Kitty Werthmann spoke today at the South Dakota Common Core Conference in Rapid City. Kitty Werthmann was born in 1926 and grew up in Austria under Hitler’s regime. She immigrated to the United States in 1950 and has been a U.S. citizen since 1962. Kitty currently resides in Pierre, SD. As president of the South Dakota Eagle Forum and she lobbies the state legislature, primarily on family issues. Kitty travels throughout the country speaking about her experience of living under Hitler’s socialist regime and warning Americans of the dangers of socialism.

The South Dakota Common Core Conference was held today in Rapid City. The event was organized by South Dakota Citizens for Liberty. The purpose of the event was to open a public dialog about the Common Core educational standards which some states have adopted while others have rejected them. The South Dakota Legislature voted to adopt Common Core in 2010, but many people, including quite a few education officials, say there was little or no discussion ahead of time about what the standards entailed.

The “50th Anniversary March on Washington” does our nation a disservice by going beyond just commemorating a great achievement and suggesting that disappointing progress is because that achievement was incomplete. Organizers suggest that blacks lag behind today because many “continue to suffer civil and economic injustices.” Not true. Black Americans are today free.

On August 23, 2013, I helped a neighbor from Griffith, Indiana. He brought a medical bill from a local hospital and asked me for help. The bill was for $748.95 for services rendered on three dates in February 2013. I reviewed the bill and contacted the client’s Medicare supplement insurance company to learn what it knew of the bill. Medicare failed to send complete and accurate claims information to the client’s insurance company. That is the fault of neither our client nor the hospital. It is Medicare’s fault.