Is this America

Good thing we have a City Council that looks out for the little guy and doesn’t bow to the big developers. I though we were a free market... I guess the Marriott didn't want to pay the market value for the land… that’s Okay, our great city council will take it for them. Okay I understand that sometimes the government needs to step in and control City Planning and Zoning etc.... It just makes me really uncomfortable when they start taking it from the small guy and giving it to HUGE corporations.

From the Union Tribune -

"The city will condemn a coffee and cigar shop in the Gaslamp Quarter to make way for a 334-room, four-star hotel.

The City Council yesterday voted 8-1, with no discussion, to use its power of eminent domain to take the Gran Havana Cigar and Coffee Lounge at Fifth Avenue and J Street. Councilwoman Donna Frye voted no.

The council, acting in its role as the Redevelopment Agency of San Diego, will sell the land to GRH LLC, which plans to build a Marriott Renaissance Hotel on the site and surrounding parcels.

The shop's owner, Ahmed Mesdaq, has called the move an abuse of power. He has owned the business in the Gaslamp for 13 years – the past three at its present location – and has spent about $2.5 million to buy and renovate the building. "

Drive Carefully...

I hope they don't shorten the Yellow Lights like they did in SD when they put in the Red Light Cameras...

From the Union Tribune-

"VISTA – The City Council authorized the installation of red-light cameras at four intersections last night and approved construction of a median on Vista Village Drive to house one set of cameras.

The cameras should be operational by June and $321 tickets will begin to be issued to violators by July, Assistant City Manager Rick Dudley said.

The four intersections are Emerald Drive at West Vista Way, Escondido Avenue at South Santa Fe Avenue, Hacienda Drive at South Melrose Drive and Vista Village Drive at North Santa Fe Avenue. "

Who's Web Page is it

From TalkingPointsMemo.com

"Secret liberal influence at the Coalition Provisional Authority?

Compare and contrast the CPA Website with that of the Brookings Institution.

Who knew Strobe's influence still stretched so far?

Actually, a quick look under the hood of each site shows that either the CPA or Brookings snagged the other outfit's website and remodeled it as their own.

The presence of this line ("submenu name="Brookings Review" id="brs" url="/press/review/rev_des.htm") buried in the code of both websites seems to give a pretty good sign of who did the deed.

Now if they'd just crib the policy proposals and not just the html!

Oh, the Humanity!

Hey, at least those CPA folks are saving money!

Okay, I'm done."

Other Than That, Quite Right

From the Washington Post Today

Other Than That, Quite Right

Meanwhile, Bush, in his news conference Tuesday, showed he was ready to raise the level of his play in this arena.

Bush found a way to make not one, not two, but three factual errors in a single 15-word sentence, which must be something of a world indoor record. Bush said it is still possible that inspectors will find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"They could still be there. They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm," he said, referring to Libya's WMD disclosures last month.

The White House, according to Reuters, said the accurate figure was 23.6 metric tons or 26 tons, not 50. The stuff was found at various locations, not at a turkey farm. And there was no mustard gas on the farm at all, but unfilled chemical munitions.

Other than that, the sentence was spot on.

I voted...maybe

from the Union Tribune

"County officials said yesterday they discovered a new problem with the flawed March election – 2,821 absentee ballots that were miscounted in the Democratic presidential and Senate Republican primaries...

...The latest problem was discovered in the standard canvassing of votes that county officials conduct after an election. "

If I am reading this right they caught the flaw after recounting/Auditing the paper absentee ballots. So what about the votes that are totally electronic? Now maybe it is in different system, for the absentee, so this problem won't affect the normal votes but it is still kinda scary. Like how do they know we didn't have problems with all the non-absentee ballots?

The natural of the error also bugs me.

"The miscounts occurred because multiple scanners simultaneously fed the absentee ballot data into the computer tabulation system. The large number of ballots and candidates on them overwhelmed the system."

When the system was 'overwhelmed' (whatever that means) it started giving the wrong people the votes. That means the very basic audit system of make sure the total count equals the number of votes casted. The very worst problem in a election is votes counted the wrong way, and that seems to be our problem.

More about City Government

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/weblogs/luna/archives/000433.html

When in trouble Borrow

From the Union Tribune

“San Diego County supervisors gave the county retirement system a financial boost yesterday by agreeing to issue $400 million in bonds to cover part of the pension fund's $1.4 billion deficit…

...In voting to approve the bonds, supervisors took turns stressing that the county's pension fund is in much better financial shape than the city of San Diego's.”

County Supervisiors love to needle the City’s government. It is great when you have a problem to know someone with a worst problem, that way you don’t have to feel so bad. If fact if you spend enough time make fun of them you might even start feeling better about yourself.

The Daily Show

...and the very best review of the attack on Clarke

Paul Krugman

This is a good article about the way information get to the public...