Now See Here, Counselor

-----Original Message-----
From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 12:11 AM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on ACLU Wants to Write Bart's Story.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "ACLU Wants to Write Bart's Story":

Okay, why don't you state your name and where you work. You are traitor to your fellow educators.



Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 4:01 PM

Stop picking on my readers. You hide behind the safety of "Anonymous" yet browbeat others who must do the same. Why is doing so ok for you but not for other people? Some who work at HCC are anoymous like the French underground was when those helping Jews escape murder by the Nazis had to assume disguises.

I think you are that snotty kid at UF who has deserted his blog because nobody reads it. Go stand in the corner. lee

9/10/2009 Mr. Gonzalez: Loath though I am to commend you, let me do so. I was pleased when in the last board meeting at which I blasted you on several fronts-- lying, incompetence, and inability to control your temper on the job --that you upheld the First Amendment in response to Chair Kurdell's request after I spoke to, in effect, give her the right as chair to muzzle a citizen at the mike during comment time. You did so in an overlong response, but there is no doubt that scrutiny of your words showed you defended the First Amendment for a citizen, even for one not given to saying kind things about you. I call that honorable lawyering.

I have been following the Supreme Court rehearing of the corporate free-speech issue involving a corporation's movie blasting Hillary Clinton's unfitness for office. Theodore Wilson is arguing for the company, not surprisingly; he wins everything but flunked the ability to protect his late wife from the hijackers who blew up her plane over the Pentagon.

The way lawyers use language to propel their case at the Supreme Court always interests me. Mr. Wilson excels in this skill, although he is usually against the side I am for. But I am torn in this case because the government wants to curtail free speech, and the Republicans want to protect it. I am also sick and tired of those narcissistic Clintons.

I have been in a free-speech standoff with Ms. Kurdell for several months. I used to sign up to comment on anything that had to do with employment and demand that the board put all jobs, their descriptions, and their candidates on the Board Web site with hyperlinks to credentials of the candidates. One can see these in Ms. Cobbe's office in person, but they should be on the Web for people who can't or don't want to go to Ms. Cobbe's office.

Every time I have reviewed folders of job candidates my judgment says ability was not the winning criterion and that the board-administration patronage choices mock taxpayers' wishes to get the best-qualified person for the job. It's my opinion that the board and administration run a jobs program not based on ability but based on sycophancy and buddy credentials. I cite your job acquisition and Ms. Kipley's husband's getting an accounting job with a high school diploma and no experience while three or four losing candidates had accounting degrees and experience. One was a woman handicapped, the kind of candidate that schools' government grants and contracts say must get special consideration.

This requirement also obliges schools' having an Affirmative Action Plan for grant-funded projects. I have heard you in the past deny this federal equal-opportunity obligation for jobs for the recipient's retention of federal contracts and grants with most's requiring Affirmative Action plan. You are wrong. I don't know why you maintain this stance unless it is to cover your non-equal-opportunity hiring as board attorney.

I have discovered that your firm has not held the board cynosure for forty years as I said in my board comments on you on the August llth but that Mr. Cosby Few's outfit had the position for years before you got it six years ago. I want to offer you my condolences for your having made only three million measly dollars or so thus far with your $276,000 more or less yearly take from the tax kitty. You almost equal Ms. Elia's loot.

My suspicion is that Mr. Few handed the job off to you with his coaching Dr. Lennard to make you Few's dauphin. I don't know what kind of hold you had on Few, but that hunch is my guess about the succession. He may have downloaded on you the Erwin case because he sensed it was unwinnable, a loser for the schools, and a blot on his record. Mr. Few, I wager, didn't want his Swan Song to be a spectacular loss of a whistleblower case with a whopping settlement, making it as redolent of board-and-administration thuggery as Erwin's was.

All the which prefaces my inquiry of whether you know that Ms. Kurdell has maneuvered me into silence on agenda items. I always want to get up and harangue about jobs not advertised, etc.

Ms. Kurdell's first tactic in my shutdown on the age agenda items was to talk over me and toward the end of this exercise to say even if I uttered only a definite or indefinite article that I was not discussing the topic or some such chair piffle intoned in Ms. Kurdell's inimitable bovine style.

The final maneuver to prevent my comments on agenda items was having that twit Steve Hegarty come to me in the auditorium to deliver a maladroit explanation that I couldn't speak on the agenda items because I was forgetful. got mixed up, and said, in effect, that the chair and perhaps the board believed I suffered from Alzheimer's. Mr. Hegarty is head of Public Outreach and should know that such inelegant comments about an elderly citizen's mental status is not the best public policy to encourage the breed to continue its whopping contributions to taxes that fund the schools.

The third or fourth time Le Hegarty brought me this Alzheimer's message for squelching my free speech, I told him to get away from me and to approach me no more or that I would ask the black guy who wears those great floppy Fifties pants and acts as sergeant at arms to protect me from the twit's harassment.

I have asked the ACLU to address the board on this issue. If it does not, I go next to the attorney general. He is a Republican running against Sink for governor and has said recently that Obama's desire to give all Americans access to health care is "socialism." He's a sharp cookie to demonstrate such talent such a new slogan never uttered before in political history. These grab the attention of the lower quartile.

I know your political party from reading your political contributions on line. You have contributed to every Republican running for office in the area, including the Water Board.

So is Ted Thorenson a Republican, the one arguing the case before the Supreme Court for the free speech of a corporation, all of whose principals are doubtless also Republicans who want to use the First Amendment to paint Ms. Clinton as the Democratic Medusa.

My point is that I infer you don't know what Ms. Kurdell is doing with the First Amendment to keep my from addressing agenda items. I suggest that you talk to her and determine whether she is shutting up my free speech, which I am convinced she is. Either tell her to stop it, or I will ask her for a ruling from you in citizens' comment time. The former would save the board the black eye of shutting down free speech and smearing your lawyer status with the tint of bad practice for condoning it.

Lee Drury De Cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708 tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com Justices Are Pressed for a Broad Ruling in Campaign Case By ADAM LIPTAK Published: September 9, 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/us/politics/10scotus.html?_r=1&nl=us&emc=politicsemailema3