Day: April 5, 2011

Tales from the voting booth

A quick update…

First, I can almost guarantee that I won’t have the results from Salisbury’s election first tonight because I have a job to do. It pays better than this site, although if the advertisers from another somewhat disgraced site wished to invest in mine this enterprise may make me more coin than my job.

Anyway, I voted today around 3:00. There were two items I found worth mentioning.

First, I asked about turnout at my polling place (Wicomico Presbyterian) and I was the 375th voter. If this is relatively accurate then I think turnout isn’t going to be much greater than 15 to 17 percent, and that doesn’t bode (no pun intended) well for the challengers. It’s the faithful voters who showed up in the primary who are voting in this election, too – so the results will likely be similar. Had there been 500 voters at the precinct I believe the challengers had more of a chance. Let’s hope I’m wrong on that one for Muir Boda’s sake.

If it were up to people who read monoblogue and Two Sentz, though, Muir would be a shoo-in. Here’s the results of our joint poll:

  1. Muir Boda, 34 votes (38.2%)
  2. Laura Mitchell, 22 votes (24.7%)
  3. Terry Cohen, 14 votes (15.7%)
  4. Orville Dryden, 13 votes (14.6%)
  5. Tim Spies, 5 votes (5.6%)
  6. Bruce Ford, 1 vote (1.1%)

Of course, I think the influence of having an ad for Muir Boda on my site and Laura Mitchell on Two Sentz just might influence the poll. If nothing else, I suppose that proves blog advertising works (see first paragraph above.)

Finally, I had a nice complement from the young lady who’s running Laura Mitchell’s campaign, or at least I presume she does. She thanked me for my fair coverage of the race, and not jumping into the rumor mill about Laura’s living arrangement.

Now maybe there was something to the rumor, but since the protagonist seemed to backtrack from it I doubt it. And hers wasn’t all that important of an issue, just like who Jim Ireton sleeps with was but a sidebar to the real issues surrounding the mayoral race two years ago. It hasn’t affected his job performance, although I was pretty skeptical about that anyway.

So after tonight’s count we will probably have an idea of who will be representing District 2 for the next 4 1/2 years, since the next time these seats will be contested will be the fall of 2015. Unless it’s close enough to require an absentee count and we end up in a tie, I think the top three in the primary will prove to remain in those positions.

If so, beware – it’s open season on landlords and other small businessmen in Salisbury.

The market basket 2011

It’s the return of a monoblogue tradition, but with a slightly new twist.

I was inspired by a recent report regarding New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley and comments he made about the rate of inflation. Inflation, he said, is measured by a number of factors but doesn’t include food and energy costs. When an observer asked about this, Dudley reminded the questioner that the price of an iPad 2 is the same as the iPad 1 when it came out – “you have to look at the prices of all things.”

Retorted the questioner, “I can’t eat an iPad.” And it seems to me that a lot of food and energy prices have surged over the last two years. Fortunately, I had done my ‘market basket’ series from 2006 to 2009 so I had a handy reference guide to see just how prices have progressed. Instead of its original purpose, which was to track Walmart’s prices in the wake of the ill-fated ‘Fair Share’ Act Maryland passed in 2005, I used these comparisons as a general consumer guide to local grocery prices.

In the wake of Dudley’s remarks I decided to see just how rampant inflation was, since I got the same perception from my frequent grocery shopping trips. But instead of comparing all four local stores I opted to just compare Walmart year-over-year. Here‘s what I found.

Overall, I was surprised that inflation among all items was just over 4 percent, particularly with that 75% surge in gasoline costs. But a lot of the key elements bringing down the rate aren’t necessarily grocery staples – the surge in chicken prices more than counteracts the drop in beef prices. Bread may be a little cheaper but milk has gone up quite a bit. Among the few declining items are non-grocery items like detergent and soda pop, which not all shoppers need every week.

And it’s gotten quite a bit more expensive to get to the grocery store with that huge spike in gasoline prices. I didn’t begin tracking them until 2008 but we’re closing in on the $3.419 that my April, 2008 survey found, with prices usually not peaking until around Memorial Day. $4 a gallon isn’t outside the realm of possibility, particularly for those who drive trucks and need diesel fuel. They’re generally the people who deliver groceries to the stores.

So it’s not your imagination, when 12 of the 20 items sampled have gone up in price. That’s 60% of the items surveyed.

And, finally, if you live in the city of Salisbury and haven’t voted yet – what are you waiting for? There’s quality candidates who need your support (and lesser ones who need to be told to hit the bricks!)