There’s many people in the world just like our Henny-Penny,

They panic when they listen to the news,

They think the sky is falling and we’re all about to die,

I’d say they have the Henny-Penny-Blues.

The Lightnin’ Hopkins song should be adopted as the anthem of the Tea Party. “The sky is falling” iseems to be the mantra of the loudest folks at tea party demonstrations and other events. It is no wonder. Doomsday prophecies dominate the nation’s airwaves and cable news channels. And although the heaviest dose of negativism and uncivility penetrates the right ear, the left ear drum also takes a beating. Whine, bitch, complain. There seems to be no escape.

This certainly is not the best of times. Nor is it the worst of times. My IRA is proof. Unfortunately, though, our society lives on instant gratification. Patience? What the hell is that? President Obama promises a slow recovery of the economy. But he should have dealt with that problem yesterday. Worse, the President delivered on his campaign promises. Health care legislation and finance reform were passed by a Democrats in Congress, despite opposition from a party that votes no on bathroom breaks.

I recognize the contradiction in my vent. Whine, bitch, complain. But I duck when passing mirrors to avoid seeing myself as others might see me. Besides, I’m a journalist. That gives me a free pass to point fingers at other people, create conflict and act like I have good sense. These are God given journalistic privileges. If you don’t believe me, just watch television. Listen to the radio. Or—I know this is radical in the Internet age—read newspapers.

So where am I going with this rant? I’m not exactly sure where my fingers will take me. More than likely, it’s in the direction of politics, pollsters and journalists. One of the qualities I admire in Obama is his apparent tendency to ignore polls. At least, in the short-term. His knee seems to remain relatively still in the face of opposition to issues such as health reform, immigration, drilling moratoriums, etc. Unlike his predecessor who put on a flight suit to declare our victory in Iraq (some victory) Obama didn’t don a scuba outfit and dive into the Gulf of Mexico to plug the BP oil leak. Maybe he expected Louisiana Governor Smarty Pants to put his finger in the well head.  

I have no doubt that Obama reads the polls. Actually, he doesn’t need to. News reporters and pundits read them obsessively and pass along the results when questioning the President. Even if he doesn’t care that people believe he is the worst President since the one yesterday. Or the one tomorrow. Even though journalists comprising the Washington elite don’t cover a hurricanes, they still bend with the breeze—most of which is generated polls.

In a weird sort of way, Fox “News” is refreshing. Bet the readers of the blog never believed I would make such a statement. But like patients in mental asylums, Fox folks see the world differently than the norm. In my book, that is okay. It just gives me additional things to bitch about in the blog. Thirty seconds watching Glenn Beck provides enough material to last for days.

I relate to oddballs because my investigative reporting career was built on contrarianism. At times when all my colleagues were jumping on the bandwagon of conventional wisdom, I hung around to ask one more question about an issue and/or individual. One more question led to two, then three and so on. The results were often surprising. As evidence, check the journalism awards on the walls of my home office. But be sure to knock. Sometimes my hair is mussed.

In some respects, the only difference between the Fox folks and me is that I based my exposés on facts rather than politics. Sadly, facts are not much in vogue today. Especially on cable news networks. All three—I’m being generous in calling MSNBC a news network—are filled programming with talking heads. Fox provides forum for every known Republican politician. MSNBC’s format of all opinion, all the time caters to Democrats. CNN tries to play the middle ground by encouraging guests from the left and right to engae in fistfights. Instead, the conflicts are pissing matches. I fully expect CNN to raise the stakes by recruiting Jerry Springer. He could take the place of John King. 

By the way (notice that I didn’t use the shortcut btw to make me seem like I was a mod kind of guy), what’s with John King—no relation to the network’s mummy in residence, Larry King. John is CNN’s replacement for nutty Lou Dobbs. Although King the younger claims Massachussets as his birthplace, my suspicion is he was born in a taxicab on Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House while his mother played video games. He is consumed with Presidential politics and digital devices that are designed to totally confuse viewers. I Tivo the show and use it as a cure for insomnia.

But enough of this rambling discourse. I warned you that I didn’t know where my fingers were going to take me. My dilemma now is coming up with a clever close to the post, something that relates to the title. I never attended journalsim school but I think there is supposed to be a bit of relevance between the opening and the finale.

How about this? I’ve rattled on today without any forethought given to what the hell I was going to say.

BTW (they years just peeled away), tomorrow is re-run day as I try to escape the dog days of summer by heading out of town.

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. The book is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.

