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Bless our dogged cops

What a handsome fellow this Beacon, decked out with a flag kerchief and a U.S. Marshal’s badge. You can print out a trading card with Beacon provided you don’t have a photo editing program guaranteed to drive you into running fits — what my Dad used to call something dogs did when they went crazy. I never saw a dog into running fits, by the way.

Beacon failed "guide dog" school because of a fondness for chasing squirrels. But I mean, who can blame the fella? His loss is the US Marshal's Service gain as an explosive sniffer.

I never saw a dog with a badge, well, not a four-legged kind until my first news assignment with then el presidente Jorge W. Bush. The dog was, if I remember correctly, an ATF dog-agent-dog and had a nice badge hanging from his neck in a leather case. I didn’t even have a badge to wear that time. I didn’t need no stinkin’ badges! Later when on a couple of occasions I was a local pool reporter I had a stinkin’ badge made out of cardboard. I still have a couple of them. Well, one is cardboard and the other is cardboard with a picture of Jorge driving his “pick-em-up truck” on one side and the White House, if I remember correctly, on the other. The badge is laminated. Ain’t I something?

Dogs are about the best thing with which one could associate except a good girlfriend (lady friend, female friend, I should maybe say that I now am age 55.) The latter is especially true as my dear, late friend Waldo Miller used to say  as long at the lady “drives your pickup for you and feeds your dog.” I always had to add as long she would also open your gate for you. I learned this living out in the country on Kingtown Road and had to either open the lock at the end of the heavy chain on my gate or have someone else to do it.  But I am getting way off course.

I love dogs. I have had trouble with a few, mostly little farts like the one who used to live next door to Waldo’s place when we were in high school. This little mutt would come out and sink its teeth into my ankle. It’s owner was a lawyer who was off and on our hometown’s district attorney. I’d complain about the little dog but mainly just inquire if it had its rabies shots. It had supposedly.

There is no doubt why TV, especially local TV news audiences love stories about police dogs which are turned into as much human as is possible without giving them a credit card.  We are a society which has long looked at animals, especially domestic ones, through an anthropomorphic lens. (Thanks so, so, much to the Beaumont Public Library Reference Librarian, who quickly came up with this word I was trying to remember but couldn’t. You rock!)

One peculiarity of modern news media is making police dogs into “K-9 officers.” I mean, it’s cute and all. And it’s police lingo which especially young reporters get hooked into early and will not shed unless they have a well-meaning but mean ol’  editor with a dislike for lingo. I covered the police beat quite a lot in my years as a reporter. I have to admit that it took quite awhile to get rid of an indirect quote from an officer who says a victim was “transported” by “Lifeflight” or who was “Lifeflighted” as opposed to just writing that the injured or wounded person was flown by medical helicopter  to  such and such a hospital.

Thus, “Officers and K-9 units, searched for hours.” That is okay if the K-9 units included a human and a canine.  But to consider  a dog as a “K-9” unit sounds odd if you think about calling old “Beacon” above, a unit.

“That unit sure can sniff out bombs.”

“Have you ever seen a unit strike such a handsome dog pose?

“Will you please get someone over here pronto to clean up the crap just taken by that unit?”

I have known a few police officers who trained and patrolled with dogs and would have just as soon spent their entire career riding the roads with their four-legged, friends. Dogs don’t tell you their dating problems, not usually at least. Dogs don’t  mind if you skipped a shower after an all-night bender unless you are teetering over the edge on your job. I used to work across the street in a small town where one of the police officers had a well-trained black Lab that was just remarkable going after lime-green tennis balls scrubbed with crack. I never actually saw the dog, whose name I have now forgotten, work catching those who transported weed or cocaine up U.S. 59  north of Houston. But Don, the cop who worked across the street from my office, would let me know whenever the black Lab would make a good score.

