Raise the Hammer

Candidacy announcement forthcoming?

Now I can't link to that ridiculous pro-hovercraft article anymore : (

Hovercraft Services For Hamilton?
By Larry Di Ianni(posted April 9, 2008)

http://bit.ly/drZz6C

I love that article for two reasons:

1) "This community would certainly be firing on all cylinders, to use an anachronistic car-based analogy". That's rich coming from the guy who brags about the highway he jammed down our throats.

2) Maybe he's not so crazy, now that his parkway is flooding maybe a hovercraft isn't such an awful idea.

DiIanni's clearly ready to announce his candidacy. His pro-west-harbour voice could be useful right about now, but he'll probably selfishly wait until a time when it's too late to do anything so Fred takes the heat.

^^^Woo-Hoo!!! Can still link to it... Thanks Cache Money!

That "article" is so ignorant it is just too funny.

We Canadians do love buying British POS though.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.chrisecklund.com/diianni_column.html

;)

Great link HamiltonSeen First article that pops up is about the Stadium. :)

Thanks for pointing this article out...this guy makes sense. Look at the cooperation he was advocating in 2007. Maybe the current mayor should have read it before going off on a rant against the tiger cats.

So council knew Ivor Wynne was falling apart in 2000... and did what, exactly? Invest in triple rinks? I would be curious to know what steps they undertook to partner with then-owners David Macdonald and George Grant with regard to site selection, private sector fundraising, etc. Or failing that, current owner Bob Young, who took the reins of the franchise the same year LD was elected mayor. I think the city pursued the Commonwealth Games a couple of times in that period. Surely they must have had consensus from the Cats on the location before recklessly including it in a bid.

Indeed the city did go after the commonwealth games twice, but were never awarded the games so never had to seek anyone's money to build anything.

Larry DiIanni has not posted anything on Chris Ecklund's site since November 2009. Removing the links could be an indication of nothing more than housecleaning for the website.

But one would have to be pretty naive to think that DiIanni is not preparing for a return to municipal politics...

You might need to change your name there, 'realitycheck'. Larry published as recently as May 2010.

@TBYW

I guess what I was getting at is that the city has a history of magical thinking about stadiums. I'm sure they knew that IWS was falling apart before 2000, it's just that the conformation came in 2000, by LD's reckoning. So let's say four mayors (Morrow, Wade, DiIanni and Eisenberger) presided over the decline of the stadium. And if Toronto didn't get the Pan Am games, there would be no contingency plan on how to replace it. I would argue that the leadership failure on the Cats portfolio extends back for at least a decade. The attention was on the city's other favourite mediocre spectator sport, municipal politics. That the team's habitual flirtation with financial ruin probably made it hard to see them as a long-erm fixture of the city.

Best of luck to both mayors and their troll armies. And God help this city.

Pretty scary to be "on side" with Larry!

Funny how Larry's friend Chris Ecklund thought it would be good for Larry's campaign to remove everything Larry's written for the past few years. One would think his thoughts on sundry issues would be an asset to his campaign!!

Get Larry's column while it's still available:

http://www.google.com/search?q=larry+site:chrisecklund.com&num=100&hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&prmd=li&filter=0

Why complain about the demise of Ivor Wynn? It's been a complete success. We're about to build a whole NEW stadium. And when that stadium sits and rots, as it eventually will, we can build EVEN MORE STADIUMS!!!

Just like the Hovercraft lunacy, the point here is development, not what is developed, who it's developed for, or even why it was supposed to be needed in the first place. Like some Orwellian dystopia, we instantly forget about the tens of millions we argued over, as the new projects fail to live up to their claims.

As for Larry, he's old news. His failure against Eisenberger was proof that despite all the Official Political Opinion in this city, the people of Hamilton actually weren't that thrilled with him. Eisenberger tries lots of things that don't work. It's a dialogue, and as much as I'd like to see a pedestrian Gore Park, I'm not sure we're ready for it. With Larry, everything was a battle. The city was divided, and cooperation was nearly impossible between progressive elements and city establishment. If somebody's going to replace ole' Fred, let's pick someone who doesn't have this kind of poisoned legacy.