During a public affairs forum last night, Rupert Murdoch denied that Fox “News”—one of the sparkling jewels of his media empire—was a Republican propaganda outlet. He also feigned ignorance about the network’s role as a cheerleader for the Tea Party Movement. He failed to address the issue of whether astonauts really landed on the moon, or whether rain is wet. 

Speaking at a forum for the Kalb Report television series, Murdock’s comments suggested that he avoids watching Fox “News.” Smart guy. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/06/murdoch-msnbc-cnn-house-d_n_527849.html. To deflect criticism of his baby, Murdoch accused the CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times of bias in favor of Democrats.

I concede that he was two/thirds correct—the exception being CNN. A major ratings problem with my former employer is a lack of bias. During my decade at CNN, it was called the “Clinton News Network.”  I know from personal experience that the label is a myth. In fact, I almost resigned in a confrontation with a CNN vice president when he tried to spike one of my stories because it undercut Whitewater allegations against Clintons. The executive told me in no uncertain terms that wanted to bring down the President and his Arkansas cronies.    

Pill-popping Rush Limbaugh is the guy who attached the Clinton label to CNN, proving that no matter how untrue, if something is said loud enough and long enough, people will begin to believe it. Fox’s moronic talk show hosts and the network’s stable of wing-nut pundits have expanded on the loudmouth theory to the extent that emotionally-manipulated Tea Partiers are taking to the streets in mass displays of ignorance. It reminds me of my days of covering street demonstrations by young people incited by loud voices of the radical left at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Except for the Vietnam war, many were clueless about other political issues that prompted protests. But, damn, they were having fun—sort of like health care demonstrators, who dress in costumes and make fools of themselves.  

Fox “News” has cashed in on the opposite of fun. The network exploits the fear and anger of people influenced by all the propaganda about socialism, Marxism and other crap expoused by Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and to a lesser extent, Bill O’Reilly. By denying Fox’s GOP agenda, Murdoch is being  duplicitous. Scratch that. He is lying, the same as many of the people who work for him. 

In my opinion, CNN should battle Fox head-on—not in terms of bias and/or partisanship, but on the basis of truth. The idea of a prime time fact-checking program on CNN has been suggested by many people. It would make a great battlefield to name names and kick ass.

My friend and former colleague, Brooks Jackson, was once CNN’s fact-checker. During election campaigns, he anchored segments that analyzed political commercials. His reports were aired in newscasts and on politcal shows. As an ex-Wall Street Journal reporter and campaign finance expert, Brooks had the background to effectively investigate false claims. Although we worked together for several years, I have no idea of his political preferences. However, he had the personality of a Republican. 

Anyway, Brooks now heads factcheck.org. It is supported by the non-partisan Annenberg Foundation. When I receive viral e-mails propagating outrageous right-wing yarns, I immediately go to Brooks’ website. Nine times out of ten, he has already countered the misstatements and rumors with actual facts. But his site is pretty tame.

Since Rupert Murdoch and his Fox “News” executives have no qualms about criticizing CNN, my old network needs the cojones to fight back. It would be more informative and entertaining than Larry King.

Come to think of it, so are infomercials for bathroom fixtures.

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. It is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.

While I have sat at home hurriedly writing posts for this blog so I could hop in my golf cart and head for the range, 78 year old Dan Rather travels to Iraq to do a report that will air tonight HDNet cable channels. He is a survivor. Although I never considered Rather a great journalist, he does a terrific imitation.

Creating the illusion of actually being working reporters is a  job requirement for news anchors. They read what others write—a TV deception that unjustly ended Rather’s CBS career after he was held responsible for an investigative report that turned out to be based on counterfeit documents. A 60 Minutes Two story prior to the 2004 Presidential election disclosing that George W. Bush was a National Guard slacker during the Vietnam War was substantially true—at least according to members of his guard unit and material documenting the absence of the future President from mandatory assignments. However, a confidential source re-created memoranda that was provided to a CBS producer. Although one expert verified some of the material, others cited forgeries. 

Reportedly under pressure from the White House as a result of the gaffe, CBS fired the producer and demanded the resignations of two news executives. Rather also eventually resigned.  But the old dude has kept on trucking. In 2006, he signed on with HDNet, which was established by Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas, Mavericks NBA franchise.

