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
See new comment at the end. lee Tampa FBI Enclave Gathers to Ponder Corruption Charges Against the Hillsborough County School Board; J. Edgar Hoover's Ghost Hovers Over the Group in the Upper-right Ionosphere. He's Wearing a Red Moo-Moo.
I can't copy and paste from my Microsoft Outlook Congressman's email until my number comes from the publisher to authenticate it.So I can't put on my blog the message from Congressman Bill Young saying that he had sent my corruption complaint to the Tampa FBI.
I hope he sent the copy of my email to FBI Director Mueller too, the one saying I wanted Jacksonville or Miami FBI to investigate the charge because the FBI in Tampa was too cozy with the Bay Area power people.
That'll get the Tampa agents defensive. Defensive is good. Defensive agents will give my complaint more attention if they find out I have sent a copy to my congressman and to their director.
Let's set on our FBI eggs and see what hatches out. lee
Reader log-in:
This is wonderful! Maybe you will finally get these crooks! I bet if the FBI really does investigate Hillsborough's schools a lot of people would go to jail, but I bet it is like you say. The local FBI is probably friends with the power people in Hillsborough. Let's hope not. Maybe some of the board members will end up in jail as they should. The fact that they misuse taxpayer dollars to hire friends and family is horrible. That is stealing from children. Are they ashamed? No. They sit on that dais and think they are important when they are nothing but common criminals who belong in jail for ripping off the area's children.
4:08 AM
We mustn't jubilate. My years of experience in working for civil and women's rights attest that moving the government's dormant ability to solve such problems takes patience and persistence.
Follow-up is important. Nudging the bureaucracy along ranks pivotal. I must think of ways to do that chore. Suggestions are welcome. A zillion heads are better than one.
Anything from practical to bizarre gets my attention. Usually nagging is the tried-and-true mode to get the train started. I excel in that. After 53 years of marriage, I merit a Nobel in nagging.
Four women so far have won a Nobel this year: that unprecedented number gives girls growing up today role models to compete with venerable and stinky status of being dingdongs and sex objects. I think of my granddaughters always, always my granddaughters.
Bottom line: let's put this FBI project on our watch list. I shall keep pondering ways to push it along. Pitch in and write me your ideas or enact them yourselves.
Once you get started in this work, you see projects everywhere. Evil is a growth industry.
Meanwhile, I rev up to file with the Florida child-abuse agency for endemic child mistreatment that Steve Kemp's cooked-up case reveals in the Special Ed leadership and board's and superintendent's collusion in this abuse.
The new head of CTA has signed on to my blog readers' list. His name is I forget. His role I don't. He has a lot of flossy degrees, including having graduated summa cum laude. Who hasn't? I did. And I did it with four little children under six hanging on to my skirts in libraries and lecture halls for the usual four years in the challenging academic purlieus of NYC.
I bet Mr. CTA didn't attend a demanding university or college or have children clinging to his pants legs while he got his multiple degrees. Women have to be twice as good as men to achieve anything. So I say to the new CTA administrator, bring it on.
The CTA has lain in bed so long with the administration and board that it has decubitus ulcers on its cowardly hiney. Let's watch this new CTA head dandy to see if he possesses the right stuff to do his job of helping teachers or whether he folds and sucks up to the administration.
Don't be afraid to comment on your findings and conclusions in this new-leadership CTA matter. Mr. CTA Head Guy must prove to us who stand vigilant caretakers of the rights of downtrodden teachers that he possesses the right mind set to deserve this position.
Teachers need somebody in CTA leadership who stands on teachers' side for a change--not another sycophantic ass kisser and power suck-up of the board and administration like the previous head of CTA. lee
Gentle readers, if you are going to send a campaign contribution, now's the time to do it. Even $25 puts you in the database.
I have sent what I have left over from Bergdorf Goodman's to Sink. She had the Siamese twins in her family. I think that is quirky and fun. McCollum calls the legislation to give health care to the 40 million who don't have it "socialism." The guy's all heart.
If you are not scared to, tell these pols that you request that they pledge to clean up the corruption in the Hillsborough County schools. No body will kill you if you do this. I will ask Mr. and Mrs. Irwin to come down from Georgia and be the stars of a fundraiser for your lawyer's deposit and put you in touch with the best First Amendment lawyer in town. He and I belong to Phi Beta Kappa's Bay Area Chapter. lee
10/6/2009
Dear Ms. Sink and Mr. McCollum:
You aretop contenders in the governor's race.
