The Grimm Truth

Next Debate, Bring The Defibrillator

It was bizarre but irresistible. CNN televised the great debate Friday night with a running graph along the bottom of the screen purporting to measure audience reaction. The red line for Republicans, blue for Democrats and green for indies.
Supposedly, when one faction or another scored debate points their corresponding line would spike like the Dow hasn’t done in weeks.
It said something about the tenor of the exchange that the graph flat-lined for most of the debate. If a hospital patient had been attached to that monitor, a team of doctors and nurses would have rushed into the auditorium armed with defibrillator paddles.
McCain jabbed but Obama for the most part refused to counter punch. I kept hoping, as McCain talked about his career-long crusade against graph and corruption, for Obama to dredge up the Keating Five S&L scandal, which has enough resemblance to the currently banking mess that it would even sound vaguely pertinent.
Obama wouldn’t. He took the punches with an incessant half-smile. It was maddening to watch. His rope-a-dope strategy probably was sensible politics, particularly for a fellow who wants to avoid looking like the so-called “angry black man,” but geez, it robbed the encounter of its entertainment potential.
Why not turn it into a mindless fight? It wasn’t as if either candidate had the courage to tell Americans that our economy is screwed nearly beyond repair and that no matter who wins, they won’t have any money to pursue their pet projects. Or that the Russia incursion in Georgia was not the simple, unprovoked display of totalitarian cold war aggression both candidates described. Or that to most of us, the difference between “preconditions” and “preparation” before meeting with the Iranian leadership sounds, well, not worth arguing about.
CNN needs to add another line, to measure those of us not particularly interested in watching a couple cordial fellows feigning substance – a purple line for bruises, kicks, ear biting points. You know, something for us empty headed Americans warming up for a big hard-hitting football weekend.

If You Break It, You Get a $700 Billion Bail-Out

    The giant Wall Street bailout has touched off a cascade of outrage among us common folk. Dolores Kantrowitz of Miami Beach, responding to my column about the $700 billion gift to investment bankers, captured the prevailing sentiment nicely in an e-mail despairing that “that all crooks go unpunished.’

    “Enron, the President, Republicans and Democrats alike - get
a slap on the wrist when they are naughty."

       But why not require them, Kantrowitz suggested, to give back “all the money they stole. This is what I taught my children - if you break it you replace it. If you steal it you
return it or if you already used it - pay for it with an apology.

      “Why are the crooks getting a slap - a minimum fine? If they go to prison it is a
white collar country club.   
        “Every one of us is to blame. I know that. It’s the Me society
and the heck with you.  Someone has to cry out until it sinks in.”

      Frances Griffith, a regular correspondent, was equally adamant:

      "Since I am a taxpayer, paying for my house on time, paying all of my taxes on time, paying all of my other bills on time, including paying off my credit card every month, I think that when I become an owner on Wall Street I should be a voting member of a Board of Directors that will vote on all decisions including golden parachutes and bonuses.

       "My resume includes the fact that I have bought and sold several houses without ever defaulting on a loan. Also, most years of my life I've had a budget and lived within it. I think those two things alone should be great qualifications.

       "I don't think I should be the only one. I think all of the CEOs and Board members should have to have those qualifications," Griffith wrote.

       Law Professor Donald Jones wrote:

        "We need to rescue  the victims, the working families who are loosing their homes, not  the perpetrators of  the crisis.  There are 10,000 foreclosure filings a day in the United States.  This is the economic equivalent of a tidal wave which threatens to  sweep away all prosperity.  The federal government needs to massively restructure loans , lowering  the cost of loans to borrowers.  This massive restructuring will stop the  wave.   Once the tidal wave of  foreclosures has been stopped the housing market will    recover, though at more affordable prices and  in  turn the majority of financial institutions will recover.  This bears a resemblance to policies of debt forgiveness that the federal government used during the depression.   This kind of government intervention is strong medicine but it is less radical than Paulson's own  form of  corporate socialism."

        Jones was just getting wound up:
      
        "Secretary Paulson's alternative  will likely leave the struggling homeowners to continue to drown in the flood of foreclosure.   In our system those who take the risks reap the rewards or take the consequences.  Paulson's proposal changes the rule of  individual responsibility, which the republicans love to talk about, at  taxpayer's expense.    In Bush's words, Wall  Street  got drunk,  and Paulson's proposal is for the tax payer to  pay the tab for its carousing .   As wall street  outstretches its palm for yet another handout the American people should say to them what the Republicans say to the urban poor,  'work  not welfare.' "
      
       My good friend a Slats was blunter yet in his evaulaton. "Do you think that before Hank Paulson gets his check without any restrictions or recouse in how he spends it, just ONE PERSON might suggest that this is the last chance Bush and Cheney have of making all their big spender buddies happy."

