Wednesday

                           Musing and History

Quote of the day:

“The greatest way to live an honest life is be what you pretend to be.”

                                                  Socrates

Out in Bell, California, a small town southeast of Los Angeles, there are just short of 40,000 residents. The majority is Latinos and 17% live below the poverty level spending a lot of time getting food stamps and standing in line at the Food Bank. The Los Angeles Times published the salaries of the city governing body and here is what the residents discovered. The city manager’s salary was $789,000/year with a 12% raise per year guaranteed. That, my friends, is double what the President of the United States salary is. The fire chief had a salary of $458,000 which is half again what the fire chief of Los Angeles gets in a city of 3.8 million. Needless to say, the residents showed up at city hall in force demanding the ouster of the Mayor, the City Manager and the Fire Chief. After a while those three did resign in the knowledge that they would receive 2/3 of their salary as a retirement pension. More hell was raised and finally the District Attorney of Los Angeles County stepped in and began an investigation as to whether obviously corrupt city officials were indeed eligible for a pension.

Over in Cowpens, South Carolina a few days ago an undercover cop working in the vice squad paid a visit to “Mr. Waffle” near I-85 (been there) seeking prostitutes. He saw a woman loitering out front and struck up a conversation. The woman asked him to buy her a soft drink which he did. The woman offered him “any kind companionship he liked.” She introduced herself as Angela which surprisingly was her real name. They got into the deputy’s truck and she demanded to see the man’s penis and he complied and Angela grabbed him by his penis and said “Ok, I guess you are not a cop.” The man suggested a form of sex and Angela “repositioned” herself and it was at this time that the deputy identified himself as being under cover and arrested poor Angela. The question I have is how did Angela expect to identify the man as a cop or not by feeling of his penis? Do cops have a tacitly identifiable peculiarity down there? We learn things every day. By the way, they had a photo of Angela in the item and she had a strangely familiar looking face…she looked a lot like Jeremy Shockey, used to be the tight end for the new Orleans Saints.

A few years ago a group of men got together and decided to open a bar/restaurant on the east side of Austin, Texas. The discussed a name and a logo and decided on The Long Branch Inn was the name and a caricature of a beaver as their logo. The beaver ended up with just the smiling head and buck teeth with LBI on the brim of a sailor’s hat. This last week they got a cease and desist order from an organization saying that the Long Branch was infringing on the copyrights of the University of Oregon State Beavers logo. The owners thought it was a joke but it proved not to be. A comparison photo of each logo was shown and sure enough they were identical except for the “LBI” on one of the sailor’s caps and “OSU” on the other. The Long Branch agreed to change their logo and initiated a contest. The Long Branch has a stuffed Beaver above their bar. So far the leading entry is the same beaver logo except this one has black Groucho Marx glasses on. I don’t know if that will be enough, however. It is pretty damned bad when there is an organization that makes a living making comparisons on college logos against those in free enterprise.

            This Date in History   July 26

1775 Earlier in October of 1774 a Patriot printer from Philadelphia named William Goddard, after years of being frustrated because the Royal Mail Service was not unable to deliver his newspaper to his readers nor to bring important information to Goddard, petitioned the Continental Congress to form a Continental Post Office. The Congress delayed its decision until after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. On this date Congress authorized the formation of a Continental Post Office with Ben Franklin as this nations very first Postmaster General. Ben held this post until the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 and then he was sent to France as the American Emissary. Ben’s son-in-law Richard Bache was named to replace Ben. This was the very first act, and would not be the last, of nepotism in the United States government arena.

1908 On this date Attorney General Charles Bonaparte ordered a group of newly hired investigators to report to Chief Examiner Stanley Finch of the Department of Justice. This event was the first baby step in the formation of the FBI. One year later the Office of Chief Examiner was renamed the Bureau of Investigation. When America entered WWI, the Bureau of Investigation was tasked with investigating draft dodgers, violators of the Espionage Act and immigrants suspected of radicalism. The last one bothers me. Radicalism could be interpreted as an every day attitude to some people but very dangerous to others. Anyway, lawyer and librarian J. Edgar Hoover joined the bureau in 1917 and quickly worked his way to be an assistant to the Attorney General. Hoover and his anti-radical philosophy made him popular during the time period known as the “Red scare era” in 1920-1921. Hoover established a card file on anyone he felt was a “radical” numbering over 450,000. He also had over 10,000 “suspected” communists arrested. The great majority of these people were questioned briefly and released. Hoover was just flexing his muscles. This was a very dangerous ideology and gave Hoover enormous power. Congress eventually became very afraid of this man but his powers of investigation insured his longevity at his position. The upside of the formation of the FBI was they could pursue criminals across state lies since they were a federal agency. Hoover became the acting director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924. With Congressional approval, Hoover greatly expanded and improved the Bureau with a centralized fingerprint file, an agent training school for agents and he whipped the Bureau into a very efficient crime fighting entity. They were going to need it in the 1930’s during prohibition because powerful criminals like the head of Murder, Incorporated Lepke Burkhalter, “Machine Gun” Kelly who specialized in the kidnapping of people of rich families and demanding enormous ransoms, not to mention Al “Scarface” Capone, “Dutch” Schultz among many others would present a great challenge. The bureau was titled the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. Hoover established an arm of the bureau called COINPRO which was an acronym for counter-intelligence program. This unit was used to counter the supposed infiltration of communists into the US. But it was also used to keep tabs on organizations like the KKK and was used unashamedly to harass and track the movements of Martin Luther King, Jr. simply because Hoover did not agree with his goals of equality for all. When the Watergate scandal broke much pressure and criticism was brought on the Bureau in general and Hoover in particular for the first time Hoover’s tenure. It was during this time frame that Hoover died of heart failure at the age of 77. Evidence proved that the FBI had suppressed evidence that would have proven the culpability of President Richard Nixon in the knowledge of the wrong doing and the attempt to cover it up. Since this time the Congress has established a process of selection of the FBI director that included Congressional approval and limited the tenure to 10 years. The FBI has proven to be a great asset to Americans, but at times have severely over stepped its boundaries.

                   Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow