STRICTLY AN OPINION | Before reading anything at all this morning, this is on our mind about last night’s wasted couple of hours. Last night was several hours of visceral torture trying to watch the livestreaming of Columbia’s Borough Council meeting and then the Democratic “anything-but-a-debate” fiasco.

Surely there are a bunch of folks (673 views at this point) around town with cricks in their necks from trying to pay attention to the council meeting. Trying to watch and hear that “cluster****” was numbing. Trying to negotiate the vertically displayed video at the borough’s facebook page  and hovering in closer to the speakers to hear the mumbling is an agonizing quest to find out what’s happening in this borough’s governance.

Citizens in this borough must demand that those in governance at meetings speak directly into the microphones and the microphones must be turned on and checked prior to the meeting. When citizens, especially those with hearing impairments, cannot participate in the meetings, it is a violation of the American With a Disability Act.

Citizens must demand that councillors reading from prepared scripts must provide copies of those scripts to the citizens or have the scripts displayed on the video display terminal in the meeting room. Further, the display terminals must be displayed in the front of the room so that all in attendance can see the screen. The current screen placement is totally inaccessible by many who attend meetings. There’s no reason that councillors have to see the screen; each of them have laptops, as does the mayor. Presentations using the wall screen can be accessed on the laptops.

No mea culpa’s — NOTHING | Notice, there’s no apology, no acknowledgement at the Borough Website or facebook page about the shabby video streaming and intermittently inaudible audio at last night’s council meeting. It’s another case of “Here’s your shit sandwich, citizens. Just STFU and eat it.”

The melted whipped cream topping for last night’s “s*** sundae” was the Democratic “anything-but-a-debate.” It was yet another debacle from which all Americans, and sadly, everyone in the world who watched, learned absolutely nothing from this group of candidates for the highest public service role in the land. But then, the bar’s been so significantly lowered, that it hardly matters.