Government in Action

Government in Action; Government Inaction
©2011 Ross Williams

Headline: WI Labor Group Bans GOP from Holiday Parade

Article synopsis: Wausau WI is going to have a Labor Day parade next week. The GOP is not going to be invited to participate by the parade organizers – apparently headed by labor unions – in the aftermath of Wisconsin’s public union hullabaloo last spring. The Mayor of Wausau has announced that if the GOP is barred from participating that the labor group can reimburse the city for the parade expenses.

Dry Your Eyes, Unions: The changes in law in Wisconsin have resulted in millions of dollars in savings to school districts in less than a year, which resulted in the rehiring of hundreds of recently laid-off teachers ... who had been laid off due to laws and policies from prior Democrat administrations. There has been no loss of benefits despite newly altered financing for them; public service unions in non-teaching sectors of government service have similarly grown in size.

For all the claims unions make that Republicans are anti-union, there is no evidence of it. For all the claims unions make that Democrats are pro-union, their policies were [and are] actively decimating union jobs – not to mention the rest of the jobs.

Conclusion: If the point of the unions’ parade pique is to demonstrate themselves to be small-minded boobs willing to shoot themselves in the foot, then they succeeded admirably. If the point was anything else ... they missed the target.


Headline: ATF Director Reassigned; US Attorney Out from ‘Fast And Furious’

Article synopsis: Three of the four federal officials – the ATF Director, the US Attorney and the Assistant US Attorney for AZ – who blew the whistle on a Justice Department stupidity have been reassigned. The ATF Director’s reassignment comes with a demotion. The stupidity tattled upon, code-named ‘Fast and Furious’, was designed to run guns to drug cartels in Mexico to determine who is in the drug cartel. Congressional investigators are suggesting the reassignments are punishment for whistle-blowing and to protect Justice Department appointees – i.e., Shyster General Eric Holder. A US Attorney from Minnesota – a protégé of Holder’s – will replace the ATF Director.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: We already know who is in the Mexican drug cartels, we don’t need fancy ballistics tests on the bullets pulled from dead bodies to know who’s behind it. More to the point, so does Mexico know who’s in these drug rings; Mexico is the government responsible for dealing with them. Furthermore, Mexico did not ask for our help in this. Despite Mexico doing a genuinely lousy job of it, and which causes problems for us here in the US, we must respect their sovereignty. We don’t. We rarely have.

It’s not that I’m particularly concerned about Mexico’s inability to safeguard their own international prestige; once you join the brotherhood of nations you’re expected to be a big boy. Someone else insinuates itself into your country like the US has done to Mexico for, like, ever, then grow some cojones and respond in kind. Mexico typically does nothing but whine.

But from our perspective, how could anyone possibly imagine that giving automatic weapons to drug lords was a good idea? For all the accusations from the left that Bush was a cowboy, who was it that tried acting out the plot of a western? And a bad western at that?

Conclusion: Hiding those who tattled on the government in a bureaucratic rat-hole is such a government thing to do. Those “reassigned” should consider themselves lucky that they were not mere ATF agents; they’d have been fired for having integrity.


Headline: Anti-Tea Party e-Mail Leads to Slap on Wrist for Human Rights Investigator

Article synopsis: A ‘Human Rights’ investigator for the State of Illinois was given a verbal reprimand for forwarding to coworkers, from his work email account, a Democrat-sponsored email sent by his sister which accuses the Tea Party of being a “dangerous, radical hate-monger” group. The investigator who was reprimanded called the action “petty as hell”, and indicated that if he’d known what would have happened he would have simply deleted the email to start with.

I don’t know which is more ridiculous: The state of Illinois has a Human Rights Department. And one of the investigators for this Human Rights Department has no clue that, first: partisan politics at work in a political job is unethical to begin with and, second, partisan politics which makes unfounded and libelous statements for political motive violates the very purpose of the job ... of being a Human Rights investigator.

And he has the gall to claim the reprimand was “bogus”?

He should have been fired. The only reason he wasn’t is because his work record was otherwise good. ...His work record as a Human Rights investigator ... for the state of Illinois.

Perhaps I am missing something, but I don’t recall that many totalitarian dictators ethnically cleansing Polish villages on the south side of Chicago that Illinois needs a Human Rights Department. Illinois surely has totalitarian dictators, but they tend to draw the line at rigging garbage collection contracts, trying to sell Senate seats, and appointing their wives and cousins to $275,000 a year jobs ... which is bad enough, but it doesn’t violate human rights.

Without scads of political prisoners in Illinois bearing thumbscrews, I find it difficult to fathom what an Illinois Human Rights Department investigator would spend his long days doing – when not forwarding emails from his sister. About the only thing I can think of is that the definition of “Human Rights” in the state of Illinois is very similar to what, for example, American muslims have been yapping about for a decade: it violates their “human rights” to have to endure people calling them terrorists or terrorist-enablers [in a nation which has free speech] when, really, only a very small portion of muslims fit that description. For the rest of the muslims the terms are unfounded and slanderous.

And if that’s the definition of “Human Rights” in the state of Illinois, then a Human Rights investigator who propagates emails describing Tea Partiers as “dangerous, radical hate-mongers” who “hate blacks” and “hate Latinos” and “hate gays” and “hate Muslims and have made many anti-Semitic statements” and even “hate Republicans” who might “cooperate with Obama” is very clearly bad at his job, either because he is maliciously inept, or because he has no clue what he is supposed to be doing.

Conclusion: Fire him, fire him now, and close the IL Department of Human Rights. We’ll consider opening it up again when the Mayor of Chicago orders execution squads to Gurnee and Oak Park. But not before.