Dissing Charlie Crist

A number of newspapers (and more newspapers) and bloggers (and more bloggers), are all a-twitter over gossip that Florida governor Charlie Crist is the biological father of a teenaged girl born in Crist's home town 17 years ago. The girl was adopted long ago by a loving couple.

Now, Crist is refusing to cooperate with a DNA paternity test. The girl herself is willing, but neither she nor her parents are formally asking Crist to contribute his DNA. They just want to be left alone by the media.

Fat chance.

We're on the side -- if one can be found -- that says it's no one's business except the parents, the child, and the governor. If Crist fathered a child nearly two decades ago, it's hard to see what relevance that has to the discharge of his public duties. No more, we think, than whether Crist is a homosexual -- yet another rumor that has dogged the man for years.

In fact, it's even less relevant than the gay gossip. At least when it comes to a politician's sexual orientation, given the "social agenda" of so many political demagogues these days, there is some cause for concern about rank hypocrisy if he (or she) votes one way and privately couples another. No similar connection is apparent when it comes to a private affair that everyone involved wants to keep private.

The whole thing reminds us of a remark an uncle of ours made long ago when we were but a boy. Uncle Jim was for many years one of two national committeemen from Indiana, which meant he also served on the governing board of the National Republican Committee.

Uncle Jim was a huge, burly man with a gruff demeanor, a dry wit, and a warm heart that he struggled to hide from the world. He could pack away a quart of bourbon and a dozen eggs in a single late night sitting -- and often did.

On the day we're reminded of he had just returned from an NRC meeting in Washington, D.C. where strategies for an upcoming congressional election were discussed at length. Uncle Jim was particularly keen on trying to defeat the incumbent congressman in his home district, Democrat John Brademus. So, he said he'd spent most of his time in Washington trying to dig up dirt on Brademas.

"One rumor I heard is that he's sleeping with every other congressman's wife in Washington," Uncle Jim chuckled, "and the other is that he's sleeping with every other congressman. I can't decide which story to promote."

In the end, it didn't matter. Bradmas won reelection by a landslide. In fact, Brademas was a very good congressmen, so good in fact that his constituents never seemed to care much about his sex life. In that, they were exactly like our Uncle Jim.

"I don't really give a damn who Brademas sleeps with," Uncle Jim explained that day so long ago. "I just want to get his nose out of the public trough and put mine in its place."

No Surge Needed on Pensacola Beach

SRIA General Manager Buck Lee apparently patterns himself on George W. Bush. In an act as hubristic as it is ridiculous, he's given the Pensacola Beach governing authority a "State of the Island" speech that contains almost as many misstatements, obfuscations, significant omissions, and outright lies as Bush himself.

Out of twenty cited items, only four have actually been completed. Half of those -- Portofino's fifth tower and beach renourishment -- were started well before Lee was hired; he had nothing to do with them. Another is that "there were no drownings on Pensacola Beach in 2006." Happy news, to be sure, but just how much did Mr. Lee have to do with that?

All of the remaining fifteen items -- count 'em, 15! -- are "set for completion" or "should be complete" or "will be accomplished... in the next few years."

No need for a surge of troops, though. Mike Whitehead will be taking care of that through regime change.

Bush Claims Your Brain

Adam Liptak of the New York Times today files a news report on the U.S. Justice Department's perversions of our judicial system in defense of the Bush administration's unconstitutional wiretapping program.

"Kafkaesque" and "Alice in Wonderland" are two phrases some lawyers and federal judges give to the Government's actions. Even those words somehow seem woefully inadequate to the task.

Try to imagine you were wrongly arrested, your home and office were invaded, and all of your files were seized without a court warrant issued upon a showing of probable cause. Turns out it was a colossal screw-up, a case of mistaken identity. Homeland Security -- this is hard to imagine, we know, but do try -- had the wrong person.

You file a civil case in court seeking money damages and an injunction against future wrongful arrest, invasion of privacy, and violation of your constitutional rights. U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez is on the other side.

The law's standard procedure of file-and-serve documents with the courts has existed since approximately 1164 A.D. when King Henry II promulgated the Constitutions of Clarendon, as it has been written, "to protect his subjects against powerful individuals who sought to intimidate in order to escape prosecution." So, you file your complaint in court and send a copy to the opposing party.

