2008
Vernon wins on 8% of the Vote
Before the elections this past Tuesday I did some trolling on various online forums to see if I could find what people were saying about the campaigns. The thing I heard the most was that Stehly was going to lose because she is negative and Brown was positive. It proved to be true.
These days I have found people prefer to be lied to as long as what they here is positive. The ugly truth does not interest them.
I had the opportunity to be close enough to Stehly’s campaign to review her mailings and website and I asked her several questions about how she came up with some of the information.
Guess what, Theresa never lied about anything. Her campaign newsprint mailer, paid for by her campaign and an obvious promotional piece was dubbed as a fake newspaper not only by people online in forums but by the Gargoyle Leader (I guess they were miffed because the mailer used a mock logo of the USA TODAY which is owned by media-monopoly-corporate-giant GANNET which also owns our down home friendly daily paper). If you read the paper carefully and check on www.siouxfalls.org you will see that Brown’s voting record was as Stehly said it was, and you will also find a PDF of the document where Brown and other councilors donated money to the indoor pool campaign. Yup, the truth. How tragic and negative indeed.
Sure there was an endorsement in the mailer written by Stehly’s friends, but wouldn’t we expect that? After all, she paid for it. Brown‘s mailings were full of vague information that you could interpret several ways, something they call in politics wiggle room. For instance he claims he is saving the city money by buying the Zoo. Huh? Don’t we subsidize the place now because we decided to buy it? Wouldn’t that mean we are losing money on the facility every year? Isn’t that untruthful?
Honestly I don‘t have a personal problem with Vernon Brown. Never had. I actually went to High School with his wife Tammi, who is very wonderful brilliant person. I have to agree with Kermit Staggers on the matter, he just felt Stehly was the better candidate and so did I, because she was truthful and didn’t sugarcoat what is going on in this city. A day before the election, Stehly said to me “Scott, I have always been truthful in this campaign and that is what is important.†Stehly is right. But apparently 60% of the voters in Tuesday’s election prefer to be lied to. Apathy is NOT a beautiful thing.
Kick them while they are down
http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080409/VOICES01/804090306/-1/voices01
In normal Gargoyle Leader vulture like style, they have decided to kick Stehly while she is down. This of course is something you would expect out of the blogosphere, Johnson’s campaign or editorial cartoonists. What purpose does it serve? Would the results been different if more people voted? Maybe? That’s right kiddies, the Gargoyle fails to mention that on a bright sunny day in Sux Falls 86% of registered voters didn’t even bother to show up to the polls. The super precints didn’t help matters either. This from a city that doesn’t have a problem with spending 3 million on a street that only benefits wealthy developers but claims they set up the super precincts to save us a lousy $12,000. Yeah right, it’s all about saving money. Maybe we should buy city hall a skid loader so they can start scooping up all the bullshit in that building. Apathy and special interests won yesterday in the city election and the 86% of voters that chose to stay home instead of voting should be ashamed of themselves. We’ll see if they wakeup in 2010 when we still don’t have the Lewis and Clark Pipeline (that we are currently paying for without a guarantee we are getting it), our deficit doubles because we decided to build an Event Center that will mostly be empty 90% of the year and the city is backlogged up to there necks in infastructure projects and lawsuits* (*more to come on this in the near future).
Way to go Sioux Falls, you have proven once again how truly sucky you are.
Coolio News
I’ve been asked to jury the Dakota State University student art and multimedia exhibt ‘BEADLEMANIA 2008’ this month.
This is exciting.
As you know I’m a big promoter of openness in art and strongly against censorship. I get to put my beliefs to the test and look forward to the challenge.