Politicians make promises during campaigns that they never fulfill. They especially indulge in gaseous statements about how important the schools are and how they will support the schools.
After observing the HillsboroughCounty schools for two years after the administration and board manufactured a Professional Standards charge against my gay friend BartBartsell, I have become something of an expert on board and administration corruption past and present.
I outline these in enclosedletters to Mr. Mueller, director of the FBI, my congressman, Bill Young, Senator Charles Grassley, patron saint of whistleblowers, Arne Duncan, secretary of education, and Ms. Obama, the husband of whose presidential bid I supported early.
Citizens should not have to listen topious false promises made by gubernatorial candidates about what reverence they have for teachers, students, schools, etc but that, once elected, the governor ignores.
A citizen should not have to appeal to the FBI to clean up the graft and corruption in Florida's local schools.In Hillsborough County schools according to my inferences from two years' observation of the board and administration, the two chief areas of corruption that need cleaning up are the illegal hiring racket of the board and administration and the savaging of teachers and trashing teachers' and citizens' free-speech rights.
Carol Kurdell, now board chair, confiscates my requests to address board agenda items clearly marked for citizen comment because the board and administration don't like what I say.
The school attorney, Tom Gonzalez, sits mute during this Constitutional shutdown of a citizen's Constitlutional right to approach elected officials for redress of grieviences. He also supports no-bid contracts because he got one from Dr. Lennard with no competition.
The board and administration keep teachers terrified and mute for fear of losing their jobs so thatboard and administration can continue power hegemony over money and hiring as well as other perquisites of office. A board member recently spent $50,000 in a single year on travel to pick up gimcrack awards in the incestuous award system in which school districts laud each other for their faux virtues.
I request that you provide specific pledges in plain English about what you, Ms. Sink, and you, Mr. McCollum, will do as governor to clean up the corruption of school board and administration in Hillsborough County, especially in hiring and shutting down teachers' and citizsens' free-speech rights.
I was a college English professor for 28 years and am skilled in the forensics of political piffle.So pray say plainly what you will do to take care of this problem.If you plan to continue business as usual, say that.Be honest so that I can make a judgment about whom to support and vote for for governor.
Dear Blog Readers: I report on my NYC 16-hour turnaround trip to see Jude Law's Hamlet. Take a moment from reading my letters to FBI Director Mueller, Congressman Bill Young, Senator Grassley, and the Secretary of Education to share my turnaround trip to NYC to see Jude Law's Hamlet. My baby daughter took me to the airport for a 7:45 a.m. Delta flight.
Have a bunch of children like I did, feed them, diaper them, take them to the dentist, walk them to school because they are afraid of the barking dogs,, wrap their Christmas presents, wash and iron their clothes, make a ton of breakfasts, dinners, and lunches, and you, too, will have raised airport transportation.
Having had no breakfast, I bought a sandwich in the LaGuardia airport ($9.90) and coffee ($2.20). I don't know how poor people survive in NYC: everything is so pricey. I sat at a little table with a couple my age overlooking the runways.
I would talk to a post, so we chatted. The guy said he was a "health worker." I said, "What kind?" "Doctor," he explained. He said he and his wife had moved from England to Canada. He asked if I were English, and I said my parents had been and asked "Why do you ask?" He said I looked English. I told him that everybody in the Old South looked and were English because they fled when Cromwell and the Roundheads beheaded Charles I. Charles I deserved to be beheaded. I would have joined the beheaders if I had been living then. Charles I is the type who would be a ROSSAC functionary had he lived today in Tampa.
The doctor said that greedy doctors in the US were a big factor in the overpriced health-care system; he said the fees they charged astonished him.
The wife was a quiet, pretty, gentle woman who added inarticulate assent to everything her old man said. She was the old-fashioned model of wives. They are passing into cultural history as we speak.
The doctor revealed that he had just had a quadruple bypass, having had a heart attack on the treadmill.
"Make peace with your genes," said he." They are your destiny."
