Saturday, May 17, 2008






The biggest lie has always been to keep quiet; and the best life-enhancer is to provoke, unsettle, rile – in short, to make people face the truth.
Gore Vidal

From: lee de cesare
mailto:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com]

Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2008 12:51 PM
Cc: 'candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'Angie Manteiga'; 'april.griffin@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jack.lamb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'jennifer.falliero@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'susan.valdes@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'marilynbrown@tampatrib.com'; 'rgoudreau@tampatribune.com'; 'Letitia'; 'hooper@sptimes.com'; 'Tisch@sptimes.com'; 'tash@sptimes.com'
Subject: School Mess as Usual

Mr. Bob Herbert, NYTimes:

Your column today cites failing high schools as omen for the country’s failing in the world because we are not educating our young people to face the looming competition of a better educated world that values education while we don’t.

You say that the chief executive of AT&T, Randall Stephenson, said his company, based in San Antonio, has had trouble finding enough skilled workers to handle 5,000 customer-service jobs he had promised to bring back from overseas.

You continue: “We can’t even keep the kids in school. A third of them drop out. Half of those who remain go on to graduate without the skills for college or a decent job.”

I taught college English for 28 years. Most of the students who entered my freshman English classes from the Hillsborough County high schools couldn’t write even a literate paragraph much less an essay. I couldn’t teach them Shakespeare before I took up half the semester teaching them grammar, punctuation, paragraph and essay construction that they should have learned in the middle and high schools.

This situation is bound to get worse since the Hillsborough County Board allowed the superintendent of schools to download on the teachers an extra class period to replace their planning time; let her to inflict on teachers and students a grade-inflation plan that made the superintendent look good in the state education bureaucracy but which the teachers opposed because it deprived students of the skills they would need to get into good colleges; sat inert and allowed the superintendent purchase “The Spring,” which replaces textbooks with a gimcrack commercial doodad to make money for edu-business and perhaps produce payoffs to the administration and board members.

Critics automatically attack the teachers’ unions as the locus of school problems. As a veteran teacher, I can attest that teachers’ unions are way down the list of causes for the malaise in high schools. Somnolent school boards and ignorant, corrupt administrations are Problem One.

Hillsborough County’s school-board candidates promise voters to guard taxpayers’ money and to require more to be spent on schools.

The board in the real world has a history of allowing a system of theft to go on in the schools’ grounds department without intervening. The board allowed workers to be paid without even coming to work; the board allowed corrupt employees to steal supplies and resell them; it allowed a corrupt manager to rig bids for his buddies; it rubberstamped contracts with rumored favorite contractors close to the board who built shoddy schools whose roofs leaked, whose paint pealed, whose water seepage everywhere was significant; whose ACs wore out in a couple of years instead of twenty, whose doors and even their handles were second-rate or second-hand.

The contractors did shoddy work but got top pay with the board’s rubber stamp. The board allowed these outrages to go on without raising an eyebrow. It was business as usual and tra-la-la.Three board members still sit on the board who were there during the worst of the above problems: Candy Olson, Carol Kurdell, and Dr. Lamb. Just as long as it’s taxpayer money, the sky’s the limit.

All the Hillsborough County board is interested in is getting elected and having the social éclat of swanning around town to receptions, cotillions, summits, tractor pulls, hoedowns of any description pretending they are the local Pooh-Bahs of education. They dote on sitting on the board dais in ceremonial potted-plant panoply, and that’s all they do besides give each other Cracker-jack awards for imagined achievements.

They spend a lot of board time oohing and aahing over some board member’s or administrator’s getting a plastic Intergalactic Award for Excellence and Stuff Like That.

Instead of hiring one of the Ph.D.s from good schools with histories of successful performance and even publication, the board lowered the requirement of a PH.D. to a Master’s for the current in-house superintendent, Mary Ellen Elia, and pay her $300,000 a year, the highest I could find in a search of the Web. They thought an in-house operator would be more likely not to disturb their incumbency and to hell with the best leader for the schools is my inference.

