Sunday, March 28, 2021

Sunday Reading

Better Press Conferences, Please — Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker on the vapidity of the presidential press conference.

Sometimes the big moments in our politics meet the very low expectations we have for them. Joe Biden’s first Presidential press conference, on Thursday, was one of them. By the end of it, after an hour and two minutes that felt much longer, Biden had answered some two dozen questions. The majority of them were repetitive variants on one of two subjects: immigration and the Senate filibuster.

Biden had no actual news to offer on either subject. In case you missed it, he is really, totally, absolutely committed to fixing the terrible situation at the border, and also not yet ready—because he does not have the votes—to commit to blowing up the filibuster. There was not a single question, meanwhile, about the ongoing pandemic that for the past year has convulsed life as we know it and continues to claim an average of a thousand lives a day. How is this even possible during a once-in-a-century public-health crisis, the combating of which was the central theme of Biden’s campaign and remains the central promise of his Presidency? It’s hard not to see it as anything other than an epic and utterly avoidable press fail.

For weeks, Washington clamored for a Biden press conference. This was, after all, the longest a new President had gone without holding one since the Coolidge Administration. Republicans—and the state-run media in Russia—seized on Biden’s reticence as proof that he was somehow too old or incoherent to face the rigors of extended, unscripted questioning. With his critics having set such a low bar, it should surprise no one that Biden, who did, after all, win a national election by surviving almost a dozen debates with his Democratic-primary rivals and two with Donald Trump, cleared it. Republicans, it could be said, succeeded in one respect with their preshow spin: they wanted Biden to be on the defensive talking about immigration and the border, not the passage of his $1.9 trillion COVID-relief package and the success of his vaccine campaign. Reporters, based on the questions, agreed.

Sixty-five days into Biden’s tenure, there was plenty to ask him about, even in the absence of the Trump-manufactured dramas that fuelled the news in the past few years: horrific mass shootings, escalating tensions with China and Russia, missile tests by North Korea, and, oh, yes, the pandemic. The killings in Georgia and Colorado over the past week forced Biden to cancel part of his carefully planned “help is here” tour to tout the COVID-relief package—a reminder that, no matter how disciplined and organized his Administration is, no matter the contrast to Trumpian chaos, all leaders fall prey to the press of urgent and unanticipated crises. Biden opened the press conference by announcing a new plan to administer two hundred million vaccines by his hundredth day in office and a vow to get a majority of elementary and middle schools open by then. But that is where the big story of his Administration began and ended—as far as the journalists were concerned.

Biden’s policies on the pandemic have been popular with the public, including with Republican voters, but there are plenty of tough questions to be asked about them, given the huge uncertainties of when and how we are going to get out of the COVID mess. Instead, the press conference quickly reminded me why I never liked them much. What did we learn? That Biden agrees with Barack Obama that the Senate filibuster is a “relic of the Jim Crow era” but is not yet committing to a full-out attack against it. That he has not yet decided whether to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan by the May 1st deadline set by his predecessor. That he will “consult with allies” about the North Korean missile tests. That he plans to run for reëlection in 2024 but might not because, hey, it’s a long time from now and who knows if there will even be a Republican Party by then. His strongest words were reserved for the current Republican campaign in numerous states to restrict voting rights—which the President called “un-American” and “sick.” The funniest moment by far was when he was asked whether he would run in 2024, given that Trump had already announced he was doing so by this early point in his tenure. “My predecessor?” Biden said, and then he laughed. It was a short, derisive laugh. “Oh, God, I miss him,” he said.

Although Biden refused to endorse the effort by progressives to get rid of the Senate filibuster, he eventually seemed to lose enough patience with the press conference that he engaged in a little filibustering of his own. Late into the hour, I found myself tuning out a bit when Biden gave a long lecture on the twenty-first-century battle between autocracies and democracies. During his answer, I noticed that Zeke Miller, the Associated Press correspondent who had been given the first question at the press conference, was tweeting from inside the press room—about a different subject entirely, the Israeli elections. (In another rarity, Israel and the Mideast also did not come up at the press conference, I should note; perhaps American foreign policy is finally pivoting, after all?) Meanwhile, Biden had begun another stem-winder, on infrastructure. “There’s so much we can do that’s good stuff,” the President said. This, by the way, was in response to a question about gun control that he did not really answer. It’s not for nothing that Biden served for all those decades in the Senate.

I have spent years, as an editor and a reporter, hating on Presidential press conferences—the faux-gotcha questions, the pointless preening, the carefully calculated one-liners from the President made to seem like spontaneous witticisms. Print reporters like me are biased toward scoops and original reporting; we tend to dislike events that are staged for the cameras, featuring journalists as props.

Then came Donald Trump, and an entire Presidential term of watching press conferences with a renewed sense of urgency. No matter how hard they were to sit through, they were undoubtedly relevant: Trump regularly used them not only as a platform for his lies and cartoonish demagoguery but also for unexpected policy pronouncements that had significant real-world consequences. Trump’s performances required watching because his Presidency defied the norms of governance; he was the only one who could speak for his Administration of one, and thus we had no choice but to pay attention.

That was then. Today, no one watches a Biden press conference worrying that he is about to suggest that Americans drink bleach to cure their COVID or that he will declare war on Michigan because its governor wasn’t appreciative enough. Wondering whether Biden, a famously long-winded seventy-eight-year-old former senator, will stumble over an answer does not have the same consequences as watching a Presidential press conference to find out whether Trump is still threatening to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea. This is an improvement, to be sure. But politics moves on, and, in this case, Trump’s exit from the White House means that we journalists have the space and time to consider once again the problem of how to insist on transparency and accountability in our government without relying so heavily on the empty spectacle of the televised Presidential press conference, a platform that arguably had its heyday in the early nineteen-sixties.

I am, of course, all for asking Biden hard, tough, and pointed questions—the more the better. But Thursday’s press conference reminded me of why I hated these staged events in the first place. It taught me nothing about Joe Biden, his Presidency, or his priorities. The problem was not that it was boring. It was that it was bad.

Rough Waters in Key West — Richard Morin in the Washington Post on the battle between the capital of the Conch Republic and the cruise ships.

It was another balmy day in paradise when Key West, Fla., voters decided they’d had enough of the thousands of here-today, gone-tonight tourists who regularly pour from giant cruise ships onto the streets of their iconic city.

By decisive, even overwhelming margins, the voters approved ballot measures to immediately slash the number of passengers who can disembark daily as well as ban the biggest ships. But several months later, in an end-around that has incensed locals, the cruise industry is fighting back. Two state lawmakers with broad industry backing are pushing bills to nullify the vote and prohibit Key West from regulating such activity in its own port.

“I am so furious that I can hardly see straight,” said Kate Miano, owner of the luxe Gardens Hotel, where century-old brick walkways wind past orchid-festooned trees. “We battled the big cruise ship companies, and now they’re taking away my vote? I can’t understand how they can possibly do that.”

Yes, they can, say legislators now meeting in Tallahassee. And there’s a good chance they will soon succeed.

“We can’t simply have a group of 10,000 people closing down the port of Key West and holding the state of Florida hostage,” Rep. Spencer Roach (R) said at a hearing this month, his number referring to the total votes cast in support of the three city charter changes.

The maneuvering in the state Capitol has at times been both blatant and blundering, marked by dueling statistics, charges of betrayal, threats of retribution and alternating predictions of economic or environmental doom. It has fueled editorial outrage in newspapers statewide — with Roach, one of the bills’ sponsors, accused with other Republicans of trampling on democracy.

Before the coronavirus pandemic idled fleets globally, cruise tourism in Key West had grown from a single ship that docked monthly in 1969 to a $73 million-a-year business. By 2018, more than a million passengers were arriving annually in ever-larger vessels that resembled floating communities; the biggest measured more than three football fields in length and carried more than 4,000 passengers and crew.

Collectively, it all had quite an impact on this island community of 25,000, a place made famous by the literary likes of Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams and Wallace Stevens.

On streets where art galleries, fine restaurants and specialty shops once flourished, vendors hawk bawdy T-shirts and stores advertise “Everything inside $5.” Part of downtown’s historic Duval Street, which runs from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, is now a shopping pit that caters to the swarms of day-trippers, in Miano’s view.

“The lower end of Duval is crap,” she said.

The cultural transformation has been accompanied by environmental changes offshore. Fragile coral reefs have been threatened by the mile-long silt trails churned up as the megaships approach and depart. The vessels also roil the bottom of the six-mile channel to the port, damaging habitat and disrupting migration patterns of game fish. Local fishing guides say they were the first to sound the alarm.

“We saw it beginning maybe 15 years ago,” said Will Benson, a Key West native whose clients pay him $700 a day to chase bonefish, tarpon and permit in the shallow inshore waters. He’s seeing fewer fish, and those he finds have become more skittish, less likely to bite. Some have left their usual haunts.

The November vote limited the total number of cruise-ship tourists allowed to come ashore every day to 1,500 — fewer than half the daily average in February 2020. It also closed the port to ships with more than 1,300 passengers and crew — about half the size of most ships that docked before the pandemic. The final charter change gave docking priority to ships with the best environmental and health records.

Industry officials contend the result ultimately will cripple cruise tourism in Key West and endanger hundreds of local jobs that depend on the big ships. The city’s coffers will take a big hit, they predict. Cruise-related taxes brought in $21 million in 2018.

The new rules will be “the destruction of the port as we know it,” said John E. Wells, another native and chief executive of Caribe Nautical Services. His firm is the agent for every cruise ship that docks in Key West. “We have 287 port calls scheduled for 2022,” ships often making a stop as they loop through the Caribbean. “Only 18 will meet the size criteria.”

The Committee for Safer, Cleaner Ships, the local group fighting the state legislation, scoffs at those claims. Key West will do just fine without the megaships, said treasurer Arlo Haskell, a writer and poet. Citing the industry’s own figures, he pegs cruise revenue at about 7 percent of all tourist spending in Key West in a normal year. Ships will continue to dock, he notes, although only the smaller ones.

“The goal is to make Key West the premier small-ship destination,” Haskell said, while holding onto the overnight and extended-stay tourists who are the backbone of the city’s tourist trade, the ones filling hotels, B&Bs and restaurants.

To Wells, opponents’ arguments carry a whiff of elitism. The smaller ships cater to a moneyed crowd; the big ships bring the cost of a cruise within reach of middle-income and working-class people.

“I call it economic discrimination,” he said. “That’s not what Key West is about.”

He and others say seaport traffic benefits areas far from port communities and should be governed by the state or federal government. They would prefer one set of port regulations “instead of a patchwork of conflicting restrictions in each municipality,” according to a statement by the powerful Cruise Lines International Association.

The initial bills in Tallahassee indeed covered all 15 Florida seaports. They were greeted with vehement protest from legislators loath to see cities in their districts lose control of their ports.

So amendments were tacked on that only prohibited cities from restricting cruise ships in their ports, excluding those ports controlled by a county or port authority. That left only Key West, Panama City, Pensacola and St. Petersburg subject to the proposed prohibitions. Of those four, only Key West is a cruise-ship destination. (The state constitution prohibits bills that target a single municipality, hence the need to create a “class” of city-controlled ports.)

Lawmakers may not be finished trying to punish Key West for its November vote. In a recent tweet, Roach urged his colleagues to oppose giving federal stimulus money to ports that ban cruise ships. “Yep, looking at you city of Key West,” he wrote.

The amended bills sailed through subcommittees. One anticipated hurdle fell several weeks ago when a Republican senator whose district includes Key West unexpectedly withdrew an amendment to exempt the city for environmental reasons. She provided no explanation.

The final legislation is expected to be delivered to Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in the next few weeks.

DeSantis, mentioned as a potential GOP presidential contender in 2024, is the wild card in this game. While a prominent ally of Donald Trump and a pro-business conservative, he has embraced several issues dear to Florida environmentalists, including restoration of the Everglades. So far, the governor has not tipped his hand.

