For blaxploitation movie buffs who remember the famous line in the Superfly movie, "don't get high on your own supply". Perry got carried away with trying to create a political legacy for himself so that when the next version of the History of The Bahamas is written, people would speak of him and Bahamas Mar and NHI and Swift Justice in the same breath as when they talk of Sir Lynden Pindling and National Insurance, and Hubert Ingraham and freedom of the airwaves, expansion of the roads and improvement in the water supply, those sorts of things. Unfortunately, few if any of the things that he was so passionate about are likely to be attributed to him and I suspect that his legacy will be mentioned in muted tones due to an inability to find any. His leadership was plagued by indecision, inaction and corruption. Worse still to lose his seat in such an ignominious manner might wind up becoming the high point of his legacy. At least Pindling and Ingraham both got re-elected before deciding to move off the political scene for good. Not so with Christie; 40 years of consecutive representation brought to a screeching halt by being voted out with no goodbye, no official send-off, nothing. Was it deserved? Only time will tell.

I was a child when the PLP first came into existence. It took them 14 years to go from opposition to governing party. I was a young man when the Free PLP first started in 1970 and merged with the UBP to become the FNM, went through upheavals before becoming the FNDM for a short and then eventually reverting to the FNM. It took 20-plus years for the FNM to become the government, in the meantime gobbling up and spitting out a lot of men and women and burning up a lot of time, money, sweat and tears. Do the people at the forefront of the DNA have 14 to 20 years to give before their efforts might bear any fruit? If the early history of the PLP and FNM are anything to go by, the DNA will have to demonstrate doggedness, longevity, financial stability, a national presence through constituency branches with elected officers, regular conventions before they are likely to gain true widespread national acceptance as an alternative to either of the more established political parties.

LBT is a classic case of not being able to see the wood for the trees. She had a gift handed to her in 2012 when Hubert Ingraham resigned as FNM leader, elevating Dr Minnis to FNM leader and LBT to deputy leader. Had she been content to stay in that position today she would be Deputy Prime Minister. As it is now, she's like baseball's Roger Maris was for a long time after breaking Babe Ruth's major league home run record - an asterisk on the political landscape of what could have been but never was. When I review the whole political mutiny episode, I am left asking myself what was the purpose, what was the end game, what was it all designed to accomplish? Clearly LBT and her comrades were not expert at reading the political tea leaves. Who would have thought that while the FNM is now the government for the next 5 years, neither she nor any of the other mutineers is in the government or is even a member of Parliament? Without a strong party base, she didn't stand a chance of re-election.

Congratulations for Dr Minnis for staying the course despite the slings and arrows, the bad mouthing, the smears that have been thrown at you by people within your party who portrayed themselves as your friends and your foes in the PLP. You can take comfort from the fact that despite all of this crap that you have had to endure that firstly the people within your party on more than one occasion and now an overwhelming majority of the voters in the Bahamas have demonstrated their faith and belief in you that you are the best person to lead them and this country at this time. Yes, this might be a long distance race run in tranches of 5 years at a time but you have won the first leg of the race of wanting to govern and now start the second leg of actually having to govern. The people of the Bahamas are like a weakening giant and will hold you to your word that you are a servant of the people and that this is the people's time. I wish you the best as you begin this emotional and political roller coaster ride.

Sears, Galanis and Miller come out stabbing Caesar (Christie) in the back while he is down. If Sears was in charge, the result would not be any different. I don't know why Sears sees himself as some sort of knight in shining armour. His hands are just as dirty as the rest of his colleagues: COB, gambling referendum, Caribbean music festival, etc. His credibility is just as shot as Christie's and the other PLPs. Good time now for the PLP to remake itself from the inside out and find honourable men and women who believe in accountability, honesty, public service, truthfulness, humility.

