signs

Taste of Cave Creek

Marc Peagler | President Cave Creek Merchants Chamber of Commerce
This year, the Taste of Cave Creek was unlike any other that has ever been and having been involved in every single one from the inception of the event, I know what I am talking about. We anticipated we would have about 1,500 people in attendance. There were in excess of 3,600. Hmmm … seems we were off just a bit. So now come the kudos.

Sue Kearns put together the most effective PR campaign ever for this event. A big thank you to Stagecoach Village for letting us use their facilities and to Alliance Beverage for donating the alcohol.

The Town of Cave Creek put so much support work into this event there is no way to thank everyone, but there are a few standouts: Councilwoman Kim Brennan who during the final weeks of organization took over critical communication functions and did a bang up job, the road crews who cleaned up what can only be described as a really big mess, and Adam Stein, without whose help there would have been no way we could have pulled this off.

The Taste of Cave Creek has been around for about 18 years and the restaurants have always stepped up for the community. This event was not the exception; it was the example. When, the day before the event, we started to get ticket estimates that greatly exceeded what we were preparing for, all of the participating restaurants stepped up to the plate and hit home runs. I thank you for that and encourage the members of the community to show their support by patronizing our local eateries.

The Taste of Cave Creek has always been a project of the Cave Creek Merchants Chamber of Commerce, which is comprised of business members primarily from the Town of Cave Creek. It is our goal to support our community by doing things to let people know we are here. The Information Center is open. The Taste was a success. Out monthly social program, Cave Creek After Dark, is off and running. Wild West Days will be here soon. We will be exploring a continual marketing effort directed at attracting people from the metro-Phoenix to the Cave Creek area for day trips.

Our chamber is now better than it ever has been. I encourage everyone to come and take a new look at our new chamber.

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Déjà Vu – 1929 all over again

Ralph G. Smith | Cave Creek
In the last few weeks we have seen the proof of the definition of “finance,” by Robert W. Samoff: “Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it disappears.” A lot of it has disappeared recently, and will continue to disappear from the pockets of the taxpayers. I am a simple person and certainly not an economist, but I do have a memory of “how things used to be” before the alchemists of Wall Street gained control of everything we do.

We used to deal with local people we knew, and for the most part, trusted. Before locally owned Valley Bank became Bank One and Bank One became Chase, if we had banking questions, we could go to the local bank and have them answered by a real live person who actually lived in the area and knew what we were talking about. Now we are lucky if we don’t have to dial an 800 number and talk to some one in Ohio, or Texas, or maybe India or Thailand. I think back to the “good old days” when old cantankerous Frank Brophy ran the Bank of Douglas, which eventually became Pioneer Bank and then I-don’t-know-what else. And when Jim Heron of Globe took great joy in looting his creation, Arizona Savings, but he and most of his buddies were here in Arizona where the State Banking Department could get at them, and did.

“Bigness” and “Growth” are, we are told, supposedly admirable goals, but the result has been a vast chain of paper transactions culminating in the boardrooms depicted in commercials on TV, with big picture windows overlooking New York skyscrapers and perhaps Central Park. And the immaculately tailored, self-proclaimed “experts,” with the faces of “concern,” saying they just want to “help us” make the right investment choices, while their CEOs, perhaps several floors up in the penthouses, smile. The little banks or mortgage brokers sell their sub-prime mortgages to larger banking “institutions,” who repackage them and sell them again to still larger institutions and eventually to Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, or maybe to foreign investors who are even more greedy than their American counterparts.

Hallelujah! Everyone makes money except the stockholders of the “irrationally exuberant” corporations, and ordinary people who were induced to buy homes they could not afford, and eventually the taxpayers, who will have to pay for all the exuberance. And now the sky around Wall Street is swarming with golden parachutes, weighed down to some extent by the bags of money the CEO chutists carry with them.

Of course, the latter day “little people,” and their sons and daughters, who have been brought up in the era of “I want it All, and I want it Now!” are also to blame, along with the credit card companies who tout “for everything else, there’s Mastercard.” It used to be people understood when you borrow money, it has to be repaid, and you had better get a job to enable you to keep that commitment. The lender then might have been the bank just a few blocks away, not an ethereal formless being hovering over Wall Street. In those long-forgotten days there were restrictions on lenders, too. If they charged over six percent interest, they could be criminally prosecuted for usury. Now, there are very few people who ever heard the word “usury.” Certainly the credit card companies never have.

