Tesla – intended originally to be a “disruptive” force in the automotive industry – is getting disrupted…
…by – what else? – the State of California.
The Party Finds You
5
Category Archives: Public Employees
It’s Almost Anticlimactic…
…reading stories of anti-gun politicians and their staffers owning the guns they desperately want to deny the little guy.
Our Slimy Overlords
Mark my words: Any police official who refers to citizens as “sheep” (and, perforce, to police as “Sheepdogs” or “Lions”) needs to be escorted from public life, sans badge, gun, and power, with extreme prejudice.
Like Broward County sheriff Scott Israel – whose office didn’t have time to investigate nearly forty contacts with Nikolas Cruz, but has had time to act like…
…well, a Democrat pol in office:
Israel had been a Republican but ran for office as a Democrat. He was first elected sheriff in 2012, then re-elected in 2016. According to the Sun Sentinel:
The outreach workers, who mainly attend community events, are in addition to political activists and others Israel hired into community affairs roles, writing and designing printed pieces about the agency, and sharing it on social media. The employee log shows six hired into community affairs roles, their salaries totaling $388,729.
Israel’s opponents say he’s built a publicly funded political machine, paying back supporters with jobs and using them to keep him in office. They say the money could be better spent, particularly after the sheriff complained about not having enough funding to secure the county courthouse, where a murder suspect recently escaped.
Sound like the priorities in a city rhyming with “Every schmiberal city in the schmunited shmates” to anyone but me?
Oh, yeah – and this next bit?
Asked about the allegations, Israel responded, “What have I done differently than Don Shula or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Ghandi?”
He also said, “Lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep.” That’s a paraphrase of a quote from the Game of Thrones character Tywin Lannister, a villainous public administrator known for promoting his family’s interests ahead of the government’s or the people’s.
Sheep.
That’s what he thinks of citizens. Not unlike way too many cops.
It’s time for some changes in Broward County.
On The One Hand…
…the bureaucracy – any bureaucracy – runs by rules of its own. Those rules usually have more to do with sustaining bureaucracy itself than to solving whatever problem or administering whatever service that bureaucracy is supposed to be doing.
On the other? Read past the bureaucratese in this report and it appears that the Minneapolis Police Department has been shaving a lot of corners on psychological testing of its new recruits.
Does this have anything to do with, among other things, the Damond shooting? Bureaucratic checkbox-checkers running amok?
Maybe a little bit of both?
Ripped From The Fictional Headlines
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Scene: a cluttered office, a fat, balding man chewing a cigar, reading a script and scowling at it. A young man steps into the doorway and raps on the door, three times, quickly.
Writer: Boss, I’ve got a great idea for a new show. It’s a political thriller, got action, intrigue, it’s great.
Boss: Yeah? Siddown and lay it out for me.
Boss tosses the script he was reading onto his desk and leans back in his chair, studying the young man. Young man sits down, butt on the edge of the seat, and leans forward, speaking eagerly
Writer: okay, there’s the guy, see? And he works for the FBI. He’s a true patriot, he hates the way the country is going and he wants to help a good candidate get elected. He makes a donation like everybody in the office, but he wants to do more. All the sudden, he finds himself assigned to investigate his favorite candidate for breaking the law. But he doesn’t want to do it, see? But he has to, see? So there’s dramatic tension.
Boss: yeah, but the law is the law. What’s he gonna do?
Writer: that’s the cool part. He interviews the candidate but he “forgets” to put her under oath. So none of her answers can be used against her, right? And there’s a suspicious death tied to the charges but he knows this candidate has a long trail of suspicious deaths and shady dealings so he’s afraid she might be involved with this one, too. So he doesn’t want to investigate that, see? But he’s torn about it, see, because maybe she really is as crooked as the rest of them. But maybe she’s not, and besides, her opponent is a real jerk. So he calls the death a “robbery gone bad” and when his boss is going to make a press announcement saying the candidate broke the law, our guy changes it to say she did NOT break the law.
Boss: wait, why wouldn’t the boss notice the change?
Writer: the boss isn’t a cop, he’s a political hack, a time-serving moron. So he goes along with the charade and the candidate gets away with the crime and stays in the election.
Boss: okay, weak, but we can work with it.
