HERE COME THE JUDGES I see by Google today that a man at the Washington Post thinks the Supreme Court was off its rocker the other day when it upheld the Second Amendment of the Constitution and the right of citizens to own and carry arms. The writer begged to remind the justices that guns in the household meant a greatly increased chance of accidents and thefts, for the results of which the Court would now be responsible. This was not very relevant, though, for what the Court was deciding was not the question of the risks involved in gun ownership, but the meaning of the Constitution as generally understood. This might be attended with some inconvenience, as the saying goes, but there are many rights in the Constitution which have this drawback.. Free speech, for instance. It 's often abused. Free elections. They always give trouble. Religious freedom. Very inconvenient sometimes. And so it goes. Nothing's perfect, I'm afraid. Such is life. Two ideas from Justice Scalia's opinion jumped out at me although I was only skimming his sixty pages. One was about the meaning of the language in the Amendment that the right to bear arms was contingent on the necessity of having a well-regulated militia. To anti-gun people this means that only militia members should have the right. I don't think so. It strikes me as more of a "whereas" clause in the enactment. "Whereas" clauses are common in all speeches and resolutions and legislative bills. They can be very specific as in a bill authorizing a Panama Canal or a railroad to be built or they can be very general as in the Preamble to the Constitution, which lists no less than six reasons for its creation, all of them extremely noble and high-minded. Looked at in this light, I see the "militia" phrase as some window dressing for the purpose of following normal procedure by presenting a plausible reason for a legal enactment. It was the expected thing to do and still is. There was a logical connection, of course; people used to bearing arms would be good candidates for enlistment. There would be a pool of such prospects. But as Scalia said, it was even more likely that arms would be useful for hunting and self-protection. If they were to be restricted to the militia, it would have been easy to specify this in the Amendment. It wasn't done. Americans wouldn't have stood for it and everyone knew it. It was true that in the Seventeenth Century the British Crown restricted arms to those eligible to join militias approved by the party in power, but this still didn't mean they had to join to have arms and America's wide-open permission for arms in the hands of people able to join or not join any militia at all meant that the right of arms was an individual one and militia enrollment was not necessary. Today the Court finds that's still the case. I now shift from Justice Scalia to another judge, from a lower court and no longer living who had some important things to say about subjects related to the one I've been lecturing on. His name was Harold Rothwax and he sat on the New York State Supreme Court. He wrote a book called "Guilty; The Collapse of the Criminal Justice System." Once again I haven't completely vetted a book I've decided to write about in this space. Instead I've cherry-picked my way through it looking for tidbits to serve up to the public. I will eventually read it in full, but I haven' t yet. But my truffle-hunt hasn't been all waste. For instance I find an old hobby-horse of mine, the misuse of the "presumption of innocence" gets attention from the judge . He was writing soon after the Simpson trial, a kind of a judicial Jonestown as far as horror shows go. No bodies littered the courtroom, but the busted precedents, legal abuses and phony arguments filled it up. Through the smear tactics of the lawyers a lot of people got the idea that maybe there had been a "rush to judgment" to try Simpson on flimsy evidence. Not so. Judge Rothwax disposes of that claim and simultaneously the "presumption" by pointing out that prosecutors don't really want to waste their time indicting people whom they don't believe are probably guilty. A lot of people seem never to have thought of that. The judge reminds us that "reality screens" exist to weed out the innocent from the guilty before any trial is held. As I 've often pointed out, these are the witnesses, the victims, if any, the arresting officers, the committing magistrates, the district attorney, and even the jailers responsible for confining the accused. All of these have to believe the defendant is "probably guilty" or they have no right to detain him for the next step in the criminal justice treadmill. And they have no obligation anytime to give him the benefit of the presumption of innocence. The judge goes on to point out that this is a trial presumption only, just as the Chief Justice of the United States, Warren Burger, did in my hearing in 1969 at Lincoln Center. The only people required to presume a defendant's innocence are the trial jurors, no one else. If only the TV and media blabbermouths could have this taught to them, the B.S. index would decline like the Dow Jones in a recession. Judge Rothwax knew all the tricks -- he'd been a criminal lawyer himself, never a prosecutor, and tricks are what he calls them instead of daring innovations and brilliant strategies in defense of society's victims, the underprivileged uneducated youth facing a future of hopelessness and turning to crime as the only way out of the misery and deprivation to which they've been condemned by the system. Rothwax left all this out of his book. Instead he has stories about the shenanigans of lawyers going to ridiculous extremes in their zeal to preserve their clients from the punishment they deserve. There are a lot of these stories, but I only have room for one: It's about a " missing witness" charge that a lawyer sought when a robbery victim refused to return from Belgium to testify against her client. This charge permits the jury to conclude that the reluctant witness would have testified against the prosecution. However it came out that he had told the lawyer he would accuse her client if he returned but still wasn't coming. Rothwax asked her, "Doesn't your own testimony belie the inference you're seeking?" "Yes", she said, "but my client is entitled to it." Entitled to mislead the jury, that is. The judge concludes "When it is proper to say in a court of law that a defendant is 'entitled' to mislead a jury, you have to wonder."
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ALL MEN ARE PRORATED EQUAL 7/25/08

Blogging does funny things to a guy. I started out with a bag full of police reports accumulated during my time in that job which I made the foundation of strikemepink, pulling them out and using them whenever I ran out of other material to use. Luckily Long Island provided me with quite a bit of such material. In my twenty-five years in Westchester I never encountered anything like the succession of scandals I came across in a fraction of that time out here. Just the $11million ripoff of the Roslyn school district was enough to keep me going for weeks. Then there was the spending spree of the fire departments and lately the double-dipping school scandal along with other such dodges which never seem to end and always furnish material for a sermon to the congregation.

Gradually then I have gotten to the point that my horizon has expanded and I no longer confine myself to police stories and related matters. Like Dr. Jekyll looking into a mirror and seeing himself morphing into Mr. Hyde, I see myself turning into an all-around commentator on all kinds of things that never stimulated me before. A guru, in other words.

That brings me to a subject that’s been bothering me lately, one connected with education which by rights shouldn’t bother me because mine was finished a long time ago and so was my children‘s, so it’s only of academic interest to me now (no joke intended). My stake in the education question today is that of a taxpayer only, but that doesn’t make me irrelevant to it. Quite the contrary, as a lot of taxpayers will be quick to let you know.

I am bothered by the insistence I hear that education for all, as exists in this county, has to be equal education for all, or it violates the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, common decency and equal justice under law. Actually the Constitution says nothing about education, but that doesn’t mean that it was illegal or anything like that. A series of laws were passed determining how land should be allocated in the new states looking for admission, and in so doing speaking well of education and reserving some of the land for its support. Popular education was the objective, but nothing was said of equality. Everybody would learn to read and write but not everybody would be taught Latin and Greek.

Surprisingly it was the southern segregationists of the 1950’s who first introduced the idea of “equality” as a requirement between schools when they defended segregated southern education as “separate but equal” and therefore not really discriminatory against blacks and not requiring integration to level things out. Just one picture in Life magazine showing the squalid conditions of a black classroom was enough to explode this theory. In 1954 the Supreme Court in its Brown v. Board of Education decision ordered full integration of all public schools nationwide.

The South should never have tried to maintain that equality prevailed in its segregated schools. What they overlooked was the fact that the South was the poorest section of the country and hardly had enough money to maintain its white schools at a decent level, without trying to claim that its black schools were on the same level. A claim like this defies reason, which tells us that the first duty of parents toward their children is to bring them up, i.e., educate them safely and equip them as fully as possible for adult life. In a section where the whites didn’t have enough to do this for their own children it was not to be expected that they would do it for black children.

Integration solved the problem in a way. Blacks who went to well-to-do white schools got to share in the superior education there. Poor white schools admitting blacks got poorer. Eventually re-segregation restored the status quo ante. Recognizing this, black pressure groups stopped pressing for integration but campaigned for equality instead.

As I’ve just said, this demand runs up against universal law. The law is that parents must provide for their children first and the children of other people second. This is the deepest human instinct that exists. In this country it translates into support for the schools one’s children attend and only after this has been provided can there be support for the ones they don’t attend.

Since all government everywhere exists of necessity to redistribute money, we don’t say that the poor shall have nothing from the contributions of the taxpayers. Once you get past subsistence amounts for food, clothing, shelter, and education, though, the problems of redistribution begin. As we have seen, there are people who want it to go to the length of equalizing, well, all incomes. This will never happen because the taxpaying class will always find ways to evade the full weight of taxation, but the demand for equal education, which sounds so reasonable to so many people, is a big step in that direction.

I’ll admit the idea didn’t sound so bad to me when it was first promoted in New York, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that equality was going to be achieved by taking my money and instead of spending it on my local schools, spending it on other ones far away. With my provincial, parochial outlook, spiced with xenophobia, irredentism, lycanthropy, morosis and other symptoms, it just wouldn’t do. It’s the same mindset that makes me balk at the idea of universal health insurance. This country is infested with millions of junkies, alcoholics, chronic overeaters and other thin-icers for whose mistakes I will be paying. Sorry, but I have enough to do to pay for my own.

Equality is an unlucky word anyway. There was a chap in France during the Revolution who renamed himself Egalité . It did him no good. He went to the guillotine anyway. As thousands cheered.

 

 

A JUDGE SPEAKS OUT JULY 4, 2008

This week I’ve been enjoying what’s known as the pleasure of recognition through my reading of the late Judge Harold Rothwax’s book, “Guilty; the Collapse of the Criminal Justice System.” I knew his reputation as a judge who maintained that the system had gone overboard in its protection of criminals and made itself into an enemy of the people it was supposed to protect. I only knew this from newspapers, though, and not from any better source with more detailed information.

