Judge: Beach Businesses Subject to Taxation

Pensacola Beach businesses are subject to real estate taxation on their commercial leaseholds even if they do not have title to the real estate or buildings, Escambia County circuit court judge Nick Geeker ruled yesterday. The decision directly affects many of the approximately one hundred hotel, restaurant, and souvenir shops on the beach.

Still pending are lawsuits brought by home and condo residents who are also challenging renewed efforts by Escambia County to impose real estate taxes on occupants of the island, which is titled in the county's name. Whatever the outcome of the suits, the issue is unlikely to be resolved until all appeals are exhausted over the next two years.

As reporter Derek Pivnick writes in today's PNJ:

It's the first loss in the court battle against property taxes on structures -- homes, businesses and condominiums -- on the beach.
* * *
If the ruling is upheld on appeal, it could mean a substantial influx of tax money for Escambia County. More than $12 million in taxes remains unpaid, according to Escambia County Tax Collector Janet Holley's office.

June Guerra, owner of the still-closed Jubilee Restaurant, spoke for many when she told the News Journal, "The county's taxation is going to be the downfall of the island."

If not a downfall, certainly a radical change. Businesses, unlike residents, can always pass the added expense of real estate taxes onto their customers. As prices escalate, fewer local mainlanders will be able to afford beach accommodations, restaurant meals and beverages, and other goods and services.

Over time, many believe, raising the cost of having a business or home on Pensacola Beach will price the average family out of the market -- both as day visitors and as potential home owners. To survive, properties will have to convert to more high rises, greater density, and higher prices.

Mainlanders and politicians who are applauding today's ruling could well find themselves unable to afford a visit to the beach tomorrow.

South Florida -- here we come.

Additional Links
Beach Leaseholders' Lawsuit Filed (Dec. 21, 2004)

Dept. of Amplification

Must-Have Pensacola Beach Book: William L. Post's "Deceit Beach"

Insurance Reform Takes A Holiday

As Paige St. John reported last week, the passion for insurance reform which Florida legislators showed on the campaign trail suddenly has cooled. There will be no special session to stem the tide of rising rates, cancellations, and unconscionable foot-dragging on hurricane claims.

What is less evident at the moment is that once the legislature convenes "on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March every year" true reform will become even more difficult. In the general session, which lasts only 60 days, other issues will compete with insurance reform.

Multiple reform proposals will be sent to multiple committees. Press coverage will be more difficult as legislators play whack-a-mole with competing insurance proposals. Insurance industry lobbyists, however, will be working the hallways and back rooms full-time. It'll be more difficult for the public to keep tabs on the issue than it would have been if a special session had been called and therefore easier for your local legislators to camouflage their own votes.

That's the real reason reform advocates like Insurance Reform Now! are disappointed with Jeb Bush's refusal to call a special session to concentrate on the insurance crisis. A special session would have trained an undiluted spotlight on the issue. As Sherri Hudson of Brevard County is quoted saying--

"No, this can't wait. We needed it yesterday."

Hudson's group, which is heavily weighted toward real estate and local insurance agent interests hurt by skyrocketing property insurance rates, has outlined a wide-ranging series of proposals they hope will be considered. On close inspection, the list looks like a bad smorgasbord of conflicting ideological tastes. But some of the more intriguing proposals include a moratorium on rate increases, anti-cherry picking rules, an end to the phony corporate-subsidiary dodge so many corporations use to hide profits and emphasize losses, and reform of the state-owned Citizens Property Insurance Company.

Until the legislature comes to accept that adequate and affordable hurricane insurance is a public necessity every bit as important to the public weal and the Florida economy as police protection, roads, schools, and -- dare we say it? -- multi-million dollar beach renourishment projects, it's unlikely the insurance crisis will be resolved.

Holiday Hoo-Ha

Yesterday's Pensacola News Journal arrived in the flower bed with a copy of Gannett Corp.'s Bella Magazine stuffed inside. This is "The Holiday Glamour Issue," the cover tells us. "Free" it says in the upper right hand corner.

