BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

Think our government and its overseers aren't becoming more narcissistic and self-absorbed? Fiddling with 'Rome' burns? (and if you or I did this - we'd be S.O.L.!) Then read this; your tax dollars HARD AT WORK: SEC porn peekers at work confess by Jim McElhatton U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission workers who made a habit of looking at pornography on their government computers, even as the economy was tanking, offered varying explanations when caught. "I think it was just arrogance and ignorance on my part," one worker said. "You know, I mean … I didn't intend to hurt anybody. I didn't intend to hurt the SEC's image or anything like that." The Washington Times reported in February on the existence of about two dozen such cases, which were detailed in reports to Congress as well as in more than 150 pages of case summaries obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Additional pornography cases surfaced last week in a memo f...

THE MARX BROTHERS & THE FBI Very interesting reading. Excerpt below. Click the link at the bottom for the whole article! The FBI spied on the Marx Brothers by Margie Burns Way back in the 1990s, it occurred to me that given the tendencies of late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the Bureau might well have been intrigued by the Marx Brothers’ last name, so I checked with the FBI and sure enough, it had indeed kept a file on that family comedy team, the Marx Brothers – Groucho, Harpo, Zeppo, Chico – which in due course I received. I still have the dossier. The FBI kept a careful eye on these popular malcontents or subversives from the 1930s into the 1960s. Julius Marx (Groucho), the most articulate and erudite member of the family and the one who most successfully handled the transition from movies to television, has a file of 186 pages. Herbert Marx (Zeppo) has a file of 48 pages, mostly a mimeographed copy of a comedy routine he and Groucho had been accused of stealing. Even Leonard ...