((Editor's Note: It appears Reno County District Attorney Keith Schroeder has once again hoodwinked the Reno County Commissioners – this time into believing his office is in dire need of its own investigator. Since the issue rose abruptly and seemingly out of nowhere, The Effort dispatched its award-winning government writer, Cookiehead Perkins, to sit down with Schroeder to fill in some of the blanks. The interview was conducted in the massive new offices on the fifth floor of the Reno County Courthouse – offices awarded him only after commissioners and the district attorney trampled over the wishes and desires of the judicial district's chief administrative judge.)

 HUTCHINSON, KS --  The Effort: Thank you for speaking with us. Let's get to the first question on everyone's mind: Will the new investigator require an $8,000 office chair, similar to the ones you've purchased in the past?

Schroeder: “I think you're exaggerating somewhat ... we ought to be able to sit him down in an Office Max knock-off for about 90 bucks, thank you very much.”

The Effort: You seem a little testy.

Schroeder: “Well, my sinuses are acting up, I'm about to lose a couple of attorneys, I've got no coroner and there's a court reporter with her foot buried halfway up my a ...”

The Effort: We get the picture. Speaking of your sinuses, you and your chief deputy, Tom Stanton, seem to be ill or injured a lot. Could you tell us how many full days of work the two of you, combined, have logged since the beginning of the year?

Schroeder: “Twelve-and-a-half.”

( The latest issue of Time Magazine, due out today, names Gov. Sebelius as one of the top five governors in the nation.

The list included two other Democrats and two Republican governors.

 Time Magazine began it's reasoning with this:

      “ For Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, the problem was simple. "There were too many cars in the parking lot," she says. Right after the Democrat surprised political experts in 2002 by winning the Governor's race in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats almost 2 to 1, she needed to erase a budget deficit estimated at $1.1 billion. A commission that Sebelius appointed to find government waste discovered that the state owned hundreds of cars it didn't use. So she sold 700 of them and forbade state agencies to buy more. The money earned from the car sale was small, but it showed that the new Governor was determined to find savings anywhere she could ... .”

Read Time Magazine's web story here: www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1129494,00.html

Mark Rogers

    However, those of us who have worked long careers inside the VA bureaucracy know of an uglier side to this day. We know that billions of dollars a year are stolen from these veterans by those who treat the VA disability system as a scam.