the navel times and observer

My man won his City Council seat against what I would have thought would have been rather long odds tonight. He was a write-in candidate, a former mayor who only served two years and he just helped to drag the whole town through the media mud by getting into a brawl with the current mayor after a city council meeting.

He writes fiery letters against the present mayor and he advocates impeaching the mayor everywhere he goes with a yard sign in the windshield of his pick up truck. He also seems to honestly want his seat of power back and I believe really feels like the mayor is ruining the city with his policies.

Is he really fit to lead? Probably not. City council members in Jasper seem to be incompetent as a rule of thumb anyway. Recent audits from the last couple years show gross violation of city codes, including allowing two council members to be paid as city employees for a full year. Granted they only earned $22,000 between them that year but it's a conflict of interest just the same. The last audit before that included dozens of bank accounts with no records and purchases people just plumb forgot about or at least didn't write into any book.

In other news, I am, despite leaving my job in three days, still anxious about failing to have gotten a story written and shipped out that the tv news technically beat us to. I learned late Friday about the result of a lawsuit between one of my towns and a couple other parties. I put it on my reporter's budget for Wednesday because I knew today was going to be largely devoted to elections and late tonight (I presume after attending the actual city council meeting) the tv news had it broadcasted about the result. So we write it a day after the news tomorrow and it will run 8 days after the damn thing was decided.

I put it on my budget, but didn't mention it today to an editor and didn't mention it before this weekend and because I wasn't here Monday I didn't mention it then either. Now we're a day late even though we knew about it almost a full week ago. Why does that still bug me???? After all what difference does it really make when I'm leaving Friday???? I don't know but I think I'm tired and just too damn tightly wound.

Anyway I have a forwarding address for Lebanon now. E-mail, call or instant message me if you want it.