Board member Candy Olson assisted the superintendent in mapping her current pay plan, which includes $37,000 in “performance bonus” for work the teachers did in raising students’ scores. The greedy superintendent is planning more bloat of her salary beyond this stratospheric figure with the Spring gimcrack plan that she bought without consulting teachers and will get no resistance from the board one is sure. Board members rubberstamp everything the superintendent puts in front of them. If anybody objects to no-bid contracts for the superintendent’s buddies, a couple of board members will leap to the administration’s defense and accuse the board member who asked to examine this practice of being disloyal to the board staff. One board member, April Griffin, enraged two members, Carol Kurdell and Candy Olson, by asking for examination of a superintendent buddy contract for $76,0000. Their jumping onto her has silenced this board member probably permanently. Courage among the board members is an absent quality.

The board lets the superintendent fill high-level, bloated-pay administrative jobs with sycophants and buddies without proper education or experience. The head of technology is a guy named Jack Davis, who has an early childhood degree and not one credit in computers. Mr. Dais was prominent in harassing and retaliating against a past administrator, Doug Erwin, when Erwin pointed out all the theft, waste, and chicanery in the various areas over which the superintendent placed him. Erwin finally got a lawyer, won the case and a $175,000 settlement from the taxpayers, and retired.

Lawyer Gonzalez’s firm reaped the benefits of the payment for the trial, one infers. The culprits remained and kept their high-level jobs. The main guy named McClelland who made himself rich stealing from taxpayers made a clean getaway. Ms. Elia with the board’s collusion even manufactured a boutique job for Dr. Hamilton, who doesn’t know the difference between the homophones “your” and “you’re” so that he could have ample time to dither about whether he should retire or not. This job was $140,000 a year. The board approved it. The taxpayers paid.

The head of building new schools is a woman with an early childhood degree. She superintended the construction of a school a big part of which collapsed and had to be rebuilt, but the contractor didn’t have enough insurance to cover the cost, so the taxpayers had to pay for it. What the taxpayers have to pay on a regular basis is the cost of the stupidity and lack of interest of the board members in doing the jobs they promised the public to do on the stump before they are elected.

A local newspaper points out that the city of Tampa just gave this same contractor a contract to build the Tampa Museum of Art. The publisher says: “ This company “built Symmes Elementary School in Riverview. That project’s walls cracked and buckled, causing $5 million dollars in damage. Did Skanska and its subcontractors stand behind their work? The settlement came to $1.5. The rest, $3.5, came out of the taxpayers’ pockets.”This bid situation illustrates the care that board members give to such business decisions that come out of a department whose head has an early-childhood degree.

The board approved the contract with the superintendent’s and the early-childhood head’s recommendation. Lawyer Gonzalez passed it as well. Lawyer Gonzalez has held the job for 37 years; he got it without its being advertised. He can be counted on to find some obscure precedent to justify any of the school-board or administration skullduggery. Then he hints that he will sue any citizen who points this situation out.

The jury in the Doug Erwin case ruled on the conduct of the school board, its lawyer, and the administration. The jury ruled for Mr. Erwin and against the school board and its administrative henchmen. That’s what the public would do at election time if it had the information that the school board and administration strive to keep behind a curtain of spin to fool the public about what really goes on in the schools under the criminally negligent attention of the members of the board.

With an administrative team of such ineptitude, the voters don’t have a chance. Stupidity and ripping off taxpayers in Hillsborough County occur

in a school system run by a witless, duplicitous, indifferent gaggle of board members.

Lee Drury De Cesare

15316 Gulf Boulevard 802

Madeira Beach, FL 33708

Leedrurydecesarescasting-room couch.blogspot.com

C: All members Hillsborough County School Board



Babylon English-English
SA (South Africa)
n. country located on the southernmost tip of Africa
SA (Salvation Army)
n. international Christian organization founded on military lines and devoted to evangelism and providing social services
Wikipedia English - The Free Encycl...
SA
SA may stand for:

Organizations

See more at Wikipedia.org...

