Intelligent Falling

Via Talking Points Memo today, there is this:

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity with New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

One Eye on Cape Verde

It's way too early to be meaningful, perhaps, but Gulf state residents may want to keep one eye on a new Atlantic storm coming off the Cape Verde islands. Sunday's NHC report is brief:

STRONG TROPICAL WAVE...ACOMPANIED BY A LARGE AREA OF CLOUDINESS AND THUNDERSTORMS...IS PASSING JUST SOUTH OF THE CAPE VERDE ISLANDS. THIS SYSTEM HAS THE POTENTIAL FOR SOME DEVELOPMENT DURING THE NEXT DAY OR TWO...AS IT MOVES GENERALLY WESTWARD OVER THE TROPICAL ATLANTIC.

September Song

Joe Scarborough says no to running for U.S. Senate. The interesting question is -- to whom did he say it? According to the Associated Press, "The National Republican Senatorial Committee, led by Sen. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, tried to talk Scarborough into challenging Harris."

It's impossible to believe Dole was trying to recruit Scarborough without the explicit encouragement of the White House. After all that she did for George Bush in 2000, Harris has to be furious -- and frightened, too.

There's no reason to suppose the White House or Senator Dole will stop wooing another candidate to oppose her. Indeed, Scarborough himself thinks so. As the Pensacola News Journal reports, "Scarborough anticipates that as the Senate race draws nearer, efforts to field another Republican candidate will intensify." {emphasis added]

May 12, 2006 is the last day for other candidates to qualify to run in the primary. The primary election itself is still over a year away.

That's a very long time in politics.

Oh, it's a long, long while from May now to December.
But the days grow short when you reach September.
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
One hasn't got time for the waiting game

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I'll spend with you
These precious days I'll spend with you

.

Shorter Wolcott

Sexism and Snobbish Classism fester in the minds of Cindy Sheehan's slimers.

Read more.

Quote of the Week

"The corporate model is to drag this on and wear people out. They're probably making tens of millions doing that. They're just flouting the law. They're in the business of making money, not taking care of people."

-- Matt Schultz, Insurance Coordinator for Levin Papantonio Law Firm

Duwayne Escobedo's cover story in this week's Independent News has an update on the Insurance industry's long stall over paying local property damage claims from hurricanes Ivan and Dennis:

Unfortunately, since the Independent News first reported on brewing insurance disasters Sept. 29, for many local citizens with totally destroyed homes the nightmare has not ended. They're still in limbo as insurance companies delay settling their claims despite state law and a major court ruling, Mierzwa vs. the Florida Underwriting Association, which require payment for the full policy amount.

Along the way he reports that, "the Florida Office of Insurance Regulations estimates all but about 50,000 claims have been settled out of nearly 1.7 million from the four hurricanes to devastate Florida in 2004."

"Estimates"? "...the Florida Office of Insurance Regulations estimates?

Eleven months after Hurricane Ivan, and Florida state insurance regulators still can't say with any precision how many claims remain unpaid?

Of course not. For months, the insurance industry and state regulators have been patting each other on the back in public press releases about how hard they've been working and how many claims they've closed. But the numbers have always been suspect. Last December, state Chief Financial Director Tom Gallagher admitted "a lot of these 'closed' cases are going to get opened again."

Read the rest in this week's Independent News.

Here, There, and About

Joe Scarborough admits he's thinking about running for the seat currently held by U.S. Senator Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), according to Leslie Conn of the News Journal.

More than that, a national AP dispatch reports that Scarborough "has already talked with Sen. Elizabeth Dole, who heads the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and plans to meet with Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and White House officials next week about whether to get into the race to unseat Democrat Bill Nelson."

Doesn't it seem unlikely Scarborough would be calling on the three most important power brokers for the 2006 Republican primary election cycle just to discuss his cable TV contract?

* * *
Some blog calling itself Betty the Crow News has the early lead for funniest line about the Florida Senate race:

BTC News has no preference for either Harris or Scarborough, but we would greatly enjoy watching their primary battle and so we will encourage Scarborough to run. Run, Joe, run.

Suggested campaign ad for Harris: "Katherine Harris has proven she’ll do anything to win. Joe Scarborough has proven he’ll quit even if he does win."

