COUNTDOWN! Worst People of 2014

[December 29, 2014] 

By Watchdog Staff
 
In a year of videotaped beheadings, school shootings, Russian invasions and annexations of eastern Ukraine (or, as Valdimir Putin calls them, staycations), Ebola, deadly Mexican cops, deadly American cops, Bashar al-Assad’s readiness to kill his Syrian fellows, Kim Jong Un’s funny/creepy hack of Sony Pictures, the release of those emails revealing that (a) Sony Pictures executives are closet racists and (b) (when they pulled the offending comedy film that irritated KJU) public cowards — in a year like this one, we’re saying, it’s easy to overlook the myriad outrageous acts of your local government bureaucrats. We’re not saying all those in government service are evil, nor even many of them. But they’re out there, the bad or merely incompetent. Watchdog.org’s national network of reporters find them. Every day, we produce investigative stories that reveal what Hannah Arendt famously called “the banality of evil” — the little ways in which otherwise average bureaucrats and others participate in acts that range from merely annoying or petty to downright homicidal.

Every day until year’s end, we’ll reveal more of the worst people we’ve encountered. Today, Nos. 15-20.

On Dec. 31, we’ll reveal our No. 1 choice — a person whose simple, everyday cruelty shines out like a 12-gauge flare fired into a child’s brightly lit birthday cake.

At a time when the saccharine of holiday spirit may sometimes overwhelm you, we offer this pause, this respite, this refreshment: Watchdog’s incomplete guide to some of our least-favorite fellow Americans. —The Editors

15. OHIO: Gov. John Kasich

Kasich was elected in 2010 as an anti-Obamacare crusader for limited government, decided in 2013 he could be a quantum politician, simultaneously against Obamacare and for the law’s expansion of Medicaid to able-bodied, working-age adults with no dependents. He captured the hearts of Ohio’s legacy press by asserting every vulnerable demographic in the state would benefit from his Obamacare expansion — and he didn’t need to convince the Ohio Republican Party, because he stacked party leadership with loyalists a year earlier. Kasich circumvented Ohio’s Republican-led Legislature to expand Medicaid, and defends the policy by lying about its funding and insisting Christ compels him. After a landslide re-election win against a Democrat whose campaign redefined the word “disaster,” Kasich is now basking in the sort of soft-focus spotlight the D.C. press reserves for Republicans who grow government using rhetoric that makes future reform even more difficult. MITIGATING FACTOR: If Kasich runs for president, count on his thin skin and quick temper to betray him at the first sign of an effective critique from a primary opponent. —Jason Hart

16. WISCONSIN: The GAB

When it comes to abuse of power, sometimes it takes an agency. Such is the case with the “nonpartisan” Government Accountability Board, Wisconsin’s regulator of campaign finance and election law. The GAB — including the six retired judges who lead it and the 34 staff members who serve it — is embroiled in several lawsuits, one alleging the agency abused its authority and sent the bill to taxpayers. The state lawsuit charges that the GAB’s use of a secret John Doe investigation created a “Frankenstein’s monster” of stitched-together administrative rules and laws. And this monster was unleashed on dozens of conservative organizations on suspicion of campaign finance violations. Two judges have rejected the GAB’s legal theory. Attorneys for the plaintiffs suspect the GAB may have altered documents related to its special investigators. The allegation is that the agency may have attempted to hide its tracks, but got caught in the process of legal discovery. The lawsuit against the GAB described the agency’s alleged abuses as “terrible to behold” and called the “monster” a “creature that covertly collects sensitive information on political activities that do not — and cannot — constitute a crime, all while maintaining a nearly impenetrable shield of secrecy.” That’s scary. MITIGATING FACTOR: The GAB’s “labyrinthian” campaign finance rules are so contrary to the First Amendment that they made easy work for a federal appeals court in ruling that the rules are unconstitutional. —M.D. Kittle