It used to be that people asked “How can I get a job and save some money?” Now the question is “How can I up my credit score so that I can borrow more money (that I may not be able to pay back).” Sometimes I feel as though I am again six years old, as I was back in 1929.

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Winners of the ‘Rename the Restaurant’ contest

Marc Peagler | Cave Creek
Well first off let me say congratulations to the six winners of our Rename The Restaurant Contest. I decided to go with the name "Silver Spur Saloon & Eatery." That name has a lot of history behind it here at Frontier Town. As you may know it was the first restaurant here.
I had several options on how to handle the winners. I decided against a random drawing because it always seems somewhat unfair to have the winning name and yet not really be the winner. What I decided to do instead was the following:

Each of the four entrants with the name "The Silver Spur Saloon" will receive two $100 U.S. Savings Bonds, a gift certificate good for dinner for two, and coupons good for two t-shirts (as soon as we get them).

The person who entered the name "The Hitchin Post" will receive a $50 U.S. Savings Bond. We are planning to use this to re-name our wedding area.

The person who entered "Where The West Was Fed" will be receiving dinner for two. I like this for a tag line.

Please send me your mailing addresses so I can get everything out as soon as possible.
Thank you for entering and again, congratulations.

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Promises made, not kept

Charles Spitzer | Cave Creek
Janet Mohr is simply mistaken in her Public Comment ("Only in Cave Creek - $39 million is better than $89 million"). She fails to realize, or does realize and deliberately misstated, that of the 4,200 customers of the Cave Creek Water System, none of them would deliberately disconnect from the CCWS and drill a well. What I stated was: if the town had kept the promises made to citizens prior to the purchase of the CCWS, the cost of the water system would not be $89 million or $39 million, but $6-8 million, for a savings of over $30 million. Furthermore, the approved capital improvement plan contains an additional $90 million to be spent in the next five years. The question everyone should be asking is – WHERE will the money come from to fulfill those promises?

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‘Senator Stealth’

Mel Clingan | Carefree
In case your many readers would care to have more information about the presidential candidate named Barack Obama, they may be interested in reading an article in the magazine called “National Review,” which is available at our Desert Foothills Library.

On page 32 of their issue dated September 1, 2008, there is the article with the title “Senator Stealth.” The article describes Obama as “showing signs of being a sub-rosa radical himself.” The article says “his extremist roots run deep …”

It also says he was a “community organizer” in Chicago and was a board member of Chicago’s “Woods Fund,” where he quietly “funneled money to his radical allies …”
We are indebted to “National Review” for providing this VERY interesting information!

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The Great Sign Scandal

Herb Natker | Cave Creek
It's taken two My Views and a news story, to expose illegal sign usage, with it's dire consequences in Cave Creek. But how about the five General Plan Amendments (less one) that will impact the people who live in Cave Creek and the "Community Neighborhoods of Cave Creek?" Why is the editor of Sonoran News silent on these issues?

We all remember his stand on The Terry Property Up Zoning in his Sept 5, 2000 My View article, "Home Stretch," supporting proposition "100" which opposed up zoning of the property.

He asked Council to "Vote NO and keep integrity in Cave Creek. Not one acre of Desert Rural zoning should be sacrificed."

He reprinted it again in 2005, when the same low density residential property was in front of Council for conversion, from residential to commercial/multi-family. What will the Editor say about these General Plan Amendments which would convert residential land to commercial and destroy our neighbor communities?

Another question: when will the Editor let the submerged Scottsdale Republic reporter, Beth Duckett, out our "20 Million gallon" oops!, "2 Million gallon" Rockaway Hills storage tank? Someone please throw her a line and a towel! Thanks.

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McCain throwing away inherent advantages

Roy Miller | Phoenix
A month ago I predicted that McCain would win the election in a landslide (defined by me as anything over ten percent of the popular vote). The reasons are simple, McCain has a resume that makes Obama look like a political trainee and McCain also has a moderately conservative philosophy that makes Obama look like the leftist that he is. McCain can ’t blow his resume advantage because that is history but he seems to be blowing his philosophical advantage in his approach to the current crisis.

