Latest news with #Vinton
American Press
09-05-2025
- Sport
- American Press
May 8 Southwest La. prep baseball scores and stats
DeQuincy's Turner Rodriguez makes a sliding catch in left field on Thursday at DeQuincy High School. The Tigers beat Vinton 10-0 in five innings to advance to the Non-select Division IV semifinals. (Rodrick Anderson / American Press) Thursday Baseball Semifinals Best-of-3 series Non-select Division I Sam Houston 2 Barbe 1 SHHS 100 100 0 – 2-2-0 Barbe 000 010 0 – 1-3-0 PITCHING: W – Owen Galley (7ip, 3h, 1er, 4k, 2bb). L – Lawton Littleton (7ip, 2h, 2er, 8k, 5bb) TOP HITTERS: Sam Houston – Ashton Bultron 1-2 (run, RBI, HR), Haden Peshoff 1-3 (run, RBI, HR). Barbe – Jordin Griffin 1-3 (RBI). NOTE: Sam Houston leads the series 1-0. RECORDS: Sam Houston – 31-7. Barbe – 34-5. Division III Sterlington 6 Westlake 2 WHS 000 110 0 – 2-5-2 SHS 000 600 x – 6-3-1 PITCHING: W – Landon Johnston (4.2ip, 4h, 2er, 2k, 5bb). L – Hadley Hardesty (3ip, 1h, 4er, 1k, 2bb). TOP HITTERS: Westlake – Bradyn Spears 1-3 (run, RBI). Sterlington – Tre Burch 1-2 (run, 2 RBI). NOTE: Sterlington leads the series 1-0. RECORDS: Westlake – 26-11. Sterlington – 32-7. Single elimination Non-select Division IV DeQuincy 10 Vinton 0, 5 inns. VHS 000 00 – 0-3-6 DHS 230 41 – 10-8-0 PITCHING: W – Carson Rainwater (5ip, 3h, 0er, 5k, 2bb). L – Gage Guidry (4ip, 8h, 6er, 4k, 4bb). TOP HITTERS: Vinton – Gage Guidry 1-2, Kortlin Kyle 1-2. DeQuincy – Nolan Schrader 1-2 (run, 2 RBI), Turner Rodriguez 1-3 (run, 2 RBI). RECORDS: Vinton – 17-12. DeQuincy – 24-11. Mangham 12 Oakdale 1, 5 inns. OHS 100 00 – 1-4-4 MHS 800 4x – 12-10-0 PITCHING; W – Lane Almond (4.2ip, 4h, 1er, 7k, 4bb). L – Braeden Strother (3.2ip, 7h, 3er, 2k, 2bb). TOP HITTERS: Oakdale – Kylar Ballard 2-3. Mangham – Lane Almond 2-3 (run, RBI, double), Jacoby Young 2-2 (2 runs, RBI, HR), Carson Mooney 2-3 (2 runs, 4 RBI, HR). RECORDS: Oakdale – 19-13. Mangham – 14-15.
American Press
09-05-2025
- Sport
- American Press
DeQuincy blanks Vinton in quarterfinals
Carson Rainwater pitched a three-hit shutout Thursday as the No. 3 DeQuincy Tiger run-ruled No. 6 Vinton 10-0 in five innings in the Non-select Division IV quarterfinals at DeQuincy High School. (Rodrick Anderson / American Press) DeQUINCY – The last time senior Carson Rainwater faced rival Vinton, he took a loss. Given a chance at redemption, he wanted the ball in his hands again. Rainwater pitched his second shutout of the postseason to knock out the Lions 10-0 in five innings and send the Tigers to the semifinals for the third consecutive season. Rainwater held the No. 6 Lions to three hits while striking out five batters and walking two. 'Rainwater is great,' DeQuincy head coach Brady Carlson said. 'He is the leader. 'And the last time he faced Vinton, he took the loss. He said please pitch me, please pitch me, because Turner (Rodriguez) got the win last time. I was like, all right, you're the senior. You got it, and he did it.' In two postseason games, Rainwater has pitched 12 scoreless innings with 16 strikeouts and three walks. The No. 3 Tigers (24-11) will face No. 2 Welsh on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. in the Louisiana High School Athletic Association Non-select Division IV semifinals at McMurry in Sulphur. DeQuincy lost to Oak Grove in the semifinals in 2024 and the finals in 2023. 'Hopefully, we can keep advancing,' Carlson said. 'It's going to be exciting. They've got a great program, too.' The Tigers scored five runs in the first two innings to cement their grip on the momentum in the rivalry game. Andrew Dowden hit an RBI single in the first inning, and Rodriguez drove in a pair of runs in the second inning. Vinton errors contributed to the other two runs. 'We've been hitting the ball really well all year,' Carlson said. 'They do a great job over there (Vinton). 'It's a big rivalry, so we were really excited about playing. A little bit nervous because that pitcher (Gage Guidry) they have is so good, but our guys really come out swinging, and they do a great job.' DeQuincy added four more runs in the fourth inning, highlighted by Nolan Schrader's two-run double. Playing in its first quarterfinal game since 2001, Vinton (17-12) loaded the bases in the fourth inning on a walk and hits by Gage Guidry and Kortlin Kyle. But the Tigers got the second out on a force at third, and Rainwater closed the inning on a strikeout.