We've been overcharged.

Bella bills itself on the masthead with these words: "Beautiful women, sassy attitude, smart magazine." We think that's awfully close to false advertising. More accurate would be, "obnoxious writing, repulsive attitudes, stupid advertising vehicle."

The entire magazine is a monument to the mega-media publisher's desperate search for something -- anything -- to generate more advertising revenue. Charging for an issue of Bella Magazine would be just short of a mugging. So they have to give it away for free.

Out of 60 pages in the current issue (counting the paginated front and back covers) 15 are entirely filled with ads, 35 pages are cluttered with a half-page or more of advertisements, and 6 and a half others consist of "holiday trend reports" and other shameless product promotions deceptively disguised as substantive articles.

That leaves 4 and a half pages of actual substance in the 60-page magazine, along with scattered textual breaks between the half-page ads.

As always, however, this hideously high ratio of ads-to-content doesn't stop Gannett from going on the cheap, too. The slick, full-color cover of Bella coordinates with the low-grade newsprint paper inside about as well as cowboy boots with a halter top on a pregnant Britney Spears.

To all appearances, moreover, the greater bulk of the few pages of content were written by just two people, Sloane Stephens Cox and Kimberly Blair. Both are young journalists that show talent when they write for the newspaper. Seeing that talent wasted on Bella's low level of corporate thievery isn't bella to watch. Invece, li rende ammalati.

Magazine "fasionistas" -- to use the repellent yet much-repeated neologism the conscripts at the PNJ employed while shamelessly hyping the magazine -- are scandalized. Or, they would be if they actually get around to reading the print version of Bella.

No one has as yet, it seems. At least, not in print form. We checked with several friends who subscribe to the News Journal to see what they thought. None of them even noticed that Bella had been included in the paper! Every one of them told us they threw it out without really looking at it.

Other than the blatant promotion the News Journal itself gave this wretched spawn, the only other media organ to notice was New York's Gawker, a web site that claims to be providing "daily Manhattan gossip and news" from "the center of the universe."

Gawker apparently made the mistake of assuming the on-line version of Bella was a duplicate of the print version. So it published a deliciously nasty little item claiming that Bella's "fawning profile" of Pensacola native Brooke Parkhurst, featured on the cover, was written by her sister, Sloane Stephens Cox. That would be the same Sloane Stephens Cox listed in the masthead as a "writer" for Bella Magazine.

It turns out, however, that a different byline was attached to the story in the print edition. There, in live black-and-white on cheesy newsprint paper, the Parkhurst cover story is attributed to Ms. Cox's cell mate at Gannett's own version of Abu Ghraib, Kimberly Blair.

Two days ago, Gawker published a correction. Sort of:

Seems that Brooke "Belle in the Big City" Parkhurst was none too pleased that we'd called her sister out for writing a puff piece about Brooke in Bella Pensacola magazine. Turns out, her sister didn't actually write the story, which we apparently would've known if we'd had a print copy of the mag on hand--anyone?--because the mistake only appeared online. Brooke herself emailed us, sniffing,

"i would like a correction on y'all's part but i'm sure that's too much to ask."

Nope, Brooke, not too much at all! See, what happened was that Brooke's sister, Sloane Stephens Cox, usually writes the cover stories for the magazine, and her name automatically comes up when a feature goes online. Whew. We sure are glad that's been resolved.

That anyone connected with Gannett thinks readers would swallow the story that Ms. Cox's name "automatically" is attached to any Bella cover story when it's published on-line is newsworthy in itself. It conveys a rather different corporate attitude about the magazine's target audience than "sassy" and "smart."

Try "stupid" and "gullible."

In the end, that's the root problem with Bella. It isn't that some Pensacola women (and men) aren't interested in "beautiful women" or don't appreciate "sassy" fashion and life style writing -- at least in moderate doses. It's that Pensacola area readers aren't as stupid as Gannett Corp. or its advertisers seems to think.