Personally, I think the so-called “war on drugs” is a waste of time. That is, at least a good portion of it. I think marijuana should be legalized. Other drugs should be carefully examined for their legality or illegality.  This “war” has caused so many lives to be ruined, ended, it has resulted in so much prison space needed for bad people, not sick or addicted people, to go missing.

That’s just me, though. I have a tremendous respect for the vast majority of the police officers in state, federal and local governments who risk their lives whether their threats come from drugs, greed, stupidity, insanity, politics, terror, or whatever. I include the “K-9 units” even if they are just dogs and live a dogs life.

I hope the dogs go home just as safely as the guys and ladies who wear the badges return home each day. That’s about all I have to say today. Hope you all, both two, four or however many legged people read this, have a great weekend as well. Wuff!

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Funny? Maybe. Journalism. Doubtful.

My friend Marcy sent me a story which came from my town’s local daily but was apparently rewritten by the Associated Press.

“A holdup?

Hilarious.

Police say a Southeast Texas bank teller thwarted an attempted robbery when she read the holdup note and started laughing.”

The story which first appeared in the Beaumont Enterprise was basically a rewritten news release from the Beaumont Police Department.

I replied to my friend, the contents of that reply will be a bit less graphic here, that it might have been really funny had the newspaper obtained a copy of the note from the police. “Let us in on the joke,” I wrote.

Now, a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo — whose bank it was which was robbed — said the teller did not laugh and the newspaper story said the video proved it. Of course, the story said it was the Wells Fargo spokeswoman who said surveillance video proved the teller didn’t laugh because the company takes such matters “seriously.” CYA? Maybe. Did the cops who wrote the report or provided the information for the press release, which the Enterprise’s story copied, get it wrong? I would doubt it.

So what’s going on here?  An odd story about a bank robbery that lacked, as far as I can tell, any original reporting? A story the corporate flacks spiked because they are worried about getting sued? Sadly, the folks here in Beaumont will probably never know unless the same would-be robber is arrested and tells all during a confession in a city in which the media actually reports news  rather than acts as a stenographer.

For the longest time I defended our local paper, but I can no longer do that. The Enterprise, a Hearst newspaper, has fallen to its lowest point that I can remember and I have been reading the paper for the majority of my reading life. More and more it seems as if the editors are content with stories which are sent out via an e-mail alert from the  police and fire department. I know about the content of the stories as opposed to that of the press releases because I also receive the same e-mail alert and read the same releases.

At least from the time I worked as a reporter until recently, the Beaumont Police Department would not have won any “sunshine in open government” awards. I will give it to the Enterprise that they have fought the law and the law didn’t win when it came to open records in a few cases. But in reality, using open records laws to gain information is like shooting fish in a barrel. The Beaumont police have had some embarrassing events lately although the public would have hardly known about it were it not for lawsuits in which the information freely flows.

I am not saying that the Enterprise does not have good journalists. I know of a few who are both good reporters and writers. I might know more were they either allowed to report or made to do so.

Good reporters can get information, the real skinny, if they have one iota of  talent. That is no matter how stingy a police department is with its newsworthy intel. I have worked in places where one would have thought the police owned and had copyrights on information. Even more though, I worked where cops and prosecutors told me everything. That’s not always good either, but I was hooked.

I have a few other beefs with my local newspaper. One is that I can’t stand the stupid, race-baiting blog on their Web site. I will not give it any notice by mentioning its name on my blog although I am ashamed to see that once again the writer of that poor excuse for journalism won first place in the state’s Associated Press Managing Editors Assn. awards. Then again, I’ve won a couple of first place awards from that same organization. Newspaper awards mean more to newspaper publishers and editors and reporters’ egos than anything of substance.

