Yep the Puffster made the list

The list of the lifetime Senate lottery winners is here. One pundit has estimated the cost of a Senator as nearly $850,000 a year, that includes all costs - 18 more what a cost for Democracy. Oh I forgot these folks aren't democratic, they never had to shake a hand or get vote in their lives.

The Monday Morn

I'm not one of the lucky ones
Well it never happened - my sitting by the phone and sending telepathic messages to the PM didn't work. I am not one of the 18 people who will win the lottery this morning. The PM is to announce the names of his new Senators today, or tomorrow - but soon. All we have to do is wonder at the qualifications needed to be one of the lucky 18 as we scan the list and look for character to jump out at us so we can say, "Good Choice, Steve!". My bet for one of them is the Puffster, the four foot cubed personality that oozes unction - Mike Duffy. of CTV. Well at least the appointment will do two things: increase the minimum width of a Senate stool and get him off the airwaves.

The Nanny State strikes again
Say goodbye to the best buy of the Season, "Buck a Beer" is dead. In a story in the G&M this morning here, one of the regulatory boards that the Government has (buried so far deep in the bowels of the Province nobody knew about it) has decided to raise the minimum price of a box of beer. Citing its "Social responsibility" mandate this obscure board has raised the price from $24 to $25.60 a case. This is supposed to send the message that beer is too cheap and some people may abuse it and the raise will forestall that possibility. [that message stands by itself - ed]

Now how about that snow?
The snow must have been cumulatively 30 inches high at the end of the driveway. The plethora of ploughs pushed the piles [enough -ed] higher all weekend. All we have to do is to sit for another day and we can have more - can't wait!. Seriously as a spectator on the main road that the Town trucks travel on it has been my privilige to observe just how much salt this stretch of University gets - a lot. Surely two applications might do it not a dump from each truck.

How to steal an election (a Conservative view)
Normally it is the left of centre pundits who scream about stolen elections, but Minnesota has produced the same cry from Conservatives, inevitable really they are now losing. Here is an article written from the Con perspective about (the author calls himself the Intellectual Conservative) Franken stealing the votes. BTW he is now ahead by a slim margin giving the Dems in the Senate another seat.

Where's the snow?

This post may come back to bite me, but no snow here yet. Snowmageddon, as Enviro Can has dubbed it already has claimed victims - air travellers and school buses. One nauseating point, AM 640 has for the past 18 hours has been poohpoohing the idea of a snow warning. Encouraging "Real Canadians" to ignore the deal, "Are we a Nation of Wimps?". Callers are being encouraged to recall how they used to crawl naked through the snow to appear in the one room schoolhouse that produced university grads on a regular basis.
The National Post has someone liveblogging the storm here

What Don Martin (G&M #1 pundit) has to say about "Snouts at the Trough":
read it here

Snouts at the trough

Is anyone else getting offended at the number of people speculating upon the common good. Lists of potential Senators are being tossed around like lottery winners' tickets. Even if you like the idea of an appointed Senate, each one costing $150,000 plus plus, turns some noses. An unelected Senate is a throwback to to the class riddled, House of Lords at Westminster, where chinless wonders affected by years of inbreeding strut their stuff and sit in Pater's seat. Totally unrepresentive and devoid of the knowledge needed to govern common folk. Just look at the recent spat in the Island of Sark where the two richest men on the Island didn't get their slate elected in an exercise of democracy, the first in 400 years, and promptly shut their businesses down and destroyed the island's economy. That's the same attitude as in an unelected Senate - feudalism!

Today, a patrician of the G&M - Lawrence Martin, another man elevated to the stratosphere by the quality of his thinking (or so he implies) makes his list. And even more offensive than his punditry, to progressives, is his number one choice - Mike Harris. Read the article here

Just to change the subject, there is no place to escape the snow, but I'd rather be here to enjoy it!

This comment is so important it must not languish in the comments

This comment was received last evening and I judged it to be of such quality that it deserves more than just 'publish or reject'. The reason being is that I don't apologise for any of the content in my post, if there was sentence that may be out of line because it named the Chair, I could have phrased it differently. If the Anonymous writer is asking for contrition it is not available. If Ms Rudd will email me her address I will express my feelings that the post could have been less specific. But that doesn't change my thinking that this committee should not exist and tax money should not be used to fund it. If the three year budget of this area is only equal to the amount that Quinte spent on one Doctor that makes the case even stronger for not engaging in bribery. If the committee has only spent one third of the amount that Quinte has and has recruited seven Doctors to their one then congratulations but that does make the case that some of them might have come even without bribes. Perhaps they liked this area better than Belleville?

In conclusion if Quinte is spending three times as much as Northumberland and achieving a seven times lower success rate then that is ammunition for the argument that says that the Province and the Feds should be directing where Doctors can work. With all the advance planning in health demographics then they know better than we the under-serviced areas. And, if the public purse pays for the tuition of these Doctors then the funders should have a greater say in the location of their practices. So we, the Municipal tax-payers, should not be paying for this - income taxes should. But if locals feel that it is important to get involved then perhaps this is one of the issues that is too important for the Politicians and use local Service Club money. Why eradicate Polio in the World when we can't find a Doctor in Cobourg?

