It's because right now he is helping contribute to a toxic stew of racism, anti-Semitism, and hatred of gays, helped along by the Usual Suspects of the right wing. How much vandalism, murder, and mayhem must we tolerate from these people in the name of "free speech"?

Tonight we have a guest post from regular commenter "skywind", who hails from Naples, Florida. I've written about Naples a few times. In some ways it seems like a moneyed Sun Belt idyll, with beautiful beaches and almost daily sunshine. It's sort of pretty in a soulless kind of way, populated like most of Florida is with gated communities, strip malls, chain restaurants, open-air malls done up like ersatz gardens or downtowns, and car dealerships, If you're retired, or are lucky enough to have a job or your own business, it can be a nice place to live, if you are OK with the climate. If you DO need a job, you are SOL, unless you work in landscaping, hospitality, health care or retail.

Most people who live in Naples have been pretty well blessed by the financial fates. It makes you wonder just why the hell they are so angry. For a peek at the local newspaper is a peek into the belly of the wingnut beast, as "skywind" reports:

This probably won’t make headlines on CNN, and I’m happy about that, because I’m ashamed of my hometown today. Hate is alive and well here, and I’m not much comforted by the fact that the person or persons who attacked Ruth Dorfman used glue and spray paint instead of a gun. Thanks to Jill for letting me write this, because I’m unbelievably saddened and sickened by it.

Ruth is a 64-year-old Jewish woman who relies on an oxygen tank to help her breathe. Her daughter is lesbian, and Ruth has been a vocal member of Naples PFLAG for years. Last Saturday, Ruth wrote a moving guest commentary in the Naples Daily News about the Second Annual PFLAG Interfaith Convocation at Unity of Naples Church. Late Monday or early Tuesday, someone glued a copy of the commentary to her garage door, along with similar articles and comments such as, “Does God hate? Yes…Gays…Jews…Democrats” The sides of Ruth’s garage were spray-painted with swastikas, and her American flag was damaged beyond repair. Upon finding the destruction, Ruth screamed and collapsed onto her driveway.

I challenge anyone to read this story and not see the pattern here. Violence is rising all around us, with guns and spray paint and the “hate talk establishment.”. People are dying. People are being terrorized. And it just keeps on and on and on.

If you can stand it, scroll through the comments at the online version of the story. Yes, there are messages of support for Ms. Dorfman and condemnation of the vandalism, but other comments make me want to cry:

Bear in mind that many of these so-called hate crimes are actually perpetrated by the " victim" as a way for them to gain notoriety and/or sympathy for their causes.

don't ask don't tell. most people don't want to hear about homosexual relationships. keep it to yourselves and stop trying to make everyone like the idea of two men kissing in public. stop trying to teach our kids that its normal. that's what pisses people off.

As far as gays are concerned I say "live and let die".

We don't know if this a hoax. It seems like a phony "hate crime" for attention.
I don't buy it. Some gay jewish guy may have done this.

Geez, don't you people understand? It's all a Democrat plot.

Our county prides itself on being a little piece of paradise. We have great weather, gorgeous beaches, and the highest per capita income in the state. Most of our public schools have superior ratings and our public services (though suffering from statewide cutbacks) are more than adequate to maintain our comfortable standard of living. But underneath all that, we’re heavily Republican, largely conservative and increasingly fundamentalist, courtesy of Ave Maria. The haters are out there, and they are getting louder and more dangerous. We need all the brave voices standing up for diversity, tolerance and peace that we can get. Now, sadly, we may have one less:

“Would this dissuade me? Possibly,” said Dorfman with a hint of sadness in her voice. “Right now I’m very frightened.”

I’m frightened, too, Ruth. And I’m very, very sorry this happened to you.

I am too. Because in Naples, Florida, the terrorists have won.

Labels: American terrorists, gay rights, right-wing hatemongers

If you ever needed to see a microcosm of wingnut policies at work, here you go:

NAPLES — It was a girl.

Doctors removed the dead fetus from Joan Laurel Small on Thursday, a day after her release from the Collier County jail.

The 22-year-old mother cradled baby “Elena Laurel.” Nurses cut a lock of the baby’s hair for a keepsake.

“They cleaned her up and allowed her to hold her,” said Small’s mother, Jennifer Graeber of New Jersey. “The hospital is making her a little remembrance book. They’re putting in a lock of the baby’s hair.”

Graeber said when her daughter arrived at The Birth Place at NCH North Naples Hospital, her blood-pressure had risen and she had a fever.

“That’s the beginning signs of septic shock,” Graeber said of leaving a dead fetus inside a mother.

Because the baby had been left in her womb more than a day, she said, Small could not deliver the baby, but had to undergo a C-section.

[snip]

She’d been held since Dec. 22 after she violated probation by returning home after her nightly 10 p.m. curfew. Small said she’d been attending a parenting class in Naples and couldn’t get a ride home; she has no car. Records show the probation violation involved a 2007 drug charge; an adjudication of guilt was withheld. It’s her only criminal conviction and records show it occurred when she was caught with drugs in the car of her former husband, Ken Enright Small, during a traffic stop; his record includes drug convictions.ock,” Graeber said of leaving a dead fetus inside a mother.

Where the hell does one even START with this? Here's a woman being held in jail on probation for a drug violation that is in itself questionable. On a day when some lunatics in South Carolina are considering prosecuting Michael Phelps based on nothing but a fucking PHOTOGRAPH, perhaps we might at last get some discussion going on the insane "war on drugs" which in Naples, Florida -- a state with more than its share of fetophile lunatic wingnuts -- is now responsible for infanticide. It's all here -- the gap between rich and poor, our appalling criminal justice system, the inherent misogyny in busting this woman for a probation violation BECAUSE SHE WAS LATE COMING HOME FROM A PARENTING CLASS, the double standard of so-called pro-lifers who think nothing of risking the life of a WANTED baby while trying to force women who don't want to carry to term to do so.

As you watch the Republicans behave as if they won the November election, and the Democrats crouching again in a fetal position in the corner, as the economy crashes and burns around us, and as the Joe Scarboroughs and Chris Matthewses of the world decide that a failed presidency makes good copy -- preparing the country for perhaps a Republican triumphant restoration in 2010, go back and read this article about Joan Laurel Small and her dead baby -- and look at what "conservative values" do to those who aren't in their little club.

Labels: casualties of conservative "values", drug war, just another outrage, misogyny

The Naples (Florida) Daily News:

There are different ways to look at the choice for president of the United States.

We can look at the record of Republican John McCain and see there is a long story of duty — from Vietnam through Congress.

We can look at the shorter story of Democrat Barack Obama and see youth’s great potential alongside questions of his early influences and concerns about his approach to spending.

We see the historical contexts, including race and this being the most trying of times — so trying that they may shape the presidency rather than vice versa. We size up the outgoing presidential administration and find both candidates running against it.

In McCain and Obama we have candidates who say they are ready to make a change.

Obama, we believe, is the right candidate for true change, a clean break from the current administration. To be sure, most change has to go through Congress, but the tone is set at the White House.

[snip]

Southwest Florida is accustomed to the role of leader or observer of the American economy. Now we are a part of it and share the pain.

We also share a sense of optimism and a belief in the strength of America’s greatest assets, its people — who now long for something different. It will not be government solving all of our problems and fears through spending and growing and removing liberties. It will be individual Americans making decisions to improve their families and communities and their country, with good government an as ally.

