FIRESIDE CHAT WITH A CROOKED GOVERNOR

Our dear governor, a woman with no ethics at all wrote us Washington state employees this today, using state e-mail of course.


"Dear Fellow State Employee:

As you know, we just finished perhaps the toughest legislative session since the Great Depression. There may be a special session to complete a handful of items, but the truly heavy lifting is done including passage of the operating budget.
I know the last months have been hard for you and your families too. There is uncertainty about the future of programs to which you have dedicated your working life, as well as uncertainty about your own future.
Although overall budget uncertainty has ended, there is still a lot of hard work ahead as our agencies absorb and manage their way through budget cuts to balance a $9 billion shortfall. It is up to us to make this budget work as best we can!
All of us, as a team, must carry out the work ahead with great sensitivity and care. I know this is not just a budget document. It’s about all of you, the families who depend on you, and the citizens we all came to serve.
In the weeks, months and years ahead, all Washingtonians will feel the impacts of the hard decisions the Legislature made – and we are now required to make along with nearly every other state – after the mortgage and financial markets set off the Great Recession we find ourselves in.
You are the men and women who will connect with Washingtonians at very important and personal levels – explaining, helping us set priorities, and serving wisely and compassionately.

This will be hard work, and your skills will be sorely tested. For example, programs and services may need to be adjusted to accommodate significant reductions in “administrative” spending of about $255 million, which means fewer people to deliver services.

Meanwhile, the budget calls for difficult personal adjustments. For instance, we may be asking employees to take unpaid furloughs to save jobs and money. The funding for our health-care benefits is not sufficient to cover health-care inflation, so we may pay higher co-pays.

Amid these difficult changes, I ask that we continue – and strengthen – the partnership we forged last year when you helped me implement vital budget reductions to better position ourselves for the challenges to come. Imagine the budget we would have if we had failed to take early action to save money.
I continue to need your skill and creativity to reform and improve how we serve our citizens. Reform of state government is not only the right thing to do – it’s now absolutely necessary. We are going to have to reinvent what we do and how we do it, and you have the ideas that can work.

I want and need your ideas. You are the people on the ground, and I can’t do this without you. Please respond to this e-mail, as you did last summer and fall, to share your input.

I’ll close with optimism.

I sense a change in this country that bodes well for us and for society as a whole. After years of pursuing other, more financially “lucrative” careers, more college graduates are showing renewed interest in public service. There is a new generation that wants to serve as much as we do. There is a new respect building for the work we do – which is to serve the greater good. What we do does matter. What we do builds the future.

So let’s renew the commitments that brought us to state service in the first place – to serve for the good of our communities. I’m counting on you, and so are the people of this great state.

Thank you, Chris"

I wrote her this sweet note of thanks, using the state e-mail system.


"I often feel like Linus…or the Peanuts character from whom Lucy pulls the football every time he tries to kick it. I keep hoping to read honesty and integrity (to include full disclosure) in your notes and have yet to read a shred. You say “you” (meaning “me”) helped you make decisions. No, only those you like and whose ideas are politically in sync with your own helped you make decisions. I did not. I offered many money-saving ideas, even ideas that were not politically controversial, not one of which was adopted. I criticized you in advance for taking Idaho (et al) taxpayer dollars through the King of all American socialists. You did that of course, so you could continue your reckless spending without sending the bill for that spending to your own taxpayers.

While your buds in the legislature wrestled with important matters, you know, like not shooting dogs, or like, say, deciding whether or not an 18 year-old in school was old enough to have sex…you know, these REALLY important things, (18 years of age as I recall is the age of full consent) you did NOT make tough decisions. By “you” I mean you and your clones in the legislature. You continue to subject the employees of this state to involuntary servitude through the unions, knowing full well as did your equally awful predecessor that the unions give to democrats and not all state employees are democrats; one of but many ways you stifle dissent. You continue to appoint minorities and women in numbers disproportionate to the population…even though the voters overwhelmingly dismissed “affirmative action” as a tool you were free to use.

You tell me in Spokane County (that Ecology is the Gestapo agency in this case does not relieve you of blame) I should not use phosphates in my dishwasher detergent. I do, of course, being one of the “soap smugglers” who buys it in Idaho until I am shown with science (not Al Gore science) that it is destructive and that there are effective and inexpensive alternatives.

You wrote that you are so pleased with the direction this country is going and I have two wishes for you, one is that the 20+ who believe that Barack and Christine can save everybody finally wake up (I am not optimistic; I believe your education and social service policies will keep a generation in the trough) and the other is that whether or not they do wake up, that the money dries up. I look forward to watching events unfold if either of those two occur. Of course, even ten years down the road I assume that will be Bush’s fault.

Congratulations on being a perfect failure as a governor. Perfection is tough to achieve in any endeavor.

John M. Tyson
WMS 2
DSHS in Spokane