* * *
Even before the final totals are known, Hurricane Ivan has settled in as the third most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history, according to the National Flood Insurance Program. Only Hurricane Andrew ($21.1 billion) and the World Series earthquake of 1994 ($15.9) exceed Ivan's costs. For now, however, the exact final total for Ivan remains unknown:

Claire Wilkinson, vice president of global affairs for the Insurance Information Institute in New York, said Ivan's total destruction likely comes with a price tag closer to $12 billion to $14 billion.

"We usually figure that about 50 to 60 percent of damages are insured," she said.

What she might have added, locals are probably saying to themselves, is that of all the insured damages, too many insurance companies routinely offer to pay only half.

* * *
Speaking of storm recovery efforts, wet-dry ballots are being mailed to Santa Rosa County voters today. They should be returned by mail or in person by 5 p.m. September 6.

This is the first time Northwest Florida voters have been offered the chance to vote by mail -- one of the only benefits from Hurricane Ivan. Chuck Pohlmann, who spearheaded the petition to put the issue to a mail-in vote, argued successfully that a mail-in ballot was needed because so many voters have been displaced by Ivan and now use mail boxes.

We'll toast to that -- and hope mail-in voting becomes routine, as it now is in Oregon.

Scarborough Clownery

"[T]his is the problem with punditry, that an uninformed opinion has exactly the same power as evidence."

-- Eric Alterman, U.S. Comedy Arts Festival 2005 ("Industry Seminar: Wag The Debate – What’s the Future of The Pundity?") Feb. 12, 2005 (p. 41)(pdf format).

An Associated Press report rounding the nation is that Republicans are asking former Pensacola congressman and current cable TV pundit Joe Scarborough to run next year against U.S. Senator Bill Nelson. The White House and party poobahs, as the Washington Post has reported, are worried that the only announced G.O.P. candidate for the GOP nomination, Katherine Harris, has negatives that top off all Florida politicians' leaderboards.

Local reporter Lesley Conn ferrets out one small fact in the Pensacola News Journal that no one else seems to have noticed:

"Another issue to resolve: 'Scarborough Country,' the 2½-year-old MSNBC talk show that Scarborough hosts from Pensacola. His contract ends in March ... ."

If he were to run, Scarborough undoubtedly would have the full-throated, rich-fisted backing of the White House and GOP campaign donors. The mere possibility will persuade a lot of Harris' potential campaign contributors to sit on their wallets for awhile.

Meanwhile, Scarborough also can parlay all the political talk into a hefty increase in his renewed MSNBC contract -- if he wants to do so. Struggling against its farther-to-the-right competitor, MSNBC can hardly afford right now to lose a popular show like "Scarborough Country."

Two other elements may be at work. For one thing, Harris greatly embarrassed herself the other night on one of Fox Cable News' screaming heads programs by adopting -- let's be discrete, here -- a grotesquely unnatural and openly flirtatious posture for Sean Hannity and and fake-liberal Alan Colmes. The episode was so bizarre that state Republicans must be wondering what kind of a mental midget they've sent to Washington and why in the world they would want to keep her there.

News Hounds ("We watch Fox so you don't have to") headlined the story 'Katherine Harris Shakes Her Boobies'. You can see the video yourself on Crooks and Liars.

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show drew huge guffaws from the audience just by showing the clip, raising a single eyebrow, and mentioning that Harris and "her two running mates" were interviewed. Even the gossipy Wonkette -- who is no enemy of D.C. Republicans -- had something snarky to say.

For a second thing, there are some faint signs that Scarborough may be feeling a little soiled after working the Cable TV circuit the past few years. Last February, he chaired a panel discussion for American Progress.org. To be sure, the conference was titled "The U.S. Comedy Arts Festival" and the inspiration was the Peabody award-winning Daily Show. But the panel debate was a fairly serious one.

The panel was discussing "What's The Future of the Pundity"? A transcript is available here.

Maybe it was the Aspen air, maybe it was all the Democrats he had to sit with at the table, but reading between the lines it's obvious that Scarborough was weighted with misgivings about the value of what he presently does for a living. Here are just a few suggestive lines that pop out on first reading:

• "When MSNBC first hired me, [my wife] said, “Don’t be a clown, I want you to be Tim Russert.” (p. 9)


• "What a lot of pundits always ask themselves is, is anybody listening, is anybody watching." (p. 11)


• "I don’t think progressives watch cable news as much as – you know, I had somebody from Fox News tell me one time when I started my show – they said, 'We really don’t care what happens east of the Hudson or west of Las Vegas. We’re going for red state America, and that’s how we’re going to build this into the top show.' And I’ll be darned if, four years later, that formula didn’t work. So I think again that’s what the focus has been. And maybe some of the more progressive pundits wouldn’t play as well with the people that turn on cable news as much. I don’t think they’re watching O’Reilly on the Upper West Side, as much as they are in Kansas City." (p. 33)


