The Grimm Truth

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.

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.

Starving The (Schoolhouse) Beast

   Christian Weiss, Charlie Crist's chief economist, terrified Florida educators with a newsletter announcing the the so-called tax swap envisioned by Amendment 5 would likely be a one-way deal. Crist supports a radical cut in school property taxes. But Weiss stated that the governor was "not supportive of increasing sales taxes, either by repealing exemptions, or by raising the rate, even if the revenues are used to lower property taxes."

   It's a nasty little ploy against public school funding. The governor urges voters to vote in favor of Amendment 5, which would slash the schools millage rate in half and eliminate nearly $9 billion in property tax collections earmarked for schools.

If voters endorse amendment in November, then there's no question: that money is gone. The cut is forever memorialized in the Florida Constitution.

Unhappily, the second portion of the amendment, the other half of the swap, is no more than an ambiguous toothless suggestion. The legislature is given a choice whether to raise sales taxes, or close tax exemptions or make cuts elsewhere in the state budget (an unlikely prospect given that Florida's budget has already been massacred.) Except there's no mechanism to actually force the legislature to make that choice.

Crist's budget boy indicated that the guv would not be pushing the lawmakers to use a sales tax to make up the difference. Crist, asked by the Gainesville Sun, refused to say where he thinks state should find the money to make up for the lost school revenues.

The growing suspicion, of course, is that the Republican anti-government leadership has embarked on a very sneaky "starve the beast" strategy: persuading tax payers to a one-way tax swap that will leave Florida's public schools $9 billion poorer. But they're never quite get around to fixing what they broke.

Flying Through the Looking Glass

        A reader named Andy (last name withheld, he said, to avoid humiliating his wife and daughter, has captured that peculiar sense, experienced by so many travelers passing through Miami International Airport, of traversing Lewis Carroll's looking glass. Andy writes:

I'm sitting here at the Miami airport, after having endured hell to get to my gate, which is about five miles away from where I entered the airport.  Here's my question:
      
        Isn't it a fact that MIA doesn't really need all of this expansion and the headaches that go along with it?  When I got to the airport, before I arrived at the security section for Concourse D, I walked through a long corridor containing nothing but charming artwork from the local public schools, plus pictures of what I guess Miami looked like a hundred years ago.  Why is all of that empty space necessary for an airport?
      
        It seems to me that a lot of the expansion continues because developers, in exchange for their campaign contributions and perhaps free tickets to sporting events and maybe even free condos, have been promised by Dade County commissioners that they will get all sorts of profitable contracts to build things at MIA that don't need to be built.  They'll get their development fees up front, and stuff may ultimately be built, or it may not.  It doesn't matter.  The point I think is to get the money to the developers to whom return favors are owed.  Meanwhile, the consumers who use the airport have to suffer through everything.
      
        Why can't we all acknowledge that these payoffs are due, and simply use the least amount of dollars necessary to make the payoffs?  My example would be, let's say that Commissioner A owes Developer A a favor because Developer A made a substantial contribution to Commissioner A's successful campaign.  Commissioner A, instead of saying that we need a new concourse at MIA that can only be built by Developer A, should be honest and say, "I need a hundred grand of county money to pay back Developer A, without whose help I wouldn't be sitting here today."  It's approved, and as a result the county spends a hundred grand.
      
        A travesty?  Sure it is, but it's a helluva lot better than going on the hook for a million dollars contract, of which the developer will still only make a profit of a hundred grand, and building or half building something that doesn't need to be built, and that will at best result in cost overruns and at worst will create tons of aggravation for the public.
      
        Am I missing something here?

Carmen To The Rescue?

Think of Carmen Electra as the true measure of the state of gambling in South Florida.

If Carmen's our big celeb, well, we ain't Vegas.

Florida's big surge in gambling was sold as the impetus for hoards of new tourists to descend on South Florida, anxious to lose their shirts and provide mighty gobs of cash for the state's beleaguered schools. Just like the Florida lottery. Well. Strike that last statement.

Gaming experts always found that strategy slightly dubious, given that so many other states, and other nations, have been scurrying to open their own casinos and racinos, expecting that same flood of tourists to crowd into their gambling dens. The question lingering over Broward County's new slot casinos has always been: Who's going to travel thousands of miles to Florida to play the same slots they can play back home?

The much ballyhooed introduction of blackjack tables at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino might offer a sobering reminder that, well, we're not yet a bigtime gambling destination.

When the bigtime celebrity is Carmen Electra, the fading sex kitten of the 1990s, it's not a good sign. The Hard Rock blackjack crowd also featured the ex-guitarists for a middling rock band, a couple supporting actors from the discontinued HBO series, The Sopranos, long retired football star Bernie Kosar, Greg (not to be confused with his brother) Gumbel. At least Greg, a TV sportscaster, is still employed.

As a group, they brought a sobering message to South Florida. We ain't Vegas.

The Phantoms on the Pacific

The phantom derricks rise out of the hazy distance on Santa Barbara Bay like seven war monuments. On January 29, 1969, one of those offshore rigs seven miles out ruptured like the heart valve of an old smoker and sent 200,000 gallons of thick crude oil spewing into the water. Beaches along the middle reaches of California were fouled black, thousands of dolphins, seals, fish and sea birds were killed. And the modern environmental movement came marching out of that black sludge. The first Earth Day was spawned in the angry reaction to the Santa Barbara catastrophe.