Then we look at the vice presidential nominees. While Senate veteran Joe Biden disappoints those who push Obama for change at every opportunity, McCain chose Sarah Palin to preside a heartbeat away.

A selection made by a maverick?

That, with McCain vowing “a new direction,” was akin to praise for FEMA for a job well done on Hurricane Katrina.

That is our tipping point in this race. Forget what candidates say they will do if elected. The choice for vice president was their first clear indicator of how they will lead.

We can do better.

It is instructive to look back to Sept. 11, 2001. One of our darkest days. But our nation was together and the world was with us.

Now look: Seemingly never-ending wars and energy and health-care policies short of where they need to be. An economy of distrust.

Which brings us back to the various ways of looking at this contest. There are intense, loyal partisans who could never, ever vote for the other party’s candidate. We respect that and thank goodness for presidential elections, this one more so than some others, stirring that passion.

All of them want what’s best for America.

To the undecideds, we say we believe what’s best for America is a president who is bright, can listen, learn from mistakes of the past and lead us toward the change we need to make at home and abroad.

We believe the candidate to do that is Barack Obama.

I don't think I've ever seen the kind of eloquence in newspaper endorsements that I've seen this year, as paper after paper endorses Barack Obama. Sometimes it's grudgingly, as in the Washington Post endorsement. Sometimes it's less an endorsement of Obama than a smackdown of the reprehensible and cynical campaign of John McCain. And sometimes it's a genuine endorsement, sometimes tinged with wonder, as if the editorial board can't quite believe it's actually doing this.

Naples is about as rock-solid Republican a place as you're going to find. It's a moneyed town, with miles of four-lane highways rapidly becoming six-lane higheways, populated by golf course and other gated communities, upscale shopping centers, and luxury car dealerships. Its beachfront is lined with highrise condominiums with 1950's houses being torn down and replaced with McMansions just a few blocks away. The Ritz-Carlton has not one but two properties in Naples. The teachers and municipal workers and the maids, waiters, and pool boys at the luxury hotels can't efford to live there. And the local paper just endorsed the black guy for president.

Awesome.

Labels: Barack Obama, endorsements

Actual letter in the Naples, Florida Daily News, reprinted in its entirety in the name of exposing this sort of crap far and wide so everyone knows what we're up against:

Editor, Daily News:

At last, the Democrats’ charade of selecting a presidential candidate is over. The black won!

I remember the days when the question was can a Catholic win the presidency? This game can go on forever — can a Jew, a Muslim, a homosexual, and so on? All great reasons for choosing a president!

There is no question that the show was perfectly orchestrated. With the unpopularity of the Bush administration affecting the Republican Party, it was a good time to try either a black or a woman for the presidency.

The choice of the woman was easy. Hillary Clinton was there — clever, articulate, ambitious and, thanks to her husband’s indiscretions, with excellent name recognition.

The black was more difficult to choose. Although the Democrat elite pretends to support the American blacks, they couldn’t find a presidential candidate among the 34 million descendents of slaves who have been in this country for over 300 years. Never mind they produced people like Barbara Jordan (for whom I voted), Thomas Sowell or Condoleezza Rice.

So they had to bring out Barack Obama, son of a black Kenyan and one of the many young white American girls who, during the 1960s, had a child from a black man as part of their rebellion against American middle-class values (I personally knew a couple of them).

So Obama has the perfect hippie credentials, and in addition is very eloquent and convincing. He only needed introduction to the public, and Hillary Clinton took good care of it.

Georges Pardo, Naples

Has your head exploded yet? He Who Must Not Be Named should sue for appropriation of the Dirty Fucking Hippies meme. "The black". In the eyes of Mr. Pardo of Naples, Barack Obama isn't even a man, he's "a black." But Mr. Pardo is no racist, no sirree, he actually voted for a black person once.

If you dig down into Mr. Pardo's letter, what you see isn't actually racism, it's fear of a word we have to pull out of the dusty closet in which it belongs -- miscegenation. It's about a white girl, Barack Obama's mother, falling prey to the Oversexed Black Man™. This letter says far more about Mr. Pardo than it does about Barack Obama OR his mother.

Labels: idiocy, racism, sexism

If you were ever tempted to order pizza from Domino's for the fast delivery, maybe this will make you think again:

The 5,000-acre tomato field in southwestern Florida sure doesn't look like heaven. Bulldozers scrape the land flat while clusters of Porta Pottis signal an undeniable earthiness. But soon a massive cathedral will rise from this barren spot. Reaching 100 feet in the air behind a 65-foot crucifix, the Oratory will anchor Ave Maria, a whole new town and Roman Catholic university 30 miles east of Naples. Ground was officially broken last week, and the plan is to build 11,000 homes—likely drawing families who already hold the church at the center of their lives.

For Tom Monaghan, the devout Catholic who founded Domino's Pizza and is now bankrolling most of the initial $400 million cost of the project, Ave Maria is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to spreading his own strict interpretation of Catholicism. Though he says nonbelievers are welcome, Monaghan clearly wants the community to embody his conservative values. He controls all the commercial real estate in town (along with his developing partner, Barron Collier Cos.) and is asking pharmacies not to carry contraceptives. If forced to choose between two otherwise comparable drugstores, Barron Collier would favor the one that honored that request, says its president and CEO, Paul Marinelli. Discussing his life as a millionaire Catholic who puts his money where his faith is, Monaghan says: "I believe all of history is just one big battle between good and evil. I don't want to be on the sidelines."

The ACLU of Florida is worried about how he's playing the game. "It is completely naive to think this first attempt [to restrict access to contraception] will be their last," says executive director Howard Simon. Armed with a 1946 Supreme Court opinion that "ownership [of a town] does not always mean absolute dominion," Simon will be watching Ave Maria for any signs of Monaghan's request's becoming a demand. Planned Parenthood is similarly alarmed. So far, Naples Community Hospital, which plans to open a clinic in Ave Maria Town, says it will not prescribe any birth control to students. Will others be able to get the pill? "For the general public, the answer is probably yes, but not definitely yes," says hospital point man Edgardo Tenreiro. The Florida attorney general's office says the issue of limiting access will likely have to be worked out in court. Barron Collier and Monaghan say they're following Florida law.

And if not, Florida law would be happy to change to accommodate them.

I really don't have a problem with self-contained communities for people who are so offended by the idea of a drugstore carrying contraceptives that they can't even set foot over the threshhold. Religious communities, such as the Amish enclaves that pepper Pennsylvania and the midwest have been part of the American scene for years. If the choice is between forcing the rest of us to live by their rules or having them separate themselves, I'd take the latter in a heartbeat.

And if community rules call for pharmacies within the confines of this community to not carry contraceptives, and people who move there are aware of this, I really don't have a problem with that. But can anyone actually believe that Monaghan is going to be satisfied with that, in an area in which it's a five-minute car ride to any number of pharmacies that presumably WILL carry contraceptives unless Monaghan can stop them?

And is Naples Community Hospital planning to offer contraceptives to NO students, or just those who live in Ave Maria Town? If policies at a clinic housed within a religious community bleed out to the community at large, then the rules of Ave Maria Town really ARE overstepping their bounds.

Because of the inevitable bleed-over between this self-contained and self-described Catholic utopia and the larger community, does anyone actually believe that Monaghan and the ultimate residents and governing boards of this community are going to be content to live and let live outside the gates?