Writer: wait, it gets better! His candidate loses the election.
Boss: what the hell? How’s that help? The show’s over.
Writer: no, no, it’s just getting started. The candidate was supposed to win, see? All the polls said so. All the experts said so. She was so far ahead, she didn’t even campaign the last week, the election was in the bag. She booked a hall and ordered fireworks and had her victory speech written and when she lost, it was stunning. The talking heads on tv were stunned. The losing candidate was drunk two days, couldn’t give a concession speech. Total disaster. And meanwhile, the smug jerk who won the election is all over Twitter rubbing it in, offering her five cents on the dollar for the fireworks she doesn’t need anymore.
Boss: yeah, so? Sounds like a depressing show. Nobody wants to watch that.
Writer: Yeah, yeah, but our guy, remember him? He’s in the FBI. They see all kinds of wacko stuff, all kinds of nuts and goofballs with conspiracy theories. So he’s devastated that his gal lost and the jerk won and he’s sitting at his desk moping when he glances at this file on his desk. Some kook claims the jerk was in cahoots with the Russians to help him steal the election and he stayed in a Russian hotel where a team of hookers gave him a golden shower right on the hotel bed.
Boss: whoa, whoa, we can’t put that stuff on television. Not in prime time.
Writer: okay, so maybe we don’t show it on screen
Boss: but maybe a special episode on cable? Pay per view? Hmmmm.
Writer: yeah, yeah! Like that. And anyway, so our guy, he sees this folder and he knows it’s bullshit but he thinks “If only the public knew what a jerk that guy is.” Just then his boss walks by and says “I’m headed to brief the President-Elect, anything new I should know?” And all the sudden, on impulse, our guy hands his boss the folder and says “You might want to warn him this stuff is going around, so he doesn’t get blind-sided.” The boss, being a dope, doesn’t realize it’s a set-up, he thinks our guy is being all noble and professional, so the boss goes right along. But one of the long-term staff people in the President’s briefing sees the dossier is political dynamite and leaks it to his buddies in the press. Ka-boom, huge political outrage, our guy’s losing candidate gets cheered up, the president-elect looks like an idiot, our guy is grinning like crazy.
Boss: and then?
Writer: and then things get interesting. The losing candidate’s political party seizes on the Russian Collusion angle and demands an investigation. The new Attorney General is a another political appointee, not used to how the game is played in the bureaucracy, so he recuses himself.
Boss: excuses himself?
Writer: no, recuses. He steps aside and lets the long-term staffers handle it. And they all hate the new President. So the staffers convince the new President the only way to clear his name is to appoint a special investigator. And they recommend their old boss, who they assure him is a straight shooter, which he is – straight in your back. But the new President doesn’t know that, see, so the new President goes along with it.
Boss: inside baseball. boring.
Writer: no, wait! The special investigator hates the new President, too. And he hires a team of assistants to help him, all of them hate the new President. And here’s the best part – he decides that for his top assistant on the team, he needs the guy who knows the most about the collusion. He needs the guy who discovered the folder. He needs OUR GUY! Our guy is now the top assistant on the team investigating the new President.
Boss: okay, more interesting. Keep going
Writer: so our guy is only part of the investigation, he can’t go after the President directly. But he remembers that during the campaign, his team used a little “creative phrasing” to convince a judge to let them wiretap some people in the jerk’s campaign. And one of those people is now the new President’s aide. Our guy drops by the aide’s office to chat and just happens to ask some questions about one of the wiretapped conversations. He doesn’t tell the aide he’s under investigation, the aide doesn’t have a lawyer present, the conversation isn’t recorded, but our guy goes back to the office and dummies up some notes in the file as to what our guy claims the aide said.
Boss: so?
Writer: so our guy walks into the special investigator’s office and says “Hey, the President’s aide lied to me. Here’s what he said on the wiretap and here’s what he told me in person. He’s a liar. We can prosecute him for lying and maybe get him to roll over on his boss, testify against the President.” So the special prosecutor is liking that and ready to run with it but our guy screws up. See, he’s married but he’s also having an affair with an FBI lawyer – that’s the love interest and we can get some steamy scenes out of that, too – and our guy sends his lover some texts bragging about his scam. But somehow the texts leak
Boss: how?
