A few jottings

First things first:
Good news for a baseball buff who likes the vacation spot in Las Vegas, here. Let's play in Vegas! But seriously with the BJs out of contention this morning, how will this help when the press in Vegas complain about the lack of the will to win by their ball team, kinda sounds like the Rogers team !

Where's the paperwork?
For the second time this month no agenda was published online for the Executive meeting of Cobourg Council. Makes one think that they either don't care about the public or they just prefre to soldier on in secrecy. Sad!

Election signs:
Two items; one was an email from a regular who asked if the County bylaw is unconstitutional and the other a brilliant rebuttal to the question, "Why is Paul Macklin asking to be re-elected ? The first answer from me is that I don't know if the County law is unconstitutional and it will cost a lot of money to find out. "Postering" - the practise of putting up posters on public property has been cleared by the Supreme Court in a case in Peterborough many years ago, perhaps "signing" could be proven allowable as an extension of that case. But folks get your money out to pay for the lawyers to prove it. The second point - Macklin's signs - was easily explained in a beautiful piece of semantical polemic (wordy academic argument). Since Macklin had been elected more than once he was entitled to ask to be re-elected again. Not being the incumbent doesn't make the use of the word exclusive to the incumbent. Pity Arnold McCurdy, a few elections back, didn't think of it when he recycled his signs in a municipal election and took a lot of flak for it.

A few election sites to watch:

• Adam Radwanski's "Election rating" here. A regular grading of the leaders's performances.
• Election prediction, local style here. This site is part of the "Election Prediction Site" where people log on and give their opinions about the election, ridings and seat projections.
• "Campaign Perspectives" - Carlton Univerity's J-School election project here
  
• Macleans blogs, a collection of election thoughts here

Email me your favourite election site please and we'll make this list longer

Someone with too much time, or an egghead professor!

How about a lesson in physics applied (no pun intended) to election sign placement Effort, load, and silencing Garth Turner's sign whine

OK, thoughts for the week

First the election:
One week down and what have we seen? Signs - NDP in the west and CPC in the east. A couple of local statements and that's about it. More to come I hope.

Letters to the editor:
Being away for the week of September 4th I missed a doozy of a letter about conditions in Victoria Park and perhaps an opinion about the weekend users, I can't say any more I do not have a copy of the letter written by Art Cockerill. If anyone has it could you send it along. Any way the letter writer, a personal friend of mine, has taken it on the chin for being misguided and perhaps unaware of the real conditions, as neighbours see it, in a couple of rebuttals. The neighbours do not like the influx of users because they abuse the park: monopolising picnic tables, using the Pavilion without a permit, using BBQs, making noise and most unusual of all - defecating on the beach, this is apparently performed inside portable latrines, confrontations with bylaw officers and a whole host of other complaints. But this is tippy toeing around the main issue to some - these weekenders are not white! Obviously a situation to be studied again by Council.
Postscript
I have read Art's letter and find it to be very clear in his criticism of Councillor Spooner beating around the bushes by reporting that he has many complaints about people in the Park but refusing to disclose the main complaint - the visitors' skin colour. Art as usual is calling "a spade a spade". I fear that the legitimate concerns of the residents will confuse the issue by veiling it. The residents should ask themselves if good clean white folk would produce the same complaints. It is the volume of traffic not the kind of traffic that produces problems in the Park.

Here's my speculation:
The Kraft sale is creating a buzz, here's my contribution to the rumour mill. If the buyer uses it for an industrial use who knows who it could be. But if as I suspect the buyer is a deep pocketed commercial/residential developer it could be our old pal Mitch Goldhar. This is the guy who owns "SmartCentres" and builds WallyMarts all over Canada. He is familiar with Cobourg and it's Mayor and Councillors, he even contributed to the longest serving Councillors campaigns, a couple of weeks before the final vote to approve the application, creating quite the local controversy at the time.

The most important piece of this sale is not the buildings, not the land but the sewage capacity allocated to the acreage. Kraft needed a humungeous amount of sewage capacity to be able to run its rice producing line and that capacity has not been reduced, in fact Council has kept it in reserve despite the possibility of using it to forestall the need to build another treatment plant. So the potential to immediately build is enormous.

If this is the case, and I think it may be a long shot, the following rule should apply. We need a Community Centre. This and any other developer should give us one in return for such a windfall sewage capacity.

Just my opinion!

What the *****

Gasoline up13 cents because of a hurricane in Texas. Two things come to mind - why do we have to pay more when we don't get one cc from Texas, and why do we send our gas to Texas and put our prices up. Answers please and remember "Steve" promised in the last election to roll back taxes if gas went over 85 cents, so don't believe a bloody word this man may say about this big hike.

Items culled from the morning papers

Never mind the puffin crap, one for the other guys:
NDP scores a point in election web war - Posted

Adolph Harper loses it

The joys of the internet, a link from Prof. Washburn gives us this gem of satire YouTube - Adolph Harper loses it

Two months off and now it's time to comment

The PM who lies!
Stephen Harper, with great fanfare, passed a few laws last session, one of them a fixed election law. Now the very act of ignoring this law, and I disregard all conservative justification as prevarification and obfuscation, makes the statement the fourth great lie in the trilogy (the last one being, "the cheque's in the mail"). Click here for a youtube comment

My reason for the two months off:
I was tired, of making comment and of the local conditions, so I joined the "who gives a damn club". Well it appears I do give a damn and accept the challenges of white space on the pages and punditry. 10 days in Europe performing sightseeing and family duties was fun and the greatest thing I did was to take pic of my great-uncle's name on a war memorial - very moving. But back to work there is an election to comment on.

I will now tell you my bias
A sign has gone up on my lawn - an NDP sign. As it has been common knowledge for years I usually do not have to tell anyone what my political opinion is as it has been assumed for years that I am a raving loony socialist. Not quite true but close enough. So I will not be advocating that Jack should be Prime Minister as loudly as people assume I would, but he is my preference to the others.

A waste of time and a slap in the face
The decision of the Cobourg PSB to host a search for the next Chief of Police is a waste of money and slap in the face for the Acting Chief - Paul Sweet. This man has restored both fiscal responsibility and respect for the service. As well as saving money by cutting sick time by boosting morale; this alone surely rates being given the job - ten years too late!

An amazing piece of local cyber-history

Reading this morning's papers about the launch of a new search engine, one that may or may not challenge Google for supremacy, I decided to test it. So using a well known, but still unknown worldly reference I punched in my name. This is one of the pages that came back. opinion page: everybody has them, some stink more than others Some of you may be interested in what I was thinking in the millennium years and others may be amazed that some of the local issues haven't changed a great deal, just the names.

A comment about Obama that I can agree with

Peter Hitchens writing in the "Sunday Mail":

"JFK and Ronald Reagan actually had something to say when they went to Berlin, because the wall that sliced through the city so clearly illustrated the brutal ‘we know better than you’ arrogance of idealistic Leftism. Now the wall is gone, and the most Left-wing person ever to run for President of the USA tries to steal his forerunners’ standing by driveling to a crowd in a park, most of whom can’t understand a word he says. Lucky for them, say I. When will Mr Obama’s absurd bubble of adulation burst?"

Read this for a realistic angle on jail

Read this opinion from the UK, conditions are the same in North America and think about it - or just reject it as liberal crap. Either way it is pertinent! Crime problem? Just lock 'em in the lavatory