Finally, a border state takes serious action to turn back the tide of illegal immigration:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on Friday signed into law a controversial bill that seeks to crack down on illegal immigration.

The sweeping measure will make it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally. It will also require local police officers to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are in the country illegally.

Requiring police to question potentially illegal immigrants sounds harsh even to my ears, but it depends on how “a reason to suspect they are in the country illegally” is defined. With the assumption that Arizona’s local authorities will behave rationally, this bill marks a big improvement over the leftist approach of making it nearly impossible for police to identify illegal immigrants.

Predictably, leftists are in an uproar over Arizona’s legislature tackling Arizona’s problem like adults:

“Our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others,” Obama said. “That includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona, which threatened to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”

Yes, that is the President of the United States, whining like an ACLU lawyer about how enforcing laws will ruin our trust in the authorities. Illegal immigrants are breaking the law by being in Arizona – right? Isn’t that what it means when you put the words “illegal” and “immigrant” side by side?

As far as President Obama is concerned, dealing with illegal immigration in any manner that doesn’t convert a lawbreaking interest group into permanent Democrat voters is irresponsible. Given Obama’s definition of what’s not irresponsible, it’s tough to share his concern. Federalism: sorry D.C. hippies, but we’ve still got some.

Friday, April 9^th is Tax Freedom Day, when the average American has earned enough to pay Uncle Sam and Uncle Sam’s various relatives what they demand. Ohio is somehow a day ahead of the average, so in honor of the big day tomorrow I thought I’d dig through some salary info for public administrators here in Franklin County. As boring as I am, I ought to make an effort to avoid any talk of numbers or statistics. As stubborn as I am, I won’t!

With employment and the economy in general down for the past year and a half, I wanted to see how the smallest of government big-shots were rewarding themselves relative to 2007 and 2008. Despite widespread populist railing against private industry salaries and bonuses, I expected to see pay increases for the insulated local bureaucrats our tax dollars keep employed. Given some of the things I’ve read recently, I was pleasantly surprised by the data.

A helpful CPA in the Franklin County Auditor’s office responded to my public records request promptly, with salary data on all Franklin County employees from 2007-2010. Download the Excel file if you’d like to check my numbers or do some analysis of your own. I’ll list hourly rates instead of annual salaries, as 2009 contained 27 pay periods instead of the usual 26. Let’s start with the highest branch on the Franklin County tree, shall we?

Commissioner’s Office

Commendably, the two highest-paid administrators in the Commissioner’s office received no pay raises this year. That makes 2008′s 6% increases in their six-figure salaries a little easier to swallow.

Department of Job and Family Services

Job and Family Services (which you’ll notice is under the Commissioner’s office on the county org chart) is more complicated because of new hires, departures, and title changes. I should also note that David Migliore, who was Chief Deputy in the Clerk of Courts office while I was employed there from 2005-2007, is hardly my favorite person. I spent my last 6 months – as a Programmer Analyst 1 doing Programmer Analyst 2 work – waiting to hear back about a pay raise request that Migliore ignored literally until the day I resigned.

⁽¹⁾ – Drop in Director’s pay from 2008-2009 reflects a change from Douglas E. Lumpkin to David E. Migliore. I don’t know who decided Migliore should be making around $130,000, but it’s nice that he started at a lower salary than the outgoing Director and didn’t get a raise in 2010.

⁽²⁾ – In 2008 the Department of Job & Family Services added a new Assistant Director, Anthony S. Trotman. The 2009 data list Trotman as a second Director, salaried at $62.37 – equivalent to a 27.86% raise. Trotman isn’t listed at all for 2010, but the additional Assistant Director position remains.

As I said, this is more complicated than the Commissioner’s Office, where the two highest-paid employees were the same guys with the same titles from 2007-2010. I won’t pretend to understand why a second Assistant Director was added to the Department of Job and Family Services in 2008, but I’ll assume Trotman served as some sort of Interim Director in 2009.

Clerk of Courts

⁽³⁾ – In 2008, Maryellen O’Shaughnessy was elected Clerk of Courts. When David Migliore departed for the Department of Job and Family Services, O’Shaughnessy brought in Mary Austin Palmer – and immediately gave her a huge raise in a poor economy. Either Mary Austin Palmer is some kind of management wiz, or Maryellen O’Shaughnessy doesn’t think much of the taxpayers’ money. See (4).

⁽⁴⁾ – Yes, I skipped down the list of Clerk’s office employees; this observation is too ridiculous to exclude. In 2007, before he departed for Columbus City Council, Hearcel Craig was paid $25.49 an hour as the Clerk’s Director of Customer Service. The position remained unfilled (to no ill effect, so far as I could tell) until David E. Black was hired. In 2009, Black’s salary as Director of Customer Service was $24.96. In 2010, Black’s title changed to Director of Business Operations and his salary increased by nearly 50%. Why, all of a sudden, is it necessary for the Franklin County Clerk of Courts to employ a Director of Business Operations? Isn’t that what the Chief Deputy is for? How does O’Shaughnessy justify creating a $77,625.60 business operations role while also paying her Chief Deputy $95,409.60?

