Last week, Pergelator opined:
I’ve been hearing about the clown show in Washington D. C. since forever and I’m thinking maybe we need a different arrangement. Instead of having Congress decide everything, maybe we should hire a manager to actually run the country, the way some city councils hire a manager to run their city. That way the clowns in Congress could concentrate on what’s important to them (which is performing on stage for the public) and the manager could worry about actually running the country. The important part is that Congress would no longer have the power to levy taxes, award contracts or borrow money.
The way the Federal government was supposed to work was that we had a manager type: The Executive, aka the President, who was nominally accountable to the people, executing laws passed by the legislative branch, the Congress. However, it has evolved so that unelected administrators in the Executive branch get to make regulations and enforce them–and they’re barely accountable to the people if the people don’t watch closely the announcements of proposed regulations and raise an outcry when some of the more expansive are introduced.
At the more local level, especially in smaller towns but also smaller cities, where the mayor is part time and the city/county legislatures more parter time, they introduced the City Managers, the chief unelected bureaucrat who ends up serving under various mayors and councils. Who become a power onto themselves, unfortunately.
Here in Missouri, several city managers have recently been ousted by elected officials:
- Branson cleans house after election; Board of Aldermen places city administrator on leave
- Call to fire Independence city manager in police overtime misuse investigation
- I saw another story from a small town east of here in one of the papers I take, but I didn’t clip it and cannot find it online now.
On the flip side, we have a police force threatening resignation when an elected mayor planned to appoint a new police chief: Pierce City, Mo. could have a ‘mass exodus’ of police officers:
”He attempted to relieve the chief of his duties and appoint someone that was not only not qualified, but her moral compass is so messed up that it’s unreal,” Hutson said.
The news story gives no real context to it, and the Springfield media has not followed up to explain who the proposed chief was or what the actual positions this person holds are. This actually follows another local town whose police force resigned en masse last year: Kimberling City Police Department chief, all of his officers announce resignations.
There’s a lot of distrust at all levels of government these days, it seems. And adding unelected authorities to the mix is unlikely to improve trust between citizens and government or even between government entities themselves.
The trailer for this film appears before one of the movies I watch fairly frequently–perhaps The Man Who Knew Too Little on DVD, or perhaps Dodgeball. So I have seen the trailer enough so that when I found the video at the antique mall when I had a gift certificate to spend, I picked it up.
So I ordered this book from Amazon a while back because although I have read some of his nonfiction (most recently 
My oldest re-watched Fletch earlier this year, and I told him to look for Fletch Lives in the watched section of the video library. The video library is only marginally better organized than the book library, which is basically because we own fewer DVDs and videocassettes to randomly array on the too-packed shelves allotted them. He did not find it then, but when I went looking for another previously watched (Coming to America, which my beautiful wife and I had seen, but not the boys had not). The oldest made a run through the stacks looking for that film and could not find it, either. So I took a try and found this film on the first pass through (and Coming to America on DVD on the second pass, but early, as it was like the third film on the upper left shelf’s second rank).
C’mon, man, you know this is the 1954 film starring Humphrey Bogart in one of his later roles and not the 1989 De Niro and Penn film. I mean, I guess I could watch that, too, since it is an oldie now–characterized not so much by black and white or bright Technicolor, but the lack of CGI and the presence of a plot.
This film is from the Ferrellverse of the early part of the 21st century, so it features some faces you’re familiar with if you’ve watched Anchorman or Old School, but no Wilsons or Vince Vaughn. It also has Andre 3000 from Outkast in an afro, perhaps a wig, in the height of his “Hey Ya” success. I didn’t recognize him. 
As you might know, gentle reader, my boys and I a couple of years ago went through the main line of James Bond movies in order, starting with Dr. No and culminating in the end of the Pierce Brosnan years. Actually, I started them with the first appearance of James Bond in