January 2

By the second day of the New Year, the enthusiasm and interest, for a new beginning has for most people passed quietly away; the inspiration for achievement has evaporated like water spilled on a Brooklyn sidewalk in August. For most people there is the sudden realization that your feeling of ‘Wow, this is great – another whole New Year’ has abruptly changed to ‘Damn, this sucks - another whole New Year!’ On the 2nd in 1923, Albert Bacon Fall, President Harding’s Secretary of the Interior, resigned his position in Harding’s cabinet due to his role in the notorious Teapot Dome scandal. Fall was also an attorney and represented famed sheriff Pat Garrett when Garrett was arrested and tried for the murder of Albert Jennings Fountain. In 1922, Fall had accepted a bribe of nearly a half a million dollars for fixing an oil lease on Federal property in Wyoming. That is the equivalent of roughly four million dollars in 2007.