When I want to know what's going on in Florida, or the reaction to Willard Rmoney's pick of The Man Who Would Steal The Rest Of The Social Security Trust Fund And Take Away My Father's Chemotherapy And My Mother's Pulmonologist Don't Kid Yourself That This Is Just For The Under 55 Set, I go to the comments sections of the newspaper sites.

First, some samples from the Naples News. Naples in in Southwest Florida. It's not dominated by seniors the way the east cost is, but it's so wingnutty that liberals tiptoe around the topic of politics at parties, lest fights break out. The word from the local populace:

"This is the beginning of the end of the homosexual takeover of America!"

(Are you sure of that? Paul Ryan IS very dapper and does P90X....

"Lets hope that Connie Mack and Bill Nelson are yesterdays news!! Vote out all incumbents!!"

(You DO know, don't you, that Connie Mack is running AGAINST Bill Nelson, right?)

"Never heard of Paul Ryan but he looks like Anthony Wiener's twin. Perhaps a gambit by Romney to round up the women and perv vote. Who knows? A warning to young men, unless you thrive on nightmares and sexual confusion, avoid the image of Wasserman Schultz."

I feel the republicans made the best choice they could from a very weak group of candidates........What bothers me is Ryan's Career choice before entering politics.......... He took young boys on overnight camping trips for a living...... Let us hope none of the wee laddies snitch him out..... He does have the look of a young beady eyed Jerry Sandusky.......

(The above commenter posts as "ISPEAKFORGOD")

"Romney picks Paul Ryan for VP.

Ryan advocates the end of Medicare as we know it to be replaced with "Coupons" to use at the doctor.

He wants to Privatize Social Security and put that money in the stock market, just when you should be reducing risk.

Ryan wants to lower taxes on the wealthy, raise taxes on the middle class and poor.

His Ryan Plan has been condemned by his own Catholic Church as it relates to the poor.

Even Romney immediately distanced himself from The Ryan Plan.

Ryan is a member of the House of Representatives from Wisconsin. He has never even run in a state election and 54% of the people never heard of him.

Is this the level of expertise we want in the White House?

Romney just shot himself in the foot.

But, hey, it takes the attention away from Romney's lack of transparency and his refusal to release his tax returns.

At least for a few days.

Mitt, enjoy the weekend."

(The above must be one of my father's friends)

"It is believed that Sodomites and Muslims are the two riders of the Pale Horse of the Apocalypse: Death and Hades (Rev. 6:7-9).

Once Sodomites control the West and Muslims control the East (both near completion), these two minions of Satan will turn against each other and conflagrate the earth, bringing the Apocalypse.

Then, the righteous will be taken to their glory in the Kingdom, and the unrighteous will be “cast into the furnace of fire, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 13:42)."

(And that, my friends, is your "***headdesk***" moment of the day.)

Now over to the Palm Beach Sun-Sentinel:

"-Shades of 2008. It is almost classic how similar the situation is! A WEAK republican candidate for president of the United States is in trouble in the polls. He's sinking, and he knows that he cannot do anything about it. He needs a spark- His campaign needs a catalyst. He makes the decision to go radical- He picks an outsider with little experience but a big mouth.....
And we all know how THAT one turned out!
The moment I heard that McCain had picked Sarah Palin as VP candidate in 2008, I knew Barack Obama had won the presidency. And last night when I read that they throught that Romney[Swiss bank accounts] was going to pick Paul Ryan...I instantly knew that it was GAME OVER!
The Democrats and Barack Obama are now going to add one more MAJOR demographic to the pile that they already basically own: Senior citizens. Paul Ryan wants to GUT medicare, and all they have to do is point this out to the public. Since over 90% of seniors vote in EVERY election....this choice for VP is about 50 more nails in the Romney campaign's coffin....."

"WHAT A BEAUTIFUL IS TO RECEIVE THE ADVERTISING BY MAIL EVERY SINGLE DAY AND SEE THE BACKGROUNDS OF ALL THOSE RUNNERS FOR ELECTED POSITIONS....FROM THE LOWERS TO THE HIGHER ARE SPECIAL IN SOME WAYS,THEY SEEM TO BE EGOCENTRICS, THEY ARE THE BEST PEOPLE,THE BEST PARENTS,THE BEST FRIENDS THE BEST HUSBANDS THE BEST IN EVERYTHING,AT THE SAME TIME THEY ATTEND TO EVERY WORSHIP AND THEY ARE DOING THEIR BEST TO MAKE THIS COUNTRY THE BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD.BESIDE THEY NEVER EVER HAVE HAD ANY TROUBLE AT LAW,NO EVEN A TRAFFICS TICKET.ALL OF THEM ASSURED ME THEY ARE MY BEST FRIEND , PALS AND ALL OF THEM PROMISE MY TO DO ALL THE POSSIBLE THINGS FOR A BETTER LIVE FOR ME
NOW I AM THE MOST HAPPY AMERICAN CITIZEN COUNTING ON AL THOSE NEW FRIENDS THAT THE ONLY THING THEY ARE LOOKING FROM MY IS MY VOTE ,IT MAKES MY A VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE.AT LEAST THEY SEND TO ME GREETINGS IN THE VOTING SEASON. I APPRECIATE IT. I THANK TO GOD BECAUSE ALL THE CANDIDATES ARE TELLING ME THE TRUE"

"Republican agenda revealed -
If the presidency is won then the plundering and pillaging of the middle class will continue. Rob from the poor to give to the rich.
If the presidency is lost then John "Boner" (Speaker of the House) will continue on his evil mission to play games and tie up congress so that nothing gets accomplished, and force the American people to vote Republican if they want things to get moving again. But it will just be back to the same old BS that got us in this mess in the first place."

"Rubio wanted to work with dems - wrong move if you are a "Tea Partier" whatever that means"

"to all of those believing that Romney paid no tax.... he I am sure is going to display all of his checks to the IRS he wrote for estimated Federal tax quarterly payments. Just to shut all the liars up. No high figure income earner goes without scrutiny by the IRS.... I am sure he took every possible deduction allowed by law. What is wrong with thst... ???Poor folks get deductions for earned income tax credit, dependents, etc. Many times the IRS actually pays low earners instead of low earners paying taxes."

How indicative this is of how Florida will go in November, I have no idea. Either seniors, near-seniors, or those who figure on living long enough to become seniors someday are dumber than I thought, or else the wingnuts are just more likely to take the internet class at the local library. The Miami Herald has some polling numbers from America's Dick and in a state where Obama should be trouncing Romney by double digits, the numbers aren't all that impressive -- yet. We'll have to see how it looks after William Saletan's orgasm is finished and Mark Halperin gets medical attention and the thrill leaves Chris Matthews' leg and the media that actual people watch start looking more closely at Ryan's actual positions.

Labels: American Idiots, Paul Ryan, What The Fuck Is It With Florida

January 20, 2013
WASHINGTON, DC - President-elect Willard "Mitt" Romney took the oath of office of the Presidency of the United States today under a steel-gray sky. He was sworn in, seemingly heedless of the icy sleet falling around him by Chief Justice John Roberts, who, unlike four years ago, delivered his lines perfectly. Following an abbreviated inauguration ceremony, the Romney family, along with the family of Vice-President Rick Santorum, walked down Pennsylvania Avenue without umbrellas, waving at the sparse crowd that had gathered despite the freezing precipitation to wish the new President well. Like the inauguration of the last Republican President, George W. Bush, twelve years ago, the festivities were clouded by controversy over the new President's whisker-thin 47%-46%-7% victory over former President Barack Obama and Libertarian candidate Ron Paul, with many elderly and minority voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Florida claiming that they were thwarted from voting due to lack of clarity over voter ID laws, lack of working voting machines in their precincts, and machines that they say did not record their votes accurately.



