In your area, are a lot of the politicians crooks?

Only since the beginning of time.

Yea they are quite bad here, apart from listing construction costs at 1.5 million euros for the local roundabout that could have been built for 20k, the mayor also likes to line his own pocket for funding his private business and having cops turn a blind eye when he does something that other businesses would get shut down for.

Isn’t that one of the requirements to be a candidate? The potential of some kind of scandal? And the more spectacular, the better?

No, all of them are.

The two terms are synonymous, aren’t they? It’s in the dictionary, I believe, third or fourth definition of the word “crook.”

Surprisingly, not very many. But then they could just be very good at hiding it.

Luckily, no! My local government is surprisingly wholesome. The politicians are well-known in the area and are mostly Frederick natives, so it would be pretty difficult for them to get away with much. It is almost exclusively comprised of far right conservatives, though, despite strong left leanings for Maryland overall.
(Although much of that is a result of severe gerrymandering, but we won’t get into that.)

But a nearby county, Prince George’s County (better known as PG County), has had some pretty big scandals in recent years.

No, the politicians here are very single minded, and goal oriented (anything goes) but they are not basically crooks.

Oh yeah. I don’t fully trust any politician higher than city government. And I’ve got Illinois right next door…

Generally no, but all of them are incompetent.

Yeah, there have been some convictions here of bribery of local politicans. One of them asked for a delay in reporting to prison until after his wife was released from jail so his kids would have a parent at home. Gotta live it. Living here I understand better why they have such a distrust of government. But, there are bad politicians all over the country. I wonder how it maps out?

I also think a lot of the politicians pander and manipuate the public like crazy here, but not all of them.

I live in Wisconsin, so yeah.

I don’t know if they are crooks, but they are assholes.

Criminalizing homelessness, pretty much every sittable surface in the city is partitioned to discourage people from lying down, information about where to go for support is nearly non existant, you’d just have to know about the homeless center that’s far far outside the city in the industrial section. Abusing eminient domain laws to out longstanding businesses. A corner market that existed for decades was razed to make a single house, Antique dealers were kicked out of their shops and forced to band together in one location to stay alive while their old locations remained vacant for more “affluent” businesses.

I bet the amount of money done to gentrify this city to make it more like Orange County is ridiculous.