Larry, a relatively small player at the time, was put there to put a steamroller through the Valley. It was something nobody else could do. And whoever was going to do it would never be forgiven by the people of this city, especially as the inevitable toll added up (or washed away). The Liberal Party's courtship of him has to be seen in the light of the horrific war over the riding which had just taken place between Sheila Copps and Tony Valeri, as well as some pretty ugly national scandals. They needed someone with name recognition for something other than "Liberal Scandal". And given his ultimate disgrace via the Municipal Elections Act, even that's debatable.

Hamiltonians are getting very very sick of the elite club which feels it owns our city. Fred has his faults, but he's got an underdog appeal which everybody has already underestimated once, and learned their lesson. I don't doubt there's a better Mayor out there, but Larry ain't it.

I am glad to see somebody reads my posts at SSP. I wrote about this a couple of days ago when I noticed DiIanni's blog was gone.

I also metioned that if DiIanni is going to run the blog might be considered a campaign contribution since it is provided free of charge. The removal of the blog has nothing to do with what the blog contains and everything to do with campaign financing laws.

I have no doubt he is going to run. The removal of the blog is just one of those indicators. He was also on the Bill Kelly show last week and was quite critical of the current Mayors leadership abilities. I think that was the unofficial kickoff of his campaign.

I like hovercrafts! haha! We can use those antique submarines as support vessels ;)

^ LOL, an up vote for that one frank!

re waiting on Larry Di Ianni now, and WIKIPEDIA
So waiting for his mayorness explains why Di ianni is painting a new Larry in Wikipedia.
During the winter and early spring of this year 2010, the sections below were part of the Larry Di Ianni Wikipedia 'bio'. When someone checked very recently, the whole thing had been 'cleaned up' and these sections BELOW were removed--like all wiki you can see them in their files of site history. The good thing is lots of Hamilton students at high school and college saw the sections below along with the Spec and other things when they studied local history, a more real version I guess, before friends of Larry were asked to make changes. Now there's something about his 2003 donations violations being like a speeding ticket--a Wiki comment several people have noticed. There was also very briefly in the Wikipedia notes a comment that probably referred to Larry's strange rantings in the Ecklund columns.

*So read these previous sections:

--Di Ianni argued, falsely, that his 2003 mayoral campaign had been run by "amateurs" when in fact it was run by experienced paid professionals. The money-raising had gone very badly by the Nov. 2003 election date. By the Nov. 2003 city election date, the Di Ianni campaign had raised less than half of what it eventually spent in total. The Hamilton Spectator had reported this in early 2005!
In that Fall 2003 campaign, above and beyond donations received, Di Ianni borrowed a small fortune for publicity to overwhelm his main opponent, who'd raised nearly as much real money from lots of individual donations; more than donated to Di Ianni. Of what DiIanni had actually collected from donations before the 2003 election, which constituted less than half of what he spent in total on the campaign, at least 25% of that collected amount was, by judges, found to be illegal donations. The local Hamilton paper, the Spectator, covered that part of this story very badly, mainly ignoring what amounts had been raised from donors before the election in favour of reminding readers what Di Ianni spent in total, except nobody claimed he overspent over legal limits for spending. The problems of illegality involved of course the donations received and accepted by the election date; so ruled the court, which also required Di Ianni to write an essay.

- - On July 10, 2006 Di Ianni was charged under the Provincial Offences Act of Ontario for violating the Municipal Elections Act of Ontario.[4] On August 24, 2006, he became the first Ontario Mayor to be convicted of violating the Act pleading guilty to six charges related to accepting inappropriate campaign donations. He'd been charged with 41 offences but plea-bargained to six guilty counts.

- - In the 2008 federal election, Di Ianni was the Liberal candidate in the federal riding of Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, however he lost the race to NDP Incumbent Wayne Marston by a margin of 6,464 votes. Di Ianni's results were far worse than the Liberal party on average did in the province of Ontario in that federal election, looking at his drop in votes and in percentage from the previous federal election [in that riding].

So why are you so scared of him?