Technical Difficulties at Blue Bexley

BB is not down, just in the process of moving to www.BlueBexley.com. If you've been having troubles visiting, try clearing your cache or waiting until Monday.

-bonobo

p.s. This post is for the feed-subscribers and aggregators. If you're reading it on the site, it obviously does not apply :)

Columbus Mayor, Columbus Dispatch, Tone of Voice

The Dispatch has a new political podcast. Well, they have a new downloadable audio thing. If you have no choice but to "check back often," there's no casting involved. Anyway, I haven't listened in yet, but I just read something that I would pay money to hear the reporter speak out loud:

It's the first time Coleman has won police-union backing since his first run for mayor in 1999. He ran against only a write-in candidate for his second term in 2003, but the FOP declined to make an endorsement.


I keep saying that I'm not that interested in writing about the Columbus mayoral race, but I keep doing it anyway (besides, the Coleman campaign is usually very effective and lightning-fast in calling attention to stuff like this, but I haven't seen anything from them yet). I also, however, recently wrote that the Todd campaign is a joke. I can't read the above sentence without snickering, so perhaps one or two folks at the CD agree. I'd love to hear the CD crew give a straight-faced recitation a shot.

Bexley Candidate List

This is the list of candidates for Mayor and City Council who submitted petitions by the 4pm deadline today. Petitions have not been certified, the Board of Elections will do that in late August or early Setember. School Board Candidates still have two weeks to submit petitions.

CITY OF BEXLEY

MAYOR – (1 to be elected)

……………...John M. Brennan, 170 S. Stanwood Rd., 43209

…………….. William G. Harvey, 417 Westland Ave., 43209

……………...Travis M. Irvine, 729 College Ave., 43209

…………..…Robyn, Jones, 825 Vernon Rd.., 43209

………………Matt Lampke, 2447 Plymouth Ave., 43209

………………Bill Minckler, 2401 Bryden Rd., 43209

……………. Scott E. Weinblatt, 59 S. Ardmore Rd., 43209

Name request………. Eugene P. Weiss, 2360 Bryden Rd., 43209

COUNCIL - (4 to be elected)

…….. Ben Kessler, 175 S. Stanwood Rd., 43209 (name request)

……...Mark Masser, 2479 Fair Ave., 43209

………Jeffrey L. McClelland, 2596 Brentwood Rd., 43209

……... Jed W. Morison, 2572 Brentwood Rd., 43209

………Hanz Wasserburger, 834 S. Remington Rd., 43209

Moving Targets

Jerid over at BSB had a mini-lament about chasing dead ends in the course of original reporting. I can one-up him. I've been chasing dead-ends in the course of doing Halletry (the act of blogging about stuff other people have written, which is called commentary or punditry or analysis or synthesis elsewhere, but which needs a special derogatory term in the blogosphere, because it has less value when we do it).

Tom Noe is Dead*. Or not.
There's a Honda Plant in the 12th District, which is why Pat is so concerned about the Farm Bill. Or not?

And over it all hovers a Plain Dealer editorial. It's what has me sarcastically invoking Senior Editor Joe up there in the last paragraph, and it is the second most infuriating thing that JMZ linked to in her Remains yesterday, though even she and her sympathetic commenters don't quite get it. The editorial ends:

We'll see. Net-roots activists like their politics undiluted by moderation or pragmatism; they think that's the way to mobilize Democratic voters.

Some have said that this is offensive because it unfairly generalizes from Kos to the larger Lefty Blogs universe. The problem is that it isn't even remotely true of Kos, champion of guys like Tester and Webb.

As for the most offensive thing, well, apparently Toledo is hostile to wealthy people. I don't know Maggie Thurber, and it's probably not appropriate for me to do anything that looks like picking a fight here on my turf, but statements like these are all too common, and reflect the casual sense of entitlement and smug superiority among many "conservatives:"

Can you imagine the outcry if local leaders said they were going to subsidize the creation of luxury housing - perhaps in the planned Marina District - in order to attract those with enough disposable income to generously contribute to the economic revitalization of the downtown area?

Tell you what Ms. Thurber, here in Columbus the highest price luxury housing you might hope to find is at Miranova, which lured wealthy buyers with subsidies in the form of a property tax abatement. Imagine the outcry**.

*YDS is much better informed than I am. Perhaps Bernadette is a widow and I'm simply out of the loop. It's happened before.

** Well, to be fair, there was an outcry by Pat Tiberi's campaign, those great demonizers of the wealthy, at least in regards to one person getting one of those tax abatements.

Quick Updates... Tick Tick

The deadline for filing petitions to get on the ballot for Bexley Municipal office is tomorrow, so we'll know how many candidates we actually have for what when that passes. According to the Messenger article I linked to yesterday, there are more council candidates than slots, so an actual campaign looks likely. I haven't had an update on the Board of Education race in a while.

In the meantime, the earliest candidates continue to be out ahead of the pack in terms of visibility campaigning. Bill Minckler has already started a slick direct mail campaign reinforcing the nifty looking "M" logo and the Moving Bexley Forward theme. Matt Lampke has followed suit with a campaign theme, promising to "SHAPE Bexley's Future," along with a major website upgrade from this to this.

Back - II

In the meantime, we are up to 8, possibly 9 Bexley Mayoral candidates. Bonnie Butcher at ThisWeek added Scott Weinblatt to the list of candidates. Scott is listed as Unaffiliated by the BOE, and as near as I can tell on short notice, as an incoming senior at Bexley H.S. (I'll be sure to update that if it turns out I'm mistaken).

In the meantime, John Matuszak at the Columbus Messenger identifies Weinblatt as a member of the category "have also taken out petitions," a category encompassing Weinblatt, Travis Irvine, and the heretofore unmentioned Lawrence Binsky. Binsky is a registered Republican, local business owner, and a man whose quickest Google hits unfortunately involve penalties for late taxes and pictures of topless women painted like dogs (I say unfortunately as neither are as bad as they sound, but still, if it were me, I'd hope the campaign generates enough interest to knock those off the front page).

More later, it's time to go back to work.

Back - I

I've tried to digest a week's worth of world that has piled up in my Reader while I was in Grand Marais and then visiting family in Traverse City, but I gave up and "marked all as read." So I'll never know whether or not there was any legitimacy to the OSC opinion that Strickland's opening veto was invalid, or how much annoyance was actually appropriate on the part of Republicans as the Ag Bill vote shifted, or whether the House and Senate SCHIP bill differences really provided enough cover to our Central Ohio delegation. I don't even have links handy.

I'll make time to catch up on the FISA agreement. I'm not expecting to be happy.