Writer: I’m working on that. But anyway, the texts leak and the special investigator finds out our guy is bent so his testimony is worthless, but the special investigator really hates the President so he quietly reassigns our guy out of the way for a bit while he tries to finesse the aide into pleading guilty so he can get something to use against the President.
Boss: wait – what happened to our guy? I thought this show was about him?
Writer: he’s reassigned to Human Resources to lay low until it blows over. The special investigator temporarily becomes the star of the show. It’s like when the main star is pregnant so the co-star gets a few episodes, you know?
Boss: yeah, okay. Then what?
Writer: well, that’s as far as I’ve gotten. But it’s great, right? It’s got everything – sex, crime, politics, drama . . . so when do we start shooting?
Boss; I gotta hand it to ya, kid, I really do. Ya got a terrific imagination. But this stuff, it’s too much. It’s over the top. One guy at the center of a conspiracy to take down the President? Nobody would ever believe it. And what the hell kind of name is Strzok? Fuggedaboutit, kid. Get the hell out of my office.
End scene
Joe Doakes
It’s only fiction if you ignore the real world.
This Is What $1.4 Billion Of Government Work Gets You
It used to be that when you waited for the Green Line train, a little billboard on the platform told you how many minutes away the next train was.
Today?
The time is nice, if you have a schedule and the trains are on time (which you don’t and they’re not).
The track number? There’s one track going in that direction.
But along with the news that mere citizens will be barred from the trains on Super Bowl week, I suspect it’s just another way of telling the peasants “be happy we grant you this much largesse, peasant! Be grateful!”
Prioritization
While MInneapolis’ mayor Betsy Hodges has spent four years diffusing her efforts over a bewildering jumble of social-justice virtue-signals, the poor woman will never top the list of “Mayors with Bizarre Priorities” list while New York’s Bill DiBlasio is in office.
Hizzoner’s latest target? In a city with rising crime, infrastructure that’s crumbling faster than an Alka-Seltzer tablet in a glass of Seven-Up, and a financial situation that is rapidly decaying, DiBlasio is…
…confiscating electric bicycles – which are booming in popularity, especially among delivery riders for stores and restaurants; they are in fact the most efficient way of navigating the most street-space-starved city in America:
On Thursday, de Blasio announced the nation’s largest city would start fining restaurants in addition to operators, expanding and formalizing a style of broken-windows policing favored by the NYPD, which has confiscated 900 e-bikes this year. His justification? E-bikes are “just too dangerous,” the mayor said at a press conference.
How dangerous are they? Nearly 70 pedestrians (and 13 cyclists) have been killed by cars, trucks, and buses in New York City this year. No one has been killed by a bicycle. As for e-bikes in particular? The NYPD has no data on e-bike accidents or complaints. Nor does the city have any information about how the crackdown affects restaurants or riders. De Blasio was acting on instinct: The crackdown began when a local cyclist, Matthew Shefler, called into his radio show to complain.
Slower, more expensive deliveries; more congestion; yet another handicap for small business, even the ones that don’t get fined.
Betsy has some huge shoes to fill in the “bizarre priorities” deparatment.
The Swanson Conundrum
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The State of Minnesota is suing President Trump for ending payments that a federal judge has already ruled must be ended. Attorney General Lori Swanson’s argument: President Obama started giving us illegal payments and President Trump continued the illegal payments while Congress worked on the problem. We budgeted based on receiving illegal payments. To suddenly end the illegal payments would inconvenience us by making us live within our own means, so therefore we’re entitled to continue receiving illegal payments, forever.
It’s illegal to follow the law.
Joe Doakes
To be fair to the Attorney General, it’s how the DFL has handled budgeting for the past six decades or so.
Meet The New Tree; Same As The Old Tree
Eagan has a new city logo: a more expensive version of the old city logo:
[The old] symbol, a more realistic green tree outlined in black, was in use since 2004. It was sometimes compared to a stalk of broccoli.
Eagan’s new, non-cruciferous-vegetable-looking logo. $75K. Not sure if that included the new city font.
A prominent graphic designer who lives in Eagan, Allan Peters, designed the updated logo for $75,000.
But practice makes perfect:
The city is on its fourth logo since the 1970s, each featuring what the city called a “strong, independent tree.”
