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BJ, when you first started running against David Price, George W Bush was still president of our country and the leader of your party. You seemed different, a breath of fresh air - you talked about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and seemed to have some idea of the dangers of powerful government. As a civil libertarian, I wanted to find out more about you, so I contacted you and we had a wonderful three-hour breakfast meeting where we seemed to agree on a lot of principles and issues. After that we met once, perhaps twice, for more pleasant and stimulating conversations. I even invited you to a liberal political group, where you impressed other liberals with your apparent earnestness and even with some of your ideas.
At one point I asked you why you belonged to the Republican Party. You replied that the party was broken, ripe for takeover. That sounded reasonable, given the ways that a Republican President and Congress had tossed away a budget surplus and gone to war against a country that hadn't attacked us. That Republican Party is dangerous, I said, and you seemed to agree.
Just got back from NC Pride a few hours ago. It was great fun. Saw friends, organizations, groups, and elected officials from across the triangle. Tons of Elaine Marshall signs around. Lots of pro-equality churches, and animal welfare/adoption tents. Here are some of my pictures of the grounds/tents/speeches and parade. Enjoy!
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Okay, so I tried loading like 50 some photos with the photo thingy & they don't seem to show up in the preview window at all, so here is a link to where I put them up on BlueNC. (if I can figure out what went wrong I'll try editing to upload some of them again)
http://bluenc.com/nc-pride-sat-sept-25
Joe Green has resigned from the CHCCS School Board (not that you'll notice that in the lack of media around here)
But I doubt we'll get into another "5th place finisher" fight because I heard MaryAnne Gucciardi moved out of the district as well. But I'm sure there will be interesting questions about whether to appoint another African-American. Or why not a Hispanic- or Asian-American given the large populations (14 and 11% respectively)?
Ruby's recent post about the problems with the Town's communication strategy regarding the new Downtown Development Framework got me to think about the ways in which our town's government does not use social media to communicate with constituents. I'll have more to say about this hopefully in a future blog post, but this one item jumped out at me:
Orange County has pressing local needs including education, infrastructure, social services, health, and small business support - just to name a few. We continually are forced to wrangle over restricted budgets which pit important local needs against one another. Meanwhile about $2600 per county citizen leaves Orange County annually for the national military budget. That's a total of about $351million.
Our current annual county budget is about $178 million. Imagine what we could accomplish for the citizens of Orange County if just 10% of our military contribution was retained at home for local needs? Another $35 million annually would make a world of difference for us.
Make no mistake, U.S. military spending - the U.S.
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