Rhode Frog: Mayor Menard Works Hard for the Money

A few days ago I wrote about the Woonsocket firefighters opting to be laid off by the cash-strapped city rather than take a small pay deduction. While the bodies were still warm, The Valley Breeze reported that Mayor Menard will also take a pay cut... but only 3% instead of 5% like every other city employee. Why? "She accepted just a flat rate $50 cut to her weekly paycheck because 'she works seven days a week' " and has never taken a day off.
Well, firefighters and police have had the gaul to take a little time here and there (slackers, I know), but they have also risked their lives every single time they punched the clock. Their families lived knowing that every day with their loved ones could be the last. But it's still necessary, to keep the city financially afloat, to slash their salaries.
The mayor risked wear and tear on her shoes walking around city hall. I guess we can only expect her to sacrifice so much.

Bits & Pieces

Senator Al Franken has proposed a "Pay for War" resolution that would require Congress to raise taxes and/or cut spending before authorizing new acts of war, so that American foreign adventures can't contribute to the national debt.

In "The Long Road Home," historian Ben Shephard tells the neglected story of the refugee crisis the Allies faced when, at war's end, millions of displaced persons -- among them prisoners of war, slave laborers and survivors of concentration camps -- had to be repatriated to their homelands or resettled somewhere else.

For most of the last century, talk of secession, nullification and the rest of the extreme states-rights lexicon were relegated to the fringiest parts of the political fringe. But since Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, mainstream Republican rhetoric and proposed legislation at the state level have both warmed to the hoary idea that state governments can take their relationship with the federal government on what amounts to an a la carte basis or perhaps abandon it altogether.

Is the tantalizing dream of a universal library dead? Some scholars and librarians across the country fear it may be, now that a federal judge in New York has derailed Google’s bold plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore.

...the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office... finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

...Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in this month's Vanity Fair about the corrosive, self-reinforcing wealth concentration that has hijacked American politics, in which the America's future is sacrificed to give ever more money to an ever-smaller group of oligarchs.

Mayor Menard Works Hard for the Money

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