Touch Base with the Long Lost and Hit Up the Fellow for A Favor

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/31/judge-orders-chirac-stand-trial-in-embezzlement-ca/?source=newsletter_world-news_headlines

The above hyperlink is to a piece about corruption in France that caught my attention. It shows that voters should be vigilant about elected officials everywhere.

I take an interest in all things French because I speak the language with a Lady Bird accent of course, and once on a lark while I was teaching at HCC I applied for and was rewarded a Fulbright grant to teach in France for a year. I pondered and reluctantly turned it down because I didn't know how my four children would adapt to France. They probably would have had a wonderful time because France has enlightened government-sponsored child care.

Go to the comments section and read John D's latest blasts. He makes a good point about my indulging Vox in truncated profanity. Vox, drop that habit. I know when you put your mind to it that you can write perfectly standard insults.

I am a teacher and know dumb and smart. John D is smart. I cannot figure out why he has fixated on me for his vitriol. The impulse must come from his childhood, from some figure or situation that deeply injured him then and that he still carries in his mental furniture of pain. Everything comes from our childhood.

John and Vox are a complementary pair. I sometimes feel I provide the Web space for them to go at each other. There is some kind of unorthodox attraction at work in their dueling insults. lee

Now here's a piece of good news. See below. I have known George Sheldon for a long time. When you live as long as I have, you get to know a lot of people. lee

John D: I have published your comments, but I will cut you if you use any more raw terms as you just did to Vox. I think the milder epithets can add color and force to a comment, but vulgarities add nothing but skunginess. I think you enjoy your being the only naysayer on my site; but to keep that privilege, watch your mouth.

Sometimes Vox uses vulgarities, but she truncates them so that they come across as funny, not offensive to anyone but you is my judgment. But I watch Vox too. I won't have my site become a haven for potty mouths. I am the teacher. I make the calls on this site. Look up some of Chaucer's epithets in Middle English and use those. There are some good ones. Let's have a little class in the cursing. lee

Dear Ms. De Cesare:

Thank you for your October 25 email to Lt. Governor Kottkamp regarding your inquiry into the head of child protective services in Florida. Lt.

Governor Kottkamp asked me to respond to you on his behalf.

In September 2008 Governor Crist appointed George H. Sheldon Secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF). Secretary Sheldon s contact information is as follows:

Secretary George H. Sheldon

Florida Department of Children and Families

1317 Winewood Blvd.

Tallahassee, FL 32399-0700

Phone (850) 921-8755

Email: george_sheldon@dcf.state.fl.us

The Florida Department of Children and Families oversees child protective services in Florida. To learn more about DCF please visit the following

website: http://www.state.fl.us/cf_web/ . As State Director of the

Office of Family Safety, you may contact me to discuss any issues you may have. I can be reached at (850) 566-5670.

Thank your for your inquiry.

Sincerely,

George Sheldon, Secretary
1317 Winewood Blvd.
Building 1, Room 202
Tallahassee, Florida 32399-0700
dcf-osc@dcf.state.fl.us
850.487.1111


Dear George,

Warren Davis of Governor Crist's office has referred me to you.

I attach a charge I filed with the state Child Protection agency. It is not the usual complaint against an individual but a charge against the administration and board of the Hillsborough County school system. Please read it and see my reason for charging the administration and school board for a situation that I describe in detail.

The area Child Protection bureau chief is located in Tampa and sits on the Children Board with three members of the administration---Superintendent Elia, Board Member Ethridge, and a administrator I don't recognize. The rest of the board is composed of the usual suspects that inevitably turn up on such boards. The chair is running for the County Commission seat of White, the sexual predator that the citizens will have to subsidize in the final payout of a jury's finding him guilty of sexual harassment. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see the local populace elect him again because when inattentive citizens go into the voting booth, that will the only name they recognize. Name identification trumps criminality every time.