• "[P]eople watch Fox News, but then when the tsunami hits, CNN’s numbers go through the roof. On the State of the Union, a lot of people turn to Matthews. I mean, people are smart enough to figure out what they’re going to get when they go to Fox News." (pp. 32-33)


• "I think... if I say something stupid – it used to be a couple years ago, if I said something stupid, which is every night, my wife would meet me at the back door and just shake her head and go to bed." (p. 33)


• "[I]s nuance going to move to the cable audience? Because we’re talking about the cable audience. Forgetting about what’s happening on PBS, forgetting about what’s happening in the New York Times. Are you talking about is that sort of nuanced debate going to take over cable news or move to talk radio?(p. 34)

At times, one supposes, everyone must be assailed by doubts about the worth of what he or she is doing. Nearly everyone, too, at least considers a career change from time to time. Joe Scarborough certainly has. He's been a musician, a lawyer, a congressman, and a Cable TV pundit, among other things.

The question of the day now is, do you think he's sick enough about what he has been doing to reenter the political arena? Or, would a fat new contract with MSNBC keep him happy as a clown?

Herding Bees

It's the dog days of summer when news that's worthy of the name is hard to come by, unless you're sitting in a ditch in Crawford, Texas, while pro-war yahoos run their pick-ups over memorial crosses to the fallen.

And, yet... and yet... The world always offers enlightenment if we would just open our eyes wide enough. If we don't, the Miami Herald will force it on us.

Take the tribulations of Florida's bee population, for example. At least twice so far this month the Herald has sung the woes of Florida's beekeeper population and their miniature charges. In identical articles.

Check it out (registration is free) here on August 1 and here again on August 16.

Herald editors must feel the duplicate coverage is warranted because bees, today, are facing a range of trials that would intimidate Job himself. Deja vu times two.

Among the challenges --

• Flat-lining honey prices


• Slumping pollination service fees


• Aggressive competition from Chinese bee sweatshops


• Rising gas prices


• Escalating bee health insurance costs


• Pestilent hive bettles


• Blood-sucking Varroa mites


• American foulbrood bacteria


• Summer heat


• Summer rains

Why, the sad state of contemporary bee life in Florida is almost a microcosm of the entire Florida economy -- except for the blood-sucking part. No, we have that, too.

But, for bees, the most inexcusable threat of all? Human stupidity:

"Vandalism also plagues apiaries. Fueled by fear and curiosity, troublemakers shoot or knock over Del Signore's hives to see what will happen when the bees get agitated. "They eat food that depends on bees, then they go out and destroy the bees that are vital to their food source," Del Signore said. "It's dumb."

On second thought, maybe life in a Crawford ditch is a lot like the challenges facing bees. Dumb vandals can be found everywhere.

Lifeguarding the Beach

The rival perspectives of two prominent Pensacola publications continue to confound and confuse readers. Both visited the beach recently.

One found unhappy lifeguards eager to blow the whistle on inadequate training by the Santa Rosa Island Authority government. The other reports more lifeguards on duty than ever before, increased saves, zero drownings, and a crew so happy they cheerfully re-built their own lifeguard towers "even though they had no background in carpentry [and] they worked 10-hour days to rebuild the wooden structures."

The widely-read but often gossipy "Buzz" column of the Independent News (formally known as the Independent Florida Sun) in its August 11 issue reports that as many as half of all Pensacola Beach lifeguards have not been trained in CPR.

Lifeguards are blowing the whistle, not on beachgoers, but on Santa Rosa Island's Water Supervisor David Greenwood and Public Safety Director Bob West.

They claim the officials, despite American Red Cross rules and state laws, are allowing up to half of the barrier islands lifeguards to watch ocean-goers, even though they do not have the proper CPR certification.

It appears the weekly newspaper has at least two confidential sources among the lifeguard staff. One of them "claims many of the lifeguards lack training on medical equipment." The newspaper says he (or she) is afraid of being fired for talking about it.

Two weeks earlier, Fredie Carmichael of the Pensacola News Journal provided a more comforting story. He reported that an all-time high of 34 staff lifeguards at Pensacola Beach have broken all records for lives saved this year:

While there have been no drownings along the 8.5 miles of Santa Rosa Island Authority-controlled beach in nearly two years, the 607 rescues are up from 374 rescues all of last year, said Dave Greenwood, water safety supervisor for Pensacola Beach."

