OUTING OUR SOURCES

SOURCES ARE TO A REPORTER are like blood to good old Count Dracula.

And using them is getting to be a little risky.

Hell there is a NYT sitting in prison right now, probably with a notebook or tape recorder so that she can write a book about the experience later, who refused to out her ‘source’ or ‘sources’.

It doesn’t make sense that she is sitting in the slammer while Jayson Blair is running around free and unemployed. But that’s another story.

Now I have sources. Real ones….people who can be counted on giving valuable, behind-the-scenes information when I need it. Some of these are like eager co-conspirators, hanging around city hall, the county courthouse, political action groups, (In Macon, more likely political inaction groups) or any of several bars and restaurants and phone in any dirt they happen across. Or, more often, if I need to get some hard….well maybe not hard, but certainly not flaccid either….evidence or proof, they dig into the problem with all the eagerness of a mongrel trying to hump your leg.

Now they usually go unnamed. And that’s by both custom and personal preference. Supposing one of the Mayor’s staff, all of whom took a loyalty oath to Hizzoner, were discovered dishing behind-the-scenes dirt to this writer. Probably cost him his job. Kind of hard to tell; it’s like a revolving door in City Hall these days.

But, lest I run afoul of some law I never heard of or which the homeland security boys and girls cook up on the spur of the moment, I have decided to out several of my most excellent sources. Now I haven’t told them about it yet, but, hey, they read this b’log faithfully so word will get around pretty quick.

The first is a girl. Ok, woman, actually, who by the name of Jenny Sequah. Jenny is part American Indian and likes her firewater a little more than she should. But she gets the job done in a timely manner when she’s sober. Oh she does when she’s a tad bit shit-faced, too, but it takes more time. We call Jenny ‘Deep Throat’ in our articles, she chose that name for herself. Than’s. Jenny.

Now there is a dynamic duo who have made frequent contributions both to this B’log and THE ELEVENTH HOUR, the bi-weekly for which I write a column. Together they constitute what is sometimes called ‘an item’. I think of them as a long-term couple who came out of that particular closet twenty or more years ago. Older by five years is Basil Quagmeier, sometime musician, sometime actor, sometime writer who had the foresight to inherit enough money in insure a lifetime of comfortable leisure. His other half is a fun-loving African American gent named David Downlow. David has a PhD in British Literature from a prestigious Southern University. Since meeting Basil he has not had to work but picks up pocket change doing a little tutoring on the side. This pair has a unique talent for getting a designated mark to spill his guts. Sitting at a table or bar with these guys is veritable barrel of laughs. Surrounded by David and Basil, the target will invariably tell them everything they want to know.

Deep inside the County Courthouse, working there in an official capacity, is Ms Della deLouse. Della is a fountain of gossip and loves to tell all she knows. A long term employee, people dish her with all sorts of salacious dirt. You wouldn’t believe what some good folks have on video tape.

More, Later.

CALLING A TERRORIST A TERRORIST: The BBC refuses to call the London Bombers ‘Terrorists’. This seems to us to be a case of Political Correctness gone wild.

It might be too early to call them ‘Muslim Terrorists’ or ‘Arab Terrorists’, or ‘IRA Terrorists’, but any group which can coordinate four separate bombings all within a very few moments of each other isn’t exactly selling comic books to third graders, either.

COMING SOON: Luke outs a CIA agent, or is it FBI. Anyway, some spook we don't really know anything about will have his/her name splashed all over the internet.

FOX NEWS....were we come.