Imagine, in response, Mr. Gonzalez:

• Refuses to file his responding legal papers in court.
• Refuses to share copies of those papers with you.
• Tells you -- and the court -- that he has "filed papers" with himself, but they can only be read if you come to his office.
• When you or the judge comes to his office, he lets you see only part of his filings, blacks out the rest, forbids you from taking notes or making copies, and watches you the whole time.
  
• When you file papers with the court objecting to this extra-legal procedure, Gonzalez then seizes your computer by threat of force and deletes all of your files from it at will, claiming "national security" as the reason.
  
• When you file a challenge questioning his legal authority to do this, Gonzalez refuses to disclose to the court whether he a security clearance, "saying information about the clearance was itself classified."
• When you nevertheless file another paper reciting what you recall about the few papers he let you read, Gonzalez then claims your memory belongs to the Government and you can't rely on it in any court filing without the Government's permission.
  

Oops! Now that you've read this, chances are the Bush administration's Justice Department soon will be knocking down your door to seize the computer you used to read about this. And they'll want your memory, too.

May as well comply. After all, what good will your brain do you when the only weapon Attorney General Gonzalez needs is your fear?

The 'Bono' of 2008

Who said this in September 2002 -- six months before Bush invaded Iraq?

"The chaos in the aftermath of a military victory in Iraq could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam."

The man who won the presidency ... and yet may become president.

Sinclair Reaches Secret Cable Deal

The mega media standoff between Sinclair Broadcasting and Mediacom continues the blackout on Pensacola Beach of local channel 3, the ABC affiliate. But this week, the aptly-named Sin-clair Broadcasting and megacorporation Time Warner reached agreement enabling TW's cable properties to retransmit Sinclair's broadcasting signals.

Neither side is saying whether, or how much, Time Warner will pay.

No similar compromise has yet been reached between Sinclair and Mediacom. But Mediacom executives are saying that whatever the details, they're willing to take, blind, the same deal from Sinclair that Time Warner now has.

Mediacom on Monday was awaiting a response from Sinclair on a proposal that Mediacom made on Sunday, asking Sinclair to give Mediacom the same deal that Sinclair negotiated last week with the much larger Time Warner cable system. Mediacom said it didn't know details of the Time Warner deal, but could make it work for Mediacom if it works for Time Warner.

As Pointer On-line says, wherever you live, even "if the fight has not come to your town, it probably will."

Murder in Miami

Jon Swift strikes again. A small taste:

Yesterday, former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt died mysteriously. He was only 88.
* * *
Although his family is making the unlikely claim that he died of pneumonia, this is no doubt a cover story they have come up with while investigators track down the conspirators behind his murder. There certainly are a number of unanswered questions about his death, which may never be resolved.

Treat yourself. Read the whole hilarious obit.

State Farm Settles Mississippi Katrina Claims

At last! The New York Times reports a significant "global settlement" has been forged for Mississippi customers of State Farm Insurance who suffered property damage during Hurricane Katrina. The hurricane struck the Gulf Coast in August, 2005, devastating almost the entire Gulf Coast.

Here are the details:

• State Farm will make an initial payment of $80 million to settle 640 pending lawsuits.
• Policy limits, or the fully insured value, will be paid to 300 homeowners whose houses were "swept away."
• "The owners of the 340 other homes, with varying degrees of damage, are to receive an average of $124,400."
• "At least" $50 million more will be paid to those among the 35,000 other State Farm customers whose claims were previously closed.
• That sum will increase to an estimated "$200 million to $600 million" depending on how many of the 35,000 customers make new requests to reopen their claims.
• Homeowners whose claims are reopened "may accept a new offer from State Farm or insist on binding arbitration."
• Any insured customer remains free to "ignore the settlement and file separate lawsuits against State Farm."

As for non-State Farm customers, unnamed "insurance executives" are telling the Times they anticipate other Mississippi insurance companies will agree to similar deals with their own customers. A State Farm mouthpiece from Philadelphia told the Times his client agreed to the settlement to "remove a major public relations headache."

