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
A Friend of Many Years at the March for Choice in Washington, at Which a Million of Us Showed Up
From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 12:45 AM To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Fighting on All Fronts.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Fighting on All Fronts":
Just great! They keep Pole Girl Faliero, but they want to fire Goader for something. Why?
Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 6:33 PM
Lord, who knows? The administration has for years been used to targeting people who annoyed them and get something manufactured on them to fire the person. That’s how I got into the school board business: friend of mine, a school media person, protested the mistreatment of gays by the Hillsborough County library. I guess Elia didn’t want any attention brought to the schools about gays—my analysis is she’s a bigot; so she and Kipley cooked up a case against my buddy. I told him to face them down, not to give in, and to make a public issue of it. It worked. They gave up on him with a slap on the wrist. But these experiences are psychologically traumatic; he had to go to therapy for a while. But he is stronger now. And my bet is they won’t attack him again because he is not one of the weak ones who roll over.
Goader has a blog. Ms. Elia and Ms. Faliero are crazy about bad publicity. So my guess they have targeted him for something because of his blog. I stand ready to help if I can. But I can’t get his blog to pull up. I hope that is not ominous.
Anybody who wants proof of how crazy and vindictive the school administrators are should read the Erwin court files. The leaders of the administration are psychopathic thugs. They have power and mean to hang on to it no matter the brutality against uncooperative employees necessary. And the board plays along by pretending not to know what’s going on. This pretended ignorance is active in the Linda Kipley outrages in the Professional Standards Cell Block. lee
I went to the board meeting, which I discovered had been set back to five p.m. I went to fight for the The Goader in case La Home-ec Kipley mounted a dirve to fire him.
When I got there, I discovered that the meeting was postponed to five p.m. instead of beginning at the usual 3 p.m. I had to return home to attend to my husband, who is not well.
If Goader needs my help, I am on call. lee
Thank you. I fight because it’s my nature to do so. If I see injustice, I am ready to march.
lee
From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com] Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 5:10 PM To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Fighting on All Fronts.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Fighting on All Fronts":
Ms. Drury de Casare,
I am writing this because I would like to commend you on your writings posted in regards to the Hillsborough County Public Schools. There is not a stone unturned in your investigations. In particular, the practices of the not so professional, General Manager of Professional Standards, Linda Kipley. Oh, and the great Superintendent of the Year, MaryEllen Elia. I encourage you to keep on with what you do!
Sincerely, Educ8shelly
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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch
Linda, I disagree. I got only the information that I received informally from an anonymous clerk that Hamilton’s name went on his bridge job to retirement before it went on the books. I did not get any other information on this job from you except, I believe, the salary of $140,000. I want to know the rationale for this job as contained in the records; I want to know who applied for it; I want to see the applications; I want to know if the board demanded a rationale for this manufactured job from Ms. Elia and what that rationale was. I want to know if Mr. Gonzalez told the board that jobs created for superfluous administrators did not have to obey the equal-opportunity laws. If he said so in writing, I want to see a copy of that. I got only the one-page contract on the Hamilton lobbying job that cited its salary of $65,000 a year. I would like to see the accounts of any lobbying he has done since he got this job that include the results for the school system. I also want to know who does Dr. Hamilton’s editing since he has trouble writing a literate sentence and whether the schools pay for this literacy assistance for its $65,000-a-year lobbyist.
ldd
From: Linda Cobbe [mailto:lcobbe@sdhc.us] Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 11:41 AM To: lee de cesare Cc: Stephen Hegarty; tgonzalez@tsg-law.com Subject: Re: Hamilton's gratuitous jobs
I have already complied with this request by providing you with all of the information related to Jim Hamilton's previous and current relationships with the school district. If you are unable to locate those records, you can find them again by doing a search on the school board agenda webpage using his name or HBEC.
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.
"lee de cesare" writes: Linda, I would like to have the paper record of the last two jobs Jim Hamilton has had with the schools: the ones Ms. Elia apparently invented for him alone and that the board subsequently approved without discussing them.
The first was the administrative position that Ms. Elia produced for him that he occupied from retirement to the time he got the second invented job: the lobbyist sinecure in Tallahassee.
These data include job description, pay range, date it was offered, list of applicants and where I can review their applications, board discussion of the job if any and approval date.
Thank you,
Lee Drury De Cesare
From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com] Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 10:15 PM To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Mount a Blog To Change the World.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Mount a Blog To Change the World":
Lee- You need to touch base with Goader--he has one of those meetings with a favorite of yours--Kipley.He will be made an example--probably at the SB meeting tomorrow.Kipley told him not one case has been successful in remaining employed ( with reputation intact) in her 8 years. Please, help! Pam
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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 7:14 PM
Oh, God, don’t tell me we have a mini Alaska of the county in Brandon.