CNN
07-04-2025
- Business
- CNN
‘It is a wrecking ball': Former DOGE worker describes Musk-led government-slashing effort from the inside
Elon Musk has claimed the Department of Government Efficiency is 'the most transparent organization in government ever.' But Merici Vinton, a federal worker who recently left her job at the government information technology office weeks after it was taken over by DOGE, told CNN in an interview she witnessed a 'highly secretive' effort operating by 'a different set of rules.' She described a wave of new staffers with limited knowledge of how federal agencies operate taking a bulldozer-like approach to shrinking the government — moves made with 'a careless disregard for trying to understand how the work happens and what the rules and policies are.' 'A lot of government culture, love it or not, is about collaboration and consensus-building. That has not been the DOGE approach,' Vinton said. 'They kind of do things their own way.' In her first network interview since stepping down, Vinton offered an inside perspective on the events that unfolded at the US Digital Service. She watched as it turned into the staging ground for the administration's push to drastically slash spending, reduce the federal workforce and remake the government around Trump's priorities. The DOGE effort — which has led to massive layoffs, canceled contracts and at times wildly inaccurate claims about federal spending — has played a pivotal role in shaping public opinion of Trump's second term. Vinton, 44, started in 2021 at USDS, the executive branch office created under President Barack Obama to improve technology across the federal government. She worked on the temporary expansion of the child tax credit and was one of the architects of Direct File, which allows many Americans to file their taxes directly with the Internal Revenue Service. Vinton said she joined USDS to support rebuilding efforts after the Covid-19 pandemic. She voluntarily left the government in March, roughly two months after the Trump administration transformed USDS into DOGE, allowing the initiative to occupy an existing government entity rather than creating a new one to run the cost-cutting operation. In the past, the office's work, she said, has been 'apolitical.' 'I came to government to really build great experiences for people, to interact with government to get their benefits easier, to file their taxes easier, to get their tax refunds quicker,' Vinton said. 'That's why I joined government. What I see DOGE is doing is, they're actually breaking a lot of that down. They're actually breaking those things apart.' 'I think it's going to be incredibly hard to rebuild,' she said. DOGE officials did not respond to CNN's request for comment. Vinton said she and other employees learned that USDS would be turned into DOGE on Trump's Inauguration Day, when the president signed an executive order rebranding the agency. 'We were all stunned,' Vinton said. 'That evening, we received invites to interviews to meet our new colleagues.' She said DOGE representatives wearing temporary badges and identifying themselves by only their first names conducted 15-minute interviews with the agency's 162 employees the next day. Those questions included some unusual queries about 'what makes you exceptional' and 'who's your favorite person' working at the agency. 'It didn't really feel like a serious set of questions,' she said. 'You know, the work that we do can be really hard and really complex. And these questions were … kind of random, didn't really feel like they were going to meet a complexity of the work that we do.' Soon, she said, 'it became very clear there (were) two separate teams' working at USDS: a DOGE team coordinating the sweeping government reduction mission and the residual USDS office, with the carryover employees struggling to keep alive what was left of existing IT improvement projects. 'After we had these 15-minute interviews, we really didn't know much about our futures. We didn't know if we were going to be the next fired, and we frankly all expected that. And so, for about a month and a half, we were rudderless. There was not a lot of leadership. People were just trying to plod along and do their work,' she said. On the night of Valentine's Day — less than a month after Trump took office — 43 of the agency's employees received 8 p.m. emails notifying them they were being fired, Vinton said. Less than two weeks later, another 21 employees resigned in protest. 'We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans' sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services. We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE's actions,' those employees said in a resignation letter to Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles. Vinton said the atmosphere at the agency changed for its pre-DOGE employees. She described it as 'a bit sad, a bit like a funeral.' Vinton insisted her personal politics did not influence her observations. While Vinton started at USDS during the Biden administration and supports Democrats, her job is considered apolitical. Earlier in her life, she was a registered Republican, and she said she has voted for GOP and Democratic candidates. Vinton said she isn't sure who is actually leading DOGE on a day-to-day basis. She said she never met Musk, and that Amy Gleason, the agency's acting administrator, 'made clear to us that she was overseeing more of the USDS legacy work and not calling the shots elsewhere.' Gleason started running USDS' daily meetings after the mass purge of Vinton's colleagues in mid-February, but the staff received no formal announcement that she was named acting administrator, even after the media reported the appointment based on White House sources. Court filings have revealed Gleason is also working as a consultant at the Department of Health and Human Services — similar to several other DOGE affiliates who are working at multiple agencies at once — leaving judges to question who is actually directing the implementation of the DOGE agenda. Some of Vinton's work was at the IRS, and she had a view into how the DOGE team was operating there. She observed the operatives embedded at that agency — who were often young and had no government experience — to be 'highly empowered, as individuals, to make decisions and to determine their activities day-to-day.' 