The Grimm Truth

The Democratic Art of Self-Destruction

    The Democrats continue their interminable march toward oblivion, about to be done in, once again, by their own peevishness.

     The party's disparate parts just can't abide that the others just can't see it their way. Hillary's sulking troops, refusing to acknowledge the reality of the numbers, intend to fight on, clear to the convention, even if it wrecks the Democrat's chances to take the White House. As if futility, in politics, can be a noble cause.

Eight years ago, the party's purists showed those Al Gore Democrats a thing or two. Ralph Nader took more votes from Al Gore in Florida than all the butterfly ballots and hanging chads combined. It was a triumph of the impetuous and self-absorbed over those who would suffer an ignoble compromise.

If the results of the 2000 election and all the wars and chaos its spawned was painful, it wasn't painful enough. Apparently, there's some self-destructive gene embedded in Democratic DNA. Hillary's seething, never-say-die supporters need to ask themselves: What happens if they win?  If they are able, by twisting arms and concocting back-room deals and manipulating the superdelegates, to thwart Obama, then what?  She limps into November without the college kids who flocked to Obama, without many of the college-educated young professions who poured prodigious amounts of money into his campaign. Worst of all, black votes, the most loyal, most dependable wing of the party, will withdraw with a sense of betrayal.

Meanwhile, those white blue collar male voters who gave her states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, are more likely to vote for McCain than Hillary come November. Bill Clinton, remember, only pulled 41 percent of that elusive white male vote the last time the Democrats won a national election.

Of course, if Obama wins, older women voters, the block that often decides elections, will be seething over their own notion of betrayal. And come November, they'll show those upstarts, the traitors turned their backs on Hillary.

Internecine warfare has become the way of the party. It's the new party ethic. And it's begins to looks as if, instead of happy delegates marching toward party unity, angry mobs are descending on the convention in Denver. As if the gathering had been orchestrated by Karl Rove.

Excuse Me Judge. About Those Crane Safety Rules You Tossed Last Week

Tons of steel crash down onto a New York sidewalk. Another crane collapse. And one wonders if U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro is tuned into CNN, watching rescue workers pull the dead from the crush of metal and rubble.

Last Tuesday, Judge Ungaro issued a temporary restraining order, stopping Miami-Dade from enforcing crane safety standards the county commission passed two months ago. The judge, just in time for the beginning of hurricane season, bought into the high rise construction industry's claim that the new rules would put them out of business in Miami-Dade County.  It was a curious argument, given that the commission seemed to have based its ordinance on existing safety standards adopted in other states.

The local need for safety standards became grotesquely apparent in 2006, when a mishap in downtown Miami sent a crane operator plunging 39 stories to his death. Then, on March 15, a 22-story crane toppled over in Manhattan, killing seven, including a Hialeah woman. Ten days later, another tower crane accident hit Miami, 30 stories up, killing two workers.

Since, there have been fatal crane collapses at construction sites in Kansas City and Annapolis.  But the industry was able to kill crane safety legislation in the Florida legislature and waylay the Miami-Dade ordinance last week in federal court.

But the collapse in New York Friday was a reminder that, beyond the legal arguments, actual lives are at stake. (Earlier Friday, three workers were killed in a crane collapse in Shanghai).  Of course, the feds, and OSHA, haven't revived crane standards in 30 years, forcing states and cities and counties scrambling to fill the void.

Except, in Miami-Dade, the judge says no. Just as hurricane season begins. 

New Opportunities for Out-of-Work Smugglers

New and unexpected items haves been added to the usual contraband smuggled into South Florida: Snow peas. Squash. Yams. Snap beans.

There was a time when crime stories involving federal agents and a Homestead warehouse crammed with illegal goods would tell of bales of marijuana or kilos of cocaine or barrels of Ecstasy. But now we have Guatemalan snow peas. Three company officials of the Homestead food importer and distributor Fresh King were indicted earlier this month on charges the company was trying to sneak food possibly contaminated with dangerous pesticides past federal inspectors.

It seemed a weird new avocation in South Florida, a region infamous in the 1980s as a smugglers paradise. But given the fast rising price of food, the world wide shortages, the specter of food riots in third world countries, maybe the Fresh King caper presages a new and growing criminal enterprise.

Psst. Hey buddy. You wanna cop some hot papayas? 