Randy J. Maniloff, a lawyer at White & Williams in Philadelphia who represents insurance companies, said yesterday that it was clear that the bad publicity had been a big factor in State Farm’s decision to settle. "They spent 80 years building up a brand," he said, "and the adverse publicity from these lawsuits has been clearly doing damage to the brand. It just flies in the face of their portrayal of themselves as good neighbors."

Branding and the rotten reputation of State Farm aside, it's clear that the insurance company was motivated by something more -- namely, the fear of facing juries eager to mete out justice.

Two weeks ago, a Mississippi jury considered the first Katrina claim to get to trial and awarded policy limits of $232,292 in actual damages plus $2.5 million in punitive damages for the insurer's bad faith in rejecting a hurricane claim. Earlier this week, State Farm agreed to settle the second Katrina case headed for a jury trial by paying an estimated $1 million.

Ironically, one of the beneficiaries of the "global settlement" will be U.S. Senator Trent Lott (R-Ms.), a frequent critic of plaintiff's lawyers and class actions. Lott is the brother in law of Mississippi plaintiff's lawyer Dickie Scruggs, who was the principle driving force behind the first two jury trials as well as the 'global settlement' reached yesterday.

The Mississippi agreement has no binding legal effect on pending insurance claims elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, including Northwest Florida , Alabama, and Louisiana. Each state's insurance laws -- and courts -- differ. Even so, the Mississippi settlement establishes what could be considered the "market value" of a Katrina claim, bringing added pressure on insurers in other states to emulate it.

Bon Mots

Bernard Chazelle, guest-blogging early this week at what is surely the most worldly and erudite blog based in Florida, Candide's Notebook, tossed off quite a number of bon mots. They have the look of something he must have been saving for a rainy day. But they're thought-provoking, nonetheless.

Chazelle, we are told, is a Princeton University computer science professor. And, a handsome one at that, to judge from the photo on his personal blog here.

Available for free at Candide's Notebook are these sure-fire conversation stoppers for your next dinner party, bar mitzvah, or bowling league night:

On Cheney: "Big-Time Dick saluted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by persuading his boss to invade Panama (for reasons no one seems able to remember). And today it is anybody's guess which Caribbean island the United States will invade to celebrate its victory in Iraq."

On George W. Bush: "In January of 2001, George W. Bush took — er, grabbed — the reins of an American Empire at its zenith. He will soon hand back a smoldering wreckage of broken lives, enduring hatred, and vanished influence."

On Bush's father: "At a recent ceremony for his son Jeb, George H. W. Bush was caught on national television sobbing uncontrollably. Pity the man who stands one short letter away from the worst president in US history. The letter is H, as in H for hubris."

On what we have become since 9-11: "Historians will ponder how one gangly caveman and nineteen scrawny associates turned America into the land of the kind-of-free (53rd freest press in the world, tied with Botswana) and the home of the petrified. The sons and daughters of the nation that stood up to Hitler and Tojo now file through airport security barefoot, much as they would walk, shoeless, into a mosque -- a mosque, they pray, empty of Muslims."

On shallow-minded pundits like Thomas Friedman and Richard Cohen: To talk the neocolonial talk from the plush comfort of the imperial capital is easy. To walk the walk is not."

On U.S. military expenditures: "US military expenditures exceed those of all nations on earth combined. And yet battling a ragtag band of lightly armed insurgents was more than the world's mightiest army could take."

On Iraq War expenditures: "The war effort's claim on the US treasury will soon exceed $600 billion: more than Vietnam; ⁽⁴⁾ more than all the money ever spent on cancer research; ⁽⁸⁾ more than enough to “race for the cure” all the way to Alpha Centauri."

On casting blame: "The grand whining parade has already begun, and mealy-mouthed apologists are being wheeled in on bloated floats to proffer lame excuses about inadequate troop levels, insufficient 4GW training, political fecklessness, etc. Eventually, the chest beating will die down as it always does, with the blame for the debacle pinned on the dirty antiwar hippies.

On America's neo-colonial ambitions: "Could the invasion have succeeded? Not a chance. * * * Leave aside the not-so-trifling fact that the United States never had the proper DNA for empire (lite or otherwise). It is the incontrovertible reality of the 21st century that the time for the White Man's Burden has passed."

