Cheap at the Price

The ACLU has agreed to accept about half of the attorney's fees they are entitled to for defending the U.S. Constitution and pressuring Pace High School to end its decades-long religious instruction in that public high school. $195,000 is cheap at the price.

Doubt it? The school's defense attorneys have billed the district more.

As of June, the [school] district had been billed by its own attorneys about $200,000 in legal fees. That included $21,739 to the district's attorney, Paul R. Green, $148,435 to the Sniffen law firm of Tallahassee; and $29,280 to the Carr Allison firm of Tallahassee.

Superintendent Tim Wyrosdick said Tuesday... he did not yet know how much more money the district will owe its attorneys. [italics added]

These numbers may numb the mind of many locals who live from paycheck to paycheck. And everyone, the ACLU included, would rather have seen the money spent more directly in the classroom -- say, for books or teachers.

But don't blame the ACLU. They aren't the ones who for years used the school's audio system to pump presbyterian prayers daily into Pace High classrooms at the beginning of every school day. They aren't the ones who took U.W.F. college teaching students on their practicums and exposed them to routine religious proselytizing in the classroom.

If, as threatened, one of the low-paid office secretaries at Pace is cajoled by the "Christian Educators Association International" into authorizing the filing of a new lawsuit or into appealing the old judgment, look for the lawyers on both sides to make even more money. They won't like it any more than we do.

Over the years, we've come to know a lot of lawyers in a lot of states who practice constitutional law. More than most folk, the smart ones on both sides of cases like the Pace High School fiasco know the vital importance of secular public education to America. Privately, as citizens, most we have met say they'd rather see the money spent in the classrooms, too.

But this is America, where any crank is free to go to court in a losing cause and, like anyone in business, the lawyers are free to charge them for their efforts.

More Pace High School Religious Instruction

Sept. 18: Late Editorial Update ("Homo Neanderthalensis")
Sept. 17: Pictures of a Pep Rally
Aug. 22: Stupid, Not Contemptuous
Aug. 5: The One and Only Faith
Aug. 4: Frank Lay's Criminal Contempt Order
May 31: Principal Lay Has a 'Come to Jesus' Moment
May 27: Laying Down the Puritan Law
May 15: Southern Hos-Pee-Tility

Conserva-Dems Against You

Mike Ross (Blue Dog-Ark) sold out to Big Pharma for big bucks, as Rachel Maddow reveals below. Now he opposes giving Americans the only effective, real choice in health care insurance -- the "public option."

Which raises the question, how many other Blue Dogs are opposed to giving Americans the "public option" alternative because they, too, have sold out to medical and drug corporations? Does it explain the curiously ambivalent statements of our own Blue Dog Senator, Bill Nelson?

Expect answers soon.....

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

A Book By Its Cover.....

How do you like the cover of your popular urology-and-sex books about the "history of the penis?" In your face or "refined and evasive?" How about "demure and euphemistic?"

Macy Halford, writing in the New Yorker, has come across evidence that marketers believe it all depends on where you live. Or, maybe not.

'Gulf Coast Treasures' Airs Wednesday

PNJ reporter Kimberly Blair yesterday reminded everyone:

On Wednesday, Pensacola residents will be able to get a sneak peek of the National Seashore documentary before it airs throughout the Southeast on Oct. 4.

The sneak peek is part of a special live televised presentation about [Ken] Burns at WSRE's Jean & Paul Amos Performance Studio called "The National Parks Celebration from Central Park" in advance of its national debut on Sunday.

The "celebration" program will feature musical performances by Alison Krauss, Carole King and Chris Botti.

PBS is previewing the entire Burns national parks documentary series here. Although the shorter, locally-produced Gulf Islands film will air only in Northwest Florida, everyone can see a preview of it on the WSRE-TV web site here or below, right here:

The NEW New York Post

The New York Post seems to have changed hands over the weekend. It's no longer a print version of wing-nut TeeVee. Get a look at today's special issue. It's hot!!

Or, have The Yes Men struck again? We remark, you declaim.

CLICK IMAGE FOR FULL ISSUE

Early this morning, nearly a million New Yorkers were stunned by the appearance of a "special edition" New York Post blaring headlines that their city could face deadly heat waves, extreme flooding, and other lethal effects of global warming within the next few decades. The most alarming thing about it: the news came from an official City report.