This is what happens when a formerly sensible suburb gets overrun by DFLers fleeing DFL policies in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, but who bring their DFL politics with ’em.
People Addict People
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
There is a crisis. People who are prescribed drugs containing opioids can become addicted to them.
There is a problem. People who receive medical treatment have privacy rights. We don’t know who’s doing the prescribing, who’s doctor-shopping, who’s obtaining prescriptions only to sell them.
There are proposed solutions, but they’re mostly paperwork regulations that have no more effect on real-world issues than putting up a Drug Free Zone sign on a schoolhouse door. More warning labels won’t help: people take the medicine doctors prescribe because we trust doctors. Restricting prescriptions won’t solve the end problem: no doctor prescribes heroin and people who self-medicate their personal problems with drugs will obtain them illegally, as they always have. Adding a new federal registry of sensitive information on individuals – does the word “Equifax” ring any bells?
“Opioid” is simply the new word for “narcotic” which has been a staple in the War on Drugs since Coke took cocaine out of its soft-drink 100 years ago. The problem isn’t the tool, the problem is the tool user.
Joe Doakes
As with any plan, philosophy, worldview or kind of government – the problem is people.
Let’s Sue The President Over His Twitter Account
A bunch of journos are apparently getting ready to sue the President for blocking them from his Twitter account.
I’m about ready to send money to their plaintiff’s fund.
Wny?
Because the journos are right. Why should pols get to decide whose speech to restrict, and from whom they can restrict access to their public speech?
It’s downright un-American.
And I’ve got quite a little list of DFL pols who’ve done exactly the same to me, and I’d guess most every conservative pundit in Minnesota.
In some cases – like Kim “Profile in Courage” Norton – it was because I publicly called out her lies over “criminal protection” laws.
And yes, I may have actually broken the story of Alondra “The Industrial Engineer” Cano distributing personal information on Twitter about people who’d criticized her privately (or so they thought() on the City of Minneapolis website to try to bully them into silence.
Both of these politicians blocked me almost immediately after I publicly ate their lunches. Waah waah waaah.
Likewise, the Twitter accounts of “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” and “Protect MN” have long since blocked me – because I crush them every time I turn my attention to them.
But others – Rep. Melissa Hortmann, Senator Tina LIebling, as well as several DFL-xupporting non-profits – already had me blocked before I ever attempted to write/tweet about them.
I know that there are apps that can systematically block all social media from authors matching some lists or algorithms – which is why I suspect the blanket block from DFL pols.
But I don’t care. If it’s fair for CNN, it’s fair for me.
Remember that in all cases, while I am a stone-cold purveyor of unassailable fact, I am also scrupulously polite to a fault. Anyone who wants to claim otherwise is welcome to prove it – and yes, there I AM more than willing to file a test case. I’m not the sharpest tool in the box, but I’m way smarter than that.
So yes, “journos”. Sue Donald Trump. I beg of you. Indeed, there’s some legal grounding already starting to happen:
So let the courts court, and the juries jurr.
Then get it incorporated onto all the states.
And hurry. Some MN Pols need some freaking free speech already.
And we’ve got some lost time to make up for.
But Where’s The Opportunity For Graft?
City comes up with an estimate of $65,000-$110,000 to build a stairway linking two levels of a city park, and replacing a rutted path with a steep incline that was causing injuries.
Citizen builds the stairway for $550.
Retired mechanic Adi Astl says he took it upon himself to build the stairs after several neighbours fell down the steep path to a community garden in Tom Riley Park, in Etobicoke, Ont. Astl says his neighbours chipped in on the project, which only ended up costing $550 – a far cry from the $65,000-$150,000 price tag the city had estimated for the job.
“I thought they were talking about an escalator,” Astl told CTV News Channel on Wednesday.
Astl says he hired a homeless person to help him and built the eight steps in a matter of hours.
Problem solved, right?
Well, no.
Because boy, is the government mad:
City bylaw officers have taped off the stairs while officials make a decision on what to do with it. However, Astl has not been charged with any sort of violation.
Mayor John Tory acknowledged that the city estimate sounds “completely out of whack with reality” on Wednesday. [Noooooo! – Ed] However, he says that still doesn’t justify allowing private citizens to bypass city bylaws to build public structures themselves.