January 21, 2013
WASHINGTON, DC = President Romney lived up to a campaign promise today when he signed five Executive Orders that had been at the forefront of his Presidential campaign.

The first was a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, former President Obama's signature achievement. "I promised to end Obamacare, and now I have," the President said. "Now the magic of the free market is unfettered to provide the best possible care to the best -- er, the most Americans."

Next, the President signed an order directing all Federal agencies to immediately suspend any regulations passed during the Obama Administration and ordered that future budgets contain zero increase in regulatory costs. "The American people are tired of their tax dollars being used to impose burdensome regulation on the businesses that employ them," he said.

The president's next order of business was to order the Department of the Interior to step up the pace of domestic energy drilling, even as Gulf Shore Boulevard residents in Naples, Florida demonstrated at the Naples Pier against drilling off the shores of their beachfront high-rises. "This is NOT what we voted for," one resident said.

The SEIU and AFL-CIO wasted no time in expressing outrage at the President's signing of his order to that reverses orders issued by his predecessor that he claimed tilted the balance of power in labor negotiations to unions. Upon signing the order, President Romney said "Every American should have a right to work in this country and not be fettered by union demands that they join, and the unreasonable demands that large unions have placed on businesses. From now on, individual initiative and merit will be the only thing that matters in American workplaces, not membership in a union." SEIU President Mary Kay Henry said, "Now Americans can see for themselves how this president is committed to nothing but the gutting of the middle class and of the great tradition of organized labor that created that middle class."

Mr. Romney then ordered the new Republican-led House and Senate to fast-track the rest of his economic plan, following which he said, "I made these promises to the American people, and now I have kept them." But absent from his signings today was a pledge to sanction China for practices he had called unfair during the campaign. When asked about this omission, the President said, "We will be looking carefully at China's practices, and if there are holes in our policy, we'll fix them."




February 24, 2013
WASHINGTON, DC - President Romney today signed into law five bills from his "Believe in America" plan, unveiled during his campaign. The legislation was fast-tracked through the House and Senate by newly-appointed Speaker of the House Eric Cantor and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Collectively, the legislation, effective immediately, cuts the corporate income tax to 25%, implements free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, orders an immediate survey of untapped U.S. energy reserves, eliminates federal job retraining programs and creates block grants for states to use as they wish, and perhaps most importantly, orders an immediate 5% reduction in non-security Federal spending. Following the signing, legislators returned to Capitol Hill, where they scrambled into the wee hours to protect their favorite programs.




April 23, 2013
TALLAHASSEE, FL - Governor Rick Scott today announced today a sweeping plan to retrain unemployed workers to work in the state's important agriculture industry, using the state's federal block grant for worker retraining to create an internship program that would put unemployed collee graduates to work picking tomatoes. "The Immokalee tomato workers work hard, and now those who have relied too much on government largesse will learn a new skill and provide much-needed labor to the farmers of the state of Florida, who have suffered too long from a lack of workers to pick their crops." Under the plan, the unemployed would earn the same wages as other workers, which are set by each farm owner following the dissolution last month of the Coalition of Immokalee workers.




May 14, 2013
GRUMBLE, IN - Jeremy Benjamin Walter, Jr., 5, died today at home. A crowd had kept a vigil outside the Walter home ever since the boy, whose family is uninsured, was turned away from Corporate Hospital after suffering a brain hemorrhage. "It's just not right," a weeping neighbor said. "It wasn't his fault his family couldn't pay." The boy's parents, Heather and Jeremy Walker, are both unemployed and are unable to obtain health insurance. Their son was covered under the CHIP program until Governor Mitch Daniels, emboldened by the new Republican rule in Washington, ended the program in February, stating at the time that the state could no longer afford to be in the health insurance business.




September 20, 2013
WASHINGTON, DC - Edith Hollan Jones was confirmed today to fill the vacant seat left on the Supreme Court when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg retired earlier this year for health reasons. Jones is one of the most conservative judges in the country, and her name has been raised by presidents as a potential Justice since the administration of George W. Bush. Justice Jones, who was Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, has high regard in conservative circles as one of the most conservative judges in the country. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee had attempted to block the nomination, but with Republicans as the majority in the Senate, were unable to do so.




November 30, 2014
Krystee Lynn Smith, 28, of Beulah, Mississippi today became the first woman put to death under a new Federal law making abortion a capital crime. Smith was pronounced dead from the lethal injection at 12:46 AM.

Smith had claimed that the five-month fetus she was convicted of murdering was miscarried, but a neighbor, seeing beer bottles outside the Smith home one evening, convinced a jury that Ms. Smith's alcohol consumption contributed to the loss of her baby. Vice-President Rick Santorum spoke out after the execution, saying "Let this unfortunate incident show that we are serious about the sanctity of the unborn. There is no gift greater than that of new life, and we will do whatever is necessary to ensure that every unborn American is treated with the honor and sanctity he or she deserves."

******************
It might not make much difference who's in power, but it does make some.

Labels: America Gone Mad, nightmare scenarios

The balkanization of America has begun. We already have some evangelicals talking about making a separate Christian country out of South Carolina. But if you buy Domino's pizza, you're helping to subsidize a Catholics-only town in Collier County, Florida:

In late March, at the first annual Boston Catholic Men's Conference held at Boston College High School, Monaghan, a major conservative philanthropist, triumphantly told the enthusiastic crowd of more than 2,000 men (including over 80 priests) that construction of Ave Maria University -- the first Catholic university built in 40 ¬years -- was moving forward.

The 240-million-dollar first phase will be centred around the "Oratory of Ave Maria," a 60,000-square-foot church with aluminium and glass arches, and will include the nation's largest crucifix in stained glass with a 60-foot-high bleeding Jesus. The church would become the largest fixed-seating Catholic Church in the nation, with room for more than 3,000 worshipers.

Students enrolled at the new university in southwest Florida would be high quality students, Monaghan said, with higher median SAT test scores than those attending other Catholic institutions. He also pledged that dormitories would be single-sex and that teachers in at least one quarter of the classes will be "wholly orthodox" priests.

Grander news, however, awaited the crowd as Monaghan then launched into a description of a new Catholic-centred town that was under construction alongside the university. While there are no plans to name the town Monaghanville, or MonaghanWorld, it is clear that Monaghan's vision is writ large over the new town, called Ave Maria.

"We're going to control all the commercial real estate, so there's not going to be any pornography sold. We're controlling the cable system. The pharmacies are not going to be able to sell condoms or dispense contraceptives," Monaghan told the crowd.

At the Ave Maria web site, the university and town are described as "a new community of uncompromising quality and boundless opportunity." The site makes no overt reference to the town's religious mission.

The project evidently grew from plans Monaghan began developing in 2002. His Ave Maria Foundation brought the Naples, Florida-based land developer, Barron Collier Companies -- which donated the land for the project -- on board to carry out the construction.

The complex, located less than 30 miles from Naples and the beaches of Collier County, "is a visionary community with a strong commitment to preserving the area's significant environmental resources as well as its rural and agricultural heritage," the web site noted.

The first phase of the project will be "open" in the spring of 2007, and by 2016, the town and the university is projected to have a population of 30,000.