On the mainstream media: "Tragically, the media has failed in its sacred duty to keep a vigilant, skeptical, critical eye on the centers of power. *** The sycophantic enablers of the Fourth Estate have blood on their hands."

(More) on George W. Bush: " No American leader has so much owned a war. And none has so little owned up to it. *** The die has been cast and the hour is too late for him or anyone to alter the unforgiving judgment of posterity. "

Our Quandry: "[I]f freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, then Bush is a free man — free to pursue the most malignant policies, heedless of the consequences to his unworsenable presidential standing. Beware the desperation of a cornered man."

There is more -- here.

'Panhandle Exemption' Eliminated

According to the latest publicly-available official summary of the special legislative session's hurricane handiwork, the notorious 'Panhandle Exemption' to the statewide building code has been eliminated. At last!

The new bill --

Requires the Florida Building Commission to eliminate all exceptions in the Florida Building Code related to wind-borne-debris protection per the requirements of Section 15 of SB 4-A. Commission shall fulfill obligation before July 1, 2007.

The exemption was the bastard spawn of former state senator Charlie Clary (R-Destin). It never made sense to anyone but builders-on-the-cheap and pols on the make for their money. Over the years before he was term-limited, Clary was paid-off handsomely for his tender treatment.

The New York Times' Abby Goodnough has a readable rundown on the rest of the bill. As Rep. Susan Bucher says, overall what the bill represents is mostly "cosmetic surgery" when what Florida really needs is "heart surgery."

Impeach Beach

Well, sure, it isn't the '70s. Still, impeachment, you might say, is a rising tide. The Christian Science Monitor captures the latest ebb-and-flow of public protest:

On Auction: Impeachbush.com

Sign of the times

Saturday Satire

Jon Swift swift-boats the swift-boaters. Here's a taste:

The media's job is to raise important questions about the candidates not provide simplistic answers. The American people can provide the simplistic answers on their own. So far the media has raised a lot of important questions about Barack Obama. Who is Barack Obama? Why is his middle name Hussein? Is he secretly a Muslim? Does he smoke? Does he work out? What is he wearing? If he were a tree, what kind of a tree would he be?

No one knows very much about Barack Obama. He has written only two books, which no one has ever read, and given very few interviews. Newsweek's Howard Fineman, in his remarkably insightful column comparing the Presidential race to a high school election, calls him the Mysterious Newcomer. "Presidential elections are high school writ large," says Fineman (his use of the word "writ" cluing you in to the seriousness of his metaphor; Pulitzer Prize judges, take note). As everyone knows about high school elections, the candidates with the least amount of gossip about them wins.

The mainstream media, which increasingly is taking cues from bloggers and chain emails, has begun to jump on the story of Obama's secret Muslim identity. Insight Magazine, which is owned by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, a religion that is not trying to take over the United States, as far as we know, has raised more suspicions that Obama is secretly a Muslim and attended a madrassa when he was young. It has also accused Hillary Clinton's campaign of trying to plant those rumors by quoting unnamed campaign "sources," which as any journalist knows are the most reliable sources of all. With this story Insight cleverly made two candidates look bad, Obama and Clinton, without having to actually prove anything.

Unfortunately, many members of the mainstream media are still operating under the old rules of journalism, which requires two unnamed sources with axes to grind before a story can be printed.

There's more... a lot more ... and the chuckles are worth it. But if you want to know what Barack Obama really said in his autobiography about his 'Muslim' experience check this out -- and then ask yourself, "Why would anyone with so much as half a brain watch Fox News?

Which brings us to Leonard Pitts' latest. The Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Miami Herald asks "President Obama?" Unsurprisingly, he sees the larger obstacles as "race and culture."

While mainstream media have seemed intrigued by, but not obsessed with, the senator's heritage, the same, unfortunately, cannot be said of the extreme right blogosphere. There, one seldom reads any reference to Obama that does not make reference to his middle name: Hussein. Then there are those who observe that only a single consonant separates his surname from the first name of the al Qaeda leader who launched the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

It is such nakedly puerile slander that your first response is to laugh. Then you remember how that same blogosphere managed to turn the war hero John Kerry into a ''traitor'' and the Texas Air National Guardsman, George W. Bush, into a war hero -- and it seems much less funny.