Cheap Labor Doesn't Come Cheap In Florida

Roy Blocker's words would have been unthinkable if he had uttered them anywhere in the volatile vicinity of the Miami-Dade School Board. “The school district has gotten cheap labor for a long time in this position,” Blocker told the Orlando Sentinel.
The pittance earned by Blocker, the Orange County Superintendent of Education, comes to about $298,756 a year. The Orange School Board tossed in another 20 grand this year as a bonus for doing a nice job.
Miami-Dade reportedly will pay Alberto Carvalho $275,000 to run the state’s largest school district. That’s more than the national average $200,751 earned by supers heading up districts of 25,000 or more students. But it’s considerable less than the $311,000 earned by Bill Vogel, who runs the Seminole County Schools. No wonder Blocker feels under paid.
Carvalho, who is negotiating his contract with a board that can’t agree on the weather without a smack-down fight, probably feels underpaid compared to his central Florida counterparts who head smaller and considerably less challenging school districts. Or, for that matter, compared to Broward Superintendent Jim Notter who was hired last year for $290,000 a year.
But my advice – free advice (Alberto can think if it as the only bonus he's likely to see this year) - would be that Carvalho should avoid referring to his work for Miami-Dade schools as words “cheap labor.”
Unless he gets an offer for the top job in Seminole County.

County Cracks Down On (Green) Illegal Aliens

Iguanas are now officially designated “reptiles of concern” in Broward County. For all the effect it will have, the county commission might as well designate the Irish as “immigrants of concern.”

Green iguanas are running amuck. They’re breeding like bunnies. They’re taking over docks and bridge abutments and feasting on hibiscus shrubs and other expensive landscaping. Broward has done a better job of creating an environment amenable to iguanas than, say, creating an attractive beachfront for the high end tourists supposed to fill the new $800-a-night hotels along Fort Lauderdale shore.

It’s too late. The new rules likely to be adopted by the county commission would regulate the sale of pet iguanas, which county commissioners worry will be released into the wild once owners tire of the voracious lizards. But the descendents of former pet iguanas have spread so fast across South Florida that some scientists now consider their breeding ground a reliable measure of global warming. As the climate warms, the lizards extend their habitat further north along the Florida peninsula.

The commission would do better policing the sale of other exotic pets with the same potential to breed and adapt to a subtropical climate. All manner of snakes, lizards and turtles could be kept out of the wild, if the county or the state cracks down now. Before it’s too late.

But anyone with a boat dock along the Intracoastal Waterway can tell you that, when it comes to iguanas, the county commission is trying to close the barn door long after the lizards moved in.

If I Can't Come Back, I Ain't Going

The post storm order was as predictable as the power outages. “Do not return until you are told that it is safe!”

We’ve all heard variations of the same pronouncement. A weary emergency operations chief, in obvious need of sleep, stands before a thicket of microphones and TV cameras, telling those folks who evacuated before the storm that they can’t go home, though the storm has passed. Not yet. Not until officialdom deems it is safe.

This time, the official spoke with a Texas accent. He was talking about Galveston. But we’ve heard similar orders issued all along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts in the days after a hurricane.  The problem, of course, is no public official can bear taking responsibility for the risk facing residents coming back into their rubble-strewn neighborhoods.

Understandably, public safety officials look at that anarchic mess and see a myriad of potential hazards. What residents see are all of their worldly belongings exposed to rain and looters. And they see police roadblocks between themselves and their homes.

This tension can drag on for days, even weeks. Public safety officials who spend so much time planning on how to evacuate residents from a vulnerable area spend too little time figuring out how to get folks back home. It’s a neglected consideration in public policy that has become an important factor in evacuation decisions.

The difficulty of returning, of slipping past those inevitable police roadblocks, to check on the state of my house, my dogs, my neighbors, has become a major factor on deciding whether I’d evacuate in the first place. All those harping newscasters and mayors and fire chiefs saying, “No, it’s not safe yet to go back,” is trumped by the voice in a homeowner’s head. “This is my home. This is all I’ve got. The damn storm is gone. Who the hell are you to tell me I can’t go home?”

Putting Lip Gloss On Preemptive War

   

    Hey. I'm from West Virginia. I ain't no ivy-educated elitist. But I know a little something about the Bush Doctrine.

    Maybe I'm asking too much, but I'd sort of like us to have a president - or the vice president of a 72-year-old cancer-survivor - to know more about foreign policy than I do.

    Let me take it a step further. I’d prefer one of those smarty-pants elitists. As long as we’re hiring someone to pull off the complex job in the universe, why not go with one of those guys who was studying hard, dazzling the teachers, making the law review, doing all the serious stuff while the rest of us were in hard pursuit of life’s temporal pleasures.

     But apparently, 2008 is shaping up to be a bad year for the brainy set what with their tendencies to give nuanced answers to complex questions. Nothing drives the electorate crazier than intellectuals who get all bogged down thinking about long-range consequences.

