Charlotte City Council

Advising its new mayor on how to assert dominance:

Council members elected by a few people in a district begin to be major power brokers at the expense of the mayor. This results in fractured ward politics and policies that do not represent long-term visionary needs for the entire city.

To overcome these and other deterrents of this form of government, I recommend the following for the mayor of Sacramento: Use the bully pulpit through the media directly to the people to stop obstructions of progress by either city staff or council members.

Translation: If anybody gets out of line, grab the nearest tv news crew and trash that person's reputation.

Twitter can be fun. It can also be a huge time suck. Seriously, like anything else, to make it work you have to dedicate time to it. I don't use a blackberry. I have no need for one and don't plan on getting one. I don't plan on taking my phone out to the garden to text to Twitter, "Just pulled weeds for 2 hrs. Back sore." Who the hell cares, right?

My first tweet was April 10, 2008. I'm down to one or two tweets every few days. I guess it's just not my thing.

What has been fun about twitter is watching it catch on among others, seeing how excited they get with their new toy knowing that soon many of them will spend less time on it than I do. It's fun to watch rather serious adults twitterize their language. See, how easy that was?