My hope is that born-again Christians that apparently predominate in Board Member Faliero’s area won’t cotton to having a woman who instigated an affair with the head of a department on school grounds, who catalyzed the guy’s divorce and caused his two young children to suffer, and who then dumped him and stood by and let him get fired as the sacrificial price of maintaining her “reputation. ” After his firing from his job, Marc Hart then could not help his former wife support the children because he couldn’t find a job. I hope he has by now. Meanwhile, let me give him a kick while I’m at it for falling for a predatory school-board floozy.
Faliero has complained that the salary of board members is not enough to live on while they get ten thousand more a year than starting teachers, who all have at least bachelor’s degrees while some of the board do not. Faliero allegedly has a degree from USF but can’t write a literate paragraph without editing help.
I know that many Republicans as well as Democrats—but more Republicans—are hypocrites and religious poseurs. Religion is the last bastion of scoundrels. They use it to cover up their skullduggery. But surely the Brandon populace doesn’t want a person with Jennifer Faliero’s character chairing the board that oversees the in-school welfare of the county’s children.
Now that the Tribune has become a ghost press, I intend more than ever to publicize board and administration peccadilloes and flat-out crimes such as took place in the Erwin crucifixion with no one letting out a peep of protest, especially the board.
I saw years ago that the print press was doomed by the Internet. Everybody with opinions on the schools should mount a blog. If you have a blog, you have a newspaper. Blogs will gradually replace print press. The ones I rely on now are Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, Politico, and Realpolitics. Bigots will feel at home with the Drudge Report. lee
From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 9:11 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on The Grammar Patrol Is on Duty--Hurrah! Dan Ruth....
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Grammar Patrol Is on Duty--Hurrah! Dan Ruth...":
I bet the majority of voters in the Brandon area re-elect Faliero, because they love a conservative no matter what she does. If she were a liberal and did the things she has done, she would get voted off by the Brandon voters pronto, b/c they hate liberals out that way. But conservatives can kill their own mother, have secret abortions (as long as they pray for forgiveness), and do all sorts of dirty dealings and they will still be re-elected as long as they are conservative. I wish that area of Hillsborough would open its eyes that voting conservative never helps the people out there.
Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 9:20 PM
From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 10:07 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Mount a Blog To Change the World.
Hold on a minute!!! I'M a conservative!!! I am a happily married with a grown child teacher who is closing in on 25 years of teaching. I believe in personal accountability and utmost professionalism. I have an MA in my field, and teach with my utmost. Faliero and I have NOTHING in common except an unfortunate election where she bamboozled lots of folks. I just happen to be teaching in the same county.
You are right. We should not generalize. My husband of almost 52 years is a Republican. I am a Democrat. Have we screamed at each other during election times? Is the People Catholic?
He voted for Obama. My old man is disgusted with his party because of its lack of fiscal responsibility. He says that is the single most important conservative belief in his book.
Maybe my reader who said conservatives will vote for Faliero even knowing her character will rethink his or her animadversions on conservatives. But I don't think Pole Girl is a conservative. I think she is a duplicitous hypocrite.
Faliero doesn't want sex education taught in the schools, so delicate is her sensibillity in this area according to her self-promoting version of her sexual restraint. That is pure hokum to fool people into thinking she is conservative in her sexual conduct. She is also against teaching Darwinian evolution unless Intelligent Design is taught also. The reason for some Christian sects' opposing science is that it contradicts the Bible's version of the creation of the world. Faliero wants voters to think that she is a deeply religious person of the born-again kind. She betrays religion with her conduct; she does not support it but undermines it.
lee
You are right, and it is wrong to generalize about people by their political associations.I am a Democrat married to a Republican for fifty-one years. We don’t always vote the same, but he is a wonderful father and most time an ok husband who helps me with the washing folding clothes, which I hate to do.
So let me apologize for my generalizing.And maybe my reader will want to leave you a message of propitiation.It never hurts to admit when we are wrong.lee
From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 10:07 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Mount a Blog To Change the World.
Hold on a minute!!! I'M a conservative!!! I am a happily married with a grown child teacher who is closing in on 25 years of teaching. I believe in personal accountability and utmost professionalism. I have an MA in my field, and teach with my utmost. Faliero and I have NOTHING in common except an unfortunate election where she bamboozled lots of folks. I just happen to be teaching in the same county.
