'WHITE-LINE 'RAVENEL "Angry' / RUSTY THOMAS Gone / TEDDY KENNEDY Alive

Thomas Ravenel, former SC State Treasurer is angry that he has to go to prison after being convicted of cocaine possession and intent to distribute. I guess being a Ravenel skewers your world view that you're not supposed to go to jail. "I've kind of resigned myself that I'm not going to get any breaks," he said.

Welcome to reality, Mr. Ravenel. Now talk to Mayor Joe about resigning ...

But it's difficult to blame Ravenel for his elitist view - growing up in the pampered good-ole-boy culture of old Charleston. The same culture that allowed fire chief Rusty Thomas (now resigned) to keep the CFD at the sterling standards of the 1970s. Chief Thomas is the perfect example of The Peter Principle - 'In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.'

On July 7, 2007, Chief Thomas defended the training and standards of CFD. He said that he trusted the department's time-honed (i.e. old, outdated) techniques, regardless of what written standards might say.

"We come from a long line of traditional firefighting, and we are never going to get away from that — never," Thomas said. "You can't read out of a book how to put a fire out. You have to go out there and do it, and that's what we do."

And people wonder why South Carolina (and Charleston County) have some of the worst public education in the United States. Here we have a public official saying that he has nothing to learn by reading about advancements in fire fighting theory and safety. CFD trained their staff to rush headlong into the building. Charleston firefighters are taught in training that if a newspaper photographer snapped their photo at a fire scene they weren't doing their jobs. That meant they were standing outside the burning building, rather than attacking the blaze head-on.

Wow. And people in this city are STILL supporting Chief Thomas and Mayor Joe. You remember Mayor Joe, don't you? The man whose job it is to keep abreast of the status of all city departments. The Mayor blames the owner of the Sofa Super Store for the deaths of the Charleston 9. Because, after all, nothing is EVER the city's fault.

I guess we should blame the flooding on the pennisula on the rain, not on the city's failure to solve the drainage problem. Blame the eye-sore trash of cigarette butts up and down Market Street every morning on the restuarant owners, not on the city who made it illegal to smoke inside privately owned businesses.

But we can keep dumping money into the abyss called the South Carolina Aquarium. By the way ... when's the last time anybody saw a movie at the IMAX? Oops, sorry, it's closed.

Just another example of the Charleston way of doing business.

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In similar news, it seems Sen. Teddy Kennedy (D/M[arxist]-Mass) had a seizure over the weekend. And as of this writing, Mary Jo Kopechne is still dead.

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HOLLYWOOD ALERT

Leo DeCapprio discusses the size of his brain ... or his penis ... not sure which.