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Who's in charge of this Agency?":

Ben, it is very interesting to me that you of all people accept verbatim what is printed in the newspaper. In the interests of clarification, no one is in or near my back pocket. This volunteer position consumes hundreds of hours per year of my time as well as that of the committee in addition to our own money in terms of hosting events and billeting visiting doctors. We are not "bribing" doctors. Of the 3 you mention that are from the are there is actually only one Erin Pepper. The other two had family in the area, among many other areas. They are not from here. If you had been at the presentation you would have know that in fact we do not give huge amounts of money to the docs. Instead we assist with moving expenses and some tuition reimbursement. Our whole budget for 3 years is equivelant to just over what Quinte West would offer one doctor and we have recruited 7!!! To be wiithout a doctor (and fortunately I have one) is putting a huge cost on our community, both in terms of health and economics. Our hospitals deficit is due in part to not having enough local docs to cover emerg. Yes you are absolutely right it is a provincial responsiblity and we have certainly continue to advocate in that arena. The reality is someone has to do it and our committee has volunteered to take on the challenge. The message to the municipalities is that when the time comes that we are faced with a doc who wants to move here and we do not have enough funds to assist with moving expenses we will come back to the municipalities and they will decide whether or not we find the money or we say no thank you to the doctor who wants to move here. Each physicians needs are evaluated and assisted on an individual basis. We do not simply write a cheque. Ben you are way off base on this one. On a personal note as someone who does a ton of volunteer work in this community your desparaging remarks were uncalled for.

If you have ten minutes to spare

If you have ten minutes to spare watch this interesting you-tube video of the last |Governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, telling tales about the scope of the CIA's activity in the US> YouTube - Jesse Ventura: CIA Embedded in Every State Government

Start the week off with cheesy puns

I hate puns, not funny not clever and just too cheesy. Here is a page chock full of them. The subject is the shoe attack on Bush yesterday in Baghdad. At last Bush said something I could agree with, calling the attack an expression of free speech. I wonder how Canadians would have reacted? This event will keep the late-night talkers in material for a month.

For those people who love the electoral process

The Senatorial election in Minnesota has been a strange one ever since the SNL comedian Al Franken decided to be the candidate. On election night Franken was about 300 votes behind the sitting Republican and ever since the counting process has been long and involved. The latest twist is detailed here Personally I can't wait until it finishes. But will it be cut short by the counters and governing boards, just as the counting in Illinois in 2004 and Florida in 2000 was?

Who's in charge of this Agency?

Reading the local papers this weekend, I was out of Town last week, and the report that the "Doctor Retention Committee" is running out of cash jumped out at me. This is probably a misnomer, they spending cash they have never had! It seems to me that whoever is running this agency is running on the wrong assumptions and therefore committing money it never had - or never had any hope of getting. Just who is on the Board of this Agency or does it get run out of the back pocket of Kim Rudd and a couple of chums? The budget was based on taxpayer funded donations from all of the Municipalities in West Northumberland. Unfortunately some of the Municipalities canvassed didn't contribute or only gave partial donations. Thus the cash flow estimate was out of whack. Instead of cutting back activities the committee went ahead and committed to an aggressive budget that will require extra funding to fulfill its purpose.

The question now is should lower tier municipalities fund this kind of activity? I think not - the Province is responsible for Health and to have Municipalities compete with tax dollars in the lottery to attract Doctors is an irresponsible use of tax money. If we have to bribe Doctors to come here how long will they stay, and will they move to a better offer the next time a Municipality comes along with money in hand? It is interesting and satisfying that two of the three new Doctors came from the area before training. Would they have come back home without incentives?

The whole process is unseemly and wasting tax dollars and without good cash flow controls the Committee will be forever coming cap in hand trying to guilt Councils into paying for a process that should be out of their jurisdiction!


And talking about spending money - just who paid for the fireworks in the opening ceremony of the "Peter Delanty Memorial Rink" that interrupted dinner last night?

Now this is how to handle online disagreement

Taken from John Draper's excellent online edition - The Cobourg Blog wonderful way to handle differences of opinion. Christie does a great job of deflecting potential insult.

1. Daniel J. Christie Says:
   December 13th, 2008 at 12:39 pm

   A botonist once told me that most species of tree increase their output of seeds in the last year of their lives. So it is that Stephen Harper, a Manitoba Maple in the throes of death, appoints 15 seeds to The Senate thereby ensuring that the species -acer conservatus- no matter how undesirable, lives on and, through political insemination, is perpetuated.

2. Joe Fountain Says:
   December 13th, 2008 at 2:47 pm

   I would have thought that a “Sun Media” columnist would get the facts correct. There are 18 Senate vacancies.

3. Wally Keeler Says:
   December 13th, 2008 at 3:18 pm

   The same “Sun Media” columnist is also incapable of differentiating between Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

4. Daniel J. Christie Says:
   December 13th, 2008 at 9:00 pm

   Both your arguments are iron-clad, well put and beyond any defence I might offer. I therefore defer to your superior intelect, researching skills, grasp of calculus, and, above all, deft and gentle-but-scathing wit. Thus, faced with towering opposition armed with such withering asides, I withdraw.

   For now anyway….

5. Wally Keeler Says:
   December 14th, 2008 at 5:42 am

   Hyperbole will get you everywhere.