His book has changed all that. The program is spelled out in full and it’s one that goes to the heart of the problem, not just to the periphery like most so-called reform proposals. Lots of reformers are all in favor of better law enforcement so long as (a) criminals are not seriously inconvenienced, only mildly so; (b) the term law enforcement is changed to law endorsement or something similar, for obvious reason. Force is such a harsh word. That’s really all that’s required to effect the changes that some people seem to feel are needed in our system.

Rothwax didn’t buy any of this. His experience of twenty-five years on the bench wouldn’t let him. He knew better. Sacred cows like the presumption of innocence, the right against self-incrimination, the right to bail, the right against illegal searches and other such banalities stood in need of re-examination the way a ship’s hull has to be de-barnacled when too much marine growth accumulates on it.

There was nothing wrong with the principles behind these hoary old monuments, but the accretions of many years had to be cleared off them to get back to those principles. How had the Fifth Amendment for instance, meant to prohibit forced self-incrimination, been turned into a prohibition against anyone drawing a negative inference from its use? Why shouldn’t a judge and jury draw conclusions from a defendant’s refusal to testify in his own defense or his invocation of the Fifth if he did so? This is just driving common sense out of the courtroom for the convenience of defense attorneys. The only consolation the rest of us have is that many jurors do draw conclusions no matter what the judge tells them in his charge.

I said above that I enjoyed recognizing some of my own ideas emerging in the judge’s book, thereby giving me, an amateur, validation from a professional in the field of lawmaking and law administration. It’s good to see a high court judge endorsing ideas you’ve been playing with for years, wondering why no one else was interested. They were heretical notions of course, questioning the very foundations of our institutions -- if you listen to the professors -- but somebody somewhere had to stand up and say the emperor was wearing no clothes.

We get the whole layout here. Rothwax believed in the Fifth Amendment like the rest of us, but he didn’t believe it was sacred. Among his other heresies are the following:

1, Search and seizure laws are so enigmatic that no evidence should be excluded if there has been good-faith compliance with the law in obtaining it.

 

2. The “Miranda” ruling should be revoked. Videotaping is sufficient to prevent the use of coercion in getting confessions.

3. Speedy trial statutes should be replaced with a rule-of-reason standard for scheduling trials.

4. The right to an attorney should apply only in the pretrial and trial stages of an investigation.

5. If a defendant fails to answer evidence against him, the jury should be instructed that they may conclude the evidence was accurate.

6. If defendants demand pretrial discovery of the state’s evidence, they should first have to file their own story so a new one can’t be concocted to fit the prosecution evidence.

7. Peremptory challenges should be limited to three or four to prevent stacked juries.

8. Majority jury verdicts are better than unanimous ones and should be introduced to replace them. Unanimous verdicts often represent a compromise with holdouts who ignore everyone else’s opinion and have to be appeased. Contrary to “Twelve Angry Men” Rothwax found that they were always wrong. He wants them neutralized.

9. American judges should be allowed a more active role in the trial, setting them apart from pushovers like Ito.

10. Go back to Square One and revise the law to comply with common sense.

The judge made particular music to my ears when he repeated my mantra about the presumption of innocence applying only to the trial jury and emphatically not to the earlier stages of the process. Some so-called true crime shows on TV print an admonition at the end that the characters we’ve just seen getting themselves arrested for gross abuses are to be considered innocent until proven guilty. No they’re not. In Judge Rothwax’s words they belong to the “probably guilty” class because they’ve been arrested on reliable information from eyewitnesses usually and haven’t given anyone reason to believe they’re innocent. This will continue to the end of the process until they face a jury, who will apply the presumption The rest of us in the chain of custody leading thereto will have held them to be “probably guilty” or, in the judge’s words there would have been no righteous grounds for arrest. I may give the judge a rest in my next essay, but I’ll be returning to him before long.

Did you know that a recent London murder jury consulted a Ouija board to get in touch with the victim, who demanded a conviction and was upheld unanimously by the jury?

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

For the third consecutive week I’ll be writing here about the local school scandal whereby forty school superintendents collected up to $500,000 in annual income by serving as active superintendents -- sometimes of districts from which they had retired -- while collecting a six-figure pension in their capacity as retirees from the stresses and strains of, well. school administration.

I see a contradiction here in that there’s a presumption that a person retires from a job because he/she has had enough of it and wants to “pursue other interests.” Out here, though, it looks as though they can’t wait to get back in the battle. The school boards ease the way for them by making only a pro forma “search” for new talent and settling on the recyclees as the ideal choices to educate youth in the way it ought to go.

Other than a desire to enrich the retirees, what was the reason that school boards went in so heavily for investing in geezers rather than choosing new administrators out of the ranks below? I’ve explained some of this before now, so I’ll simply deal with the experience argument here. This is the argument that retirees have a matchless background of experience and the schools can’t afford to lose their talents just because they’ve decided to retire. Well, civil service law permits re-hiring retirees in special cases, but forty re-hires? That’s not a special case. All the same we hear the experience excuse reiterated on all possible and impossible occasions. One educational guru justified it on the grounds that sometimes districts experience employee or community unrest and no “rookie administrator” should be thrown into such a situation/

This, of course, is the Dawn Patrol approach. In that movie Leftenant Nigel got properly cheesed off at Captain Reggie and flew at him instead of the enemy: “You can’t send those green kids up in those flying coffins to fight the Red Baron! It’s murder and I’ll have no part of it!”

To which Captain Reggie answered that orders were orders and one must bite the bullet and obey. This is different from the gurus who are overcome with anxiety to protect their proteges from the shot and shell flying about in the educational front lines. I confess I’ve never thought of school districts as battlefields where danger lurked behind every clump of grass, but apparently I was mistaken. But let’s not carry this business of looking out for the rookies too far. After all, I’ve never heard of a school administrator getting bumped off for flunking too many kids or buying lousy school lunches, so maybe the risks have been exaggerated a bit.

Well, so much for the school scandal. If I devote this whole paper to it, I’ll have to call it The Stricken Land III and that joke has kind of run its course. I’ll return to the story of the Forty Thieves in the future, but for now go on to something else.

One of the things is a book that I’ve been poking into from time to time called “Orley Farm.” It was first published in 1860. It’s by Anthony Trollope, an Englishman who spent a good deal of time in the United States. The book covers events beginning in the 1840’s and running up to the Sixties. That’s getting to be almost two hundred years ago, but the story reads like today’s headlines. It all begins with a rich Englishman named Sir Joseph Mason, who is inadvertently introduced in a thoroughly sexist way by Trollope. Trollope was a careful writer who didn’t normally omit essential facts, but here he introduces Mason as a rich widower with four grown children without mentioning the dead wife or anything about the births of the children. She only existed for the purpose of widowing her husband, but she deserved to get some mention. Trollope’s mother was a well-known writer. If she met her son in the great beyond, he probably heard about this.

The connection with modernity comes in immediately when we find that Sir Joseph has gotten himself a very modern accessory, a trophy wife. She is a sexpot of a Victorian type, demure to the view, but with hidden fires smoldering inside. She is many years younger than her husband, but that’s no defect in his eyes. She uses a tactic popular today in such marriages, which is to conceive a child early on so as to strengthen the bond and overcome the age barrier. Tom Wolfe has identified this as a common strategy with women who marry elderly rich men.

As often happens today, the four children of the first wife are in arms against the interloper and her little boy. He is obviously a threat to their inheritance of their father’s fortune. The new Lady Mason hasn’t shown any inclination to poach on the inheritance for herself, but things are different when it comes to looking out for her son. Her husband owns a valuable estate called Orley Farm and this is the property she wants bequeathed to her son. Sir Joseph dies within two years of the boy’s birth and sure enough, he has left Orley Farm to young Lucius with his mother as trustee until he’s 21.

Sir Joseph’s oldest son, also Joseph but with no title, takes this very hard and drags the widow into court to face forgery charges. She is acquitted and keeps the estate. Joseph nurses his grudge and swears revenge. Twenty years later when the book takes up current events, a lawyer has found evidence that there was a forgery and he incites Joseph to reopen his case against the widow.

It would be cheating to reveal the outcome of all this and besides I haven’t gotten that far in the book yet. I’ve been giving it about a half an hour a day, which means that I’ve got at least two weeks to go. Trollope had plenty to say as a writer and you find yourself engaging with it more than you thought likely when first coming across the book.

One of Trollope’s preoccupations was the peculiar nature of English law. He’d seen a lot of the world in his travels everywhere and he thought the adversarial system was unsound, offering a premium for concealing truth and preventing judges and juries from knowing it. He also had a low opinion of lawyers’ honesty. I’ve sometimes thought we ought to import some English lawyers, people who defend their clients as well as any Americans but without staging circuses like the Simpson trial. In Trollope’s book, however, we find one high-priced lawyer asking another to burn some evidence for a thousand pounds, telling him ‘everybody does it.’ So much for my illusions.