Distributed by over 2000 volunteers throughout New York City, the paper has been created by The Yes Men and a coalition of activists as a wake-up call to action on climate change. It appears one day before a UN summit where Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will push 100 world leaders to make serious commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in December. Ban has said that the world has "less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet," adding that Copenhagen is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity."

Although the 32-page New York Post is a fake, everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts.

"This could be, and should be, a real New York Post," said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. "Climate change is the biggest threat civilization has ever faced, and it should be in the headlines of every paper, every day until we solve the problem."
* * *
The paper includes original investigative reporting as well. One article ("Carbon counter counts New Yorkers as fools") reveals that Deutsche Bank - which erected a seven-story "carbon counter" in central Manhattan - not only invests heavily in coal-mining companies worldwide, but has recently entered the business of coal trading itself.

The paper has the world's gloomiest weather page, covering the next 70 years rather than just 7 days.

The Coming "Great Gulf Coast Zoo Kill"

The fight to save the Northwest Florida Zoo isn't over, writes PNJ reporter Louis Cooper. There's a petition on line to try to convince our county and city leaders to reverse their earlier refusal to fund the Northwest Florida Zoo for "a second year."

As it is, reporter Cooper laments, a couple of valuable Orangutans already have been shipped off to one creditor. And zoos that previously loaned other animals to the Northwest Florida Zoo "have been asked to pick them up, " according to Bob Zwitzer, an owner of the Zoo land the animals inhabit. Adds Switzer:

"We are in the process right now of getting bids for all of the animals," he said. "We're also talking to people who might want to buy all of the animals at one time, as a collection. Then we're talking to a third group of people who want to keep the zoo here."

The one thing Cooper's report doesn't mention is what happens if no one wants all the animals, birds, reptiles, and fish? There are thousands of them out there. While a few may be sufficiently unique to attract the interest of other zoos, our sources say the vast majority of zoo animals are not likely to attract any bids -- and it may not even be possible to give them away -- unless someone buys the entire zoo as a package deal.

Chances of that happening are very slim and they plummet from there. Knowledgeable zoo officials we know are talking about the most likely scenario yet to come, but only in hushed tones.
As far as they can see, unless county commissioners reverse themselves or someone steps up to buy the whole zoo, the only realistic alternative is to kill all the animals that can't be sold individually.

Remember the Great Goose Kill at a local golf course a couple of years ago? It became the "story that would not die," attracting attention from all over the world. And, it wasn't an attractive story.

The Great Goose Kill will look like a small family squabble compared with what's in store for tens of hundreds of animals at the Gulf Breeze Zoo if someone doesn't step up soon and save the place.

Citizens can sign the petition to save the Zoo here. But the people who really should be signing it are Gulf Coast tourism promoters and local politicians who expect to run for reelection.

Dept. of Dead Links, Revived

After reporter Cooper's article of today disappears behind Gannett's thoroughly useless pay-to-see- what-we-wrote-last- week screen in seven days, you can still read a lengthy excerpt of it at the Chimpanzee Info Blog.

minor edit
9-20 pm

Late Editorial Update

Homo Neanderthalensis

by H.L. Mencken
(July 29, 1925)I

Such obscenities as the the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist Pace, Florida, High School principal and athletic director, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone -- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized -- though I should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer -- that is, provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of the air.

On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

II

The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution for prayer in the schools are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders -- that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous -- by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law.

Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely the mob's hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their comprehension is of the devil. A glass of wine delights civilized men; they themselves, drinking it, would get drunk. Ergo, wine must be prohibited. The hypothesis of evolution is credited by all men of education; they themselves can't understand it. Ergo, its teaching must be put down.

This simple fact explains such phenomena as the Tennessee Pace High School buffoonery. Nothing else can. We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive -- and a few are enough to carry on.

III

The inferior man's reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex -- because it puts an unbearable burden upon his meager capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plow can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged -- and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple -- and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him.

The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.