'I never understood who they, you know, were necessarily reporting into, other than … Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent,' she said. 'It was very unclear to me who was ultimately calling those shots.' But the benefits for DOGE in using USDS as its launchpad became apparent to Vinton. 'They could have access to the White House through our office space, they could have access to email accounts and … the ability to hire people,' Vinton said. 'So, we very much felt just like a convenient container for DOGE.' Trump also moved USDS from its longtime home at the Office of Management and Budget — where it would be subject to the Freedom of Information Act and other government transparency laws — to the Executive Office of the President, which is much harder to penetrate from an oversight perspective. Vinton was sharply critical of the Trump administration's moves to lay off probationary employees — those hired most recently. Vinton said many of those employees were brought into the government because they had specific skills needed at the agencies. 'A lot of those were highly technical people who we recruited, we brought in, because we were so excited about the technical skills that they brought to government. It's not efficient to fire, you know, your brand-new recruitment class, who brings the newest skills,' she said. Vinton said what worries her most is that Trump's cuts across federal agencies will make it impossible for future administrations to rebuild the government's ability to deliver the services Americans expect. 'I want Americans to try to understand it and to believe it and to understand that what it is a wrecking ball, and that it's not a scalpel,' Vinton said. 'It is going to dramatically decrease our government's capacity to deliver services and benefits in the next few years.' 'This is real, and it's not in a bubble,' she said.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Senate passes employee pay plan with legislator raises intact
The door to the Senate Chamber at the Montana Capitol. (Micah Drew/Daily Montanan) Montana senators overwhelmingly voted this week in favor of a bill implementing the state's 2026-27 employee pay plan — which includes substantial raises for state legislators. 'I've been around here a long time, and we've always, in my view, undervalued and sold ourselves short as legislators,' said Sen. John Esp, R-Big Timber, who is carrying the measure through the Senate. 'We leave home, we come up here, and then we volunteer our time, basically to serve the public … I realize there's other points of view, but we are valuable.' The employee pay plan, carried in House Bill 13 each session, is negotiated between the governor's office and public employees' unions, and usually passes the Legislature with strong bipartisan support. The legislation authorizes raises for the state workforce, increasing health insurance payments, adjusting per diem travel rates and raising legislator salaries in line with other public employees. However, this session the bill has ruffled some feathers in both chambers by adding in a separate provision to boost future legislators' salaries by tying them to Montana's average salary — a controversial inclusion. Sen. Sue Vinton, R-Billings, brought forth an amendment to strip out the legislator pay raise from the bill. Last session, Vinton said, a standalone bill was passed to increase legislator pay from $16 to roughly $24 an hour and was 'met with a very public rebuke by the governor.' ''As has been the case since before our nation's founding, public service comes with personal sacrifice — long hours away from home, less time with family, and appropriately limited compensation,'' Vinton quoted from Gov. Greg Gianforte's veto letter. Esp suggested that feelings in the governor's office may have changed over the biennium. The governor during a Thursday morning press conference said the employee pay plan needed to pass and had been a fair compromise with the unions. He also said that 'we put the pay raise for the legislators in the bill as well,' but added that the legislature has the final say in the bill. Gianforte's office did not respond to more specific questions from the Daily Montanan about whether he would sign the bill as is. The pay plan for state and Montana University System Employees calls for either a $1-per-hour or 2.5% raise, whichever is greater, for each of the next two years, effective July 1. The plan also increases the state's per diem meal rates by tying them to 70% of the standard federal rate of reimbursement — bumping up each meal roughly from $3 to $4 dollars — and boosts employer health insurance contributions by $26 in 2026 and an additional $27 in 2027. Crucially, and the reason for spirited debate on the Senate floor Wednesday, sponsor and Rep. John Fitzpatrick, R-Anaconda, added in a provision to make lawmaker pay a function of the state's average wage, which he said on the House floor would stop the legislature from debating the issue every two years. Legislators currently earn $16.11 an hour — a number that would go up along with all state employees if the pay plan passes on its own — equivalent wages to an annual salary of $33,900. Under HB 13, lawmakers during the 2027 session would earn the equivalent of 80% of the state average hourly wage, and during the 2029 session would make 100% of the state hourly wage. According to the latest Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean hourly wage in Montana across all occupations was $26.88 in 2023, or $55,920 annually. The bill would increase the state's payroll costs by roughly $41 million a year, including the standard increase for legislators. The additional cost of changing legislator salaries to tie them to the state average would be $1.4 million and $2.2 million during the next two years. The cost of increasing health plans are $2.9 million and $7.9 million respectively during the next two years. Sen. Jonathan Windy Boy, D-Box Elder, spoke against the amendment to strike the legislator pay raise, saying that in his 13 sessions serving in Helena, legislator pay has inched up while the cost of living has skyrocketed — he said his housing costs had roughly tripled in the Capitol. 