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HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF For the third consecutive week I’ll be writing here about the local school scandal whereby forty school superintendents collected up to $500,000 in annual income by serving as active superintendents -- sometimes of districts from which they had retired -- while collecting a six-figure pension in their capacity as retirees from the stresses and strains of, well. school administration. I see a contradiction here in that there’s a presumption that a person retires from a job because he/she has had enough of it and wants to “pursue other interests.” Out here, though, it looks as though they can’t wait to get back in the battle. The school boards ease the way for them by making only a pro forma “search” for new talent and settling on the recyclees as the ideal choices to educate youth in the way it ought to go. Other than a desire to enrich the retirees, what was the reason that school boards went in so heavily for investing in geezers rather than choosing new administrators out of the ranks below? I’ve explained some of this before now, so I’ll simply deal with the experience argument here. This is the argument that retirees have a matchless background of experience and the schools can’t afford to lose their talents just because they’ve decided to retire. Well, civil service law permits re-hiring retirees in special cases, but forty re-hires? That’s not a special case. All the same we hear the experience excuse reiterated on all possible and impossible occasions. One educational guru justified it on the grounds that sometimes districts experience employee or community unrest and no “rookie administrator” should be thrown into such a situation/ This, of course, is the Dawn Patrol approach. In that movie Leftenant Nigel got properly cheesed off at Captain Reggie and flew at him instead of the enemy: “You can’t send those green kids up in those flying coffins to fight the Red Baron! It’s murder and I’ll have no part of it!” To which Captain Reggie answered that orders were orders and one must bite the bullet and obey. This is different from the gurus who are overcome with anxiety to protect their proteges from the shot and shell flying about in the educational front lines. I confess I’ve never thought of school districts as battlefields where danger lurked behind every clump of grass, but apparently I was mistaken. But let’s not carry this business of looking out for the rookies too far. After all, I’ve never heard of a school administrator getting bumped off for flunking too many kids or buying lousy school lunches, so maybe the risks have been exaggerated a bit. Well, so much for the school scandal. If I devote this whole paper to it, I’ll have to call it The Stricken Land III and that joke has kind of run its course. I’ll return to the story of the Forty Thieves in the future, but for now go on to something else. One of the things is a book that I’ve been poking into from time to time called “Orley Farm.” It was first published in 1860. It’s by Anthony Trollope, an Englishman who spent a good deal of time in the United States. The book covers events beginning in the 1840’s and running up to the Sixties. That’s getting to be almost two hundred years ago, but the story reads like today’s headlines. It all begins with a rich Englishman named Sir Joseph Mason, who is inadvertently introduced in a thoroughly sexist way by Trollope. Trollope was a careful writer who didn’t normally omit essential facts, but here he introduces Mason as a rich widower with four grown children without mentioning the dead wife or anything about the births of the children. She only existed for the purpose of widowing her husband, but she deserved to get some mention. Trollope’s mother was a well-known writer. If she met her son in the great beyond, he probably heard about this. The connection with modernity comes in immediately when we find that Sir Joseph has gotten himself a very modern accessory, a trophy wife. She is a sexpot of a Victorian type, demure to the view, but with hidden fires smoldering inside. She is many years younger than her husband, but that’s no defect in his eyes. She uses a tactic popular today in such marriages, which is to conceive a child early on so as to strengthen the bond and overcome the age barrier. Tom Wolfe has identified this as a common strategy with women who marry elderly rich men. As often happens today, the four children of the first wife are in arms against the interloper and her little boy. He is obviously a threat to their inheritance of their father’s fortune. The new Lady Mason hasn’t shown any inclination to poach on the inheritance for herself, but things are different when it comes to looking out for her son. Her husband owns a valuable estate called Orley Farm and this is the property she wants bequeathed to her son. Sir Joseph dies within two years of the boy’s birth and sure enough, he has left Orley Farm to young Lucius with his mother as trustee until he’s 21. Sir Joseph’s oldest son, also Joseph but with no title, takes this very hard and drags the widow into court to face forgery charges. She is acquitted and keeps the estate. Joseph nurses his grudge and swears revenge. Twenty years later when the book takes up current events, a lawyer has found evidence that there was a forgery and he incites Joseph to reopen his case against the widow. It would be cheating to reveal the outcome of all this and besides I haven’t gotten that far in the book yet. I’ve been giving it about a half an hour a day, which means that I’ve got at least two weeks to go. Trollope had plenty to say as a writer and you find yourself engaging with it more than you thought likely when first coming across the book. One of Trollope’s preoccupations was the peculiar nature of English law. He’d seen a lot of the world in his travels everywhere and he thought the adversarial system was unsound, offering a premium for concealing truth and preventing judges and juries from knowing it. He also had a low opinion of lawyers’ honesty. I’ve sometimes thought we ought to import some English lawyers, people who defend their clients as well as any Americans but without staging circuses like the Simpson trial. In Trollope’s book, however, we find one high-priced lawyer asking another to burn some evidence for a thousand pounds, telling him ‘everybody does it.’ So much for my illusions.

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HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

For the third consecutive week I’ll be writing here about the local school scandal whereby forty school superintendents collected up to $500,000 in annual income by serving as active superintendents -- sometimes of districts from which they had retired -- while collecting a six-figure pension in their capacity as retirees from the stresses and strains of, well. school administration.

I see a contradiction here in that there’s a presumption that a person retires from a job because he/she has had enough of it and wants to “pursue other interests.” Out here, though, it looks as though they can’t wait to get back in the battle. The school boards ease the way for them by making only a pro forma “search” for new talent and settling on the recyclees as the ideal choices to educate youth in the way it ought to go.

Other than a desire to enrich the retirees, what was the reason that school boards went in so heavily for investing in geezers rather than choosing new administrators out of the ranks below? I’ve explained some of this before now, so I’ll simply deal with the experience argument here. This is the argument that retirees have a matchless background of experience and the schools can’t afford to lose their talents just because they’ve decided to retire. Well, civil service law permits re-hiring retirees in special cases, but forty re-hires? That’s not a special case. All the same we hear the experience excuse reiterated on all possible and impossible occasions. One educational guru justified it on the grounds that sometimes districts experience employee or community unrest and no “rookie administrator” should be thrown into such a situation/

This, of course, is the Dawn Patrol approach. In that movie Leftenant Nigel got properly cheesed off at Captain Reggie and flew at him instead of the enemy: “You can’t send those green kids up in those flying coffins to fight the Red Baron! It’s murder and I’ll have no part of it!”

To which Captain Reggie answered that orders were orders and one must bite the bullet and obey. This is different from the gurus who are overcome with anxiety to protect their proteges from the shot and shell flying about in the educational front lines. I confess I’ve never thought of school districts as battlefields where danger lurked behind every clump of grass, but apparently I was mistaken. But let’s not carry this business of looking out for the rookies too far. After all, I’ve never heard of a school administrator getting bumped off for flunking too many kids or buying lousy school lunches, so maybe the risks have been exaggerated a bit.

Well, so much for the school scandal. If I devote this whole paper to it, I’ll have to call it The Stricken Land III and that joke has kind of run its course. I’ll return to the story of the Forty Thieves in the future, but for now go on to something else.

One of the things is a book that I’ve been poking into from time to time called “Orley Farm.” It was first published in 1860. It’s by Anthony Trollope, an Englishman who spent a good deal of time in the United States. The book covers events beginning in the 1840’s and running up to the Sixties. That’s getting to be almost two hundred years ago, but the story reads like today’s headlines. It all begins with a rich Englishman named Sir Joseph Mason, who is inadvertently introduced in a thoroughly sexist way by Trollope. Trollope was a careful writer who didn’t normally omit essential facts, but here he introduces Mason as a rich widower with four grown children without mentioning the dead wife or anything about the births of the children. She only existed for the purpose of widowing her husband, but she deserved to get some mention. Trollope’s mother was a well-known writer. If she met her son in the great beyond, he probably heard about this.

The connection with modernity comes in immediately when we find that Sir Joseph has gotten himself a very modern accessory, a trophy wife. She is a sexpot of a Victorian type, demure to the view, but with hidden fires smoldering inside. She is many years younger than her husband, but that’s no defect in his eyes. She uses a tactic popular today in such marriages, which is to conceive a child early on so as to strengthen the bond and overcome the age barrier. Tom Wolfe has identified this as a common strategy with women who marry elderly rich men.

As often happens today, the four children of the first wife are in arms against the interloper and her little boy. He is obviously a threat to their inheritance of their father’s fortune. The new Lady Mason hasn’t shown any inclination to poach on the inheritance for herself, but things are different when it comes to looking out for her son. Her husband owns a valuable estate called Orley Farm and this is the property she wants bequeathed to her son. Sir Joseph dies within two years of the boy’s birth and sure enough, he has left Orley Farm to young Lucius with his mother as trustee until he’s 21.

Sir Joseph’s oldest son, also Joseph but with no title, takes this very hard and drags the widow into court to face forgery charges. She is acquitted and keeps the estate. Joseph nurses his grudge and swears revenge. Twenty years later when the book takes up current events, a lawyer has found evidence that there was a forgery and he incites Joseph to reopen his case against the widow.

It would be cheating to reveal the outcome of all this and besides I haven’t gotten that far in the book yet. I’ve been giving it about a half an hour a day, which means that I’ve got at least two weeks to go. Trollope had plenty to say as a writer and you find yourself engaging with it more than you thought likely when first coming across the book.

One of Trollope’s preoccupations was the peculiar nature of English law. He’d seen a lot of the world in his travels everywhere and he thought the adversarial system was unsound, offering a premium for concealing truth and preventing judges and juries from knowing it. He also had a low opinion of lawyers’ honesty. I’ve sometimes thought we ought to import some English lawyers, people who defend their clients as well as any Americans but without staging circuses like the Simpson trial. In Trollope’s book, however, we find one high-priced lawyer asking another to burn some evidence for a thousand pounds, telling him ‘everybody does it.’ So much for my illusions.






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THE STRICKEN LAND II

To the gratification of all of us scandalmongers, the school scandal featured in my last week’s essay has continued to escalate and percolate through the local hills and valleys with partisans of all kinds coming out of the bush to join in the fun. The newspapers are the main battleground and are carrying lots of letters from indignant citizens and also from other citizens who are indignant about them. Are you mad? their general line seems to be, don’t you realize we’re saving a fortune when we retire a school superintendent at $350K a year and then hire him back at $250K to fill in as interim superintendent in succession to himself? If he didn’t make this sacrifice and come back to work we would have had to hire a new man at more than $250K and we’d be out money.