Politics and the fine arts repeat the story. The issues that the former throw up are often so complex that, in the present state of human knowledge, they must remain impenetrable, even to the most enlightened men. How much easier to follow a mountebank with a shibboleth -- a Coolidge, a Wilson or a Roosevelt! Bush, a Cheney, or a Palin! The arts, like the sciences, demand special training, often very difficult. But in jazz there are simple rhythms, comprehensible even to savages.

IV

What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera -- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.

That is why Beethoven survives. Of the 110,000,000 307 million so-called human beings who now live in the United States, flogged and crazed by Coolidge, Rotary, the Ku Klux and the newspapers Bush, the Republican Party, Freedomworks, and Fox Cable News, it is probable that at least 306 million have never heard of him at all. To these immortals, made in God's image, one of the greatest artists the human race has ever produced is not even a name. So far as they are concerned he might as well have died at birth. The gorgeous and incomparable beauties that he created are nothing to them. They get no value out of the fact that he existed. They are completely unaware of what he did in the world, and would not be interested if they were told.

The fact saves good Ludwig's bacon. His music survives because it lies outside the plane of the popular apprehension, like the colors beyond violet or the concept of honor. If it could be brought within range, it would at once arouse hostility. Its complexity would challenge; its lace of moral purpose would affright. Soon there would be a movement to put it down, and Baptist clergymen would range the land denouncing it, and in the end some poor musician, taken in the un-American act of playing it, would be put on trial before a jury of Ku Kluxers, teabaggers and railroaded to the calaboose.

More Pace High School Religious Instruction
Sept. 17: Lay, Freeman Beat the Rap with the 'I'm Stupid' Defense
Sept. 17: Pictures of a Pep Rally
Aug. 22: Stupid, Not Contemptuous
Aug. 5: The One and Only Faith
Aug. 4: Frank Lay's Criminal Contempt Order
May 31: Principal Lay Has a 'Come to Jesus' Moment
May 27: Laying Down the Puritan Law
May 15: Southern Hos-Pee-Tility

Lay, Freeman Beat the Rap with the 'I'm Stupid' Defense

Pace High School principal Frank Lay and his athletic director, Robert Freeman, were acquitted early this evening by the same federal judge who earlier had charged them with criminal contempt of her judicial order. The judge found that while the defendants in fact had violated the court's order, their actions were not intentionally contemptuous.

"It was just out of reflex," Freeman testified about his own actions in offering a prayer during a school event, according to Pensacola News Journal reporter Kris Wernowsky. As for Lay, U.S. assistant attorney Randy Hensel repeatedly hammered home the principal's earlier out-of-court admission, "I asked Robert to say grace. I didn’t think about it."

In other words, Judge Casey Rodgers concluded neither the Pace High School principal nor the head athletics teacher was thinking. This is known in criminal defense circles as the "Dumb as a Post Defense."

It might be bad for educators but, when believed, it works wonders for people charged with crimes. The dumber the defendants seem to the ultimate fact-finder, the more believable the defense.

The thing is, it's a one-time pass. If either of these birds do it again, they'd better have a toothbrush packed, because theyll be staring at a very long stretch in the pokey.

Meanwhile, the federal consent order entered back in January continues in force. Santa Rosa schools, including Pace High School, for the first time in that locality's history are enjoined to cease all religious proselytizing in the schools.

More Pace High School Religious Instruction
Sept. 18: Late Editorial Update ("Homo Neanderthalensis")
Sept. 17: Pictures of a Pep Rally
Aug. 22: Stupid, Not Contemptuous
Aug. 5: The One and Only Faith
Aug. 4: Frank Lay's Criminal Contempt Order
May 31: Principal Lay Has a 'Come to Jesus' Moment
May 27: Laying Down the Puritan Law
May 15: Southern Hos-Pee-Tility

Pictures of a Pep Rally

The criminal contempt trial for Pace High School principal Frank Lay and athletic director Robert Freeman is well underway today in the Pensacola federal courthouse. Observers hoping to see the one and only faith vindicated began lining up outside the building at 3:00 a.m.

By nine o'clock, when we arrived, a couple of hundred protesters were getting drenched by a driving rain. They filled the boulevard median, restricted by local police and federal agents to stand no closer than fifty yards from the entrance to the courthouse.