'Our pay here and the cost of living does not equate to one another. And not only that, I'm away from home, four months, from my residence, and I still have to pay all of those expenses, and so as this is just to double the burden on me personally,' Windy Boy said. But several Republican legislators sided with Vinton, saying that voting for their own pay increases was unnecessary, not what Montanans wanted, and just plain looked bad. 'What if this was a referendum? What if this issue, legislator pay, was on the ballot? How do you think that would go?' asked Sen. Forrest Mandeville, R-Columbus. '… We're in a unique situation. How many other people would love to be in the situation where they can vote for their own pay increase?' 'I'm not a fan,' he said. Sen. Daniel Zolnikov, R-Billings, said money should not be the motivation for serving in the lawmaking body, adding that opponents' arguments that only independently wealthy, retired, or remote-working individuals could afford to serve were misguided. 'I lived on nothing when I was in the House, if you knew me, and I loved serving this place. And I still do, because it was about being in here, ideas, philosophies, concepts,' Zolnikov said. '…We never used to do this. We got stopped doing this. This is service.' Zolnikov added last session the Legislature voted to increase the per diem rate legislators get paid while in session — to $206 per day in addition to a salary of $128.86 a day — which should be enough to offset living expenses. But proponents of legislator raises continually returned to the idea that a citizen legislature should more closely represent the population, and prospective lawmakers should have the means to take the time to serve. 'What this bill will do is allow more young parents, for example, to join right? It will allow people with different perspectives who wouldn't be able to take time off because they simply don't have the privilege of the support networks that we all do,' Sen. Cora Neumann, D-Bozeman, said. 'I just think that if we can do something like this, we're going to have a wider and higher quality of bills. I think that's going to make this body have much more depth people are bringing from their own personal experience.' Esp agreed it would widen the pool. 'It's getting more difficult to find people that are willing to serve that aren't retired like I am, or that have some other jobs that they can do from both places, or they're just making a great sacrifice to be here,' Esp said. 'I think it's high time we recognize that.' The amendment failed 12-38, and the full employee pay plan passed the chamber 37-13.
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- Yahoo
‘My life was centered around him:' Wife of Killingworth man killed in hit-and-run mourns
KILLINGWORTH, Conn. (WTNH) — A Killingworth man died following a hit-and-run over the weekend. State police said Vinton Fitzgerald Dawson was helping a truck that had broken down on the side of I-95 when he was hit. The 61-year-old died at the hospital Monday morning. 'My life was centered around him. We lived for each other,' his wife Pauline Dawson said. Man dies after being struck while helping disabled vehicle on I-95 in Milford The immeasurable pain of losing her husband of 36 years can be heard in Pauline Dawson's voice. 'We were always together, many sleepless nights on the road helping others, which ultimately took his life doing the same thing. He had a passion for diesel work,' Pauline said. Vinton and Pauline had just settled in, watching some Friday night TV at their Killingworth home, when his phone rang. A friend of a friend had a broken-down tractor trailer on the side of I-95 south in Milford and needed help. A near hour drive, but the 61-year-old went without hesitation. 'No matter what time of night they called he was out there,' Pauline said. A few hours later, their son called Pauline and said there was an accident. State police said around 2 a.m. Saturday morning, a white Hyundai Genesis entered the right shoulder, hit Vinton and kept driving. 'I raced to Bridgeport Hospital. He was already in surgery. I waited six to seven hours for him to come out,' Pauline said. 'He was almost unrecognizable. I couldn't believe that was my husband, but I stood by his bedside. I talked to him.' After two six-hour surgeries, she said Vinton was too weak to speak but found another way to communicate with the love of his life. 'He opened his eyes and seemed to look at me and closed them back. His hand was clenching from pain. I put two fingers between his and he seemed to feel it,' Pauline said. 'He was probably telling me goodbye that his strength was running out.' Vinton went into cardiac arrest and died at the hospital Monday morning, leaving behind his wife, their two sons and daughter. The couple had plans to travel to Europe this weekend, now Pauline is planning a burial, while police hunt down the driver. 'No conscious, but God is the bigger camera. You can run but you can't hide,' Pauline said. State Police said the white Hyundai Genesis should have right front damage. They are asking anyone who may have witnessed this hit and run or has any information to call police at (203) 696-2500 or by email at Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