We know when we're being had by a commercial flier gussied up to look like a real magazine. And that's all Bella amounts to.

Who Rules?

Who rules? Homeland Security.

It sure isn't ordinary citizens of the United States. From today's New York Times:

The Homeland Security Department will require virtually all air travelers entering the United States after Jan. 23 to show passports -- even U.S. citizens.

Until now, U.S. citizens, travelers from Canada and Bermuda, and some travelers from Mexico who have special border-crossing cards for frequent visitors were allowed to show other proofs of identification, such as drivers' licenses or birth certificates.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff disclosed the effective date of the initiative in an interview with The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department was planning to announce the change on Wednesday.

We're already on the way to a national I.D. system for domestic work, travel, voting, and benefits. As former Georgia congressman Bob Barr wrote this month, "National guidelines for standardized IDs, and a proposed database for states to share voter-identification information, are the beginning of a "show us your papers" society.

And you can't leave without the government's permission, either.

On the other hand, corporations remain free to siphon off billions in federal Homeland Security Department funds for private profit with no accountability. From today's Washington Post:

Private consultants hired by the Department of Homeland Security have found widespread problems with its contracting operation, including nearly three dozen contract files that could not be located.

Files that could be found often lacked basic documentation required under federal rules, such as evidence that the department negotiated the best prices for taxpayers, according to a copy of the consultants' report obtained by The Washington Post.

Private consultants hired by the Department of Homeland Security have found widespread problems with its contracting operation, including nearly three dozen contract files that could not be located.

Files that could be found often lacked basic documentation required under federal rules, such as evidence that the department negotiated the best prices for taxpayers, according to a copy of the consultants' report obtained by The Washington Post.

From "of the people, for the people" to "of the Government, for corporate profit."

Feel safer, now?

Feel A Draft?

Join the debate at Why Now?

Moonwalking

The Washington Post is reporting a special advisory committee appointed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff has identified three options for fixing the Iraq disaster. They are being called "Go Big," "Go Long" and "Go Home."

The winner? None of the above. The advisors -- who probably cut their teeth on weapons procurement programs, where the customary approach is to have two cakes and eat two more, all at taxpayer expense -- are leaning toward a "combination plan."

One defense official with a tin ear calls it "Go Big but Short While Transitioning to Go Long":

Under the hybrid plan, the short increase in U.S. troop levels would be followed by a long-term plan to radically cut the presence, perhaps to 60,000 troops.

Critics say this is just "a way to moonwalk out of Iraq."

"[T]hat is, to imitate singer Michael Jackson's trademark move of appearing to move forward while actually sliding backward.

You know your nation's leaders are stupid when the best they can do is turn to Michael Jackson for inspiration.

Cheaper, Better, Accurate Elections

Oregon's Secretary of State, Bill Bradbury, explains in tomorrow's Washington Post how that state's vote-by-mail system works. It's 30 percent cheaper, voter turn-out is a nationwide high of 70 percent (and higher in presidential election years), it's convenient for working citizens, fraud-free, and it leaves a paper-trail to make recounts easy and accurate.

No wonder it will never be adopted in Florida. It makes too much sense.

Homo Sapiens Hanky-Panky

The Christian Science Monitor, among others, earlier this week reported the exciting news that two scientific teams working in Europe and the U.S. are well on their way to finishing "a rough draft" of the entire genome of Neanderthal man.

[U]sing the 38,000-year-old remains of a 38-year-old male, found in a Croatian cave, each group now says it has rebuilt, or sequenced, long segments of Neanderthal DNA - the twisted, ladder-shaped molecule in the nucleus of cells that holds an organism's genetic blueprint.

The technique is not only yielding new insights into Neanderthals, reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature and Friday's issue of Science, it's also likely to prove an important tool in teasing out secrets about how plants and animals evolved, researchers say. DNA "is the ultimate forensic record of evolution," says Sean Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "There's never been a more exciting time to be an evolutionary biologist."