Sa
Sa or sa may refer to:

See more at Wikipedia.org...

sa
.sa is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of Saudi Arabia. Domains of this type can be registered through SaudiNIC, a department of the Communication & Information Technology Commission.

Registrations are within these second-level categories:

  • com.sa: Commercial entitites and registered trademarks
  • edu.sa: Educational institutions
  • sch.sa: Elementary and secondary schools
  • med.sa: Health services (hospitals, clinics, etc.)
  • gov.sa: Governmental entities
  • net.sa: Internet-related services (ISPs, web hosting, portal sites, etc.)
  • org.sa: Non-profit organizations
  • pub.sa: Entities or individuals that do not fit in other categories, including personal names.

See more at Wikipedia.org...

Babylon German-English
SA (Sturmabteilung)
Nazi storm troops, German military units during WW II
säen
v. sow, plant seeds, seed
Babylon French-English
SA (/Société Anomyme/)
public company, company with at least seven stockholders that has the authority to recruit public funds (if funds have already been recruited the company must present a yearly balance to the registrar of companies), public limited company
sa
adj. his, her, its
société anonyme (f)
n. public company, company with at least seven stockholders that has the authority to recruit public funds (if funds have already been recruited the company must present a yearly balance to the registrar of companies), public limited company
Babylon Italian-English
sapere
v. know; hear; understand; know how, can, be able
Posted by at 2 comments:

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Let's get back to the Erwin Papers. When I had waded through the three fat notebooks and two boxes of papers on the Erwin case, I felt I had grasped the ethos of the administration and board in all its grubby diminsions.

When Dr. Grant, who shortly retired, moved Mr. Erwin into his job as head of buildings and facilities

Here's the Pile-on of Doug Irwin by Blackwell, Director Planning and Construction, Hamilton, Deputy Superintendent, Rampello, Director of Federal Finances. This is the push to make Erwin look whack-a-do so that his unearthing and publishing the rip-offs going on under these three's noses are merely figments of Erwin's imagination.

Blackwell:

SCHOOL DISTRICT OF HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY
PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS
TRANSCRIPT
DRAFT
28 August, 2001
SUBJECT: Grounds
INTERVIEW/Present: JOEL T. from) BLACKWELL, Director, Planning &
Construction
Wayne C. Dasinger, Internal Invest. Manager, Prof. Standards
Mike Saia, Senior Professional Standards Investigator
DATE: 27 August, 2001
LOCATION: Velasco Student Services Center Building
SATA: Mr. Blackwell, you’re aware the tape’s on and we’re being recorded?
BLACKWELL: Yes, I am.
SAIA: Also present in this interview is going to be Wayne Dasinger.
DASINGER: Mr. Blackwell, I appreciate you coming down on such short notice. As I told you before we turned the tape on, we’ve been tasked with looking into a wide variety of issues in the District in regard to purchasing, contracts...a wide variety of things. In the course of that, there’s been some statements or some situations, I guess, that were attributed to you, and franidy, these came from Mr. Doug Erwin, and I will tell you what he said, and this is all in writing here, which I have copies of, and then I will give you a chance to respond. Also, just a couple of genenl questions, as a director of new construction, what is your primary job responsibility with the District?
BLACKWELL: To oversee the employ...efforts of architects and contractors who we employ to construct schools and renovate existing schools.
DAS1NGER: In the course of those duties, are you involved in the bid processes at all? In regard to selection of vendors or contractors, or things of that nature?
BLACKWELL: It’s tough to answer because of the way the question’s asked. The bid process, really no. The only bid processes . ..well, on major projects, that refers to selection of
—1—subcontractors, I presume, we do have some sMaller projects that my staff did. I have not participated in those in quite some time. But, my staff does.
DASINGER: In regard to things such as selection of architect firms, selection of contractors, what is the District procedure for those things to happen?
BLACKWELL: The process is prescribed in state law, something called a “Consultant’s Competitive Negotiations Act,” and we follow those procedures explicitly. That means that we run an advertisement in the newspaper and we conduct interviews, and that the selection is by a committee, arid I participate sometimes as a voting member, more often than not just as a facilitator.
DASINGER: Who are the current members of that committee?
BLACKWELL: It varies. It’s not consistent.
DASINGER: I mean, where do we draw...what pooi of talent do we draw from in that area?
BLACICWELL: Well, there’s usually approximately a half dozen people on the committee. Sometimes it’s five, sometimes it’s seven. Usually of...there’s often one of the area directors on the committee. ..one of my staff, either an architect or an engineer on the committee. Mr. Davis typically on there. Sometimes the MBE manager is on there. Those sorts of follcs.
DASINGER: What’s an MBE manager?
BLACKWELL: Pardon?
DASINGER: What is an MBE manager?
BLACKWELL: Well, as is now, Mr. Henry Ballard, who is the school district’s MBE manager.
DASINGER.: That’s minority business...?
BLACKWELL: Minority Business Enterprise, yes.
DASINGER: In regard to land purchases, what procedure do we have for that? Are you involved in that at all, or what department handles that?
BLACKWELL: Um....I wouldn’t say I’m not involved at all; I have no meaningful role in it.
DASINGER: Who’s in charge of that process for the District?
BLACKWELL: There’s a site acquisition manager...I don’t know it that’s their real title, Ms. Jill Lemons. She’s located in the same area of the SAC building as I am, but she doesn’t report to
-2-
me. She reports directly to my boss, Mr. Davis.
DASINGER: Okay. So she would handle those processes, whatever they may be?
BLACKWELL: Yes.
DASINGER: And you’re not really directly involved in land purchases?
BLACKWEELL: Only when she asb for assistance, such as a survey or a recommendation on traffic or some such advice, but not in the purchase itself in any way.
DASINGER: The...and I’m going to quote from some of this written communication we have here..
BLACKWELL: All right. I
DASINGEIt .. .and this is originated by Mr. Erwin. He states, quote, “I discovered that many of our schools are built on trash dumps, some in high, areas of high concentration of phosphate, and we have to monitor the gases that are released. I, in fact, the plan was made to have the land evaluated during the driest time so that we could use it.” He’s referring to some wetlands somewhere. Are you familiar with any plan or any land purchase that we made that was evaluated so that it couldn’t, wouldn’t be designated as a wetland, I guess, is my question. I thinlc that was the inference here, that the place was a wetland. We evaluated in the dry season so we could purchase it, or something to that effect.
BLACKWELL: Not as described, no.
DASINGER: Any other description...?
BLACKWELL: Well...
DASINGER . ..in a similar vein?
BLACKWELL: Usually land such as this describes requires fill before it can be made useful, and you usually have to obtain permission from the environmental regulators before you can fill and their permission is more easily obtained in the dry season, let’s say.. .at least it appears to be more easily obtained in the dry season and that’s the extent to which I think there’s any truth in that statement. It has nothing to do with site acquisition.
DAS]NGER: Okay, is there any truth to that statement, that you’re aware of, that we build schools on trash dumps? I mean, we could have; I don’t know, and I’m not saying that’s wrong, I’m just saying that’s a statement that was made. —
BLACKWELL: That has occasionally happened and there’s quite a precedent, probably going
-3-
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LAW OFFICES
THOMPSON, SIZEMORE, GONZALEZ & HEARING
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Lee Drury DeCesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard
Unit 802
Madeira Beach Florida 33708

Dear Ms. DeCesare:

I thank you for your publication of my recent letters regarding the case of Satchel v. The School Board of Hillsborough County, Florida. I can tell from the tone of your posting of May 5, 2008, that it caused you much pain to have to publish something that is factually accurate. Yes, I had severe convulsions from my descent into candor. I have been abed since and do not expect recovery until you admit that Linda Kipley is the tackiest Professional Standards head in all of Florida.