It’s been more than a year since cruise ships have docked in Key West. Locals say the offshore waters are cleaner and downtown streets less mobbed. Tourist-tax collections haven’t cratered, and Miano says business at her hotel is better than ever.

Even the fish seem friendlier, Benson says. “They are more relaxed, and the bite lasts longer.”

Doonesbury — Party preference.

Sunday, March 21, 2021

Sunday Reading

Welcome to Florida Politics — Fabiola Santiago in the Miami Herald.

Confirmed: There was voter fraud in Florida in the 2020 election after all.

And the alleged perpetrator, foul-mouthed Frank Artiles, is getting his due.

The disgraced former Florida lawmaker and GOP operative is charged with making a mockery of democracy: rigging a 2020 state Senate race in Miami-Dade by planting and paying $44,708 to a bogus, no-party candidate with a similar name to the Democratic incumbent.

His masterful strategy to win for the GOP — now the stuff of riveting search and arrest warrants — was to siphon off votes from the Democrat.

Who needs to rack up endorsements, debate the issues and highlight experience, when all you have to do is hire a guy who lives in Boca Raton with the last name of Rodríguez?

Two Cuban-American Rodríguezes against a Cuban-American García amounts to perfectly executed confusion for the largely Hispanic and Anglo voters of Miami, Coral Gables and Pinecrest.

The Senate 37 race between Democratic Sen. José Javier Rodríguez and his newcomer Republican opponent, Ileana García, founder of Latinas for Trump, was decided in her favor after a three-day recount — and by only 32 votes.

The shill candidate drew 6,382 votes.

García’s win was one of the upsets that expanded the majority Republican dominance of the Florida Legislature. García is there right now casting votes and shaping policy along predictable party lines — and we may never know if that was truly the voters’ will.

We do know Artiles’ intention — he even bragged about the candidate plant — and we know who benefited from his dark money criminal enterprise: the Republicans.

Like in a movie, he allegedly paid Alexis (Alex) Rodríguez for the dirty deed by repeatedly raiding his Palmetto Bay home safe, grabbing stacks of cash — from $3,000 to $5,000 — so rewarding a nondescript auto parts dealer he didn’t think anyone would bother to track down.

Idiot that he has always been underneath the bravado, Artiles didn’t think the money and paper trail would lead to him — or that three reporters, the Miami Herald’s Samantha Gross and Ana Ceballos, and WPLG TV’s Glenna Milberg, would tirelessly pursue the truth.

Or, that the cheating Alex Rodríguez would talk.

Or, for that matter, that the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office Public Corruption Task Force would investigate and pursue the case.

His home raided by law enforcement, Artiles now faces several felony campaign-finance charges and additional ones for false swearing in connection with voting or elections.

May he languish in prison for it, although that remains to be seen, given Miami-Dade’s prosecutors’ poor record for putting corrupt politicians behind bars, where they belong.

But for now, it’s democracy-affirming to see the law catch up to his shenanigans.

The ex-Miami state representative for District 118 and senator has been a slimy politician his entire career — with the support of his colleagues and his party, it’s worth noting.

He broke the law in 2010 when he ran for office in District 119, which spanned from Sweetwater to Homestead before redistricting, where he didn’t live. When caught by Political Cortadito blogger Elaine de Valle at his Palmetto Bay house wearing gym pants and socks at 9:45 p.m. on a Monday night, he claimed ignorance.

In 2016, post redistricting, he won his Senate seat using ethnic-baiting tactics in a heavily Hispanic district. He told voters that his African American contender, Dwight Bullard, supported “a terrorist organization.” It was Black Lives Matter. Shameful.

In the Senate, he bullied Senate colleagues. He bullied the Miami Dade College president.

He hurled racist and misogynist rants at an African-American senator in front of colleagues gathered at a Tallahassee bar in 2017.

He called Senate President Joe Negron a “p—y” and the senators in the GOP caucus that elected him “n—as.” He called Sen. Audrey Gibson, an African-American Democrat from Jacksonville, sitting across the table from him at the Governor’s Club, a “b—h” and a “girl.”

Trying to escape Senate censure, he made things worse with an insincere apology that blamed his lack of basic human decency on growing up in Hialeah. He was eventually forced to resign in disgrace, although not by his Cuban-American colleagues, who did all they could to torpedo Senate censure.

Nothing much was lost.

A homophobe, he had been peddling a potty bill that would have made it illegal for transgender people to use a public bathroom that doesn’t correspond to their biological gender designation at birth.

Here’s hoping he liked the bathrooms at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center, where he was booked Thursday morning and spent about nine hours before posting a $5,000 bond.

But what about the voters?

A rigged election shouldn’t be allowed to stand, but a special election can’t be called unless García is implicated, too, and so far, she hasn’t been.

For now, voters can only hope to savor the kind of justice served by the prospect of a five-year prison term for a bad actor who has long-earned banishment.

Bully, racist, misogynist, gay-hater — and hopefully soon, convicted felon, Frank Artiles is getting what he deserves.

This incident drew national attention: both the New York Times and the Washington Post covered it, and while they were at it, got the village I live in, Palmetto Bay, into the news and Google. So the Trumpers were right: there was voter fraud. And they should know, because they were doing it.

Doonesbury — Jim Crow 2.0

Sunday, March 14, 2021

Sunday Reading

A Big Effing New Deal — Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker says that the American Rescue Plan is the most progressive use of the economy in decades.

Traditionally, every new Democratic President starts out by passing a big economic package (and every new Republican President starts out by passing a tax cut). Jimmy Carter’s, in 1977, cost twenty billion dollars. Bill Clinton’s, in 1993, was mainly a tax increase, aimed at eliminating the federal deficit. Barack Obama’s, in 2009, which passed during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, cost eight hundred billion, some of it spending increases, some tax relief.

The American Rescue Plan, which President Joe Biden signed last week, is on an entirely different scale. It will cost the government $1.9 trillion, even though the economy today is in better shape than it was when Obama took office; and, unlike Clinton’s opening economic initiative, it is proudly indifferent to the size of the federal deficit. The law’s most famous feature, its fourteen-hundred-dollar payments to individuals (meaning that many families will wind up with much more), is only the beginning. There are also extensions of eligibility for unemployment benefits and food stamps; debt relief for renters; subsidies for state and local governments that are out of money, so that they can continue to provide services; a bailout for insolvent pension funds; health-care subsidies; and a nearly universal child-care benefit.

The left’s disappointments with the adjustments necessary to get the bill through the Senate—it doesn’t raise the federal minimum wage, and the cash value of unemployment benefits was reduced—should not obscure the important point. This is the most economically liberal piece of legislation in decades. It is not just much bigger than but different in kind from the Obama Administration’s version, which helped people mainly through end-of-year tax credits. Biden’s bill was designed to send regular monthly checks to millions of American families, so it will be palpable that the government is helping them in a tough moment. Gone are the work requirements, the sensitivity to the risk of inflation, and other centrist concerns that have been at the heart of Democratic programs for decades. The side that always seemed to lose the argument within the Democratic Party has finally won.

In 2009 and again in 2020, the Federal Reserve drew the assignment of staving off a depression, which it did by keeping interest rates low and by buying many billions of dollars in financial instruments to prevent the markets from collapsing. Those maneuvers meant that people in finance, and, more broadly, people who have secure employment and assets in the markets, were spared the severe pain felt by millions of working people. Only Congress has the tools to provide direct help to the people most in need. That it is now able to act, quickly and effectively, is a sign that our democracy isn’t as completely broken as a lot of people have been assuming, and that government can moderate the grotesquely unequal effects of the pandemic on people’s well-being.

A year ago, nobody was predicting that Joe Biden would be presiding over a neo-New Deal. His long career didn’t seem to indicate it, and he was clearly not on the way to having large majorities in both houses of Congress, as Franklin Roosevelt did. So how did this happen? The obvious answer is the pandemic, which generated the sense of urgent, universal crisis that the American system requires in order to make major changes. It’s less obvious, but just as pertinent, that the response to the 2008 financial crisis is now seen as having been woefully insufficient, in ways that led to years of unnecessary suffering and a populist political revolt that disrupted both parties. It feels as if half a century’s effort to reorient the political economy away from the state and toward the market may finally have run its course.

No Republicans voted for the American Rescue Plan—it would not have passed if the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia had turned out differently—but the G.O.P. still played a part in what happened last week. The Party’s new sense of itself as a competitor for working-class votes meant that it was supporting major covid-relief programs through last year; the Democrats had to top the Republicans’ performance. And, their votes aside, the Republicans have chosen not to wage a full-scale rhetorical war on the new law, perhaps because polls show it to be highly popular. Because the law provides such immediate and tangible help to most Americans, it’s more difficult to campaign against than the 2009 relief effort was. Two generations’ worth of modest Democratic anti-poverty programs have foundered because their opponents portrayed them as mainly benefitting minorities; Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and the welfare benefit that primarily assisted children of single mothers that Bill Clinton ended, both representing tiny fractions of the federal budget, are leading examples. Now, because the economic pain is so widespread, the new law has a very large and racially diverse group of beneficiaries, which ought to make it less vulnerable to the familiar attacks on social programs.

Yet the American Rescue Plan is actually a kind of economic appetizer. Its most progressive provisions—notably the child allowance, a monthly check of up to three hundred dollars per child, which would be the first true guaranteed family-income program in the United States, and would cut child poverty nearly in half—are temporary, expiring by the end of the year. The main course is what may be called “the Build Back Better bill,” soon to be unveiled by the White House. It will be bigger and more permanent, representing a real remaking of the government’s role in the economic lives of ordinary Americans. But that’s only if it passes.

The bill that Biden signed into law last week had the advantage of a deadline, because the Trump Administration’s pandemic-aid programs were due to expire in March. Build Back Better may contain large infrastructure programs, green-energy programs, and wealth taxes—a long list, with most of its items lacking the rescue plan’s pandemic-induced sense of crisis management. The new bill’s fate will depend on Americans embracing the idea that the reason the misery of the pandemic may finally be abating is that government can solve problems. Republicans, accustomed to caricaturing Democratic programs as élitist schemes created by a party that doesn’t care about ordinary people, will have to feel too intimidated by their constituents’ appreciation for the American Rescue Plan to stage an all-out assault on the new bill.

It is not yet time to celebrate. It is time to prepare for a months-long campaign with the highest possible stakes: a new social compact, which might finally bring an end to forty years of rising inequality.

Carl Hiaasen hangs it up at the Miami Herald.

Let’s get it over with.

This is my last column for the Miami Herald. I didn’t plan to write about that because there’s actual news to be covered, but my dear friend Dave Barry told me I’d look like a jerk if I didn’t say some sort of goodbye.

So here goes. I grew up reading the Herald and what was then the Fort Lauderdale News, my parents holding this radical notion that being factually informed would help us develop into conscientious, fully functioning citizens.

I fell for newspapers and ended up at the University of Florida’s journalism school, still one of the best. The Herald shelved my first job application, but in the summer of 1976 I got hired as a city desk reporter.

Reubin Askew was governor, and a harmless fellow named Gerald Ford was president only because the paranoid criminal who preceded him had been forced to resign, and the criminal president’s criminal vice president had also quit after getting busted for taking bribes.

Those were the days when all of us wanted to be Woodward or Bernstein.

Meanwhile, South Florida was growing into an outrageously fertile news mecca — weird, violent, drug-soaked, exuberantly corrupt — and eventually I landed on the Herald’s epic investigations team.

Years later, my oldest son, Scott, was doing that same job for the paper. I wasn’t always good at telling him how proud I was, so I’m telling him again now.

I was equally proud of my only brother, Rob, a columnist and editor who was murdered with four co-workers when an angry gunman charged into the Annapolis Capital Gazette newsroom on June 28, 2018. Rob’s family and mine will be forever grateful to the hundreds of you who reached out to us after that heart-crushing day.