I wonder if they're going to have their own police and fire departments, and their own wells, filled with holy water as well. Are they going to have their own doctors and hospitals, or are they going to use their clout to put pressure on Collier County medical facilities to run in a Catholic manner (read: no abortions, contraceptive prescriptions, and when in doubt, let the mother die)? Somehow I don't think this so-called "town" is going to be self-sufficient enough to not live off the public teat. But it's OK to take pagan, heathen government money, as long as you can live in a bubble that you think is holy.

Skywind, you live in that neck of the woods. Over to you.

I read this morning that the theme for the Republican National Convention is going to be "We Built It" -- flogging a comment by the President that was expressed far less artfully than Elizabeth Warren did while saying the same thing. All of this makes me hope that the theme for the Democratic National Convention is "The Uterus Is Not a Garage Door Opener", and would make me hope for the Goddess to turn Isaac into a nice Cat-3 or 4 hurricane and smite Tampa with it just as some fundie nutball is on the podium speaking derisively how climate change is a myth concocted by left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers, were it not for the fact that such a hurricane would also strike Naples, where my father is going for his first post-chemotherapy lymph node scan next Thursday and then up to New Orleans, where Liberal Dan lives. So scratch that second part.

But rest assured, there will be a whole lot of people who made their money from a government paycheck and K-street campaign dollars up there talking about how business owners are rugged individualists who headed west on foot and in covered wagons, armed only with their rifles and a dream, facing rain, desert, floods, and injuns as they soldiered on with their individual grit and determination, and praising the edifice in which they're sitting,

Oh, wait:

The Republican Party's convention site is creating an awkward reality at odds with the conservative media mythology that is at the center of the convention's theme.

In recent days, Fox News has praised Republicans for adopting "We Built It" as a theme for its upcoming convention. "We Built It" is based on the Fox-fueled distortion of President Obama's remarks tying the success of businesses to "this unbelievable American System" that includes government spending on infrastructure and education.

However, the selection of the Republican convention site actually proves President Obama's point about the role of government assistance. The construction of the Tampa Bay Times Forum was majority financed by the public; the arena is owned by local government; and the Republican convention has received tens of millions in government funds to help with costs and security.   

Republican Convention Site: Publicly Financed, Publicly Owned

Republicans will host their 2012 convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum, an indoor arena that is publicly owned and whose construction was majority financed by the public.

The Forum was built in 1996 by the Tampa Bay Sports Authority, which was created as a public agency in 1965 for the purpose of "planning, developing and maintaining a comprehensive complex of sports and recreational facilities" in the area. According to the Authority's 2011 financial statements, the Forum is actually owned by Hillsborough County, which then leases it back to the Authority. This step was taken specifically to avoid the inclusion of the arena on the county's tax rolls.

Reports on the actual cost of construction are inconsistent, ranging from $139 million to $162 million [Tampa Tribune, 8/17/97, via Nexis]. But the Forum was reportedly majority-financed using more than $80 million in city and county bonds backed in part by taxes, with additional funding from the Tampa Bay Lightning professional hockey team. 

The Tampa Bay Lightning is owned by a small businessman named Jeff Vinik. He's a hedge fund manager. You know, a small business -- just like the mom 'n' pop bagel shop around the corner.

Labels: assholes, double standards, Republican clown car, Republican lies

The McCain campaign is caging Florida voters already:

A new pitch for John McCain's presidential campaign aimed at older Democratic voters is causing complaints by Democrats and concern by elections officials.

The piece, paid for by the Republican National Committee and authorized by McCain, tells voters it is seeking to double-check their "unconfirmed" party affiliations while asking for money. A letter signed by McCain tells the Democrats: "We have you registered as a Republican."

"I was a little bit shocked and a little bit surprised," said recipient Bill Smith, 81, of Tampa, who calls himself a lifelong Democrat and has been registered at his current address since 2000. The retired plant engineer is one of about a dozen senior citizens that Democratic Party leaders identified as recipients, all of them longtime Democrats.

The RNC declined to discuss the mailer, which Democrats said has landed in five counties: Duval, Hillsborough, Collier, Miami-Dade and Escambia.

[snip]

Some Democrats suspect a motive beyond raising money. The first-class GOP mailing has a "Do not forward" instruction on the envelope, meaning they will be returned to the GOP if a recipient has had mail forwarded, perhaps to a summer address, or has moved.

Letters returned as undeliverable can be compiled into "challenge lists" of unverifiable addresses and can be used to challenge voters' eligibility during early voting or on Election Day. The vote suppression technique is known as "vote caging."

"That postcard is a little disconcerting," said letter-recipient Steve Hemping of Naples, chairman of the Collier County Democratic Party and a state party official. "You don't know if they're going to use it to challenge somebody's right to vote."

Of course they're going to use it to challenge somebody's right to vote. I don't know about the other counties, but I do know that Collier County is as Republican as it gets.

Our commenter skywind is from Collier County, and she's going to be helping out Election Protection on Election Day down there. She writes:

If anybody’s looking for a worthy cause to donate to, $31.37 will pay for an hour of hotline time. And if anyone knows any lawyers, paralegals or law students, they need volunteers as well.

The only reason for Republicans to do this is that they now fear they can't win this election fairly. Let's not forget that John McCain wrote in his 2002 book Worth the Fighting For:

"I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I'd had the ambition for a long time."

And he's not going to let a bunch of Florida Democrats stand in his way.

Labels: 2008 election, John McCain, vote suppression

When Luciano Pavarotti, the greatest operatic tenor since Caruso, passed away on the 6th, he did so exactly a decade after attending Princess Di’s own funeral. Unlike most performers, he actually enriched the planet’s culture with his amazing voice and his grand sendoff in Modena, Italy is not the mourning of the mortal theft of a great cultural phenomenon but a celebration of extraordinary achievement.

Pavarotti’s funeral also underscores something to which we ought to pay heed here in the states: A reverence for culture at its very highest level, a reverence that transcends the merely respectful. It is a great European nation’s salute to its own culture.

Whatever your thoughts about the sheer scope and scale of Pavarotti’s funeral and whether or not all of it was necessary and appropriate is not with standing. The point that ought to be brought home is that the Italian government and luminaries from the worlds of entertainment and politics bothered to make a spectacle of Pavarotti’s funeral.

There were acrobatic jets emitting colored trails of smoke from the Italian air force. A brief list of some of the luminaries in attendance: U2’s Bono; Romano Prodi, the premier of Italy; former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Franco Zeffirelli.

Consider Caruso’s achievement in a much shorter life. By the time of his death in 1921, radio and recording technology were still emerging and developing and were hardly available. Yet Caruso’s talent that had to be heard almost exclusively in a live setting secured his place as one of the greatest singers of all time. Devotion and a fine appreciation of the arts alone can account for that. And Caruso’s own funeral in Naples was one normally reserved for royalty or heads of state.

If one goes to Reuters, one will see a strange juxtaposition, news of Pavarotti’s death with other entertainment items. As if Pavarotti’s funeral is on an equal footing, this Reuters blurb also mentions the return of Britney, Madonna’s adopted kids and Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe. And the upshot of this skewed relativism is the fact that Britney or Madonna are never in the news anymore except for their own maternity skills or lack thereof.


Then, as an embarrassing counterpoint, consider Bush’s seemingly endless parade of gaffes at the Sydney Opera House, the venue of some of the most memorable operatic performance of the last two generations and at which the great tenor had sung three times.

