Sidebars

Florida....by Bob Sanders

 

Mike Royko was easily the most entertaining and evocative columnist I've yet to read and I'd rank Jimmy Breslin second probably because I lived in Chicago for 22 years.  The Chicago wonder has been gone two weeks more than 15 years and I continue to miss his incisiveness and wit.  The wonder of it all was that he wrote his column five times a week--a staggering output.  He knew Chicago better than the back of his hand and he could spot a phony by way of uncommon insight.

Royko had a lot of targets.  Writing for first the Daily News, then the Sun-Times and, finally, the Tribune, the columnist went after the Mayors Daley, aldermen on the take, cops with more than character flaws, the Cubs when they were playing badly (and that was most of the time), Hollywood's latest darlings, and adjacent states including Indiana.

Were he still among us, I think Royko would have been absolutely captivated by Florida, that skinny Texas of extraordinary confusion.

It's difficult to know where to begin with something as curious as Florida.  There are the people past including: railway magnet Henry Flagler; the fabulous Mizner brothers who became the rogues of the 1920s Florida Land Boom and whose raffish personalities gave further understanding of the affinity New Yorkers have for Florida; Meyer Lansky, otherwise known as the "Mob's Accountant," and Hank Meyer, a public relations whiz so persuasive that he talked Second Corner weathermen into never crediting Miami Beach with temperatures higher than 89.  They do today, but Meyer is no longer among us.

Let us leap immediately into the contemporary Florida now recognized as the fraud capital of the U.S., a reputation well-established long before Bernie  ripped off so many friends and relatives in Palm Beach, easily his favorite hunting ground.  Florida led the nation last year with 130,449 complaints while also grabbing the top spot in home foreclosures and identity theft.  The Bermuda Triangle of the latter is the Miami metropolitan area where 51 percent of the state's complaints originated last year.  Way to go, Miami, whose numbers were nearly double those of the next-highest U.S. metro area.

While best known for 114 hurricanes (37 major) since 1851, dead beat Florida also has impressive credit card debt records with four cities in the top 25.

In the dumper job-wise, Florida will have to wait at least another year to realize all the magnificence inherent in a mega-casino bill pulled from consideration the other day by House sponsor Erik Fresen when it became clear passage was not possible.  Not even a statewide TV advertising campaign, in addition to glitzy architectural renderings we've come to expect from the Sunshine State, could make possible three $2 billion mega casinos in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties.  Las Vegas-style gambling in South Florida can yet be a reality.  After all, like corporations, casinos are people.

As if living in Florida isn't difficult enough, The National Transportation Safety Board tells us the state is on its list of those needing the most improvement in highway safety.  The problem involves an out-of-touch legislature unwilling to pass a single distracted driving law.  While more than 70 percent of Florida voters support a ban on text messaging while driving, the legislature has been turning down safety bills since 2006 when the problem was timidly referred to as "hands free."

The concerned have statistics to back up their contention tht keeping legal outrageous driving is not acceptable.  During the first 10 months of 2011, electronic distractions led to 2,218 vehicle accidents in the state with 145 linked to texting and drivingl.  The big year for messaging bills that never made it out of committee was 2008 when in e met such a fate.  Of little help is Gov. Rick Scott, a conservative Republican (thought I'd never get there, did you?) who vetoed a bill in 2011 that would have required education about the dangers of electronic distracted driving.  What a flippant thought.

Sometimes referred to as the Persistent Vegetative State, voters not long ago passed a law making the wearing of baggy pants a criminal offense that can cost the offender up to $150 and 60 days in jail.  Ah, priorities where in Florida baggy pants are more important than electronic distraction while driving.

Oh, yes.  Did you know that Orlando, where Mickey Mouse is king, is the kiddie porn capital of this here country?  That's according to a Men's Health Magazine study based upon such factors as hard core DVD purchases, rentals, and streams.  Florida is so salacious that Las Vegas finished second with New York coming in 77th out of 100.

It may have been the butterfly ballot of 2000 that first brought our attention to Florida in terms of how corrupt and screwed up it is.  The hanging chad became one of those infamous terms forever associated with America's only stolen election although Jack Kennedy's win in 1958 is a reasonable Republican response.  The brilliant punch card design was on its way out with but 37.3% of voters using the system in 1996.  Socioeconomics determined which counties would keep punch card voting and Palm Beach County was considered disadvantaged without funds to buy voting machines.

What set up confusion in Palm Beach County was the state's 1998 gubernatorial election in which Jeb Bush beat incumbent governor Lawton Chiles.  Had George W. Bush's brother lost in Florida, Gore would have won in 2000 because of a first position on the ballot.  The 1996 election found Republican Bob Dole second on the ballot because Chiles was in office so Dole got all the ruined ballots.  With Jeb Bush Governor, Gore got second place on the ballot and lost the election.  It was those error-prone folks in Palm Beach County who determined the election along with a lot of help from the U.S. Supreme Court.  Proof that Bush was unfairly awarded the Presidency is every one of Pat Buchanan's 3,407 Palm Beach County votes.  The total represented 19.6% of votes cast, a highly suspect number since the Reform Party candidate pulled but 5.4% of the total in 1996.  There were 336 registered Reform Party members in 2000.  Once Bush was in office, he made certain that the lede paragraph of his obituary will make mention of his war criminality rather than the flukiness of the 2000 election.

Speaking of criminals, there's a burgeoning number of Floridians who will steal anything not nailed down.  Among them is a guy who concentrates on ripping off large amounts of medical equipment.  His specialty: heart monitors unhooked from their owners.

Floridians are often challenged by a lack of awareness as evidenced by the flight trainer who didn't find it unusual shortly before 9/11 when he was told by a cash-paying aviation "student" to forget about landing instructions and "just teach me to fly it around."

Key West, where weirdness might peak, is worth mentioning if only because of the German doctor who fell in love with a young tuberculosis patient.  She eventually died and he tried to restore her to life after stealing her from her tomb.  In a plot twist Tim Burton probably wouldn't touch, the doctor had sexual relations with her corpse quite possibly proving, once again, that a good bedside manner can go a long way.

Let's make it encore, Key West, where in 1984 the entire police department was declared an illegal enterprise under the RICO laws--usually used to shut down mobsters.  One witness testified to delivering bags of coke to city hall on a regular basis.

Of much more recent vintage has been the Trayvon Martin shooting by George Zimmerman in which Florida's short-sighted stand your ground law is being questioned now by even the fools in government who came up with such an un-civilized law.  It's always interesting to learn what adjoining states are doing and, to little surprise, Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama have similar laws.  Yahoo states do as Yahoo states are.

A town with an innate ability to insult a celebrity is Lauderhill that once invited actor James Earl Jones to speak at a Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration and receive a plaque to commemorate the occasion.  Everything went according to plan until the presentation of the plaque.  It was inscribed to James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated King.

Enormously funny author Carl Hiassen has kicked the state around while living in South Florida.  It was during a Steve Kroft interview on "60 Minutes" that Hiassen revealed a lot of his plot developments are based upon actual people including the heroine of Skinny Dip who was flung off the stern of a cruise ship, only to be saved by a floating bale of marijuana.  Other characters include a professional wheelchair thief, a school board candidate whose legal residence was a tool shed, and a U.S. attorney who bit a stripper during a table dance.  Oh, and let's not forget a South Florida mayor who tried to employ city hall workers to kill her husband.

One of the verities of Florida, sometimes referred to as "America's Penis," is the vast number of retirees living in places like The Villages whose TV advertising budget is probably exceeded only by that of Super PAC Restore Our Future.  The Villages residents, as might be expected, resort to print advertising including the following under the heading: Long Term Commitment: Recent widow who has just burned fourth husband, and am looking for someone to round out a six-unit plot.  Dizziness, fainting, shortness of breath not a problem.  It would appear it's possible to have a sense of humor in the Alligator State despite living conditions on the challenging side.

Adding to Florida's uniqueness is the topography.  The lowest high point of any state is Britton Hill at 345 ft.  To no one's surprise, there are theorists fully convinced a great day is coming when a really significant tsunami will do what Floridians have been unable to do thus far: put the state out of its misery.

And, as the saying goes, there's much, much more not touched upon in this sally including the continuing role of Miami's Little Havana in our Cuban policy and the laugh-out-loud rewriting of Senator Marco Rubio's family history; the unusual death 10 years ago of a Joe Scarborough ("Morning Joe") employee in Walton Beach; the odd case of Terry Schiavo kept alive for six years in a vegetative state for political purposes; and Jeb Bush's request for an Orlando court-appointed guardian for the fetus of a mentally disabled rape victim.  He was refused.

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Lost and Found....by Bob Sanders

 

It has been a disappointing week.  The Artest (first name Ron) formerly known for rude behavior on NBA basketball courts is back in fetid form under his new and highly inappropriate name, Metta World Peace.  Hardly tranquil was the Los Angeles Lakers small forward's declaration of war on James Harden's head.  Harden's considerable skills are employed by the Oklahoma Thunder and the vicious assault was by way of a World Peace flying elbow.  World Peace claimed it was "accidental" but TV replays suggest otherwise.  For causing a concussion, he got a seven-game suspension, a decided contrast to a 2004 docking of 86.

Joining World Peace as major screw ups were a bunch of Secret Service operatives assigned to protect the President.  Somehow, a number of Columbian hookers wound up at the hotel where President Obama would be staying and, somehow, one of the agents refused to pay for services rendered.  Quicker than you can command room service, hotel management, then the cops were summoned resulting in the mom's apple pie reputation of the Secret Service going in the toilet.  It was the kind of opening scene of inspired lunacy that might have come from the enormously fertile mind of film director/writer Billy Wilder.  The kicker to the scene, of course, is that prostitution is legal in that part of Columbia.  Details, details.

It could very well be that the price-conscious agent has one of those very reactive minds much like head-hunting NFL defensive linemen quite unable to think things through.  As the story develops, it becomes clear that a number of agents will no longer run the risk of taking a bullet for this or any President.

