County Government Must Learn to Live Within Your Means!

County Government Must Learn to Live Within Your Means!

As Voter Apathy Turns to Taxpayer Rage, Glassel Calls for Moratorium on Levy Increases

Largely to protect Government Officials from the wrath of their own constituents, The State of Minnesota has enacted a terrorist threat law.

Taxpayers are urged not to use words like “lynch,” “mob” and “Courthouse” in the same sentence.

Oddly enough, punching someone in the stomach is fifth degree assault (a misdemeanor) while colorful metaphors levied against public officials could result in felony charges.

Certainly, taxpayers should remain civil and courteous toward those officials that openly misappropriate, steal and waste your tax dollars.

We are in a recession, a fact that seems oblivious to those in power. Levy increases of your property tax continue as though we were still living in the high times.

Young families are losing their homes to foreclosure at a record pace, while those in power, the ruling troika of Commissioners Shultz, Robinson and Gustafson continue a wild tax and spending spree at your expense.

Chisago County is at a crossroad. It is time for independent and free thinking leadership, unrestrained by the elitist power brokers that currently run our community.

We must look to our greatest resource, the citizens of Chisago County for input and solutions to our problems. We must engage in an open and honest debate about the future of our home.

We cannot allow the corruption, cronyism and “Good Ole Boy” politics of the present board to continue.

You can do something about it! Vote for Glassel!

County Attorney Wages War on Poverty; Janet Jails "Poor White Trash" in Record Numbers

Story by Uncle Lars Bob

The problem, according to Chisago County Attorney Janet Reiter, is simple. Chisago County does not have enough black people.

Nationwide, 1 in every 15 black males are in jail or prison. In a county of Polocks, Swedes and Germans, the County Attorney’s office was in a real pickle.

Reportedly, it was Assistant County Attorney Beth Beaman who arrived at the final solution.

Janet says, “Sure, we try to maintain county prestige by keeping up with nationwide quotas. We jailed a few “Spics,” Indians and Jews but them damned Jews had Lawyers, the Indians are governed by Tribal law and Mexicans are in just as short supply as Negroes in these here parts.

So Beth comes up with this great idea and we started to jail poor white trash to meet our quotas.”

Janet explains further, “Guilt or innocence is not the real issue. The objective is to get breeding age males out of the reproduction system. Of coarse, these white guys are not as prolific as Negro males. We have to jail two white guys for every Negro, but if we interrupt the breeding cycles of the poor, we can eliminate poverty in Chisago County.”

Janet continued “This has worked quite well to keep down black populations in those areas fortunate enough to have Negroes to jail.

The Sheriff’s Department wasted a lot of time and effort profiling blacks as they passed through the County, but them uppity, citified Negroes what can afford cars and gas hired Jewish lawyers, so we were screwed again.

We have this new jail to fill up, so we just lock up poor white trash. It would be a disgrace to allow this county to fall behind established incarceration rates!

Of coarse the new county jail will cost taxpayers over fifty million dollars. Paying these increased taxes will reclassify a lot of middle class whites to poor white trash status, giving us a much broader pool from which to choose our prisoners.”

When asked if jailing drug dealers should be a higher priority than prosecuting poor folks, Janet responded, “You whining, left wing, liberal, pansy asses are all the same. Prosecute the drugs dealers, prosecute the drug dealers. I get so sick and tired of hearing that, it makes me want to puke.

Drug dealers have even better Lawyers than them citified Negroes.

We would actually have to provide proof to convict a drug dealer. What do you think we are, CSI Las Vegas? Look, we can jail a hundred of these “white trash muthas” for the cost of trying just one drug dealer.

It just does not make good economic sense to go after the drug dealers.

Our Judges are just as determined to get this white trash off the streets as we are. Just put yourself in the Judge’s shoes for a minute. You earn about a million bucks a year with your salary from the state and the stock tips you get from the lawyers employed by the drug dealers.

You’re driving your Mercedes to your ten million dollar lake home after a hard day of jailing this white scum and you have to drive past all those rusted out old Pontiacs and Fords, poor people cashing in their food stamps at the same grocery store where you shop.

Hell, you’d jail the bassards yourself, just so you wouldn’t have to wait behind them in the checkout line while they buy their lottery tickets. Like these morons would ever get rich?”

