Ed, Shut Up

What a stroke this guy is (and what a stroke Flannery is for even giving this the play he does):

• As Chicago aldermen prepare to pore over Mayor Richard M. Daley's $6.1 billion budget and the spending cuts and financial maneuvering needed to balance the budget, one alderman is suggesting a politically risky idea: pay cuts for police officers and firefighters.
  
  
• He said that means police officers and firefighters should have to take pay cuts to help deal with the budget. "I mean, they are employees of the city of Chicago and we have to make sure that the city functions."
  
  But Smith's suggestion has no realistic chance of being approved by the City Council.
  
  
• [Ald. Leslie] Hairston (5th) would like to eliminate the practice of paying police on days when they're "available" for duty, even if they don't actually get called in to work.

Well then Leslie, we'll just take that duty-availability as an add-on to our salaries and pensions as it was an "end around" play on actually giving us raises years ago. We did our part back then when the City was crying poor - what did you do? Oh yeah, another raise for you.

And Ed, you sure got a pretty mouth when you're talking about cutting police and fire manpower after you just voted yourself a 6% raise, voted your staff a 5% raise and increased your "discretionary fund" by $1.3 million per aldercreature. Are you giving any of that back for your $100,000 per year part time job?

When are these morons going to realize the City would function better with 30 less aldercreatures that with one less police officer?