The other beef and it is a major one is that I bought a newspaper one day last week for the first time in a year or so and I was disturbed to find stuffed inside was the Southeast Texas Record. The Record is a weekly newspaper that reports from all the local courts in the area and in the federal Eastern District of Texas. When I say report, I mostly mean its reporters draw information from court records.  The only problem I have is that the Record is one of several papers in the country published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Why would the U.S. Chamber of Commerce publish a paper in Beaumont, Texas, you might ask? That is because this area has garnered a reputation — rightfully or wrongly — of being a “judicial hellhole” or a place in which juries and sometimes judges are plaintiff-friendly.

I do not have the time nor patience to debate the whole “frivolous lawsuit” issue. In fact, the U.S. Chamber’s part in trying to deny an American citizen’s right to a civil trial as specified under the 7th Amendment is only one area in which that behemoth of American commerce is a threat to the average citizen. The chamber is also exceedingly anti-union and pro-Republican. If you want to do some research into donors to the Republican party, you just might find a great deal of those dollars coming from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Obviously, I have a bunch of pent-up anger toward my local newspaper. There are various reasons why. But I would much rather someone at the top start kicking some ass and taking names to make the Enterprise a real newspaper once more than to read press releases I can get at my own fingertips.

The Enterprise has pointed out that it just stuffs the Record inside and it has no “marriage of convenience.” Nevertheless, the BE has long been an editorially-conservative newspaper and its stuffing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce inside it just too much for a moderately liberal union guy to bear.

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Spring break: A little common sense needed if you know someone with some

Hey, it’s party time!

Those words once made my ears perk up and had my mouth already tasting the keg beer before it ever got tapped. I still like parties, but I prefer ones in which a little sanity prevails. Even though my friends and I talk a good game about it, I am afraid the days are over of our sitting on the roof and watching the sofa — shot to hell with semi-automatic gunfire — burn in a big blaze of bonfire glory.

The big Spring Break destinations were never really my shot of tequila. About the closest I ever came to that was sharing a room with about eight or nine other guys and girls in a room we named “Motel Hell” during a 4th of July weekend in Galveston. I suppose  it was a fun outing with the exception of the incident in which a comment I made about a friend’s then-girlfriend that was not for public consumption apparently was consumed by said friend’s then-girlfriend. To this day, from what I gather, she still won’t talk to me. I don’t know why. I just happened to make the remark while another friend and I were driving off to the store in his Blazer that the aforementioned girl was beginning to get a bit of a large tush. Ah, youthful indiscretions — at almost the age of 30.

Not visiting the Spring Break hot spots then, some 25 years ago, such as Daytona, Padre Island and even Galveston, could be chalked up to my status as a “non-traditional” college student. Spending four years in the Navy and a year only working put me in university classes at age 25. I worked full-time and attended classes full-time. I also had received the GI Bill and had something many college students did not — a salary. I would usually take off work as a firefighter during Spring Break and go somewhere, but I would prefer going to visit out-of-town friends and staying with them. We still spent money and partied like it was 1999, which didn’t come for another 14 years or so. None of the vacations really stood out. They were all good.

College students today face a lot “buzz kills” we didn’t back then. The drinking age during most of my time in school was 18, until they raised it to 21 once again and forever. That doesn’t mean college students will go drink-less in places like Padre Island or Galveston. But all kinds of police enforce all kinds of laws today. If you are under 21 you might not go to jail for being caught with a brew but could get a ticket  — and a ride to jail if you are drunk and/or sass the LEOs. You can’t even drink on the beaches in Galveston except for East Beach. That is why the Bolivar beaches have flourished with the exception of  when Hurricane Ike hit and up until the time that the area recently began to rebuild.

Then there is that whole “Mexico thing.” I refer to the violence, the majority of which is blamed on drug cartels. The U.S. State Department issued a warning to travelers last year. Just recently the Texas Department of Public Safety issued their own warning.

“Our safety message is simple,” said DPS Director Stephen C. McCraw, “Avoid traveling to Mexico during Spring Break and stay alive.”

