"Crowd backs arts and parks"

That's nice.

Why don't you open your wallets and support them? Don't make me pay for something I have no interest in paying for.

If your arts group can't get by without public funding, either you're not making a big enough effort to find private patronage, or maybe your group just plain sucks and ought to die anyway.

I don't have a "pocket park" in my neighborhood, why should I help pay for yours? If you love your neighborhood "pocket park" so much, get out there and beautify and maintain it yourself.

What do you want to bet that most of this crowd were liberal Democrats?

In other news, it looks like Ballard is cleaning up the 8-year Peterson/Anderson mess in the IMPD. Well, hurrah for that. Once that's done, maybe they'll start cleaning up the rest of the city. Oh, and I'd like to point out to the Gannett Star that, contrary to their breathless editorializing, it kind of looks like Ballard IS confronting the crisis within IMPD -- or at least the IMPD is cleaning house. This problem can't be blamed on Ballard, it's been festering for many years during Peterson's years of less than benign neglect of the police.

And in closing, let me once again point out that the Gannett Star's website is probably the worst newspaper website I have ever had the displeasure to view. It takes forever to load (probably because it's implemented in ASP; at least I don't know of any unix technologies that use .DLLs to display content) and they have a tendency to hide things on the website that they've headlined in the print edition -- like the article I started this post with. In a word, they are teh sux0r of newspapers.

But we already knew that; we really subscribe mostly so we have something with which to line the cat boxes.