Last week, standing on Santa Barbara Beach, I realized those dormant oil wells were at the heart of the reaction back in Florida after presidential nominee John McCain and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced that they now supported relaxing Florida's ban on drilling in coastal waters. The ban evolved from the 1969 California disaster and the terrible fear what a spill like that would do to Florida's beaches.

Drilling technology has improved over the last four decades. Offshore rigs have withstood hurricanes without a major breach. But Santa Barbara residents told me that allowing drilling to resume, ever, would be unthinkable. Before this presidential campaign, before $4-a-gallon gas became a campaign issue, I thought the same was true in Florida.

The Neglect of the Mentally Ill Has Many Victims

Maybe we've been framing the argument the wrong way. The media has presented society's neglect and general disregard of the plight of the mentally ill as as something quite devastating for those pathetic, lost souls wandering through our city streets in constant conversation with the voices in their head.

We appealed to society's better angels. The mentally ill, many of them homeless or nearly so, were pitiable victims of our neglect. A broken promise. When the U.S. began downsizing state mental hospitals in the 1950s, eliminating three-fourths of their occupants, turning out 560,000 patients by 1977, the promise was that they would be looked after in community treatment centers, most of them as out-patients. They would be beneficiaries of the new, stabilizing drugs that would enable most mentally ill patients to function as normal citizens.

We broke that promise. Out-patient treatment has never been fully funded. And the problem with the theory of normal functions was the occasional tendency of the mentally ill, once they've been stabilized by their regime of drugs (which often have unpleasant side effects), they figure, "Hey. I'm normal. I don't need these pills."

They wonder the streets, confused and pathetic, walking symbols of societal neglect. And often the easy target of criminals.

There's another price paid for this negligence. Not one the press has pursued with much enthusiasm. On June 10, a 25-year-old man with a long criminal record was arrested for the rape of a 20-year-old woman in Fort Lauderdale. George Pierre was charged with armed sexual battery, false imprisonment, armed burglary with a battery, aggravated assault and giving a false name to officers.

Pierre's arrest record reaches back a dozen years. He was already wanted for a parole violation. But the problem was that Pierre is mentally ill. The most serious charge against him, a drug trafficking rap, had been dropped when a judge found him mentally incompetent.

Pierre was in a legal netherworld. Clearly, he belonged in a secure institution. But he could not be confined unless he was a clear and immediate danger to himself and others. He was a danger to others. But it was the nebulous  "immediate" requirement that kept him on the streets. That and our insane failure to provide aggressive treatment programs for the mentally ill.

The tragedy of neglect isn't just about the mentally ill. Studies in Britain and Sweden attributed about  five percent of violent crimes to the mentally ill. A U.S. study found the mentally ill commit about 1,000 murders a year. While the mentally ill are 2.5 times more likely than other segments of society to be the victims of violent crimes, the small percentage of crimes they commit have real victims.

The life of a 20-year-old woman in Fort Lauderdale was violently altered. She too is a victim of our shameful disregard.

Poetic Justice: Let Marco Do The Cutting

The Miami-Dade School Board, reduced to unseemly squabbling over the brutal $284 million in budget reductions, are in obvious need of an arbitrator. And the perfect candidate lives just across town.

The school board turned particularly acrimonious over the last $33 million cut, which would eliminate 516 jobs and some of the board members' favorite programs. Board members, teachers, parents are howling. At this point, in the already emaciated budget, any cut is just too unbearable to one constituency or another.

So bring in Marco.

Florida Speaker of the House Marco Rubio, the father of the legislature's no-tax, budget savaging tsunami, should drop by and show the school board a way out of the impasse. It's his mess. He oversaw a budget process that finished up the session by allocating more than $300 million for new prisons while cutting another $300 million from the schools. Which brought the total reduction for education to $2.3 billion. Which meant education took more than half the hits in the legislature's $4 billion reduction frenzy.

Obviously, Marco and the gang in Tallahassee, were aware of the mandate in the Florida Constitution:  "The education of children is a fundamental value of the people of the State of Florida. It is, therefore, a paramount duty of the state to make adequate provision for the education of all children residing within its borders. Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education and for the establishment, maintenance, and operation of institutions of higher learning and other public education programs that the needs of the people may require."

I'm sure the school board would like to hear Rubio explain how an education allocation fulfills that mandate while cementing Florida's place at the bottom among all states in per student education funding. (Particularly how private school voucher funding meets the criteria for "high quality system of free public schools.)

Rubio can demonstrate a little leadership, explaining which teachers, which education programs aren't worth funding. Which students aren't worth the trouble. Which district workers should get the boot. He should do it, like the board is forced to deal with these matters - in front of the very effected teachers, workers, students, parents, all of them raging, or crying, in the school board meeting room.

Rubio, once he makes that last $33 million disappear from his hometown's schools budget, could travel the state offering his services. Because nearly every school board is facing the same anger and heartbreak. In the last week, boards across the state have been laying off teachers, jettisoning aids, eliminating school cops, summer school, coaches, field trips, school bus drivers, reading specialists.

School boards are catching hell. They could all use his expertise. Let Marco face down the parents and teachers and students and workers who want the board members' heads. He can explain to the angry crowds across the state how dessicated public schools are a good thing for Florida's future.