Wednesday digest

- Cindy Sheehan, good friend of Howard Dean and John Kerry, has taken her act to Vienna. Here are some pictures, courtesy of Yahoo! News, which demonstrate that thanks to Cindy, 12-year old Austrian girls will never be part of the Republican base. (I'm sure Karl Rove is losing sleep over that one.)



- What's this?

- Sheila Copps talks taxes and says that without a high tax burden, we'd have a bad education system and dirtier water, among other things.

I have three questions:

Have you ever heard of any public servant, including teachers, getting canned for poor performance? Yes or no?

Keeping that in mind, were the Koebel brothers, public servants who were charged with ensuring the cleanliness of Walkerton's water, alcoholics who had been falsifying records back to the early 1980s, right under the nose of their political masters of all party stripes? Yes or no?

Finally, have you ever heard of anyone having to wait less than 6 months for a knee or hip replacement, yes or no?

The honest answers to the above question are no, yes, and no.

Even if you're on the big government side of the political divide, you cannot possibly argue that we get good value for the taxes we pay. And that's what should be unacceptable to all of us. It's time to start looking at how much better we can be than settling for mediocrity all the time.

- Finally, Andrew Coyne says hockey rules. I gotta give it up for baseball, but yes, hockey does rule.