Coincidentally, former CNN war correspondent Peter Arnett also found a temporary home at HDNet. Peter resigned from CNN in the wake of a controversial exposé that accused the U.S. Military of using nerve gas during the Vietnam War. I was peripherally involved in the story—given the task of trying to prove its accuracy following complaints by the Pentagon. As I revealed in Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, testicle-challenged CNN executives didn’t wait for the outcome of my investigation. Like CBS, the “most trusted network” fired producers and forced resignations in order to make peace with the Pentagon. It was the beginning of the end of CNN’s Special Assignment investigative reporting unit.

Three months after the nerve gas debacle, I was reassigned to play golf for the remaining two years of my contract. I have continued the assignment ever since.

Occasionally, I have the urge to rake some muck. But the itch passes after hitting a bucket of golf balls.

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. It is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career. 

Twenty years ago this month, CNN’s Special Assignment Unit made its debut with an exposé of the hypocrisy of collegiate athletics. I was then Senior Correspondent for the network’s highly-touted  investigative team. We were being billed as television’s biggest and best muckraking unit—a team of reporters and producers, who had earned dozens of broadcasting most prestigious journalism prizes.

The talent recruited to staff the unit was in sharp contrast to the cable network’s cheapskate reputation, which had earned CNN the reputation as the Chicken Noodle Network.  Indeed, the Columbia Journalism Review published a lengthy article questioning why “some of America’s top reporters gave up great jobs to join an untested unit at the nation’s fourth network?” But in the beginning, our future looked rosy. My ten year tenure didn’t work out as I hoped it would. But I have no regrets.

Our initial series of stories about college athletics—four segments ranging from eight to ten minutes—were a spin-off of a local one-hour documentary I reported  five years before for WBRZ in Baton Rouge. The CNN series, titled Prisoners of the Game, covered the breadth of college sports from recruitment to graduation rates to the final disappointment of athletes, who completed their eligibility without degrees or hope for professional athletic careers. The reports ran in conjunction with basketball’s Final Four craze, thus giving added emphasis to the huge sums of money at stake for colleges that build successful teams. The abuses we uncovered in our reports were widespread. And two decades later, not much has changed. 

Although most colleges with top-rated teams claim that athletic programs are self-supporting, improve school profiles, provide scholarships to kids unable to afford tuition, and keep alumni happy, athletes get shortchanged. Graduation rates are frequently appalling. Worse, some schools offer courses only slightly above basket-weaving that are designed to help athletes maintain academic eligibility. So instead of student/athletes, teams are made up of athlete/students. Or more accurately, athlete/entertainers. Bigtime athletic departments operate like the entertainment business.

The National Association of Collegiate Athletics has a rule book outlining what schools can and cannot do. But rules governing human nature are a matter of conscience, meaning that loopholes are exploited. To quote what Vince Lombardi probably never said, “Winning isn’t everything, it is the only thing.” For coaches, losing games is the equivalent of near-death experiences. Their jobs depend on winning records—making it easy to justify and rationalize loose interpretations of NCAA rules. 

For years, former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown has been one of the most outspoken critics of the NCAA. He believes the regulations encourage, rather than discourage cheating. Since athletes are entertainers who earn millions of dollars for their universities, Brown endorses giving moderate stipends over and beyond tuition, books, housing and food. A large percentage of star players are recruited from low income and impoverished backgrounds and Brown says it is unreasonable to expect these young athletes to resist the temptations of perks provided by alumni and fans. He and probably every other coach of major college teams have seen star athletes driving cars and wearing expensive clothing that were beyond their financial means. It creates a dilemma. Coaches are not trained detectives. To avoid confrontations in which the truth might emerge, they close their eyes to the obvious and pray that others will do the same.

Dale Brown is not alone in his belief that athlete/student/entertainers should receive a level of compensation that leads them not into temptation, but delivers them from cheating. But the NCAA membership is dominated by schools that put education above athletics—an attitude that is considered a distortion of priorities by the most dedicated fans of the nation’s top college teams. When it comes to a vote, any proposal for paying college athletes more than current limits is soundly defeated by the majority. It’s better to be blind.

As a result, cheating continues year after year, decade after decade. 

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. It is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.

I show my age by recalling the stumbling Saturday Night Live language of fictional Dominican baseball player, Chico Esquela. The Garrett Morris New York Mets character was a regular on Weekend Update during the late seventies. The catch phrase, “bery, bery good to me,” was soon adapted by SNL fans to define their benefits from other occupations and pursuits. 

