Re: Pate (finally)
Okay, fine, conceded, Pate may be an intelligent man, but it certainly doesn't mean that he should be our mayor. Throughout the entire election, from start to finish, Pate said absolutely nothing--that's jack shit--about what he plans to for our city when elected, in addition to MISSING THE DEBATE, which is an utterly unacceptable and inexcuseable action for someone serious about running for public office (even Brockette was there, jesus), and completely lacking almost any knowledge or direct experience with Cedar Rapids whatsoever which his state and national office experience doesn't even come close to neutralizing or compensating for his lack of knowledge about the people he represents, not to mention their wants and needs. You say "Actions, my friends, actions speak louder than words," but Pate has no "actions" applicable to this election (which doesn’t benefit your pitiful argument like you insinuated) and CR to speak of, while Clancey has a slew of them, including especially the fact that Cedar Rapids, despite numerous public improvements, still maintains the 2nd lowest property taxes out of any "major" city in Iowa. By the way, your fiery all-caps proclaiming of the glory of our educational system completely works to my advantage--why switch up mayors if things are so good? Way to go, dumbass.

With respect to our president's intelligence, if you can call it that, and his supposed “4.0 GPA in college versus tree-huggin’ hippy Gore’s 2.0 GPA” I'd like initially to cite The Harvard Crimson newspaper’s editorial “Bush—no member of the intelligentsia” written on November 12, 1999 regarding the subject:

“As for Republican presidential front-runner George W. Bush, he seems to have no problems convincing the masses(however unintentionally) that he's no member of the intelligentsia. The New Yorker recently printed a transcript from Bush's years at Yale which revealed him to be a rather mediocre student. He had highs of 88 in philosophy and anthropology, a low of 69 in astronomy, with a GPA somewhere in the mid-C range.”

Oh, and by the way Adam, captain fuckup also managed to swing a 73 in his POLITICAL SCIENCE class. No Adam, those are FACTS, you lying sack of bigoted shit. Gore was nowhere near those embarrassing lows. Even if you discount that, fucking watch CNN for five minutes and watch GW struggle to form sentences and wrestle with the three and four-syllable words provided by his speech writers for him on the teleprompter. You can’t argue with that, and you certainly can’t argue with Harvard, or the fact that GWB didn’t have any foreign intelligence experience, or the fact that GWB didn’t have any national office experience. Although the alternative wasn’t necessarily the “magic bullet” for all of America’s problems, it was certainly worlds better than our “choice,” and most likely would have been elected anyway if it wasn’t for Nader, but that’s besides the point. The only reason Bush enjoys such high approval ratings right now is because of the September 11th attacks, which any president with a pulse could use (as Bush has done) to gain the same extreme popularity by pump out speech after speech about patriotism and the evils of the Taliban and terrorism, etc.

Thirdly, the destination of the money projected to be derived from the local option sales tax was clearly delineated towards specific goals—it wasn’t a block grant (do you know what that is?) like you claimed, and “floating a bond” would be stupid because it would generate an astronomical city debt that the local option initiative was created to avoid. Also, your attempt to link the horrible state of our school facilities with educational results is ridiculous—do you honestly think that we should just let the schools go until they start doing poorly because classrooms are being flooded with rainwater, and kids are missing most of the week because of weather to do something? If we want to stay as good as we are educationally, we need to invest in it.

You know Adam, you didn’t have to make this personal like you did out of the first line of your post. You could have tried to refute my “arguments” (of which there were really none to speak of, because I was just posting more or less as a joke—euthanasia?) as a decent human being. Oh well, you got up on your soapbox, made a fool out of yourself, got back down, and forced me to make you my bitch. You lose, whore.