I said I was on good terms with my double helix and knew I would die of a stroke or heart attack because when the family historian, Cousin Shirley, and I tour the family cemetery in Burnt Fort (burnt by wicked Yankees, of course), I will ask, pointing at a headstone, "What did he die of, Shirley?"
"Stroke, honey." Shirley will say. "He just upped and fell dead."
So will I.
I spent about a hundred dollars on three cabs. The toll into the city from LaGuardia adds $5.00 I flagged one at LaGuardia and said, "Take me to Bergdorf's on Fifth Avenue near the park."
Nobody is poor in Bergdorf's. The customers are mostly rich women looking for something to spend their pocket money on. The women look terrific. When you see their husbands lugging briefcases on the street, they look like hell. Pay-your-own-way-ladies has not emerged in Bergdorf's clientele.
It used to be that all the clerks in Bergdorf's were all these blonde, Anglo types with hair up in aristocratic buns and nose up in the air.
A few years ago, my husband and I were going back home after a cruise to the Far East, and I insisted on stopping at Bergdorf's. I entered to see a dark-haired young woman behind the counter of this flossy handbag station I like to drop by to see what's new. I said to her, "Aren't you Hispanic?" She nodded. I said, "I am so happy to see some ethnic variety in the salespeople."
This comment so delighted the lass that she ran screaming to the other counters to repeat my remark. Even the sprinkling of remaining blonde and bunned Anglo sales women laughed at her jubilation.
And what does a person go to Bergdorf's for? Shoes, of course. You can't get good shoes anyplace in Florida. Flip-flops and man-made soles are about it. You also go to see all the beautiful things that spread out before you. We all need beauty in our lives.
I now am reading a book about Louis XIV. He invented elegance in its entirity: in food, in interior decorating, in everything. If you go to Paris, prepare for streets and streets of beautiful architecture. Every administration feels an obligation to add at least one exquisite building to the city.
Louis XIV bought thousands of pricey swans for the Seine simply for the panache of these exquisite creatures on the river. A lot died of the pollution. But enough toughed it out, adapted, and multiplied. They are still on the Seine. The police don't let people pester them.
I like Louis XVI's mind. He made France the country with a franchise on elegance. He would have loved Bergdorf's.
I headed to shoes like a lemming the minute I stepped through the door.
Bergdorf has met the economic downturn and given it the finger. Last year its shoes started at $565. This year they clock in at $665.
Then I went to the Chanel salon for the fun of looking at the prices. You know that classic little suit of Channel's with the short, no buttons jacket? Know what the price tag was for it? Try $6095. Don't you love that $95 fillip?
Skirts: a mere $1500; blouse: $1200.
Fortunately, I am too chubby to look good in Chanel. You have to be both thin as well as rich for Chanel. Chanel herself was as skinny as a snake. You, too, must be rib-cage-showing thin to wear her clothes successfully. She took a Nazi officer as lover during the occupation of WWII; the French never forgave her. I think they were right. But they still bought her clothes, and women of the world do today if they have the money.
It was some solace that I carried my biggest handbag as substitute for a suitcase, a giant Chanel bought 20 years ago. Know what the very same bag costs now? $3000. I felt smug that I had got mine twenty years ago so cheap. I have a collection of old Chanel bags hung around my bedroom for panache. Chanel bags (le sac) never change. Never. My old bags adorned the flossy Channel luxe bag corner of Bergdorf's: new but the same style exactly. I may have a fortune hanging around on nobs in my bedroom. It's comforting to know that you have money put away, invested in old Chanel handbags against hard times.
My time ran short. I had to get to the theater for Hamlet. So I accosted one of those guys in the Chanel salon and asked him, "What floor is Escada on?"
Wearing an Italian suit, Gucci loafers, and a perpetual sneer, he shrank back in horror and gazed at me down his nose, "Madame, we don't carry Escada!" as if it were Salvation Army retreads.
"I mean Escandar, Monsieur Les Sacs," I spat back at the fashion snoot.
He brightened and responded," Sixth Floor."
I had to visit my Escandar buddy Jan, head saleswoman of Escandar. I have been buying from her for years. Jan is petite and skinny with a mop of greying hair done up in a top-knot twig on the top of her head--not the back, but the top. Jan has a flawless sense of cutting-edge style laced with daring and wit. She always looks terrific, draped in some Escandar combination in dead black head to toe.