Baseball was certainly ”bery, bery good to me” in a lot of ways, beginning with my interest in reading newspapers and magazines. When I was five or six years old growing up in south Alabama and first began understanding the concept of baseball, I started skimming the sports pages of the Mobile Register for scores of games. My dad was a former semi-pro pitcher and nurtured my interest in baseball.  I have early memories of going with him to see the Mobile Bears, the Southern Association farm club of the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

By the time I was ten or so, I had become obsessed with baseball, reading everything I found about the game and its players—in Mobile and elsewhere. At the age of eleven, the Sunday Register published a baseball story that I submitted to its lead sports columnist. My reporting offered an “in-depth” analysis of the Bears outlook for the 1947 season. Seeing a credit line on the story may have been the genesis of my reporting career. However, it would have been a sub-conscious desire since I never considered reporting until it was literally forced on me after my dreams of becoming a rock and roll disc jockey were sidetracked fifteen years later.

My interest in sports went beyond the Bears. I followed football, basketball and boxing with almost the same enthusiasm. My reading material expanded to include sports magazines and kid’s books about athletic heroes—all of which fueled childhood fantasies being a star in whatever sport happened to be in season. Unfortunately, I was a mediocre athlete. My greatest exploits were leaping around the bedroom while giving play-by-play accounts of my game winning homeruns, touchdowns and Championship fights.  The play-by-play experience in describing imagined feats would come in handy. Two of my jobs moving up the career ladder as a radio newsman were a result of having dual-skills as a reporter and play-by-play announcer.

As a kid, I got my big break in sports in 1948. A junior high school friend was the Mobile Bears batboy. While I was at a game one Sunday afternoon, he recruited me to work as the “roof boy.” The job entailed retrieving foul balls that landed atop the grandstand and were blocked by a rear screen from going into the parking lot. Other duties involved clubhouse chores before and after games, and running errands for players.

Sitting alone during games atop at Mobile’s Hartwell Field, I did play-by-play of games, along with a running commentary. Baseball is a game of long lulls. And filling the gaps while players scratched their private parts and otherwise took time between pitches helped me improve my skills as a bullshit artist. If people in the stands could see me, they probably figured I was a handicapped child. Anyway, I learned to keep my lips flapping even when there was nothing to say. 

Rubbing elbows with professional athletes taught me to keep my mouth shut. The biggest perk of the job was  interacting with players before and after games. I quickly learned to be the proverbial fly on the clubhouse wall, observing and listening. I had nothing relevant to say to players except, “Here is your coke and hotdog.” Silence is an important journalism trait—especially in interviews with people who enjoy the sound their voices. Sometimes, they reveal the unexpected. 

Baseball’s most important benefit to my journalism career, perhaps, was an oddball memory that I developed for facts, figures and events. I use the term oddball because of the selectivity of my memory. Throughout my careers a reporter, I had the ability to recall specifics of conversations, documents, and obscure material for months and even years. Indeed, my memory was nearly photographic in visualizing sources of information. As a result, I rarely needed notes to do complicated interviews. This was amazing to my producers and camera crews because I was notorious for the number of takes it required for me to do simple on-camera narrations that I was supposed to have memorized. And my memory of names of people I meet for the first time has always been horrible.

A few years ago, I had something of a revelation in determining the possible source of my memory gymnastics. While standing in line to buy baseball tickets and yakking to a friend about baseball players and statistics, he asked me how I recalled such trivia. The question brought to mind a long ago baseball board game I played as a child. The game featured cards for all the major league players. The cards displayed the statistics of every major league player—the number of singles, doubles, triples, homeruns and outs he recorded in his career. I eventually memorized every one of the players statistics. I can still recite the line-ups of a few teams. It was a great mental excercise, which over the years, helped me overcome  educational deficiences and improved my b.s. skills immeasurably.

So I as prepare for a new season, I am happy to say that baseball was “bery, bery good to me.”

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. It is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.

This month marks the 20-year anniversary of the biggest art heist in history.  In March 1990, burglars breached the security alarms at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, handcuffed and bound two security guards, and got away with $300-million in rare paintings. In the two decades since, there have been occasional leads. However, the crime remains unsolved. Nor have any of the paintings been found.

In the aftermath of the theft, the name of one suspect immediately emerged—Myles J. Connor. The burglary had all the earmarks of a Connor break-in. There was a slight problem, though. He was safely tucked away in a federal penitentiary serving the final years of sentence for drug dealing. Still, he could have planned the crime from inside. That was his modus operandi. So investigators paid him a visit. And sure enough, Connor hinted that he knew the art thieves. He promised to cooperate. But for a price. He wanted his freedom. It was a scam he used several times before.