One can only ask this question, “What would we do without Beth and Janet?”

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The story above is not true. It is a parody of a news story. It is not a real news story, which should be obvious from the content. When a story, as the one above is so obviously untrue when read by intelligent people, no disclaimer is required.

The Case for Jury Nullification

Reprinted without permission from Time Magazine and the Wire
Because it is important-Jonathan P. Glassel

"If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest.

If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional."

We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they've invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.

These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?

And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could.

Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones.

To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.

The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined.

In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that.

Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.

What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.

Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.

"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day.

In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.

The authors are all members of the writing staff of HBO's The Wire, which concludes its five-year run on March 9

High Tech Hoosegow or Debtor’s Prison?

Lynn’s Desperate Gamble to Win Re-Election

Opinion and Political Commentary by Jonathan P. Glassel

Let sleeping dogs lie, as the old saying goes. A Forty Million Dollar Boondoggle was dead, or so we thought. Commissioners Robinson and Gustafson seemed perfectly willing to leave the issue lie during an election year.

Overriding Commissioners Gustafson and Robinson, County Chair Lynn Schultz has revived the jail issue and is determined to ramrod the jail project into fruition by year’s end, with final Board approval coming after the fall elections, possibly in a “lame duck” capacity should she lose her bid for re-election.

In a down economy, with angry taxpayers nearing revolt, pushing a boondoggle of this magnitude would seem to be political suicide.

However, Schultz is preparing for a tough rematch with Lora Walker this fall. As you will recall, Lynn defeated Lora by a mere 132 votes in the 2004 election.

An invigorated and reinvented Walker is likely to build relationships with elected township officials, alienated (pissed off) by Commissioner Schultz. It is rumored that Walker has taken a leave of absence from her regular job for the sole purpose of regaining her seat on the County Board.

Lora Walker made some “bonehead mistakes” while in office that cost her 132 votes and the election. Right, wrong or indifferent the Libraries have been built and I do not look for Lora to repeat the mistake of imposing undue burden on the landowners along the St. Croix River. It should be noted that Walker did act to repeal that mistake.

Walker has maintained her popularity in the District. People forgave her mistakes, which seem minor when confronted with the inane, self absorbed, high handed and vindictive bitchiness of Commissioner Schultz.

Hence, the logic behind Schultz’s Gamble.

Lynn has tasted power and wants more. She does not want to be remembered as a “one termer.”

Re-Election could well cost Schultz $50,000 or more facing an extremely popular opponent like Walker. Lynn needs money, lots of it and the support of County employees, most notably from Sheriff Rivard and the Sheriff’s Department.

Unlike most taxpayers, Government employees are “recession proof,” with a select few getting paid while they attend college at your expense. Chisago County employs 500 to 600 people. Assuming a spouse at home, people within their sphere of influence and County employees can supply the winning votes to re-elect most anyone, even Lynn Schultz.

Public Works Projects like the new jail, are job security for those on the County (your) payroll.

Though the jail will cost you, the taxpayers of Chisago County over Forty Million dollars, it could well assure Schultz’s re-election. If re-elected, you can expect Schultz to push for a new HHS (Health Human Services) facility at a cost of a mere Ten Million dollars of your money. Lavishing that much of your money on our civil servants could keep Lynn in power for years to come.

The darker and more troubling question is this. With fifty million of your tax dollars up for grab, with slim pickings in Government Contracts, would Jail Supporters pick up the cost of Lynn’s campaign to assure her vote for the project?

In local elections, most voters never know or understand the issues confronting them. Most vote on name recognition. Fifty Grand will buy a lot of name recognition. The families of County employees may well supply the margin to keep Lynn spending your money for years to come.

Absolute power corrupts, absolutely. The circle is complete. The Patsy has become Queen, usurping power from a scandal weakened Bob Gustafson while leading Commissioner Robinson around by his nose ring.

As the ancient Emperor Vespasian looted the Temple of Jerusalem to build the famed Coliseum of Rome, Lynn seeks to leave her name on as many cornerstones as possible, thereby assuring her immortality for all eternity in Chisago County by looting the Temple of the Taxpayer.

(First in a series)