Wednesday, July 13, 2005 | The tragic outing of Rep. Duke Cunningham was the climax of a long line of misconduct that was not publicly known. The problem would not have surprised a London taxi driver who informed me during a recent traffic jam on Piccadilly. I was riffling through a guidebook when he suddenly offered a dazzling insight: “With all these polls and surveys going on, our politicians know a lot more about us than we do about them.”
Attorney Jim Miller’s wife got him brooding over this countdown: “Next time someone brushes off the city’s billion-plus pension deficit, consider this perspective: A billion seconds ago it was 1959. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive. A billion hours ago, our ancestors were living in the Stone Age. A billion days ago, no one on earth walked on two feet.”
– NEIL MORGAN, Voice Senior Editor