Recent storms have made conditions trickier than usual, with shifting sand bars, deep drop-offs, and stronger rip currents. No one wants to talk about it, but locals also report there's still a lot of hurricane debris beneath the waves.

So, what's the truth? Are Pensacola Beach lifeguards more numerous and better skilled than ever, or has the era of life-saving improvements at Pensacola Beach come to an end?

And, while we're asking questions, do you think those lifeguards working "10-hour days" got paid time and a half?

Crazy George's Land Grab?

Lesley Conn today files a superb, informative, detailed, and deftly written article covering all the complications facing federal and state officials as they ponder what to do about repeated hurricane destruction of public roads leading to Ft. Pickens and Opal Beach.

The issue is difficult because it pits man's material desires against nature's inevitability. Conn's front-page article examines alternative solutions -- all of them decidedly "short term" on a geological time scale. It's a long article but definitely worth a thorough read. Buy the paper or read it on the web before it disappears behind Gannett's lame screen charging money for archived articles.

After the jump, there is this highly revealing passage which you shouldn't miss (italics added):

Creating a man-made berm system directly contradicts National Park Service management policy. It also contradicts the federal legislation that created the park, which states that the government's mission is to "preserve and protect to the greatest extent possible the natural systems and the forces that shape them."

[Park Superintendent] Eubanks, a former road engineer, understands the concerns, which [County Administrator George] Touart has voiced to him personally.

"I've told him from a road-building standpoint, you're preaching to the choir," Eubanks said. "But there's a bigger picture. As far as an environmental standpoint, a big berm would be disastrous to the ecology of the island."

Touart considers the park so vital to county interests he is beginning to share what he calls "one of his crazy George ideas."

If the National Park Service decides not to rebuild to Fort Pickens, Touart wants to move the entrance gate very near the historic buildings at the west end of the island. The miles of beach and road leading up to the gate would be turned over to the county, which would renourish the beach and maintain the road.

"Crazy George," indeed. What Touart is suggesting, of course, is to shrink Ft. Pickens Park and turn most of it over to Escambia County.

From the date county commissioner Tom Banjanin originally mentioned him for county administrator, many have suspicioned that Touart was just a stalking horse for the same real estate developers who, 35 years ago, opposed creation of the Gulf Island National Seashore. You can be sure that if Touart were to get his way, we'd have wall-to-wall condos running the length of Santa Rosa Island, right up to the ancient walls of Fort Pickens.

Just to protect the road, you know.

Feeding the Tin Hats

Blogger Quote of the Week

from Abramoff Goes Down in Flames

"The thing I hate fourth-worst about the Bush regime -- after the way they're screwing up the country, dishonoring the flag, and making the world a more dangerous place -- is all the ammunition they supply the tin-hat brigade. How am I supposed to convince my students not to believe in elaborate wicked conspiracies when we've got an elaborate wicked conspiracy running the damned country?"

-- Prof. Mark A.R. Kleiman

Pensacola Shark Alert

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that Scott Sullivan, former CFO for the former Worldcom, now known as MCI, may be serving his five year federal sentence at a minimum security facility in Pensacola.

Sullivan participated in an $11 billion corporate fraud that led to the largest bankruptcy in history. After cooperating with prosecutors to put Bernie Ebbers away, Sullivan pleaded guilty himself and was sentenced this week.

At the request of Sullivan's lawyer, Irvin Nathan, [Judge Barbara] Jones said she would ask the Bureau of Prisons to place Sullivan in a minimum-security facility in Pensacola, Fla., near his home.

What "home" could that be? Not Boca Raton, which a former SEC chief has called "the only coastal town in Florida where there are more sharks on land than in the water," according to Forbes Magazine.

Sullivan originally tried to stuff his other people's money safely away in a multi-million dollar mansion there. But he recently sold the house and his lawyer now says Sullivan owns nothing.

So, now Boca Raton gets the rich sharks and Pensacola gets the poor ones. Life in the Florida panhandle just ain't fair.

Where's Karl?

Elisabeth Bumiller, the New York Times' White House lapdog, wrote another puff-piece yesterday gushing over vacation plans for Mr. Bush' aides.

Included was this tantalizing tidbit about a leading suspect in the growing Treasongate Affair:

"Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, headed for his house in the Florida Panhandle.