“I think everyone will understand that it will be more than $550,” he said on Wednesday. “We just can’t have people decide to go out to Home Depot and build a staircase in a park because that’s what they would like to have.”
Of course not.
There are consultants – members of the political class – to be paid to study the issue. There are contractors – favored by the political class, frequently due to polices promulgated and administered by other members of the political class – to whom money must be funneled, usually via other members of the political class.
If people just made stuff work, the system would completely break down!
“But what about the handicapped?”
He pointed out that the park already has an accessible path for those who worry about falling down the incline, which is essentially a shortcut from the parking lot to the garden area.
It’s all about showing the peasants who’s boss.
Disgust
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
St. Paul Police Chief Axtell does not know what he’s talking about.
Gun violence is exploding in St. Paul. The Chief says “ . . . basically it’s yesterday’s fistfights are today’s gun fights.” But then he says it’s “ . . . a community health problem, this is a public health crisis.”
No.
A health problem is caused by disease. The cure is quarantine and medical treatment for those infected, and sanitation to prevent spread of illness. Americans know very well how to handle outbreaks of disease. St. Paul does not have a public health problem.
St. Paul has a cultural problem. Perfectly healthy people are choosing to shoot each other instead of fistfight. We’re not willing to quarantine residents in Frogtown and there is no medical treatment, no vaccine that cures bad behavior. Bad behavior is cured by deterrence and punishment, to make bad behavior unacceptably costly to the actors.
When Charles Napier wanted to end the Hindu practice of burning wives alive on their husband’s funeral pyre, he explained to the priests: “This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.” The practice of suttee ended abruptly.
In fairness, it may be that the Chief knows exactly what’s going on in his city, but he’s afraid to speak the truth because the City Council is a bunch of liberals more concerned with signaling their virtue by mouthing politically acceptable platitudes than with protecting their citizens by enacting effective law enforcement measures. As long as the people dying are young Black men and poor children on the East Side, what’s the big deal?
Can we talk about adding another light rail line now? Because that’s a big deal. That’s something we care about.
Joe Doakes
I have to hope that there’s a lot of smart cops out there acting dumb because they want to keep their jobs.
The alternative? Remember – today’s police forces didn’t exist when the Constitution was written. I have a hunch they are more like the standing armies our forefathers feared than our current standing army is.
The New Brahmins
Democrat congresswoman tells commoner that her First Amendment rights are “Different” than his:
A bit of background: when Rep. Demings was a police chief, her gun was stolen from her car; it’s tautological that her gun fell into the hands of a criminal.
Demings is, naturally, a gun grabber:
So that’s two “rights of the people” where this Demcorat rep thinks some people are more people than others.
Only Complete Subjugation Will Do
The City of Minneapolis has decided not to completely put Surdyk’s out of business for the “crime” of selling liquor on Sundays because Sunday liquor sales would be a catastrophic moral blow to the state even though the law hasn’t quite expired yet. The city negotiated the fine down from a multimillion dollar one-month suspension of the liquor license to $6,000 in fines and eight Sundays of suspension…
…only to have a City Council committee reject the deal.
Why?
Reading between Lisa Goodman’s lines, it’s because the greatest crime is defying Mother Government, or even not paying instant obeisance:
“We went down and asked him not to open, the state called him and asked him not to be open, and he basically said, ‘Too bad, I’m not going to do it,’” Council Member Lisa Goodman said. “If he had shut down right after they came in and asked him to do so, I might have felt different.”
“Justice” in Minneapolis is a matter of connections, after all:
A new deal must be negotiated over the next month, the council committee said, and there may be a public hearing. Goodman said she has heard from “a lot of members of the public” about the matter, and they are not happy that Surdyk might have gotten off with a $6,000 fine and 10-day suspension.
Yeah, Goodman. I just bet you did, and I just bet they’re not.
The worst part? The best defense seems to be self-abasement:
His lawyer, Dennis Johnson, told council members that a $6,000 fine would wipe out any profit Surdyk made on March 12, the day he opened illegally. Johnson attempted to make no justification for his client’s actions, however.
“It’s simply that it was a boneheaded move,” Johnson said. “We need to deal with it, and accept any consequences that come from the city.”
