(EVANSVILLE, IN) – It was a saloon before Prohibition, and then it was converted into a restaurant. Over the years it alternated between serving food and liquor, eventually becoming a pet grooming business and most recently an eyesore.

On Tuesday, Mayor Winnecke will use a sledgehammer to take the first swing at the old Paddock Tavern, as demolition crews begin to raze the dilapidated structure at 1510 N. First Ave.

The building was recently purchased by Bootz Manufacturing, which opened a distribution center at 1600 N. First Ave. in 2010. Bootz President and CEO Pete DeSocio said the company completed extensive landscaping around the distribution center and was recognized with the 2011 Community Improvement of the Year Award by Keep Evansville Beautiful.

DeSocio said the company views purchasing and tearing down the old tavern as a community improvement project and a way to enhance safety. He said the building blocks the line-of-sight for truck drivers making deliveries to the distribution center off First Avenue, causing drivers to miss the entrance and have to turn around.

Floyd Staub, Inc., has been contracted to raze the structure. The work is set to begin tomorrow, Nov. 13, at 8 a.m. Staub will be closing the inside southbound lane of First Avenue for one hour. According to Historic Preservation Officer Dennis Au, the structure was built sometime between 1905 and 1910. Before Prohibition, it was Emerson B. Baldsdon’s Saloon. During Prohibition it was converted into a restaurant. One of the eateries was owned by Abraham Schick in 1929.
After Prohibition, in 1939, William Kirsch ran a tavern at the location.

Au said during World War II, George Kirsch (1942) and Nellie Piper (1944) operated restaurants in the building. In 1983, it was listed as Art’s Post and Paddock Tavern. After that, the building was vacant for almost a decade. In 1997, Country Charm Pet Grooming opened at the location. The building was purchased by Bootz Manufacturing in 2012.

Excerpts:

“Barack Obama’s victory this week was hoped for, and celebrated, in Canada as a triumph of Canadian-style Americanism.”

“This was an historic election, but not in ways that Americans or the Canadian left will celebrate. Mitt Romney was never a strong candidate, and any serious incumbent would have sent him to the proverbial dust-bin of history”

“A shocking $3-billion was spent to keep a failed administration and mediocre congressional leaders (House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) in place, operating a system that is very corrupt and is almost completely dysfunctional. Almost nothing worthwhile was said during the campaign about anything substantial. There is nothing in any of it to celebrate. An incumbent president was re-elected to a second term with fewer electoral votes than he had the first time — the first time this has happened.”

“The administration couldn’t run on its record, and so resorted to a smear campaign against Romney with a fear-mongering leitmotif about “reproductive rights.” None of the leading figures seemed able, right down to the nauseating treacle on election night, to stop the clap-trap about “the greatest power in human history’s greatest days are ahead of it” long enough to notice what a basket case America has become.”

“Public health and education standards have collapsed (though not those in the private sector); the whole country is being terrorized by a fascistic prosecution service; and the number of food-stamp recipients and the number of people with criminal records are coursing neck and neck toward 50 million apiece, a shocking figure in each case. The wealthiest country in history is bankrupt, with 50 million citizens in poverty and the entire middle class on an economic knife-edge.”

“Historically, when America has needed leadership, its greatest leaders have come forward. Not this year.”

“Lest any reader fear otherwise, I am not partisan, nor, overall, to the right of Obama. But I support a more consistent definition of American security interests than has been shown by his feckless attitude toward almost everything — including Iran’s Green Revolution and nuclear program, the failed “reset” with Russia; Libya and Syria. But at least he has avoided the open-ended adventurism of his predecessor.”

“I favour low income taxes and less regulation than the administration. But, as I wrote here on Wednesday and especially after spending three years in American prisons, I am a strong leftist on protection of human rights and liberties, restraint of rabid prosecutors and a radical effort to address poverty. Yet Obama’s “sharing the wealth” approach won’t accomplish anything.”

“This president has converted the $10-trillion of national debt accumulated in 232 years of American history (from 1776 to 2008) into $16-trillion now, and has financed most of it by selling bonds to the Treasury’s 100% subsidiary, the Federal Reserve, in exchange for bogus cyber-notes. This violates George Washington’s injunction to defend an indissoluble Union militarily and with a strong currency.”

“It isn’t debt at all; it is just a money supply increase of incendiary inflationary consequences, with a delay-fuse provided by the proportions of the economic slow-down the official extravagance has failed to alleviate, in which the 25% annual gasoline price increase and double-digit food and milk price increases are disguised by collapsed housing prices and minimal interest rates, and the recessionary pricing of manufacturers. It is a giant shell game, but there is nothing under any of the shells.”

“this President has added $17,000 of new debt for every man, woman and child in the country, and given no hint of how he proposes to prevent the U.S. currency from becoming toilet paper. And there are five million fewer Americans working than four years ago. The greatest and wealthiest nation in history is sliding into a more profound bankruptcy than any serious country has had since Weimar Germany, and almost the whole country seems to be in a delusional fantasyland.”

“Nothing short of higher taxes on discretionary transactions to shrink the deficit, lower income taxes to promote growth and recovery, a serious spending review including entitlement reform, a bi-partisan assault on medical costs (more than twice what they are in other advanced countries such as Canada, while providing inferior care for a third of Americans, a state of affairs that will not be much altered by Obamacare); and a radical reconstruction of the education and justice systems, will restart the long-inexorable rise of America. There is no sign of any of this being considered or that it is even politically possible.”

“For the first time, a combination of non-white minorities and whites who are invested personally, either emotionally or more often for tangible reasons, in the redistributive side of the political civil war between advocates of growth and of direct transfers of resources from those who have earned them (or inherited from those who did) to those who haven’t (regardless of mitigating circumstances), has eked out a clear victory. If American politics continues along these lines, the social strains, piled onto the funeral pyre of the national accounts, will put the fate of what has long been the world’s greatest nation in acute doubt.”