Unfortunately, I will have to continue to insist that you do so whenever you venture from the truth, which seems to be a trip you take all too often. Listen, Sugarbritches, I have never in my long and vivid life "ventured from the truth." I have escaped the confines of the truth, galloped forth from the fetters of the truth, zipped in sprightly freedom from the dusty truth, and departed with vigorous eclat and great glee from the truth from time to time. But never have I ventured from it. I am not the venturing kind. Venturing is far too sedate for the kid here.

Having said that, I assure you that I have no intention of telling you what to think or write in your blog and you know that nothing in my letters suggests that I do. Doing so would be useless. And, yes, you have suggested that if I continue to speak my mind, you will sue me. You do in this letter. Remember that we deal in words here, and words are my specialty. Screwing-working-people precedents is your forte. Could you reveal whether you omit a comma after "blog" in the previous sentence just to annoy me or from ordinary ignorance? My only concern is for your less than nodding (Hyphenate "less-than-nodding.") acquaintance with facts. Facts are less than beguiling unless one bedizens them with the glitz of persiflage is my belief and practice. As for the “people who write messages to the blog,” anonymous comments really Don't use the superflous adverb "really." It makes you sound like a California or Beach Park Valley Girl. don’t concern me much and the fact that your husband had to ask who I was strongly Dump these superflous adverbs if you aspire to a cogent style. suggests that not even he reads your stuff, so the universe of potential commentators isn’t especially large, is it? Don't put three independent clauses in a sentence. Put a comma after "much." I can make my husband read what I write with kitchen blackmail, which I call the chicken-and-dumplings-deprivation strategy that all women know and employ ad lib. My writing upsets him because he is protective of me and thinks bozos like you mean it when you say you will bring me to the bar of justice. He, like you, is a Republican, and you know Republicans have frail nervous systems. That's why they don't want things to change ever. I have been giving my old man curtain lectures for almost 52 years on changing from the Grand Old Party of Bigots to that of us compassionate Democrats. So far I have failed. But I have a few years left for this project. Don't ever underestimate the elasticity and enterprise of a mother who has raised two Democrats and two Republicans.

You contend that your latest mention of the fees paid to my firm in the Erwin litigation constitutes the fourth time you have asked me for that information. Once again you deviate from reality. You have never asked me for that information. I begin to suspect email flimflam here. I didn't know you had turned off my email in a snit. So I continued to send you messages that didn't come back. I rest my case.

Moreover, I hope I have made clear my intention to not answer your requests, just as I have made clear that fees paid to my firm are public record when they are in the possession of a public entity subject to the public records law, not in mine. If that be not an anal-retentive, fusty old windbag of a sentence, I have never read one. No, you have not made the foregoing clear. God forbid that you ever make anything clear to a citizen of my meagre understanding. That would break precedent and transition you from rude to polite. If you want to obtain such records relating to the School Board of Hillsborough County, you should direct your request to the appropriate custodian of those records. I am unaware of your ever having made such a request. I am aware of it, and I am the one that counts, Mr. Hoity Toity Above It All. Do you say, "If you want information, ask Linda"?

As for your husband, if I am thirty years younger than he then he is 88 years old. No, he is a dewy 75. But if he weighs 235 pounds then he has a significant edge in that category, Vanity, vanity. I bet you weigh 275 if you weigh an ounce. I suspect your love handles clock in at 50 pounds apiece.so I appreciate your holding him off.

I do think you should know, however, that among the several clients I have served for some time is the City of Madeira Beach. Indeed, I performed work for them during the time I assume your husband had a role in the hiring of lawyers. He served that job a miserable twelve years before he quit in protest of incoming commissioners' firing our lawyer, who was the best the city ever had, my Tom said. While you characterize those I serve in less than complimentary terms, I assure you that I never got any indication that your spouse was a “fat-cat industrialist, corrupt school administrator [or a lazy-as-hog school-board member.”Did you fail to close the brackets, or did my shoddy scanner cut it off? I am going to assume my shoddy scanner is guiltless. Mayor Tom has snookered you, counselor. He's a born politician in the Dick Greco model and can flimflam his way out of anything. My consort, retired now from the corruption of politics, is indeed a "fat-cat industrialist" etc. wannabe. He just didn't have the get-up-and-go to achieve that Republican desideratum. It interfered with his TV sports and murder-mystery obsessions.