The disturbing part in all of this is what looks like a new wrinkle in an old debate. Not the debate about what happened to Neanderthal man. The one about why Homo Sapiens, sapiens men can be such brutes to women.

Although the genome is far from complete, the teams have used the data to test questions about the history of humans and Neanderthals. One centers on the contentious issue of whether the two species interbred during the 10,000 to 20,000 years they shared the same territory in Europe and western Asia. Several paleo-anthropologists hold that the fossil record points to some interbreeding.

Dr. Rubin's group says that the genetic information his group has gathered so far shows no signs of interbreeding. The second team, led by Dr. Paabo of the Max Planck institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, suggests genes may have been mixed, but only in one direction - from male humans to Neanderthal females. [emphasis added]

Get it? Today's New York Times editorial calls it "hanky-panky." Others might call it rape.

Drilling Rig Boycott Barrier

We and a thousand others from Pensacola wanted to protest the one public hearing in Florida that Minerals Management Service allowed yesterday over its most recent 5-year plan to sink "exploratory wells within a hundred miles" of Pensacola Beach.

But the oil-friendly U.S. agency scheduled the hearing too far away, at mid-week, and during working hours. Plus, the weather was wretched.

So none of us could attend the boycott.

Hadi Headed for Hoosegow?

Is the head of Florida's deservedly-maligned Department of Children and Families, Lucy Hadi, headed for the hoosegow? So it would appear, according to the New York Times.

Abby Goodnough reports that "at least one judge has raised the possibility that the secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families could go to jail for contempt of court" for consistently ignoring court orders to "promptly transfer severely mentally ill inmates from jails to state hospitals."

State law requires that inmates found incompetent to stand trial be moved from county jails to psychiatric hospitals within 15 days of the state’s receiving the commitment orders. Florida has broken that law for years, provoking some public defenders to seek court orders forcing swift compliance.

With the state now rebuffing even those orders, a rising number of mentally ill inmates, now more than 300, have been left without treatment in crowded jails because the state’s 1,416 psychiatric beds are full.

Local police have neither the training nor the tools to properly care for mentally unbalanced inmates. Two died in police custody here in Escambia County over the last year and a psychotic incarcerated in Pinellas County jail "gouged his eyes out."

The root source of the problem, as always, is that state government has been deliberately short-changing social services. The culprit behind that strategy is out-going governor Jeb Bush.
This year, DCF's budget was cut by $53 million "which public defenders say makes no sense given the inmate crisis and the state’s $8 billion budget surplus."

What's a judge to do when the highest officials of state government choose to ignore state law?

Judges in Broward, Hillsborough and Miami-Dade Counties are... weighing motions to force the department to comply with the law or to hold it in contempt for letting the mentally ill pile up in unsuitable jails. The department appealed after three state judges in Miami ordered it to take custody of several inmates last month, but a panel of the Third District Court of Appeal indicated last week that it might rule against the department and its secretary, Lucy D. Hadi.

“It strikes me that ultimately you’ve got contempt issues,” Judge Frank A. Shepherd said during oral arguments, “and Ms. Hadi may be going to jail.”

If Hadi goes to jail for contempt of court, do you suppose her co-conspirator, Jeb Bush, will bail her out?

Bolton Is Toast

It's one thing for the lame duck Senate in the waning days of Republican control to contemplate confirming George W. Bush's second nomination of the execrable house-wrecker, John Bolton, to be U.N. ambassador. It's quite another for them to pick between Bolton and a patently superior alternative candidate who is a widely-respected Republican.

And that's just what's happening in Washington as Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Or) and Jim Walsh (R-NY) promote 30-year veteran congressman Jim Leach (R-Ia) for the post which effectively is ambassador to the world.

"I can't think of any American better qualified to represent our interests before the United Nations," Walsh is saying. "He is the most diplomatic politician I have ever met,'' says Blumenauer.