Then, there's the case of GSA official Jeff Neely who became the poster boy for the $830,000 tab run up by his organization at much ado about precious little celebrations in Las Vegas.  What happened in Sin City is not staying there.  Neely had the misfortune to be photographed with two glasses of wine within easy reach while smiling from a hot tub.  Fox News went reliably crazy.

Offering a nice contrast to this country's stupid elite was one of those feel-good stories NBC's "Evening News" likes to sign off with on Fridays.  It's the tale of Misaki Murikami, now aware one prized possession survived the tsunami that destroy his home and community on March 11, 2011.  A football, containing messages of best wishes, was given him in 2005 as a good-bye gift when he transferred to another school.

The ball made it all the way to Alaska where David Baxter, a radar technician from Kasilof, found it while beachcombing on Middleton Island, 70 miles south of the Alaskan mainland.  Baxter and his wife plan to visit Japan next month but will not deliver the ball directly to Murikami.  They don't want to create a fuss.

While on the beachcombing subject, we've been fascinated for a long time by items carried great distances, then found.  People have been putting messages in bottles for something like 2,000 years.  Champion bottle finder appears to be beachcombing Illinoisan Clint Buffington.  A teacher at the University of Kentucky, Buffington is to bottle finding what Art Wall is to the hole-in-one.  Wall, as a touring professional, had 45 plus nine as an amateur.  Californian Norman Manley claims 59 but he wasn't a pro and some of his aces are unattested.  

With bottle-hunting not as popular as golf, statistics are on the rare side.  Buffington claims 38 readable notes in bottles and his pursuit is intense for someone with sand in his shoes.  He once found a Coca-Cola bottle on an island in the Caribbean Sea and got in touch with the daughter of the man who wrote it, perhaps 50 years ago.  The daughter, Paula Pierce of New Hampshire, understandably was impressed: "That gave me the chills.  I feel like they're sending me a message."  Her parents had stayed at the Beachcomber Hotel in Hampton and had placed a note in a bottle promising the finder $150 to be paid by owner Tina.  Dad was, doubtless, a big spender of other people's money.

It was in 2007 on the shoreline of the Turks and Caicos Islands some 550 miles south of Miami that Buffington came upon another bottle tossed in the Atlantic Ocean.  The year was 1999 and the bottle flip a part of a first wedding anniversary celebration by Ed and Carol Meyers in Duck, North Carolina, an outer banks community just a few quacks away from Kitty Hawk.  Interestingly enough, the beach where Buffington found the Meyers' bottle is the same one where he came upon the Pierce container and the note promising $150 to the finder.

A not so far-traveled message in a bottle was one found three years ago by Darin Winkler of the River Run subdivision on the Spokane River.  Walking the banks of the river with his kids, Winkler noticed an old flattened basketball and a bunch of bottles.  One, with an old-fashioned cork stopper, appeared to be of greater vintage than the others.  Carefully extracting a note from the bottle, Winkler noticed the paper was a bit damp, but mostly intact.  A date on it, March 30, 1913, took his breath away.  The note was signed by Emmett Presnell of nearby Rockford.  Research by Winkler suggests the bottle had had a very short trip and very likely spent the better part of nine decades high and dry on a tangle of logs or washed up on a bank making the note so readable after so long.

A postcard can have a lot of travel miles on it and so it was with one received by Vasilia "Vas" Mazzotta last April.  Mazzotta, who now lives in Cromwell, Connecticut, was a bit baffled when she first tried to make sense of it.  Addressed to "Miss Vassoula Sitara" (her maiden name), it was an Easter card, written in Greek and signed by her long-deceased grandfather.  It was dated Athens 20 April 65.  There are no hints of where the postcard had been for nearly 46 years and it remains a mailbox mystery.

Under the right circumstances, balloons can be impressive travelers and so it was when Laura Buxton, 10, released a red balloon ino the air over her home in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England.  That was in June, 2001 and on one side of the balloon she had written: "Please return to Laura Buxton," on the other her home address.

About 140 miles away a man in Milton Libourne found the balloon stuck in a hedge on his property.  Noticing Laura Buxton's name and address, the man took the balloon to a neighbor's house showing it to the 10-year-old girl who lived there.  Her name: also Laura Buxton.

From there the story is like something out of the "Twilight Zone."  The second Laura Buxton wrote the first to tell her of the found balloon; the two, thinking the balloon connection extraordinary, decided they had to meet in person.

On meeting day, the two girls wore the same outfit--a pink sweater and jeans.  The girls, both tall for their ages, were the same height, had brown hair wearing it in the same style and even brought their guinea pigs along.  Both  pigs were  the same color and even had duplicate orange markings on their hindquarters.  Both had three-year-old black Labrador Retrievers at home, as well as gray pet rabbits.

The odd events that brought them together have made possible a strong bonding between the two.  They are now 21 and believe their most unusual meeting was too significant to be regarded as mere coincidence.  Can't you just hear Rod Serling introducing the two Laura Buxtons: "You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination--next stop, the 'Twilight Zone.'"  Da-da-da-da/da-da-da-da.

Quite a few of our four-footed friends have used a variety of travel means to reappear after unique adventures.  Emily, a one-year-old tabby diappeared from Lesley and Donny McElhiney's home in Appleton, Wisconsin while on her evening prowl.  She soon found herself on a truck headed for Chicago.  Inside a container of paper bales, she was shipped to Belgium, eventually winding up in France where a laminating company's employees found her thin and thirsty.  Wearing tags, she was soon reunited with her family thanks to Continental Airlines.  Emily's across-the-pond adventure totaled 4,500 miles.

It wasn't easy for Troubles, a scout dog, to get back to his First Air Cavalry Division Headquarters during the Vietnam War.  Troubles' handler, William Richardson, was wounded deep in the war zone and the two became separated when Richardson was flown by helicopter to a hospital.  That was a tough break for Troubles who not only lost his handler but was abandoned by the rest of the unit.  Everything was strange about Vietnam but Troubles made it back to headquarters in Anikhe three weeks later.  Troubles, a canine on a mission, wouldn't let anyone near him as he searched tents.  The lengthy search ended when Troubles curled up for a nap after finding a pile of Richardson's clothes to use for a bed.

I wonder if my Joe Sewell glove will ever turn up?  I left it behind when World War II called.  Worn by the Hall of Famer who played for the Cleveland Indians and New York Yqnkees, the glove was given me by Xen Scott, a Cleveland area neighbor and Sewell's coach at the University of Alabama.  That glove would have to travel some 2,000 miles--if it's still in a dusty corner of a basement on Summit Ave. in Lakewood.  That's a long way but you never ever really know about such things.  Da-da-da-da/da-da-da-da.

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Petitions....by Bob Sanders

 

With the world going broke and Dwight Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex giving us further pause, one has to wonder about the lack of outrage being registered concerning the frightening number of problems facing this country.

The anger simply isn't there although the concept of paper petitioning democratic governments, as old as the Magna Carta, remains in place while not in vogue.  Petitioning doesn't appear to be the serious process it once was; perhaps it's a matter of having given up on our Washington politicians, a suggestion of obvious merit judging from those single digit approval ratings.  Maybe we have backed away from the out-of-touchers and have turned to the internet to register what, unfortunately, is often trivial whining.  Fortunately, we remain inclined to petition on a local level and it was a Bellingham, WA story that whirled my mind toward the electronic petition gaining in popularity as our favored method of registering complaint.

The Bellingham tale is about the Executive Director of the Port Commission who was fired by two of three Commissioners, the second of whom required a decidedly illegal weekend shoring up by the originator of the scheme.  Without going into great detail, one of the Commissioners didn't like the Executive Director, a hire out of Seattle where he was highly regarded.  According to those who know about such things, his Bellingham work was exemplary.  A petition to save the Executive Director's job was enjoined by a less effective paper version.  Close to 1,000 signatures and an April 17 heavily-attended and vocal Port meeting failed to impress the two Commissioners and the Executive Director's job was not saved.  Other than learning of some Machiavellian involvement by a few Port staffers, the public still doesn't have any details of the firing.  Petitioners will now attempt to increase the number of Port Commissioners to five.

Known as the City of Subdued Excitement, Bellingham achieves minor titillation most often when someone screws up at City Hall or at the Whatcom County level.  It's the kind of place where an ex-mayor (he lost in November) succeeded in sliding a street-based camera security system past the City Council, then lost the election in all likelihood because his maneuver was recalled by an aroused citizenry that first produced a petition with enough signatures.  The Council settled with the camera people for $100,000 later breathing great sighs of relief that the city had gotten off so cheaply.  We put up with a lot of shit in Bellingham.  Largely inured to such foolishness, we've become subdued although occasionally capable of retort.

It was a petition that started the camera folly rolling in another direction and 'hamsters became aware of the Port story when it was revealed by John Servais who publishes online the NorthwestCitizen.  More down the road about Servais whose story beat the Bellingham Herald's version by two days.  There are times when 'hamsters feel they are living in Mayberry and the Herald accounts for a lot of those times.

Curious about internet petitions and whether or not the American public has turned to them to express anger, I began searching the internet discovering a plethora.  One is in behalf of an actor, Patrick Murphy, who plays Dr. Derek Sheppard on "Grey's Anatomy."  Aware that the medical world provides fabulous fodder for fixated followers fascinated by favorite TV doctors from Ben Casey to House, I was not surprised to find petitioners desperately wanting Murphy to play Dr. Stephen Vincent Strange for Marvel Comics' upcoming "Doctor Strange."

It's good to know the Druids are not being ignored thanks largely to right-wing columnist Melanie Phillips who got on a tear back in October when she took exception to the British government's determination that the Druids have an official religion that enables them charitable status.  Phillips writes for the Mail and it wasn't long before King Arthur Pondragon, a Druid activist, showed up at the Mail with an online petition of more than 4,000 signatures.  Do not show pictures of Druids to Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.  Druid apparel is heavy on white sheets.

Half-time at the Super Bowl, like the Academy Awards, gets a lot of yawns and this year's use of Madonna got very mixed reviews.  Hard to believe, but there's a hue and possibly even a cry from fans of Weird Al Yankovic (I'd call him Weird but we have yet to reach a first name basis) has "unparalleled showmanship," fans extol his "wide-swath of musical styles ranging from grunge parody to rap parody," and, least we forget, "geek appeal" that would translate into "killer ratings."  By all means, let's never lose sight of geek appeal.