Lee Drury DeCesare
May 13, 2008
Page 2

Your obvious distaste for having to read my most recent letters brings to mind a communication you posted from a recipient of your mass-mailed blog who clearly considered it a much less than welcome gift. For asking that you take her/him off of your send list she/he received one of your trademark ad hominem attacks. I don't recall that request to take anybody off my list. Those who get my list are enchanted to get it is my impression. But if I wrote him/her an "ad hominem" attack, I want a copy of it. I am preserving all my ad hominem attacks in a family album for my grandchildren's delectation. Why can't this person use a block-sender on me? Or does he or she just like to call attention to him- herself?

Perhaps you will keep in mind your own response to my letters the next time someone asks you not to bother them. As for your comments on my shortcomings as a trial lawyer, I will note that: Dump that colon. You need an independent clause before a colon. (1) my win- loss record severely undercuts the validity of your opinion; (2) I didn’t try the Erwin case; and (3) your currently held opinion that I am “not pretty” enough to try cases is somewhat inconsistent with your earlier estimation that I am “one of the most beauteous cavaliers of the Legal Priesthood.” Consistency is the hobgoblin of creativity. You want me to be dull and predictable comme vous; but I won't be. I won't. I won't. You wrote that on December 1,2007. While my mother’s upbringing compels me to politely assume that you finally got your eyes checked, a small corner of my brain holds the strong suspicion that you are just a mean-spirited creature who when stuck for a substantive thought (as so often seems the case) will resort to vitriol with no concern for accuracy, one way or the other. Tell the truth: wouldn't you rather be around the vitriol producer than the goody-twoshoes twits of sanctimony who bore you to tears?

Have I ever bored you? No. And that's why we are today still conducting a Fed-X epistolary exchange to be published as Pamela II. I plan to send these exchanges off the to the Florida Bar journal, which, God knows, needs some jollying up. You certainly Dump this tendency to use superflous adverbs. It vitiates your style, which cannot stand too much more vitiating. evidenced that tendency when you responded to my statement to the Bar not by dealing with anything of substance but with a retreat to matters of grammar (and almost all of your comments in that regard were wrong as well, Ms. DeCesare, a fact anyone may verify by resort to any of the authorities to which you sometimes cite by title but obviously don’t actually read). Your grammar is shaky, Tom; you are not going to meet a better authority than I on this subject unless it is George Curme, now dead, but still top of the list of grammar gods. Meet me in the parking lot on any grammar question you want to dispute. I will wipe up the floor with you.

I am not aware of the existence of the “US Bar.” I assume you meant the American Bar Association, What a flatulent version of US Bar, which connotes not just law, but Wild-West law, where a hanging never came about except if the judge were three sheets to the wind. You have an appetite for the dry and dull. which is a voluntary organization having no authority over attorney licensure or complaints made against lawyers. What about the pompous dork Scalia and the other two Republican puke judges Bush just inflicted on us? I heard that the one whose wife wept during the hearings preens himself on his grammar bona fides. Should I write to those turkeys to cite your deficiencies? Then there's always Clarence Long Dong Silver to rat you out to. He can't even spell all that pornographic lingo he tortured What's Her Name with. In any event, I am not a member of the ABA, so don’t expect much from any contact that you may make with it. Now this I didn't expect. A Republican not a member of the ABA is a shocker when everybody knows Republicans are sticklers for belonging to all the ordinary, dull as a dish-clout associations because they lack the imagination to think of alternatives.