As we noted in our post-election 'surprises' item, Leach actually expressed relief when he was narrowly defeated for reelection earlier this month. For decades, he's been a steadfast, moderate voice of reason in a political party that's been hijacked by reactionary extremists. But Leach's diplomatic personality and the persuasiveness of his reasoned arguments have won many fans from both sides of the isle.

The former career Foreign Services officer and current chairman of the House Banking committee also is under active consideration for the soon to be vacant position of President of the University of Iowa. Much as the university might want him, the nation needs him more.

"Jesus Camp" Reviewed

"His singed eyes, black in their deep sockets, seemed already to envision the fate that awaited him but he moved steadily on, his face set toward the dark city, where the children of God lay sleeping."

-- Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (1955)

The late short story writer and novelist Flannery O'Connor once said, "My audience are the people who think God is dead."

O'Connor was herself a devout Roman Catholic. Most emphatically, she did not think that god was dead. Yet, when she wrote with sympathy and dark humor about the violent extremism of primitive Southern fundamentalists, the purposes and vision of her art often were misconstrued by reviewers, academics, religionists, and sometimes even her own family.

The grotesque, tormented fanatics she wrote about 'cannot possibly exist' was a common complaint in her time. She invented them simply for exaggerated effect, others suggested. The Protestant rural South that O'Connor depicts is 'demented', some argued; if the deranged people of whom she writes exist at all, fellow citizens of Milledgeville, Georgia, claimed, they certainly are not found in any numbers.

If those criticisms of Flannery O'Connor's work had any small merit then, they surely do not now. America has caught up with Flannery O'Connor's fiction. Doubters have only to see Jesus Camp, now playing at Gulf Breeze Cinema 4.

The film, as Kirsten A. Powers efficiently describes, is a documentary "which chronicles a North Dakota summer camp where kids as young as 6 are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in 'God's army... .'" Without benefit of narration, we simply see and hear what can only be described as brain-washing techniques used by adult evangelicals on their own adolescent children.

They home school them against evolution. During church services they lead prayers to a cardboard cut-out of George W. Bush. Before meetings they recite a 'pledge of allegiance' to a flag resembling the pop-culture version thought to have been carried into the Christian Crusades. And, at summer camp the children are dressed out in camouflage and practice military maneuvers with wooden swords while giving Heil Hitler-like straight-armed salutes.

Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady abruptly begin the film Jesus Camp in a nondescript Missouri motel meeting hall off an interstate highway exchange. It's the kind of room that might easily be the site of a weekend company training session for Xerox repairmen. Instead, we see it filling with dozens of suburban soccer moms and their adolescent children whom they've hauled along for a weekend Play-and-Pray that apparently doubles as a recruiting session for "Kids on Fire," a fundamentalist summer camp.

The camp, we learn soon enough, is run by Becky Fisher in a remote part of North Dakota. Fisher is a Pentecostal minister of the charismatic variety that talks in gibberish called "tongues" and lays hands on people to "heal" them. She would be right at home in an O'Connor story.

A woman of gargantuan girth, Fisher is seen early in the film haranguing the children and their mothers about the evils of modern America. Among these she includes, without hint of irony or self-awareness, people made "fat and lazy" by too much fast food. Secular humanists in the audience will laugh. The true believers in Fisher's audience would not even see the reason.

As Fisher explains candidly to the camera, her church is training the children to be religious warriors who will "take back" the U.S. government. They are using, she says, techniques pioneered by Muslim religious extremists. 'Except," she adds with a smile, "we're right."

Before going to camp, the documentary invites us into the neat, average-looking suburban homes of some of the children's families. 'We don't believe in evolution,' Levi, a 12 year old boy recites for his mother by rote during a home schooling session at the kitchen table. Then he adds, unprompted, 'Galileo was right to renounce science, too.'

A cute ten year old girl dances to "Christian Rock" so frenetically in her pink-on-pink bedroom that she works up a sweat. Then, she worries aloud that some who see her may mistakenly suppose she is "dancing for the flesh" instead of for god.