Dan Ruth Vacates the Tribune; so Does Rosemary Goudreau
Ms. Goudreau:
I regret your being one of the Tribune people downsized.
I am grateful for the very long meeting you held with teachers about their side of the story on school issues on which the administration and board shafted them.It meant the world to the both those present and those absent teachers that you and Vicky would take three hours of your time to give them a full hearing.
I don’t know what you plan to do in terms of work.I advise people against going into the print press.It’s a dying industry.I said so years ago when the Web first appeared.
The way you summarized the teachers’ input in such a logical, professorial manner impressed me when Vicky put it on the blackboard as you spelled it out.
Why don’t you teach?It’s not a career with much money expected.The administrators get the money because they and the complicit board divvy it up in their favor before the teachers see a cent. Steve Hegarty, a former SPT reporter who didn’t have the experience required in the job description and can’t punctuate got the nod from Elia because she thought his having been a reporter would yield her automatic good press.She is not savvy enough to consider that the press would resent Steve’s defection and his making twice the money they do although his job at the Times was tip top.
But there’s more to life than money.You get the satisfaction in teaching that, when you walk out of the classroom at the end of the day, you feel you have done your part to improve the world.And teachers do get a pension. I have a friend down the beach working now in her dotage because she did not consider this factor when she was young. There is nothing worse than a poor old woman, so women should review their eventual retirement situation.
I hope you will teach in Hillsborough County and have sufficient courage to show teachers they can push back at the board and administration and not be annihilated by these obtuse bullies. I hope you will also lead an effort to get teachers to drop the current union and get one like New York teachers have that does the job for teachers and does not hop in bed with the administration as the current CTA does in Hillsborough County.
Good luck in whatever you do.
Lee Drury De Cesare
Dan,
I read about your leaving the Tribune in La Gaceta.It said some fired employees got marched out the door by Tribune constabulary without getting to clean out their desks. That would be my preferred way to depart the premises. I have always loved hostile dramas of that sort.
I recall your and my sitting in Beach Park at my kitchen table thirty years ago during your first Tribune stint—you were a reporter then.We discussed the social turmoil that the women’s movement in Tampa caused.I had convened a NOW chapter when my family moved from NYC for my husband’s job.
How the years have flown.I lived to see the ERA go down, of course.Typical weapons of expunging women’s Constitutional status came from the thought patterns of the quidnuncs of Hillsborough County’s fens and bogs.These Pleistoscene intellects maintained that ERA’s passage would ensure sexually integrated bathrooms. All of civilization would then be in the toilet, of course. The toilet argument worked.
That’s the kind of sure-fire appeal to idiocy that Bay Area denizens demonstrate. One has to journey to NYC periodically to get a dose of culture because our main resources in these forlorn badlands are the Bucs franchise and tractor pulls.
Yet you managed to make this unpromising customer base laugh—and often out loud.
That is a rare talent. Even Swift and Chaucer didn’t get belly laughs. And Aristophanes did only occasionally.
My youngest daughter, Margie, will be forlorn at your leaving.She often quoted you to me.I bet you have a lot of fans like that.
And stop preening your triple bypass.It wasn’t a quadruple, was it? I am a registered nurse and don’t cotton to malingering. Be grateful for small graces.
You will live a long time is my prediction.So find another job.Go over to the Times. Troxler did and is a star at that location. Tell Tash he is brilliant and handsome.I have called him a chachectic ectomorph, which is why I never get a letter to the editor published.
But your best bet is to solicit Slate for a slot.The future of the print press dwindles apace.Communication, as I told my old man many years ago, belongs to the Internet.
Good luck and thanks for the memories.
Lee Drury De Cesare
From:Anonymous [noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent:Saturday, November 15, 2008 5:49 AM
To:tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject:[Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Once Upon a Time.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Once Upon a Time":
"I think the the board and the administration should indeed get the publicity they deserve so that an informed public will vote the board slugs out of office and vote in [some people] who care about education instead of power and [who throw state money around without consulting teachers about the issues that affect them.] "
You think the informed public should vote in some people who throw state money around without consulting teachers? Good eye. But Hamilton's mix-up of homophones is worse in the illiteracy scale.
My fault is I wrote a sentence that is too long, so I got one of my prepositional phrases attached to a wrong antecedent. I should have done this: "I think the board and administration should indeed get the publicity they deserve so that an informed public can vote the board slugs out of office. Voters can vote out board members who don't care about education but instead care about power. Voters can also throw out board drones who throw state money around without consulting teachers about issues that affect them.
This knocks the your/you're thing into a cocked hat.
A Friend of Many Years at the March for Choice in Washington, at Which a Million of Us Showed Up
