You know they want this. They need to establish this as something that happens on occasion, so that it can then happen more frequently. And then, habitually.

Pretty good gig -- do nothing, produce nothing, except for bossin'-people-around social engineering, and collect a cool mil a year, without fear of ever losing your job for any reason whatsoever. Beautiful.

So much for that old saw that government employees are being paid less than the rest of us so they deserve better benefits.

The Los Angeles Times revealed in a front-page story that Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo is paid a salary of nearly $800,000 a year. His contract calls for annual increases of 12%. That means his one-year increase in salary next year will be over $94,000.

If he stays with the job - and why wouldn't he - and the contract doesn't change, the city manager of a city with a 37,000 population will be making more than a million dollars a year in a couple of years.

Highly paid public administrators in Bell don't stop with the city manager. Police Chief Randy Adams pulls down $457,000 a year. The Times article points out that salary is 50% more than the yearly salary of the Los Angeles police chief and L.A. County sheriff.

Even the assistant Bell city manager is paid more than the L.A. police chief.

The Bell City Council members take care of themselves as well. They are part-time employees who make $100,000 a year. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office is investigating the city council salaries.

Thanks to StarChamberMaid.

Posted by: Ace at 08:12 AM | Comments (56)
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I love Slow Joe, he's one of those rare Washington types who, out of shockingly naive dumbassededness and congenital stupidity, often speaks the truth in a way he didn't really intend. He just gets the timelines and geography a little wrong sometimes. He's the Forest Gump of the political class.

Vice President Joe Biden brushed aside suggestions on Sunday that Democrats will suffer big losses in November midterm elections, vowing that Barack Obama's governing party will "shock the heck out of everybody."

The public is starting to realize this junta is pretty much capable of almost anything as long as it weakens the nation and economy and increases their taxes. We're not "shocked" by that stuff anymore.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 08:01 AM | Comments (46)
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VDH:

How would we characterize the new aristocracy? In a number of ways.

1) Untruth. One requisite to being a cultural elite, unfortunately, is a certain allegiance to untruth, to saying one thing and doing another. Consider the manifestations of falsity from ecology to race. Often exempt from worry over a weekly check, and distanced from the mechanics of how things work, the elite clamors for a green cap-and-trade revolution. It rejects compromise with a fossil fuel near future that would transition us in a half-century or so to renewable energy.

That said, it is hard to find cultural elites who live green lives. Most use their money at times to fly on jets or boat (like the president this weekend). As in the manner of the tastes of a John Edwards or Al Gore, the bigger and more impressive the home, the better to contemplate how lesser others use too much carbon-based power. Usually green sacrifice is to be made by coal miners, oil drillers, and timber men of politically incorrect industries — the distant horny-handed classes whose unmentioned work brings us instant convenience.

On matters racial, it gets complicated since advocacy is one thing, living another. The cultural elite use “pull” to get their kids into college, money to live in a “good” neighborhood, and “networking” to marry and “place” like others from a good background. All that remains unspoken and rarely articulated. Why so? Because otherwise the logical ramifications of such a liberal belief system would be to live in the San Jose or Fresno mixed suburbs, to have their children school with the “other” at Cal State Stanislaus or Indiana State, and to marry their children to Rick Lopez or Tyrone Hiller to encourage “diversity.”

In short, money, privilege, and status create in the cultural elite both a fear of mixing it up with others that might jeopardize position and placement, and yet guilt for that very sense of entitlement and exemption. All that, in turn, only heightens the shrill and sanctimonious rhetorical demands on less blessed others to prove their morality.