Johnson said Surdyk just wants the problem to be resolved, and he is hoping that time and the fact that his business has been a model of regulatory compliance for 40 years, will help the city show some leniency.
“In the heat of the moment he made a horrible decision,” Johnson said, as Surdyk looked on. “He can’t justify what he did. He screwed up.”
It’s American in 2017, and striking a blow for freedom against a stupid regulation in an autocratic bureaucracy needs to be defended by pleading “I just can’t make decisions without the beneficent hand of the all-wise Council guiding me”.
This nation is doomed.
Reader Mail
From today’s mailbag, we’ve got a question…
…for Joe Doakes from Como Park:
Hello Mitch…
Does “Joe Doakes from Como Park” have time to answer a question from the Norwegian Lutheran contingent of the NARN Peanut Gallery? [Not sure that narrows it down much – Ed]
My question: In her haughty refusal to obey a Presidential executive order. One vetted by the DoJ Office of Legal Counsel and which counters Emperor Obama’s previous directive that ignored federal law…
Did Miss Yates also violate 18 USC 2384?
Respectfully submitted,
– Tor S.
Scum of the earth technical writer
Deplorable infidel
Lord of the low frequencies
I need a Doakes Signal to shine on a low-hanging cloud.
Huh
Charitable Exhortation
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
In what conceivable way is my charitable giving any of my employer’s business?
More annoying – they pick some charity they want to fund and hit up everybody to contribute. I nominate the National Rifle Association. No? Why not? Why does it have to be the United Way funneling money to Leftist causes?
A “charitable contribution” is, by definition, a non-governmental activity for which my contribution is tax-deductible. Why would a governmental entity be encouraging government employees to reduce the tax revenues from which we’re funded?
Joe Doakes
It’s not like tax revenue ever really drops…
Shades Of Things To Come?
Why does the American political class spend so much time jabbering about “gun safety”, about gay marriage, about climate change?
To distract you from the economy, and the oncoming deflation of a huge entitlement debt bubble that is going to have drastic impact on…well, everything.
The California pension system – which is a bellwether for most blue-state-model pension systems around the country – is starting to groan under the strain of the contradictions it labors under (emphasis added):
As Steven Malanga has noted, both of these union-managed funds are notorious for pulling political stunts even as they face gaping shortfalls, going on a misguided “green” investing binge that flushed taxpayer money down the drain, and pulling out of tobacco companies on moral grounds just before those stocks began to rise.
But the underlying flaw with the funds is not their politicization. If anything, these kinds of moves are a distraction from more pressing crisis of public employee retirement systems: That state legislatures have epically over-promised the level of retirement benefits they can reasonably provide, and obscured this reality by presuming levels of investment returns that are impossible to sustain, especially in this era of historically low interest rates.
The choice is pretty stark – massive reforms, including a shift away from defined-benefit pensions for public employees, and other tough choices.
Politicians from both sides hate tough choices – but it’s the blue model that’s given us this debt, and it’s the blue states that are facing the most immediate fallout.
Minnesota’s public plans are – depending on your political point of view – either better-administered, or do a better job of laundering the money. Maybe it’s a little bit of both, combined with a state that has a better income-to-debt ratio than California for now, but the pain might strike us later.
Emphasis is on “later”.
Diagnosis
Andy Aplikowski – long of the “Residual Forces” blog – writes re the Brexit on Facebook:
So it appears the only people still whining about #BREXIT are:
1) European politicians who will lose power.
2) American politicians afraid of Federalism and State’s rights catching on in the US.
3) Filthy rich who lost a “crap ton” of money due to stock market and currency corrections.The rest of the world doesn’t seem to be permanently affected. Maybe we should have more votes of no confidence in the people who are screwing up the world.
Line up the petitions. I’m good to go.
Cause And Effect
A longtime friend of this blog writes re Keith Ellison’s recent op-ed in the MinnPost:
“Long airport-security lines are a symptom of Congress’ budget-cutting mantra” [1]
Hmm. Doesn’t look right.
“Long airport-security lines are a symptom of Arabs hijacking aircraft and blowing them up”
There. Fixed.
Well, mostly.
Terrorist attack led to concern for security, which led to government seeing a new opportunity for graft, which led to a permanent bureaucracy which does little to secure air travel but very much does want to get paid, and paid well.
There. Now we’re all ship-shape.
