A Bad Idea By Any Other Name is Still A Bad Idea
My Dad was a Police Officer for 26 years in Jackson MS. My brothers and I were subject to almost daily interrogations from a trained professional. Partly because he controlled the car keys and the family finances and partly because we had a healthy respect for his occasional use of corporal punishment, we were denied the use of our 5th amendment rights concerning self-incrimination. We did, however, learn from our mistakes, and became experts at answering his questions in ways that did not, at least too much, incriminate us and our teenage friends. We also became, through observation of and participation in Dad’s investigative techniques, experts at detecting bovine scatology when we heard it. He once pointed to a newspaper story of a Mississippi politician that proposed a 75% raise for members of the Legislature. Public outcry was immediate and overwhelmingly negative, so a 2nd politician came immediately to his colleagues’ defense. “My friends, in these difficult economic