Skimming through the other Franklin County salary information, it looks like our highly-paid bureaucrats are at least politically intelligent enough not to give themselves raises when unemployment in the Columbus metro area is somewhere between 9 and 10 percent. Except for the Clerk of Courts office, which seems to have suffered from John O’Grady’s move to the Commissioner’s office.

Happy Tax Freedom Day!

[Update: Additional follow-up on the Clerk of Courts available here and here.]

The folks behind Chuck seem to have completed their quota of dumb, repetitive love triangle episodes for season 3, and the show has bounced back in a big way. Tonight’s episode was another very entertaining one.

According to TV By The Numbers, tonight was actually intended to be the season 3 finale. Chuck is on the bubble again, it would seem? Allow me to refer you to last spring’s cutting insights on the topic of cancellation. Anyway, what would’ve made a great finale could also make for a good segue into what this season should have been all about: butt-kicking and laughs courtesy of a fun duo with a great cast of co-stars. Chuck as this guy. Sarah as this hot mama.

I didn’t think of this until my roommate said something a few months ago, but the relationship between those characters is the perfect template. Chuck’s got ridiculous talents, and is more of a clown than a tough guy (though admittedly about .04% as terrific as Wash from Firefly). Sarah is also extremely talented, but her sense of humor takes a back seat to all the skull-cracking she’s got to do. Like Zoe. They’re different but made for each other, blah blah etc etc.

So, yeah… if you’ve given up on Chuck as I nearly did during that string of lame episodes earlier this season, catch up! With any luck, the remaining filmed season 3 episodes feature a sturdy, non-high-school relationship between the show’s namesake and leading lady! Better late than never, and there’s still plenty the writers could conjure up besides everyone breaking everyone elses’ hearts and making sad faces 10 minutes per episode.

It doesn’t hurt that Adam Baldwin maintains a steady level of awesome.

The past two election cycles, we’ve put some heavy-duty hippies in Ohio congressional seats. Senator Brown and Representative Kilroy wanted to remind us of that, so they gave a fun Obamacare pep rally to a union group on Thursday. I personally find myself taking the lazy, jaded, “I prefer conservatives, but a politician’s a politician” mindset more often than I should. Mary Jo Kilroy sharpens the mind:

Kilroy said the health-care measures, such as extending coverage to the uninsured and eliminating insurance restrictions based on pre-existing conditions, will “improve the lives of all Americans.”

“It is paid for and will lower the deficit,” Kilroy said. “What is not to like about that?

“This is the beta version. We’re going to keep working.”

And let’s not forget Sherrod Brown’s contribution to this conversation:

Brown called the health-care reforms the most important cause since civil rights in the 1960s.

“The main reason people are living longer is because of activists and progressives getting the government to fight for things that matter to them,” the senator said.

Representative Kilroy describes as “paid for” a bill that uses 10 years of taxes, fines, and mythical cuts to pay for 6 years of outlays. Senator Brown literally thinks we owe our lives to the government and to the politicians dedicated to its limitless expansion. When our taxes go even higher, remember that Kilroy and Brown were shoveling more coal as the Democrats’ entitlement train went off a cliff. More handouts! More debt! More big-government rhetoric with no connection to reality!

Read those quotes again and let ‘em sink in. We elected these people. We probably should not have.

You’ve got to hand it to President Obama, he knows what he’s good at and he sticks with it. Obama is a terrific speaker when he’s reading from a prompter and the media acts as if finally, the spoken word lives up to its potential. Because we have so much more than politics going on in our lives, meaningless soundbites will always be well-received by a certain percentage of the electorate.

During an enthusiastic, campaign-style appearance in Maine’s largest city, Obama mocked the pundits and pollsters who say he isn’t getting a boost from his yearlong campaign to pass the sweeping reform.

Every story about President Obama contains some variation of this sentence. Obama continues to talk as if he can solve any problem at no cost, while promoting legislation that increases the federal government’s bulk without an honest number in sight. It’s difficult to defend life while catering to the abortion lobby; difficult to curb unemployment when your advisers are union goons and lifetime politicians; difficult to write bipartisan legislation in a room containing half a dozen left-of-left Democrats. It may also be challenging to save money by expanding entitlements, but I’m reaching a little here. At any rate, gravity eventually takes its toll.

That doesn’t mean Obama will abandon his “I’m from the government and I’m here to help — let me prove it by handing you these other suckers’ money” bit:

“Can you imagine if some of these reporters were working on a farm and you planted some seeds, and they came out the next day and they looked and – ‘Nothing’s happened. There’s no crop. We’re going to starve. Oh, no! It’s a disaster!’ It’s been a week, folks. So, before we find out if people like health care reform, we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place. Just a thought.”

This is exactly like that, if seeds cost $2,000,000,000.