This is actually what we’re hearing from those who are trying to convince us that we just don’t understand the true principles of good government and consideration for the needs of the taxpayer. If we did we would recognize the righteousness of paying superintendents gobs of money for whatever it is they do, even though we’d puzzled to describe it, much less compare it to equivalent jobs in other occupations. We would stop asking questions about the art and mystery of running schools and take it on faith that it is an advanced study that only a mastermind can fully understand. Verily, verily, as the Bible says.

The critics, including the Attorney General, are asking just why is it necessary to resurrect some pensioned former superintendent to fill the shoes of a newly retired one? Or in some cases to fill his own shoes by replacing him with himself? Wouldn’t it be the normal thing to do to reach into the ranks of assistant superintendents and find one there entitled to promotion? And why don’t these people object when they find their career paths obstructed in this way by retreads from the elephants’ graveyard?

I believe the explanation is simple enough. The eager young assistant is taken aside and told “Look, just be a little patient. We’re bringing back old Joe for one last payday as an interim super. We did the search for new blood in one day and decided we wanted to stick with what we knew. Interim work can last maybe five years or a little longer. Then we’ll have to let him go or get in trouble with the law. If you’ll just wait till then, then the job will be yours. And when you retire from it, you can go the same route as Joe. You can be interim for a few years. You’ll be fixed for life and the day after.”

When school boards do these generous things, is there a quid pro quo? I know what I think. The Attorney General has subpoena power to prove me right or wrong. I can’t wait to find out.

So much for the “double dippers”, the pensioners collecting retirement money and also working a job that usually doubles their income. They have their defenders, of course. One is quoted above, rhapsodizing on the great saving effected by rehiring retirees, who theoretically are past masters of the work they retired from and are now working at again, but are graciously accepting less money for it than they would have demanded if they didn’t already have pensions.

This overlooks the fact that the so-called reduced salaries they get are actually just about as extortionate as those they would have gotten normally. How salaries have risen to this kind of stratosphere is a mystery as impenetrable as the secrets of the flying saucers. One day teachers were underpaid and all but begging on sidewalks and now suddenly they’re economic royalists and placemen rolling in dough and thumbing their noses at the suckers. Especially if they’re -- take off your hat -- “administrators.”

The particular letter I quoted here earlier is a perfect example of the sense of entitlement the pedagogues feel to their dubious gains. It’s a defense of one Robert Feger, aka the Arizona Kid, who retired from one school district with a pension of $70K yearly and now administers another one on Long Island by telephone from Arizona, getting $20K yearly for his trouble. This doesn’t sound like much unless one takes into account the fact that there are only seven kids actually attending school in his district, so that per capita he gets only a little less than $3,000 yearly per student for his phone calls. No, he doesn’t contribute the phone calls.

Well, it was all good while it lasted. A lot of people got their snouts in the trough and fed high on the hog and all that. The count so far adds up to forty administrators on Long Island ‘double dipping’, that is, collecting a pension and continuing to work in the school system at the same time. Thirty-seven of these thirty-six gentlemen and four ladies got amounts in the six-figure range going from $516K to $132K Three men got only five-figure amounts between $92K and $78K. Somebody had to be last.

Provisions for re-hiring retirees who have special qualifications exist in most civil service systems. They are meant to be exceptions, not the rule, as the Attorney General says. Things may revert to that status soon, because Tuesday is school election day on L.I. and
quite a few school board members who connived at ‘pluralism’ as it used to be called, may find themselves out of office. Lets hope their beneficiaries remember them in their
hour of need.

All the hoo-ha over school personnel hasn’t caused anyone to forget about the first malefactors exposed for enriching themselves unjustly from education money. These were the lawyers and some other professionals who got themselves designated “employees” of the schools so they could get pensions when in fact they were independent contractors not entitled to pensions. That investigation is proceeding well, with notices going out to boodlers to return their unlawful income. Settlements have been reached with some offenders. Others, being lawyers, are digging in and preparing to fight it out. They aren’t basing their defense on statutes, but on the unwritten law “This is the way it was always done.” I declare this to be an inadmissible defense and find for the state, with damages.






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THE STRICKEN LAND

Long Island never ceases to amaze. I lived in Westchester for twenty-five years and things never hit the fan the way they do out here. The scandals never stop. In my other venues, New York City was a monastery by comparison, Rockland County a holy city. In L.I. by contrast, since I moved here a few years ago we’ve had, first the Roslyn school scandal with the school administrators walking away with $11,000,000 in school funds, leaving only the blackboards and desks behind, then the volunteer firemen spending taxpayers’ millions in building palatial firehouses with built-in nightclubs to enhance their social life, and now the endowment of lawyers and other non-employees of our school systems with six-figure pensions for life on the pretext that they were actually employees. Is it necessary to add that no career as a building inspector here is complete without a jail stretch involved or that the same applies to plumbing inspectors, electrical types and all other guardians of local construction integrity ?

It shouldn’t be thought that just because non-employees were so adept at riding the gravy train, actual employees missed out. Far from it. In particular, it seems, the title of superintendent carries with it a license to steal. One of them is featured on the front page of Newsday today. He runs his district by remote control. From Arizona. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. His district includes only nine students actually attending locally, with the other seventeen taking their classes in another district. For his guidance of these lucky twenty-six he is paid $20,000 yearly as an interim employee. This doesn’t seem bad -- almost $1,000 a year for each student, none of whom he actually teaches anything -- but there’s a sweetener in the shape of a $70,500 retirement benefit that he gets for his previous career in the district, where he has now returned for a farewell performance -- from Arizona. In the story he is seen sitting on his porch in the foothills there while using the telephone to inspire his subordinates in New York. How he became the superintendent of a “district” that isn’t equal to a classroom in a normal district and who arranged for him to collect $90,500 a year for running it by telephone isn’t explained and probably never will be.

Newsday reports that approximately forty school superintendents and assistant supers are collecting about $11 million annually in combined pay and pensions by operation of a law that permits them to return as “interim” supers immediately after retiring and beginning to collect a handsome pension, practically all in six figures, which is now matched or exceeded by the annual salary paid for actually working. ‘Let the good times roll’ has got to be the motto of these heaven-blessed individuals who obviously are in good with God.

If people object to me being flippant about the good luck of these people, I won’t apologize. I just don’t have that high an opinion of the work or whatever it is done by school superintendents. In ghetto districts out here they sometimes get fired when the district goes broke from too many sweetheart contracts with friends and relatives of the school board or through some similar swindle, but generally they remain in office up to the onset of senility. After that they go “interim” for a prolonged time until finally retiring for good when practically ready to pull the graveyard grass over them like a blanket. And all the time not one person in ten in their district even knows their name or what they do for a living.

Returning to the other concern we have with educational ripoffs, it’s heartening to report that, thanks to Newsday’s exposés, some heirs apparent have been nobbled at the gate just as they were set to dash off with the big prize. Two were private lawyers and one is an accountant. While in private practice they had managed to accumulate sixty years of employee pension credit between them even though none of them had ever actually been an employee of the school districts reporting. The amount of the pensions lost hasn’t been given, but there can’t be any doubt that it would have been Long Island substantial. L.I. pensions are the gifts that keep on giving.

The bloated pensions of the education bureaucrats are accumulated in ways that would test the ingenuity of any Wall street “compensation expert.” In the most outstanding case, where a highly successful superintendent has hit the jackpot for a $316,000 pension plus a $200K salary, his pension was based on his best five years compensation and they were good years indeed. His compensation was computed to include not only the exorbitant salary he got each year, but also the merit pay bonus he always received, plus $7,000 compensation for having no car provided, plus an equal amount for “conference expenses”, plus the value of the life insurance his board gave him, plus $26,000 representing the amount they paid out for his tax-sheltered annuity, and on and on. Presumably this character and his friends were good at making speeches about their dedication to the needs of the children (sob) entrusted to their care and the high ideals which animated their actions in furtherance of their mission, to the success of which they had committed themselves with no thought of the personal sacrifice involved.

If anyone thinks that this kind of rhetoric will be in abeyance at least for the time it takes to separate some of the money-grubbers from the honey pot they’ve been feeding on, he should read some of the letters flooding in to Newsday from defenders of the system now being exposed. They come from public school lifers for the most part and show their writers to be in full denial mode. Too much is being made of the regrettable actions of a a few bad apples in a system that is otherwise a credit to the outstanding work force that has produced results never approached by educators before. No actual facts are cited, but eventually the names of National Merit Scholars and the like will be produced as proof that the millions thought to have been dispatched down a rathole were not actually wasted.

All this proves to me is that the Russians were right when they said “public property is nobody’s property” and treated it accordingly. I worked in a public-property job and waste was the order of the day. School property offers the chance not just to waste money, but to steal it or chisel it also. So does private property, but against this abuse it sets the barrier of accountability. Private property belongs to somebody, not nobody, and that somebody, whoever it is, will guard it to prevent abuse and conserve value. In this light public education presents itself as kind of overripe fruit oozing juice being lapped up by an army of parasites. They’ve had their fill; why give them any more nourishment?






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OLD WINE , NEW BOTTLE

Being temporarily out of action amd unable to produce something new for this week's edition of strikemepink I'm reprinting here a poem suitable for this year when maybe we'll have a convention similar to the old-fashioned free-for-alls. Back to normal nest week

NO CONTENTION, NO CONVENTION

I miss the old conventions
They were always full of hell
From early in the morning
Till the chairman’s gavel fell.

The fought about the platform
And they fought about the ticket,
They argued with the chairman
And they told him where to stick it.

The questioned all credentials
And disputed every seat.
Each motion was essential
And they’d never call retreat.

That’s what they told each other
No compromise for them
When brother fought with brother
In the sweltering stadium.