Myles J. Connor is one of the most fascinating characters I encountered in my thirty years as an investigative reporter. We first met in a cell at Boston’s Charles Street Jail. He was the inmate. I was a journalist investigating a story of misconduct by state prosecutors. On a steaming hot day in July, I spent three hours listening to Connor’s recitation of crimes he committed, and crimes that he was charged with but proclaimed innocence. The most recent of the criminal charges he faced was the murder of two young women, whose bodies he helped authorities recover. Despite knowing the location of the bodies, he said he was innocent of the murders. I believed him—as did many other people, including the District Attorney of the jurisdiction in which he was charged.

This was not the first time that I took up the cause of a notorious criminal, nor would it be the last. Four years before, I provided key testimony that led to the acquittal of Anthony Accetturro—the soon-to-be boss of a New Jersey crime family. I had no choice. I was an eyewitness and possessed video of an incident that disputed a cops account that he was assaulted by the mobster. He was being framed. Four years later, my reporting defended international drug smuggler/turned informant Barry Seal, then the target of overzealous Louisiana lawmen. Their abuses eventually led to Seal’s assassination by a Colombian hit team. Described by DEA agents as ”the most important informant” in the agencies history, Seal’s death was devastating to an investigation that would have crippled the world’s biggest cocaine cartel.

My contrarian stories dealing with Myles Connor, Anthony Accetturro and Barry Seal are an example of a dilemma that sometimes confronts investigative reporters. Do we defend the worst kind of characters to ensure the integrity of the nation’s justice system? Connor, Accetturro and Seal were, or would be, government snitches. In Connor’s case, he had a history of bargaining for his freedom.

The son of a cop and a well-known New England performer billed as the President of Rock and Roll, Connor first beat the system trading a stolen Rembrandt for a reduced prison sentence that was imposed in another art theft case. He engineered a heist at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in which three confederates walked into the gallery, fired a shot into the ceiling and when everybody dived to the floor, the 1632 Portrait of Elizabeth Van Rijn was grabbed from the wall.

Prior to Connor’s scheduled trial in the Wyeth case, there was a series of mysterious telephone calls and a movie-like rendezvous in a dark corner of a restaurant parking lot where the Rembrandt was placed in the trunk of a car driven by a state cop. The following day, the U.S. Attorney in Boston, the State Police Commissioner, and the acting director of the Museum of Fine Arts jointly announced that a “public-spirited citizen” returned the painting.

The “public-spirited citizen” was hustled into a federal courtroom two days later to received a four year sentence in the Wyeth case—a slap on the wrist for Connor, who was a convicted felon. In reality, he outsmarted himself.  FBI agents, who made case, had long memories. And when Connor pulled off  another scheme that resulted in his release from prison, it backfired.

Tommy Sperrazza was a vicious killer suspected of numerous homicides, including the murders of two teen-aged girls. They disappeared after witnessing him kill a man outside a Boston bar. The girls’ bodies had not been found. Connor, looking again for keys to the prison gates, approached Sperrazza with an absurd proposal. If he would tell him the location of the bodies, Myles promised to hijack a helicopter following his release and fly into the prison to facilitate the killer’s escape. Nobody in their right mind would believe such a proposition. But according to prison psychiatrists, Sperrazza was legally nuts. He drew a map for Myles.

The victims were buried in western Massachusetts, more than a hundred miles from the murder scene. Norfolk County District Attorney, William Delahunt―a U.S. Congressman as this is written―made a deal with Connor. In September, 1977, he led investigators to the girls’ remains and was paroled after serving only one year of his sentence.

Other lawmen decided it was time for payback. They linked Connor to the murders. Their chief witness was none other than Sperrazza. He said Connor showed him how to kill the victims―a remarkable claim for a guy believed to have murdered a dozen people or more. Myles had barely known Tommy outside of prison. Nor did he have a motive to commit the murders.

Enter on the scene John Connolly, a rogue FBI agent convicted two decades later for his dealings with informants. It is one of the Bureau’s worst ever scandals. Connolly promised Sperrazza all sorts of rewards if he linked Connor to the murders.  Tommy’s decision didn’t require much thought. Hence, he was the chief witness in a case that ultimately resulted in Connor’s acquittal. Connor was later convicted of drug charges in Illinois.

 As much as he enjoyed top billing, Myles was less important to my reporting than the characters recruited to testify against him. I produced a series of stories for Boston’s ABC afilliate titled, Witness for Hire.  My series also ran on CNN long before I was recruited to the network. The reports dealt with the excessive rewards and inducements given to jailed criminals in return for testimony in high-profile trials―a tactic I described as a “bounty hunter system of justice.” In short, witnesses like Sperrazza  had more reasons to lie than tell the truth. 