For McCain to genuflect to the ‘insufficient government regulation caused this crisis” arguments as he now seems to be doing is to give up the Republican Party’s historical (unfortunately, not recent history) reliance on free markets. There is no one with an ounce of brains or integrity who believes this crisis was caused by “greedy businessmen” or insufficient government regulation. The proposed firing of Chris Cox at SEC, the suspending of his campaign, the rushing back to Washington (as if our problems are solved there rather than created there as Ronald Reagan reminded us), and his off and on decision to skip the debates are superficial actions that belie the actions which should be taken to solve this crisis. I believe that McCain knows government is the problem and that it must be cut back.

Just like the Great Depression of the late 1920’s, this current crisis is purely the fault of government’s efforts to run the economy (and, more recently, most other aspects of our lives).

As lifelong Republican activist I am hoping McCain will come back home, home to the principles of Barry Goldwater, the man he succeeded in the Senate. (And, by the way, stop foolishly attacking Obama for superficial errors such as the lipstick on a pig comment.)

I have stopped predicting a ten percent victory but maybe he can still make it in a squeaker.

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The great debate … or was it?

John Traynor | Carefree
However you were leaning before the debate, I suspect your opinion may not have changed much. I am sincerely disappointed that these were the best two choices our country could offer.

But I'm not writing to provide commentary on the candidates or the debate itself. Rather, I'd like to point out something about the American broadcast media. No sooner did the debate end than cameras and microphones focused on the 'spin doctors' for each side. Comments were both predictable and a waste of air time. Except for a 'scientific' instant poll of 500 non-committed voters sponsored by CBS News. Katie Couric introduced the poll, conducted immediately after the debate. Who, where? We were not told. However, one question got my attention to focus upon this scientific poll. It went something like this: Who would be better to lead the economy? Answer: 41 percent for McCain, 68 percent for Obama. So 109 percent of the 500 non-committed voters were scientifically polled by idiots that can't add!
Obama may be correct after all - we gotta do somethin abut de damn educashon system in amerika.

P.S. Regardless who you favor, I felt it was bad form for Obama to call McCain, John while throughout the debate McCain referred to his opponent as Senator Obama, or simply Senator. It was also bad form for McCain to avoid looking at Obama while Obama was addressing him. I implied above that I'm not overwhelmed by our choices in the upcoming election but I do subscribe to a reasonable degree of respect; I even call Wayne [Fulcher] Mr. Mayor in public.

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Secretary of State Jan Brewer's statement on Governor Napolitano's Convention Speech

Jan Brewer | Secretary of State
It’s always good to see an Arizona Governor talking about our state on the national stage, but she conveniently left out the circumstances of our state’s billion dollar budget deficit.

The fact is that Barack Obama’s celebrity status is not going to help Arizonans, or any Americans, at all. We don’t need his higher taxes, more government spending, and his desire to separate us from the rest of the global economy.

We keep hearing from some Democrat leaders at the convention about their support of Obama, but a great many Democrats believe he’s just not ready to lead. Even Joe Biden agrees with that.

Not only has Obama voted against tax cuts and for tax increases nearly 100 times in his short career, he thinks we need more of the same.

He’s wrong. There is no better way to kill jobs and move our American businesses oversees that to raise taxes during an economic downturn.

It’s a terrible idea, and we’re better than that. John McCain will prove it.
Our Senator McCain has experience, good judgement, and strong character. He has done wonders representing our state in the United States Senate, and will do the same for the American people as President of The United States.

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Thanks for the bail out

Mike Ross | Tempe
I am a rich Wall Street mortgage broker and I would like to deeply thank all the American people for the help they are giving us.

Although the bail out will cost $700 billion, which is $2,333 for every man, woman, and child in the USA or about $5,000 for every American adult, since children don‚t pay taxes, I assure you the bail out is worth every penny of the $700 billion.

Without it I would have to cancel my family’s upcoming vacation in the Bahamas, put off remodeling my winter vacation home in Vail, Colorado, and make do with driving my old Mercedes instead of buying a new one like I do every year. Again, I wish to deeply thank the American people for their help.

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