The temperature was awful
But still they fought and died
Against the schemes unlawful
Of the fiends on the other side.

Some were Dewey, some were Taft
That in the battle reveled.
Their shirts hung out both fore and aft
And all were much disheveled

For either party ’twas all the same
Whatever the bone of contention
And if the unit rule didn’t bring a duel
It wasn’t much of a convention.

But Rayburn was high on his rampart
Where he knew how to control such anarchy
By gaveling down each upstart
Who dared to challenge his monarchy.

He’d a weapon to command and that was the band
Who waited for his direction.
If anyone moved a motion he’d banned
He was silenced with a Sousa selection.

Now we’ve all become good bunnies
Who always mind our manners.
I miss the the Fordies and the Ronnies
Destroying each others’ banners.

I remember the time of Governor Fine
And the Philadelphia story,
He’d the delegate slate from the Keystone State
And great was his power and glory.

Again Pennsylvania showed its power and might
With the Lawrence delegation,
He did his stuff while out of sight
And Kennedy got the nomination.

The party bosses did much assume
Their right to impose their visions.
They settled things in a smoke-filled room
Then told the folks their decisions.

Some of the delegates howled with pain
And protested against these choices.
So the band struck up again
Plus a chorus of a hundred voices.

Today there are no protestors
Except in the streets and avenues.
Inside it’s like a bunch of investors
Hearing the news of their revenues.

The silence of the lambs is prevailing
It’s really quite awe-inspiring.
But what has become of the delegates’ drum
And the fireworks they’d be firing?

What of the shoving in the aisles
And the angry words exchanged?
Now everything’s sweetness and smiles
And even the cheers seem arranged.

Take me back to those days of our history
To conventions that were sweaty and hot
Where each delegate was a separate mystery
Who might have been sober, but was probably not.

OLD WINE , NEW BOTTLE Being temporarily out of action amd unable to produce something new for this week's edition of strikemepink I'm reprinting here a poem suitable for this year when maybe we'll have a convention similar to the old-fashioned free-for-alls. Back to normal nest week NO CONTENTION, NO CONVENTION I miss the old conventions They were always full of hell From early in the morning Till the chairman’s gavel fell. The fought about the platform And they fought about the ticket, They argued with the chairman And they told him where to stick it. The questioned all credentials And disputed every seat. Each motion was essential And they’d never call retreat. That’s what they told each other No compromise for them When brother fought with brother In the sweltering stadium. The temperature was awful But still they fought and died Against the schemes unlawful Of the fiends on the other side. Some were Dewey, some were Taft That in the battle reveled. Their shirts hung out both fore and aft And all were much disheveled For either party ’twas all the same Whatever the bone of contention And if the unit rule didn’t bring a duel It wasn’t much of a convention. But Rayburn was high on his rampart Where he knew how to control such anarchy By gaveling down each upstart Who dared to challenge his monarchy. He’d a weapon to command and that was the band Who waited for his direction. If anyone moved a motion he’d banned He was silenced with a Sousa selection. Now we’ve all become good bunnies Who always mind our manners. I miss the the Fordies and the Ronnies Destroying each others’ banners. I remember the time of Governor Fine And the Philadelphia story, He’d the delegate slate from the Keystone State And great was his power and glory. Again Pennsylvania showed its power and might With the Lawrence delegation, He did his stuff while out of sight And Kennedy got the nomination. The party bosses did much assume Their right to impose their visions. They settled things in a smoke-filled room Then told the folks their decisions. Some of the delegates howled with pain And protested against these choices. So the band struck up again Plus a chorus of a hundred voices. Today there are no protestors Except in the streets and avenues. Inside it’s like a bunch of investors Hearing the news of their revenues. The silence of the lambs is prevailing It’s really quite awe-inspiring. But what has become of the delegates’ drum And the fireworks they’d be firing? What of the shoving in the aisles And the angry words exchanged? Now everything’s sweetness and smiles And even the cheers seem arranged. Take me back to those days of our history To conventions that were sweaty and hot Where each delegate was a separate mystery Who might have been sober, but was probably not. Designed and Hosted by Online Ontime Ltd.

Designed and Hosted by Online Ontime Ltd.

OLD WINE , NEW BOTTLE

Being temporarily out of action amd unable to produce something new for this week's edition of strikemepink I'm reprinting here a poem suitable for this year when maybe we'll have a convention similar to the old-fashioned free-for-alls. Back to normal nest week

NO CONTENTION, NO CONVENTION

I miss the old conventions
They were always full of hell
From early in the morning
Till the chairman’s gavel fell.

The fought about the platform
And they fought about the ticket,
They argued with the chairman
And they told him where to stick it.

The questioned all credentials
And disputed every seat.
Each motion was essential
And they’d never call retreat.

That’s what they told each other
No compromise for them
When brother fought with brother
In the sweltering stadium.

The temperature was awful
But still they fought and died
Against the schemes unlawful
Of the fiends on the other side.

Some were Dewey, some were Taft
That in the battle reveled.
Their shirts hung out both fore and aft
And all were much disheveled

For either party ’twas all the same
Whatever the bone of contention
And if the unit rule didn’t bring a duel
It wasn’t much of a convention.

But Rayburn was high on his rampart
Where he knew how to control such anarchy
By gaveling down each upstart
Who dared to challenge his monarchy.

He’d a weapon to command and that was the band
Who waited for his direction.
If anyone moved a motion he’d banned
He was silenced with a Sousa selection.

Now we’ve all become good bunnies
Who always mind our manners.
I miss the the Fordies and the Ronnies
Destroying each others’ banners.

I remember the time of Governor Fine
And the Philadelphia story,
He’d the delegate slate from the Keystone State
And great was his power and glory.

Again Pennsylvania showed its power and might
With the Lawrence delegation,
He did his stuff while out of sight
And Kennedy got the nomination.

The party bosses did much assume
Their right to impose their visions.
They settled things in a smoke-filled room
Then told the folks their decisions.

Some of the delegates howled with pain
And protested against these choices.
So the band struck up again
Plus a chorus of a hundred voices.

Today there are no protestors
Except in the streets and avenues.
Inside it’s like a bunch of investors
Hearing the news of their revenues.

The silence of the lambs is prevailing
It’s really quite awe-inspiring.
But what has become of the delegates’ drum
And the fireworks they’d be firing?

What of the shoving in the aisles
And the angry words exchanged?
Now everything’s sweetness and smiles
And even the cheers seem arranged.

Take me back to those days of our history
To conventions that were sweaty and hot
Where each delegate was a separate mystery
Who might have been sober, but was probably not.

OLD WINE , NEW BOTTLE Being temporarily out of action amd unable to produce something new for this week's edition of strikemepink I'm reprinting here a poem suitable for this year when maybe we'll have a convention similar to the old-fashioned free-for-alls. Back to normal nest week NO CONTENTION, NO CONVENTION I miss the old conventions They were always full of hell From early in the morning Till the chairman’s gavel fell. The fought about the platform And they fought about the ticket, They argued with the chairman And they told him where to stick it. The questioned all credentials And disputed every seat. Each motion was essential And they’d never call retreat. That’s what they told each other No compromise for them When brother fought with brother In the sweltering stadium. The temperature was awful But still they fought and died Against the schemes unlawful Of the fiends on the other side. Some were Dewey, some were Taft That in the battle reveled. Their shirts hung out both fore and aft And all were much disheveled For either party ’twas all the same Whatever the bone of contention And if the unit rule didn’t bring a duel It wasn’t much of a convention. But Rayburn was high on his rampart Where he knew how to control such anarchy By gaveling down each upstart Who dared to challenge his monarchy. He’d a weapon to command and that was the band Who waited for his direction. If anyone moved a motion he’d banned He was silenced with a Sousa selection. Now we’ve all become good bunnies Who always mind our manners. I miss the the Fordies and the Ronnies Destroying each others’ banners. I remember the time of Governor Fine And the Philadelphia story, He’d the delegate slate from the Keystone State And great was his power and glory. Again Pennsylvania showed its power and might With the Lawrence delegation, He did his stuff while out of sight And Kennedy got the nomination. The party bosses did much assume Their right to impose their visions. They settled things in a smoke-filled room Then told the folks their decisions. Some of the delegates howled with pain And protested against these choices. So the band struck up again Plus a chorus of a hundred voices. Today there are no protestors Except in the streets and avenues. Inside it’s like a bunch of investors Hearing the news of their revenues. The silence of the lambs is prevailing It’s really quite awe-inspiring. But what has become of the delegates’ drum And the fireworks they’d be firing? What of the shoving in the aisles And the angry words exchanged? Now everything’s sweetness and smiles And even the cheers seem arranged. Take me back to those days of our history To conventions that were sweaty and hot Where each delegate was a separate mystery Who might have been sober, but was probably not. Designed and Hosted by Online Ontime Ltd.

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NO RESPECT

This is a problem. No one escapes. The biggest names in the country come under attack without pause, especially in this year, an election year where everyone gets his licks. Maybe I’m just too much of a sensitive soul but I’m taken aback sometimes by the ferocity of the assaults made on the characters of the ‘prominenti’ who figure in the news of the day. The other day for instance I heard a commentator denounce another commentator who had talked about General Petraeus testifying before Congress in a uniform loaded with “military bling.”

The first commentator thought this was disrespectful and even unpatriotic and shouldn’t be allowed. Maybe so, but all the same it wasn’t exactly surprising. I had been expecting it for a long time. How long were the congressmen going to go on letting themselves be obscured by these military peacocks dressed up like circus ringmasters? In fact I had been wondering when someone was going to bring it up. General after general had been appearing at hearings and every one of them was the same. They all glittered like the gates of hell and it was only a matter of time until someone called them on it.

