No More Excuses

To Ms. Elia and all board members plus Mr. Davis

One more reason to vote for Obama: There are those who chafe a bit when we take shots at McCain's age, but there's always a deeper point lurking behind many of those shots (cheap or not) -- leading the world's sole superpower in this digital era should require basic understanding of those things which drive the modern culture and economy. Asked whether he is a Mac or PC person, McCain answered:

Neither, I'm an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.

School Board:

Only one school-board member, Griffin, has a Web page. It’s time the other board members get competent in computers so that they can construct Web sites as re-election approaches. People in politics like McClain, above, who tries to be cute about his ignorance, are no longer acceptable.

People involved in education leadership can no longer afford to be dumb about computers. All the incumbents’ opponents have Web sites. Mr. Smit came up to me and told me he had a Web site last night at the board meeting. He said he did it after I wrote and asked him where his was.

Get Jack Davis, head of technology, to teach you. Tell him you need a board seminar or several. Davis has not a single computer credit on his resume, but my guess is that he knows how to construct a Web site. Ask him. No, he’s your employee. Order him to teach the board Web-construction illiterati to mount a Web site so they can talk to their constituents, students, and gadflies. Being Web-site savvy may save your job.

When Bart Birdsall sent emails to Joe Stine of the County Library complaining about Stine’s cooperation with the shutdown of Wanda Storms’s bill to deprive gays of full rights in the library of which Stine was head, the gutless Stine, instead of answering him, went running with a citizen’s email to his boss. Pat Bean forwarded the emails to Ms. Elia. Both Stines and Birdsall are gay. When Bart Birdsall and I-- after Ms. Kipley and Ms. Elia had cooked up a case against Bart of using the school emails for private purposes-- attended Tiger Bay, at which Ms. Elia spoke, we asked her about the frame-up she and Kipley had cooked up. One supposes that they got Le Jack’s help in scanning the system computers. When we asked her why she sent emails produced at Bart’s home to Linda Kipley for a school charge against Birdsall, Elia said she didn’t know how to distinguish the “to” and “from” information on an email.

As we walked away, I said to Bart, “If the superintendent will lie flagrantly about something as easy to detect as this, she’ll lie about anything."

Lee Drury De Cesare

The Great Interrogation Spectacle

To the guy who's lost part of the Blackwell testimony piece. It's on my computer. So Try again. Maybe it's your server. That's all I know about computers, so find an expert. Isn't it enough that I know how to make fiend broth with eye of a newt and toenail of a cat?

To the two women who wrote me defending Elia's grammar: Be patient; I shall respond on the main page. I love these kinds of discussions. I will not forget you. lee

Also, put August 15th at 5 p.m., Columbia Restaurant, on your calender. You order and pay for yourself. And, no, you can't sit there and not order anything. The restaurant is in the food business.

This gala introduction will be the teacher-political- forum-school-board-candidate review. Official name: Teachers' Ybor Forum.

Be sure to come and introduce yourself. I like to see the faces of the people who send me notes on the blog. lee

Picking up on the Erwin Crucifixion Again

We are at mid-point of this saga. The first part involved Mr. Erwin's being put in the buildings job and discovering theft, bid-rigging, water damage in the schools from shoddy construction although built in the last five years, first-class payment to contractors for 3rd-class schools; ac's going on the fritz a couple of years after their installing when they should last 20 years; people in the grounds department's faking their hours and getting pay when they weren't working, not to mention the head guy, McClelland's (boss over the lawn workers) driving his school truck with school gas on school time to his plantation in Pasco. He constantly stole supplies right down to toilet paper and fenced the goods through his nephew, also employed in some unorthodox way by the schools. In addition, McClelland lifted three tractors and a hay baler, all school property;two school security men too dumb to take a camera saw the tractors on McClelland's Pasco property, but they were gone when the flatfoots got back with a camera to record the purloined tractors in McClelland's yard. It's the Keystone Kops meet Howdy Doody.

ROSSAC and the security police are no more adept at fighting crime in situ than they are in putting punctuation in the right place.

Mr. Lennard and, I think, Mr. Davis (Blackwell's boss) both plead with Erwin not to leak the situation to the press.