Didn’t I say “buzz kill?” But with good reason, at least according to authorities. More than 30,000 people have died in drug violence since 2006. More than 2,600 were killed in  Ciudad Juarez during 2009 alone. Also, while most of the violence has occurred in northern Mexico, there have been instances of serious crime elsewhere.

Mexico’s tourism agency says come on in, the water’s fine. Many of the more tourist-bound destinations are safe, the Consejo de Promocion Turistica Web site infers. One can link on that page to a number of flight and hotel packages to locations across Mexico. Four days in Cozumel beginning at $1,000 or Puerto Vallarta for as low as $840.

On the other hand, the Texas DPS said 65

A Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission agent writes a citation for something or other during Spring Break at South Padre Island

Americans were killed in drug violence last year in Mexico. However, an analysis of overseas traffic accidents that was compiled by USA Today shows almost 690 Americans were killed in Mexico car crashes and more than 20,000 injured between 2003 and 2010.  Divided among those years that would account for almost 90 U.S. deaths per year.

Not to belabor the point but there are areas of Mexico clearly dangerous and driving in Mexico has always been a dicey situation. It is unfair to generalize, especially for a culture you only know snippets of relatively speaking, but the expression !si dios quiere ! which roughly means “If God wills it” is embedded in the minds of  more than one Mexican driver. Then combine that with the American expression “get the hell out of my way” and you can have a major culture clash if not a nasty and perhaps fatal car crash.

One may also say there are a number of places where one should exercise caution visiting  in the United States. At the very least there are sections of places in the United States that one should perhaps avoid. Fortunately, most of those places don’t have a beach and a bunch of half nekkid, hormone-charged kids swilling beer like it was the night before prohibition began.

Common sense should rule Spring Break decisions before and after. And I should have a million dollars. But those decisions don’t always involve common sense and I am short by just about a million. I don’t know who I am saying it to, myself being a 55-year-old man who crackles when he walks from arthritis but I was a young college student once and thus can spill more useless information than one would ever care to know. So if any college age folks are out there, I just say be careful, have a good time and stay clear of all known hazards.

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110 years ago today in our town — 110 years later in our world

” … and up from the ground came a bubbling crude, oil that is, Black Gold, Texas Tea.”  From “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” written by Paul Henning

That description of good fortune found by Jed, of “The Beverly Hillbillies” fame, fits to a “tea” what happened in real life about three miles from where I live. The crude began bubbling — exactly 110 years ago today (January 10, 1901) — at place known as “Spindletop.” A very informative article about the history of Spindletop that was written by Robert Wooster and Christine Moor Sanders, and published in Handbook of Texas Online describes the pivotal moment of the World’s most important oil gusher ever:

“The startled roughnecks fled as six tons of four-inch drilling pipe came shooting up out of the ground. After several minutes of quiet, mud, then gas, then oil spurted out. The Lucas geyser, found at a depth of 1,139 feet, blew a stream of oil over 100 feet high until it was capped nine days later and flowed an estimated 100,000 barrels a day.”

It is pretty safe to say nothing of such far-reaching magnitude ever occurred since in Jefferson County, Texas, located on the easternmost Gulf Coast of the Lone Star State. Although I wasn’t around for Spindletop, I bet that not even Janis Joplin’s triumphant return in 1970 to her 10th graduation anniversary at Thomas Jefferson High School in Port Arthur could have matched Spindletop as a colorful and raucous event. And, from what I saw on local TV, Janis coming home freaked out a lot of folks.

The geyser, simply stated, started the modern petroleum industry as we know it. Some of the world’s most important oil companies had their start within a 25-mile radius of Spindletop: The Texas Company, later Texaco; Magnolia, later Mobil and even later ExxonMobil; Humble Oil, later Exxon and ExxonMobil, Gulf Oil, Sun. The companies read like a who’s who list of the petroleum industry.