As you can tell, I did finally get around to reading your blog, Liar! Liar! Pants on fire. You dote on my blog. You live to read it. as I thought I should before responding to your unfounded Very well founded and carefully argued--but not dull. I had a wonderful time and made you spend many unbillable hours composing your labored, mendacious lucubration of a response. complaint to The Florida Bar. It was an instructive exercise. It was for you: you are not accustomed to defending yourself. Your mode is the autocratic attack on people cowed by your lawyer status and inferred power. I say to hell with lawyer status and pumped-up power. You are printing a lot of falsehoods, Ms. DeCesare. I hope to improve and double the number every time the moon is in the full. I will bay at it and pray to Hecate to help me bump up my lie output. You do not have to scour court files before uttering your thoughts, but when you make statements of alleged facts, you do have to a basis for them. Don't whine about scouring court files. You picked your worker-screwing field; nobody made you become a bloated-pay labor lawyer. You could be teaching Virgil in some flossy boys' prep school for a pittance. Then you would be pure and not bored out of your mind so that jousting with a put-upon citizen such as I represents to you the only diversion you can discover. I am saving your sanity, in fact. Any day you may doff your lawyer suit and run screaming down the court-house halls from reading too many precedents. The cry will ring out, "Send for De Cesare! She's the only person who can get his mind off his citation-of-precedents fetish.You very Dump "very." Don't use it ever again. often do not. The SLAPP statute which you seem to consider a safe harbor for slander protects you only from suits by an agency, not suits by individuals. Our exchanges are school-board related. That's our agency. You are its representative But if you are dying to sue me as an individual. I will try to attack you outside that agency one day when the spirit of adventure is upon me. Then let's see Torquemada's performance. You will make a fool of yourself, and I will call in as ally Mother Gonzalez as a character witness. The number of persons who have such a cause of action based on your commentary is legion. You really should consult with an attorney about your editorial policies. I consulted the best First Amendment lawyer in town--a fellow PBK member--gratis, and the information I have is that nobody bothers to sue bloggers. Bloggers don't have any money. I don't. I have sent all my egg money for the past year to Obama.



Lee Drury DeCesare
May 13, 2008
Page 3

On the date last mentioned you also wrote this:

Tom Gonzalez told the board to eat the losses on the two-section collapse since the contractor was not big enough to carry the catastrophic insurance burden that would indemnify the board.

That is what I understood you to advise after Pole Girl Falliera (your pin-up damsel in distress, for whom you currently spread your coat over puddles) had her faux hissy of alarm and indignation. I recall your mentioning an uncle contractor and let seep out that you entertained some sympathy for the breed.

You and I read words differently. That's what solipsism dooms us to--you more than me, of course. I am often able to get outside of my own head.

This statement, too, is false. You know it to be false, Don't use a comma before a trailing restrictive adverbial clause. I think I have told you that before. because you were in attendance when the settlement was recommended to the Board and had access to both the Board item which described the reasons for the recommendation and the public discussion of the agenda item in which those reasons were discussed. I asked about a bazillion times if you recommended in writing to the board that it get the hazard insurance to indemnify the loss. I never could prize an answer out of anybody. Linda, who is usually good at providing information that Hegarty is too dumb to find, ignored me.

I repeat: you may think what you wish. You are not, however, entitled in any way to write things that aren’t true. I hope one day that you learn that simple distinction. The most wonderful things in the world's history are things that are not true in the parochial sense, and yours, alas, is parochial. They are true in the transcendent sense. Think Aeschyles, Euripides, Sophocles. Think even Bill Maher.

My friend who's a commissioner in Indian Rocks says you are the firm chasing down the most recent city manager, who absconded with funds. He's a liar for sure. I tangled with him about his exchanges with the former mayor--another dork--about a woman alleged to have been sexually harassed in the city. I said I would not put up with elected officials' sexually harassing women. The theft-prone city manager claimed not to be alluding to the mayor's being the guilty party in an exchange of emails with him on the subject. Combating lies is about all I have time to do, come they so fast and furious at my poor head.

I told my friend to watch out for your hijinks, having described you as the beauteous Thomas Gonzalez, that you were a dangerous critter just dying to do mischief but that your chances of doing so were so frequent in your board job that you didn't have much time for mischief freelancing on the beaches.

Very truly yours,
Thomas M. Gonzalez
TMG/hs


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