“the geopolitical vacuum incarnated by Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and the Republicans who sat the race out, will create a powerful and dangerous vortex. These will be perilous times.”

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/11/10/conrad-black-the-obama-disaster-part-ii/

The City of Denver has six dog parks. The sizes range from an acre up to three acres. Minimally dog parks have a perimeter fence, some benches to sit on, a place to dispose of dog wastes, and a free run area.

Excluding the cost of the land private groups have installed dog parks at existing parks for a cost of between $25,000 and $100,000 per park. Dog owners in Denver and other locations have shown a willingness to pay a fee of about $50 per year for he use of dog parks. Most users of dog parks walk their dogs to the parks as opposed to driving so distance from dog owners residences are to be considered in choosing a location. Finally dog parks have restriction on proximity to play areas for protection of children from aggressive dogs.

Enjoy seeing what a real plan looks like. If realistic thinking prevails Evansville may just be able to put in some dog parks at appropriate locations for a reasonable ($25,000 per park) cost and generate fees from dog owners to cover the expense of maintenance.

Link to Denver Master Dog Park Plan
http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/626/documents/Off_Leash_Dog_Park_masterPlan_web_.pdf

The CCO has been curious about the nearly 100 Million eligible voters who did not vote since that fact was disclosed. After all it seems as though 30% of eligible voters re-elected the President while 29% voted for Mitt Romney and another 0.7% went for Libertarian Gary Johnson. That means that just over 40% of eligible voters for some reason voted “none of the above”. Here are some excerpts and a link from a very telling article about who stayed home and why. Our warning is that this is not kind to either political party but is particularly harsh on Republicans.

Excerpts:

“But the story is not about who voted; it is about who didn’t vote. In truth, millions of Americans have decided that Republicans are not a viable alternative because they are already too much like Democrats. They are Washington. With no hope that a Romney administration or more Republicans in Congress would change this sad state of affairs, these voters shrugged their shoulders and became non-voters.”

“The country yawned. About 11 million fewer Americans voted for the two major-party candidates in 2012 — 119 million, down from 130 million in 2008. In fact, even though our population has steadily increased in the last eight years (adding 16 million to the 2004 estimate of 293 million Americans), about 2 million fewer Americans pulled the lever for Obama and Romney than for George W. Bush and John Kerry.”

“Obama lost an incredible 9 million voters from his 2008 haul. If told on Monday that fully 13 percent of the president’s support would vanish, the GOP establishment would have stocked up on champagne and confetti.”

“if there is any silver lining for conservatives here, it’s that Obama was hurt more by the decrease in his level of support from this demographic — down six points from the 66 percent he claimed in 2008 — than by the marginal drop in total youth participation. It seems to be dawning on at least some young adults that Obamaville is a bleak place to build a future.”

“The brute fact is: There are many people in the country who believe it makes no difference which party wins these elections. Obama Democrats are the hard Left, but Washington’s Republican establishment is progressive, not conservative. This has solidified statism as the bipartisan mainstream. Republicans may want to run Leviathan — many are actually perfectly happy in the minority — but they have no real interest in dismantling Leviathan. They are simply not about transferring power out of Washington, not in a material way.”

“Yes, Democrats are reckless in refusing to acknowledge the suicidal costs of their cradle-to-grave nanny state, but the Republican campaign called for enlarging a military our current spending on which dwarfs the combined defense budgets of the next several highest-spending nations. When was the last time you heard a Republican explain what departments and entitlements he’d slash to pay for that?”

“Our bipartisan ruling class is obtuse when it comes to the cliff we’re falling off — and I don’t mean January’s so-called “Taxmageddon,” which is a day at the beach compared to what’s coming.”

“What happens, moreover, when we have a truly egregious Washington scandal, like the terrorist murder of Americans in Benghazi? What do Republicans do? The party’s nominee decides the issue is not worth engaging on — cutting the legs out from under Americans who see Benghazi as a debacle worse than Watergate, as the logical end of the Beltway’s pro-Islamist delirium.”

“Republicans talk about limited central government, but they do not believe in it — or, if they do, they lack confidence that they can explain its benefits compellingly. They’ve bought the Democrats’ core conceit that the modern world is just too complicated for ordinary people to make their way without bureaucratic instruction. They look at a money-hemorrhaging disaster like Medicare, whose unsustainability is precisely caused by the intrusion of government, and they say, “Let’s preserve it — in fact, let’s make its preservation the centerpiece of our campaign.”

“Republicans lack the courage to argue from conviction that health care would work better without federal mandates and control — that safety nets are best designed by the states, the people, and local conditions, not Washington diktat. In their paralysis, we are left with a system that will soon implode, a system that will not provide care for the people being coerced to pay in.”

“Truth be told, most of today’s GOP does not believe Washington makes things worse. Republicans think the federal government — by confiscating, borrowing, and printing money — is the answer to every problem, rather than the source of most. That is why those running the party today, when they ran Washington during the Bush years, orchestrated an expansion of government size, scope, and spending that would still boggle the mind had Obama not come along.”

“That is not materially different from what the Democrats believe. It’s certainly not an alternative. For Americans who think elections can make a real difference, Tuesday pitted proud progressives against reticent progressives; slightly more preferred the true-believers. For Americans who don’t see much daylight between the two parties — one led by the president who keeps spending money we don’t have and the other by congressional Republicans who keep writing the checks and extending the credit line — voting wasn’t worth the effort.

Those millions of Americans need a new choice. We all do.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/333135/voters-who-stayed-home-andrew-c-mccarthy?pg=1