Decidedly on the serious side are a couple of petitions that recently forced a reaction by the White House and may have struck a blow to millions of conspiracy theorists.  The petitions, containing 17,000 signatures, called on the government to disclose knowledge of extraterrestrial beings and contact with them.  As a result, the White House has started a new andd highly original initiative called "We the People" that encourages petitions while denying there is any "credible evidence of extraterrestrial presence here on earth."

To pierce or not to pierce appears to be the question following tattoo adornment.  Just as marijuana is the gateway drug, it appears that's the case with tattoos although Elke of the UK doesn't make a reference to any tats in her petition located on the Bureau of Petitions website.  "I really want to get my nose pierced," she writes, "but mum won't let me...I think she will if I get enough signatures, I am 16, so I think I am old enough to make my own decisions...please sign!!!  Thus far Elke has pleaded her way to 100 signatures.

Another slant on piercing is offered on the Care2Petitionsite where an attention-getting headline, Outlaw the Piercing Gun NOW!!! leads the reader into claims that the instrument is unhygienic, inaccurate and dangereous.  With a goal of 1,000 signatures, 613 have signed up so far.  No word yet about reaction from the National Rifle Association.

Holly's petition is to own a cat and may be found on Petition buzz whose website is, indeed, impressive.  There are 10 categories, enough to satisfy the biggest complainers among us.  Entertainment & Media, for example, has 886 offerings while the sports world has 277.  Civil and Human Rights presently includes 664.  A hot whine these days is a 20% VAT charge on sports nutrition drinks in Britain that will go into effect October 12 unless enough squawks materialize.  The complaints, now numbering 22,413, are being sent to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.  One of the fascinating aspects of Petition buzz is its thoroughness including tips on the use of Paypal to collect donations.  

Tattoos for cats seem a bit obscure but the Russians are stirring things up as they occasionally do.  Thus far, 24,322 cat lovers have expressed outrage at Russian tattooist Timur Rimit whose artistry is now being worn by his hairless sphinx.  Another tat catastrophe is Mickey whose chest is now emblazoned with a likeness of King Tut.  Both Mickey's owner, Oskana Popova, and Timur did make certain that three hours of sedation accompanied the procedure.  Thus far 646,120 facebookers have made clear their removed disenchantment by registering a thumbs down.

Any sprawling topic like petitioning has to include the Japanese and it was U.N. Donne, head of Japanese Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, who knows just how weird are the Japanese and you thought their Hello Kitty assault rifle and the square watermelon were something along with penis ice cream and the breast grabber amusement arcade prize game?  A thousand people recently signed a petition demanding that the government legalize marriage to cartoon characters.  The petition does not make clear whether sexual identity is of any consequence in cartoon nuptials.

And, finally, it's good to know a sense of humor is possible in Pakistan.  The humorist is a judge who recently heard a petitioner, one Atiqur Rehman, who claimed to be Meera's husband.  Meera, for the uninformed, is a Bollywood babe who will do anything for publicity--most notably calling off engagements and weddings.  One of her biggest scores was achieved starring in a movie featuring a kissing scene deemed "immoral" by Pakistanis not fond of her making films in India.

Rehman's request was pretty unique: he wanted to have a test conducted to determine the actress's virginity.  The judge thought for a moment, then declined the request suggesting such an examination would open a Pandora's box.

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Waiting for Gojoe....by Bob Sanders

Timing, as the saying goes, is everything and that undoubtedly explains my recent series of failures to find Joe Scarborough on his "Morning Joe" television show.

Slotted on MSNBC beginning at 3 a.m. (PCT), the three-hour program is my Plan A when I find a return to sleep challenging.  Searching for Scarborough has been something like "Waiting for Godot," Samuel Beckett's absurdest play in which nothing happens while the main characters anticipate the arrival of Godot who never appears.  Let's call my Joe no show "Waiting for Gojoe."

The interruptions of my sleep were occurring about every fifth night or so.  Scarborough simply wasn't showing up whenever I flipped on "Morning Joe" and there were a number of possible reasons.  Had the former Florida U.S. Congressman returned to hometown Pensacola preparatory to running for public office?  Never in memory has any former politician shown greater evidence of a longing for, in his case, those good old days featuring Newt Gingrich as House Speaker and his Contract With  America--proudly signed by Scarborough.  What a contrast with today; yesterday's Contractors, who screwed things up, have been replaced by today's Tea Party leaving in the dust such forever pols like Scarborough whose evidence of GOP loyalty consists largely of trumpeting the triumphs of Ronald Reagan.

There were other possibilities for Scarborough's absences including a resumption of talks with CNN or CBS regarding a move away from MSNBC.  The original rumors came last year on the heels of "Morning Joe" executive producer Chris Licht's leaving NBC to take over the always foundering "Morning Show."  Self-serving like most rumors of its kind, they coincided with contract negotiations involving the major "Morning Joe" hosts.

Those devilish contracts nearly ended Joe and Mike Brzezinski's show about a year after it began in 2007 when Mika learned Joe was making 14 times her salary.  There were a number of factors involved including Joe's positioning as producer plus Mika's having joined NBC after being fired from CBS.  A then recent book published by her with the title, Knowing Your Value, was a bit awkward and she successfully battled for a re-worked contract after producer Joe, the guy who underpaid her, casually gave her one of his paychecks.  Joe, obviously, didn't want to lose Mika.

Another plausibility for Joe's no show might involve that very odd intern death back in Walton Beach, not far from Pensacola.  Had the cops finally come up with some answers to questions about Lori Klausutus' mysterious death 11 years ago?  Klausutus, 28, a Scarborough employee, was found in the congressman's office early one morning.  The shoddiness of Florida police work was no better then than the current Trayvon Martin shooting death in Sanford.  The cops all too quickly determined that Klausutus, a long-distance runner in outstanding condition, had fainted striking her head twice on a desk.  The cause of death, heart arrhythmia, was determined by a discredited medical examiner apparently incapable of wondering how a head could strike a desk twice.

Scarborough, scornful of the media these days, back then also was publisher of the Redneck Riviera's Independent Sun and he quickly resigned his ties to the newspaper and his seat in Congress.  The man people now refer to as "Morning Joe" had initiated divorce proceedings two years earlier from a wife of 13 years.

A much more likely reason for Scarborough's disappearing act would be occasional guest appearances by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mika's father and national security adviser during the Carter administration.  Do not invite Zbigniew and Scarborough to the same party.  The latter plays smart ass to a man who treats the show's host much as an un-wanted son-in-law.  Their relationship peaked late in 2008 when Brzezinski called him "stunningly superficial" for his assessment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Brzezinski's umbrage was very reminiscent of Jack Paar's Alexander king, maybe the best TV guest ever.

"Morning Joe," close to celebrating its fifth anniversary, has strange origins even for television and began with Brzezinski doing a news segment from beautiful downtown Secaucus, New Jersey for Scarborough, then hosting a failing "Scarborough Country" program from Florida.  Informed by friends that Mika had used mocking tones about "Scarborough Country" during her feed to the show, Joe was intrigued, looked her up and, as they say, it was just a matter of time.  That time came when Don Imus, host of "Imus in the Morning" and the prior occupant of the "Morning Joe" time slot, was fired for making insensitive remarks about the Rutgers women's basketball team.  We can measure the true power of a broadcast personality on the basis of whether or not they get fired for serious indiscretions.  Imus was gone quickly for what was paltry compared to Rush Limbaugh's recent disgraceful series of rants leveled at a female law student.

Keith Olbermann, who left MSNBC last year for the Current Channel, continues to suggest that Scarborough's sharp elbows are being thrown all over NBC as he challenges credentials of guests on shows other than his own, now augmented by a talk pack of nearly 30. 

There is an odd chemistry, not yet fully realized, that exists between Mika and Joe.  The fractious relationship of "The Odd Couple" has been suggested more than once although it seems to this viewer that whatever magic exists is much more reminiscent of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn although Trace rarely did the kind of off-putting body language now so seemingly intrinsic to the Scarborough persona.  Arms across the chest, Scarborough seems committed to sweaters and other casual attire to set himself off from the guests, regular and otherwise, who bring to the table far too much about politics--particularly the strange people who have been attempting to unseat President Obama.  Third host Willie Geist seems to be on board mostly to keep beady-eyed Joe from running roughshod over Mika.

Of late, the political pickings have been so sparse that clothing worn by regulars and guests has been seized upon as slim and obvious subject matter.  Three hours a day is a long, long time.  Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post and clearly a sartorial dandy, was a bit put out recently by show regular Mike Barnicle whose clothes might best be described as the kind of go-to-hell casual worn by far too many men in Bellingham, Washington, a serious candidate for dress down capitol of this country.  I know about these things because I live there. 

With my sleeping habits much improved during very recent days, I have managed to note that Pat Buchanan is no longer a "Morning Joe" regular.  Pat, who has managed to maintain guest status on the decibel impressive "The McLaughlin Group," recently dashed off a book in which he finally put in writing what he has been saying for many years: he's an out and out racist.  Good luck with the book, Pat.

Other people have come, gone and, in one case, come back.  The comebacker is Mark Halperin who got cut from the talk team last year when he called the President a dick.  To be perfectly accurate, the quote was "sort of a dick the other day."  Poor Obama gets blamed for everything: gas prices, wars, being a Muslim (according to one poll, 52 percent of Mississippi residents believe so), a questionable birth certificate (45 percent of Republicans are birthers), and, probably, bad asshood for putting a hex on second-seeded University of Missouri by picking the Tigers to be one of March Madness' final four.  Missou was knocked off in the first round by 15th seed Norfolk State.

The dick caller returned to "Morning Joe" after a month's banishment and everything, as my dad used to say, is copacetic.  A Time senior political analyst, Halperin is co-author of Game Change with fellow "Morning Joe" regular John Heilemann.  It's an inside look at what went wrong when John McCain and others decided to put Sarah Palin on the 2008 GOP ticket.  Made into a feature length film, it is currently playing on HBO.

