HOMETOWN HOLIDAYS

What do Robert Dyer, a giant walking cookie, and former Gov. Bob Ehrlich have in common?

(I'll bet you thought this was a trick question).

All 3 of us were working the crowds at Rockville's Hometown Holidays celebration this past weekend.

If you were lucky enough to be in Ocean City, then you missed a giant cookie walking around Rockville Town Center. You missed Bob Ehrlich (I actually missed Gov. Ehrlich myself on Saturday, because I was there from 5-8pm). You missed the Taste of Rockville. You missed Buffalo Wild Wings and Gordon Biersch.

And, you missed me doing my James Carville-on-the-Montgomery-County-Council-Budget-Crisis impersonation!

"They could have sent the Woods Hole people! They could have sent the Scripps people!"

By the way, although the Washington Post took the council mightily to task in yesterday's editorial, I found their concluding recommendations troubling. The Post declined to "finish" the editorial: based on all of the evidence laid out in the earlier paragraphs, the editorial should have ended by calling for the ousting of every member of this failed County Council.

Instead of that - or even substantive suggestions for fundamentally restructuring government, or cutting a bloated, $4 billion budget - the Post said "candidates" should forgo union donations, "refuse to answer any" questionnaire question "that would commit them to undefined future spending" (News Flash: the MCEA is the only county union to send a questionnaire so far, and none of the questions asked me to "commit" to "undefined future spending," so I'm not sure what the Post is talking about), and said the county "should beef up its rainy-day reserve funds."

By themselves, these steps would do nothing to solve our structural deficit!

"They've got to get down here and take control of this, put somebody in charge of this thing, and get this thing moving!"

The council's budget in no way addressed the structural deficit; it merely raised taxes and fees astronomically, and slashed all the wrong items, balancing the budget squarely upon the backs of working families, the poor, seniors, children and the disabled.

"We need to launch a criminal investigation..."

Then, in January, the council will raise taxes like you've never paid before. Again, that does not solve the structural deficit, and will put the county in danger of bankruptcy. Not to mention the loss of our AAA bond rating. So why has the council refused to take action?

"There's a thousand things that they could do, they just need to get down here and start doing something!"

The council has new talking points, but no voter I talked to in Rockville this weekend was buying them. Those who know about the county council's Energy Supertax are furious; those who didn't know were about to explode when I told them about it. Imagine living paycheck to paycheck during a recession, and then your county council drops a financial atomic bomb like this on your family's finances - just because they believe it will get them reelected! (Heckuva strategy).

It's outrageous!

It sounds like November 2 is going to be a day of reckoning for this out-of-touch council. Don't panic; help is on the way! With one press of the voting machine touchscreen, you bring Change Beyond Belief to Rockville and Montgomery County, by voting for Robert Dyer.