A newspaper uncovers some questionable public spending, and a public official is properly outraged:
But at least one government official has objected to the practice, arguing that the schools should not push students into voting booths at public expense.
Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott complained in April that Gary schools had taken students out of class and that the public paid to transport them to early voting polls at the county's Government Center.
Gov. Daniels wants to give taxpayers a break:
Gov. Mitch Daniels pitched a proposal Tuesday that would give taxpayers automatic tax credits if the state's banking account and reserves reached a level determined to be safe for weathering an economic downturn.
We learned a couple of weeks ago that the Fannie and Freddie bailout might cost up to $25 billion. Now, this just in:
Remember, the government's estimate of the cost to taxpayers for the S&L crisis rose from an initial $50 bn to more than $124.6 bn (not inflation adjusted).
In San Francisco, it won't be just the politicians who aren't allowed private lives. Even residents' trash won't be safe there:
Garbage collectors would inspect San Francisco residents' trash to make sure pizza crusts aren't mixed in with chip bags or wine bottles under a proposal by Mayor Gavin Newsom.
During the Monica Lewinsky peccadillo, Susan Estrich spent a lot of time arguing that a politician's private life was none of our business ("It wasn't the sex, they argued, but the lying. I never bought that. It was the sex."). Now comes the John Edwards scandal, and she's not so sure. For one thing, there's the fact that he allegedly enlisted a fall guy to take the rap, one who is also married and has a child, a pretty dishonorable thing to do. Then there's the effect this must be having on his wife:
Last week, I did a post about the Indianapolis Star's dreamy-eyed editorial urging the state to redirect public money from roads to mass taransit. Somone from the Department of Transportation has now answered it, doing a much better job of destroying the illogic than I did:
There are a lot of Democratic supporters of Hillary Clinton who are still so upset about their candidate's loss that they can barely contain themselves:
It's sad to see someone once heroic not know when to get off the stage before he ends up a pathetic shell of his former greatness. No, not Brett Favre. This guy:
Given that the "conservative" presidential candidate has Teddy Rossevelt for a political hero and the sitting "conservative" president has outspent LBJ, Reason's Matt Welch is dead on in noting the delusions of the left-of-center analysts who are proclaiming the death of the limited-government idea:
Happy 30th birthday to the Department of Energy. I loved this line:
Prior to 1973, the United States had no coherent energy policy.
Does that mean we do now? Then, we had a number of smaller agencies, often working independently of each other, and our oil demands meant we were hostage to oil imports. Today, we have a federal department with 16,000 employees and a $25 billion budget, and our oil demands make us an evev bigger hostage of oil imports. That's progress for you!
