(Jan 18, 2021, 5:30 p.m.) -- You've heard that hoary cliche about how Nero fiddled while Rome burned, well, our beloved mayor, Mr. Robert (Waiting Anxiously To Get A Job In The Biden Administration) Garcia, recently during his comical State of the City address dispensed enough hot air to singe the epidermises of those unfortunate enough to have listened to it.
While Long Beach might not be burning, daily shootings have become a too common occurrence, homicides are on the rise, and, natch, street crime is, too.
Indeed, Long Beach has become such a shooting gallery in recent times that a wiseacre pal of mine named Bernie Selmanson describes such a fad as Gun Fights At The LB Corral.
Mr. Garcia, oh so predictably, failed to bring up any of these ominous developments in his speech, as he blithely overlooked public safety, much like he did last May 31st when he allegedly ordered his police chief, the Honorable Robert Luna, to have his troops stand down which Mr. Luna compliantly did and which resulted in 210 Long Beach businesses being looted.
You would think Mr. Garcia would at least say in the face of these disturbing realities that he would do everything within his mayoral power to bring back at least a portion of the 200 police officers Long Beach has been stripped of in recent years.
But one must remember that he himself was partly responsible for getting rid of nearly 50 in this year's budget, and I'm sure he also played a vital role in disbanding the LBPD's gang unit that had done such stellar work across the years.
Mr. Garcia's LB legacy will in future years be a much-debated subject, albeit there is one area that I'm sure won't be in dispute.
Great Crime Fighter will be one accomplishment you won't find anyone mentioning in his mayoral body of work. . .
Why am I not surprised that our Long Beach Unified School District superintendent, Jill Baker, has entered into an alliance with six other school districts and handed over whatever local powers she had vested in her office to the state of California and allow it to establish the proper Covid-19 guidelines for re-opening the schools?
While this alliance certainly isn't faintly comparable to what Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill ceded to the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference on Feb. 4, 1945 -- most of Eastern Europe -- this certainly isn't a proud moment for those panjandrums who oversee these large school districts in California.
Why would Ms. Baker and her like-minded colleagues voluntarily relinquish total control to a governor whose credibility is so low that he's currently facing a serious recall movement and whose appetite is so immense that he recently was caught without a mask having quite a feast with 13 other maskless phonies at the tony French Laundry restaurant in the wine country village of Yountville.
I suspect these brave superintendents decided on such a move to take some of the harrowing daily pressure off themselves -- there are thousands upon thousands of Long Beach parents disgusted with Ms. Baker -- by rolling over and letting the state officials handle such responsibilities.
Of course, that gives new meaning to passing the buck, which, if nothing else, Jill Baker is quite adept at, since she certainly has developed unmatched skills at making a buck.
She astoundingly makes a staggering 345,000 bucks a year, much to the astonishment to every single citizen in Long Beach except those four members of the Board of Education who gifted her with such largesse and who actually passionately defend such lunacy (their names never will appear in this column to spare them a lifetime of ignominy).
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