Leroy Johnson is in trouble again for comments he made during the Cranford neighborhood historic district discussion.

Johnson is accusing the other City Council members of trying to oust him due to their liberal leanings. My opinion - Johnson is just being unprofessional. Sitting on the City Council is an important position in this community and Johnson needs to take it seriously. If he doesn’t he should yield his seat to someone who does.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to too some local resident’s opinions on the Leroy Johnson saga. Looks like, as usual, no one in this town agrees on anything.

Finally, some anti-Paccione websites! I’ve had some links to some very outspoken Marilyn Musgrave critics for a little while now, but these are the first sites I’ve seen criticizing Angie Paccione.

Paccione On Immigration.com
Liberal Extremist.com

Well, today’s post is a bit off topic (and a bit old), but since it’s my blog I guess that’s OK.

I’m sure many of you know about all of the Network Neturality talk that’s been going around for the last several months. If you don’t, you should research it, it’s important.

In response to the Net Neutrality legislation that appeared before Congress in May of this year Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, sponsored a bill requesting more study be done by the FCC on the potential abuses of Net Neutrality. In a Senate Commerce Committee on June 28, 2006, Senator Stevens discussed his views on the Internet and it’s potential uses. If you haven’t heard Senator Stevens oration you should listen to the mp3, it’s enlightening to say the least. No wonder he want’s more study done - he obviously doesn’t understand how the Internet workw.

Here are some excerpts from his speech:

“I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.”

“They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”

He also tirades about services that are going to allow movies to be downloaded and how that commercial use is going to clog up the Internet and hurt the consumer. Never mind the fact that communication across the Internet is often a commercial use. Never mind that many of us buy products from Amazon and Ebay as a commercial use. This 37 year veteran Senator and Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee obviously can’t even identify commerce when he sees it.

Now there are many posts in blogs and podcasts around the Internet makeing fun of Senator Stevens’ buffonary. That is not my intent here. Instead, I want to criticize the voters of the state of Alaska for sending this man to the Senate term after term and for his fellow congressmen for allowing him to chair a committe which he obviously has no business even being on.

When we go to the polls this August and November please think about Senator Stevens. Experience does not automatically make a good elected official. Any representative of the people should have the capability and willingness to change with the world we live in and understand current concepts and events. If this is not possible a new person should be elected.

In the fiasco that was the Colorado legislature’s special session our own Jim Riesberg was a standout. The whole special session appeared to me to be just a power struggle between Democrats and Republicans. Republicans wanted to put the immigration issue on the ballot and let the voters decide. Democrats on the other hand wanted to ‘do their elected job’. Riesberg himself was quoted as saying

“We pass 400 laws a year, and we don’t put 400 things on the ballot,” he said. “If we can do the job the voters send us to do, why do we have to put it on the ballot?”

Good for him, I think. Problem is the Democrats then killed House Bill 1018, which would have required employers to get a state issued ID when hiring an employee, undoubtably due to pressure from lobbyists. Instead they passed the nearly incomprehensible HB1023 that bans non-emergency taxpayer-funded services from anyone without a state issued ID. Now maybe I’m crazy, but exactly what kind of non-emergency services is this going to cover? Are IDs going to be needed when enrolling a kid for school? If you call to report a non-emergency crime, like theft, are the cops going to ask for an ID? Wouldn’t it just be simpler to keep employers from hiring illegal immigrants?

I’m guessing if HB1018 had become a ballot issue it would have passed with flying colors, instead the Democrats ‘did the job the voters elected them for’. Appearantly they know what we want better than we do ourselves.

Early this morning the Greeley City Council voted 3-3 on the proposal to designate the Cranford neighborhood as a Historic District. The split vote (with Ed Phillipsen abstaining since he lives in the Cranford neighborhood) resulted in the failure of the proposal. A five-vote majority is needed to declare a historical district.

It appears we have a new candidate in the race for Colorado Governor.
LaSalle farmer Chuck Sylvester has his website up as a canidadate for Governor.

Personally, I am very interested in Chuck as a candidate. He appears to be a fairly normal Weld County farmer. Kind of the everyman candidate. He is still an unknown, so I’m not willing to really give an ‘endorsement’ yet, but with the likes of Bill Ritter and Bob Beauprez running for Governor Chuck maybe a good choice. (besides, how cool would it be to have a governor named Chuck?)

As part of the upcoming election process I would like to come up with some questionnaire for our elected officials. I would encourage anyone visiting the site to leave comments about the major issues we face in Northern Colorado and what we expect out of our federal, state, county and local elected officials and specific questions you, our readers, would like to have answered by candidates for office.

Once we have a good list of questions I will post them here and email them to the appropriate candidates to see if we can get some dialog going.

The Greeley Tribune had some reader editorials on Scott Renfroe, Angie Paccione and Dale Hall.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, except for one comment.  What does it say about a person if the only qualification they have worth talking about is experience?