The normally sensible Mr. Pitts missed it here. As Jon Swift's satire shows, it isn't just the "extreme right blogosphere" that's behind such "puerile slanders." It's the mainstream media, to its shame. Media like Newsweek Magazine, Fox News, CNN, and Moonie-owned publications like Insight Magazine and the Washington Times.

Two Dinosaurs in Local News

Local radio Friday afternoon was reporting that Dr. Dino, more formally known as Kent Hovind, was sentenced today to ten years in the poky. Hovind was convicted late last year on 58 felony and misdemeamor counts related to tax evasion. His wife's sentencing has been delayed.

(UPDATE: Michael Stewart has the quick story and, a day later, the full story at the PNJ.)

Hovind made a small fortune himself -- or, if you still believe in fairy tales, for god -- by preaching that dinosaurs cohabited the earth with mankind. The root of his problem seems to be that god forgot to file his income tax returns and so the IRS turned to Hovind, instead.

Maybe Hovind was right about one thing. At least one dinosaur coexists with mankind: Tom Banjanin, former county commissioner for the district that includes Pensacola Beach.

Banjanin announced today that he will be a candidate to nuzzle up to whatever public feeding trough he can manage to fool somebody into giving him. Today, it's the special election to fill state House District 3, recently vacated by Holly Benson after she was named head of Florida's Department of Business and Professional Regulation.

Before making a career of getting paid to do nothing as a county commissioner, Banjanin learned his trade as a state representative, where he also did nothing. So, you can certainly say he has experience.

Republican voters will have their second chance in four months to vote against the insipid Banjanin when early voting begins January 29.

Burgess 'Sinked' Out of Advocate Job

Steve Burgess will be leaving his job as Florida Insurance Consumer Advocate at the end of the month, the Palm Beach Post is reporting.

Steve Burgess said he was told last month his services were no longer needed by newly elected Chief Financial Office Alex Sink. He said Sink asked him to stay until the end of January, after the legislature concludes its special session on property insurance.
* * *
Tara Klimek, a spokesman for Sink, said the CFO wanted her own pick for the job and was searching for the right person. She would not provide specifics of the search or say how long it would take. She said Burgess' staff of seven, which includes an actuary, would continue its work without a department head while the search is under way.

According to the Post Burgess and Sink are both Democrats, but Burgess isn't 'taking it personally.'

Shell Game

As we said yesterday, it's no time for high-fiving over the seeming appearance that the Bush administration has at last agreed to abide by the Constitution and will cease wiretapping American citizens without a court order. Adam Liptak of the New York Times tells us why in more detail:

On Wednesday, the administration announced that an unnamed judge on the secret court, in a nonadversarial proceeding that apparently cannot be appealed, had issued orders that apparently both granted surveillance requests and set out some ground rules for how such requests would be handled.

The details remained sketchy yesterday, but critics of the administration said they suspected that one goal of the new arrangements was to derail lawsuits challenging the program in conventional federal courts.

“It’s another clear example,” said Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, “of the government playing a shell game to avoid accountability and judicial scrutiny.”

Adding to suspicions is the fact that the administration hasn't agreed to release the FISA court order which Attorney General Gonzalez cited shortly before testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, even though the FISA court says it would have no objection. Gonzalez' answer to the bi-partisan demand for a copy of the order?

"That's a decision that I would like to take back to my principal."

Whoa! As Attorney General, Gonzalez' "principal" is the American public.

Florida's own Pierre Tristam, writing in his daily Candide's Notebooks, has more.

The notion that the administration will continue to spy on Americans and foreigners as zealously as it has since 2001 isn’t a matter of cynicism, it isn’t a conclusion arrived at by mistrust, but by the logic of the administration’s own precedents and public pronouncements.

There's only one thing to add: can't you see that same grotesque fealty to ideology leading, if it hasn't already, to an administrative "out-sourcing" of the wiretap program? Privatizing the NSA spying program on Americans to a corporate 'partner', and thus removing it from the purview of all branches of government before the 2008 elections, would be so like the Bush Administration.

Anyone care to guess who would pick up the contract?

One thing seems certain, as Media Matters documents. The vast majority of journalists covering the NSA wiretapping story have been fooled into losing track of the pea beneath the shell.