Observations...

There have been a few stories in the news the past few days that warrant some short observations...

The first is the story about Mayor Finkbeiner's latest spokesperson. It seems that Jason Webber's comments that he made about the mayor in his myspace blog wound up on Swampbubbles.com. Webber said that it was his way of updating his friends on his job, his comments were taken out of context and that he thought his profile was hacked because the blog was set to private.
Having read the comments, I have to ask... for example, in what context would comparing your boss's voice to Yosemite Sam would be considered positive?
Then there is the obvious thought of whether Webber will get to keep his job. I don't know that I would want a senior staff member of mine to be stupid enough that he thinks there is such a thing as privacy on the Internet. At my job, we take annual training in computer security, which always seemed pointless to me because so much of it was obvious. Now I know why our company does it. Apparently the idea of not posting private information on myspace isn't so obvious to everyone.
Given how fast the mayor seems to be going through spokespeople, maybe leaving the position vacant and speaking for himself could be part of the solution for the budget deficit.
Which brings us to the second item, which is the city council deciding not to approve the city-tax reciprocity measure that the mayor had as part of his balancing of the budget. The mayor had planned to have people who live in Toledo and work in other cities (some 19,000 of them) pay city taxes. They currently receive a 100 percent credit for taxes paid to the cities in which they work. Dozens of people were at the council meeting to protest this idea, and in a rare performance, the council listened to the voters and didn't approve the mayor's request. It came as a surprise to me. I didn't think that the folks at Government Center met a tax or a fee they didn't like.
Finally, the city council passed a measure encouraging congress to put a temporary moratorium on foreclosures. Council president Mark Sobczak said on the radio that the system in place isn't working because within 6 months 55 percent of the people who are saved from foreclosure are right back in it. This is probably a silly question, but is it at all possible that the reason these people are right back in foreclosure is because the majority of them were not qualified to buy their houses in the first place? In case you missed it, Mr. Sobczak, people buying houses that they had no way to afford was one of the first dominoes in the chain that led us to the current economic situation.