Occasional, sketchy reports from inside the courthouse agreed that the Government's first witness, a Santa Rosa County school board member, took the better part of the first two hours on the witness stand. At that pace, if you will forgive the pun, it would be surprising if presentation of all evidence wraps up before five o'clock this evening.

Meanwhile, outside the atmosphere was rather like a pep rally at Dumbbell High. Some couldn't distinguish between free speech and religious indoctrination.


Others apparently missed the fact that today's criminal contempt hearing is precisely about whether Lay and Freeman contemptuously disrespected the authority of a federal judge.


The crowd was about evenly divided between perky, young, naive high school girls wearing matching T-shirts and older, rather used-looking men and women wearily propping up signs with various anti-ACLU and pro-prayer-in-the-school messages:

The big attraction was a four-member, avowedly "Christian" motorcycle gang that repeatedly circled the courthouse block, each time drawing cheers from the crowd as they idled by with prominently-displayed, mildly pornographic arm tattoos, crudely lettered "Christian" messages, and over-sized American flags. One couldn't help wondering how those in the crowd would have felt if these same toughs had come roaring down the driveway to their own homes.

Later, the motorcycle gang led a clutch of protesters in a spontaneous group prayer along the sidewalk. No one in the crowd could tell us who the gang members were or if they had the sort of character one would hope for from someone giving religious instruction. "They're praying out loud," one woman said to us. "That's enough for me."


As sometimes happens in such circumstances, it was a passing dog who had the most trenchant comment to make about the event, although his owner may not have understood the double entendre:

More Pace High School Religious Instruction
Sept. 18: Late Editorial Update ("Homo Neanderthalensis")
Sept. 17: Lay, Freeman Beat the Rap with the 'I'm Stupid' Defense
Aug. 22: Stupid, Not Contemptuous
Aug. 5: The One and Only Faith
Aug. 4: Frank Lay's Criminal Contempt Order
May 31: Principal Lay Has a 'Come to Jesus' Moment
May 27: Laying Down the Puritan Law
May 15: Southern Hos-Pee-Tility

Pensacola Beach Storm Story

After Hurricane Ivan hit the Florida panhandle, there were hundreds of individual storm stories circulating in newspapers, magazines, on the Tee Vee and, later, even in film. One enterprising local community theater group even knitted many of the stories together into a stage play, a year or two after Ivan hit.

There is one story we know, however, that has never been made public. Not until today. We heard it almost five years ago, just a few weeks after the storm. It was told to us by the very man who claimed to be at the center of the saga.

"Bill," we'll call him. Bill said he was still nervous about being arrested if the events he was about to relate to us ever became known. So, he asked us not to repeat the story or disclose his real name until the coast was clear.

If there is a crime buried somewhere in Bill's storm story, we're fairly sure the statute of limitations must have expired by now. So, we're going to share Bill's story with you now, for fear that if we don't it may be lost forever to posterity.

There are no hyperlinks in this story, offering you proof of its veracity. There will be no documenting footnotes, either. For that matter, we can't verify the story ourselves. While the events Bill described were going on, we were still on evacuation, closeted in a cramped motel room sixty miles away with a wife and two giant dogs. For all we know, Bill's story is not even true, although as we listened to him relate his tale, we thought we detected the distinct ring of truth. No one could possibly have made this up.

Bill is a reasonably good-looking, average sort of man in his mid-to late-sixties. Average height, average weight, thinning brown hair, glasses. A retired Navy officer, he spoke quietly in a way that somehow conveyed both an easy authority and an endearing degree of humility.

"I have a rental property on the beach," he began, "although my wife and I live year 'round in Gulf Breeze. We decided to ride out the storm at home, not far from the golf course but fairly high above the flood plane. As it happened, we did fairly well. The storm took some shingles, of course, and we had some minor leakage, but on the whole we were very lucky. We came out okay.

"That Friday, after the last of the storm had passed, you'll remember the day turned beautiful. Not a cloud in the sky. My wife and I ate a late breakfast together. Then I decided to ride my bicycle down to the Sound to see if I could tell how the beach had fared.

"By the time I reached the water's edge, visibility was good, but I still couldn't see much detail across the water -- just a few houses and a lot of white sand. As I stared across the Sound, I found myself thinking, 'Well, hey! It really doesn't look that far. I could probably swim across and get a better look.' So, I stripped down, tied my clothes in a bundle around my neck, hid my bike as well as I could in some bushes, and started swimming toward the island.