Most opinion columnists start out as street reporters, an experience vital to understanding how things really work as opposed to how they should. My own approach to the column — drawn from the incomparable Pete Hamill, Mike Royko and others — was simple: If what I wrote wasn’t pissing off somebody, I probably wasn’t doing my job.

Take a sharp-edged stand on any issue, and the other side seethes. Show me a columnist who doesn’t get hate mail, and I’ll show you someone who’s writing about the pesky worms on his tomato plants. The detestable first-person pronoun will likely appear in this column more times than in the archive of my last three decades combined.

Nobody becomes a journalist because they yearn for mass adoration. Donald Trump didn’t turn the public against the mainstream media; the news business has never been popular. We’re tasked with delivering information that some readers don’t want to hear, and will claim not to believe.

Lyndon Johnson blamed the press for turning Americans against the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon blamed the press for overblowing Watergate. Trump blamed the press for everything except his bronzer.

The internet has made it easier to wage war on the truth. Yet, as shown by the Capitol uprising of selfie-snapping Trump rioters, social media also serves to lure the dumb, deluded and dangerous into the open. Seeing them all offers important, if unsettling, clarity.

I’ve done this column since 1985. No idea how many. No particular favorites, no regrets. Slash-and-burn was the only way I knew to do it.

Even the satirical pieces could be scalding, but that’s what those who betray the public trust deserve. When somebody got caught selling their commission vote under the table, or stealing outright, I felt morally obliged to write something that would make them choke on their corn flakes the next morning.

Once I called Miami City Hall a “bribe factory,” and another time described Tallahassee as a “festival of whores.” Too subtle? Possibly.

One time, the Legislature authorized random drug tests for state employees. Lawmakers mysteriously exempted themselves, so I offered to personally pay a big lab so that every one of them, including the governor, could pee in a cup.

No volunteers. Wonder why.

Another time the then-publisher of the Herald, a very decent guy named Dave Lawrence, said he might run for governor. I wrote a piece suggesting he’d “lost his marbles,” and nicknamed him Publisher Loco.

I didn’t get fired, and Dave let the column run exactly as written. A different publisher once did try to kill one of my columns, failed, and soon departed for a new career in a new line of work.

That wouldn’t happen at most papers, which is one reason I never wanted to go anywhere else. Another reason: It’s hard to put your heart in this job if you don’t have lifetime roots. My friend Hamill never gave up on New York, and that’s how I feel about Florida.

Progress, if it happens, is slow. When I was a kid, hardly anyone running for office talked about the Everglades. Meanwhile, the part that wasn’t disappearing under pavement was being used as a free latrine by corporate agriculture and subdivisions.

These days, billions are being spent trying to save the besieged River of Grass, and every ambitious candidate — Democrat or Republican — waxes rapturously about it. A few of them might actually be sincere, but all of them know how to read the polls.

It would be lovely to report that other things have also changed for the better, but Florida’s wild places and clearest waters are still under assault from overdevelopment, opioids are killing more people than coke or street heroin ever did, racism thrives likes a fungal rash and corruption is more rampant than ever.

Millions of worried seniors are still awaiting COVID inoculations because they don’t live in gated communities full of rich Republicans writing checks to the governor’s re-election committee. Then again, who’s really surprised that a resort like Ocean Reef gets special vaccine shipments while regular folks in nearby Florida City get to sit in their cars for hours, praying the supply doesn’t run out?

As you read these words, some scrofulous tunnel rat in public office is busy selling your best interests down the road. It might be happening at your town council, zoning board, water district, or county commission — but it is happening.

Certainly there are those with guts and unshakeable integrity in both political parties, but theirs is an uphill slog — and often they don’t last long.

Retail corruption is now a breeze, since newspapers and other media can no longer afford enough reporters to cover all the key government meetings. You wake up one day, and they’re bulldozing 20 acres of pines at the end of your block to put up a Costco. Your kids ask what’s going on, and you can’t tell them because you don’t have a clue.

That’s what happens when hometown journalism fades — neighborhood stories don’t get reported until it’s too late, after the deal’s gone down. Most local papers are gasping for life, and if they die it will be their readers who lose the most.

The decision to leave now is mine. It’ll be strange not having my Thursday deadline, but I’ll never stop writing about this bent, beautiful, infuriating state. Fortunately, all the scammers and greedheads remain vastly outnumbered by caring, thoughtful people who fiercely love what’s left of this place.

Thanks to all of you who buy enough of my gonzo novels that I don’t have to depend on a pauperizing newspaper pension. Thanks also for the heaps of mail, including the letters with prison postmarks.

I owe a special debt to Bob Radziewicz, who retired from the newsroom years ago but has continued editing my column out of friendship and perhaps sentimental curiosity. Same goes for my op-ed page editor, Nancy Ancrum, who’s always been there to gently remind me this is a family newspaper — please calm down and keep it clean.

Finally and most important, I’ve got to thank the Herald and its streaming cast of talented, tenacious editors and reporters. Their superb, solid work always made my job easier.

Now someone else can come along and do it better.

Doonesbury — Getting your facts free.

Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Don’t Drink The Water

Someone hacked into the water system in Oldsmar, Florida. Via the Tampa Tribune:

Local and federal authorities are investigating after an attempt Friday to poison the city of Oldsmar’s water supply, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said.

Someone remotely accessed a computer for the city’s water treatment system and briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye, by a factor of more than 100, Gualtieri said at a news conference Monday. The chemical is used in small amounts to control the acidity of water but it’s also a corrosive compound commonly found in household cleaning supplies such as liquid drain cleaners.

The city’s water supply was not affected. A supervisor working remotely saw the concentration being changed on his computer screen and immediately reverted it, Gualtieri said. City officials on Monday emphasized that several other safeguards are in place to prevent contaminated water from entering the water supply and said they’ve disabled the remote-access system used in the attack.

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office is investigating, along with the FBI and the Secret Service, Gualtieri said.

This incident got national attention. Some speculated that it might be foreign powers (RUSSIA!) or some terrorist organization. As yet, no one really knows. But Adam L. Silverman at Balloon Juice happens to live in Oldsmar. He has a long resume in national security matters, and he is pretty sure that it wasn’t Putin, despite his reputation as using poison as his weapon of choice.

There are several reasons why I doubt this was the Russians. The first is that right now Putin does not want to do anything to further stress Russian relations with the US. President Biden and his team are not Trump and his team. And President Biden has already made it clear to Putin that he is not going to tolerate Putin’s actions the way Trump did. The second is that since almost no one in most of Florida, let alone the rest of the US knows that Oldsmar existed, at least before today, that it is a very strange place for Putin’s merry band of mischief makers to target a water treatment facility.

I think it is far more likely that either a disgruntled current or former employee of the City of Oldsmar or of Pinellas County who knew that this point of access existed and exploited it for their own purposes. Or that a local mischief maker went probing for an access point, found one, and decided it was party time. We do have a small, but sizable white supremacist, neo-NAZI, and domestic right wing extremist presence in the area, so it is also possible one of them did it. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out that an actual authorized user who was teleworking and on the system stepped away from their computer for a few minutes without logging out to get something to drink or use the facilities and their cat walking across the computer desk or their toddler wanting to help daddy or mommy work unintentionally reset the levels. I think the Russians attacking Oldsmar, Florida through a water treatment facility that only supplies Oldsmar is, in my professional opinion, a big stretch. Is it possible it was the Russians? Sure. Is it probable and plausible? I think it likely improbable and implausible.

We’ll know more when we know more. And I know enough about what I don’t know to state that I could be wrong.

I’m going with the cat theory.

Sunday, January 24, 2021

Sunday Reading

Charles P. Pierce on what must be the solution.

It was 40 years ago this week that I attended my first presidential inauguration. I was working for The Boston Phoenix and I had spent a lot of 1980 covering the Republican side of the presidential campaign. This was not as hard as you might think it was. Yes, the Phoenix was an alternative newspaper with roots in the Sixties, that already fading decade that was slowly surrendering its historical moment to the coming Age of Reagan. But the Republicans were trying hard to make inroads with younger voters, presciently anticipating the greed-is-good, MBA culture of the 1980s, and the Phoenix had demographics to die for. So, outside of some cracks about my hair—on my Secret Service ID from those days, I look very much like St. James The Lesser—the Republicans were very happy to see me, and I got my phone calls returned fairly quickly. So, that January, it was natural that I would finish up my work on that beat by watching Ronald Reagan get sworn in. Which brought me to the Capitol lawn, and an unsteady folding chair that eventually collapsed, dumping me into the lap of Ron Bair, the mayor of Spokane, Washington.

Inaugurations are part civic religion and part democratic bone-worshipping. As much as monarchies have marble traditions attending every change in monarch, the rituals of our democracy carry the same weight with us by now. At the beginning, they weren’t quite as important. As much as we heard reverence paid to Thomas Jefferson’s first inauguration over the past week—peaceful transition of power and all that—there was more than a bit of ill-feeling that should seem familiar to those of us presently staggering out of the past four years like spavined gas-station hounds. After all, just like the most recent president*, John Adams spurned the ceremony. While his (then-former) friend was waxing eloquently about…

But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans. We are all federalists.

…Adams was grumpily rattling north back to Quincy, fed up with the world, as usual. This established something of a family tradition in that, 28 years later, after an even more rancorous campaign, President John Quincy Adams refused to attend the inauguration of Andrew Jackson, the man who had made him a one-term president like his father had been. God, what a stiff-necked bunch the Adamses were, every one of them with a stick up their behinds the size of a Louisville Slugger.

(Jackson’s inauguration famously turned into a general hooley, with hundreds of Jackson’s backwoods supporters guzzling whiskey punch and smashing the good china.)

Anyway, the inauguration of 1981 was every bit as transformational as either of those two were. Jimmy Carter had been a beleaguered one-term president turned out of office by a great political wave that had gone largely undetected. The GOP power had moved south and west, away from Wall Street and into the hills and deserts, plains and mountains. At the same time, responding to the gains of the civil rights movement, northern blue-collar voters surfed the white backlash into a Republican Party that looked like a refuge from the perils of racial equality. The New Deal coalition had been an empty shell for almost a decade, but nobody really noticed until it was far too late. This definitely included me.

In November of 1980, the bill finally came due. Not long before Election Day, I spoke to a friend who had been earning extra money doing telephone polling for Carter as part of Pat Caddell’s operation. He told me that, based on what he was hearing on the phone, Carter was bleeding support all over the country. Moreover, for my election preview, I took a motor trip around the Rust Belt, from Youngstown to Grand Rapids, stopping in Toledo and Flint along the way. In what should have been Democratic strongholds, Carter’s support was unenthusiastic, where it existed at all. However, when I wrote the preview, I pulled my punches, telling myself that people would clean the gist of the upcoming slaughter from the anecdotes I included. Show, don’t tell, I thought to myself, knowing all the while that I could call the coming landslide if I had the guts to do so. It remains the biggest mistake of my career.

Reagan crushed Carter by almost 10 points. He piled up 449 electoral votes to Carter’s paltry 89. Not only did Reagan win, but he won so smashingly that he took down the Democratic majority in the Senate, too. Before Election Day, the Democrats held a 58-41 edge. After Election Day, the Republicans had a 53-46 advantage, their first Senate majority since 1955. And these weren’t obscure backbench incumbents who lost their seats, either. George McGovern went down, as did Birch Bayh, Frank Church, and Gaylord Nelson. (McGovern couldn’t even muster 40 percent of the vote in South Dakota.) And that was how I came to be sitting in the lap of the mayor of Spokane on an unseasonably warm day in Washington in January of 1981.

Lord, they were having a ball, these suddenly resurgent Republicans who were taking over the capital again. After a long time in exile, and after the disastrous post-Watergate elections, they were back in charge, and hot damn, it was fun to spend money again. I followed my inherent sportswriter instinct that insists that the best stories are in the losing clubhouse. I went looking for Democrats.