I am afraid buddyism will vitiate my charge with the local guy, given his Children's Board seat. I am trying to find out the name of the new top guy of the Child Protection services. He is the fellow the governor hired as head just recently. I read in the Times that this new head is a Christian who believes in whipping children. That's just the sort of enlightened view we need in that job for sure. If you know his name, pray send it to me. I want to sic him on the Tampa Child Protection guy to make sure he doesn't ignore my charge because it would miff his school buddies on the Children's Board.

Don't sit on this request and pursue the usual government bureaucracy's flim flam to bamboozle a citizen. Pray do what you can on this problem. You might call up the FBI in Tampa to see what it is doing with my charge of corruption against the administration and board, using the text of the complaint that I will attach for your review. I complained to my Congressman Bill Young (Tom and I moved to our beach condo when we sold our house in Beach Park; he was the longest-serving mayor of Madeira Beach until he quit, not being able to take the bickering any longer. He now devotes him to those around-the-clock sports channels that I tell him will make him dumb.)

I also wrote to FBI head Mueller and told him I would like the charge assigned to the Miami or Jax office of the FBI since the local office is reputed to be knee-deep in reciprocity with the local political bigwigs, such as they are. I wrote Ms. Obama because I figured I would be on her good list since I sent Mr. Obama $500 the minute he announced in Philadelphia. I wrote the new state Secretary of Education Smith; if he were any less active in his position, he would be motionless. I also wrote the new national education. I have learned in my long servce in civil rights to hit all the buttons.

We still have no corruption investigation of the schools that are run by a bunch of crooks. Recall the Erwin case in the early Nineties when Erwin reported theft and graft in the Hillsborough County schools and asked the board and administration to do something about it.

What Earl the Pearl Lennard and his ROSSAC thugs did--including the board attorney Gonzalez--was to set upon Erwin to try first to convince people he was crazy and when that didn't work to try to frame him in some manner so as to fire him and deprive him of his pension. Mr. Erwin finally gave up on the people with whom he had worked for thirty years and hired lawyer Priscilla Ryan for a whistleblower suit against the board. Mr. Erwin won. The jury didn't believe a word of the lies that the administration and board rascals told on the witness stand.

Naturally, Earl the Pearl Lennard is Governor Crist's choice to replace Phyllis Busansky as Elections chief. Phyllis was honest and was going about dealing with the pile of debt that that Buddy Johnson, that pig's feet and fried-chicken restaurant guy, had run up in his incumbency. I can't wait to see what pickle Earl the Pearl will get himself into since I believe the graft he and the board were trying to cover up in the Erwin case all went to the top administrators and selected board members. Old habits die hard.

Pray pay attention to this request, George. You owe me for when Doris and I came up to Tallahassee years ago after you had lost your seat in the legislature and was shopping for just such a job as you have now; Doris and I repapered a room in your new house. You didn't even thank us. So now you must tardily do your duty to the kid here in my request to you for the help that I know you can give if you will.

The problem I see with our government is that when people get inducted into some posh bureaucratic post, they suddenly forget their promises to serve the people and spend all their time evading citizen requests for help so that they will have more leisure to cement their positions by coddling the influential people above them who affect their tenure in the government bureaucracy. Elected officials act the same way. They don't want to offend anybody and to hell with the citizens because these soi-disant public servants are maneuvering to run for the next highest office. I have just read The Wars of Watergate. What a country. The book exceeds my fears. I have even got Tom to reading it between football games. "My God," is his most frequent comment.

Pray let me hear from you, or I will assume you have filed this request for help in the waste basket.

I sent Alex Sink $500. I think she would make a good governor and that her opponent McCollum, who became an elected official in his bassinet and has never looked back, would use the post to prep for the next office. I had sent Ms. Sink's husband money. He ran the worst campaign in the history of the genre in Florida and lost.

lee drury de cesare
15316 Gulf Boulevard 802
Madeira Beach, FL 33708
tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com