{"id":2142,"date":"2011-04-22T12:59:18","date_gmt":"2011-04-22T16:59:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/public-criticism-leigh-touchton.html"},"modified":"2011-04-22T12:59:18","modified_gmt":"2011-04-22T16:59:18","slug":"public-criticism-leigh-touchton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/public-criticism-leigh-touchton.html","title":{"rendered":"Public criticism &mdash;Leigh Touchton"},"content":{"rendered":"<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File:Hear_speak_see_no_evil_Toshogu.jpg\">\n<img style=\"float:right;border:none;\"\nwidth=\"200\" height=\"77\"\nsrc=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/6\/60\/Hear_speak_see_no_evil_Toshogu.jpg\/800px-Hear_speak_see_no_evil_Toshogu.jpg\"><\/a>\nLeigh Touchton posted a comment with a report from\nlast night&#8217;s Valdosta City Council meeting:\n<blockquote>\nI won&#8217;t stay to the end in the future because if they are going to\nmake public attacks on citizens and then go into Executive session so\nthey don&#8217;t have to hear a rebuttal, then I don&#8217;t care to listen to their\nbombast. Yost apparently thinks\nyour public criticism of the activists not\nstaying (and also the Tea Party left right after one of their members read\nfrom the Bible about how laws and regulation are a sin&#8211;I had difficulty\nkeeping from laughing out loud&#8212;we&#8217;re in a recession because laws and\nregulation were thrown away and banks made a video called Banks Gone\nWild&#8230;but I digress)&#8230;apparently Yost thinks your criticism of people\nnot staying is something he can use to good effect to nullify the need\nto publicly address citizen complaints. Here&#8217;s his position, distilled:\n<blockquote>\n&#8220;You won&#8217;t stay to the end, I&#8217;m offended. You called our important work\nboring, I&#8217;m offended. (much redness of face, some veins popping out)\nYou come in here and talk to us like that then I&#8217;m not going to address\nyour complaints, I&#8217;m offended.&#8221;\n<\/blockquote>\nWell I&#8217;m offended that a grown man elected to represent Valdosta acts\nlike that.\n<p>\nLet me go back and educate the gentle readers out there who haven&#8217;t\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<!--more-->\n<blockquote>\nfollowed this saga from the beginning. WACE has been down there asking\nfor Mr. Yost and everyone else to get educated on the issue, to come\nto our public events (never saw Yost at any of them but maybe he came,\nI don&#8217;t know for sure), to respond to our issues publicly like a public\nofficial is supposed to do because we are a democracy not a dictatorship,\nand Yost occasionally does engage citizens from his dais, but when I&#8217;ve\nseen him do it, he&#8217;s snarly about it.\n<p>\nDeidra White reiterated that she was not going to give her position\npublicly from the dais, even though the segment called Council Comments\nis the appropriate time for that to occur. She did say she would meet\nwith citizens and deliver her position there. I can&#8217;t understand the\nbig deal, because if she does meet with citizens we&#8217;ll broadcast her\nposition publicly, all public meetings are recorded by our members. At\nleast she was the only one who said she would meet with us.\n<p>\nI think they all need to go, this is simply ridiculous. I delivered my\nofficial letter from our branch asking each member for a letter stating\ntheir position on selling gray water to the Wiregrass incinerator, and\nI&#8217;ll let you know if our branch has any better result in getting them\nto state their position.\n<\/blockquote>\nLooks to me like people staying to the end has resulted in several\ninteresting effects. More in a following post.\n<p>\njsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leigh Touchton posted a comment with a report from last night&#8217;s Valdosta City Council meeting: I won&#8217;t stay to the end in the future because if they are going to make public attacks on citizens and then go into Executive session so they don&#8217;t have to hear a rebuttal, then I don&#8217;t care to listen [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,120,40,15,16,2,2951,22,32,3,54,4596,178,700],"tags":[4691,344,4020,8863,290,1660,8726,8796,4123],"class_list":["post-2142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-biomass","category-community","category-education","category-environment","category-government","category-naacp","category-politics","category-pollution","category-transparency","category-valdosta-city-council","category-vcc-21-april-2011","category-vlcia","category-wace","tag-bible","tag-deidra-white","tag-leigh-touchton","tag-naacp","tag-robert-yost","tag-tea-party","tag-valdosta-city-council","tag-wace","tag-wiregrass-power-llc"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-yy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}