I got away with only one Escandar tee-shirt. Escandar tee-shirts are things of beauty not to be sneered at for their plebeian origins. First of all, they are silk and linen and cut with generous opulence so that they hang so beautifully that you just want to sit down and boohoo for joy when you put one on and look so good in it. Even if you are as ugly as a toad, these Escandar tees make you look good.
To make curtain on time, I tripped out of Bergdorf's, having had my tee and shoes shipped to save taxes. Yes, I said shoes. Can I go to Bergdorf's and come out without at least one pair of shoes? Louis XIV would understand. I hailed a cab went to 43rd Street.
This Hamlet was a matinee and packed. Every seat taken. New York supports the arts. The Bay Area supports tractor pulls.
Jude Law lives a disreputable private life, impregnating bedazzled women hither and yon--not admirable conduct at all. I am going to send the boy--now pushing 40-- a box car of condoms.
But on the stage, Le Law transforms into the magic persona of the beauteous Prince of Denmark. He does it so well with such authority over the words, such elegance of movement, such masterful elan, that he makes the rest of the quite skillful cast look inadequate.
First of all, Jude Law looks like Hamlet. Hamlet couldn't have been more than 20 or 21 years old. Remember, he has come back for his father's funeral from Wittenberg, a university town. Horatio, Hamlet's school buddy--"Show me that man who is not passion's slave/And I will wear him in my heart's core,/ Aye, in my heart of hearts"--is Hamlet's sole friend in the play.
When Horatio arrives, Hamlet asks, "Why make you from Wittenberg?"
Horatio responds," I come for your father's funeral."
Hamlet says, "Nay, for my mother's marriage." Horatio says, "Indeed, it did follow hard upon" (two months after her husband, the King, died).
Mr. Law is tall and thin and muscular with a whippet sized waist. He slouches around speaking the lines and looking and sounding just swell. The costumes for the cast are earth tones in some neutral styling that suggests The World, Anytime.
Appearance aside, it's when Law opens his mouth and says Shakespeare's lines that he is splendid. He projects beautifully so that you can hear him even in the rear of the theater, where I sat. Many of the actors could not reliably project their lines so as to be clearly heard as could Law. The women had particular difficulties.
Law brings a suppleness of pronunciation and movement to the role that looks princely. He dominates the stage when he is on it, even overshadowing the ghost of Old King Hamlet, the usual sceen stealer.
I am glad I saw this performance. It's one of the best I have seen, and I have seen all that have played on Broadway for years.
Play over, but only one curtain call: New Yorkers are a tough, savvy audience. Nobody enraptures them easily.
I had a hard time flagging down a cab for the airport heading home. It was six o'clock when the drivers are either going home or chauffeuring cabs full of passengers going home.
I finally got a cab; I thought a woman drove it.
"I'm so glad to see a woman driving a cab," I chirped.
"I'm not a woman," the driver said. "I am a man."
"Well, how was I supposed to know?" I responded. "You have a mop of big hair, so I thought you were a woman. Take me to LaGuardia."
"You know how much that costs?" he inquired, mistaking my Southern accent for a hillbilly who didn't know how pricey cabs are in NYC.
"It's about $35, and I'm good for it," I responded.
Talking with cab drivers is one of my favorite things to do in NY. They come from all over the world. They are sophisticated men even if mostly uneducated. Some are erudite. It's nothing to see Spinoza with the page turned down on the seat beside a cabbie.
The cab driver who took me into the city was Greek; so was this guy. The first and I talked about the Parthenon and the Elgin marbles, which Lord Elgin stole so that they now reside in an English museum. Greeks love to fulminate about this outrage. And they are proud of their culture and grateful if you allude to it. They should be proud. All of Western history is a footnote to the 6th-century B.C. Greeks.
I have gotten into knock-down drag-out fights in faculty lounges on this issue of the Elgin marbles. Some argue for the theft by saying that the marbles are "safer" in the English museum. How does that justify stealing a people's cultural heritage? Safe or unsafe, the marbles belong to the country of the people who produced them.
The first cabbie and I totally agreed on that issue. We damned the English and spat on Lord Elgin's memory.
The second mop-of-hair cabbie said he didn't care about the Elgin marbles. I asked him what he cared about.
"Money," he said.
Then he told me he had been married twice.