No hurricane debris cleanup for Karl, though. His house is located at Rosemary Beach.

Charge $$ for Hurricane Forecast?

At one point, a freshman Republican Member of Commerce was asked how we would know whether hurricanes or tornadoes were about to hit if we did away with the weather bureau. He replied that we could just watch the Weather Channel - which, of course, depends on the National Weather Service for its own information.

-- Congressman John Dingell, News Hour, Sept. 27, 1996

Speaking of science versus ideology, as we were quite recently , Tom Zucco of the St. Petersburg Times today asks, "Will Bill Darken Weather Sites?"

He is referring to Senate Bill S-786, titled the National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005. This proposed legislation was introduced last April by ultra-conservative Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA).

Santorum is famous -- or infamous, take your pick -- for ostentatiously praying at Terri Schaivo's bedside and flip-flopping the other day on Darwinian evolution. Many regard him as the kind of politician who will go anywhere and say anything to get reelected.

Santorum's newly proposed law would effectively deny Floridians, and the public at large, free access to tropical weather data, graphics, and long term forecasts. The net effect is you would have to pay a commercial service for the kind of weather forecast information you now get for free. The National Weather Service's public web site would be shuttered:

Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., the Senate's third-ranking Republican * * * has said the bill's intention is to keep NOAA [the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Adminstration] from competing with private companies. The main task of the weather service, he said, is to provide public alerts for emergency conditions such as tornadoes and severe weather, which the bill would require the agency to continue.

But critics say the bill would force NOAA to disseminate much of its data, which is collected at taxpayer expense, only to private companies. The result, they say, would be that the government's ad-free Web sites would go dark.

As proof, they point to a key sentence in the bill involving the cabinet post that oversees NOAA:

"The Secretary of Commerce shall not provide, or assist other entities in providing, a product or service that is or could be provided by the private sector."

That, say opponents of the bill, is akin to telling the U.S. Postal Service that Federal Express and UPS would have exclusive use of all the government's package delivery equipment, and that the post office could only deliver packages if it didn't interfere with the private companies.

The St. Petersburg Times bitterly editorialized against Santorum's bill two months ago. There, it was revealed that a commercial weather service bribed paid Santorum "thousands" before he introduced the bill.

AccuWeather is the Pennsylvania-based company that gave Santorum a $2,000 campaign contribution two days before he filed the bill (and thousands more before that). The company's mission statement: "To save lives, protect property, and help people to prosper, while expanding AccuWeather as a healthy and profitable business." Apparently it only wants to save the lives of those who can pay for its services, while building profit at taxpayer expense.

Americans already support the weather service with hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year. And guess where AccuWeather gets most of its data? Yes, from the weather service. So Santorum would have us pay twice for the information we need to save our property and maybe our lives.

Santorum's bill is written so broadly that it might shut down the weather service's Web site, which logged 9-billion hits last year when four hurricanes struck Florida in six weeks. He would even prohibit government weather experts from granting interviews that involve "weather data, information, guidance, forecast or warning to the public" if it would diminish the "market value" of any business.

Such restrictions were too much for the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, which warned that the bill could deny private pilots the weather information they need for safe operation. Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida is fighting the bill, too. In a letter to President Bush, Nelson warned that the bill would "restrict the public's right to access government information."

Unless we buy it, of course. The sanctimonious Santorum has no problem asking government to snoop in your bedroom or medicine chest if he gets a whiff of behavior that offends his moral superiority. Yet he turns up his nose at government fulfilling a clear moral obligation to help the public protect itself from inclement weather.

Santorum is in a tight re-election contest, so he needs all the campaign contributions he can connive to get. He should look elsewhere, however. This bill deserves the fate of a pile of wastepaper in a Category 5 hurricane.

Today's news, as reported by Zucco, is that Santorum's bill may be brought to a vote as early as September. "The bill," he writes, "did not get a hearing before the summer recess, but it is still pending before the Senate Commerce Committee and may find its way to the floor of the Senate after Congress reconvenes Sept. 6."

As the St. Pete Times notes, Florida's own Senator Bill Nelson is strongly opposed to the Santorum bill. Contact him and share your thoughts.

Or email Santorum directly and tell him how much you like the idea of paying extra for a 5-day tropical storm forecast after your taxes already helped to fund the National Hurricane Center.

Trading Places

Gannett Corporation, owner of USA Today and the Pensacola News Journal, among many others, Thursday announced it is trading several smaller Western papers and the Detroit Free-News for the Tallahassee Democrat.