    In her first sit-down interview on ABC Thursday, Sarah Palin’s scripted answers didn’t quite fit the questions but I doubt that hurt her election prospects one bit. What Americans are looking for, in a president or vice president, is someone who’ll shoot first and think later. Come to think of it, that pretty well sums up the Bush Doctrine.

Illegal Smile Can Get You 15 Years In Florida

Magic mint, which can get you 15 years in Florida, has become the first felony contrived via YouTube.

It was an inadvertent campaign. The YouTube set posted fits of silliness and intimated on their videos that their intoxication had been brought on by an hallucinogenic herb cultivated by Mazatec Indians down in Mexico -- Salvia divinorum. Some 5,000 salvia videos were posted on YouTube. And a dozen state legislatures were appalled enough by what they saw on their computer screens to outlaw the drug.

Florida, which loves the notion of packing its prisons with druggies, enacted a law this year that will cart a salvia head off to prison for 15 years.  Apparently, the legislators based the new law solely on what they saw on YouTube. No scientific testimony necessary. Perhaps that was because there was no scientific evidence available that salvia represents a serious threat to society.

Consider these two paragraphs cribbed from a Sept. 9 New York Times piece that examined both the usage and the outlawing of the drug: "Though research is young and little is known about long-term effects, there are no studies suggesting that salvia is addictive or its users prone to overdose or abuse. Indeed, a salvia experience can be so intense, and at times so unsettling, that many try it just once, and even devotees use it sparingly.

"Reports of salvia-related emergency room admissions are virtually nonexistent, likely because its effects typically vanish in just a few minutes."

Apparently, in Florida, just looking silly is enough to get you 15 years.

Sarah Palin Trails Jimmy Morales By 81,222 Votes

Sarah Palin has become the vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party after receiving less votes -- in all her elections combined -- than Jimmy Morales, the losing candidate in the 2004 election for Miami-Dade County mayor.

Morales lost with 322,032 votes in 2004. Add up all of Palin's votes, ever, from city commission to governor, she has totaled 240,810 votes. That puts her well behind the popular votes of Catherine Parker, who lost a race for Miami-Dade circuit judge in 2004 with 257,405.

She has never received as many votes, lifetime, as Broward Property Appraiser Lori Parrish who received 400,680 votes in 2004, or Broward School Board Member Robin Bartleman, who won 319,579 votes that year. Bartleman's opponent, Terry Snipes, received 238,963 votes that year, not good enough to win the school board election but more votes than Sarah Palin gathered in the election that elevated her to governor in 2006. Palin got 238,307 -- a plurality but enough to win a statewide race in Alaska.

She won her first election, for Wasilla city commissioner, in 1992 with 530 votes and was re-elected in 1995 with 413 votes. Enough, maybe, to win a condo election in South Florida.  She was elected mayor in 1996 with 651 votes (not enough to beat Joe Geller in North Bay Village) and re-elected in 1999 with 909 votes. Which, to be fair, would have given her the top job in Opa-locka in a walk.

Her grand total of 240,810 votes might be a piddling total by South Florida standards but that's enough, apparently, for the Republican Party to put her up for a rather auspicious office. Jimmy Morales, Catherine Parker and Terry Snipes should take heart.

All The News, Unfit To Print

    The loathsome wash of modern politics has engulfed a 17-year-old kid.

    She's pregnant, normally not a situation worthy of news bulletins rivaling coverage of a Category 3 hurricane. But Bristol Palin's also the daughter of John McCain's running mate. McCain's campaign outed the teenager, apparently to quiet rumors churning through the blogosphere that Sarah Palin's youngest child, born in April, was actually Bristol's. This second pregnancy may humiliate Bristol but it eclipses a major distraction.

   And news editors can now rationalize paying so much attention to an unseemly matter because the girl's unplanned pregnancy lends us "insight" into her mother, someone who happens to be a new actor on the national stage.

   That strikes me as an thin excuse for an exercise in crass titillation. I don't much like Jane Palin immoderate politics -- particularly her disdain for evolution -- but her daughter's deportment is scant evidence of Sarah Palin's character or her faulty family values.  We all know better. We all know upstanding conscientious attentive parents whose teenage children have gone irrationally berserk. We know kids from fine families who've become 17-year-old tattooed skin-head drug peddlers.

    Besides, I doubt Bristol's misadventures in love hardly compare to, say, my own 17th year. I was on my own down in Mississippi in perpetual pursuit of girls and beer and gas money for my 1958 Ford.  I'll say that my behavior would have pretty well disqualified anyone in my extended family from any hope of elective office.

   Maybe we ought to limit media criticism of young Bristol to bloggers who can certified that they spent their 17th year as virgins. The rest of us would be stuck dealing with issues that actually matter.