The boy Levi could be a stand-in for Francis Marion Tarwater, O'Connor's troubled orphan in The Violent Bear It Away. Tarwater's crazy grandfather had prophesied that he would become a prophet in his own right and this haunts the boy throughout the novel. Levi hankers to become a minister, too. At camp we see him assiduously practicing his sermonizing skills, measuring each new phrase he has thought up for its emotional impact on a future audience. ('Use your youth until you're in your thirties,' Rev. Ted Haggard advises him, 'and by then you'll have content.')

The view we are given into this seemingly normal exterior world with an appallingly primitive spiritual core is not entirely monochrome. At camp, one articulate eight or nine year old openly confesses his doubts about god and the bible because, he says, there seems to be no evidence for either of them whatsoever. He is quickly shamed. After Becky Fisher sternly says, "We don't have phonies in the army of God," the boy winds up tearfully confessing to the sinful bent of his intellectually curious mind.

In the absence of any narrator of the film, Pensacola's own Mike Papantonio -- an Air America talk show host as well as a prominent local lawyer -- provides the only counterpoint to what we witness. In occasional cut-aways, we see him in the studio from time to time declaiming on the air against Jesus Camp and, near the end of the film, debating or interviewing Becky Fisher -- it's hard to tell which.

The film's subjects, however, more often than not expose their own fallacies. Therein lies any fun for the audience.

Nowhere is this so more than when the film makers follow some of the Jesus Camp families on a pilgrimage to the Rev. Ted Haggard's megachurch in Colorado Springs. You can see a cutting from the documentary for yourself on YouTube.

In the film, Haggard interrupts a sermon to stick his face into the camera and make inappropriate jokes about 'knowing what you did last night' and pretending to demand blackmail to keep 'your secret.' Embarrassed when he saw the scene later on celluloid, Haggard accused the film makers of having had "an agenda" -- which Ewing and Grady vigorously denied.

We don't have to wait for End Times to know how this one turned out. Haggard resigned from the church a little over one week ago after admitting he was a "deceiver and liar" who was "guilty of sexual immorality." It was he, not the filmmakers, who turns out to have been burdened by "a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life."

Secular humanists will find in this film ample proof of the rank hypocrisy that seems endemic to the current crop of religious revivalists. But they will also see a powerful spiritual commitment to changing American political and public life -- by marrying their church to our government. It seems to be a spirit as imperishable in their lives as it is antithetical to the American tradition and constitutional law. No matter how many of them may be unmasked as hypocrites, sinners, or cynics, one comes away from this documentary convinced they will persist... and persist... and persist.

As Neva Chonin wrote in her review of "Jesus Camp" for the San Francisco Chronicle, "The film offers one answer to why the country's Evangelical minority packs such a political wallop, and it's frighteningly simple: They're efficient -- and ruthless."

The real-life Jesus Camp closed last week (not the movie). supposedly a casualty of the documentary. But don't think for a moment the camp "counselors" have quit. Any day, now, they'll be coming toward the "dark city" near you.

Pensacola News Jammies

(Above: Stephan Sharkansky, recently named a "best blogger in Seattle"
seen here in his working pj's and bathrobe)
Media giant Gannett Corp., publisher of the Pensacola News Journal and 90 other daily papers, announced the day before the congressional elections that it is shifting "all of its newspapers to 24-hour converged newsrooms."

The Gannett initiative, titled the "Information Project," is requiring each newsroom to submit a plan for a fully 24-hour converged newsroom by mid-November, editors said. Most will be implemented by next May.

Three Gannett papers -- the Des Moines (IA) Register, The Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, S.D.; and Florida Today in Melbourne, Fla. -- have been implementing the approach in recent months as test sites.

Des Moines editor Carolyn Washburn said the changes have included more online databases, from election information to local events calendars, with added staff as well. "The biggest challenge has been work flow," she told E&P. "Everyone is trying to figure out how to balance [demands]."

Gannett's corporate bean-counters doubtless expect the innovations will cut expenses by producing smaller hard-copy papers and heftier, more up-to-date web sites.