In truth, Halprin should have received a stiffer sentence than a month's dismissal not so much for disparaging the President but for being so inaccurate with political predictions.  Among his gaffes: insisting that both Palin and fellow lightweight Donald Trump were serious GOP ontenders; suggesting that McCain's mid-campaign week's return to Washington "won the week" for the Arizona Senator, and just about any crystal balling found in his (2006) book, The Way to Win.  Co-author John Harris, co-founder of Politico, has to share the blame for that turkey.

Halperin's castigation that morning of the President created a momentary pall upon the show's usual cocktail party atmosphere (Starbucks served, of course) with Scarborough expressing agitation that a new producer was unable to activate a seven-second delay.  Such are the vicissitudes of broadcasting when a producer can't punch the right button.

The essence of "Morning Joe," clubby yet rife with the distinct possibility of someone walking in off the street to take exception to Scarborrough's brand of conservatism heavy with wish for the halcyon days of Reaganism, may very well be on the right track.  The challenge is that the rigors of doing it three hours a day for five days a week may wind up boring the hell out of viewers but that would have happened by now.  "Morning Joe," with less than half the audience of the hardly scintillating "Fox & Friends," continues to stay ahead of CNN in the time slot.  Certainly, the casual roundtable banter is a welcome contrast to the all too traditional panel stuff seen in short segments on "Meet the Press," "This Week," "Fox News Sunday" and "Face the Nation," soon to expand to 60 minutes.

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Newton Minow & The Supremes

 

It was while working for TV Guide in 1957 that I learned some multi-tasking, long before the term was invented, that enabled me to do a particularly good job then and later on for my employer.  My acquisition was in an unlikely place, Dothan, Alabama, and provided additional insight into the inner-workings of small-town television. 

I had been moved to Atlanta from St. Louis in the late winter of that year.  Atlanta was a production center where editions of the magazine were produced for Georgia, North and South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama.  My first day on the job was a bit unusual and involved a breakfast to herald the acquisition of MGM films by WSB, a station whose call letters stood for Welcome South, Brother.  Aware that the breakfast was to begin in 10 minutes, I dashed out of my office to find what I thought was a cab parked by the curb.  Leaping into the vehicle, I realized the driver was a cop who saw the humor in what had happened.  "Where do you want to go?" he asked.  "WSB," I answered and we were off.

The cop then drove me to what turned out to be WAGA-TV, the CBS affiliate.  Apologizing for confusing the two stations (perhaps I spoke a strange dialect?), he took me to WSB.  "What an interesting introduction to what I'm sure is a wonderful city," was my Chamber of Commerce comment made to a curbside Norman Shavin, then radio-tv columnist for the Atlanta Journal.  He used the quote in his next day's column.

Having a unique responsibility for coverage areas of many stations, I took an early-on drive through Alabama where I was astonished to find a dirt road in the very heart of Birmingham.  To get to the Florida panhandle, I had to go through Dothan where I learned from the promotion manager of the town's only station that the magazine was getting 50 and 60 spots a week in trade for a half-page advertisement.  Many were in prime time.  Offering proof of performance by showing me station logs, he threw in a comment about "an FCC ruling that any citizen, upon request, must be shown a log."

I never forgot that one realizing I could not only view the accuracy of our programming but, also, the positioning of our trade-out-spots. While stations in markets like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles traded on a dollar-for-dollar basis, it was the Dothans, Topekas, and Chattanoogas where enthusiasm for the magazine often was based upon the answer to a question I was prone to ask station managers and promoters: "Would you rather have a newspaper or a TV Guide in the hands of a viewer seeking program information?"  Because TV Guide was pre-eminent in providing program details, the answer to the question went a long way in the magazine's success.  All it took was a handshake.

Venturing further south to Panama City, I checked the station's logs and learned things that would have raised the ire of the FCC.  In those days, you could not have three commercial spots in a row.  A way around the rule was to drop a station promo spot among the paid-for ones and I was surprised such obvious subterfuge was ignored there.  The log showed popular shows like "Tennessee Ernie Ford" often were resumed in progress--sometimes missing more than two minutes during which commercials ran.

While it's unlikely Newton Minow was ever aware of the specific guile practiced by the Panama City channel, it is true that the former FCC chairman included the spirit of such shenanigans in his charge that the TV industry was a "vast wasteland."  That was on May 9, 1961, four years after my trip to Dothan.  Minow had been appointed recently to his position by President John F. Kennedy and his words shook up TV like no one before or since.

The Minow comment got mixed reviews.  Many regarded his attack before the National Association of Broadcasters long overdue as criticism of excessive violence and frivolity while others thought it elitist hammering of programs enjoyed by viewers who believed the criticism as private enterprise interference by government.  Sound familiar?

Others unhappy with Minow's observations included (not surprisingly) Ayn Rand and Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of "Gilligan's Island."  Schwartz, who died last year at 94, offered a retort in the form of Gilligan's ill-fated ship, the S.S. Minnow.  The ship was used in  pre-program dramatic effect to explain how the seven survivors wound up on the island.  Minow never got specific about what constituted "wasteland" but "Gilligan" had come more than close and the FCC chairman took the jab in stride.

Over the years, I've had the good fortune to chat with Minow while working for WTTW, Chicago's public television station.  A Chicagoan, he was instrumental in getting the station on the air and in eventually hiring a long-needed professional general manager, Bill McCarter.  I also spoke with him shortly before retiring from the Chicago Tribune in 1988.  Although Minow's "vast wasteland" speech is his strongest connection to the public, he is responsible for fostering two initiatives that dramatically changed American TV.  His All-Channels Received Act of 1961 mandated UHF reception for all television receivers thus creating the number of stations that included PBS throughout the country.  He is a past president of the Carnegie Corporation, the original funder of "Sesame Street."  Still active at 86 and holder of many honors, Minow is the Walter Annenberg professor emeritus at Northwestern University.

Minow believes his most important contribution was successfully urging Congress to pass legislation making possible communications satellites.  It was Minow who told Kennedy: "communications satellites will be much more important than sending man into space, because they will send ideas into space.  Ideas last longer than men."

Writing late last year in Politico while taking exception to the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United permitting unlimited expenditures of union and corporate money in politics, Minow called attention to a law that has been on the books for more than 75 years.  Minow, who continues his law practice, suggests in his article, written with former general counsel of the FCC Henry Geller, that Section 317 of the 1934 Communications Act is the means of discovery and consistent with Justice Louis Brandeis's philosophy that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." 

One of Minoe's complaint examples involves Terry Branstad who ran for the Iowa Republican gubernatorial nomination last year.  Roughly $370,000 worth of TV commercials accused him of being a "liberal" while purchased by "Iowans for Responsible Government."  Not revealed was that the ads were created and paid for by the Democratic Governors Association.  In addition, something like $450,000 commercial time was bought by "Concerned Taxpayers of America" who turned out to be the "Ending Spending Fund" underwritten by one donor who sponsored more than $1 million in campaign ads.

According to the authors, "the long-standing FCC regulation requires an announcement to fully and fairly disclose the true identity of the person or persons...or other entity by whom or on whose behalf such payment is made.  It provides that when a person or entity acts on behalf of another, and this fact is is known or could be known by the station exercising reasonable diligence, the name of the real sponsor must be announced."

Minow and Geller continue: "Broadcast and cable stations are required to determine the true identity of the sponsoring entity or entities and announce that name.  Most important, when viewers and listeners hear an ad that used a front group with a meaningless name--"Americans for a Better Tomorrow"--they should ask the station, with a copy to the FCC, to use reasonable diligence to disclose the real person or entity that put up the money.

"If the station fails to do so, there can be resort to the FCC or, if necessary, the courts.

"The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United permitted unlimited expenditures of union and corporate money in politics.  'But the court did not rule that these expenditures should be secret.  It ruled, prompt disclosures of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable.  This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages."

Cornerstone of American television policy, the Communications Act has driven conservatives crazy for 77 years and that must have been the case two years ago with narrow-minded members of the Supreme Court whose search for loopholes and re-interpretations resulted in a terrifying decision whose short-sightedness has resulted in the current election mockery as a handful of Republican sugar daddies determine the Republican Party presidential nominee.

Imagine.  The solution to a remarkably outrageous Supreme Court decision that provides increased opportunity to buy elections, has been on the books on 77 years.  Thank you, Newton Minow.  The transparancy law appears to be the same one--certainly it has symmetrical spirit--as that referenced by that Dothan, Alabama station promotion manager so many years ago.

It's time to write some letters and knock on some doors.

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"Boomerang"....reviewed by Bob Sanders

 

With the world going broke as a result of a tsunami of cheap credit extended between 2002 and 2008, some outstanding writers have stepped forward to provide a great many explanations of how it all happened.  Andrew Sorkin's splendid Too Big to Fail is a tour de force of Wall Street meltdowns, House of Cards finds William Cohen detailing the last 10 days of Bear Stearns, while The Greatest Trade Ever is a look at John Paulson and his bet against home prime loans.  As good as these books are, they lack world scope.  

Offering a different approach is Michael Lewis whose Boomerang offers insight based upon national characteristics of a strange collection of world-wide financial experts whose inane antics provide the book's subtitle: Travels in the New Third World.

Lewis writes funny about a very serious subject; while it would be easy to pay too much attention to his devastating satire, he is far more significant while seeking out the why of the world's self-inflicted destruction.

Particularly damning is Lewis's sad hilarity about Greece where tax evasion is a birthright and where new governments immediately call off tax collectors.  As with other nations of financial fools highlighted in the book--Iceland, Ireland, and the U.S--it is the author's point that a nation's fiscal recklessness is closely tied to the desires of its people.  Both Greece and Iceland are particularly odd.  A room full of the world's greatest writers of satire could not come up with the story of the bedlam that is Greece where Vatopaidi monks, energized by a Father Ephraim, were awarded a lake for a 700-year-old destruction of their land by Catalans.  Even Spain got drawn into Ephraim's remarkable chutzpah and soon the monks were extracting money from a variety of sources.  Grants and more reparations were brought into play; through it all, the Vatopaidi monastery did what no other did: cultivate relations (very effectively) with the outside world.

