Spike:

I hope the city street cleaner visits Dodge Street again to clean up the Chicago fireworks mess perpetrated by our slumlord from 7th Street.

Did this group of people have a city permit to destroy our quality of life for two nights with their damn fireworks that were big enough to shake the homes of nearby residents? The neighborhood shook for over eight hours of constant explosions with no law enforcement anywhere to be found.

I wonder how many calls they got complaining about it and why didn’t they put a stop to it Friday night when it all began. What kind of low life people would destroy a neighborhood through two nights of constant loud fireworks and I always thought fireworks were illegal in Iowa; so why is this group of surrogates allowed to disrupt our life for eight hours over a period of two nights.

How many city codes were broken and why weren’t they enforced? Just typical Burlington canned codes that are never enforced unless it brings in cash in one form or another (you can substitute favor in place of another).

Oh well, once the quality of life is destroyed it’s damn hard to get it back and the slumlords have no desire to do anything but line their pockets via the Department of Social Services and to hell with the neighborhoods.

Sickofthem

Spike:

"The Iowa Alcoholic Beverages Division improperly spent tens of thousands of dollars on artwork, leather chairs, bicycles, a camper, high-definition televisions and other products during the past four years, state auditors allege.

The agency also is alleged to have spent millions on contracts to renovate its offices without going through the proper bidding process. In one instance, the agency signed a contract with a construction company and just 48 hours later - long before the work was done - paid the contractor more than $1 million."

It’s really bad when the taxpayer in Iowa is having their taxes spent on luxury furnishings for state employees as though it were their money to squander in any fashion the deem fit.

Viewers should visit the link to get the low down on the Iowa Alcohol Agency’s high living off our tax dollars. The people working for government in Iowa have no shame and live high on the hog off taxpayer backs. Government is incapable of controlling itself and should be run like the prisons where everyone is accounted for at all times.

Iowa government is packed tight with people that see nothing wrong with wasting tax dollars on their own work surroundings and I would suggest they build buildings similar to army barracks, reduced their overpayment of salaries and benefits and let them work for a living once. There are also plenty of them stealing money outright, just read the papers and you’ll read about them provided they get caught.

No one is accountable in government nor are they responsible since most are democrats and this means their “special people” in that they couldn’t find work in the private sector where accountability is the name of the game and all that’s left for them is state jobs where accountability and responsibility are not a requirement; so we’re stuck with them even at premium salaries 45% higher than the private sector when doing the same job.

The foxes are in the hen house in Iowa.

Disgusted

Spike,

"NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a recent interview that his "foremost" mission as the head of America's space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world."

A heritage of exploration is being exploited in the cause of a failed foreign policy. Whatever happened to setting high goals and meeting the challenge of a new frontier beyond the blue?

We have become a nation of whining apologists. As long as we elect wimps to lead us, it will not change.

JG

"Michael Griffin, who headed NASA during the last four years of the Bush administration, says the space agency’s new goal to improve relations with the Islamic world and boost Muslim self-esteem is a “perversion” of NASA’s original mission to explore space. “NASA was chartered by the 1958 Space Act to develop the arts and sciences of flight in the atmosphere and in space and to go where those technologies will allow us to go,” Griffin said in an interview Tuesday. “That’s what NASA does for the country. It is a perversion of NASA’s purpose to conduct activities in order to make the Muslim world feel good about its contributions to science and mathematics.”

"The cost of harboring illegal immigrants in the United States is a staggering $113 billion a year -- an average of $1,117 for every “native-headed” household in America -- according to a study conducted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)."

"...The single largest cost to the government of illegal immigration, according to the report, is an estimated $52 billion spent on schooling the children of illegals. “Nearly all those costs are absorbed by state and local governments,’ the report states.

Moreover, the study’s breakdown of costs on a state-by-state basis shows that in states with the largest number of illegals, the costs of illegal immigration are often greater than current, crippling budget deficits. In Texas, for example, the additional cost of immigration, $16.4 billion, is equal to the state’s current budget deficit; in California the additional cost of illegal immigration, $21.8 billion, is $8 billion more than the state’s current budget deficit of $13.8 billion; and in New York, the $6.8 billion deficit is roughly two-thirds the $9.5 billion yearly cost of its illegal population, according to Jack Martin, the researcher who completed the study."

Click Here for entire report.

"Over the past two decades, Iowa's Latino population has quadrupled.

"It is actually growing faster than most people had been projecting," said Mark Grey, director of the Center for Immigrant Leadership and Integration at the University of Northern Iowa.""

Growth by County
Louisa 17%
Muscatine 15%
Washington 5%
Scott 5%
Des Moines 3%
Lee 3%
Henry 2%

“Matching LIHEAP data with federal civilian payroll records, we identified about 1,100 federal employees whose federal salary exceeded the maximum income threshold at the time of their application,” the GAO reported.

One such case involved a Chicago-area Postal Service employee making $80,000 per year. According to the GAO, the woman, who was not named in the report, claimed on her LIHEAP application that she had no income. However, when pressed by GAO investigators, she admitted that she was not entitled to the benefits but wanted the money anyway because: “Times are tough and I needed the money.” She also said that she saw “long lines” and wanted some “free money.”

The entire show.

"After a year and a half of Obama, it's starting to feel like 1932: The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. The budget deficit is above 10 percent of GDP. Home and retail sales are way down. If that wasn't enough- 9.2 million people are unemployed. But despite all of this, President Obama is taking a victory lap around the country. He's calling it "Recovery Summer." History shows us that big government spending is simply not the answer to national economic problems. But, here we go again down the big government path."