Download the indictment:  Download fresh_king_indictment.pdf   

Marginalized Americans Are Where You Find Them

    My colleague Leonard Pitts, in yet another column this week complaining that latent racism skewed the Democratic primary in mostly white, working class West Virginia, serves up a phrase about the folks back home that struck me as particularly misinformed. Pitts was bothered by readers who found little moral difference between blacks who voted nine-to-one in favor of the black candidate, Barack Obama, and the mountain state whites who voted overwhelmingly for the white candidate, Hillary Clinton. He wrote, "Thing is, that's not what happened in West Virginia. Not unless you're going to tell me with a straight face that that vote reflected marginalized whites (an oxymoron if ever there was one) seeking a seat at the table."

I don't know how much race was factor in the Clinton vote in the West Virginia primary. Some, surely. Maybe racism was a decisive factor. Worth more than Clinton's union support. Or the residual affection for her husband. I know, too, that in the southern West Virginia coal fields, elections are won by candidates who know where, or rather with whom, to put their money come election day. Campaigns in West Virginia, not unlike the black-dominated urban centers of dying old industrial towns, are decided by election day largess. Obama's new Internet-driven campaigns, peopled by college kids and young professionals, don't translate into votes in towns like Pineville, Logan, Sophia, Welch, Coal Mountain. Those elections traditionally run on $5 bills. Or pints of whiskey. Not on websites.

Last winter, I drove through a few of those same forsaken towns. The coal mines have played out. The storefronts were mostly empty. The best educated, the most ambitious, the folks with gumption abandoned the coal fields and West Virginia. Substitute crystal meth for crack and these little rural towns are suffering from some of the same pathologies as America's black inner cities. Their children must leave the state to find work. Those who stay behind, can only watch as the strip miners, who employ relatively few workers, wrangle giant shovels that utterly brutalized the mountains, with the economic advantages going to outsiders. Meanwhile, the locals find they're suffering 100-year floods with increasing frequency.

Down in the deep hollows of Appalachia, the word "marginalized" seems less an oxymoron, as Pitts suggests, than downright inadequate.         

Blogging, Circa 1968

I blog, therefore I am.

Or maybe it was that, before today, I didn't blog. Therefore I wasn't.

For the last few years, I've been happily cramming my thoughts into an 18.6 inch column of newsprint, oblivious to the unconfined, perpetual, free-flowing, interactive nature of this new medium. Now, I feel a little like one of those pathetic prisoners sprung after four decades behind bars. Blinking from the sun. Hesitant. Just an anachronistic old print guy, unsure how to handle all this new-found freedom.

I'll try to be a bit more responsible than when I graduated from a military prep school (Castle Heights Military Academy, Class of 1965). Mostly, I translated freedom as something to do with drinking beer and chasing girls.

But a blog, circa 2008, affords a kind of intimacy between a writer and a community, even a community of six million South Floridians, not unlike my first newspaper job. In 1968, a reporter for a small daily newspaper in the Mississippi Delta covered everything. No choice. I write high school sports, county government, elections, murders, fires, automobile crashes, graduations, floods, tornadoes, local business, drug busts, weddings, trials, civil rights, funerals.

I worked all morning writing stories for an afternoon edition, then walked the gauntlet past the storefronts on my way to buy a cup of coffee. Everyone along the sidewalk had something to say about my stories. The interaction, in those days, was street level. I got hell. I got adulation. I got opinions. Man, did I ever get opinions. Store owners, customers, farmers, cops. Everyone had something to say. The reader opinions - as they would say 40 years later - came in real time.

Writing for a small town newspaper, knocking out one little story after another, every day, writing about everything that moved, I was utterly intertwined in the life of the community. And the community wasn't shy about telling me I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. I was blogging. I just didn't know it yet.    

Why Don't We Quit, At, Say, 100 Million

The embattled activists pushing the Hometown Democracy Amendment, which would keep city and county commissions from veering outside the bounds of their growth management plans without voter approval, argue that despite what their critics claim, the amendment would not bring an abrupt halt to growth and new development in Florida.

Lesley Blackner, a Palm Beach County land use attorney and a leader of the amendment drive, points to a 1999 university study that added up the density allowances for all 470 land use plans adopted by Florida's county and city governments. The combined plans have room for 101 million residents. That's where we'd draw the population line if Florida adopts the Hometown Democracy Amendment -- 101 million.

Imagine the economic disaster facing Florida if developers are limited to building new homes for only 83 million more residents. No wonder the chamber of commerce folks are in just a tizzy.

Here's a 1999 Tampa Tribune story about the teeming masses to come. Download 100_million.txt