The administration fears nothing but the press. If the press doesn't know what's going on behind the closed doors of the ROSSAC bunker, the board feels secure in pursuing its japes and skullduggeries. But if the press gets wind of these public servants' contre-temps, then it will record the bad behavior above the fold of the Tribune city section; then the jig will be up. The reason I can't recall for sure if Mr. Davis were one of the two that asked Mr. Erwin not to squeal to the press is that his deposition is so scrambled with his acute memory lapses that he's almost incoherent. Mr. Davis is a master at tripping up the deposing lawyer by not being able to recall whether he learned to tie his shoes or not.

Mr. Erwin meets with Ms. Brickelmeyer and Mr. Gonzales because he believes Ms. Brickelmyer will do something about the crime wave he has been trumpeting for three or four years to Les Lennard, Davis, and Hamilton. Gonzalez and Bricklemyer promise that they will see that he gets the protection of the Whistle-Blower Act if he writes down all he knows and gives them copies. Mr. Erwin must be able to do this in his sleep by now after repeating these exercises that he has catalogued for Lennard, Hamilton, and Black for several years.


Mr. Erwin gives his data to Mr. Gonzalez
and Ms. Bricklemyer. They say, "Good fellow. We will protect you from all harm for providing us with this information. Go, our son, in peace and confidence."

They don't.

Les Lennard, Davis, and Hamilton amp up their torture of Mr. Erwin the Whistleblower Act bedamned. ROSSAC poohbahs are above the law. Bricklemyer and Gonzalez do nothing to thwart the harassers. So much for whistleblower immunity.

You should know by this time that the ROSSAC Protocols require the insiders to demonstrate impeccable skills in lying like rugs to protect the sanctity of the Party Line. Messieurs Lennard, Davis, and Hamilton recommence their campaign of driving Mr. Erwin crazy but deny the activity. The official ROSSAC cover lie is that Doug Erwin is genetically crazy--hallucinating crazy--and that you can't believe a word he says--this the three driving him crazy aver with piety knee deep, hands over hearts. Mr. Black's favorite code word for saying Erwin is crazy is that he "frets."Normal people don't "fret" when a fellow drives three tractors off school property to take to his Pasco spread. That's nothing to fret about. But Irwin does. And that shows that he is crazy.

You know opponents have run out of ammunition when they move to this "He's- crazy" stage. My experience is that they give me no time at all before they label me crazy. "Her? Oh, everybody knows she's crazy."

The ROSSAC proletariat dummies carry the rumor around high diddle diddle. It's an easy sell. It's the age-old lie trumpeted about people who don't believe what those in power preach that marks them as crazy. The ROSSAC Greek chorus all carry the rumor but will be eager to turn on a dime if the power brokers say, "Wait! We have a new read on that chorus about Erwin's being crazy."

"What is it?" yodel the ninnies' chorus. "The new rumor is he's catatonic and foaming at the mouth," says the ROSSAC town crier. "Can you say 'catatonic'?" asks Townie.

"Yes, but we can't spell it," choruses the Herd Mentality, all with early- childhood or home-ec degrees, or members of the gang are at least Linda Kipley's 3rd cousins.

Now that Dr. Lennard has declared Interrogation Lockdown, the Professional Standards people rev up for wall-to-wall interrogations of The Usual Suspects.

Tom Gonzalez hires an outside investigator--Glitzen & Associates-- to grill a bevy of school suspected miscreants but then suspends Glitzen's activities when Glitzen's findings replicate Erwin's complaints.

Le Tom is an officer of the court who can justify such maneuvers with a pre-Magna Carta precedent copied verbatim from the Lascaux Caves'walls. Tom cites the legal data painted right above the bison by a legal whiz of the Pre-Indo-European Era, mentioned by Darwin in connection with his seminal investigation into the dormancy phase of the Amlyrhynchus cristatus lizard of the Galapagos Archipelago--the black one, not the brownish-green one.

I cite this fact because when you are dealing with information that may turn up in court, it's vital to be accurate lest you be charged with trying to befuddle a member of the legal priesthood, all of whom are easily befuddled.