George Bush, badly-timed as a debater and public speaker but invariably in perfect tempo with the cruelty of coincidence, displayed not only his personal failings in a bumbling, slurred public address but also our nation's ability to produce someone who claims to have read 87 books this year yet cannot distinguish between Australia and Austria, APEC from OPEC or pronounce Canberra and Kuala Lumpur even with a prepared text before him.

In a way, it would've been sheer, tragic poetry if Australia's Prime Minister John Howard didn't stop Bush from dropping out of site had he continued his exit. The steep drop that Bush would've suffered would've been perfectly emblematic of a nation that prizes corporate profit above all else and allows culture to drop off the edge and into an abyss.

Corporate culture, obviously, is a contradiction in terms. The bottom line is the bottom line and, as I’ve been saying for two or three decades, “the business of business is business.” It’s a vicious, profit-driven culture, for want of a better word, that emphasizes and maximizes profitability and exposure. But we cannot completely blame corporations, conglomerates or George W. Bush’s Republican party for this descent into an artless Hell. Because corporations only feed a demand that is merely shaped rather than created by a political party that would love to completely obliterate Head Start and National Endowment of the Arts grants faithfully funded by Congress. In other words, those of us who do not care to advance the cause of culture have no right to complain about corporations feeding a demand that is provided and driven by us. We are part of the reason for this self-fulfilling prophecy.

No, we cannot blame George W. Bush for the paucity of cultural education, a trend that had begun decades ago and valiantly battled by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Yet George W. Bush and his No Child Left Behind program can certainly be blamed for not only not reversing this trend but exacerbating it. In its incidental, ancillary function (the primary being providing contact information to the DoD’s recruiters in exchange for federal funding), NCLB does indeed stress the three R’s but not the arts upon which two of these rudimentary skills are built.

As a result of decades of such unimaginative bureaucracy, we’ve produced a generation or two of adolescents whose sole cultural contribution to America is in wearing its clothes backwards and having committed to enduring memory the lyrics of thousands of heavy metal and hip hop songs while not being able to perfectly recite a single line by Shakespeare or Keats. Mention Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” and most people under 40 will automatically think of the other, more popular but no less tragic Christina.


Pavarotti’s funeral. Anna Nicole Smith’s funeral. Let’s be honest, folks: Which one got the most feverish press?

I'm not kidding. Because Occupy Wall Street/Portland/Boston/everywhere even the bizarroland that is Naples, Florida is now branching off into other ways of taking back our country from banks and their Congressional shills, perhaps it's time to just trademark the name "Occupy" and start thinking about the many ways the movement is going to work.

One of the most heartening is Occupy Our Homes, which is not only helping people hold onto the homes they have, but also to put homeless families into the boarded-up, decaying properties that are already bank-owned, sitting and rotting both in reality and on bank balance sheets, benefitting no one.

Yesterday on Up With Chris Hayes, Esther Amrah made the point that this country is not suffering from an absence of wealth, it's suffering from the waste of resources -- homes sitting empty, peple sitting idle without work. The panel discussed the meaning and work of Occupy Our Homes:



So I got to thinking.

A few weeks ago, my department at work participated in a project for Habitat for Humanity's "Brush with Kindness" program, helping to rehab a home that had been flooded by Hurricane Irene. We sent teams every day for a week, where we hung sheetrock, spackled, and laid floor tile. Habitat primarily builds new homes for lower and middle-income working families who work in the community but cannot afford market-rate housing. Habitat families put at least 400 hours of sweat equity into their build, and then buy the home using a no-interest mortgage provided by Habitat. These homes remain Habitat homes upon sale; families cannot flip the house at market rate. It's not a "free house" and it's not Section 8. Habitat has been terrifically successful at what it does, and whether it's out of a desire to do community service, or simply to learn how to do something you can use in your own home, volunteering for Habitat can be a really rewarding experience.

What the panel discussed yesterday isn't the Habitat model. Right now it's more like squatting, and it remains to be seen just how long the family portrayed in the video will be allowed to stay. Something tells me that after this property is rehabbed using the sweat of volunteers, Bank of America will try to turn around and sell it right out from under them. So perhaps it's time for Occupy Our Homes to get into the real estate business.

Here's how it would work (and this assumes that Bank of America and other companies holding foreclosed properties would be able to recognize the potential for rehabilitating their reputations and go along with it): Occupy would purchase empty foreclosed homes for pennies on the dollar. Bank of America (or whatever bank) would get a tax break for the difference between the amount owed on the foreclosed mortgage and the token dollar amount for which they sell the house to Occupy. Then Occupy starts working the way Habitat does, rehabbing these houses and either selling them or renting them to homeless families or low-income working people. How the details would work remains to be seen, and Occupy would at some point have to become far more organized and perhaps hierarchical than it is today -- and with far more funding. But I have to believe that getting these properties off the banks' books, reducing or eliminating the amount of rotting housing stock, and the work skills gained by those rehabbing these houses, just might go along way towards ameliorating a number of problems in this country.

Yes, there would be resistance. I ran into it at work while working on the team coordinating our participation in Habitat. "No one gave ME a house!" "I have to pay MY mortgage, if they couldn't do theirs, the hell with them." It's the "I got mine and fuck you" mentality that is keeping the 99% squabbling amongst each other while the 1% takes an ever-increasing piece of the pie.

On my street there's a foreclosed house. It's a cute little thing; a cape with two shed dormers and an attached garage. The photographs accompanying the listing of the realtor the bank hired to sell the property make it look to be in not bad shape for a foreclosed property. Some new carpet or refinished floors, a good powerwashing of the siding, and it would be as good as new. There's just one problem and her name is Irene. She came slamming through here in the fall, and I'm told this cute little property now has water in the basement that no one is addressing because the bank doesn't give a shit. So this once-cute house is now a moldy mess-in-progress. And this is on a nice little street in suburbia. Repeat all over the country. Now what good are these houses doing the banks, other than helping fulfill the conservative dream of a nation of a few billionaires, a government doing their bidding, and the rest of us killing each other for scraps?

Perhaps the banks won't go along with it. Perhaps they'd rather bring down entire neighborhoods with their criminality and their neglect. But if an organization could go in there with a real solution to the problem of toxic assets and and equally real problem of homelessness, at least if the banks refused they'd have nowhere to hide from what they really are.

Labels: housing bubble, ideas, Occupy Wall Street

Here in New Jersey, soon to be known as The Epicenter Of The Most Amazing, Awesome, Terrible, Very Bad Mega-Super-Giganta-Catastrophic-Booming-ZOMG-Holy-Crap-Rainmageddon-Windpocalypse Storm Of All Time, we are trying to get ready for whatever surprises Sandy has in store for next week.

Predictions for our slightly inland area right now are for gale-force winds and 5+ inches of rain. Having foolishly left gasoline in our generator after LAST October's Snowmageddon (which interestingly took place on the same day as this one is expected, we now have to siphon out nearly five gallons of old gasoline from the generator, put new gas in, and then figure out what to do with the old gas. This time we are more knowledgeable, so we have a nice little bottle of Stabil handy for when it happens again. So we will fire up the genny, pray the sump pump works, and hope that the power holds out -- all vain hopes, I know.

The good thing is that I have signed a contract to have some work done in the house anyway, so hopefully if I have to I can throw a few more thousand dollars his way to replace the inevitable wet sheetrock that may occur if the rain is more than about 4-5 inches and the power inevitably goes out and doesn't come back on for days. I had hoped to have him fix the gaping hole at the bottom of the front steps where the ground has settled, but instead I'll have to settle for a bucket of concrete patch and whatever I can do.

