would like you to believe.

Mr. Wise assumes of course that the good Democrats of Berkshire County only consume news from the mainstream media aka the narrative-spewing lap dogs of the Democrat party like ABC, NBC, CBS, NY Times, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN, etc. That's why they won't be able to determine that his letter is packed full of lies on their own. It's not a surprising tactic from a leftist like Mr. Wise. He knows he truly can't tout the Biden admin's accomplishments, because there are none, so he resorts to attacking the opposition while relying on the easily duped Democratic base to be uncurious about the facts.

Allen Jezouit
Chicopee, Mass, formerly of Williamstown

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Mount Greylock School Committee OKs Updated Policy on Seclusion, Restraint

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:57AM / Tuesday, August 25, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock School Committee recently approved an updated policy on time-outs, seclusion and the physical restraint of students.

The policy is based on updated state regulations that came down last winter. Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the panel at its August meeting that his office waited on recommendations from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees that were released in May and ran the proposed changes past the district's legal counsel.

That timing — and an expectation from the commonwealth that districts have the updated policy in place for the start of the 2026-27 academic year — led to an expedited process for the School Committee, which did not do a first read with a vote at a subsequent meeting as is its practice.

"Policy JKAA speaks to the ways the school district and our procedures shall abide by the updated state regulations," Bergeron said. "We're not going to have a lot of leeway.

"Nothing about the way we interact with our students on a day-to-day basis is being shifted by this."

For example, the commonwealth does not allow schools to use "seclusion," or, "the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area, with or without adult supervision," except some extreme cases, like when, "when student behavior poses an imminent threat of assault, or imminent serious physical harm to self or others, but only if safeguards are accounted for," the updated policy reads.

"From the state's perspective and my perspective, the idea of locking a child in a room without adult supervision is something we've never done," Bergeron said. "And it's something the state wants to make explicitly that nobody ever does."

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