Residents speak out, turnout convincing:
VANCOUVER (CP) – Vancouver residents took to the polls in record numbers Saturday and voted not to adopt a ward system used by every other major Canadian city to elect its municipal politicians.
In the city-wide plebiscite, 54 per cent of voters said no to a ward system on their ballots. Fourty-six per cent were in favour according to unofficial results released late Saturday.
A visibly shocked Sam Sullivan, head of the No Wards campaign, had to revise his pre-planned loser speech. “I believe that a no vote was not for the status quo,” said the Vancouver city councillor. “It is a vote for cautious, deliberate, progressive change.”
I’d agree with that last comment. I spoke with quite a few people on this issue – even among those who had made their mind up one way or the other, there seemed a consistant level of indecision. Quite a few did not buy the arguments pro and con that either side put forward—democracy is alive and well.
A partial introduction of ward-like responsibility might have flown with the public, however hard it might be to implement. Idea: half of council ward-based, half at large?
I’ve been saying for a while that the debunking of the “nuclear smoking gun” is perhaps the critical issue in the campaign to oust a morally corrupt administration. Many conservatives are going to have to come to grips with ousting one of their own, in favour of Kerry, simply because it is the right thing to do.
Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush’s obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed closer to zealotry than mere policy. He sold the war to the American people, and to Congress, as an antiterrorist campaign even though Iraq had no known working relationship with Al Qaeda. His most frightening allegation was that Saddam Hussein was close to getting nuclear weapons. It was based on two pieces of evidence. One was a story about attempts to purchase critical materials from Niger, and it was the product of rumor and forgery. The other evidence, the purchase of aluminum tubes that the administration said were meant for a nuclear centrifuge, was concocted by one low-level analyst and had been thoroughly debunked by administration investigators and international vetting. Top members of the administration knew this, but the selling went on anyway. None of the president’s chief advisers have ever been held accountable for their misrepresentations to the American people or for their mismanagement of the war that followed.— New York Times Editorial Board
Clearly its not just us plain thinking conservatives, liberals, and others around the political spectrum which have zeroed in on this key issue.
Former Bush treasury secretary Paul O’Neill on George W. Bush:
“a blind man in a room full of deaf people”
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush:
“I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.” “This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts, he truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.”
Democratic senator Joe Biden:
“I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad, and I was telling the president of my many concerns. Mr. President, how can you be so sure when you know you don’t know the facts?” Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator’s shoulder. ’‘My instincts,’’ he said. ’‘My instincts.’’ Biden said “Mr. President, your instincts aren’t good enough!”
Source: NY Times – Without a doubt