Some who share my occasional liberal thoughts seem to believe “oil” is a four-letter-word. But the truth is not even those people can with any type of ease live without the fruits of hydrocarbons. While the oil industry made some people filthy rich and others just filthy, many modest livings — read: above average middle class — came from refineries, drilling and other facets of the petrochemical world. Why yours truly has made even a very modest amount of dough off oil and gas wells that I inherited. Certainly not much, albeit the low five-figure range over 25 years.

Most of the folks in the area I grew up in certainly knew the worth of oil as the industry paid for a lot of those people’s pickup trucks, bass boats, nice houses and for the most part a comfortable life. But other than immediate jobs, those who lived in the area I am from and now live in had no clue 110 years ago how Spindletop would transform the worldwide economy.

Those were certainly heady times, back in 1901.

But all was not quiet.

In September at a state fair that year, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt first mouthed his foreign policy mantra: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Four days later, President William McKinley was shot at the Pan American Exhibition in Buffalo, N.Y. He died eight days later.

McKinley’s assassin, 28-year-old Leon Czolgosz, was an avowed anarchist although none of the known anarchist groups would claim him as a member and some reportedly thought him to be a spy for the government. Before the month of September was out, a jury convicted Czolgosz. In really swift justice he was executed in the electric chair at New York’s Auburn Prison about a month later, his last words being: “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.”

The new Republican president, Roosevelt, showed that year that he would not be  easily buttonholed as a politician when it came to his actions. There was  his bully pulpit rhetoric about carrying a big stick, but after becoming president he also told Congress he wanted trusts curbed reasonably and he also invited noted African American Booker T. Washington to the White House. The latter sat off riots and other unrest in the South.

On Saturday, January 8, 2011, almost 110 years to the day Spindletop blew in, Jared Lee Loughner, 22, allegedly shot almost two dozen people at a congressional meet and greet outside a Safeway store in Tucson, Ariz. Six people were killed including a 9-year-old girl and a federal judge. The target of the shooting appeared to be U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat. Giffords was shot in the head and remains in critical conditions although doctors say she shows encouraging signs that could signal improvement.

Loughner has left a lot of crazy writings behind as he sits in jail. The alleged assassin appears to be anti-government but like Czolgosz  also appears to be a lone nut job.

Perhaps in the days ahead we will learn just what were the motivating factors behind these shootings. Was the act because Giffords is a Democrat, or that she is Jewish, or that she supported President Obama’s health care plan even though she supported tough immigration measures and is pro-gun? Did the relentless cacaphony of political argument that passes for entertainment on cable news and talk radio play a part in driving Loughner over the edge?

We may never know. But just as the world turned 110 years ago today in the town in which I reside, giving rise to the world’s most important — although sometimes exasperating — industry so does our planet keep revolving where it seems no amount of good can ever completely snuff out the anger that lives in mankind.

I am painting broad brush here. But sometimes it does a body good to look at the world through the macro lens inward. Perhaps one must speak softly and carry a big magnifying glass.

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Running down a dream: Merry Christmas

It has been kind of a quiet, slow Christmas Eve for me. I went for a walk because it’s been such a beautiful day outside although I didn’t get very far because of my incessant back pain.

I’ve got this cornucopia of chronic pain problems which my Department of Veterans Affairs doctors have yet to sort out, or rather, I have yet to get those doctors to dissect them  for me. One of the biggest concerns I have right now is having those medical minds figure out whether my back pain is from “structural issues” as one neurologist stated or from a perhaps not-so-rare but still relatively unheard of spinal cord injury condition known as “arachnoiditis.” It is an inflammation of one of the spine’s different membranes which can result from a number of situations and for which there is ultimately no cure. In its most repugnant forms it bears a resemblance to progressive neurological diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis. Paralysis can develop and it is incredibly painful.

My last MRI revealed that I have arachnoiditis but my previous neurologist believed it to be “scarred over.” Thus, not a particular issue. That neurologist now has moved on and my most recent neuro specialist believes my back pain is caused by the spider-sounding arachnoiditis. Perhaps some of you might wonder why I am concerned, but, really?

