This Is The City I Love.

I don't usually write about local things, but I thought you might get a laugh about the city of Scranton, Pa. Pennsylvania has had a program for "distressed cities" that affords them some special opportunities that were designed to help them get back on their feet again. Scranton has held this designation for decades and decades. all through the prosperous years of the nineties. In fact It's hard for me to remember a time when it wasn't designated as distressed. Now being distressed during times of plenty is somewhat humorous, but during a deep recession with extended high unemployment it shouldn't be so funny. That is unless you're talking about Scranton. See, they have a mayor and a chair of city council who seem to hate  each other with a passion. Now you might say that that probably makes it difficult for them to work together. Not so. They just simply ignore anything the other does or proposes. So last year when the mayor proposed tax increases and some layoffs for this years budget, the council under this chairperson, instead, gave out substantial tax cuts with no layoffs and stated that the mayor could not unilaterally lay off anyone without councils permission. Which it presumably would not give. So part way into the year, the city was about to run out of money and the mayor laid off some firemen and police officers and maintenance workers. The story goes on and on. Now the mayor wanted to stop some retirement payment obligations, but the state Supreme Court had said he cannot do it. This sort of stuff has been going on  here for about as long as either this mayor and this chairperson have been in office. You could sell tickets if you could get the two to appear together, but you can't get them together, even for a council meeting where the chair demanded the mayor attend. He didn't. Th reason I write about this comedy is that it's so much like Washington, that you'd think both were written by the same playwright. Except they aren't plays off Broadway. Both are actually hurting peoples lives and don't seem to care. Whether it's a city council chairperson or a Senate minority leader, they both seem to hate the mayor/president enough to harm the whole city/country. Isn't it time to stop? Both?