The monks then traded the lake for government-owned properties and it wasn't long before another coup was performed through prayer given for the prime minister's right hand who had a life-threatening illness.  A miraculous recovery followed and, as the plot developed, the monks achieved further fiscal triumphs including the acquisition of property built for the 2004 Olympic Games.  It became clear that the monks were either simple con men or the savviest businessmen extent.  Peter Doukas, a Ministry of Finance official and Lewis' initial monk contact, estimates he helped create for them a nine-bill-dollar trading profit.

Author Lewis exhibits his own chutzpah when he gains audience with a monk named Father Mathew from Wisconsin.  With the monks subjects of many lawsuits, Father Mathew tells Lewis: "Most people in Greece have this image of the abbot as a hustler."

Lewis' experiences in Iceland are almost as bizarre.  A tip-off occurs on page 1 when a representative of The International Monetary Fund explains how a nation of extremely well-to-do, well-educated, historically rational human beings had organized themselves to commit one of the single greatest acts of madness in financial history.  "You have to understand.  Iceland is no longer a country.  It is a hedge fund."

Stefan Alfsson is one of the more fascinating Icelanders.  A fisherman, Alfsson quit at age 30 to become a banker specializing in currency trading.  All the young people were doing it in the country whose population is 300,000 and Alfsson's customers were mostly fishermen.  The good times rolled with a rollicking flourish and Iceland became an adviser to companies on currency risk hedging.  When the kids were through with Iceland, three brand-new global-size banks had collapsed and the population learned its responsibility for $100 billion in banking losses works out to about $330,000 for each citizen.  That's in addition to tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own speculations including a stock market down 85 per-cent.  As Lewis points out, Iceland became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, "Well, at least we didn't do that."

Another oddity is Ireland whose financial disaster, according to Lewis, "shared some things in common with Iceland's.  It was created by the sort of men who ignore their wives' suggestions that maybe they should stop and ask for directions, for example."  While Iceland's initial profit overflow bought foreign places like trophy companies in Britain, the Irish turned its profligacy inward.  They bought Irish land from each other with disastrous results.  Irish unemployment is at 14 per-cent, the budget deficit is now 32 per-cent of its GDP and the country's population is shrinking.

"Alone in a darkroom with a pile of money," writes Lewis, "Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom.  They'd been conditioned to grab as much as they could without thinking about the long-term consequences.  Afterward, the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their sub-prime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans."

States like California face problems similar to those of Greece with ballooning pension obligations and employment costs a major fctor.  Lewis examines this nation's biggest state challenge by way of two interviews with former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plus a frightening visit to that state's Vallejo, a bankrupt community where drastic cuts in human services are making the town of 112,000 unlivable.

Considerable pause for thought is offered by Lewis' somewhat upbeat conclusion: "When people pile up debts they will find difficult and perhaps even impossible to repay, they are saying several things they can immediately afford.  They are saying, less obviously, that their present wants are so important that, to satisfy them, they are implying that when the future difficulty arrives, they'll figure it out.  They don't always do that.  But you can never rule out the possibility that they will.  As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off."

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Significant Saps of the Year....by Bob Sanders

 

There can be little denial that this corner's Significant Saps of 2011 are a unique and highly impressive collection of lamebrains as this country continues its steep dumbing down slide.  This year's grand grouping admittedly is weighted by crazed politicians attempting to gain the Republican Party nomination for the Presidency.  Better days are ahead when the GOP ninnies are filtered down to a not so precious few shortly into the new year giving hope for a much more balanced assemblage of the bizarre next year.  Let us count the ways in which they have distinguished themselves while entertaining us this year.  

Worth noting is Sarah Palin's largely subdued performance while failing to achieve the kind of sap stardom of past years.  Palin is to be commended for staying away from commentary about such subjects as Russia, turkeys and death panels while concentrating on self-promotion, something for which she has enormous energy as she sells books and does phoners with Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity.  Alas, there was no further enrichment of Webster's dictionary by her, a somewhat disappointing development.

It was, however, a past year's blunder that came back to haunt Palin when Rep. Gabriella Giffords was shot in Tucson.  It was on a SarahPAC map that Palin had placed a target over Giffords' congressional district, an act that many blamed for the shooting that took six lives.  Palin, therefore, is a member tried and true of this year's team.  Charlie Sheen is not.  He's simply a creep.

If Palin is a turkey, then former Rep. Anthony Weiner is, well, a weiner.  As we learn to live with and understand the quick communications that dominate our lives, we continue to make mistakes and Weiner made a big one when he sent a crotch shot to a young admirer out there in Twitterland.  First Weiner claimed his twitter account was hacked, then resigned when the photo suddenly appeared on the web.

So much has been written about and captured on TV about the GOP contenders that words seem inadequate to describe each candidate's faltering attempts to connect with a confused public.  Of the candidates, only Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann have stayed on message.  What has been reduced to a seven-ring circus defies analysis as attack ads mount in intensity with Newt Gingrich's "high road" showing signs of abandonment.  Newtie's in trouble (it couldn't happen to a nicer guy) with an inclination to augment answers to questions.  Such add ons can be devastating as he smugly proves what we already know: he's the best debater of the bunch.  One is reminded of the Hitler story in which The Fuhrer is deep in a Berlin bunker being bombed by both Russian and U.S. armies.  In a particularly impressive rage, Hitler shouts: "O.K.  No more Mr. Nice Guy."  As this is written, Newtie has begun to fight back.

The social conservatives can't handle Romney's Mormon faith nor does Newtie's marital baggage inspire hosannas.  Ron Paul, who may very well win Iowa, is over the cliff on half the debatable subjects while the rest have simply not gained reasonable traction.  Rick Perry does a great impression of George W. Bush while Huntsman's great hope is New Hampshire which he needs to win.  As a Jewish friend once observed: "It's such a puzzlement."

The biggest GOP laughs were provided by Herman Cain whose salesmanship on behalf of pizza and restaurants proved to be poor preparation for the rough and tumble of politics.  Offering public pronouncements of little sense, Cain provided memorable moments heavy on the kind of jive associated with The Kingfish of "Amos & Andy" fame.  Cain's campaign disintegrated when a number of women stepped forward to reveal the pizza man had fast hands in the back seats of cars; one revealed an affair of 13 years.

Also prominent in the Sex Sweepstakes was Arnold Schwarzenneger whose marriage to Maria Shriver was terminated with the discovery of a love child conceived with a housekeeper of some 20 years.  Now 14, the former governor's son began getting strange looks from Arnold and Maria's friends who decided he looks more like the ex-body builder than the other four kids.

We finally got rid of Nevada Senator John Ensign in April and it took a while.  It was in 2009 that Ensign, who had called on President Clinton to resign because of adulterous conduct with Monica Lewinsky, admitted doing the same thing with the wife of an employee.  Ensign's parents paid off the mistress with a total of $96,000 in eight tidy payments of $12,000, a figure that complied with tax rules governing gifts.  Followers of the current GOP Presidential nominating process probably were spared an even great degree of TV attack ads when Ensign's infidelity was revealed.  Amid much speculation that he would run, a June Iowa trip was planned, then called off.  Some "kids" move in with their parents, other maneuver them into mistress payoffs.

Speaking of politicians, another former Illinois governor made it to prison this year.  In a move both criminal and highly gutsy, Rod Blagojovich attempted to sell Barack Obama's old Senate seat.  Amid seriously bad hair displays, Blago, as we have come to know him, was recently sentenced to 14 years on felony corruption charges.  Those knowledgeable about the sentencing of Illinois governors for criminality believe Blago should not have attempted to become a public personality of wide recognition while a judge determined how much time he should serve.  By appearing on such shows as Donald Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice," displaying a propensity for endless TV interviews, and achieving stardom on a TV commercial for Wonderful Pistachios, Blago gained notoriety just this side of the Kardashians that may have added a year or two to his sentence.

Speaking of Trump, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that The Donald needs a new gig as he seeks whatever it is he is seeking.  Further public recognition is what it appears to be mostly about; rumors, largely floated by him, continue to suggest he wants to be President.  There was a period during the year when Trump seemingly was determined to be a king maker over food.  The Trump Primary first found The Donald meeting over pizza with a self-invited Palin.  Other candidates sought Trump's imprimatur with Paul and Huntsman declining.  Disappointed with the many TV debates, The Donald decided to hold his own, then had to back off when all but Gingrich declined.  

Far from the political arena except for Iowa caucusers (that one's a Palin leftover) was Jesse Dimmick of Shawnee County, Kansas who made the mistake of kidnapping newlyweds a couple of years ago.  Dimmick was a murder fugitive at the time with the cops in pursuit when he burst into the home of Jared and Lindsey Rowley.

That was shortly after the cops chased the stolen van Dimmick was driving onto the front yard of the Rowleys, married some seven days.  A confrontation followed, a cop shot Dimmick in the back and the fugitive was sentenced to 10 years and 11 months.  The past two years in the pokey gave Dimmick time to thnk about life's vagaries and what happened when he broke into a home.  Late in October, Dimmick filed a lawsuit of $235,000 against the Rowleys for his pain and suffering.

Then, there's the story about the drunken Santa Claus at the recent Mavericks-Heat game in Dallas.  Santa, gin and tonic in hand, was confrontational with Heat star LeBron James, maybe the most disliked NBA player--particularly in Cleveland where he once played. 

"What do you want from Santa?" questioned jolly Santa as James got set at the foul line. 

"How about a ring?" added Santa in reference to James's having been preeminent as the Heat folded in the finals against the Mavericks.  James made the free throw and scored 37 points as the Heat won.