Barack Obama was a genius in recognizing all this, and at a very early age no less. The subtext of Dreams from My Father, and indeed Obama’s life from 18 to 45, was to allay elite fears, guilt, and suspicions. And by proving to be a calm, charismatic, minority wannabe fellow elite — who could ipso facto offer instant penance for rather isolated and shamed cultural elite s— Obama in return grasped that the rules simply would not apply to him (elites having few real unchanging principles and values): graduate admission without commensurate grades and test scores (their release to the public could in theory prove my hypothesis wrong), law review without a paper trail, teaching and offers of tenure at law schools without normal publication, community organizing without worry of tangible results, running for office without repercussions from tawdry attacks ranging from suing to invalidate petitions to leaking divorce records.

Daley:

What is more startling is the growth in America of precisely the sort of political alignment which we have known for many years in Britain: an electoral alliance of the educated, self-consciously (or self-deceivingly, depending on your point of view) "enlightened" class with the poor and deprived.
America, in other words, has discovered bourgeois guilt. A country without a hereditary nobility has embraced noblesse oblige. Now, there is nothing inherently strange or perverse about people who lead successful, secure lives feeling a sense of responsibility toward those who are disadvantaged. What is peculiar in American terms is that this sentiment is taking on precisely the pseudo-aristocratic tone of disdain for the aspiring, struggling middle class that is such a familiar part of the British scene.

Liberal politics is now – over there as much as here – a form of social snobbery. To express concern about mass immigration, or reservations about the Obama healthcare plan, is unacceptable in bien-pensant circles because this is simply not the way educated people are supposed to think. It follows that those who do think (and talk) this way are small-minded bigots, rednecks, oiks, or whatever your local code word is for "not the right sort".

The petit bourgeois virtues of thrift, ambition and self-reliance – which are essential for anyone attempting to escape from poverty under his own steam – have long been derided in Britain as tokens of a downmarket upbringing. But not long ago in America they were considered, even among the highly educated, to be the quintessential national virtues, because even well-off professionals had probably had parents or grandparents who were once penniless immigrants. Nobody dismissed "ambition" as a form of gaucherie: the opposite of having ambition was being a bum, a good-for-nothing who would waste the opportunities that the new country offered for self-improvement.

But now the British Lefties who – like so many Jane Austen heroines looking down on those "in trade" – used to dismiss Margaret Thatcher as "a grocer's daughter", have their counterparts in the US, where virtually everybody's family started poor. Our "white van man" is their Tea Party activist, and the insult war is getting very vicious. It is becoming commonplace now for liberals in the US to label the Tea Party movement as racist, the most damaging insult of all in respectable American life.

Just to prove the point, here's the New York Times:

The question of racism in the amorphous Tea Party movement is, of course, a serious one, since so much of the Republican Party seems to be in the thrall of its activists. There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.

Andrew Breitbart just emailed to say "You can go to hell."

But the insidious presence of racism within some quarters of the movement — or, maybe more accurately in some cases, an utter indifference toward racial sensitivities — shouldn’t really surprise anyone. That’s not necessarily because a subset of these antigovernment ideologues are racist, per se, but in part because they are just plain old....

This does not mean that there arenÂ’t hateful 25-year-olds coming to Tea Party rallies and letting fly racial slurs. What it does mean is that a sizable percentage of the Tea Party types were born into a segregated America, many of them in the South or in the new working-class suburbs of the North, and lived through the marches and riots that punctuated the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s. Their racial attitudes, like their philosophies of governance, reflect their complicated journeys. (This is true for a lot of older, urban Democrats, too, who consider themselves liberal but whose racial commentary causes their grandchildren to recoil.)

Posted by: Ace at 07:50 AM | Comments (66)
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Et tu Times?

President ObamaÂ’s auto task force pressed General Motors and Chrysler to close scores of dealerships without adequately considering the jobs that would be lost or having a firm idea of the cost savings that would be achieved, an audit of the process has concluded.

The report by Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program of the Treasury Department, said both carmakers needed to shut down some underperforming dealerships. But it questioned whether the cuts should have been made so quickly, particularly during a recession. The report, released on Sunday, estimated that tens of thousands of jobs were lost as a result.