I found them in a bar called The Class Reunion, which apparently had been the regular watering hole for young White House staffers during the Carter Administration. On this night, it was packed to the gunwales with people, young and old, who would be unemployed after noon on the next day. I established base camp at the bar next to a gentleman from the Irish embassy. He was staring past his glass at his hands, and I asked him what was wrong. He said that some wingnut Evangelical congressman from South Carolina had invited Ian Paisley, the angry face of Protestant Ulster, to the inauguration. His embassy had gone up the wall, but there was nothing he could do about it. Times and administrations were changing, and the Prods were ascendant, and Ian Paisley, who called the pope the Whore of Babylon, was an honored guest of the United States government. I ended up the night with some junior staffers from the office of outgoing Vice President Walter Mondale, who were completely sockless and unreasonably happy that I knew all the lyrics to the Minnesota Rouser. Reagan was inaugurated the next day, and he said to all of us, to god and the world, those portentous words:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

It can be argued, and I have, that this election, and the president who won it, scared the Democratic Party out of its best instincts for the next 30-odd years. While they made some gains in the 1982 midterm elections, riding the discontent of a recession touched off by Reagan’s devotion to supply-side foolishness in his first and most misbegotten budget, the Democrats spent year after year, election after election, chasing after those voters who had abandoned them in 1980. This desperate, futile chase brought about the rise of actual neoliberalism, the Democratic Leadership Conference, and a careful barbering of the party’s commitment to civil rights that was tacitly blamed by many Democrats for what had happened in 1980.

Meanwhile, as the Democrats were fashioning themselves an endless rack of new clothes to wear, the Republicans were getting drunker and drunker on their own supply. They doubled down repeatedly on appeals to white backlash and they attached themselves ever more securely to the political power of fringe Protestantism. The party was clearly, steadily going mad, and yet the Democrats declined to take advantage of that, and many Democrats didn’t think they should anyway. Consequently, the Republicans had no reason to stop their steady slide into extremism.

I would argue—and I will—that we all just experienced the logical end of all of this over the past four years. The Republicans built a party in which some president like Donald Trump not only was possible, but inevitable. That he came in the form of an incompetent sociopathic monster may have been the only break we caught. Now comes Joe Biden, 40 years after Reagan, talking about a massive federal program to confront the ongoing pandemic, and to improve the nation’s infrastructure, and illustrating by word and deed that government can indeed, and must indeed, be the solution, and not the problem. This day, delayed by decades, has finally arrived.

The Next Florida Man — Diane Roberts in the Washington Post.

Donald Trump has flown off to Florida, which is, after all, what New Yorkers of a certain age tend to do. But it was long overdue, even when his mailing address was on Fifth Avenue: With his candied-yam tan, his commitment to year-round golfing and his inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy, Trump’s always been more Florida Man than Manhattan sophisticate.

Taking up full-time residence at Mar-a-Lago — assuming the town council of Palm Beach decides not to enforce the 1993 agreement he signed barring anyone from making the club a permanent residence — the twice-impeached Trump joins a long list of shady characters who found a refuge, even if only fleeting, in sunny South Florida. What with its paradisal weather and a certain ethical looseness when it comes to the rich and famous, Florida has always been a desirable location for the well-heeled disreputable. Richard Nixon ruminated over the Watergate break-in at his Key Biscayne compound. O.J. Simpson lived in Kendall until he was convicted of armed robbery in 2008. In 1928, Al Capone bought a Palm Island mansion from brewery heir Clarence Busch, and in 1929, he threw a lavish party there the same night that hit men killed rival mobsters in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, giving himself a copper-bottomed alibi. Former despots have also aimed for soft landings in South Florida over the years: Fulgencio Batista, overthrown by Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution, bought a vacation home in Daytona Beach and a house in Miami’s Spring Garden, and Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza Debayle (who was kicked out by U.S. authorities) and Haiti’s Prosper Avril (who wasn’t) both made their way there after fleeing their countries.

Trump isn’t exactly a deposed dictator, though he wasn’t shy about asserting autocratic power as president, repeatedly insisting that Article II of the Constitution allowed him to do anything he wanted. It didn’t. But in Florida, reality is negotiable. Trump still won’t admit he lost the election, and he still denies any responsibility for inciting the mob that looted, pillaged and desecrated the Capitol, leaving four rioters and a police officer dead. In Florida, he won’t have to. The Bay County Republican Party, for example, refuses to acknowledge that Trump is no longer in office, officially referring to President Biden as “president-imposed.”

Florida is the Looking-Glass Land of the nation, where it’s not only possible but perfectly normal to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Andrew Jackson — Trump’s favorite president — burned native people out of their homes and ran them off their land, clearing Florida for enslaving cotton magnates. The White gentry named their plantations after Sir Walter Scott novels and played at being British aristocrats, with jousts and “knightly” pageants and Queens of Love and Beauty. Standard Oil founder Henry Flagler turned the Atlantic coast of Florida into a make-believe Mediterranean, his hotels mash-ups of the Alhambra, the Palace of the Doges and Windsor Castle. Walt Disney bought unprepossessing chunks of central Florida land from unsuspecting citrus farmers and transformed them into a Neverland of princesses and talking mice.

Washington now teems with Democrats sporting their diversity and their masks, their Chuck Taylors and their selfies with Lady Gaga and J-Lo. That makes Florida a much friendlier place for Trumpist Republicans. Gov. Ron DeSantis is one of Trump’s more limpet-like supporters, an early adopter of hydroxychloroquine as a covid-19 miracle cure, hostile to lockdowns and social distancing, and an enabler of Trump’s claims of a “stolen” election. He has declared that the most important issue in Florida now is the perfidy of Twitter and other social media platforms that are supposedly muzzling conservative voices. Rep. Matt Gaetz, often not so much economical with the truth but in pitched battle against it, is only the loudest of the baker’s dozen members of Congress from Florida who refused to certify Biden’s election.

While Sen. Rick Scott has supported Trump since he announced his presidential run in 2015, Sen. Marco Rubio was an early rival for the Republican nomination and may find his slower conversion to MAGAism rewarded with a primary challenger for his seat in 2022 — because Ivanka Trump is also moving to Florida. She and husband Jared Kushner have bought a $30 million, two-acre lot on Indian Creek Island in Biscayne Bay. For that matter, newly engaged Tiffany Trump has been looking at properties in South Beach, and Don Jr. and his shouty girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, have been touring upscale houses in Jupiter. Only Eric Trump and his wife, Lara, seem to be resisting the lure to head south, possibly because she may be planning a run for the U.S. Senate from her native North Carolina.

But Florida still isn’t completely Trump territory, as the ex-president will find. Palm Beach County is deep blue. Rep. Lois Frankel, Trump’s congresswoman, was, like Trump, born in New York, but she’s a progressive Democrat. She won reelection by 20 points in November, even though Trump captured the state easily and her opponent, Republican conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, had endorsements from Roger Stone (also a Florida resident), Roseanne Barr and the founder of the Proud Boys.

South Florida, more broadly, also remains majority Democratic, but that probably won’t trouble Trump. As long as he owns the clubs, he’ll have golfing partners. As long as the likes of the Boca Raton-based Newsmax can sell ads, he’ll have a political megaphone. Unless the Senate votes to convict him in his impeachment trial, or the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney or city, state or federal prosecutors in New York file charges against him, Trump will go on spinning dark dreams from his Florida fastness — just another old caudillo trying to relive the glory days.

Doonesbury –An oldie but a goodie.

Thursday, December 17, 2020

DeSantis Is Killing It In Florida

Literally.

When Ron DeSantis ran for governor of Florida in 2018, he made a politically savvy decision: He would be the most pro-President Trump candidate possible. He popped up on Fox News Channel repeatedly, understanding that it would be an effective way to get Trump’s attention. After he earned Trump’s endorsement in the Republican primary — and then won his party’s nomination — his campaign ran an ad touting how loyal he was to the president’s vision. At one point in the spot, he helped his young daughter build a wall with her blocks.

After narrowly winning the general election, he remained loyal to Trump. After the coronavirus emerged in the United States, he echoed Trump’s insistences that economic activity should not be constrained to slow the virus’s spread.

At one point in late May, DeSantis stood in the driveway of the White House after meeting with Trump, attacking members of the media for criticizing his decision not to limit business activity.

“You’ve got a lot of people in your profession who waxed poetically for weeks and weeks about how Florida was going to be just like New York,” DeSantis said. “‘Wait two weeks, Florida is going to be next. Just like Italy, wait two weeks.’ … We’re eight weeks away from that and it hasn’t happened.”

“We’ve succeeded and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative, it challenges their assumption,” he later added, “so they’ve got to try and find a boogeyman.”

At the National Review, Rich Lowry echoed DeSantis’s rhetoric, asking where the Florida governor should go to get his apology.

Lowry should have waited a few weeks. On the day DeSantis spoke at the White House, Florida was seeing 724 new coronavirus cases a day on average. Three weeks later, the average was more than 1,200. Three weeks after that, more than 7,100, 10 times the figure as when DeSantis was taking his victory lap. At the worst point over the summer, Florida had nearly 12,000 new infections a day and 185 new covid-19 deaths.

[…]

A White House report recommending that Florida curtail the availability of indoor dining and other activity to slow the spread of the virus was reportedly muffled by DeSantis’s administration. On Tuesday, he appeared at an event to encourage restaurants to remain open, claiming — falsely — that restaurants aren’t a significant driver of new cases. (He also declined to refer to President-elect Joe Biden as president-elect.)

Last week, Jones’s home was raided by state police who seized computers she was using to create a standalone data tracker. She is accused of illegally accessing state computer and messaging systems; she claims the state sought to silence her.

In the end, Trump would almost certainly have won Florida no matter what the coronavirus death data showed. His victory was powered heavily by a shift among Hispanic voters in Miami-Dade County, where a 290,000-vote loss in 2016 became an 85,000-vote loss in 2020, as his statewide win margin grew to 260,000 votes. But with Trump leaving office and DeSantis sticking around for at least another two years, the question remains: Did his administration intentionally misrepresent coronavirus data for political purposes?

In other words: Did DeSantis’s loyalty to Trump and favored position as a keep-the-economy-open poster child manifest in less-dire death totals?

In a word: Yes.

Carl Hiaasen in The Miami Herald:

From the beginning, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ handling of the COVID-19 crisis has been a course of secrecy, cold-blooded deception and negligence.

Now comes the raid by Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents on the home of Rebekah Jones, the ex-state health data analyst who started her own COVID dashboard after complaining that the DeSantis administration was twisting statistics to underplay the severity of the pandemic.

The governor initially said he didn’t know about the investigation or raid. On Friday, he admitted he did, fumed about the term “raid,” and then huffed out of a press conference. Look for him soon on Fox News.

Seizing Jones’ computer — ostensibly to investigate a “hacking” incident — has all the appearance of clumsy retribution for embarrassing DeSantis. So spongy was the state’s search warrant that it prompted the resignation of former prosecutor Ron Filipowski from the 12th Circuit Judicial Nominating Commission, to which DeSantis had recently reappointed him.

Filipowski, a Marine veteran and lifelong Republican, said that DeSantis has been “reckless and irresponsible” in dealing with the pandemic, and that Floridians “are not being told the truth about COVID.”

A recent investigative series in the Sun-Sentinel provided sickening details about the depths to which DeSantis sunk to please President Trump, his super-spreader idol.

In late September, for instance, the Florida Department of Health — DeSantis’ pliant Ministry of Propaganda — told county officials to stop making public statements about COVID-19 until after the Nov. 3 election.

News releases or media posts must not mention the virus, the order stated. It came from Alberto Moscoso, communications chief of the state health department. He left his job Nov. 6.