Le Gonzalez has held his sinecure as board attorney for 37 years, secured by venerable good-ol-boy wink-wink-job-getting protocols, the only kind that counts in the Tampa Bay Area. You are in good hands when you are in those of Thomas Gonzalez, Esquire,taxpayer-funded mouthpiece of anybody who can pony up the per-hour cash on the barrel-head the fee he extracts. He even brags of having an almost 100 percent rate of screwing workers. If the opponent is proletariat, Le Gonzalez's motto is,"Drive the impoverished creep out of town on a rail. We don't want such riffraff in the Bay Area's flossy neighborhoods."

Gonzalez routinely vilifies and discriminates against me because I am poor and downtroden and elderly.

Le Tom burns the midnight oil looking up precedents to impress jejune Hillsborough County outback judges so as to beat up on poor workers for rich industrialists and orange-and-tangelo-grove multimillionaires. Everybody keeps forgetting he is a labor lawyer.

What do such vile practices do for the reputation of the nobility of the law? Get the legal scamps a lot more despicable clients is what.

This epic segues into Part II: the INVESTIGATIONS.

In Irwin's desperate begging of Lennard, Davis, and Hamilton beginning in '98 to do something about all the theft, etc. going on under his and their noses, their pretending not to see it and their dodging him and sending him on wild goose chases around the ROSSAC fortress and assigning him task after task to write up and outline how to rectify the problems as penance for his being a busybody, it finally occurs to Erwin (thank God) that Lennard, Davis, and Hamilton are playing cat and mouse with him. So Mr. Erwin goes to see the board member who he mistakenly thinks will help him because she is the most ethical one on the board gang: Carol Bricklemyer.

Mr. Erwin's first mistake is thinking there exists such a thing as an ethical board member. The minute a candidate who has promised to serve the public and the teachers and students gets elected, there is an obligatory initiation ceremony in the board room at midnight at the first post-election dark of the moon in which the other board members and the senior administration assemble and chant, "Double, double, toil and trouble" Then Dr. Lamb throws eye of newt and toenail of a cat into the change-into-a-fiend broth boiling on the lectern on a Buntzs burner lifted from the Hillsborough High chemistry lab.

Ms. Edgecomb dips up a cup full of it, hands it to the oldtimer board member Kurdell; Kurdell waves her hands in a fiendish manner over the cup, passes it to Susan Valdes, who passes it to all other members of the board coven. Their collective touch will fortify and transform the mixture into bat's broth imbued with powers to make the person who imbibes it impeccably evil.

Finally, the last hand to touch the holy cup of the the unholy board-initiation broth passes it to the inductee and says in a spooky voice that ricochets off the board-room walls, "Bottoms up in the name of Beelzebub."

Mr. Friebourg, the head school cop, tall as Mt. Rushmore but not as smart, has been brought in beforehand to hold down Tom Gonzalez because Gonzalez wants not just a slug of the bat's brew but to clean out the pot, his having become addicted to the concoction over the 37 years he has been quaffing it intemperately in these initiation dramas; he is thus currently on the wagon per orders of the Tampa Police Department Crack, Horse, Gas Fumes etc. Squad.

Then the new board member drinks the vile stuff and wipes the green spittle from her (occasionally his) mouth and gets a hearty slapping on the back from the gang now ready to go to work screwing over the citizens, teachers, and children of Hillsborough County whilst supporting Elia's vile machinations featuring sky-high salary heists with the board's going along with her. i.e. making the teachers give up their class prep time to teach another class to solve Elia's budget problems; coercing teachers adopt a grade-inflation scheme that will produce statistics that will up Elia's "performance" bonus but will insure that students will not be prepared to get into good colleges and universities; paying for Elia's dumb purchase of the Spring edu-flim-flam flying machine, another scheme to up Greedy Elia's "bonus" pay.

But what was I saying?

Oh, yes. Now I recall. You must pick up on this thread next of the interrogations. Steady now.

SCHOOL DISTRICT OF HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY
PROFESSIONAL STANDARI)S
TRANSCRIPT
DRAFT

28 August, 2001

SUBJECT: Grounds

INTERVIEW/Present: JOEL T. (Tom) 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