While the dunce cap in business hss been worn by many--Coca Cola, Ford's Edsel and Enron come to mind--Netflix achieved high honors this year for losing what probably will total two million subscribers.  With the motion picture industry in the doldrums largely due to ticket prices running from $8 to $13 a ticket, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings thought it might be a good time to raise prices.  What ensued was a disastrous financial drama that included a stock tumble from $304 to a recent $71.  The preparing of loyal customers for a price change was not considered and the price hike was as sudden as a roadside bomb.  There was no PR campaign explaining a marketing strategy down the road and Netflix pulled the business blunder of the year.  It was the kind of decision suggesting Reed's qualification for politics.

What Jon Corzine did this year may very well have been both stupid and criminal.  While most of us can revisit poor financial decisions by examining our checkbooks, Corzine managed to lose $1.2 billion and he made it look easy.  A former U.S. Senator, ex-Governor of New Jersey, and former head honcho of Goldman Sachs of Too Big to Fail fame, Corzine proved a remarkably poor gambler when he bet $11.5 billion on a horse named European Debt.  Now gone are bankrupt company MF Global, the billion dollars and change and a reputation that was looking a bit tarnished before he decided Wall Street offers more excitement than Las Vegas.  Oh, yes.  The money of customers and former workers as yet to be found.  How do you jmisplace that kind of money?

One might be inclined to feel sorry for Rupert Murdoch if it weren't for the man's dreadful record as a media impresario and social climber whose leech-like use of people like former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reflects how he gains power in the UK.  Murdoch's media empire hacked the telephones of celebrities, the royal family and public citizens with the past year the worst yet for the Australian.  His hacking included the phone of a child murder victim.  The investigation of Murdoch is taking place in the UK and in this country (his U.S. holdings include Fox News) with the FBI heavily involved.

By all means, let's not forget Kim Jong-Il who had the decency to take leave of us as starving North Koreans shed tears.  Maybe the tears were real.  After all, the supreme leader was a fashion icon of enormous impact, he invented the hamburger and, yes, shot a round of golf 38 strokes under par while making, you're going to have a hard time with this, 11 holes-in-one.  You could, as Casey Stengel once put it, look it up.  Better yet, check out the bodyguards who were present and attested to Kimmy's feat (there were no pars on his card) and bear in mind it was his first round of golf.  Measuring 7,700 yards, the Pyongyang Golf Course is not some tricked up, short track whose 19th hole that momentous day likely served the divine one his Cognac obsession, Hennessy, whose homeland cost of $630 a bottle amounts to just $270 less than a North Korean family's average annual income.  Hennessy, the corporation is in deep mourning since Kimmy used to spend around $800,000 a year on his favorite booze making him Hennessy's biggest customer.

While Christmas gives us the kind of bemusement that comes with those (hopefully) one-page literary round-ups of familial triumph sandwiched by a card of holiday tidings, the subject of accompanying pictures of poor taste are recalled.  Going away winner this time around is Jorge Santini, mayor of San Juan, who reminds us that politicians are at least a little goofy just about everywhere.  Jorge really outdid all others picture-wise when he posed his family huddling around not a manger scene but one depicting a taxidermied killing.  As a leopard sinks its teeth into a fear-stricken antelope, a little girl smiles sassily.  That's not all.  The caption suggests "the hunt scene was chosen to embody the mayor's holiday spirits over a few other creepy options--including an unconvincing penguin figure staring into a young man's ear in a frosty wonderland a giant bird swooping over the Mayor's head as a black bear poses nearby."  Perhaps something got lost in the translation.

Understandably, political rivals have made their own interpretations suggesting the picture is an understated warning to Santini's opponents in an upcoming election.  This, as we know, wouldn't be the first time a politician has used family as an election furtherance.  The mayor, meanwhile, insists the picture was a promotion for the San Juan Wildlife Museum.

Finally, there's a community of saps who live in State College, Pennsylvania.  We know not how many they number but for a minimum of 10 years (we're not yet sure how long this outrage went on), the townsfolk managed to know nothing about child molester Jerry Sandusky.  The disgusting story tells us a lot about the power of a university (or a corporation) in a small, relatively isolated town and how people, somehow, can become incapable of doing the right thing.

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Sidebars....The Cult of Football....by Bob Sanders

 

The cult of football, momentarily blind-sided by the nastiest sports story within memory, likely will be returned shortly to its full-blown glory.  After all, the Penn State University's Beaver Stadium (it seats 107,000) sold out six days after we began hearing some of the sordid revelations and firings of school officials.

Yes, the Nittany Lions lost to Oklahoma in spite of a second half comeback but winning isn't everything or is it?

Without attempting to draw a parallel, the time frame of both the Herman Cain sexual harassment charges and the Penn State mess beg questions about timing, often referred to as being "everything."  Given 10 days advance notice by Politico.com, how could Cain's response be so lame and disconnected?  Taking disconnect to another level, the people involved in the Penn State matter had 13 years to think about the horror that was thrust upon them.  Psychiatrists and other people who study such things must be fascinated not only by the the lack of reaction--short and long term--but by what happened during those intervening years.  We are in for a long shake out.

The role of football at the college level during the past 50 years has risen in importance at a rate even faster than tuition increases.  Football is the big money-maker with head coaches making far more money than campus presidents with whom coaches tend to have uneasy relationships.  The tail is wagging the dog or, in this case of Penn State, the lion.

More than half the 120 Division 1-A coaches make more than $1 million a year.  The greatest disparity between coaches and college presidents is at the University of Alabama where Nick Saban ($5.9 million) makes almost 10 times the salary of president Robert Witt.  Paterno, at slightly more than $1 million before told to clean out his locker, was something of a steal partly because Penn State is a public institution.  

To be accurate, the coaching fraternity is as closely knit as those of cops, firemen and your average fighting unit in Afghanistan.  Maybe, more so.  What is emerging from State College, Pennsylvania is a coaching staff that decided to cover up the truth rather than act both responsibly and morally.  Instead of reporting Jerry Sandusky's rape of a 10-year-old boy in a shower to police, then graduate assistant Michael McQueary went up the football ladder with his horrific story.  Instead of going to the police, or at least dealing the cops in, McQueary, a former quarterback now an assistant coach on leave, went to head coach Joe Paterno--a natural but unfortunate choice given that coaches have a particularly close relationship with play-calling quarterbacks.  Paterno took the story to his bosses never involving the police.  McQueary's decision, while conforming to the letter of the law, was staggeringly jock stupid.  Quarterbacks are supposed to be smarter than. 

As this story continues to unfold its agonizing chapters, maybe we'll find out how massive was the cover-up in the campus football culture that made possible such a series of outrages.  By comparison (if indeed, one can be made), Watergate is a cover-up nothing as we learned how pedophile Sandusky, an ex high profile assistant to Paterno described by USA Today as  a "revered former coach," managed to abuse at least eight at-risk kids for as many as 13 years.  More are coming forth.

As wake-up calls reach other college football machines, memories of sexual abuse involving the Boy Scouts of America and the Catholic church are recalled causing wonderment that, apparently, no one thought that Sandusky's taking showers with young boys was odd.  Sandusky, released by a friendly judge on an embarrassingly small bail bond, is now passing himself off as a hail fellow jock who liked to hug kids and snap towels in showers.

Let's put a fine point on one of the frightening mysteries involving what may have happened from 1977 to 1994 during the formative years of The Second Mile, initially founded by Sandusky as a group foster home dedicated to helping troubled boys while eventually growing into a charity devoted to helping kids with absent or dysfunctional families.  It was pedophile heaven making it difficult to believe that Sandusky's impulses were dormant during that period.

It's also hard to understand how the Sandusky story remained hidden for so many years--particularly in State College, a small town with a 2010 population of 43,034.  The area, ranked as the third-safest metropolitan area in the U.S. by CQ Press, is commonly referred to as "Happy Valley."  People talk in towns like State College and often it's in bars where conviviality can prompt disclosures of the kind kept hushed by the school for so many years.  It's purely conjecture but it appears that a pass was taken by a great many big-time schools on Sandusky when he retired in 1999 at the ripe old age of 55.  One of the best college defensive coaches in the country, Sandusky was somehow overlooked by other schools when Paterno's long-time heir apparent became available.  Could word about Sandusky's "problem" have been a reason?  Common sense tells us it was either that or his commitment to The Second Mile that overwhelming.  Perhaps, during the 13-year silence, the good folks of State Collect simply dismissed head-to-head communications while becoming aware that computer messages can be extracted.  Keeping secret a 13-year story of such horrendous magnitude defies logic, yet it happened.  How uneasy must have been life in the Penn State cocoon.

The grand jury's 23-page report offers a litany of failure by university officials and others to act thus allowing an expansion of the victims list.  Even the university's janitors, perhaps the most anonymous of school employees, are among the most knowing when it comes to awareness beyond the classroom.  Was the fear of losing a job or being assigned less favorable work that important?

As nagging backdrop to it all, there's the strange matter of the then Centre County District Attorney, now declared dead having been missing since 2005.  Ray Gricar's his name and he's the guy who failed to prosecute the case in 1998 having been given information he deemed insufficient.  When authorities found the prosecutor's computer in his abandoned car, it was absent its hard drive.  If this were a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Gricar would be the MacGuffin with the prosecutor's opening scene a dash from an office (a little Psycho traveling music, please) to a car he then drives through some fierce fog as the scene dissolves. 

Paterno, 84, whose 409 victories are the most by any Division I coach, was making $200,000 a year more than the president and, comparatively speaking, somewhat underpaid.  While president/coach relationships at major universities tend to be strained, so are those between campus police and off campus professionals.  Because so main schools of advanced education are located in small towns, local gendarmes, are inclined to be: (a) pros of the Barney Fife variety and (b) thankful that that the campus cops, more social workers than protectors, are there to handle their own special turf.  Turf is also what divides all manner of government protector agencies as we look back upon pre-9/ll terrorist activities in this country and the failure of local cops, the FBI and CIA to coordinate activities.  Ten years later, we continue to hear turf war stories.

As educators know, the smaller the university town, the more important the school in the general scheme of things.  What we had going at Penn State was a total lack of morality on the part of the people singled out so far.  There will be more.  What is spilling forth is a morality play and some writer with a strong stomach is going to do it justice just as Reginald Rose did when he wrote 12 Angry Men.