More haste, less filling. Exactly like a blog.

According to Wired News, a closely related initiative is Gannett's plan to "use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features." The full crowdsourcing memo has been published here.

"Crowdsourcing" is boardroom-speak for "volunteer labor." Again, just like many blogs.

Yet another dramatic change will be in the working hours of journalists:

At the Home News Tribune in East Brunswick, N.J., Executive Editor Charles Paolino predicted an earlier workday for many staffers. "Most activity now is 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon, but I can see a few people being here quite early in the morning," he said. "One of the biggest changes will be organizing when we go to work."

Exactly like the blogs.

We're predicting that before you know it the dress code at the Pensacola News Journal will be changing, too. If the reporters and editors who are left after the next round of staff cuts will be expected to newspaper less, blog more, and work all hours of the day and night, they might as well do it in their jammies and bathrobes at home -- just like all the other bloggers.

From there, it's only a short step to paying journalists the same as bloggers -- nothing. That ought to make Gannett's Wall Street investment bankers happy. And that's all that counts in the world of journalism these days, right?

Florida A National Laughing Stock - Again

Voting machines in Sarasota County, part of Katherine Harris' congressional district, appear to have malfunctioned on Election Day, sending as many as 18,382 votes into never-never land.

The error may have cost Democratic candidate Christine Jennings the election. According to Herald Tribune reporters on the scene, Bob Mahlburg and Maurice Tamman:

If the missing votes had broken for Jennings by the same percentage as the counted votes in Sarasota County, the Democrat would have won the race by about 600 votes instead of losing by 368... . Even if the undervote had been 8 percent -- more than three times what it was in Manatee [county] -- Jennings would have won by one vote.

As the Orlando Sentinel explains:

[T]he final results showed that 18,382 people either chose not to vote in the House race, were confused and missed the contest on the ballot, or were victims of a malfunction in the touch-screen-voting machines.

This so-called "undervote" raised suspicions among Democrats because it represented almost 13 percent of all people who cast ballots in Sarasota County on Tuesday.

That percentage is high by almost anyone's standards -- especially in a race in which the candidates raised $8 million to reach out to voters through TV and other advertising.

By contrast, the undervote in the U.S. Senate contest in Sarasota was only 1,600. In the governor's race, it was only 1,800.

Already, the news is sweeping the country. Once again, Florida's inability to manage the math or hold a clean election makes us a national laughing stock.

Dept. of Amplification

See also, "Damaging Democracy" (Nov. 7, 2006)

Northwest Florida Congressional Wrap-up

Courtesy, Florida Division of Elections

It wasn't a surprise that Joe Roberts lost to incumbent Jeff Miller. In this redneck of the woods, he never had much of a chance. Roberts surely knew that, even if it was bad form for him to admit it openly.

The Democratic Party and, in fact, all the people of Florida's 1st Congressional District should be grateful that he made the effort. Roberts ran an up-beat, positive, issue-oriented campaign and made a contest of it. Without him, what was supposed to be an exercise in representative democracy would have degenerated into merely another coronation of the mediocre by the oblivious.

Joe Roberts cheerfully took on the task of running against a deeply entrenched, well-financed incumbent in what surely is the last place in the nation where an upset could be expected. And, he did it with virtually no financial support from the national Democratic Party, little attention from the media, and against the stiff wind of four meretricious cavalcades through Pensacola by the Bush entourage in just two years.

The Democratic Party owes him, even if Roberts doesn't see it that way. Maybe the new majority in the House and Senate will have the sense to draft him into service with some Party or alphabet-agency that would give him the opportunity to work for bettering the lives of working men and women, small businesses, and the veterans he cares about so much.

If that were to happen, given the seismic shift about to rattle Washington, the irony would be Joe Roberts could wind up doing more good and influencing public policy more than Jeff Miller ever will as an undistinguished member of a nationally-rejected minority in the coming 11oth Congress.