The motive for muzzling local health departments was obvious. Florida being a key state for Trump, DeSantis didn’t want voters to be reminded that COVID-19 was on a deadly surge.

On Sept. 25, DeSantis himself ordered a full reopening of bars and restaurants, and sought to stop local governments from enforcing mask mandates. Between Sept. 30 and Election Day, at least 2,526 Floridians died of COVID-related causes.

That number, which came from the state, is probably higher. Real experts believe the state’s death toll has already passed 20,000. Many of those victims could have avoided getting sick, but we have a governor who has shunned medical warnings in favor of “blue sky messaging.”

DeSantis’ own spokesman has disparaged the use of masks and tweeted that the coronavirus is “less deadly than the flu.” That yammering stooge, Fred Piccolo Jr., still has his job, which is all you need to know about DeSantis’ true priorities.

From the pandemic’s early days, his administration hid key information about the spread of the virus in nursing homes, prisons, hospitals and even public schools. Only the threat of lawsuits by family members, news organizations and patient advocacy groups has pried loose the data.

The governor habitually edits COVID statistics to paint the cheeriest possible picture. His latest spin is that most newly infected patients are younger, healthier and asymptomatic, which curiously fails to explain why hospital beds and ICUs are filling up with coronavirus patients.

Who in Florida can forget DeSantis’ smug victory sit-down with Trump at the White House? That was more than seven months and 18,000 deaths ago, but the governor’s arms are probably still sore from patting himself on the back.

Later he toured the state with Trump’s pandemic guru, Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist and Stanford University Fellow who doesn’t like masks and preaches for a fully reopened economy.

Seeking infectious-disease advice from a guy who reads X-rays for a living is like hiring a dentist to do your colonoscopy — it’s not exactly in his wheelhouse. The Stanford Faculty Senate “strongly condemned” Atlas’s position as “contrary to medical science,” and he recently resigned from the White House.

Mercifully he has not resurfaced at DeSantis’ side, but there’s still time.

These days — when he’s not harassing the whistleblower who caught him fudging the COVID statistics — the governor is following Trump’s cue and focusing exclusively on the coming vaccines.

Like the President, DeSantis had little use for virus scientists until now, when they’re poised to save his political future.

Meanwhile, Johns Hopkins University reports that new COVID-19 cases are doubling every 78 days in Florida . As of this writing, more than 4,500 persons are hospitalized here with the illness, nearly twice as many as a month ago.

True, lots of people who once scoffed at the idea of masks are wearing them now, but lots of people are dead who might never have been infected if their friends and loved ones had been more careful.

Or if we’d had leadership that sent the right message from the first day, instead of spinning upbeat story lines while trying to gag local health officials who knew what was coming.

Heartsick families, packed hospitals, crushing unemployment — but in the DeSantis version of reality, nothing but blue skies.

Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Damn The Virus, Full Speed Ahead

Cases of Covid-19 are soaring in Florida, but that’s not going to stop Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and his minions from doing his piety to Trump by demanding that public schools reopen in the fall.

Florida’s top school official issued a sweeping executive order Monday requiring all schools in the state to reopen their buildings for in-person instruction for the coming school year, even as coronavirus cases in the state continued to rise.

Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran, a Republican and former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, issued the order, which states that “school districts and charter school governing boards must provide the full array of services that are required by law so that families who wish to educate their children in a brick and mortar school full time have the opportunity to do so.”

Many districts, including the Miami-Dade school system, have proposed offering multiple options for schooling, including hybrid models that would incorporate online and in-person learning. The order requires schools to offer full-time instruction “at least” five days a week for families who desire it.

The order leaves room for local health officials to override it. Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho called the order “fair and measured.”

The announcement comes the same day President Trump tweeted, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” In a later tweet, he said those hesitating to reopen schools amid a global pandemic were politically motivated: “Corrupt Joe Biden and the Democrats don’t want to open schools in the Fall for political reasons, not for health reasons! They think it will help them in November. Wrong, the people get it!”

So basically Mr. Corcoran made a lot of noise and then basically said go ahead and do what you want. For the record, we will. Despite the talk from Tallahassee, the Florida Department of Education is making millions of dollars available to public and charter schools to provide for remote learning and, if the schools choose to re-open for face-to-face learning, money to purchase personal protective equipment (PPE) and all the accoutrements that go along with enforcing CDC guidelines for social distancing.

What it all comes down to is that the Republican governors are realizing that against all prudent advice they re-opened bars, restaurants, and other businesses only to have the infection rate soar and they have to deal with it all over again.

The pandemic map of the United States burned bright red Monday, with the number of new coronavirus infections during the first six days of July nearing 300,000 as more states and cities moved to reimpose shutdown orders.

After an Independence Day weekend that attracted large crowds to fireworks displays and produced scenes of Americans drinking and partying without masks, health officials warned of hospitals running out of space and infection spreading rampantly. The United States is “still knee deep in the first wave” of the pandemic, Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday

Fauci noted that while Europe managed to drive infections down — and now is dealing with little blips as it reopens — U.S. communities “never came down to baseline and now are surging back up,” he said in an interview conducted on Twitter and Facebook with his boss, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.

Despite President Trump’s claim that 99 percent of covid-19 cases are “harmless,” Arizona and Nevada have reported their highest numbers of coronavirus-related hospitalizations in recent days. The seven-day averages in 12 states hit new highs, with the biggest increases in West Virginia, Tennessee and Montana. The country’s rolling seven-day average of daily new cases hit a record high Monday — the 28th record-setting day in a row.

But we were told it would all “disappear.”

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Sunday Reading

A Fight For the Soul of Our Democracy — Elijah E. Cummings.

Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat, represented Maryland’s 7th Congressional District until his death Oct. 17.

This op-ed is adapted from a foreword that Cummings wrote July 17 for the forthcoming book, “In Defense of Public Service: How 22 Million Government Workers Will Save Our Republic,” by Cedric L. Alexander.

As I pen these words, we are living through a time in our nation’s history when powerful forces are seeking to divide us one from another; when the legitimacy of our constitutional institutions is under attack; and when factually supported truth itself has come under relentless challenge.

I am among those who have not lost confidence in our ability to right the ship of American democratic life, but I also realize that we are in a fight — a fight for the soul of our democracy.

As an American of color, I have been able to receive an excellent public education, become an attorney, and serve my community and country in both the Maryland General Assembly and Congress because of one very important fact: Americans of conscience from every political vantage point took our Constitution seriously and fought for my right to be all that I could become.

This is the personal debt that I and so many others with my heritage owe to our democratic republic — to the 20-million-plus Americans who serve our republic and its values in our nation’s civil service.

And this is also why I, personally, will remain in the fight to preserve our republic and the humane and equitable values at its foundation for as long as I can draw breath.

It was to our Constitution — and not to any political perspective or party — that I gave my oath when I became an officer of the court, when I joined the Maryland legislature and when I was elected to serve in Congress.

It is this commitment that I bring to my work as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, the committee that has direct oversight over our federal civil service. From my more than two decades of experience performing this oversight, I can confirm that our nation’s federal employees deserve our respect, gratitude and support.

When people in the leadership of the nation attack our courts, the members of our Congress, our civil servants and our media, they are attacking the glue that holds our diverse nation together as the United States of America.

And when these attackers do so on the basis of factually unfounded opinion, rather than verifiable evidence, they are engaged in demagoguery of the most dangerous sort.

This is why our civil service, committed to maintaining the rule of law and decision-making based on verifiable facts, is so important to maintaining the legitimacy of our government, both elected and appointed.

Under our democratic republic, elected leaders make policy but must rely on civil servants, appointed on the basis of merit, to implement those public policies. We must rely on the expertise of our merit-based civil service if we wish to have a government that addresses the factual realities of our lives (to the extent that human beings can ever achieve that goal).

This duty to find and implement the truth, as I have mentioned, is the province of our civil servants, whether they serve in Washington; our states; or in the law enforcement agencies of our country. This is not to say that our government agencies always get it right or that they never overreach. Human beings, however talented and well-meaning, make mistakes.

As citizens of the greatest democratic republic in the world, we have the privilege and duty to recall our nation’s founding and to engage our nation on the basis of those fundamental principles.

I hold fast to this conviction because the functioning — indeed, the very legitimacy — of our democratic system has been under attack for some time. I am speaking, of course, of the continuing attacks on our elections — from sources both foreign and domestic — and of the failure of too many of my colleagues in Congress and the White House to adequately defend us against those attacks.

For the unity and future of our republic, our Congress must reassert its constitutional obligation of oversight, seeking and obtaining the answers to serious questions of governance that, until now, have gone unanswered. We must perform this constitutional duty so effectively and convincingly that those Americans who support this president and his administration and those who disagree will reach a shared and united answer as to how our nation must proceed.

I remain confident that we can fulfill this historic duty. To succeed, however, we will need our federal civil service and the Americans who serve us there to give us their complete and unbiased cooperation. To the extent that we are required to do so, we will enforce that cooperation through action in our courts, but I sincerely hope that this route will seldom be necessary. Toward this end, I will close with this pledge. In the words of my heroine, former congresswoman Barbara Jordan, from 1974:

“My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, [or] the destruction of the Constitution. I hope and trust that all Americans feel — and will do — the same.”

Cheap Water for a Price — Carl Hiaasen on how Nestlé is ripping off Florida’s water.

Florida, perpetually in a water crisis, once again is poised to give away hundreds of millions of gallons that will end up in plastic bottles on the shelves of supermarkets.

A company called Seven Springs Water wants to renew a lucrative permit that allows the siphoning of Ginnie Springs, a scenic recreational site along the Santa Fe River near Gainesville.

For a farcical one-time fee of $115, Seven Springs would be allowed to withdraw almost 1.2 million gallons a day from a river system where the flows already have dropped 30 percent to 40 percent, according to the Florida Springs Institute.

The agreement would be bad for the Santa Fe and also the fragile Floridan aquifer, which supplies drinking water to millions of people. But for Seven Springs the deal is sweet: free water, which it then sells to Nestlé, the world’s largest bottler.

Many of the Nestlé labels are familiar: Perrier, S. Pellegrino, Arrowhead, Deer Park, Poland Springs and Zephyrhills, to name a few. The company is expanding its facility near Ginnie Springs and needs more liquid product.

For decades, Florida has handed out metaphorical free straws to companies that profitably suck the water from natural springs. Approval of “consumptive use” permits rests with regional water management districts, the boards of which are appointed by the governor.

Sometimes the appointees are qualified and knowledgeable; sometimes they act like tools of special interests. Despite Gov. Ron DeSantis’ very public pledge to rescue the state’s natural waters, most of the district boards are crippled by so many vacancies that they can barely assemble a quorum. Like the Everglades and algae-plagued coastal waters, Florida’s famous springs are now in trouble. Too much groundwater extraction combined with diminished annual rainfall have sharply lowered the levels, and introduced harmful nutrients.

Once-pristine Ginnie Springs now carries nitrates from wastewater and farm runoff — ingredients you won’t see listed on Nestlé’s bottles.

The company won’t reveal how much — or little — it pays Seven Springs for the water, but says it’s a caring corporate neighbor that supports conservation causes.

“It would make no sense to invest millions of dollars into our local operations just to deplete the natural resources on which our business relies,” wrote a Nestlé Waters spokesman.

Florida isn’t the only state foolish to give away its most critical resource. Citizen groups in Michigan also have been battling Nestlé over its pumping of public springs and aquifers.

The Florida Springs Council, a consortium of 48 organizations focused on water issues in northern and central Florida is among the opponents of the Ginnie Springs expansion. It notes that the Santa Fe isn’t the same river it was 20 years ago, when the original usage permit was issued.

Trouble was evident as recently as 2013, when the Suwannee River Water Management District reported that the Lower Santa Fe had a “deficit of 11 million gallons per day.” Today, the river is considered to be at minimum flow.