"What happened to your first marriage?" I asked.
"She divorced me because I couldn't speak English," he said.
"I don't like that woman," I responded.
"Neither do I ," he said. "She wanted to get back together after five years, but I had already met my second wife. So she was out of luck."
"Or lucked out," I thought to myself. This guy was no Brad Pitt.
"I am 70," he announced triumphantly. "And I had a $17 sandwich for lunch." He named the Italian restaurant and its address.
"I am older than you and had a $9.90 for lunch," I said.
"You don't look it," he said.
"That's genes," I said.
Then this old cabbie taught me something I didn't know. He said, "Do you know Thermopolis?"
"Yes," I said. "That's where the Greeks turned back the Persians who came by water in thousands of ships to overthrow Greece."
"You know what "Thermopolis" means in Greek?" he asked.
"No," I admitted.
"It means "'warm,'" he said.
So words like "thermal" and "thermos" come from "Thermopolis."
You can always learn something from everybody you meet if you listen.
I gave him a generous tip. I always do if I can afford it. Cab drivers have only their salaries. They don't have pension plans.
I sat on the aisle seat returning to Tampa. Two Bay Area high school girls sat beside me and talked and talked and talked when I wanted to sleep. I would like to have killed them.
I went back to the kitchen, where the four stewardesses had gathered after serving us a beverage but no peanuts. The airline has discontinued peanuts, for God's sake. I always talk to the stewardesses in the airline-stewardess sisterhood.
"I was a stewardess over fifty years ago," I told them. "And not only did we serve peanuts but filet mignon as well."
I didn't say so, but there was an age limit when I flew, now illegal, and you needed a Bachelor's or a nursing degree to meet the education requirement. Also good legs. The employment interview included raising your skirt to show your legs. Women wouldn't put up with that now.
The dear stewardesses, none of whom would have made the cut fifty years ago, found me another seat so that I could escape the motor-mouth girls.
My baby daughter awaited me as I exited the transit car from airside.
We gossiped as we drove back to her house in Beach Park, where I stayed the night before returning to the beach.
I hadn't had anything to eat since my morning sandwich, so my child gave me a cold chicken breast and a beer. It was delicious. Whatever your child feeds you always is. We sat and talked at the kitchen table while I ate my chicken breast.
I told my youngest child that I had had a great time in NYC. In fact, I told her what I have told you above. lee
From: Linda Cobbe [mailto:lcobbe@sdhc.us]
Sent: Monday, October 05, 2009 10:24 AM
To: lee de cesare
Subject: Re: public information: third request
It's the second link under Important Links. Also, Ellyn Smith is on special assignment in Divisional Program Services. She earns $44.56 per hour, which is the same rate she earned as principal.
Linda E. Cobbe
External Communications Manager
Hillsborough County Public Schools
901 E. Kennedy Blvd.
Tampa, FL 33602
813-272-4602 (O)
813-493-6964 (C)
813-272-4510 (F)
Our mission is to provide an education that enables each student to excel as a successful and responsible citizen.
My bad math says Ms. Smith, former Alafia principal, makes about $58,000 year. Why should she get a principal salary in this make-work position for a job she couldn't do? Don't beginning teachers make $33,000 a year? Doesn't this cast some doubt on the board's "saving every penny of taxpayer money" as Susan Valdez of the $50,000 travel budget opines from the podium every time she gets the chance to zap us with another hypocritical cliche?
Smith's is another administrative featherbedding slot in an economic downturn. lee
The Senate Judiciary Committee Convenes to Debate Escatology
Senator Charles Grassley Senate Judiciary Committee Washington, DC 20500 10/4/2009
Dear Senator Grassley:
I read online about your sharp questioning of FBI director Mueller regarding possible FBI tampering to emasculate a stronger whistleblower bill.
Mr. Hoover could not have given a more evasive performance than did Mr. Mueller. You have done well to demand more candid responses to your questions from the Justice Department. If I have my hierarchy straight, the Justice Department is Mr. Mueller's boss.
I have sent an appeal to Mr. Mueller to have the FBI investigate corruption in the Hillsborough County school system. In the early Nineties, whistleblower Doug Erwin received sadistic board-and-administration punishment for reporting to them about the graft and crime in the Hillsborough County schools. Instead of investigating the possible crimes, the board and administration tried to cover up the complaint by convincing people Mr. Erwin was crazy and crafting a campaign to fire him and deprive him of his pension. Three of the board, which cooperated in the savaging of Mr. Erwin, still occupy board seats.
