freedom: it just put your ass in a biometric database
I don’t know if I’ve ever loved a news story the way that I love this one from USA Today. See, the U.S. military needs to identify insurgents in Afghanistan, so it’s using retina scanners and fingerprint scanners to build a database encompassing “all Afghan males of fighting age.” Then they lift fingerprints from a [...]
max boot, shameless lying asshole
“Above all, the terrible fear of Saddam and his secret police, of the knock in the night, has been lifted. Numerous radio and TV shows, newspapers and magazines air a variety of viewpoints, and politicians from a multiplicity of parties compete in free and fair elections.” — Max Boot, Winning the Peace in Iraq, the [...]
Getting a Clue
Marc Grisham was hired in 2004 to be the city manager in Pittsburg, California, a working class city of 65,000 people. His contract is below. Grisham’s starting salary was $169,000 a year. His contract was amended five times in the years since. By 2008, he was making a base salary of $231,938 a year (see [...]
how to show the limits of your humanity in one easy step
Over the last year, the Los Angeles Times has reported a long investigative series on abused children who died while under the protection of the LA County Department of Child Protective Services. On Wednesday, the county Board of Supervisors voted to open an investigation…
…to catch the county employees who are leaking documents to the Los [...]
the empire has a glitch
I left one thing out of my post on Todd Purdum’s empire worship, yesterday: the main point. I got distracted by the glorious awfulness of Purdum’s ponderous paragraphs, and lost track of the indescribable blindness that he shares with the subjects of his worshipful journalism.
Purdum argues that Washington is “broken,” that procedural disfunction prevents the [...]
let’s just eat the whole thing (II)
Between 2000 and 2010, the cost of living went up by about 30%.
In the same period in the city where I live — West Hollywood, California — government salaries went up by rates that, in many instances, come remarkably close to 100%. (The city manager’s salary growth actually topped 100%, as I’ve already noted.)
The proof [...]
i’m empty without something to obey
Ron Burgundy, royal retainer. Todd Purdum has just written the most perfect self-parody of late-imperial ruling class thought in, like, forever. Teasing Purdum’s 10,000-word Vanity Fair slopfest on its website, the magazine’s editors introduce the effort with these terrifying words: “Using history as his backdrop, Purdum spends a day inside the West Wing…”
Oh dear.
“It used to [...]
and then, keep looking
Robert Rizzo, city manager salaries, yadda yadda. And now everyone and his grandmother are looking at how much their own city manager is paid.
But. There are 480 incorporated cities in California.
If you take the word of the California Special Districts Association, there are at least 2,300 special districts in the state. If you believe the [...]
congratulations, we’re showing you the door
Rosemead, part two. Tax money to burn.
I first heard about Oliver Chi from the indescribably sharp Claremont Insider, a local blog that does better journalism than the several newspapers in town. More than a year ago, the Insider covered much of the ground I’m about to revisit. But with documents in hand, it’s worth another look — [...]
let’s just eat the whole thing
Here comes a perfect illustration of the way local governments behaved during the bubble years.
A quick note on the way there: the promised second half of my look at the City of Rosemead has been delayed by a two year-old who believes with all her strength that sleeping is for other people. If the universe [...]