Arborist trucks have been out in force yesterday trying to deal with trees close to the streets that are most likely to cause power lines to fall. But in an area dominated by 100+ year old oak trees, anything can happen, including destruction of entire second floors of houses like mine. I pay an arborist a ton of money to keep my oaks trimmed and monitor their health, but I am nervous about them anyway, let alone the tree on the next block that never quite leafed out properly this year and is now covered with green fungus -- the one that if it falls toward the street is likely to bring down power to the entire neighborhood.

We have flashlights, Halloween candy, tuna fish, peanut butter, and bread...and will lay in a few more supplies today and tomorrow. But it's batten down the hatches, folks.

(Meanwhile, in Naples, Florida, in the actual hurricane zone, forecasts for Monday and Tuesday are for sunny weather with highs in the 70s. Cue Pat Robertson talking about left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers.)

Last night, after watching Keith Olbermann report that Bill O'Reilly, who claimed earlier that kidnap victim Shawn Hornbeck must have enjoyed the things that Michael Devlin was doing to him, was going to be appearing at an event for the National Center for Missing Kids in Naples, Florida; followed by the bizarre story of astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak; I was feeling pretty bleak. Sort of like Peter Griffin here:



I said to Mr. Brilliant, "You know what I want? I want to see a story about some guy jumping into a river to save a really cute puppy."

Well, this isn't quite there, but it's close:

Molly has been using her maternal instincts after lambs Lucky and Charm were born with complications on a farm.

Her owner Maria Foster, 38, from Forden, near Welshpool in Powys, said Molly slept with the pair at night, and even protected them from other animals.

Lucky and Charm are recovering and will be placed in a field in about 10 days.

Ms Foster said the pair needed help to improve their circulation soon after they were born.

They were placed in an Aga oven for warmth and after being lifted out Molly took over and started licking them as a ewe would have done.

"The first 12 to 24 hours for a lamb are absolutely crucial and if Molly hadn't been doing what she was doing, I would have had to have been there rubbing the lambs through most of the night to keep their circulation going," said Ms Foster.

"She could have ignored them but she didn't and it is quite comical to see."

Now 11-month-old Molly is like a mother to the two lambs, who stick closely to their unlikely guardian.

(h/t: Changing Places)

Here we go again:

Sure, Ted Ravelo likes Barack Obama. But two hours is a long time to stand in line to vote, especially considering that it's still October. "This has to be remedied," Ravelo, 72, said Wednesday morning, shaking his head, as he gave up on voting early -- at least that day -- at the North Miami Public Library, where a couple of dozen voting machines and their operators were struggling in vain to keep pace with a flood of citizens. "Something has to be done." A line stretched two blocks from the building, as other voters doggedly stood -- or sat on the folding chairs many of them had brought along -- for up to two hours while waiting to cast their ballots.

It may have been a bit too much for Ravelo. He said he'd probably have to give it another shot on Election Day, and that his daughters -- who have to work on Nov. 4, and who sent him to scout out the wait time -- might not get to vote at all. But compared to Monday here, when early voting opened, two hours on Wednesday was a breeze; on the first day, officials and community activists said, the wait was three times that long.

A visit to Florida in the waning days of the 2008 presidential campaign threatens to evoke a certain sense of déjà vu for another late October eight years ago. Once again, polls show the state is deadlocked -- and once again, there's a very real possibility that a lot of people who support the Democratic candidate could have trouble voting.

[snip]

The night before, Tasha Thomas, 26, who works at the University of Miami's veterinary school, had told me she'd been besieged by weird, panicky questions from supporters since she started volunteering at the Obama field office in her Miami neighborhood. People thought they couldn't vote if their voter registration card was starting to fade, or thought they had to go back to the state where they were born to vote, even if they lived in Florida now. "It was eye-opening, how much wrong information so many people have," she said.

Somehow I'm guessing that our Naples contingent will report in that in staunchly Republican Collier County, there are no problems at all.

Labels: vote suppression

The town in which I live isn't quite an example of the suburban sprawl we've seen in recent years, with housing developments springing up ever-farther away from necessary amenities. The housing stock is predominantly post WWII vintage, or at least it was until the bash-and-build McMansion boom of the last five years. But if the automobile were to disappear tomorrow, we would still be within a reasonably biking distance of a strip mall with a supermarket and a thriving downtown area.

What this area lacks, however, is any kind of public transportation infrastructure that doesn't involve going into Manhattan. It also lacks any kind of road structure that would encourage cycling. You ride a bicycle on the main thoroughfares in this area, you are taking your life into your hands. The SUV drivers who insisted they needed these behemoths for everyday use because once a week they have to put soccer gear into them are paying four bucks a gallon for gasoline, and they are angry. They are still trying to terrorize Civic drivers, let alone cyclists.

So if you are going to work in the area, you're going to drive. We are near any number of main highways, which makes even such far-flung areas as Parsippany viable within a one-hour commutation limit -- except who wants to drive thirty miles each way to work, even in a car that gets forty miles to the gallon on the highway, when gasoline is four bucks a gallon and rising as soon as the oil companies get McCain elected?

This forces a change to the viable employer radius, narrowing it significantly in all directions other than east, where there is public transportation to New York City. Of course with the exception of one bus that only runs during rush hour, you need to drive to get to said public transportation -- a drive that is about six miles because the park and ride is on the other side of a major highway. There is a train in the next town, but what parking exists is limited to town residents and there is only one bicycle rack. And it is 2-1/2 miles door-to-door, which for a person less than five feet tall is a 45+ minute walk.

It's worse elsewhere. I have family in the Chapel Hill area of North Carolina and in Naples, Florida, and public transportation in those areas is practically nonexistent. Two-lane roads become four-lane highways, and four-lane highways become six-lane highways. It's Drive or Stay Home. Some newer communities are adopting the "new urbanism" model, or a variant that means "postage-stamp lots" rather than a full complement of services within a reasonable and safe walking or cycling distance. Others, like Southern Village in Chapel Hill, offer a somewhat comprehensive array of retail stores and restaurants, as well as a movie theater and an upscale market. If you live in Ave Maria, a Catholicism-oriented community in Florida built by Domino's Pizza magnate Tom Monaghan, you never even have to leave the gates of your community (and you don't have to worry about those evil sluts trying to avoid the consequences of their sins by using contraceptives either, because the drug store in Ave Maria doesn't sell them). But if you don't live in one of these communities, and you've bought a house in the exurbs, you are shackled to the internal combustion engine for life.

Perhaps now that oil is temporarily under $120/barrel, and gasoline prices have eased to slightly south of the four-dollar mark (though not by as much as a $20 drop in the price of crude would indicate it should), people will adjust to $3.50 gasoline as the new benchmark of "cheap gasoline". But the effects of expensive driving are rippling through the suburban communities that used to represent the American Dream:

Cheap oil, which helped push the American Dream away from the city center, isn't so cheap anymore. As more and more families reconsider their dreams, land-use experts are beginning to ask whether $4-a-gallon gas is enough to change the way Americans have thought for half a century about where they live.

"We've passed that tipping point," U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said.

Since the end of World War II, government policy has funded and encouraged the suburban lifestyle, subsidizing highways while starving mass transit and keeping gas taxes much lower than in some other countries.

