Good post Hockey, this isnt realted to it but does anyone know if Mr. Olmstead is allowed back into council meetings?

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"How does one "Seem to think"? Either you did or you didn't! "
-ZenGary

yes Rick has been readmiitted to the town building..I understand that the mayor did that as one of the first actions of the new council....not sure if it is a blessing or a curse but he can enter those hallowed halls.

My recollection has faded about what happened so many years ago when the scuffle occurred in the chambers.
But in order to avoid litigation and not be served with a summons i will be vauge with the following.
I asked ( person hereafter known as X) X what happened and X's side of the story, which was told to me with a gaggle of supporters in close proximity. I listened and said something along these lines
Well I see your point but lets say if one of my kids got sick because of a water borne illness whether at the beach or from a neighbours septic tank flowing into my potable water supply I would make sure that I will attended one of your meetings ( I can't remember the name of the group right now) and not only would I create a physicall confrontation but I would be far more successful in task completion. I was told be X that I would have my a.. kicked if I tried that and if I showed up to one of thier meetings I wouldn't be welcome...
Gotcha, if I make a ruccuss in your meeting I will have my a.. kicked. The gaggle in the background was like a Dom King enterouge in a prefight news conference(sp) going on with .. yeah, thats right, thats whats gonna happen....
BTW since there has never been any movement on this since that time I am sure my position stands re my kids and I am sure my a.. will be kicked if I create a fuss...
I am sure I wrote about this here a long time ago.
In other news damn fine fall weather we are having

And so are we all. If you haven't seen it yet, you should watch the video of a student being tasered at a John Kerry speech - as frightening and gruesome as it is to watch the young man led away in handcuffs after repeated taser jolts and charged with "inciting a riot" for simply asking one question (Was it true Kerry and Bush are from the same frat house?) the really horrorshow of the video was when I asked my american colleagues about it, and they shrugged it off as "Yeah, well, so what? what do you expect?" and when I tell them the story about Rick Olmstead and Carl Noble, their jaws drop. They cannot believe such a place can exist on this Earth. "You can do that in your country????"

They truly and sincerely cannot believe Rick was not tasered and hauled away in chains along with anyone else who dared rush to his aid. It is unthinkable that anyone should have such freedom.

No joke. Even in America, even in supposedly enlightened and progressive neighbourhoods of America like Beverley Hills, the common expectation would have Rick multiply tasered into submission, then hauled by the burliest OPP out of the council chambers and bullied and charged with some bogus burocrat-pleasing excuse like inciting civil unrest.

We got something special here folks. Sure there may be plots and counterplots and hidden agendies and ugly interrogations and buried lies, but, so far (knock on wood) nobody here gets openly and instantly detained and tortured for pointing them out, and that my friends, is social progress!

I remember way back, during the National Dis-Unity Debates and the endless repeticious repeated rephrasings of the Quebec Question, we affectionately called them 'Neverendums ... it's like when the 9 year old asks, "What's for dinner?" or over and over until you break down and give him the answer he wants. Hmmm ... Ditto for the courtroom lawyers too, come to think of it, so I suppose a nag-you-into-compliance tactic among politicians shouldn't really come as a surprise then, should it ...

"The motion passed by a slim margin of 5 to 3.

"The committee will look at the size of council and possibly reducing the number of councillors, looking at the ward system and possibly taking it away, thinking about creating a Deputy Mayor's position and looking at the mail in voting system.

"Mayor Gwen Gilbert is opposed to the committee saying it not should be up to 5 people to decide but it should be the entire community.

[ South Bruce Peninsula looks at election reform ]

Gilbert, Wunderlich and King all say this should be re-neverendumed on the next ballot, but then, why this issue and not all the other issues, if indeed 'important' things should not be left "up to the 5 people to decide" on behalf of everyone, but then, unless I'm mistaken, is the whole purpose of democratic representation supposed to imply that the 'Will of the People" is already invested in the duly elected representatives? And if not, and I won't comment on my take on that, then what are we hoping to accomplish with elections? and that would then also imply that if elections cannot choose our executive proxies, then how could the same flawed process decide an 'important' issue like the structure of the electoral process?

It hurts my roho just pondering it all!

And then it gets dramatically worse: if our current method of electoral selection is so flawed that we cannot trust the resulting councils to make our decisions, how could we ever trust the process to meter our neverendum choice? Sticky, sticky business, mired in muck and circumstance, best left to experts I say, and I can't really comment on it all because I still haven't read that expensive inch-thick document about the last electoral reform question :(