17. WASHINGTON: Kshama Sawant

Virtually unknown a few years ago, this self-declared socialist led the campaign to raise Seattle’s minimum wage to $15 an hour this year, and leveraged that victory — and a proposed “millionaire’s tax,” “transit justice,” the nationalization of major corporations (including Microsoft, Boeing, and Amazon.com), and rent control – into a successful run for City Council. When confronted with evidence that raising the minimum wage would kill jobs for the very people Sawant claims she wants to help — minorities and young people — she responded with a kind of inside-the-box idealism: “If making sure that workers get out of poverty would severely impact the economy, then maybe we don’t need this economy,” she told New Yorker magazine. Karl and Che would be so proud. In her most recent proposal to spend other people’s money, she’s demanding taxpayers fork over $100,000 to install public internet in Seattle’s tent cities, raising electric rates on business, and blasting her colleagues for not spending enough on welfare programs. MITIGATING FACTOR: She’s led protests against police brutality in the wake of controversial killings by police in New York and Missouri. —Dustin Hurst

BOWEN:

Milwaukee County Supervisor David Bowen was seen by some as a champion of low-wage workers, persuading his county board colleagues to pass an ordinance requiring that all government-contracted workers be paid a “living wage.” It turns out Bowen’s law produced a side effect —boosting membership in the powerful Service Employees International Union. Bowen wrote the law with SEIU-affiliated individuals and accepted campaign contributions and continued support from the union. Ironically, the law includes a provision exempting county-contracted firms from the living-wage standard — if they force their workers to join a union. The county’s comptroller says the living wage will cost taxpayers more than $28 million over the next five years and possibly shut down a county agency that assists the elderly and disabled. And it could get even worse for taxpayers come January. That’s when Bowen will be sworn in as a new member of the state Assembly, a position he secured with help from SEIU campaign endorsements and contributions. —Adam Tobias

Tim Larsen/Governor's Office

Does it get any scarier than President Chris Christie? In a meeting with potential supporters of a 2016 run for the White House, Christie was asked how he would deal with Russia’s Valdimir Putin. Comparing himself to Barack Obama, Christie said, Putin would know better than to mess with the New Jersey governor: “I don’t believe that given who I am, he would make the same judgment,” he said, mixing naivety with bluster. There’s a big difference between radioactive mushroom clouds in the sky and mushrooms on the governor’s pizzas. In the Garden State, the governor’s embarrassing double-standards are pretty obvious. Despite vowing to fix the public employee retirement system, Christie hired double-dippers while the state’s deficit grew to $170 billion. After promising transparency in government, he is playing hide-and-seek with his travel records. And his administration says nothing and hides much about a criminal investigation that implicated Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, his running mate and second-in-command. Nationally, Christie remains a strong contender for the GOP nomination, voters fascinated by his tough talk and bombastic persona – just as TV audiences are drawn to Tony Soprano, “Jersey Shore” and “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” —Mark Lagerkvist

During the Great Ebola Scare of 2014, when it seemed his agency had mishandled the first Ebola case in the U.S., the director of the National Institutes for Health did what anyone at the top of a federal bureaucracy would do: he blamed someone else. Speaking to the Huffington Post, Francis Collins said congressional budget cuts were to blame for the lack of an Ebola vaccine and the NIH’s ham-fisted response to the disease. He said the agency would “probably” have developed a vaccine by now if it hadn’t seen a “10-year slide” in support for research. Except the facts didn’t exactly back him up. Yes, the NIH had been mostly flat-funded since 2004 — if “flat” isn’t an increase, it’s also not a slide — but the agency’s budget has increased by 900 percent since 1970, and topped $30 billion this year. It’s really a question of priorities. And what have been higher priorities for the NIH over the past few years? How about studies that included feeding cocaine to Japanese quail, finding out why lesbians are fat and getting monkeys sexually aroused. MITIGATING FACTOR: Ebola wasn’t as big a deal as some in the media made it seemed, and has already mostly been forgotten here. So the NIH is free to continue blowing money on comic stuff with no real repercussions. —Eric Boehm

[This article courtesy of Watchdog.]