I had been thinking about it enough that I rather expected others had been doing the same and the displays might be toned down. This turned out to be an example of wishful thinking. When Petraeus appeared he was sparkling. He had four big stars on each shoulder and at least eight or nine rows of ribbons on his chest. He also had stripes on his sleeves and a number of badges and doodads on the right or unoccupied side of his chest, all of them attesting to his great military merits. The only thing lacking was the Blue Max around his neck, but altogether it was a dazzling display.

The ironic part of this is that most of the ribbons he was wearing were no more than Good Conduct badges. Since 1945 even our most experienced generals have seen relatively little combat. We’ve had Korea, Vietnam, Granada, Somalia, Kosovo, the Gulf War and Iraq, but all the medals available for these incidents wouldn’t add up to half of the billboard the general was wearing.

Things have changed quite bit since 1945. I have a book by John Eisenhower called “Allies” dealing with the WWII relations between the U.S. and its wartime friends, the British, Russian, French and Chinese. It is illustrated with pictures of practically all the leaders of all these nations, among them the author’s father Dwight D. Eisenhower. All the soldiers are pictured in uniform. Every big name is included, Patton, Marshall, Bradley, Clark, MacArthur, Montgomery, Brooke, Alexander, DeGaulle, Chiang-Kai-shek, Stalin, and on the other side Hitler, Mussolini, Rommel and King Victor Emanuel. None of them are wearing more than three thin rows of ribbons and most have only one or two, or none It’s more like military parsley than a floral blanket as seen today.

The Russians have to take responsibility for these gaudy demonstrations, although some people might suspect the inspiration came from the “pearlies” of London or the carnival dancers of Rio de Janeiro. The Russian generals surpassed both of these. People gasped when their first portraits appeared in the West. Their medals could not be counted any more than the stars in the Milky Way, which they outshone. Each one of them had at least ten Orders of Lenin plus a half dozen Orders of the Red Banner. All of them were of course Heroes of the Soviet People. They had to be heroes to bear up under the weight of so much precious metal. Presumably they were proud to bear the weight even if it did tend to make them round-shouldered. A hero has to be prepared for these things. Now Americans are finding out about them.

Who else got himself disrespected this week? In a way that trivializes the little misstep of General Petraeus? No, not Eliot Spitzer. That was last week or before. Politicians are hard to please. They’ve got to have the spotlight and the headlines or they wither away. This time it was Barack Obama who saw Spitzer suddenly become almost immortal and decided he had to get in on the action. He found his opportunity and made full use of it. He put his foot in his mouth and chewed it with all thirty-two teeth. He made a speech in Indiana in which he made it clear that he looks on the pathetic slobs whose votes he is soliciting in Pennsylvania as a set of characters right out of “Deliverance”, who worship guns, practice hillbilly religion and hold Klan meetings in the woods at night. How he omitted their addiction to moonshine and blood feuds I do not know. It couldn’t have been because he was afraid of giving offense.

Only one explanation of this outburst is possible. Obama is just too immature to be running for President. He really believes what the rest of the Ivy League believes, that the people living in the great flyover are a set of primitives living their grubby little lives in a continual sweat of hatred of their betters, the progressive, sensitive, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, refined, cultivated, liberal, exponents of true civilization which they are bringing to the world. He is unable to understand that anyone could possibly not understand this and actually reject the treasure he’s being offered, instead choosing to cling to outdated superstitions like religion and nationalism and even ethnocentrism, not caring that all this involves rejection of those outside the fold. Such people are simply unable to appreciate inclusiveness.

They could redeem themselves by voting for Obama. Maybe his condemnation will shame them into doing this. They’ll realize their abnormality and try to make amends. Maybe. More likely their reaction will be negative, to the point of derailing Obama’s whole campaign. If so, his remarks will go down in history alongside those of the famous Republican preacher who insulted Catholics in the 1884 presidential election, thereby electing the Democrat. I see it as a blunder of the same high quality, and I haven’t seen anything comparable outside of the history books. But Obama’s a young man. He will learn by his mistakes. Nest time he’ll campaign in a coonskin cap.






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WE'RE IN THE MONEY

The story of the phantom school employees has legs, it seems. That’s newspaper talk for a story that lasts beyond the first day it’s printed. When it was first printed in Newsday -
not my favorite paper, but due a salute for investigative journalism -- most of the space was taken up by a man named Reich, a lawyer who was carried as an employee full-time by five different school boards and got a $61,000 pension as a result. His smiling face decorated the front pages of Newsday for a week after that but now he’s been replaced by a much greater star. This is a lawyer named D’Agostino who appears to have been the beneficiary of a fraud that will go down in history along with the Tweed Courthouse and the Credit Mobilier.

Concerning his case the Nassau County comptroller has said “Who was watching…when a private lawyer…is retroactively given 21 years of employment status without the county ever hiring him?” Mr. D’Agostino started working for public bodies, including school districts, in 1976 and up to the year 2000 when he “retired.” (He’s still lawyering for three school districts.) He often worked for up to four municipal bodies at a time, disproving the claim that there’s no such thing as an indispensable man. In the year 2000 he got his reward in the shape of a ruling that during all the years he was being paid as an independent contractor he was actually a public employee. Presumably though, he had been filing tax returns as a contractor, thereby being able to take advantage of the helpful deductions appertaining, which were not available to those filing as employees.

The objective of the ruling being to qualify Mr. D’Agostino for a state pension, Nassau County paid $110,000 into the pension system to cover the contributions which he would have paid during his career if only everyone had realized then that he was really an employee, not a legal consultant. But it’s never too late to mend and don’t let it be said that Nassau is too proud to recognize an oversight and correct it when found. So with his arrears to the pension fund made up in this way Mr. D’Agostino emerged from his chrysalis and entered on his new existence as a rich retiree at a pension of $106,702 yearly.

The New York State Comptroller, Mr. DiNapoli, now has the monumental job of getting Mr. D’Agostino to give back the $700,000 plus that he’s collected since retiring. I wrote recently that that would be like getting fish from a man-eating shark. But there it is. The Comptroller has already ordered repayment by Mr. Reich, who began all this uproar when he was found to have been designated an employee after years of consulting and got a pension of $61,459 starting in 2006. Obviously he has less of a challenge than Mr. D’Agostino, but the law requires equal treatment without regard to hardship.

Another complication has arisen in the shape of a vote that Mr. DiNapoli cast for a lawyer named Weinstein 32 years ago when he was head of the Mineola school board. DiNapoli proposed that he be classified as a full-time employee at a salary of $7,000 yearly. The records, however, show that he also got double that amount as an independent contractor. Besides that he was able to work out the same kind of arrangement with four other districts at the same time. He was classified full-time at two of them, part-time at the others. The $7,000 salary seems unlikely for a full-time employee of any type, and the $12.000 pension he got also seems low, but probably both can be explained. The newspaper story says he collected $427,000 salary in his best three years, on which his pension was based. Total years of employment also count in the pension computation, which may be the reason it wasn’t higher. If anyone’s wondering about the Social Security account, well. independents pay in to it using the SE self-employment return, so they’re properly paid up when they switch to employee status.

Since the attorney general of the state says that all intentional misclassifications of contractors as employees to receive taxpayer paid benefits were and are frauds, it looks like Mr. DiNapoli has some explaining to do. My own recommendation is that he could say something about school board meetings getting out of hand sometimes and people proposing that something should be done for good old Hank the lawyer. Someone else says “I’ll drink to that” and the next thing you know we’ve made the guy an employee and pension-eligible. After thirty-two years it’s all a blur. All I remember is we all got home safe.

This may not be good enough. Mr. DiNapoli may have to recuse himself from the investigation. A Special Counsel should then be named. Luckily New York has one available whose reputation is such that a successful outcome is almost guaranteed. In fact, upon hearing his name not only should people like D’Agostino agree to restitution of their illegitimate gains, but people not yet even under suspicion would be likely to come out of hiding and surrender themselves at discretion, knowing that resistance would be futile.

Only one man could produce an effect like this. I’m referring of course to Rudy Giuliani, New York’s most famous, and feared, citizen. He is presently at liberty, having put his presidential ambitions on hold for this election while he waits for his chance at the governorship in 2010. A nice brisk investigation of the school mess would be a good warmup for 2010. It would keep him in the public eye and reassure the public that the guilty and maybe even the innocent were being properly punished for their misdeeds.

Recourse to Rudy may be too much to hope for with the Democrats in power in Albany, but media pressure might be enough to overcome that problem. There is no one else of Giuliani’s stature who could possibly be appointed. Giving him the job would insulate Governor Paterson from cover-up charges and improve his standing with the citizenry. And maybe Rudy wouldn’t run against him in 2010. It might hurt rather than help his presidential plans for 2012. He’d be charged with running out on his job in Albany, plus he’d have to spend at least half his time campaigning around the country.

I think I’ve been taking in too much information about politics lately and am in danger of becoming an expert. I protest. I’m really like the guy who said he wasn’t a politician and his other habits were good.






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SCHOOLDAYS, SCHOOLDAYS

Out here it never ends. A few weeks ago I wrote about a crew of Long Island lawyers who had gotten themselves state pensions by arranging to be listed as full time employees by school districts where their firms were on retainer. In other words, having begun as independent contractors advising the districts on their legal problems, they morphed into employees like the teachers and the principals, doing the same thing. They weren’t quite the same though, because several of them were carried as full-time employees not just in one district but in in two to eight separate districts. This was not true of any teachers or principals. Not being lawyers, they recognized the impossibility of being a full-time employee in two separate districts simultaneously.

Everyone wants a good lawyer when needed and a good lawyer is one who can do the impossible. These attorneys could; not only were they capable of bilocation but also of astral projection so two or even six jobs at once were duck soup to them. Based on a fifty-week year the multi-district designations meant that some of them got credit for 300 weeks of work in a single year. Naturally these supermen retired with pensions up to $100,000 yearly for the rest of their lives.

