First Prize. A dozen Original Marshmallow Sandwiches for you, a dozen for your favorite local politicians.
So your city council is going to pass a resolution honoring the 71st birthday of the United Nations, but is too busy to fix a pothole that broke three axles last month. Continue reading
What do Barstow, Cotati, Dublin, Dunsmuir, Monrovia, Richmond, Santa Maria, and Santa Rosa have in common, besides all being in California? In the first few months of this year, they have each carried out a method of cronyism that I call the Ooze and Cruise Method. How does it work? Simple. 1. If you have always wanted to be a member of your city council, suck up to a current member. 2. Get appointed to a planning commission or design review board. Hang around and wait for an opening to appear on the city council. 3. Ooze into the vacant seat by being appointed by other members, even though you have never run for office. 4. Cruise into the office in the next election because you are now an incumbent, and have a definite advantage. Continue reading
In Richard Daley’s Chicago of the 50s, greed, corruption, and embezzling by local Democrats was widely accepted as business as usual, and that tradition continues in Illinois to this day. How widely accepted? A friend who was born in Chicago tells this story: Continue reading
Takoma Park, MD, a city of 17,000 in Joe Biden’s home state, has voted to lower the voting age for city elections to 16. Continue reading
Note: This is the column that got me fired as an irregular columnist for a local newspaper, before it even ran.
What could be better than spending three hours on Tuesday night at a City of Cotati Strategic Planning Study Session? Spending two hours. Actually, 10 minutes would have been even better, because that was the amount of time that involved either strategies, or the study thereof.
On this particular evening, there were 11 people from city government, and three citizens in the peanut gallery. The 11 included the mayor, vice mayor, three councilmembers, the city manager, assistant city manager, the police chief, economic development director, administrative services director, and director of public works. Continue reading
Now that Obama has been gone for two years and liberals and progressives are still outnumbered in the Senate, some people think the country is returning to a degree of normalcy. I disagree. Because I’ve seen liberals, progressives, and twits in local governments do far more damage to our freedom than deep state politicians in the federal or state governments could dream of.
It’s time to watch the sausage being made, and the fools who make it.
Until recently, I lived 50 miles north of San Francisco, so I could write a whole book about the craziness in my former back yard, but unfortunately, the fools in local government are spread across more zip codes than you can imagine. In fact, in America’s 50 largest cities, 34 mayors are Democrats, 13 are Republicans, and three are Independent.
So in this blog, I’ll bring you local horror stories from coast to coast; from dense urban conglomerations and dinky hamlets alike. What kind of outrages can you find in here? I’ve lumped them into three basic categories: the massive amounts of your money that local governments waste; the stunning intrusions they make on your personal liberty, and the things they do that are so flat-out dumb that nobody could possibly make this stuff up. Three examples:
My driveway rocks.
It started with the rocks.
After living in San Francisco for 20 years, and putting up with 20 summers of bone-chilling fog, my wife and I decided to move 50 miles north, where we had bought a small piece of undeveloped land in Sonoma County, and piece by piece, built a horse farm on top of an old silage field. Continue reading
