taking care of business

and working overtime....

so I was looking forward to attending the criminal trial of "sometime News-Press five time Emmy award winning former ABC investigative journalist" Peter Lance, but I looked on the court calender and they moved it to late July...and no trial but rather a settlement hearing with Judge Brian Hill... Hill hears a lot of domestic violence cases, but I don't want to chase this thing until 2012...justice is a slow boat to China it seems....

so I looked at the new publication online called the Montecito Messenger and was underwhelmed....it was rather boring...the first edition needed a hook....not a bunch of old news about the Miramar and interviews with people nobody knows.... step it up people!!!

there's a bunch of stories the local news media won't touch..instead they are content to report on stabbings in Oxnard, car accidents, pensions of public workers, bank robberies..that's it..that's what their news cycle revolves around! and they are content to sip wine at tasting parties and attend ballroom functions honoring old Santa Barbarans with lots of money....it's too sick...when are the local media gonna start taking care of business??

unions vs nonprofits

so the News-Press released the results of its latest push poll..with anti-union slants..and this time they claimed 900 people responded...of course most said the unions were causing the budget problems in the county...on the Voices page they had two opinions by Team Wendy members Lanny Ebenstein and Mike Stoker... both guys had the same message to end gov't worker pensions and keep giving to nonprofits...

Lanny always repeats this idiotic line "government does not exist to provide pensions to retired government workers; government exists to provide services for the people".....
Lanny, lemme tell you something: government exists to compensate hired employees for services rendered.. government does not exist to hand money to nonprofits...do you understand that, you dumb fuck???

Stoker said as a former supervisor in 1992, he was trying to manage a 30 million dollar county deficit...were the unions to blame back then, too??? of course not...

if you read Stoker's opinion, it was a jumbled mass of confusion and self congratulations about what he accomplished 20 years ago....the point was Mike wants to save the non-profits..and all of a sudden Team Wendy is concerned about the poor and disadvantaged!

well, all those tax exempt entities that ask the county for money and the tax payers for money double dip all the time and councils always give away your tax dollars...and all these folks on Team Wendy love nonprofits..Wendy's got one in her own name..the Wendy Pee McCaw Foundation...she parks about 35 million dollars there for tax purposes, I bet...and the News-Press must be a nonprofit since it hasn't turned a profit in 10 years!!

so Mike wants the county to keep giving to the nonprofits....nonprofits that are sitting on billions and overpaying their CEOs!! that's a major reason why budgets are in crisis...it is easier to blame the unions and the public workers and Wendy, always looking for the easy way, continues to use the poor for political purposes...

there is no reason any government body should give handouts to the nonprofits..if they want to exist, they can raise their own money..and the county should do what Boston did.....start retrieving cash from the foundations who have been stealing from the public for too long....

BOSTON — The City of Boston has been mailing voluntary property tax bills to major hospitals, universities and museums. As nonprofits, they don’t have to pay taxes, but Boston Mayor Thomas Menino says they should. He is asking them to pay a quarter of what they’d have to pay if they were taxable institutions.
While Boston has long collected voluntary payments from its nonprofit institutions, it has done so haphazardly, with some universities paying millions of dollars, while their peers paid little or nothing." The City is to be given some credit for finally turning up the heat on some of these nonprofit institutions which get away virtually scot-free from paying taxes under a law that dates from 1830(!).

and.....I read in the Daily Sound that Mike's friend, JoeArmenrdariz, Carp city council member, was having trouble paying his property taxes..and I see Joe just sold his house..looks like a short sale (read in the News-Press real estate section) .....and I see Joe is now working for Wendy's radio station as a co-host of "Voice of Santa Barbara AM 1290"..that's Lanny's show!! remember when the News-PRess was doing stories on the SB City Council members with personal issues, like Barnwell and Babatudne et al...well maybe they will check out Joe's issues...

“What really impresses me about Joe Armendariz is he is a Republican that was elected in a city with a large Democrat majority. He was able to do in Carpinteria what Governor Schwarzenegger did in California, build broad coalitions.” – Andy Granatelli, retired professional race car driver

In short, I recommend Joe Armendariz for any opportunity or position for which he might apply or seek. No one could do a better job.” – Lanny Ebenstein, Professor of Economics....UCSB economics professor??? hey, Joe, Mike and Lanny are back together again....what next fellas, are you gonna conduct Real Estate seminars on how to lose properties??

but... I guess these guys will just never learn...if you preach financial and personal responsibility you need to practice what you preach...and if you go after hard working thrifty public workers when you can't even manage your own checkbooks, then perhaps it's time to leave the public eye and work on these things...or you could just run to Wendy when the going gets tough....

it's the work that we avoid and we're all self employed, we love to work at nothing all day...