Well. Election Day. We in the Bureaucrat Beat Newsroom sipped coffee yesterday and shot barbs at politicos and the legalized bribery afoot in Washington and Sacramento. How to vote? Look very carefully for some hint of ethics, intelligence and, this will surprise you, kindness. The real deal, that is. A kind of detached balance that smells like care for the other guy. Yeah. It’s tough to smell, but try. Because if the one you vote for cares about the other guy, for real, he or she will care about you.

On to the inherent bad stuff with bureaucracy. A bureau takes on a life or rather an un-life of its own. The rules do not match with real life, usually, but with some fake reality that spawns more unreality. Bureaucrats wonder why citizens don’t trust them. Because robo-rules don’t care about people. The key to all this? Citizens need to behave themselves so as not to give bureaucrats more chance to create more bureaus to regulate human behavior. That’s one thing. The other thing – do the work to stay ahead of the bureaucracy and fight like hell if they do wrong things.

Okay. Now, you’re probably saying to yourselves, “What have they been smoking in the Bureaucrat Beat Newsroom?” We wish cigarettes, but we’ve accepted they’re bad for us. Earmarks are bad for our country’s people. We still have a copy of the 2010 Pig Book from Citizens Against Government Waste. It takes awhile to go through the whole thing – $16.5 billion worth of “special” projects. Here’s a good one – $1.2 million to fund the American Museum of Natural History for infectious disease research. The funding was tagged onto a defense bill. We never knew it. Page after page after page of this kind of price tag in the Pig Book. We need a freeze on all earmarks for several years up to forever.

To some it seems like the Administrative Office of the Courts will take forever to hand down their edict on where Inyo County’s new court building will go. Meanwhile, the AOC has stirred trouble in other county seats. The Sacramento Bee reported on El Dorado County and the wish of its officials to locate a new court building in the county seat of Placerville. Seems El Dorado County officials want the new court building next to the county jail. The AOC apparently wants it somewhere else.

It’s the same drama all over again. Remember what we said earlier about those who care and the robo-rules of bureaucracies? Yes, this is it again!!! In fact, people do matter, and towns do matter. State bureaucrats need to get over themselves and write an essay on service.

Hey, to those people who were “offended” by a comment Steve Klassen made, let me explain it to you. Klassen, in his presentation for a use permit to operate a medical marijuana co-op, said it’s easier to be a gay man than a marijuana smoker in Mammoth. People, people. Klassen was trying to express that medical marijuana has been solidly seated in the closet in spite of the fact that it’s legal in California. Some folks seemed to think Klassen insulted gay people. Good grief!! Can’t even get away with a creative analogy these days!! It’s not always about you, people.

Did you see 60 Minutes Sunday night? David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s budget man gave the Republicans and the Democrats what for over taxes. He pushed a 15% surtax on the wealthy because it would cut our national debt in half. Stockman said the top 5% of the wealthiest in 1980 owned $8 trillion in assets. Today, the same 5% own $40 trillion. Does this sound like a healthy society to you?!? We in the Bureaucrat Beat newsroom support Stockman’s plan. Quit sucking the life out of the U.S. !!

Of course, these same wealthy pay our lawmakers in Washington to down talk taxes on the wealthy. As we said earlier, legalized bribery keeps us in trouble.

With that, this is Benett Kessler signing off for Bureaucrat Beat where we await your word on our lives in the Eastern Sierra and beyond.