Great Horny Toads! Webber Keeps His Job?

I saw on 13abc tonight that Mayor Carty Finkbeiner has decided not to fire his spokesperson, Jason Webber for the things Webber wrote in his myspace blog. Here's the story...



I can only come up with two explanations for this. Either nobody else is willing to do the job; and given the public relations disaster that is Carty Finkbeiner, that's not an unreasonable thought; or Webber is dumb enough to fit right in with the Finkbeiner theme.

I've talked to people who have questioned Chris Myers' ethics of posting something that he knew could get Webber fired. I suppose. I don't think I would have put it here. I'm not sure if the media had come across it first if they would have kept it back, but who knows? That notwithstanding, Webber doing this has to be one of the dumbest maneuvers I've seen in awhile.

Seriously, how dumb does this guy have to be? Let's begin with the fact that he posted the writings on myspace and thought they would be private. Then there's the idea that he said it was only meant to be between himself and about 20 to 25 of his friends. Something that you're telling that many people is not private.

Then, there is my personal favorite, where Webber said that some comments were meant to be satrical and others were taken out of context.

From Jason's blog:

"The mayor continues to dig his political grave, as he gets himself in one
pickle after another."

Would someone please explain to me how this is satirical? Conversely, I would accept an explanation of what context makes this anything but a negative statement - unless maybe they left out the part where he says, "...but in a good way!"

Jason Webber needs to spend some time going to church and thanking God that he still has a job. If he were on my staff, he'd be gone - if for no other reason than I wouldn't want someone who is dumb enough to think that things posted to the internet can be private to have access to sensitive information.

Then again, maybe Carty didn't want to help raise the skyrocketing unemployment rate in Toledo. Just a thought.

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.