The sane response would be to reduce — not increase — the volumes being pumped out. A jump to 1.2 million gallons per day would more than quadruple the current impact on Ginnie Springs.

Rejecting or at least modifying the application seems like a wise and obvious choice for the Suwannee district board. Unfortunately, that vacancy-plagued panel is one of several that the governor seems to have forgotten.

Nestlé has big money and political clout, so the state is unlikely to completely shut off the Ginnie Springs spigot. Still, it wouldn’t be revolutionary to require water-bottling operations to start paying for what they take, as California does.

The Florida Springs Council estimates that even a puny, one-cent-per-gallon fee on the Seven Springs/Nestlé permit would generate at least $400,000 a year that could fund restoration projects in the Santa Fe River Basin, which is fed by dozens of natural springs.

Statewide, the group says, a fee of only 50-cents-per-thousand gallons on companies such as Nestlé would raise “hundreds of millions of dollars to protect and sustain Florida’s waters.”

One thing is certain: If Nestlé doesn’t have to pay to preserve the springs it bleeds, taxpayers will billed for the damage — as they are now for Everglades restoration and man-made algae outbreaks.

By speaking out against the Ginnie Springs permit, DeSantis would prove he’s aware that the state’s water crisis isn’t confined to South Florida.

Meanwhile, the next time you think of buying a bottle of Zephyrhills or Poland Springs, check out the label. Here are a few words you won’t see:

“Thank you, Florida, for all this tasty, refreshing, dirt-cheap water.”

Doonesbury — Rewriting history (click to embiggen).

Monday, May 13, 2019

Love Is In The Air

I drove to the Tampa area and back this weekend and brought back a real Florida souvenir.

‘Tis the season in Central Florida for the lovebug invasion.

They’re baaaack: Twice a year, pesky, invasive lovebugs swarm Florida, splattering their gooey insides on car hoods and windshields, flying into people’s mouths, and even annoying the visitors at the Happiest Place on Earth.

In recent days, Florida social media users have been sharing video and photos of the annoying insects as the bugs descend on the state in what many people are calling “the worst lovebug year ever.”

“The weather between October and April can have a large impact on how bad the season will be,” meteorologist Candace Campos wrote on Click Orlando. “This is a vital time when they lay eggs and those eggs become larva down at the soil surface.”

According to Campos, the larvae lay dormant for several months, and thrive when the weather is slightly warmer and drier than usual.

“Looking back at fall 2018, winter 2019 and the early part of spring, warmer and drier weather has been common” in Florida, she said. “Temperatures have hovered about 2 to 3 degrees above normal since October, with rain totals running about 2 to 3 inches below the average.”

This means the time is ideal for lovebug growth.

Lovebugs are an invasive species, also known as the honeymoon fly or double-headed bug. During and after mating, adult pairs remain coupled, even in flight, for up to several days. And contrary to rumors, they weren’t genetically modified and then released by scientists as a way to rid Florida of mosquitoes — they don’t even eat mosquitoes.

University of Florida (UF) researchers suspect their spread in Florida might have been assisted by prevailing winds, vehicle traffic, sod transport, expansion of pastures and increased habitat along highways.

I left Miami on Friday morning around 9 a.m. and by the time I got to Sarasota at noon the front of the Mustang was already very well spotted.  The picture above was taken when I got to my destination north of Tampa, and that’s just the windshield.  I hosed it off Saturday morning and when I got back to Miami Sunday afternoon my first stop was at the car wash; if you leave the splatter on too long, it will damage the paint.

South Florida has its drawbacks, but being swarmed by insects in the throes of afterglow isn’t one of them.  And as a friend noted, sometimes you’re the windshield, and sometimes you’re the bug.

Monday, April 15, 2019

Florida Man Meets Darwin

Via Buzzfeed (HT Faithful Correspondent):

A Florida man has died after being attacked by either one or two cassowary birds, which have often been called “living dinosaurs” and are considered one of the most dangerous birds in the world.

The victim, identified as 75-year-old Marvin Hajos, owned the farm where the incident occurred.

“It appears that the gentleman who was killed raised the birds and was injured after falling in a path near the Cassowary enclosure,” Jeff Taylor, the Fire Rescue Deputy Chief for Alachua County, told BuzzFeed News.

Taylor said that there were two cassowaries on the site, but it’s “unclear whether one or both birds took part in the attack.”

Hajos was taken to UF Health Shands Hospital where he later died, a spokesperson said.

“Our crews worked very hard to give the victim the best chance possible at survival,” Taylor said.

Cassowaries are large feathered birds that resemble the emu, according to the San Diego Zoo.

They can run as fast as 30 miles per hour and can grow as large as 6 feet tall.

The animal is native to tropical forests in New Guinea and can be found in Australia as well.

It possess a claw on each foot, which can grow as long as 4 inches, and can “slice open any predator or potential threat with a single swift kick.”

Lt. Brett Rhodenizer, a spokesperson for the Alachua Police, told the Gainesville Sun that “initial information indicates that this was a tragic accident for Mr. Hajos and his family.”

Rhodenizer added that the birds involved are “secured on private property at this time.”

The incident is currently being investigated by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission and the local sheriff’s department.

Representatives for the Alachua Police Department were not immediately available for comment.

On second thought, peacocks are just annoying.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Toad Haul

And I thought peacocks were a nuisance.

A Florida suburb is being plagued by thousands of poisonous toads.

Experts say the amphibians are bufo toads, also known as cane toads. Residents in the infested Palm Beach Gardens neighborhood worry toxins secreted by the toads will harm their pets and children.

News stations broadcast images of the small toads clogging pool filters, hopping en masse across driveways and sidewalks, and lurking in landscaped lawns.

Resident Jennifer Quasha told WPBF her family first noticed the toads Friday. She said hundreds of them were in her swimming pool.

Mark Holladay of the pest removal service Toad Busters told WPTV that recent rains coupled with warm temperatures sent the amphibians into a breeding cycle.

Holladay said even more toads are likely to spread throughout South Florida in the coming weeks.

PS: If you don’t get the punning reference in the title, go read The Wind in the Willows.

Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Unnatural Disaster

Florida has had its share of troubles, but the karmic lesson of reaping what you sow on top of Mother Nature and her visits are becoming a bit much for Trump fans in one part of the Sunshine State.

MARIANNA, Fla. — A federal prison here in Florida’s rural Panhandle lost much of its roof and fence during Hurricane Michael in October, forcing hundreds of inmates to relocate to a facility in Yazoo City, Miss., more than 400 miles away.

Since then, corrections officers have had to commute there to work, a seven-hour drive, for two-week stints. As of this week, thanks to the partial federal government shutdown, they will be doing it without pay — no paychecks and no reimbursement for gas, meals and laundry, expenses that can run hundreds of dollars per trip.

“You add a hurricane, and it’s just too much,” said Mike Vinzant, a 32-year-old guard and the president of the local prison officers’ union.

If nature can be blamed for creating the first financial hardship, the second is the result of the even less predictable whims in Washington: President Trump warned last week that the shutdown might last “months or even years.”

In Florida, where Republicans dominated the November midterms and the state’s only Democratic senator went down in defeat, conservative towns like Marianna — along with farm communities in the South and Midwest, and towns across the country that depend on tourism revenue from scaled-back national parks — will help measure the solidity of public support for Mr. Trump and his decision to wager some of the operations of the federal government on a border wall with Mexico.

Jim Dean, Marianna’s city manager, said he had already been concerned, even before the shutdown, that the hurricane would prompt public agencies to consider reducing their footprint in the region. What if an extended shutdown contributed to keeping the prison closed indefinitely?

“I worry about the government pulling out of rural America,” he said.

It’s easy to gloat and practice saying “schadenfreude” with a particular Germanic tone, especially when you remember that at this stage in the recovery from Hurricane Maria, people in Puerto Rico were still 90% without power and nothing was happening even with the government up and running.  It’s also a reminder that a lot of people who supported Trump are the ones who were so sure that they didn’t need the government hand-outs — bootstraps, everyone! — and those who had their hands out were lazy druggies or worse: immigrants.

I don’t minimize the pain and struggle the folks in Marianna went through after Hurricane Michael; I know hurricanes and they don’t care about politics, and all the best preparation doesn’t stop them.  But the rest of it was easily prevented, both before November 2016 and after when they were so sure that rhetoric and metaphors about mythical walls was the real solution to all their problems.

The shutdown will end at some point, the checks and back pay will come, and given the short attention span of the American electorate, they will probably vote back in the same people who lied and conned them the last time.  They probably know it; rest assured the liars and the con-men are counting on it.

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Still Rolling In

The results keep coming in.

Republican Jeff Denham has conceded to Democrat Josh Harder in California’s 10th District.

[…]

Blue America candidate Katie Porter pulled ahead of Mimi Walters in California’s 45th district by 3,797 votes as of the latest update. Dave Wasserman projects her the winner after this latest update.

In California’s 39th district, Gil Cisneros is nipping at Republican Young Kim’s heels, with just 122 votes separating the two. Kim is still leading, but that will probably change tomorrow.

In New Jersey, Democrat Andy Kim has been declared the winner over Tom MacArthur, architect of the Trumpcare efforts in 2017.

Meanwhile, over in Utah, Mia Love is not happy with the way results are coming in for her, so she is doing what Republicans do best: Trying to cheat.. TPM reports:

Republican U.S. Rep. Mia Love sued Wednesday to halt vote counting in the Utah race where she is narrowly trailing her Democratic challenger.

Love’s campaign said in a lawsuit Salt Lake County clerk isn’t allowing poll-watchers to challenge findings during the verification process for mail-in ballots. Voting is done primarily by mail in Utah.

Note that Love is only suing in Salt Lake County, where there are still many outstanding votes and where her challenger, Ben McAdams, is leading by a narrow margin.

Here in Florida, well, things were getting a little overheated.  Literally.

Palm Beach County has managed to recount about 175,000 early votes affected by a machine malfunction, but the county is still far behind schedule to finish recounts in the races for U.S. Senate, governor and commissioner of agriculture and consumer services.

On Wednesday, Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher said her staff had worked through the night to recount early votes after ballot-counting machines overheated Tuesday and gave incorrect vote totals. The county brought in mechanics to repair the machines on Tuesday, and Bucher said the equipment had worked well overnight.

But Bucher said she wasn’t sure whether elections staff would be able to finish recounting votes cast in the Senate race between Gov. Rick Scott and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson by the 3 p.m. Thursday deadline set by the state.

Gov. Scott has recused himself from the final voting results, but it didn’t stop him from going to Washington to participate in freshman orientation.  Counting those chickens, eh, Rick?

Ah, democracy.

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Slow Going

The recount in Broward County is going to take a while.

Two days after state officials ordered a statewide recount in three key races that ended within razor-thin margins, Broward County elections officials said Monday they have not yet started their recount of more than 700,000 ballots it must tally before Thursday’s deadline.

Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes said she was not concerned that her office would not meet its deadline, even if the start of the recount is delayed until Tuesday morning.

“No, there is not” any concern, said Snipes, whose headquarters in Lauderhill were once again surrounded Monday by a small crowd of protesters critical of the elections chief and her competence to serve.

Broward will conduct three statewide recounts and additional recounts on four municipal races, all of which are on the first page of Broward’s ballots. The machines have to first separate that page from the rest of each ballot before they can then be refed and recounted. (Ballots in Broward county can range from four to seven pages, depending on the city.)

Elections workers had begun that process on 10 machines late Sunday morning, after technical glitches delayed the start for a few hours. Two new machines were delivered to the supervisor’s office on Monday morning, and workers were still separating ballots as of Monday afternoon. About 10 representatives from both parties are overseeing the recount, along with monitors from the state’s Division of Elections.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are in a huge hurry to get it done, the implication being that if it not done RIGHT NOW they will somehow lose, or it will give fraud a chance.

Despite mounting pressure from top Republicans to investigate unfounded claims of voter fraud in Broward and Palm Beach Counties, the top official for Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement remained mum on whether  his agency would start a probe.

