Gary Stein The Sun-Sentinel

June 8, 2011

Gary Stein
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33316

RE: Sometimes it’s OK to construct a universal from a particular – Some comments on your column about government waste on a Brobdanaglian scale in Broward County.

Big Stein,

Having heard about the $4,500 windows I biked from Bayonne to Jersey City to see them. The new school building there also had $900 student desks and $100 wastebaskets. Not bad for 1958.

15 years ago I went to the Broward County Board of Education to get some financial information. No one seemed to know the difference between capitol items and expense items. My explanation to the pleasant enough young lady is still valid. The big steel boxes, AKA refrigerators, in kitchens are capitol items. The milk, eggs, and cheese in them are expense items. I may as well have been speaking Kurdish.

[Incidentally, the Federal budget, making no distinction between an aircraft carrier and “Midnight Basketball”, can never be “balanced” in the sense that people in the real world understand the term. Adam, my uncle from my father’s side, said “What is prudent in running the affairs of a family can scarce be folly in running the affairs of an empire”. Valid when he said it; even more so today. At no time in the ‘90s, the time when the budget was supposedly balanced, did the Federal debt go down by one penny. Ever. As Casey Stengel used to say, “You could look it up”.

What is one common denominator, a trait shared by Hudson County and Broward County that might explain how these things happen?

How about one party rule?

The Democrats, people who know ab ovum the difference between the buttered side and the dry, always take Mr. Hinnisy’s advice to heart. “They seen their opportunities and they took’em.”

Rather than listing all the bills of indictment floating around it should be sufficient to say that the Broward County Board of Education and the Broward County Commission are extremely ethically challenged. Rumor has it that the largest renters of commercial property in Broward County are the various Federal investigative agencies.

Although they lack the panache of the Democrats I am sure that the Republicans would quickly master the art of stealing a hot stove. The problem is simple. By the time they get to the stove it’s cold

Until last year the only way a Republican got on the Broward County Commission was when a Republican Governor got to name the replacement for the Democratic Commissioner who went to jail for stealing from himself.

So long as Democratic primary voters will vote for Dr. Mengele because of his progressive stance on abortion, so long as district boundaries insure the near unanimous election of an OJ Simpson or a Michael Jackson, so long as the odds on manatee suffrage get closer to chalk each election cycle you will find pools that Seal Team 6 could use to prepare for their next target.

[Allow me to segue to the national scene. The outstanding foreign policy achievement of an alumnus of the Cook County School of Politics, the man who, “Ask not what you can do for your country” or “Tear down this wall” being taken, enjoined us to “Never take a knife to a gun fight” is the shooting in the head of the head WOG terrorist, is just another example of palm cards and bullet voting]

Perhaps Napoleon has the solution.

Before a battle he would select 3 soldiers at random. He would then court-martial them and shoot them for cowardice. He said it “encouraged the others”. It worked right up to Waterloo. And that you may recall, as the Iron Duke said, was a “damn close run thing”.

It may be worth trying for a few years.



Kevin Smith



PS – Lest you think I am prejudiced just against Democrats I offer as Exhibit A the United States Postal Service. It matters not one whit which Party is in the White House or which Party controls Congress. Beyond SNAFU, beyond FUBAR it should be obvious that that dog won’t hunt. Worse than there being no method for punishing failure there is also no method for rewarding success. Let FedEx and UPS have a shot at it. How much worse could it be? Conversely, the main argument against teacher tenure is not that a bad teacher gets paid as much as a good teacher but why does a bad teacher get paid at all.

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