If you have an interesting local news story throw it in here. It can be funny, strange or anything else. My story below is a little more on the crazy side.





I ran across this news story today out of the big city of Birmingham. Tell me our government isn't wasting our tax dollars. The Mayor of Birmingham is paying a 13 year old girl 10,000.00 to help design a park

Videos | ABC 33/40 News

__________________
Want The Advantage Of Not Trading Blindly? Sign up For Free L2 Service Offer........http://www.alphatrade.com/egateOverv...tockMarketCats

Well up here in Canada our politicians are having a "who's the biggest a$$clown" contest.

We had an election like 6 weeks ago, with 4 major parties, one of them (the conservatives) are about 8 seats shy of having a majority.

The parties/seat counts are:
Conservatives: 143
Liberals: 77
Bloc Quebecois: 49
NDP: 37
Independants: 2
Total seats: 308

All 4 of these parties are basically ideologically opposed to each other. Recall that "center" in canada is left of your democrats in the states.

Conservatives - supposedly our center right fiscally conservative party
Liberals - basically center-left party.
Bloc Quebecois - elected by quebec, to take whatever money and power they can get, and do what they can to break up the country and achieve separation for quebec
NDP - wingnut socialists and union kegger party, re: "the party of bankruptcy"

So 6 weeks into office the conservatives put a minor fiscal update on the table, and included a clause to roll back funding for political parties from taxpayers. In canada when elections are over the gov't pays the parties that win seats just under $2 per vote they get, the gov't decided to end that with this bill among other things.

The conservatives have a grassroots funding organization which dwarfs the other parties. Not only that, but the liberals were broke before the previous election and they're on death's door and deeply in debt. They lost a lot of seats in the last election because of a terrible leader and platform (their main platform plank was giving us a carbon tax heading into a recession... serious....). So after the election 6 weeks ago, the liberals decided to oust their naive leader and platform and start a leadership campaign (similar to your primaries but normally between elections) which has started but not really gotten off the ground yet. This will further put them in debt.

The liberals are heavily in debt and have no real fundraising apparatus or ability. What can I say, they're moderate socialists, and true to form they exist solely on the taxpayer dime. So anyway, they view this bill as an attempt to exterminate them via bankruptcy.

The conservative leader is known as a reasonable tactician for a reason, it probably was an attempt to crush them for good.

So the liberals are faced with choices like:
a) develop a grassroots funding campaign from scratch, which over the last several years they've shown they either don't know how or are too lazy to do. It's like... work, man.
b) go bankrupt
c) conspire with all the other parties to throw down the gov't and call an election which they have no money to fight, and no leader to fight it with, just 6 weeks after the last election
d) conspire with all the other parties to throw down the gov't and grasp a rule which allows them to ask the governor general to ask the opposition to attempt to form the gov't with some kind of stated support from the other parties, under this option there is no election, they just claim power

So right now, they're going for d and we're waiting for monday to see if they have the balls to mutiny and depose an elected government basically through a coup to preserve their subsidies. The second thing they agreed on is that none of the leaders of any of the 3 parties were acceptable to the others. So they're talking about just appointing a leader for the liberals and short-circuiting their own leadership convention, and installing this appointee (who will at least be an elected member of parliament however) as Prime Minister.

Hiowever they have such few seats because the conservatives nearly have a majority, that they require virtually all the votes from the 3 opposition parties (including the separatists) to avoid being immediately brought down for an election. This is just a bizarre and desperate flailing attempt to clutch at power. It's just disgusting to watch.

All this 6 weeks after an election in which the conservatives gained seats and the liberals were trounced by voters.

Just in case you thought american politicians were nuts.

PS: if you see pictures of the Jolly Roger flying over the Canadian parliament next week you'll know what happened. LOL

Here's a link to a partisan article written from the liberal side:
globeandmail.com: Why the opposition can't back down now

PS: these are the nutjobs obama was talking about renegotiating nafta with

tip: you want to stay far away from the suicidal nuts running the show here

I saw this on MSN Money today. Thought it was appropriate but not sure where to post.

"I will tell you how to become rich. ... Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful." -- Warren Buffett

__________________
The CYCLONES traded their 5-19 coach to Auburn!