A few months after the Boston series, I worked as a freelance investigative reporter in New York on the ABC Close Up documentary, When Crime Pays, which featured the Connor case. Therefore, when his name surfaced in the Gardner museum theft, I didn’t have to think twice about the deal he was trying to make. But this time, Connor was apparently using bullshit as  leverage. Investigators received no useful information from him amd he served his full sentence. Although I talked to Connor a few times while he was in federal prison, we haven’t been in contact in years. I last heard that was living in Boston. But there is no sign of the $300-million in art around his house, or anyplace else that lawmen know about.

Maybe Myles is saving the paintings as a bargaining tool if he is ever charged with another crime. Though farfetched, it’s an intriguing thought.

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. It is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career. 

Presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal plans to create a labor pool for Fox “News” by opening the gates of the East Louisiana State Mental Hospital. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit. But I can’t resist the opportunity to take shots at the looney-tunes network. Indeed, former New York Times executive editor, Howell Raines, criticized the mainstream media last week for failing to adequately challenge the Fox ”News” abuses. It was a strange criticism coming from a journalist who acted as cheerleader for the NYT Times abuses that inspired and perpetuated the Whitewater investigation—a $70-million charade that caused irreparable damage to the country by helping elect George W. Bush. More substantive regarding Fox “News” is a lengthy article in this month’s Columbia Journalism Review. It will be the topic of another blog post. Meantime, back to Bobby Jindal. 

The ambitious Governor apparently will do just about anything to enhance his conservative image, including cutting back the health services of people, who are the least likely to cast ballots for him in future elections. To reduce spending in the wake of Louisiana’s budget shortfall, his Administration has been carving away programs in the Department of Health and Hospitals. DHH reductions include, Medicaid payments to doctors, reduced home health care for the disabled and large-scale of layoffs of state employees. Additionally, Earl K. Long Hospital—the primary treatment facility for the poor in Baton Rouge—is being closed and its services taken over by Lady of the Lake Hospital. The Lake is a fine facility, but it is a long way from the city’s most populated low income neighborhoods. 

Most recently, the sharpened budget knife is directed at mental health services. During a town hall hearing this month in Jackson—the home of East Louisiana State Hospital and a majority of its employees—plans were revealed to reduce patient beds at the facility by moving about one-third of its patients to a scattering of private group homes. Other states around the country, including DSS Secretary Alan Levine’s old stomping grounds of Florida, have experienced mixed results with so-called privatization. In theory, the principle is sound. But as a practical matter, privatization runs the risk of profiteering by companies contracted to operate the programs. Too often, the bottom line is more important than the quality of treatment, includes administering drugs to patients in proper doses and on  prescribed timetables. Patients frequently get lost in this system—regardless of whether they are treated by private or by public agencies. A symptom of mental problems is refusing to acknowledge and/or treat the illness.

Forty years ago, I produced a radio documentary about the sprawling, plantation-like East Louisiana State Hospital—then with a census of 2400 patients. That is six times the current number of beds. My report aired at a time when the hospital was notorious for its ancient treatment methods. I have a vivid memory of what was known as “Colony Nine,” a unit in which severely impaired patients clad in gowns or naked marched aimlessly around rooms with tile floors. They were not toilet trained. Hence, the stink was overwhelming. Every few hours, they would rotate to a second room while they other was hosed down.

At the time of my story, the catch word in mental health treatment in Louisiana and across the nation was “deinstitutionalization.” Large numbers of patients were released and told to report to publicly operated clinics to receive their medications. Many failed to comply and there was an immediate increase in the population of street people everywhere the rapid release plan was implemented. 

I’m not suggesting that mentally ill folks be kept locked-up. But cutbacks that reduce the number of beds in facilities such as East Louisiana State Hospital require carefully planned and executed alternative treatment programs. Most forms of mental illness can be controlled by proper levels of medications. And in some instances, patients fully recover as a result of pyschiatric counseling.

So as Bobby Jindal flies around the country raising campaign money from fat-cats, I hope he sets aside his national aspirations for a moment to consider the impact of budget reductions that effect people with voices that are so weak they are never heard by politicians. Otherwise, the streets of every city in Louisiana will display even more visible evidence of the failure to properly treat mentally ill patients.

Worse, Fox “News” will hire commentators crazier than the ones now on the network. Sorry. But I just can’t seem to control myself. And yes, I know there are clinics to treat my Fox obsession.