Dartmouth, Notre Dame, Stanford

Three great educational institutions gave football coaches the pink slips. Notre Dame's student athletes are to vote about NOT going to the Insight.com bowl game. That's interesting too.

Row office reform and Dan O on Bowyer

Our Chief Executive, Dan Onorato, was on the Jerry Bowyer show and spoke about his bill on row office reform. The bill is presently in committee and should surface to a vote soon. Until the vote on council, we're not sure where the people stand. This vote, by the way, only gets the question to change the row office onto the ballot.

Dan's is a 10-to-2 plan. We end up with two row offices. This is the next logical discussion. The second step in home rule is here. Home rule -- there is an interesting point that gets kicked around in the city. We don't have home rule when we have two oversight boards. So, we've swapped out row offices for oversight boards and Over Lords.

The so-called machine, so says Dan, is something that makes him chuckle. He said, "I don't know how much machine is left." We'll find out.

"A lot of those things are from a prior era. It really does not exist. Most of these jobs are civil service jobs. You can't bring in your friends. Merit hiring is in place."

Today's machine is around, but not in the employee ranks. However, the machine is in the funding, campaign ranks in terms of donations to campaigns. The machine is in place in terms of the media coverage too, I expect.