A day after Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly rebuked FDLE Commissioner Rick Swearingen for not investigating claims of voter fraud in the state’s midterm election, the two agencies issued a joint press release assuring the public they were watching for “criminal activity.”

But they stopped short of saying whether they’d found any fraud.

Gov. Rick Scott has repeatedly gone on TV to complain of “rampant fraud” in Tuesday’s election after witnessing his lead in the U.S. Senate race against Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson dwindle as votes continued to be counted after election night.

Like Bondi, he’s offered no evidence of fraud in his call for an investigation. So far, FDLE officials have said they’ve had no evidence to warrant an investigation.

Jim York, who was FDLE commissioner under Gov. Bob Graham in the 1980s, said he was outraged that Scott and Bondi were pressuring Swearingen.

“It’s extraordinary. I don’t know where the attorney general feels she has any jurisdiction here,” York said. “I just appreciate Swearingen, and I hope he continues to stand up to this kind of crap.”

In normal times, it would be the people who are behind in the race who are screaming fraud and carrying on about that kind of crap, but Scott has an apparent lead and it’s very rare for a recount to overturn an election.  But Scott and Biondi and the rest of the banshee delegation are taking their cue from Trump, who’s injecting himself and his nutsery into the recount here.  Andrew Gillum, the candidate for governor who trails Ron DeSantis by less than 0.5%, dealt with Trump’s frothing with the perfect response.

He should win just on that alone.

Stay tuned, folks.  This ain’t over by a long shot.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

Sunday Reading

Invasive Pythons — Charlie Pierce on the GOP shenanigans in Florida’s recount.

Before we descend into the madness that is Florida and the way it conducts itself during elections, we should get a bit of a look at what’s at stake so we can understand a) why the Republicans are fighting so hard; b) why the Democrats should match their ferocity, and c) why Marco Rubio is peddling his self respect one Tweet at a time on the electric Twitter machine. As part of the latter effort, Rubio tweeted out a video from a guy who was a Seth Rich Truther. But we are concerned at the moment withother swamps and other critters therein. From the Miami Herald:

In a series of morning tweets, Everglades Foundation CEO Eric Eikenberg claimed “the public deception is underway” as a South Florida Water Management District government board meeting started in Miami. Eikenberg accused officials of trying to derail the project by tying up the land for two more years and failing to give adequate notice for the decision. U.S. Rep. Brian Mast echoed those concerns during public comment, saying Ron DeSantis, the Republican who has railed against the sugar industry and maintains a narrow lead in a state governor race facing a recount, asked him to deliver a message: Postpone the vote. “The governor-elect as well as federal legislators would like to be briefed,” said Mast, a fellow Republican whose district includes coastal communities along the St. Lucie River repeatedly slammed by blue-green algae blooms ignited by polluted water from Lake Okeechobee.

DiSantis [sic], who is headed for Recount City with Andrew Gillum, and Rick Scott,who is presently tied up pretending to be Juan Peron in his battle against Senator Bill Nelson, both have opposed extending the leases on the land held by the literal sugar daddies. Everybody—including Senators Nelson and Rubio—have argued for the necessity of letting the leases run and then establishing the reservoir on that land. The state has been an environmental catastrophe this year, so much so that even Scott, who would sell his grandmother for parts if he thought the old girl would bring a price, got concerned.

This past summer, that outrage was compounded by a saltwater red tide, also fed by coastal pollution, that littered beaches with dead marine life and became a central issue in a heated election. DeSantis, who claimed to be the “only candidate who fought Big Sugar and lived to tell about it,” and voted against sugar subsidies while in Congress, has been embraced by some environmentalists. His opposition to the industry helped him win an endorsement from the Everglades Trust and a hearty congratulations from the Everglades Foundation, which does not endorse candidates but has lent support, including a press conference with outgoing Republican Gov. Rick Scott in the closing days of his race against U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson. The tight Nelson-Scott race is also going to a recount. District officials said they complied with meeting laws and would have listed Thursday’s vote in the meeting agenda sooner but only reached a deal with Florida Crystals late Wednesday. Board chairman Federico Fernandez, who seemed genuinely surprised by the negative reaction, said he was assured the decision met requirements.

This is part of the reason why the fight in Florida has gone to knives as swiftly as it has. Along with the climate crisis, quick-buck development scams and environmental predation have been devouring Florida for decades and the political establishment there never has been able to unite against these threats to the ordinary citizens.This time, apparently, it has. So the reservoir now becomes something that may be at stake in whatever backroom maneuvering is undertaken in the pursuit of the two contested political offices. And, my lord, is that becoming a tangled disaster. Once again, Broward County is haunting the nation’s dreams and, once again, we find ourselves in the preposterous position of having one of the candidates controlling the process of settling an election in which he is involved. The count in the Senate race has closed to within the state’s requirement for a statewide hand recount, and Scott went into a frenzy trying to stop it. From the Tampa Bay Times:

Rick Scott filed suit against Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes over the county’s delay in completing its count of the votes from the midterm election. Scott sued as a candidate for the U.S. Senate, not in his capacity as governor of Florida. Scott followed up by lashing out at Snipes in an extraordinary press conference at the Governor’s Mansion on Thursday night. Broward County lags the rest of the state in completing the first, crucial phases of counting ballots from Tuesday’s midterm election. As of 8 p.m. Thursday, the same time the governor summoned reporters to the mansion, Broward County was the only one of the state’s 67 counties that had not reported to the state that it had completed its tabulation of early votes. Early voting ended Sunday in Broward.

Scott, acting in his capacity as governor in furtherance of his attempt to become senator, sicc’ed the state police on the election officials in Broward. Armed police officers were headed to the counting houses. In a late-night press conference, Scott wentall the way up the wall.

“I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the great people of Florida,” Scott told reporters on the front steps of the stately Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee. The targets of Scott’s wrath were Brenda Snipes, the Broward County elections supervisor, and Palm Beach supervisor Susan Bucher. Both officials are Democrats; Scott is a Republican. Scott unleashed the attack as his slim lead over Democrat Bill Nelson in the Senate race continued to evaporate. It stood at 15,092 votes, or .18 percent, on Thursday night. President Trump chimed in on Twitter, describing, without any evidence, a “big corruption scandal” involving election fraud in South Florida. Scott took the unusual step of delivering a partisan political attack from his taxpayer-funded residence, which is reserved for official state events.

A reminder: what we are talking about here is the counting of votes, which is the basic fundamental process for every election. We are not talking about recounts and chads and all that other nonsense that is surely coming down the pike because this is Florida, man. We are talking about counting the votes. And Scott is using his authority as governor to ratfck that process with armed law-enforcement personnel. Somebody get this guy a white suit with some braid, and a balcony on which to stand. And he’s doing so with the entire Republican political apparatus up to and including the White House supporting him by enabling and weaponizing what are so far baseless charges. There is a great deal at stake here. We should wait and see what gets traded away and what gets held hostage and which firmly held political positions are used as currency. The gators and cranes and invasive pythons in the Everglades should be watching, too.

The Queer Coming-of-Age Film Comes of Age — Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic.

“My God, are we gonna be like our parents?” That’s the fear voiced by one of the five motley high-school students locked in detention in John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club—and that’s the crucial question underlying most movies about adolescents coming of age. The onscreen antics of teenagers might take the form of giddy flirtations (Grease), drunken ramblings (Dazed and Confused), or feisty self-renaming (Lady Bird), but the kids’ objectives are usually the same: to fashion an identity by rebelling against the authorities—and expectations—that raised them. This quest is, however, circular. The losing of virginities and conquering of cliques may require transgressions in the moment, but by the time the credits roll, the teens have generally started prepping for a productive adulthood against which their own children might someday revolt.

For some kids, though, rule-breaking is less a route toward self-definition than a requirement built into existence. That’s the reality recognized by a recent crop of popular films centered on the queer teen, a figure who until now has been cinematically marginal: casually stigmatized in crass banter, relegated to playing sidekick in someone else’s rites of passage, or claiming the foreground only for small art-house audiences. The first major-studio movie about adolescent gay romance, Greg Berlanti’s spring hit, Love, Simon, uses teen-comedy tropes to portray homosexuality as no big deal in a well-off, relatively woke slice of America. But other recent films, set in less tolerant places and eras, hint that integrating queerness into a schema that has been overwhelmingly straight isn’t so simple.
Two prominent depictions of Christian gay-to-straight “conversion therapy,” the star-studded Boy Erased and the Sundance winner The Miseducation of Cameron Post, forgo the notion of puberty as a full-circle journey. So, in more oblique ways, did Moonlight, the Best Picture winner at the 2017 Oscars, and the 2018 Best Picture contender Call Me by Your Name. Whether persecuted or nurtured by their surroundings, queer teens fundamentally flip the Breakfast Club script: Their fear is not that they’ll become their parents, but that they face a future in which that isn’t a possibility. If that sounds potentially freeing, it is also, in these movies at least, a special kind of terrifying.

In literature and elsewhere, the go-to queer narrative is the coming-out story, which might seem well suited to the on-screen LGBTQ teenager on the brink of autonomy. After all, high-school movies are always, on some level, about outing: The protagonist struggles—nervously or defiantly or both—to announce who she really is to the world. But the queer teens now taking center stage are understandably gun-shy about this rite. Almost in passing, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird highlights the difference in what’s at stake. For Saoirse Ronan in the title role, bucking the dutiful-teen image is a performative thrill; her boyfriend (Lucas Hedges), who she discovers is gay, isn’t ready to upend parental expectations in what feels like a more irrevocable way.

Putting that apprehension in the foreground, this year’s gay-teen movies summon external forces to yank identity struggles into the open. In Love, Simon, Simon (Nick Robinson) is blackmailed by a classmate who discovers the secret Simon had hoped to keep through high school—and the kid eventually outs him anyway. Family members, peers, and school staff rally in support of an almost caricatured romantic-comedy finale for Simon: Young lovers ride a Ferris wheel, happily ever after. Simon never dreamed he’d remain in the closet; he just wanted to time his emergence to his arrival at college. That the mortifying disruption of this plan turns out to be kismet is not unlike what happens to the straight teens of Sixteen Candles and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, who have their private crushes revealed against their will.

The recent conversion-therapy movies redraw the blueprint more radically with the simple recognition that for a lot of queer youths, exposure really can spell catastrophe. In Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, set in the 1990s, the title character (Chloë Grace Moretz) is furtively hooking up with another girl at prom when the car door is flung open by Cameron’s male date. In Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, Jared (Hedges again), the Arkansas son of a hard-line preacher (Russell Crowe), diligently resists acting on his same-sex attractions—but is still outed, in extremely traumatic circumstances, when he goes to college in the early 2000s. The unmasking of these characters doesn’t represent a capstone of self-actualization; it kicks off a communal effort to constrain who they might become—to stop same-sex attraction before it “gets worse,” as one Boy Erased church elder puts it.

Change, usually the liberating mantra of coming-of-age movies, represents oppression and conformity in these films: It’s what the Christian brainwashing camps insist is possible for gay teens, something very near the opposite of the discovery of a true self. The comic pop-culture trope of the regimented high school morphs into a grimmer setting of hapless yet powerful adults and trapped kids. Even the homework is a perverse twist. For The Breakfast Club’s crew, being forced to write an essay about “who you think you are” offers each teen a pretext to break out of a stereotyped public image. But mandatory self-analysis, when truly futile, begins to resemble torture: Jared must annotate his family tree with the sins of his forebears (alcoholism, gambling, gang affiliation), and Cameron draws an iceberg showing all the supposedly malign influences below her surface (enjoyment of sports, lack of positive female role models). “How is programming people to hate themselves not emotional abuse?” Cameron asks.Seeing through the quacks in charge and confirming the truth of their own desires—which both of them ultimately do (Jared with the eventual support of his mother)—isn’t a prelude to fruitful rebellion or an upbeat transition away from home. Jared the earnest church kid frets about his parents’ love more than anything else. Cameron takes on light punk airs, joining ranks with the pot-smoking skeptics in the program she’s sent to, but she’s not fighting the system to achieve acceptance. Though both characters end up as runaways of sorts, they don’t seem to be running toward any particular adulthood they may be dreaming of. Survival has to come first.