“It is not at all clear that the greatly accelerated pace of the dealership closings during one of the most severe economic downturns in our nation’s history was either necessary for the sake of the companies’ economic survival or prudent for the sake of the nation’s economic recovery,” the report said.

Translation of that last bit: it was bad management and bad economics and we can't for the life of us figure out what the President thought he was doing. However, I have a suggestion or two.

The truth is that the Administration was in full panic mode and were trying to chop the auto companies down to something a distracted, inexperienced bureaucracy could manage. Both GM and Chrysler ultimately rejected hundreds of Obama terminations -- evidence that the President's taskforce was making hasty and arbitrary choices.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:33 AM | Comments (46)
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Blasting Dan Coates for having served as a lobbyist, then jetting off to Canada (Canada?) to meet with trial lawyer lobbyists. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:22 AM | Comments (23)
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Saturday. PM. On the West Side. If you want to come, contact info is here.

I've seen a few folks complaining that they tried to attend meetups in the past, but couldn't find us at the place. I don't know what to tell you except: stop with the blushing, shy foot shuffle. I assure you that we're there. Which means, that if you're there too, all you have to do is wander around yelling "Gabe? Morons? Ace of Spades?" and you'll find us. Or we'll find you. We're usually a good-sized group, at least a dozen and sometimes more. H2U tells me he's had plenty of emails about this, so get with the program.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:20 AM | Comments (18)
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Wall Street Journal floats the idea that Republicans may take back more than the House in November.

The emergence of competitive Republican candidates in Wisconsin, Washington and California—Democratic-leaning states where polls now show tight races—bring the number of seats that Republicans could seize from the Democrats to 11.

Democrats now control the Senate 59-41—after the death of Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who was replaced by Republican Sen. Scott Brown—including two independents who usually vote with them. That means Republicans need 10 seats to take a 51-49 advantage.

Republicans would have to win virtually every competitive race to retake the Senate, without losing any seats of their own—clearly an uphill climb. The trouble for Democrats is that many trends are against them. Surveys show that Republicans are more motivated than Democrats to go to the polls, and that voters are looking for new leadership in Congress.

"I think there is definitely a chance" of losing the Senate, said Democratic strategist Gary Nordlinger, a Washington-based media consultant. "I wouldn't call it a probability, but there is certainly a chance."

"Republicans still have to [win] all the competitive races in order to get to a majority, but at least there are enough seats on the table to pull it off," said Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the non-partisan Rothenberg Political Report.

Now, don't get your hopes up too much. Like it says, this is an uphill battle. I still expect Democrats to start with the usual tricks in September and October -- the feminist dog whistle. The claims that Republicans are going to steal Social Security from seniors. (Unusually, the claims of racism will be blunted from overuse during the past year; the boy-who-cried-racism feature of this presidency may doom typical Democratic race cries for a few years.)

To this point the Democrats have been raising money and taking attacks of opportunity when our candidates stumble. That's not a campaign, that's a holding pattern. Incumbents like Barbara Boxer, Dirty Harry, and Colorado Senator Michael Bennett have millions tucked away while their Republican opponents are campaigning on a shoestring margin.

Still, check out Real Clear Politics Battle for the Senate map. It's possible.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:01 AM | Comments (68)
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To the last, I grapple with thee!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:36 AM | Comments (64)
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Argh Update: Commenter Waterhouse below seems to have the right of it:

he's not talking about letting oil into the gulf. The collection ships they have hooked up to the new cap are capable of handling up to 80,000 barrels/day. He's talking about opening up the valves from the cap that feed the collection ships. No oil gets into the gulf; all the oil goes into the collection ships, and thus the flow rate is determined.

I hereby retract everything I say below...except the part where I called Congressman Markey an artard. I'll stand by that. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:15 PM | Comments (121)
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End of the weekend for some, just another day for others, but all are welcome at the ONT party.

So Is This Fake?

I hope not because it looks awesome. And in fact I believe The Flying Nun used a similar technique.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:50 PM | Comments (845)
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