Concerning the article about Councilman Fiore, and the multiple public-funded international trip, I think these types of inquiries and articles tend to miss the much larger point.

Rather than focusing anecdotally on whether an isolated public official is taking too many trips, and how necessary or beneficial they are to the performance of her duties and overall public benefit, we need to move the focus away from analyzing these isolated examples.

If we merely analyze these matters on a case-by-case basis as they arise, it confirms some false premise that presumably public officials should often be taking public-funded international trips, but that we merely need to be careful to make sure there is not an occasional individual who overuses the trips and perks.

Instead, we should take an overall approach that this climate needs to stop and that most of these trips by public officials seldom benefits the public and is nothing but another ultra-expensive glorified vacation for the politician.

And I say this not from the point-of-view of a fiscally responsible Republican watchdog, but instead from the perspective of(as my so-called friends characterize me) a fiscally irresponsible left-leaning Democrat.

But putting my lame attempts at levity aside, these trips are almost always complete bullshit. At least Commissioner Brown intends to tighten the reins on all this. We shall see.

In these economic times(or at any other times, for the matter)the clear purpose of the trips needs to be much more clearly delineated, with much more of a cost-benefit analysis and what will specially be learned that benefits us, and to the best extent possible, explain and document how that will ultimately save us money, or increase the functioning level of certain entities, etc.

Instead, this b.s. that "well we can't break it down in dollars, but creating more diplomacy and good will with these countries will ultimately be in our interests." That may be a passable rationale if you are sending the President or some real high-ranking public official to a country with have a fractured relationship with..

But instead we get garbage about how a plethora of new members of congress(or, worse yet, representatives from state legislatures or from municipalities of a state)are sent to Italy, Spain, or other countries many people would love to vacation at, to find out "how they do things."

How they do what? These countries, where these useless, low-ranking new or back bench ineffectual politicians vacation to at public expense, tend to be countries we are long-term allies with, where there are no conflicts we need to apply diplomacy to, nothing specifically we seek to learn from them that we can't learn by far less expensive means, and which(not so coincidentally) are some of the standard countries people dream of vacationing at.

For example,you don't need some newly elected, or worthless back-bench, members of a State Assembly to take vacations to visit Portugal, France, Italy or Greece(the whole time dining with other newly elected State Assembly members at the most expensive restaurants, but often with no representative of that foreign government being present)so they can learn how "things are done" over there.

It's all b.s. Seldom helps anyone(except the vacationing politicians who get all these wonderful freebies).So, rather than focusing on this particular politician, we should start with a much broader premise that most of these public-paid trips are to be avoided unless there is some really compelling purpose behind the meaningless "good will" moniker. These trips tend to be to wonderful places where we have more than sufficient "good will." These trips are seldom to real hot bed parts of the world that we have fractured or challenged relations with, but instead are often to countries who are already close allies, and where you and your spouse would love to vacation to.

The most important part of the Fiore article: "The Review-Journal is owned by the family of Las Vegas Sands Corp. Chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson. Las Vegas Sands Corp. operates the Sands Expo and Convention Center, which competes with the LVCVA-operated Las Vegas Convention Center. Las Vegas Sands operates the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore."

Uncle Sheldon is less-than-subtle about using the RJ as a cudgel to bludgeon the LVCVA, a competitor to his business. I have a subscription to the RJ. I read the paper every day. I always just skip these articles. That conflict of interest makes the RJ "investigative" stories of almost no value. It's especially obvious given the frequency with which the RJ has gone after LVCVA since Uncle Sheldon bought the paper.