Mr. Erwin finally gave up on people with whom he had worked for thirty years, filed and won a whistleblower lawsuit, received a $165,000 settlement, and taxpayers ponied up settlement payment for board and administration crime. Mr. Erwin and his wife fled to Georgia to distance themselves from the horror of that experience.
Nobody got punished, for criminal behavior and vicious treatment of Mr. Erwin to cover the crimes up. This fact has left this crime's DNA rampant in subsequent administrations and boards. They continue crime in various ways.
I enclose a plea to Mr. Mueller to have the FBI investigate corruption in the Hillsborough County schools. My conviction is that the kinds of crooked things the board and administration in Hillsborough County do to retain control of the tax money that pours in via student head count and the power and prestige of the positions that money buys in administration bloated salaries and community eclat are endemic in the whole country's schools, not just those in Hillsborough County.
If the FBI documented the practices in Hillsborough County's schools, it would act as model for the rest of the nation.
Since I am a species of citizen whistleblower, I hope you will urge Mr. Mueller or his boss at Justice to have the branch office of the FBI investigate my charge of corruption in the Hillsborough County schools.
I believe it was the Judiciary Committee that submitted the request to the Supreme Court to force Mr. Nixon to give up the tapes. You all must comprise a powerful and revered group in the Congress with great political heft.-
Your biography says that you are a farmer. I came from a Georgia farming family on my mother's side and a timber and turpentine family on my father's side. I return every year to our family reunions at the little church and cemetery with our Civil War dead in the back of it that my father's family established in the 1800s, I argue with my clan about politics and eat fried chicken at the tribe's dinner on the grounds. My Georgia family is all Republicans due to Mr. Nixon's Southern Strategy I infer. I tell them to hand in their Social Security and Medicaid cards when they inveigh against the Public Option of the pending health-care bill because it is "socialism." They gang up on me with the accusation that I am "one of them liberals that is ruining the country." I am glad I escaped from these dear bigots when I was young to become a college professor and a Democrat.
Please heed this request. Its results would bear fruit nationwide.
Respectfully,
(Ms.) Lee Drury De Cesare 15316 Gulf Boulevard 802 Madeira Beach, FL 33708 tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
I enclose an email that I sent to Mr. Mueller, FBI head. The corruption in HillsboroughCounty schools cries out for FBI investigation.
I ask that you ask Mr. Obama to request that Mr. Mueller carefully consider the request for an investigation that he will have received by now.
I was an early supporter of Mr. Obama. I believed he would be concerned about the louche leadership of the schools and would be sharp enough to know that the administration, not the press's robotically cited unions and teachers, contributes a significant part of the problems of education.
Please review my letters to Mr. Mueller, make a judgment of my claims, and if, as I will hope, you see that I have a point that you will request your husband to ask Mr. Mueller to investigate the school system of Hillsborough County for administration and board corruption.
My husband was longest-serving mayor in our little beach town. As First Lady of our miniscule city, I asked my husband of 53 years to do such things while claiming I knew nothing of politics to irate callers for the may.
Wives should never underestimate their power in curtain lectures.
Ms. Cobbe, this is my third time to request the status of the Ms. Smith principal whom Ms. Elia did not fire after the parents' wrath at her principalship at Alafia. I ask for the job status of Ms. Smith in the school system: what did her job pay as Alafia principal, what does her job pay now if Ms. Elia has reassigned her?
The attorney general says 48 hours is time sufficient for a public institution to answer a public-information request. That time has long since expired in my repeated requests. I expect answers by Tuesday morning. lee drury de cesare ___________________________________ Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Third Request for Public Information":
lee, a thought. you should request the names and addresses of all teachers who have resigned in the last five years .... or since elia ascended to the throne. There would be some interesting interviews in there I feel sure.
I can try, but Linda Cobbe is stalling on just about everything. Like all the bit players in administration, Linda fears for her job is my analysis. I think that the crooks have caught on that I use public information to lob charges against them via other agencies, and this is exactly their fear: exposure. lee
See new comment at the end. lee