With all my health-care providers “practicing” medicine hoping to eventually get it right (I’m sorry that was just too easy, kind of like lawyer jokes), I have been given a variety of potent concoctions which these medical personnel surmise will help me in one way or the other. I have come to the conclusion that one of those drugs should perhaps be stricken from the shelf.

I speak of Neurontin, actually the generic form Gabapentin. It is a drug that has long been used for treatment of epilepsy. However, it has also had a fairly lengthy history for being controversial. This is especially due to instances where drug company reps were accused of encouraging doctors to use the drugs for non-approved uses such as in chronic pain. I took Gabapentin previously when doctors decided to pile one pain drug continually on top of the next until I just had to say “No to drugs.” At least no to nothing but drug therapy. The result was my having a non-VA doctor perform a procedure known as “anterior cervical diskectomy with fusion (ACDF)” in a non-VA, Catholic-run hospital. It was my second cervical disk operation and in this one the doctor removed disks and replaced them with a titanium plate grafted with a piece of bone from the illiac crest of my hip.

A lot of different pain later in nine or so years I was prescribed Gabapentin again, this time for neuropathic pain in my foot and hip. I can’t see that the particular drug does anything to improve my conditions but it definitely takes me for a wild ride in dreamland. These are not nightmares per se. I can describe the dreams as disturbing at times and certainly vivid. I will spare several of the adventures into “Neurontinville” I  have taken in recent months but will try to describe this morning’s strange story line.

In the dream I was at a courthouse  like the one of my youth.  Everyone came outside to observe a ceremony, for what I couldn’t tell you. But the main feature involved firing a “Polaris missile” at a no longer used or unwanted structure in a harbor. I can just about bet you the missile wasn’t really a Polaris missile as it was more the size of a MK-44 torpedo. (On which I sat once. Don’t ask.) At the last second, the missile was accidentally spun around and fired into the surrounding neighborhood, creating a very breathtaking explosion and fire. A fireman, whom I think I knew, came by talking on a walkie-talking saying there was a conflagration in progress. When I say breathtaking, I mean vivid and in living color. I felt it was my duty as a former firefighter to go to the scene and don a bunker suit and join the fight. I did all of that except for the fighting part because of my rather long absence away from the job (27 years) I had some retraining to do. That was where I was stuck — looking at manuals — until waking up. Oh the humanity.

Well, at least I can say I wasn’t dreaming about people like Texas State Rep. Leo Berman, whose rerun trainwreck of an interview with Anderson Cooper earlier this year was replayed on Copper’s show last night. I can only describe Berman, who despite apparently being educated and being a retired military officer, as clueless. Berman introduced legislation to require presidential candidates to show their full birth information. Not that this particular issue is of a major concern to the Texas House of Representatives.  Which reminds me, all new candidates for especially high-profile elective offices expect some challenges, but the office of Neil Abercrombie the Democratic governor of Hawaii since Dec. 6 apparently has become the repository for all things relating to the birth — some such as Berman think happened in Kenya — of President Barack Obama. I have to say from the story I kind of like Abercrombie given he called the reporter back at 11:30 p.m. worried about deadlines. You don’t see too much of that any more.

Well, thanks for letting me talk out all the things which have been on my mind lately. You, whomever you are, are  great listeners. I know a few of those readers, whether all the time or just occasionally, and I’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, brothers Ted, Robert and Dennis, and other readers, Tere, (Hope to see you in a week), Judy, Kenneth, Egberto (I got your book today and just started reading it), Sally, Suzie, anyone else who are good friends whose names begin with “S,” Bruce, if you ever read my blog anymore, Ross, likewise, Diane, Philip, any of the other Texas Progressives who bother to read and last but not least Paul who helps make this whole thing work. Back in the USA for Christmas? We will be looking for how the nation looks after a long absence.  Ho, ho ho,  ho, ho, ho.