The World has cranked up its high powered intellectual might and worm’s eye analysis to weigh in again on the Stufflebean recall by deploying a cheesy metaphor.
Oregon’s recall law is like a fighter plane’s ejection seat. It should be reserved for emergencies.
Gag me with a spoon!
Once again it fails, so busy is it straddling both sides of the fence, to make a convincing argument denouncing the costs of a recall or how divisive to the community they may or may not be.
If the road budget decision was wrong, what would have been right? Stufflebean’s adversaries have not offered a concrete alternative. Instead, they say the real issue is not the decision itself, but the sneaky process behind it.
They’re right that the process was flawed. The cuts were rushed to a vote on New Year’s Eve, with dubious public notice. But voters must ask whether one high-profile transgression warrants an expensive special election, especially when the transgressor’s term ends in less than two years.
There is a continued insistence on the part of The World that the recall is only about one issue. The lack of transparency surrounding the road department layoffs motivated citizens to form Citizens for Fair and Open government but a copy of the committee talking points, (I am sure the paper could obtain a copy) will reveal a broad range of concerns. Recalls may be divisive, most issues are, especially when County funds and resources are being mismanaged and the taxpayer cost is far in excess of a special election.
Right or wrong the recall has gotten a lot of people to start paying attention to what is happening in the commissioners’ boardroom, asking questions, filing public records requests and watching public access television.
Sounds like you are winding down after a torrid week
This one is too good not to share, “Mommy, Mommy I want to be a Roadmaster”…………….
Have a good weekend everybody…
Peace,
thom
A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, ‘If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?’
Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers; ‘Sure, Why not?’
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany.
Within mere seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data is stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, ‘You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.’
‘That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,’ says Bud.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then Bud says to the young man, ‘Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?’
! The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, ‘Okay, why not?’
‘You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government’, says Bud.
‘Wow! That’s correct,’ says the yuppie, ‘but how did you guess that?’
‘No guessing required.’, answered the cowboy. ‘You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about cows…this is a herd of sheep. . . Now give me back my dog.