This was the objective of the employment fraud -- pensions. Pensions went to employees, not to consultants, or independent contractors, as these were. Becoming an employee was an achievement, but it did not mean that anyone had necessarily to give up the juicy pickings that went with being a consultant. So the school boards continued to pay out large fees to the law firms where their “employees” were partners. State law prohibited this kind of double-dipping, but the lawyers neglected to advise the school boards of this.

This was wearing two hats with a swagger. Employee one day, consultant the next day, but on the payroll every day. It was something like the old movie “The Captain’s Paradise” where the ferry captain had a different wife, and different life, at each end of his daily voyage.

What’s being done about all this? One trophy head has been collected from the thundering herd. A lawyer collecting from five school districts has been ordered by the state comptroller to pay back the $30,000 or so pension money he has collected since retiring in 2006. Another guy will be a tougher nut to crack. He retired in 2000 with a yearly tribute of $106,702 due him. Trying to get $700,000 back from him will be like trying to get fish from a man-eating shark. There are others due for the same treatment, who can also be expected to put up fanatical resistance.

The easiest to handle may be the three participants who have not started collecting the fat pensions yet and now can be headed off at the pass. Three suspects have been collecting long-term, meaning from 1979, 1996 and 2003 respectively and may have trouble disgorging. There will still be plenty of action for the investigators, which include the FBI, the state comptroller and the state attorney general, since the school boards have been told to produce their records of dealings with other professional type vendors, such as doctors, architects and accountants. Were they as ingenious as the lawyers?

One of the key points that will be raised against the school-lawyer cartel is the ignorance they’ve displayed of the IRS definition of an “employee.” When classifying the lawyers as employees the boards overlooked the requirements that they work in an office or work station provided by the employer, are provided with materials by the employer and submit time sheets for the work done. Possibly some of them may claim they worked from home communicating via the internet, but it may be difficult for them to prove this. This leaves both them and the boards liable to charges of falsifying official records.

I myself wonder about other troubles the faux-employees may have with IRS. When they attached five or six W-2s to their tax returns emanating from several employers, IRS had to assume that they were part-time workers because nobody could be full-time at all these jobs. What multiple W-2s meant to me when I was a tax preparer was that the customer had to be switching from one job to the other each day and was thereby entitled to a travel and transportation deduction for doing this. This could be a very useful deduction. I had a bad experience with it starting out in the business. Two black men walked into the office one day. They both had two W-2s from their jobs. They worked at one job daytimes and as cleaners in Grand Central at night. Since each employer withheld tax on them without regard to their other job, treating its payment to them as their total income for the year, they were underwithheld because the two withholdings did not add up to the amount of tax due on the total income from the two jobs together. In other words the tax on $15K in one job and $20K in another does not equal the tax due when the two amounts are added together to make $25K.

I felt for these men, who obviously deserved a break, but just couldn’t come up with a solution that would enable them to avoid paying out any more money than had already been extracted from them. Disappointed, they left. Disgusted, I remained. Then it came to me “Travel between two jobs! Of course! Why didn’t I think of it? What’s the matter with me? Where’d those guys go?” That I never found out. They were gone. I hope they found someone else who filled in the gap I hadn’t been able to. I never made the same mistake again. When I saw multiple W-2s I knew to ask about the travel involved in serving two masters.

That’s been a digression. But I always think of the tax angles in any employment cases that make the newspapers. I can’t help wondering if any of the faux employees in this one might have succumbed to the temptation to claim employee business expenses such as travel when they did their returns. Or did they put on their independent contractor hats and take the long list of deductions available to that taxpayer category, to the annoyance of the IRS? They could do both on one return, since they had both categories of income, but taking the employee deductions would be tricky, since the travel deductions alone would be impossible to prove, seeing that their employee status is impossible to prove. Aw, they’re lawyers, they’ll figure something out.






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TEACHERS' ISLAND CREAM

Where did I get that title? Why am I playing games with the name of a respectable old Scotch whisky and twisting it about so it means…say, what does it mean? Well it’s about teachers, you see, and how they’re deep in whipped cream out here on the “Island.” This has caused a reaction from the peasants here, leading to bad puns. Because the teachers are getting…bad sums. This has got to stop.

Seriously, folks, things are out of hand out here. I’ve previously reported on things like the $11M rip-off the Roslyn school district, the multiplication of million-dollar firehouses that compete with Las Vegas for luxury, and a large number of other raids on the public funds by officials of high or low rank, and now it’s the teachers’ turn. Our local paper Newsday has done its research and has found:

A. There are 124 separate school districts on L.I. They are sliced and diced pretty thinly, falling in the middle range between our 97 incorporated villages and our
179 (!) fire districts.
B. The schools enroll 465,000 students. Each district has a superintendent, eleven of whom make over $250,000 a year. The Chancellor of the New York City schools, which enroll 975,000 students, makes $250,000 even.
C. After the superintendents come their entourages, which includes a personal assistant, deputy superintendents, principals, assistant principals, and directors. What they direct is not specified, but I suspect that maybe they’re assigned to different subjects like English perhaps, or P.T., making sure that all the teachers of these subjects are following the curriculum.
D. The total strength of this elite is over 2,000 picked men and women averaging $153,000 each in annual pay and benefits. Depending on how you do the count, there are either 224 students for each administrator or 169. The students also have teachers, of course. The difference is that they see the teachers, but not the administrators. The teachers are in the trenches but the others are back of the lines with the staff.

There’s more of this, but you get the picture. The gravy train is rolling, carrying its passengers to their country estates, rural hideaways, hunting lodges or wherever they go to enjoy gracious living. After all, if you’ve got the funds and you’re in a job where you get the whole summer off, why shouldn’t you have a retreat where you can escape the wear and tear of daily life and take advantage of the good things that have come your way?

You don’t have to be idle all summer either. There are all those improving seminars in places like Palm Springs and yes, Vegas, where you can add to your professional credentials in the mornings and sample the amenities of the place in the afternoons. All work and no play makes Jack a dull teacher, you know.

Las Vegas was a favorite place for seminars attended by the former superintendent of the Roslyn school district who is back in the paper today for making restitution of $2,213,257 misappropriated by him before his arrest in 2005. This will help him with the parole board when he comes before it in 2010. He needs to make a good showing because his maximum sentence runs to the year 2017. A number of his accomplices in Roslyn have made restitution of another $3 million or so, also with their paroles in mind.

All these people would be enjoying sinecures with big paychecks today if they only could have resisted temptation a little better. But the district was rich, the school board was a group of unpaid part-time volunteers and there were easy pickings to be had. The problem with white-collar crime, though, is that it’s almost impossible to carry it out without leaving a paper trail. Checks have to be written, ledger entries have to be made, vouchers must be filed and all these things are subject to exposure when they are closely examined. The school board finally smelled a rat and woke up, and the rest was easy. The audit firm which had missed all the clues went out of business and the district attorney took over.

Another thing about white-collar is that restitution can be had if the culprits did as these did and either banked their loot or spent it on conspicuous consumption like big houses and Formula One cars. Their extravagant habits served them in the end because they had property to be seized. If they had gambled away their takings or even buried them in some impenetrable location, they wouldn’t have been able to make restitution of anything.

Roslyn goes on its accustomed way, not tightening its belt even if it is watching its cash better. When it comes to swollen staffs, they are right up there with the rest of the big spenders. For 3,379 enrolled students they have 27 administrators over $110,000 yearly. Some other comparable districts have more students but still get along with fewer administrators, at least of the high-priced variety.

All this wealth creation by a class of people who used to solicit pity for their poverty and continually call attention to their oppressed condition comes as a surprise to someone like myself who hasn’t been paying attention to what’s going on. I did read about grade inflation which came into vogue in the Sixties when students demanded that schools stop failing people and instead build up their egos by passing everyone. What I didn’t learn about was paycheck inflation, which started roaring along at the same time. Now it’s a five-alarm fire. The teachers have taken over and the rest of us are holding the bag. I just hope the administrators get good value for the money I’ll be forced to give them. Don’t let anybody sell you any cultured pearls, boys, hold out for the real thing. You can afford it.

John Dewey would be proud to see how education has progressed since his time. He was the father of progressive education as expounded at Columbia’s Teachers College where he presided. H.L. Mencken described him as an expert in pedagogics, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, logic, politics, pedagogical metaphysics, metaphysical psychology, psychological ethics, ethical logic, logical politics and political pedagogics. What a man! But he didn’t make as much as a deputy assistant superintendent on Long Island. That’s what it is to be born too soon.






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I usually consecrate this space to the discussion of one subject only each week, going from its earthly manifestations to its cosmological significance and disposing of it for a reasonable length of time. Recently, however, there has been such a rush of events, all forcing themselves on one’s attention, that concentration goes by the board and diversification takes over.

The first shocker we’ve seen of course is the Spitzer affair. All details are known by now, and some are a bit disappointing. It seems that the ladies involved weren’t all beauty queens as advertised, but sometimes just females who were available for duty on short notice, but not really dreamboats, One thing stands out, though. Spitzer was advised that he was being sent an “American girl” which is kind of inspiring when you think about it.

It’s still a bit of a mystery how his name came up at all, but that was the chance he took when he decided no one was tapping his phone and when he tried structuring his payments to keep them under the $10,000 reportable amount. When I was working in a bank in the Eighties that was already a hot button getting close attention, which only increased since 9/11.

All the same, Alan Dershowitz, one of O.J. Simpson’s lawyers, thinks the investigation should have been called off once it was determined that Spitzer wasn’t doing anything but calling up for dates as in high school. Defense attorneys think that way. By them the right time to terminate investigations is before they start. However great oaks from little acorns grow and sometimes small incidents have big results, e.g:

The French Connection case started with two detectives in a nightclub wondering where the Brooklyn guy at the next table got all the money he was spending.

