In Waukee, Iowa, the city manager has big plans. He'll try to spend a few million tax dollars on "development." When it is all gone, the chumps paying the bills will get to know where it went.
This guy has put the city development plans in his personnel file, making them secret under the law. And the mayor and city council go along.
"The public trusts us when they elect us to efficiently run the government and the city," (Mayor) Peard said. "They trust that we manage the city (administrator) and that the city (administrator) manages his administration. I guess the evaluation factor comes (at election time) with how good of a job they think we've done."
So, Waukee folks, y'all go ahead and vote, then take a two-year nap. Just like your buddies out in Bell, California.
Actually, the mayor and council are probably relatively honest people, as politicians go. Just naive.
I don't know which is worse, to be governed by a thug or by a stupe.
Sep 23, 2010
Where life is better
It's Dakota/Lakota country, where the Sioux forged a pact with the pony and created a culture. Where Jinglebob still works broken land, one foot in the 21st Century and one in the the 19th.
Sep 22, 2010
Bell, California and my Ditch Digger
The hands are wringing and the tears flowing.
How, oh how, could a pipsqueak city of 36,000 let things get so far out of hand? An $800,000 mayor. A $457,000 police chief. A $376,000 assistant city manager. Five city council members at $100,000 each.
The guy who digs my ditches knew years ago, even though he, like the rest of us, never heard of Bell before the Los Angeles Times made it a poster child for avaricious politicians and bureaucrats run amok. He's a thoughtful guy who likes to read and to discuss "why things are so f----d up." His answer one cold morning over post-excavation coffee: "Because we need better people." Not better politicians; he and you and I know that is a fool's dream.
No little group of elected and appointed thieves steals $5.5 million from a small city unless the population is composed of docile apes, too dumb or lazy or complacent to give a damn.
That kind of theft can't be hidden. Any junior-college trained bookkeeper with a four-buck pocket calculator can identify it. Any reporter good enough to hold down a job with an Arkansas weekly can make it an issue.
Where in perdition was the Bell electorate on Nov. 29, 2005, when the thugs pushed through a charter municipal government system with a total turnout of 400, including, according to Wiki, 200 dubious absentee ballots? Where has that same electorate been in the five ensuing years.
To Hell with Bell and its inhabitants. You deserved no better, and unless you're willing to begin acting like United States citizens, you will get no better. You'll go back to Dancing with the Stars and the latest from Fox on Lindsey Lohan, and two years from today the carnivorous monkeys will be back, eating what ever is left of your undead faces.
Rule 1 of making a republic work is, "Pay attention." Fail and you deserve every thing you get.
How, oh how, could a pipsqueak city of 36,000 let things get so far out of hand? An $800,000 mayor. A $457,000 police chief. A $376,000 assistant city manager. Five city council members at $100,000 each.
The guy who digs my ditches knew years ago, even though he, like the rest of us, never heard of Bell before the Los Angeles Times made it a poster child for avaricious politicians and bureaucrats run amok. He's a thoughtful guy who likes to read and to discuss "why things are so f----d up." His answer one cold morning over post-excavation coffee: "Because we need better people." Not better politicians; he and you and I know that is a fool's dream.
No little group of elected and appointed thieves steals $5.5 million from a small city unless the population is composed of docile apes, too dumb or lazy or complacent to give a damn.
That kind of theft can't be hidden. Any junior-college trained bookkeeper with a four-buck pocket calculator can identify it. Any reporter good enough to hold down a job with an Arkansas weekly can make it an issue.
Where in perdition was the Bell electorate on Nov. 29, 2005, when the thugs pushed through a charter municipal government system with a total turnout of 400, including, according to Wiki, 200 dubious absentee ballots? Where has that same electorate been in the five ensuing years.
To Hell with Bell and its inhabitants. You deserved no better, and unless you're willing to begin acting like United States citizens, you will get no better. You'll go back to Dancing with the Stars and the latest from Fox on Lindsey Lohan, and two years from today the carnivorous monkeys will be back, eating what ever is left of your undead faces.
Rule 1 of making a republic work is, "Pay attention." Fail and you deserve every thing you get.
Sep 21, 2010
A pier, haiku version
Technically, it is not a dock, but a pier. I've been away from living on salt water so long I fall into corn-field usage.
It will make a convenient place to tie -- chain, actually -- the canoe, and a comfortable perch for fishing. It's on a point about 50 yards from the canal outlet to the big lake, and the water is good for walleyes in the spring and fall.
Installing a dock is one part brute labor, another part finicky adjustment of supporting poles, a third part lesson in not dropping tools, and a fourth laboratory work on the differing physics of moving about in chest deep water as opposed to air.
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