Wednesday, October 12, 2011

PSC Prohibits Plale Purchasing Privileges

OK, so that's grammatically incorrect. I should have said revokes rather than prohibits, but I couldn't resist the alliteration.

There was an episode of The Sopranos where Tony and his crew went after a small businessman who welshed on a gambling debt. They raided the man's sporting goods store and took whatever inventory they could easily sell, then used company credit cards to buy plane tickets and other big-ticket items.

I've often thought that episode provides a useful metaphor for what Scott Walker is doing to the State of Wisconsin, turning civil service jobs into overpaid patronage positions, hiring high-priced private lawyers at taxpayer expense rather than giving the work to the Justice Dept., and privatizing whatever he can for the benefit of his donors.

However, Walker appointee Jeff Plale and his staff seem to be literally copying that episode.

3 comments:

Tim Morrissey said...

Excellent analogy! First, the "Office of the Railroad Commissioner of Wisconsin" is a Tommy Thompson boondoggle; he created the job for his pal Rodney Kruenen ("Uncle Rodney"). Second, there no need whatsoever for this position, which could be handled by a one-eighth-time equivalent position in the state Transportation Department. Uncle Rodney was a harmless train buff; Jeff Plale is a career politician who knows nothing about railroads.

Dan said...

Tin foil hat wearer alert!!!

Ordinary Jill said...

Blogger's acting weird with comments again. It put Dan's comment in the "spam" folder (maybe due to the triple exclamation point -- I'm not sure what algorithm they use). I released it, and saw the display now says "3 COMMENTS" -- but when I clicked, I only saw two.