Americans couldn't wait to trade in the cramped city apartments of the Kramdens and Ricardos for the lush lawns of the Bradys. Local land-use policies kept housing densities low, pushing development to the periphery of metropolitan regions and forcing families who wanted their dream house to accept long commutes and a lack of any real transportation choices other than getting behind the wheel.

Even the way the government pays for roads and transit is dependent on gas taxes, which is effective only if Americans keep driving.

"There is a whole confluence of government policies -- tax, spending, regulatory and administrative -- that have subsidized sprawl," said Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. A gallon of gasoline costs more than $8 in Britain, Germany, France and Belgium, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Much of the price difference is due to higher taxes.

Federal spending is about 4 to 1 in favor of highways over transit. Today, more than 99 percent of the trips taken by U.S. residents are in cars or some other non-transit vehicle, largely as a result of decades of such unbalanced spending.

The policies -- building so many highways and building so many houses near those highways -- have had a direct bearing on how and where people live and work. More Americans, 52 percent, live in the suburbs than anywhere else. The suburban growth rate exceeded 90 percent in the past decade.

But there's been a radical shift in recent months. Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer highway miles in May than a year earlier. In the Washington area and elsewhere, mass transit ridership is setting records. Last year, transit trips nationwide topped 10.3 billion, a 50-year high.

Increased use of mass transit is an indisputable good, but with so much money still going into roads and highways, such mass transit systems as exist are stretched to the breaking point. A few years ago I saw a documentary at Full Frame Fest about train commutation in India, that showed men hanging onto the outside of the train and riding on the roof. Mass transit in the New York area isn't quite that bad yet, but it's not unusual for rush hour trains to be standing room only, which for a one-hour commute is hardly going to make people paying $300/month think they're getting value for their money.

I'm hoping that I can find a job that's either within fifteen miles of home, or that at least allows for telecommuting a few days a week. At some point, all of us, including corporations, are going to have to change the way we do things. But the kinds of policies that are necessary to deal with the gradual phasing out of the instant gratification that the automobile offers are going to require a New Deal-type federal effort, that incorporates changes to corporate policies, huge investments in mass transit (both public and private) and renewable energy, and housing policy. The exurbs that exist cannot be allowed to turn into weed-choked wastelands, but will need to be connected to more populated areas through a network of bus, train, van, or trolley services. It's going to take a huge amount of money, something we don't have at the moment, because it's all going to companies like Blackwater and Halliburton and U.S. oil companies reaping profits from Iraq. The U.S. has allocated $48 billion for reconstruction in Iraq while little actual reconstruction has taken place and Iraq is poised to see a $79 billion budget surplus this year. $48 billion would be a drop in the bucket for the kinds of changes we need here at home to sustain anything even remotely resembling the life we currently enjoy. But at least it would be a start.

If you're not familiar with this annual bacchanal of bloggy goodness, Skippy explains it for you:

once again, it's time for our yearly celebration of blogroll amnesty day!

readers of this space know that b.a.d. is the holiday wherein we ask everyone in blogtopia (and yes, we coined that phrase) to link to 5 smaller blogs w/less traffic than theirs (no bad jokes about no blogs having less traffic than yours, please).

this way we all can introduce our readers to new voices in blogtopia (and yes, we coined that phrase)' as well as giving greater exposure to blogs which may otherwise go unnoticed.

now, please realize that b.a.d., or "blogroll amnesty day" for short, does not, much like purim, fall on the same date every year. it is more or less dependent on various factors in the yearly cycle, including the number of blue moons in that previous calendar year, the day of the week that chinese new year falls on, how interested we are in lent next month, and when and/or if we remember. usually, tho, the celebration starts on superbowl weekend.

of course, the impetus for this whole ordeal originated w/our dearly departed friend, the legendary jon swift, aka al weisel, who was quite upset by the original blogroll bloodbath and self-amnesty declaration by those big box blogs who shall not be named.

al, in his guise as conservative blogger jon swift, wondered why so-called liberal blogs would have the least liberal blogrolling policies. we here at skippy international joined al/jon in his mock self-righteousness, and thus, five years ago b.a.d. was born!

to begin this year's festivities, we'll let our long-time partner in this endeavor, blue gal, introduce some ground rules:

small and newbie bloggers please be aware of the ironclad rule that you are not allowed to make "hey no blog is as small as mine" jokes regarding blogroll amnesty day. the rule is, straight from the queen of the indy blogs herself (ahem), that you are not allowed to complain or mention your blog's low traffic until you have been posting daily for a year. if you're little, link other blogs that are new or still growing their audience, and encourage them to practice their craft daily. then, show them how.

truthfully. not only is the "there are no blogs smaller than mine" joke unoriginal, it's not funny, and is seriously whiny. unless you have a blog with literally zero traffic, which means that even you don't bother to read it, then you can bet there are blogs with traffic smller than yours. be a mensch. find them. link to them. help each other out.

Now regular readers of this blog know that here at B@B, EVERY day is Blogroll Amnesty Day, as we have two regular, if intermittent features, designed to spotlight our fellow bloggren.

Big Blue Smurf Blogging is a reference to a certain Blog The Background Of Which Is Blue And To Which We Do Not Link. This particular blog, the proprietor of which one day declared himself to have amnesty for purging blogs from his blogroll that he deemed "unworthy", is wont to do things like put up entire posts consisting of nothing but "What Digby Said", and so we honor those who write things we wish we'd said by linking to said posts and excerpting a quote that inspired us to link.

Around the Blogroll and Elsewhere is, I admit, a way of posting on days when I don't have anything interesting to say. But it does give me a chance to do a short perusal of our blogroll and link to things that I think our readers should see.

And then there's the times we peruse the blogroll of others, or look back at the Blogger profiles of people who link to us to see what they're talking about. That's where most of our more recent blogrollees have come from, other than those I pick up over at Paul Krugman's comment section, which gave us Sardonicky and The Wifely Person and Dagblog and Reality Chex, none of which are smaller than we are (except perhaps on days when we are honored with a link from Big Boi Blog Crooks and Liars).

You of course shouldn't miss the blogs of our fellow Breakfasters, like jurassicpork (who doesn't cross post everything over here, so you should take a run over to Welcome Back to Pottersville, even if only to reward JP for his constant vigilance for when I'm too overwhelmed to write, and throw a few shekels his way). And then there's Tata, whom I want to be when I grow up because she is fabulous and witty and a great cook of healthy but delicious foods and manages to be ridiculously cool even though she's a grandmother of two, and despite the name of her blog, has very good impulse control. Bob doesn't post much here, but The Rix Mix is a lyrical compendium of vignettes of life in New Jersey.

Then there are the people we still miss, but since there's no death in cyberspace, we can still read Steve Gilliard and Maya's Granny (whose daughter is still blogging) and the immortal Jon Swift himself.

And there are the people we've known forever, like Elayne, who we've known longer than most of my co-workers have even been alive, and the peripatetic Lynn, whom I've known since birth because she's my sister; and who makes sense of both Triangle area real estate and the universe itself. And I'm waiting eagerly for Trader Joe's in Naples, Florida to open on Friday so Skywind can pick up where I've left off and start blogging at Disciples of Joe.

I know some of you have visited here for the first time this weekend after a detour from C&L. But I hope that you'll join me in celebrating the life of Al Weisel, a.k.a. Jon Swift, who would blogroll anyone who asked him, and support independent media by visiting some of our links.

Labels: bloggers, Blogroll Amnesty Day