Only in this country can people get away with operating illegally for umpteen thousand years, not be prosecuted or go to jail, make money hand over fist and then be rewarded with licenses to make even more money. None of them who operated illegally for all these many years should be eligible for a license or allowed to operate a webshop. This guy, Brown, is trying to jump on the bandwagon and get some of the gravy while he can. The government's plan for webshop licensing will only cerate a monopoly or cartel out of the illegals. How can that make any sense? We don't need any more of these philanthropic millionaires because eventually, through their wealth, they will have more political clout in this country than anyone else. If the government is so hellbent on legalizing and legitimizing the numbers business then I say tax the hell out of them as there is nothing socially beneficial about what they are doing.

The title the newspaper gave Ms Johnson's letter was a misnomer; it should have been titled "Misuse of Power of URCA". The point of her letter was that the fine money was not URCA's money to donate to NEMA but fine money that should have gone to BTC's customers as compensation resulting from its 2014 island-wide network outage. If the fine money was surplus monies after end of year external audit, URCA could have asked the government to pay it over to NEMA for hurricane relief rather than into the Treasury/Consolidated Fund. But the fine money was neither surplus monies or even URCA's own money but compensation payable to BTC's customers. Ms Johnson asked under what authority did URCA make this decision and URCA's chairman in his letter fails to answer that question. Ms Johnson's plea was against the misuse of power by URCA as the regulator of an important sector, whether deliberately or in ignorance, a plea which URCA's chairman would do well to keep uppermost in his mind.

This is what I call "rubbish statistics". What is she saying? What are we to make of this? That perhaps as many as 56 persons charged with murder made 183 bail applications for 2015 and of those: 8 applicants were granted bail; 30 applications were denied; 9 who were on bail got variations of their conditions; 1 applicant for a variation of bail was denied; 1 applicant had their bail revoked; and 7 applications were dismissed (i.e., denied)?

What she does not say is what happened to the other 127 applications?

What she should be telling us is that so far for the year "X" number of PEOPLE have made 183 bail applications; how many of them made multiple applications that were either approved or denied/dismissed, withdrawn, not proceeded with, etc. Separately, she could tell us about the numbers of persons who applied for and got/were denied variations of their bail. applying for bail is way different from applying to vary bail or the prosecution applying to have it revoked as the first is in jail trying to get out while the second is not in jail but doesn't like or is finding it difficult to comply with the bail conditions. It's wonderful that they are now keeping statistics but the statistics have to provide the public with meaningful information which this story does not do. It amounts to an attempt to provide statistics simply for the sake of appearing to provide information without doing any structured analysis of that information.

@Jlcandu - Sorry, I disagree with you. The way that the legal system works is that a crime is technically only a crime if there is a formal complaint made to the police. The police only investigate complaints made to them. In certain cases, a law might stipulate that it is a crime not to report a particular matter to the police. However part of the disparity between the PMH stats and the police stats might arise because the victim first seeks medical treatment but fails or refuses to make a formal complaint to the police instead of the other way around of complaining to the police first and then being taken to the hospital for medical treatment. I've known of situations where a person's premises was broken into but they did not report it to the police or the police never came. Yes, that person was the victim of a crime but not a reported crime, which is what the argument between the COP and Dr. Sands is really all about.

Let me give Mr. Christie and his newly formed committee some free and simple advice - tax the living daylights out of these web shop jokers. Seeing as these guys claim that they are already licensed under the Business Licence Act and that makes them licensed, legitimate businesses, then if the Government is not prepared to bring them within the terms of the Gaming Act then all they need to do in the short term is to amend the Business Licence Act, create a special category of "web shop" or whatever name they use to describe their "business" and tax them at 85% or 950% of their turnover as defined in the Act. Let's face it, these webs shop guys are not in "business" for any altruistic reasons, they are in "business" because there is easy money to be made from the "service" that they supposedly provide. If Bahamians want to gamble, let them. Just make sure that the Government gets the lions share of this easy money in the form of taxes. Don't leave the potential tax money sitting out there whereby these guys become multimillionaires for doing nothing; do the right thing and turn this situation to good use for the benefit of all of us. Some of the tax money can even be allocated specifically for sport development, arts and culture, education and antiquities.