State College is about half the size of Green Bay, Wisconsin where the Green Bay Packers are as important to the community as the Nittany Lions to State College.  Packer fans, known mostly to viewers of professional football as people who wear funny cheese hats, are the rarest of the rare.  They own the team, a delightful one-of-a-kind.  If you're a Packers follower, you have little knowledge of anything but Packer lore.  As this is written, you can be sure that far too many people in Packerland find it easier to rattle off, say, the name of the player who holds the ball for conversions and field goals rather than identify the president of the Green Bay branch of the University of Wisconsin.  The denizens of State College, too, have an understandable sense of ownership of the Littany Lions if only because Beaver Stadium holds more than twice the town's population.  That's a lot of business for the community and there are other sports, some of which make money but not like football.  State College without Penn State would be like Bentonville, Arkansas without Walmart.

The nomenclature of sports is full of sayings that have caught on to become part of the game's essence.  One is "Winning isn't everything.  It's the only thing."  A number of coaches have been credited with its origination but it was Green Bay coach Vince Lombardi who used it to greatest effect in the 1960s.  Today'it's almost solely attributed to Lombardi although Henry "Red" Sanders, "Bear" Bryant and Red Blaik made earlier use of it   

In truth, actor John Wayne was even quicker on the draw having uttered the words in a 1953 film titled, Trouble Along the Way.  Wayne, like the rest of the country, was taking it easy by then having won World War II all by himself, not easy when he not only wasn't in it but didn't even try.

Sorry to disappoint football fans but it wasn't a coach who originated "Winning isn't everything.  It's the only thing."  Sound of trumpet, please.  It was Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the man considered to be the father of modern Olympics.

While there appears to be little in the way of a relationship between Lombardi and Paterno, both were highly quotable.  Paterno, in particular, got off one that he stuck with a long time although a use of it today is rather unlikely.  Those particularly appreciative of timely irony know a Paterno winner when they see one: "The minute you think you've got it made, disaster is just around the corner."

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Polls Raise Cain....by Bob Sanders

 

Excuse me, but have we once again become distracted?

The reference is to the Herman Cain contretemps that started out as another one of those "revelations" planted with an online media outlet.  Knowledgeable observers remain of a mind that one of Cain's rivals in the race to represent the Republican Party in the 2012 Presidential election did the planting.  Suggestions that the Democrats are responsible make no sense.  The race is for Mitt Romney to lose and the Dems would much rather be confronted by Cain in the finals for all the obvious reasons.  Cain, meanwhile, is in impressive denial with the specter of at least four women pooling their experiences on TV chilling in terms of a Cain survival.

It was an odd week of peculiar verbalizing by the rag tag collection of those seeking the GOP nomination aided and abetted by not always helpful associates.  Michelle Bachmann suggested Mount Rushmore recognition for James Garfield who barely had time to check out the rose garden during six months in office.  Then, there was money decider Karl Rove, further distancing himself from the Tea Party by suggesting that celebrity attorney Gloria Allred (Sharon Bialek's mouthpiece) "lends credibility" to sexual harassment accusations leveled at Cain.  Let us not forget big-hearted Rick Santorum who became a rare early bird to not call for Penn State's Joe Paterno's resignation just hours before the old coach was told to clean out his locker.  We certainly can't pass over Ron Paul who once again suggested scuttling the minimum wage nor can we forget a quote, actually a resurrection of a quote, about Newt Gingrich that was first reported a year ago.  We have word from ex-wife Marianne Gingrich who quoted "Newtie" staffers as saying: "He's a sociopath, but he's our sociopath."

Perhaps the biggest gaffe of the campaign was made Wednesday night when Rick Perry, straight from a highly animated appearance in New Hampshire where he gave further evidence that he does a magnificent impression of George W. Bush, couldn't come up with a third department he would eliminate should he make it to the White House.  This guy is so goofy "Saturday Night Live" has zeroed in on his stumbling.

Somehow, and hardly a surprise, the far right wing commentators (identifications are hardly necessary these days), responded to the Cain matter by blaming it all on the "liberal press."  Were Machiavelli around today, he would not be impressed by the lack of subtlety.

Lost in all the ululation was the Cain story's most important factor.  Given 10 days advance warning by Politico.com, Cain handled things with such withering dithering that his guilt or innocence regarding old sexual harassment complaints simply don't matter.  Cain bungled a series of challenges while changing his stories to meet the developing charges finally implying race is at the root of it all when pointed in that direction by the usual hate radio suspects.  The bottom line is that Cain has proved what most people had already figured during his inept campaign; he is not capable of the Presidency although better than most of the candidates.  It seems logical that had Bill Clinton been given 10 days to come up with a superior legalistic use of words, we would have heard something more impressive than a parsing of the word "is."

Cain's run for the Republican nomination has underlined how stunningly short of leadership we are in this country.  The message is clear when a candidate like Cain can gain significant traction with Republican Party primary voters by running as a Beltway outsider who once ran a pizza company and the National Restaurant Association.  His undeniable connection is based upon the well-earned eight percent approval rating currently accorded the 535 clowns who represent us in Washington.  How in the world has there not been a call for Joe, the Plumber to haul us out of this mess?

What we have been getting out of Cain has advanced from puzzlement over the words "settlement" and "agreement" to what sounds strangely like lines from old "Amos & Andy" radio shows with Cain doing a very effective George "Kingfish" Stevens including the kind of upscale speech expected from a representative of the business world.  Those of sufficient memory may recall the Kingfish as a fraudulent observer whose misadventures often involved "The Knights of the Mystic Sea."  Kingish nemesis was Madam Queen and we seem to be gathering a burgeoning cast of featured females more than capable of raising Cain's hackles.  Who knows where the road will lead us but I have the damnable feeling that we're going to hear more about the inner-workings of the hospitality-prone National Restaurant Association than we really deserve.  We may yet see those women on "The View" with the go-getting Barbara Walters, a highly proficient getter of the "get," in fine feminine fettle.

This action distraction in politics, characterized by a deadly seriousness and determined reluctance during shallow TV debates to discuss a lot of highly important subjects, wasn't always so.  Back in the days when Richard Nixon was running for Congress against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, the future President was done in for the first time by prankster Dick Tuck, then a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  It was an absent-minded professor who made possible Tuck's stunt by asking him to promote a campus appearance by Nixon whose campaign against Douglas remains one of the dirtiest ever.  As advance man, Tuck rented a big auditorium, invited very few people, then gave a long-winded speech to introduce Nixon.  As Nixon moved to the microphone, Tuck asked him to speak about the International Monetary Fund.  When Nixon finished, the candidate asked Tuck his name, then told him: "Dick Tuck, you've made your last advance."  It wasn't.

Tuck quickly became Nixon's avenger with his famous prank, "the Chinatown Caper," a particular winner.  Running for Governor of California in 1962, Nixon pulled into Los Angeles Chinatown where a backdrop of children held "welcome" signs in English and Chinese.  When Nixon spoke, a community elder whispered that one of the signs in Chinese said: "What about the Hughes loan?"  The reference was to an unsecured $205,000 loan that Howard Hughes provided Nixon's brother, Donald.  On camera, Nixon grabbed a sign and ripped it up.  Later, Tuck learned that the Chinese characters actually spelled out: "What about the huge loan?" 

So distinctive was Tuck's mischief-making that arch-conservative William F. Buckley singled him out as a master political prankster.  "You see," wrote Buckley, "Dick Tuck has been an employee of Democrats for many years, and his running assignment is to embarrass Republicans by any means.  He specializes in glorious improvisations which are no doubt more damaging to Republicans than any conversation the Watergaters might have tapped from the telephone of Lawrence O'Brien."

Humor always characterized Tuck's pranks and there was never any suggestion of meanness to what became legendary efforts.  In 1868, Nixon was defeated by Pat Brown in a race best known for his "you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" comments to reporters.  Nixon's state of mind that day was believed by many to have been irrational and unbalanced; his behavior was partially attributed to Tuck having tricked Nixon twice during the campaign.  Included was the premature departure of a train from which Nixon was speaking.  Tuck modestly denies the event and such is the snow-balling effect of fame where undeserved credits are sometimes awarded.  To connoisseurs of dirty tricks, Tuck's were to politics what Frank Sinatra was to beautiful women.

One of the most fascinating moments of Tuck's career occurred in the White House during a give and take between Nixon and H.R. Haldeman.  On tape, a perplexed President makes references to disclosures by staffer Donald Segretti whose Watergate dirty tricks were deemed inferior to those of Tuck's everyday efforts.  That was in October, 1972 and there is admiration in Nixon's voice in recounting Tuck's triumphs.  "Dick Tuck did that to me," says the President.  "Let's get out what Dick Tuck did!"

It's easy to understand how a lot of people credit Tuck with an inspirational role in Watergate.  Segretti was hired by Dwight Chapin who reported directly to Haldeman.  It was during the Watergate hearings that Tuck ran into Haldeman, asked to resign the month before along with John Ehrlichman.

"You started all of this," said the former White House chief of staff.

Replied Tuck: "Yeah, but you guys ran it into the ground."

No one ever accused the Nixon White House of having a sense of humor and I think it fair to believe that Nixon and his staff didn't understand that Tuck was almost exclusively a merry prankster and a decided contrast to most of those who surrounded the President.  I was twice interviewed in 1967 by Haldeman and Ron Ziegler, both employed at the time by J. Walter Thompson Advertising in Los Angeles.  They were looking for a Ziegler replacement on the Disney account and my two sessions with them were enormously serious.  I didn't know it at the time but they had been tapped by Nixon for future White House work with Ziegler taking on a job for which he was disastrously ill-prepared: press secretary.

Tuck ran for office once and it was a failure.  That was in 1966 and his race for a newly-created California State Senate seat happened when he was late for a meeting with fellow Democrats.  By the time he arrived, his pals had chosen him.  He lost big time but his concession speech lives on: "The people have spoken...the bastards."

