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Payback?Wednesday, Jul. 28, 2010 3:48 AMWe begin with a visit to Bell, California, a suburb of Los Angeles where city officials granted themselves six figure salaries ... for part-time jobs running a community of only 38,000 residents. While several officials have resigned, the rest agreed to take a 95% pay cut, but refused to step down. The video of Monday's town meeting is quite telling, as not one of the officals present display any sign of remorse. Bell residents may want to thoroughly audit the town's books, because I think outrageous salaries are just the tip of the iceberg. The city council doesn't look concerned or remorseful because they've still got their pile, as it were. And maybe they should be required to pay it back, criminal charges or not. Don't you just love the irony of Republicans waxing poetic about fiscal responsibility, but somehow, during a Republican administration and with a Republican Congress, $9.8 Billion went missing in Iraq? Tomorrow, Arizona's anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, goes into effect. Law enforcement officials have been receiving training on how to handle things. In Maricopa County, home to whackaloon Sheriff Joe Arpaio, they're putting up a tent city to house all the illegals they're planning on rounding up. This is not going to be pretty. Frankly, if you want to complain about illegal immigrants taking jobs away from hard-working Americans, perhaps you need to be talking to the corporations that have been outsourcing jobs to India and China. And as we see more and more communities facing cutbacks for critical services like police and fire departments, perhaps our focus needs to be on why our communities aren't fostering an environment where we're closing schools and paying for more police presence. It's fine to want to feel safe, but constantly allocating more money to police is a losing proposition. An ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure, and all that. We're facing the same issue at a national level; we've poured billions into two wars, neither of which we can say we're winning, neither of which seem to have a clear mission. We've created a behemoth of a federal agency that no one understands the full scope or cost of.
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