Set further in the past, the breakout queer-teen movies of the previous two years each consider—from opposite perspectives—how a person’s initial environs might follow them forever. In Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, the black youth Chiron (played in turn by Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes) suffers bullying and parental abuse as he grows up amid Miami drug dealers and addicts in the 1980s. Moments of grace and fellowship are precious, and he’s shown acting on his same-sex desires in only one fleeting teenage encounter. In his high-school years, he does rebel—but by savagely beating a classmate, making a display of masculinity that brings him in line with the heterosexual status quo. Years later, he hasn’t diverged from the script that shaped his youth—he’s become a drug dealer—and whether he may belatedly be ready to pursue his desires is left open. Life itself may have erased this boy.

A contrast to Chiron in so many ways, the white and wealthy Elio (Timothée Chalamet) of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name avails himself of a few different scripts over one blissful ’80s summer in the Italian countryside. Like a stereotypical 17-year-old, he sneaks around in pursuit of sex behind his worldly parents’ backs, at first with girls and soon with Oliver (Armie Hammer), the handsome graduate student spending the summer at his family’s villa. Yet what looks like brave same-sex exploration on his own terms is suddenly cast in a very different light at the film’s close: Elio’s father indicates that he’s been aware of the affair all along. In fact, he’s been jealous of it, having yearned in vain for similar experiences.

Can Elio be who his father wishes he’d been? The film holds out, for a moment, the utopian possibility that a queer kid could be propelled forward by the possibility of fulfilling unmet parental dreams, rather than disappointing deeply entrenched ones. Yet a shadow flits across that uplifting prospect. Elio is soon heartbroken to learn that Oliver, who has returned to his grad-student life, is marrying a woman. “You’re so lucky,” the older man tells the younger one over the phone while reflecting on their tryst. “My father would have carted me off to a correctional facility.” In the film’s pointedly open-ended final scene, Elio just sits and cries. Presumably he’s contemplating the mystery of his future, one in which the men who might have been his role models appear to have surrendered some part of themselves. Even in Elio’s liberation, there’s no clear path for him to walk.

Most teen stories, of course, are open-ended on some level. Puberty breaks everyone’s life in two, and what comes after graduation is necessarily unwritten. But for gay kids, a ready synthesis between the old order and the new sexual self doesn’t obviously await. Willingly or not, they’re swept into an unfolding historical saga. These characters thus come to inhabit their misfit status—a dislocation that’s permanent and deep, rather than fleeting and cosmetic—reluctantly, quietly, and often with gestures toward external conformity.

In look and feel, these movies mimic their muted heroes. Mostly gone are the hijinks and raunch of typical teen comedy, eclipsed by struggles to belong that tend toward stately, notably pretty melodrama. A sensitive camera eye helps capture teens’ interiority, a social vista, and the chasm between them. Yet the critic D. A. Miller has convincingly argued that mainstream gay movies’ “mandatory aesthetic laminate, which can never shine brightly enough with dappled light,” is also a sop: meant to make homosexuality palatable for a broad audience.

Certainly it’s curious that in an age of unprecedented visibility for LGBTQ communities, the queer teens chosen for the cinematic spotlight appear so allergic to, well, seeming gay. Simon is self-mocking as he at one point indulges in a daydream of being accompanied by a rainbow-clad cheering squad when he leaves the closet, and he keeps the only out kid at school—sardonic, femme, and black—at arm’s length. Elio pokes fun at the flamboyant older gay couple who visit his parents, and Jared’s arrival into a life of writing New York Times op-eds and attending Brooklyn dinner parties is shown glancingly, in an epiloguelike time jump. Whether the implied assimilationist impulse reflects the filmmakers’ or the characters’ caution is up for debate. Either way, the caution serves as a reminder: There’s a reason slogans like “It gets better” have tried to give queer kids the kind of optimistic narrative arc that pop culture has offered straight teens for so long.

And even in their mannered quietude and their relegation of politics to subtext, these films carry a disruptive message. Boy Erased ends with Jared telling his dad that he, not Jared, is the one who needs to change. When Simon’s father repents for all the gay jokes he’s told over the years, the gesture is warm but wan. The parental apology suggests why coming of age feels so heavy in these movies: It’s the world, not just the teen, that’s struggling to mature.
Doonesbury — Veterans Day.

Friday, November 9, 2018

A Good Fit

Matthew Whitaker, the acting attorney general, seems like a perfect fit for the Trump administration.

Before Whitaker joined the Trump administration as a political appointee, the Republican lawyer and legal commentator complained that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the election and of the Trump campaign was dangerously close to overreaching. He suggested ways it could be stopped or curtailed and urged his followers on Twitter to read a story that dubbed the investigators “Mueller’s lynch mob.”

Now — at least on an interim basis — Whitaker will assume authority over that investigation, an arrangement that has triggered calls by Democrats for him to recuse himself.

He also harbors interesting views on the role of the Supreme Court in the scheme of things, arguing that the landmark 1803 Marbury v. Madison case that affirmed the court’s role as the final arbiter of interpreting the Constitution was one of the worst decisions the court has rendered.

“There are so many,” he replied. “I would start with the idea of Marbury v. Madison. That’s probably a good place to start and the way it’s looked at the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of constitutional issues. We’ll move forward from there. All New Deal cases that were expansive of the federal government. Those would be bad. Then all the way up to the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate.”

He also seems to think that our laws descend from a higher power.

During a 2014 Senate debate sponsored by a conservative Christian organization, he said that in helping confirm judges, “I’d like to see things like their worldview, what informs them. Are they people of faith? Do they have a biblical view of justice? — which I think is very important.”

At that point, the moderator interjected: “Levitical or New Testament?”

“New Testament,” Whitaker affirmed. “And what I know is as long as they have that worldview, that they’ll be a good judge. And if they have a secular worldview, then I’m going to be very concerned about how they judge.”

Religious tests for judges are barred by the Constitution, but I think we already know where he stands on interpreting it.

To round out the rest of the portfolio, as an attorney he’s been accused of defrauding clients.

When federal investigators were digging into an invention-promotion company accused of fraud by customers, they sought information in 2017 from a prominent member of the company’s advisory board, according to two people familiar with the probe: Matthew G. Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney in Iowa.

It is unclear how Whitaker — who was appointed acting attorney general by President Trump on Wednesday — responded to a Federal Trade Commission subpoena to his law firm.

In the end, the FTC filed a complaint against Miami-based World Patent Marketing, accusing it of misleading investors and falsely promising that it would help them patent and profit from their inventions, according to court filings.

In May of this year, a federal court in Florida ordered the company to pay a settlement of more than $25 million and close up shop, records show. The company did not admit or deny wrongdoing.

Whitaker’s sudden elevation this week to replace fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions has put new scrutiny on his involvement with the shuttered company, whose advisory board he joined in 2014, shortly after making a failed run for U.S. Senate in Iowa.

At the time, he was also running a conservative watchdog group with ties to other powerful nonprofits on the right and was beginning to develop a career as a Trump-friendly cable television commentator.

So, he’s got authoritarian-executive views of the basic laws of the country, he wants religious tests for judges, and he’s provided legal counsel to a fraudulent get-rich-quick scheme here in Florida.

My only question is why wasn’t he the first pick for Trump’s attorney general before Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III?

Bonus Track: According to two highly-respected legal scholars, Neal K. Katyal and George T. Conway III, Trump’s appointment of Mr. Whitaker as acting attorney general is unconstitutional.

What now seems an eternity ago, the conservative law professor Steven Calabresi published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal in May arguing that Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional. His article got a lot of attention, and it wasn’t long before President Trump picked up the argument, tweeting that “the Appointment of the Special Counsel is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL!”

Professor Calabresi’s article was based on the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, Article II, Section 2, Clause 2. Under that provision, so-called principal officers of the United States must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate under its “Advice and Consent” powers.

He argued that Mr. Mueller was a principal officer because he is exercising significant law enforcement authority and that since he has not been confirmed by the Senate, his appointment was unconstitutional. As one of us argued at the time, he was wrong. What makes an officer a principal officer is that he or she reports only to the president. No one else in government is that person’s boss. But Mr. Mueller reports to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general. So, Mr. Mueller is what is known as an inferior officer, not a principal one, and his appointment without Senate approval was valid.

But Professor Calabresi and Mr. Trump were right about the core principle. A principal officer must be confirmed by the Senate. And that has a very significant consequence today.

It means that Mr. Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States after forcing the resignation of Jeff Sessions is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr. Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.

I heard one conservative commentator suggest that the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 allows such appointments in the case of a vacancy or incapacity, but it is for a relatively short period, and besides, the Constitution has supremacy.  So if Mr. Whitaker tries to fire Robert Mueller, he may face a legal challenge.

PS: Karma strikes again: George T. Conway III, the co-author of the op-ed, is married to Kellyanne Conway.

In Florida, It Ain’t Over

Here we go again.  Via the Tampa Bay Times:

A visibly frustrated Gov. Rick Scott on Thursday accused “unethical liberals” of trying to steal a U.S. Senate seat from him, as his campaign filed a lawsuit against election officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties for allegedly refusing to release voting tabulations.

“I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the great people of Florida,” Scott told reporters on the front steps of the stately  Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee.

The targets of Scott’s wrath were Brenda Snipes, the Broward County elections supervisor, and Palm Beach supervisor Susan Bucher. Both officials are Democrats; Scott is a Republican.

Scott unleashed the attack as his slim lead over Democrat Bill Nelson in the Senate race continued to evaporate. It stood at 15,092 votes, or .18 percent, on Thursday night.

“And I would have pulled it off if it wasn’t for those meddling kids!” said every villain in a Scooby Doo cartoon.  Nature and barbering choices are what made Mr. Scott look the part, but it goes along with the axiom that Republicans believe that counting every vote is tantamount to fraud

Meanwhile, Andrew Gillum, who had conceded the governors race to Republican Ron DeSantis, is having second thoughts as the count narrows down to the range of an automatic recount.

As of 9 a.m. [Thursday], DeSantis’ lead was just 42,948 votes out of 8,189,305 ballots cast — equal to 0.52 percent of the vote. Concession speech or no, Florida law requires an automatic machine recount in any race where the margin of victory is within one half of one percentage point.

By 2 p.m., Gillum gained on DeSantis by another 4,441 votes, and now trails by only 0.47 percent.

Thousands of ballots still remain uncounted, so it’s too soon to say whether a recount will indeed happen in the race for governor. Florida’s 67 elections supervisors must send their unofficial numbers to the state by 1 p.m. Saturday, and campaign volunteers were scrambled around the state Thursday as supervisors prepared to examine provisional ballots cast by voters with unresolved issues at their polling places.

The Gillum campaign sent out an email to supporters Thursday afternoon urging those with provisional ballots to call their supervisor of elections offices before 5 p.m. to make sure their ballot was counted, and campaign spokeswoman Johanna Cervone said the campaign was prepared for a recount effort.

“It has become clear there are many more uncounted ballots than was originally reported,” she said in a statement. “Our campaign, along with our attorney Barry Richard, is monitoring the situation closely and is ready for any outcome, including a state-mandated recount.”

There’s good reason for both Scott and DeSantis to be worried.  All of the votes haven’t been counted in Broward County, which is Fort Lauderdale, and that’s the most Democratic county in the state.  If there’s going to be a change in the resumed result of Tuesday night, it’s going to come from those votes.

Might as well get comfortable; we’re going to be here for a while.

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Saturday, July 7, 2018