Two years later he joined the Robert Kennedy campaign following his candidacy announced in March, 1968.  Tuck did press relations and occasionally walked Kennedy's dog, Freckles.  Kidded by journalist friends, Tuck observed: "To you, this is just a dog, but to me it's an ambassadorship."  Tuck was walking behind Kennedy when the candidate, celebrating his California primary victory, was shot by Sirhan Sirhan.  Tuck tended to the fallen Kennedy and rode with police to the hospital where the candidate died.

Tuck also had the last laugh on Nixon when he helped give the public a better understanding of Watergate.  While the unedited transcripts were made available in August, 1980, no tape excerpts had been played on national media.  The National Archives would not allow any public access to the tapes other than being able to hear them at the Archive building.  Acquiring tapes from an undisclosed source, Tuck called an October 21 press conference in the Aspen (Colorado) Hotel's Jerome Bar.  He played excerpts for an hour, the media recorded the material, and the public acquired a better understanding of how venal and paranoid was our 37th President.

Dicktuck.com has a wealth of information about the prankster who lives in Tucson, Arizona.  Now 87 with a birthday coming up in January, Tuck has much to look back upon.  He had a lot of laughs and so have those of us who know how devastating humor can be in the political arena.  Nixon was almost forever a stranger to fun and breathed his last believing that a 1968 "Sock it to Me" appearance on "Laugh In" got him elected President.  My best guess is that he never really understood the why of it.

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Pushing the Sweepstakes Envelope...by Bob Sanders

 

With dire predictions about the future of the U.S. Postal Service rampant, it seems a bit odd that solicitations by mail appear to be both more numerous and of greater weight as we approach the holiday season.  Further, there seems to be something of a shrill quality to requests for monetary funds.  The economy is probably to blame but it's as if the old standby mail service is being used in more aggressive ways by many non-profits in what may be a kind of farewell salute.  As a great philosopher once suggested, "Get it now."

Offhand, I'd say I've received at least twice my normal mail during the past six weeks and it's not just attributable to the buying of public office.  At the risk of being called a roadshow Andy Rooney, I'm certain some of these annual appeals arrive at least four times a year.  A new wrinkle is the holiday gift including such items as tote bags, jackets, blankets, note pads and more return address labels than I could possibly use in 10 decades.  Boys Town, American Heart Association and the Paralyzed Veterans of America have told me to look inside for my present.  Easter Seals has announced on the envelope that I've been a supporter since 2011 and that there's important information inside regarding my 2012 membership.  Wonder what it might be?

I can't recall who it was but I've received two checks for $2.50.  Implicit in the pitch was the suggestion that I, the original nice guy, wouldn't cash the check but would add to it.  My guess is that the most difficult aspect of being a legitimate non-profit is media coverage.  Hardly a week goes by without a story about either a mail scam or the sky-high overhead of yet another do good organization.  Yes, let's blame the media, today's All-American whipping boy, if you discount President Obama.

In a country whee greed is hardly limited to Wall Street, many of us buy lottery tickets as a solution to money shorts.  While I'm sure that the people at Publishers Clearing House think otherwise, a sweepstakes is a sweepstakes is a sweepstakes.  How unfortunate was Gertrude Stein not to have lived long enough to experience the Clearing House Follies.  What a musical that will make some day with an Ed McMahon-like character making house calls while proving what he was: Max Bialystock with carny blarney.

Publishers Clearing House caught up with me the other day and my reaction was one of wellwhadyaknow? things much like running into a friend of a largely forgotten ex-wife.  Curious, I opened the PCH envelope to a WARNING indicating that the Executive Offices at 101 Winners Circle in Port Washington, NY were letting me know about my ignoring prior notices.  The WARNING was further identified as a WAIVER that could very well be activated if I followed directions.   

The WARNING (capital letters, often in boldface type, are PCH stock in trade) became detailed indicating that a failure to return my official entry validation & order form would (a) automatically waive my ownership of Mega Prize Number 391112404319, (b) automatically waive my number's permanent admission onto the Final Winner Selection List for the November 30th Mega Prize and (c) automatically waive my opportunity to win Millions of Dollars from this Notice.  Fortifying these threats was a hand-written note: "Don't let this happen to you.  Respond today, before it's too late."  In the word of Jack Benny: "Well!"

As if to sound a note of reason, there was a five paragraph raison d'etre from Dave Sayer, Prize Patrol Executive Director.  I wonder what it's like running a prize patrol?  Probably full of logistics and, if you're a veteran of the biz, likely to harbor feelings of good fortune that you never had affable Ed McMahon on your team although, come to think of it, McMahon's efforts as spokesman for rival American Family Publishing, no longer in business, were often mistaken as being for PCH.  Confusion often is a word used in conjunction with the sweepstakes since the direct mail scheme, deftly promoted, was started in 1963.  Confusion may have peaked with McMahon's death when a great many articles and obituaries credited McMahon's efforts as being for PCH, a firm for which he never worked.

We have Reader's Digest partly to blame for PCH's sweepstakes.  It was in 1963 that the Digest, now the world's most read monthly magazine with a circulation of 17 million and 70 million readers, came up with a highly successful sweepstakes that inspired PCH to develop its own version four years later as a means of drawing attention to magazines.  Who can forget a greatly enhanced version in the late 1980s and those live recorded moments featuring the Prize Patrol, lurking on American streets, and not conclude the towering excitement was an early version of reality television?  All those balloons, flowers, champagne, and big checks are impressions not easily diminished by time.

Sayer's reassuring note largely concentrates on why PCH is so happy to give away so much money.  It probably comes with the territory that any Prize Patrol Executive Director would become excessively inclusive and it took Dave but five paragraphs to declare palship by signing his first name to a communique with two references to my full name while interjecting seven yous, one you'll, plus a your in addition to making it clear I don't have to buy anything to win.  It was a promise later fort of rescinded.

Deception, no doubt accompanied by an awareness that a large percentage of this country's citizens continues to be victimized by a lengthy and severe dumbing down, has alway been part of Publishers Clearing House's sales ethics.  Something of a breakthrough occurred in 2000 when, without admitting any wrongdoing, the firm settled with 23 states for $18 million.  Key to the settlement was a forced inclusion of a "Sweepstakes Facts Box" and disclaimers thast tell participants "Buying Won't Help You Win" and "You Have Not Yet Won."  The firm also was ordered to maintain a Do Not Contact list for those wanting nothing to do with PCH.  Things got a touch more expensive the next year when it took $34 million to settle with 25 states and, for the first time, acknowledged "harm done in the past by deceptive practices."  Settlement agreements during the next 11 months were reached with 40 states.

State settlements appear to be a sweepstakes minor irritant to PCH.  In September of last year, contempt charges of violating the 2001 Agreement were reached with 33 for a paltry $3.5 million, a sum likely found encouraging by PCH.  Each settlement has produced more ground rules seemingly still trespassed judging from what arrived in my mail.  Certainly, the spirit of ground rules corrections has been violated; one wonders if PCH has the kind of corporate sense of humor capable of giving rise to a yearly internal sweepstakes game within the game enabling home office types to buy in-house chances on the number of state settlements to be made plus the dwindling chump change fines since the new century began.  Corporations, as we've been told by George Romney, are people and there are something like 400 employees headquartered in Port Washington, NY.  Conspiracy theorists are probably wondering if there is any connection between a doubling of lobbyists during the glorious George W. Bush years and greatly reduced PCH fines meted out for obvious obfuscation and whose murkiness remains a hallmark of written chicanerey.

I couldn't help but notice an enclosed Official Entry Validation & Order Form.  Implicit is the declaration that my current PROVISIONAL ONLY status will remain just that unless I affix my Mega Prize 10-diget number contained on the FINAL WINNER SELECTION LIST ADMISSION NOTICE.  If my submission arrives by November 14, I make it to the final round should my number be selected.  It used to be simple before this winnowing process was deemed necessary.  The odds of winning as much as a mega prize of $1 million plus $5,000 a week for life are something like 1 in 1.75 billion, an increase of 23% from a year ago.  The odds have always been contention's bone with the 2007 chances, announced by PCH, as "1 in 333 million."

I kind of like the free postage envelope enclosed.  I don't recall such assistance before but, the passage of time and the fecklessness of my past responses may be to blame.  With the government critical of the continuing word games played by PCH, there is possible blatancy in a suggestion on the envelop0e that it be used to "enclose your official entry validation & order form and mail."  Critics wise to the ways of nuanced literature will deplore an ampersand certain to put lawyers to work.  

I do miss all those magazines that Publishers Clearing House sold in the early days.  What came in the mail the other day makes one wonder why the word "Publishers" remains in the firm's name.  It's one thing to flog a classy publication like The New Yorker, it's another to shill for such products as an NFL Football Monkey complete with your choice of team logos; a heart-shaped birthstone pendant with two pairs of pierced earrings, an irresistible 32-melody wireless digital doorbell (tunes include "The Yellow Rose of Texas, batteries not included) and three sets of glittery Santa window sticker that come with three snowmen stickers if four payments of $2.99 are made.  I counted 83 advertisers participating in what normally is associated with cheesy local mailings heavy on pizza parlors, automotive specials and sex shops.

It wasn't long before I learned these people never give up.  Deep within the PCH envelope contents was a "Fast Cash" bingo card adjacent to eight sticker chips that, somehow, gave me a matching row of numbers and the opportunity to slap the card on the back of my Official Entry Validation & Order Form and make me a $50 Fast Cash Winner.

I also stumbled upon an even greater opportunity that might win $100.  It seems that Bellingham resident Robert Sanders is on the LOCAL PRIZE WINNER SELECTION LIST, provisionally (there's that word, again) eligible to win the SEATTLE-TACOMA TV area major prize of $1,000.  TV stations KOMO-TV, KING-TV and KIRO-TV are guaranteed to be alerted to my windfall.  Of course, the entry must be validated by 11/14/11 or the provisional eligibility will be REVOKED.

It's tempting to inform PCH that Bellingham, located 100 miles north of Seattle, is not part of the Seattle-Tacoma area.  Also, I don't believe either KOMO-TV or KIRO-TV will be interested in me and my $1,000 prize.  That's particularly so should they learn Brian Williams will announce the name of the mega prze winner on the NBC-TV nightly news of November 30.

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