The case of Colonel Abel, the Russian spy posing as a photographer in Brooklyn, came to light only because a hollowed-out coin containing microfilm fell out of a pocket in a suit he’d left for dry cleaning.

Sometimes nothing at all can be a clue. Sherlock Holmes once told Watson that he was concerned about “the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.” “The dog did nothing in the nighttime” blurted Watson. “That was the curious incident” said Holmes. It meant that the dog knew the person who sneaked into the stable and stole the Derby favorite.

Sherlock had plenty of nothing and nothing was plenty for him. He wasn’t the kind of fellow to call off an investigation once it started and neither were the boys from the IRS. Just because there was a big name involved. In fact it’s been noted that IRS is inclined to break its big-name cases in the month of March just when people are making out their tax returns. One year it was John Wayne, other times it was comparable people, but the message was always the same, “Look out!” Spitzer didn’t.

Skipping to another topic as promised, I will mention an “epiphany” that came to me the other night. The word quoted is a hip substitute for “revelation,” and doesn’t mean something miraculous has happened to me. The light dawned as I was watching Humphrey Bogart in “To Have and Have Not” on an oldies channel. It was a wartime picture and Humphrey’s character was doing his bit as a Caribbean boat captain. This brought him into conflict with Vichy French characters in charge of the French West Indies. Once more, as in “Casablanca” Humphrey teamed up with the Free French to thwart their evil plans.

The picture climaxed with Humphrey trapping the Vichyites in a hotel room and demanding information from one of them. He is refused and, well, the next thing he starts to do is to pistol-whip the fellow to get the information. Whap! Whap! go Hmphrey’s wallops as the man’s head bobs from side to side from the impact. Finally he cracks and gives up his information.

What’s wrong with this picture? What does it remind you of? Yeah, that’s right, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding and all that. Torture, in other words. The unforgivable crime today, as we know. Condemned by the Civil Liberties Union, the mainstream media, the church, you name it. All the progressive people in fact. But somehow Humphrey’s infractions escaped them. In fact others followed them right up to the present day. Out of interrogation scenes in thousands of movies I present a couple more, because I haven’t seen the others:

“The Day of the Jackal.” French police interrogate a suspect in an assassination plot against President DeGaulle. They do it by applying electrodes to his genitals and activating them to get answers. They get one but no more because the prisoner dies from the shock. The late William Buckley took note of the lack of horror anti-torture activists exhibited in this case. He concluded that it was because the anti-Gaullists were identified as crypto-fascists, not progressives, and so undeserving of sympathy.In “Guarding Tess,” a recent movie, Nicholas Cage, a Secret Service bodyguard for a President’s kidnapped widow, solves the case by shooting off the toe of a suspect while promising to do more of the same unless he talks. He talks. Oh yes, his victim was a Democratic widow, not a Republican, so he deserved what he got.

So, with all the indignation that progressives generate about alleged torture applied to enemy combatants to elicit information, we see that the Civil Liberties Union, for example, which was in being when all these movies were made, has never bothered to criticize them. I don’t happen to believe that much torture has been done by our forces in Iraq or elsewhere, but where it has been I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the perpetrators should claim they were inspired by Hollywood in carrying them out. That would be free-lancers like the Abu Ghraib crowd, not intelligence officers. In any case Hollywood and the ACLU are not reliable guides in this area. The clear indications are that they practice selective indignation so that when it comes to torture all men are not equal. Doing it to leftists is an outrage; doing it to rightists…so we all make mistakes.

SHOTS FIRED

Google brings us everything, as we all know, but there are limits. Today I tried to check out two young criminal prospects I encountered in my police days to see if there was any information on their adult careers. I drew a blank, as they say, causing me to conclude that they never got very far in their chosen profession. I might have done better checking morgue records. A lot of once-promising young hoods are to be found there.

Then there’s always the unlikely possibility that they went straight and never added to their criminal records. That would have been difficult for one of them, Sean Ryan, who had two homicide convictions before he was twenty-one years old. I described an escape he made from police in this space last year. After that who knows? Google doesn’t.

The other “person of interest” had a better prospect of rehabilitation than Ryan, since he was only sixteen years old when I came across him. He was a teenage terror, though because unlike other thugs his age, he aimed higher than just knocking off a bodega or two or mugging some senior citizen in a hallway. His name was Mark Orlander and he went heeled. Not with a zip gun or a knife, but with a fully loaded shotgun with a hair trigger. And he didn’t attack stores, instead his target was a movie theater seating 1,000 people.

Our paths crossed just after he had attempted to carry out this scheme, which was interrupted by police in its execution, generating a shots-fired report by the duty captain which I was required to follow up on and supplement a few days later.

I don’t have the original report on which my own was based, so it’s not clear to me what happened when Orlander walked into the theater manager’s office with his shotgun. It is clear that a sergeant and a cop were crouched behind desks therein, waiting for him. It’s clear also that shots were fired, but by whom and how many I can’t say. No one was hurt, though, and Orlander escaped, only to be arrested at home later.

Other things are also clear to me from my report, which repeats a good deal of the original one, though not all. Some unknown way or other the manager of the theater had been tipped off that he was on the spot for that night. He called 911to report a potential robbery, but the message went out as “disorderly youths.” When a sergeant arrived he was told that Orlander was already upstairs in the balcony of the theater along with an accomplice. He also learned that a getaway car should be parked outside. It was, conspicuously. Two cops took control of the driver. Using caution though, they kept the volume so far down on their walkie-talkie that they didn’t hear the sergeant tell them to intercept Orlander as he left.

In spite of this lapse, however, things were handled pretty well inside the theater. An usher in the balcony called down to the office immediately when Orlander and his accomplice left to go there and once he learned Orlander was actually in the theater, the manager instructed the ticket office to allow no more customers into the premises.

Orlander and Liss, his accomplice. may have felt good about getting away after being repulsed at the office, but the getaway driver Stuto, was left behind. He was escorted to the station house and invited to provide the names of his accomplices. He did this and they were soon in custody. The detectives also seized Orlander’s weapon, a twelve-gauge Remington loaded with two shells. If he had managed to fire it inside the office it would have made it look like a classroom at Columbine.

The little communications lapse I’ve described here shows how easy it is for things to go wrong even in a relatively simple operation where there was some time for preparation and only four men involved. A garbled radio message was sent out to begin things and then another message went unheard, allowing an armed robber to escape At least all the cops involved were uniformed men, so that there was no mixup over identification. As I write this three plainclothesmen are on trial in Queens, the same borough you’ve been reading about, for shooting a man who they thought was going for a gun to use on them, but which was never found. Did he know they were cops? He can’t speak for himself having lost his life in the encounter, but his lawyer says he didn’t and so do his relatives. That is usually the case in these affairs.

I’m making an analogy here between the two incidents, but I’m not trying to draw any lessons from them. Murphy’s Law already covers the situation -- if something can go wrong, it will. My focus of interest is the one I had at the beginning of this piece, the remarkable precocity of a teenager who sets out to rob a theater full of people using a double-barreled shotgun. His gang consisted of two boys, or men, three years older than him, but under his orders. I once stopped reading a book called Brighton Rock because it featured a gang leader in his teens controlling an English resort, but now I wonder.

Having paid my respects to the past, which I do now and then, next week I’ll return to today’s world for a look at some of the phenomena now transpiring, e.g., the death struggle for the presidency, the introduction of purified baseball, the business bust, with fleets of Titanics going down with their captains, while the owners take to the lifeboats as they did in 1912, leaving the woman and children behind., and last but not least, the exposure of the Great School Heist out here, where lawyers were found to be full-time employees of several school districts at once, enabling them to work 180 weeks in a 52-week year. Es imposible? Non, c’est magnifique!






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THE ARABIAN KNIGHT

Now who is that chap in the flowing Arab clothes,
He really knows how to wear ‘em
But a fact that a eunuch has lately disclosed
Is they’re causing a riot in my harem!

All of my wives have turned into groupies
Who’re mad for this mysterious fellow
Each one ignoring her true wifely duties
And sending him a key for her cell-o.

Now Arab hospitality is known far and wide
And sometimes to a visitor a companion we’ll provide
If first he’s introduced and he shows his bona fides.
But this guy didn’t bother, he found his way inside,
So I thought I’d just console myself with another blushing bride
But when I went to find her she was nowhere to be spied!

Yusuf Ben Obama is this rascal’s name,
For gals he’s a message so tender
Tho’ he’s running for office 'gainst a dame
She’s been deserted by the feminine gender.

He exerts such a keen fascination
Exuding his mysterious glamour
He’s now got a world reputation
In Ireland they call him O‘Bama.

In Italy he’s called Casanova
That hero of the Latin culture
They’re seeking an artist like Canova
To immortalize him in a sculpture.

In France they welcome this boy-o
They’ve never even heard of Hillary
They greet him with a feu de joie-o
From all of their heavy artillery.

It’s always the same all over
Whether the setting is rural or urban
Wherever there appears this rover
In his dazzling snowy turban.

He is lord of the hosts of Allah
Like Abdullah Bulbul Emir
To which he murmureth “Imshallah”
'Let the will of the Prophet appear.'

So now our friend the Bedouin
Is locked in a fight that’s a dilly
With a lady who’s known as a heroine
Just from being married to President Willy.

It’s a glorious battle our friends have been waging
With fifty debates where they’ve been engaging
We’ve heard about NAFTA and Iraq and such
And the evil George Bush who got us in dutch.
But we know all these sorrows will nevermore face us
With the girl from the backwoods or the boy from the oasis!






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