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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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Wanted: Simpler, quieter, less complicated

At times I wish the pace of this old world was a little bit slower. I suppose that is a sign that I need a vacation away from everything, the TV and Internet included.

You may hear older folks or even those people who are not so old wish for “simpler times.” I suppose when I was a kid, in the early to mid 1960s things were quite a bit simpler than today, but they weren’t all that much simpler or even “the good old days” for many. I think I first heard of Vietnam when I was 7 or 8 years old. Not too much later, that piece of ground in Southeast Asia would come to an omnipresence  in our society until at least the time I had enlisted in the military. Growing up with a draft, with a war killing tens of thousands of young people, some of whom you knew, was not at all the good old days and weren’t particularly simple.

Then, pretty much all of my life I have known about “the bomb” although it seemed for the most a real and looming threat  for the first 30 or so years of my life.

Yet, times were in some respects simpler when I was a kid. I can remember watching water rushing through a culvert after a heavy rain and staying entertained for a good half hour watching the sandy brown liquid runoff run all which a ways.

We didn’t  have a phone in our house until we moved into our grandmother’s place, after she died. The phone, one of those rotary dial versions, was also on a party line with the older lady who lived in our then-deceased Uncle Algie and Aunt Ada’s house across the field. Unless there was an emergency Mrs. Irons wasn’t about to get off the phone until she had finished telling someone how she made her fig preserves. We had TV of course. It came in only two colors in our house, black and white. It seems there was always some kind of record player around and a radio. I was kind of techno nut even back then. I guess if I hadn’t been so lazy I might have built a ham radio. But I remember when I was about 10, my parents bought me a fairly nice, though not terribly expensive radio with AM/FM and two shortwave bands.

For as long as I had the radio, up to my early high school days, you couldn’t hear much on FM because there weren’t very many FM stations in our area. But I learned a good bit that prepared me for this vastly more complicated world today by listening to shortwave stations, including those from Communist lands such as Radio Havana.

There was a time when I was going to college that I didn’t pay much attention to TV, I didn’t even have one where I lived. The only time I’d watch was when I was on duty at the firehouse. I’d listen to the local radio stations where several of my close friends were deejays. Of course, I listened to music. A good many friends had very high-powered sound systems. We used to scare the cows away when I lived in the country and one of my friends would bring his monster Klipsch speakers over for a party.

From the time when my friend Bruce showed my how to write with his computer in 1989 until present time it seems I have learned a little more technology each day and have seen the techno world explode into one new thing and another. Along with cell phones that record videos and take pictures and allow Internet access to the cable TV networks that provide the so-called “24-hour news cycle,” the complex world has become even more complex. The world is real-time 24/7.

The president of the U.S. watched live from the White House on Sunday as a U.S. Navy SEAL commando team raided and killed the man who is responsible for a number of terrorist acts including ones on Sept. 11, 2001, in which two loaded passenger planes were crashed as missiles into the World Trade Center in New York, another jet was crashed into the Pentagon and a third went down in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought terrorists for control of the plane, killing all passengers and terrorists. More than 3,000 Americans were killed that day.

Less than 24 hours later, a DNA test confirmed that one of those killed in the SEAL team raid which happened in Pakistan was indeed Osama bin Laden. Although most of the raid was videotaped, the president decided not to show the world the death pictures of bin Laden, fearing the photos would inflame passions of would be terrorists. Shortly afterward, a whole big deal erupted by both friend and foe of President Obama (no relation to Osama, Mamma)  over whether the pictures of the dead terrorists should be shown. Now much of the world is complaining about the pictures not being shown.

Now, again in real time, we once more we are dropped down into the vastly complicated world and since I am back to where I started, perhaps the self-analysis helped me some, but I still need some time off and a chance to disconnect from most of the world’s literal USBs. Perhaps I can go somewhere with the only sounds existing come from wind gently blowing through the treetops, water lapping through rocks on a river or large creek, or perhaps be startled by the hoot of an owl nearby or be amused by the dueling calls of whippoorwills. Time to cut off the phone and the Internet and the 24/7 cable.

Of course, I’ll take my digital cameras. ‘Cause you still need pictures or even a video of it so it can be a reminder that there are such places to getaway on a day just like this one in which that ever circling drama known as life threatens your sanity.

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Sensible for sensibilities or not. The prez makes another good call.

Should he or shouldn’t he?  I speak of whether pictures of the dead version of Osama bin Laden be shown or not to the American people and all the terrorists who supported him. The president has already answered that, unless he comes back several years later and does a repeat of what he did with his own birth certificate, I think that question has been asked and answered.

Obama says the pictures won’t be shown and supposedly that is that. He has had agreement with bipartisan congressional members, a select few, who saw the photos during a briefing. Either that or those members deferred to Obama.

Like practically all other classified material, those pictures of the al Quida member will likely be shown at some time. It may be in a few years or perhaps in 20-30 years. But I am satisfied.

Having worked in the newspaper business I have observed first hand that Americans have a schizoprhenic view when it comes to seeing gory things in the newspaper or TV. I was once on the scene in Central Texas after a boy in his early teens went missing in the water while swimming. The boy had been missing for at least an hour when I walked toward the edge of the creek in which the child disappeared. At the same time a friend of the boy’s family who was at the creek when the boy went under water also  walked near the edge of the water near me. Suddenly, this woman let out an ungodly scream. She glanced into the water and could clearly see as could I the boy floating underneath, tangled up into a branch protruding from the water.