What Happens When You Let Government Ration Your Rights?
Sure enough, government functionaries will start a black market in graft to sell those rights to the highest bidder.
This Is What Generations Of One-Party Democrat Rule Looks Like
Last week, social conservatives on social media vented their disgust at a mother whose son had been shot and killed in an armed robbery attempt; the woman infamously asked how it was her son was supposed to get money for clothes, being in “the hood” and all.
The landed punditry pummeled the mother; with such an upbringing, how was the kid supposed to grow up? was a common refrain.
I’m not going to bag on a distraught mother. She’ll have an eternity to wonder about what she did or didn’t do wrong as a mom. I’m not going to chuckle at grief, even if it provides what seems to be a window into a worldview utterly foreign to mine.
And because there’s a much more galling example of corrosive entitlement happening on a much bigger, but less dramatic, scale.
The Detroit Way: A dozen current and former Detroit school administrators received the equivalent of federal indictments for bribery and kickbacks totaling over a million dollars over 13 years. The administrators allegedly worked with a crooked vendor to take kickbacks for school supplies that weren’t delivered, funneling funds through dummy companies set up to try to fool auditors.
That case will wend its merry way through the courts for many more years, no doubt.
But if I may, I’ll ask the world’s collective dogs to leave the grieving mother of the late robber alone, and take a gander at this ripe turd of entitlement (with emphasis added):
“It’s pitiful that they’re going after principals who are probably just doing what they need to do even if it might be a little bit unethical in order to provide the students in their schools with the supplies and materials that they need that district and the state should be providing us,” teacher Cathy Brackett said. “They should be going after the big thieves who have come into the district under the guise of emergency managers and consultants who have skimmed not just thousands of dollars but millions of dollars away from our students and just move on to their next gig, seemingly without repercussions.”
While Ms. Brackett is right to a point – the educational consulting racket is basically an under-the-table wealth transfer from the taxpayers to the political class, which in Detroit means Democrat hangers-on – it’s that emphasized bit that made me forget all about the robber’s mom’s outburst; people skimming taxpayer money are “probably” doing it for their kids’ benefit? Read it for yourself.
You’ll notice that this happens only in cities where one-party rule has ossified into a permanent political overclass – which happens only in Democrat-run cities, as it happens.
Here’s Your Crow; Cold And Bloody
Court rules that the IRS acted in bad faith, targeted Tea Party groups:
A federal appeals court spanked the IRS Tuesday, saying it has taken laws designed to protect taxpayers from the government and turned them on their head, using them to try to protect the tax agency from the very tea party groups it targeted.
The judges ordered the IRS to quickly turn over the full list of groups it targeted so that a class-action lawsuit, filed by the NorCal Tea Party Patriots, can proceed. The judges also accused the Justice Departmentlawyers, who are representing the IRS in the case, of acting in bad faith — compounding the initial targeting — by fighting the disclosure.
My greatest dream is to see those responsible frog-walked into a paddy wagon. Like the “Clinton Indictment”, it’ll never happen – but hope is what it’s all about.
Na Na, Hey Hey, Goodbye!
I missed covering this the other day. AFSCME’s push to vacuum up money from Minnesota daycare providers got rebuffed in a landslide so decisive, that even the government unions – who normally clap their jaws onto any hint of graft like a pitbull – have given it up:
AFSCME organizers declined interviews on Tuesday but issued a statement saying they were disappointed, but that they wouldn’t pursue another union election before the law expires in 2017.
Upside? Maybe the good guys/gals can get some decent sleep during the next session:
Jennifer Parrish, a Rochester child-care provider and a leader of the Coalition of Union Free Providers, said the results of the vote weren’t surprising.
“We know that over the 10 years that we’ve been working on this that child-care providers are hands down overwhelmingly opposed to this. They were waiting by their mailboxes just so they could have an opportunity to vote no,” she said. “Family child-care providers are small business owners. … We set our own rates, we create our own working conditions — all the things that unions typically negotiate for, we determine for ourselves.”
The union would have negotiated public policy issues that “we can work for through our associations without having to pay high union dues,” she said.
Five will get you ten the DFL and Governor Flint-Smith Dayton are upset because they already spent the $2 million a year the jamdown was going to bring the DFL.