Some paramedics were on the scene and they quickly scooped up the boy and began giving him CPR. I don’t know whether the actions by the medics were a reflex or just meant to take the mind off of what every one had seen. This child had been in the water for more than an hour. The water temperature was not especially cool as this was a mild April day, so hypothermic effects weren’t likely to contribute to the boy’s survival. Nonetheless, the medics’ actions were for naught.

One of our photographers snapped what I believed was a fantastic photo of the paramedics as they were rushing the boy to the ambulance after having pulled him out of the water. I saw a a proof of the photo and later the shot, and I had to say I was proud to have my story with my byline under the great action photo. But many, many readers of the paper did not like the picture. Those outraged called the paper the next morning, bitching out anyone who dared answering the phone. Finally, the publisher relented and issued an apology.

The picture of what to me, who had been a trained emergency medical technician for more than a decade, was an obviously dead child didn’t seem to be particularly gruesome. I’ve seen more than my fair share of dead folks who met an untimely end. Some of those scenes were gruesome. Now, I watch TV shows and some of my favorites such as “NCIS” have fake scene of extremely gruesome deaths. I guess that it’s good that people draw their own lines at what is real and what is “in the can,” so to speak.

My point is that my sensibilities are different that those of other people. I grimace at some of the images on NCIS and I feel that to be a healthy reaction on my part. I feel a whole lot of Americans may just as soon not make their own determination as to whether OBL went to meet his 72 virgins who doused him with a very volatile liquid.

In short, I don’t care that Obama has decided to not release the photos showing Osama bin Laden was dead. As far as I am concerned, he is toast. Let me say it for Gee Dubya: “Mission Accomplished.”

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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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In the news world it’s “root hog, or die”

Quite a piece it has been since I heard those quiet tappings from the keyboards, the telephones, the occasional neighbor talking too loudly to his source, the buzz of CNN on the TV screen, and people pissing me off because they stopped to shoot the shit right behind me as I try to finish a story on deadline. I am talking about the sights, sounds and, yes the emotions, of the daily newspaper newsroom.

Actually, next month it will be six years that I stopped working full-time as a newspaper reporter. I left under what is called a “confidential agreement.” You can draw your own conclusions, but sure as shootin,’ I don’t want to pay back the eight weeks severance I got when I left on that ugly April day.

Over time, though, you see that those feelings you once held so tightly and rightly about how you went about your job and how the means turned out looking differently from the ends sometimes, especially to the readers.

The three local TV stations we had where I worked — we had three TVs in the newsroom and we watched them each night at 6 & 10 — were mediocre small market news operations. Like many small markets I have seen, they always tried to claim their news superiority was more than it really was. Particularly galling, was the phrase several of the news anchors used “”As we first reported.” The trouble I had with the phrase was 99 and 1/2 percent times, the “first reporting” meant that they were first to report it on the air. As to where the story originated, it was almost always something the TV stations stole from the newspapers.

I followed a couple of important stories in that town and market over the seven years I worked for this paper. More often than not, when news broke on these stories, it was I who did the breaking. I fancied myself a better writer than reporter for a number of years until I became really good at the reporting end of it. I am not bragging. It was just a fact that I was an above average reporter who had that “nose for news”  and who kept on top of his “stuff.” That is why the TV people would piss me off. I was the one who broke the stories.

These days, since I do little real reporting and I tend to “bury the lead” more than I would like, I often look differently at TV news knowing that — normally — the area’s local daily or strong weekly newspapers supply the TV with their stories. The “pretty boys and girls” put the underpaid newspaper beat reporter’s words into tons of mousse and hairspray. Sorry, I know I am just being mean there. I know a number of local TV reporters who are nice people and very competent. But I also know some who are as worthless as a beer bottle in a gunfight.

To be perfectly honest, the place where I now reside doesn’t have a very good, prominent, daily newspaper. The paper is blessed with a few good reporters/writers, but the old, established daily, suffers from a severe lack of leadership. The best newspaper reporter in the World can only carry a medium-to-small-medium-sized newspaper so far.

The guided-missile destroyer USS Barry launches a Tomahawk missile March 20, no doubt, to NOT find its way up Libyan strong man Col. Quadaffi's butt. (Navy photo by ICFN Roderick Eubanks)

Okay, so I bury this way deep. Last night when CNN’s foreign correspondent Nic Robertson reported Quadaffi’s compound was “blowed-up” by a cruise missile or something of the kind, I noticed the visible excitement of his back in the “USSA” anchor T.J. Holmes. Continually, it seems, Holmes would replay the moment when Robertson first reported that Q-daffy’s place went boom and he would not be hesitant to announce we saw it all first on CNN.

As the “Breaking News” went on, I was becoming rather ready to throw a shoe (a flip-flop at least) at the TV set and Mr. Anchor Holmes. But I remembered how I used to hate the TV stations for bragging about their exploits to the point where I finally said — with an editor’s approval — if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ When we were the ones who broke a story, we told God and everybody.

All in all, dealing with a medium which stole your stories and claimed those stories were theirs, it came down to just standing up to the local TV thieving bastards. Sorry, most weren’t like that, I only used the term “thieving bastards” first, for effect and secondly, because that’s what a very few were with which we were dealing.

In the end, no honor exists among thieves whether it be pimps, dope dealers, lawyers, Realtors, or reporters. The world is that of the subterranean and you have to dig for it, and “root hog, or die.”