"It wasn't that far -- a mile, mile and a half, that's all. I'm in pretty good shape, so it wasn't long before I was pulling myself out of the water and onto the beach. My clothes were wet, but I threw on my pants and started down a little side street toward our rental.

"And that's when the patrol car pulled up. A deputy sheriff jumped out and came running toward me.

"Dammit, I thought. I knew I had been caught. You'll remember, for quite a long time after the storm people were banned from going back to Pensacola Beach. It was all over the radio, how it was against the law and trespassers would be arrested. The officials assumed anyone trying to enter Pensacola Beach was a thief. I thought for sure I was about to be arrested.

"'Oh my god, you're alive!' the deputy shouted. 'And, look at you. You're all wet! Man, you're a lucky guy. Do you know? You're the first survivor we've found alive! Here, let me help you.'

"Before I could say a word, the deputy wrapped me in a blanket and hustled me into his patrol car.

"'We've got to get you to the command center,' he said as he gunned the engine. 'They'll want to talk to you.'

"By now, I realized the deputy thought I had ridden the storm out on the island. He was very happy to have found me. But what would his reaction be if I told him I had just swum over from Gulf Breeze? He'd arrest me, for sure. I didn't know what to do, so I just sat there and let him continue shouting for joy over rescuing me.

"Turns out, the command center he was taking me to was the Dome Home. You know, that circular cement thing they built a few years ago? The one that was going to be storm-proof. Well, apparently, it works. I don't know when, but some time after the storm the emergency rescue people had turned it into their headquarters on the beach.

"So, we pull up in the patrol car and the deputy hustles me in. Inside that dome home, there were more deputies, and feds, and reporters, and all kinds of other people wandering around. Now, I was really in a fix. I couldn't see any way out. They had me surrounded. The deputy shouted out that he'd found a survivor. Everyone crowded around me, shouting and clapping me on the back and stuff. It was chaos, believe me. Then this guy from a TV network -- NBC, I think it was -- grabs me. He says he wants an interview, and so he needs to know my name -- and by the way, am I married and what's my wife's name and where is she?

"I tell him, 'Well, she's safe at home over in Gulf Breeze, where we live.'

"The reporter had this satellite phone with him. Somehow he finds out my phone number, I guess, and he rings her up. And I hear him saying, 'Hey, Missus. We have your husband here. That's right, Bill! He survived the storm! He's alive and safe, right now. He's awful wet, of course, and hungry, too. Wanna talk to him?'

"Then he hands me the phone and I hear my wife saying, 'You say Bill's hungry? How can that be? We just finished a huge breakfast right here, not an hour ago.'

"It was just sheer luck the NBC guy didn't hear her. I turned my back and tried to whisper into phone. 'Be quiet! I'll be home soon.' But it was no use. She was rattling on and on, saying how whoever it was they thought they had rescued, it sure as heck wasn't her husband. He had ridden the storm out, warm and dry thank you very much, right next to her all night long. Her husband wasn't starving. He'd just stuffed himself right there at her kitchen table with pancakes and eggs and...

"I hit the disconnect button. Just as I was about to hand the phone back to the NBC guy, someone shouts, 'The governor! The governor!'

"A limo had just pulled up in front and Jeb Bush was inside. Everybody ran to the door and peered out the windows to get a look at him. All kinds of officials and reporters began to scramble down the stairs to greet him.

"'I'm gonna get a sound bite from the governor,' the NBC guy tells me. 'I'll be right back. Then we'll do your interview.'

"He rounded up his camera crew and they all took off for the limo, too. For the first time since I'd crawled out of the water and saw that patrol car coming for me, I had time to think things through. It dawned on me that I had only two choices: continue letting everybody think I was a storm survivor and play along as the whole thing spins out of control and goes on national TV; or confess the truth and hope I don't get more than a month or two in jail.

"I didn't like either option. So, I decided to make a run for it. In all the confusion of the governor arriving, I just went outside and slipped away. I walked a few blocks, then caught a ride back to Gulf Breeze with a truck driver. He never asked me what I was doing on the island. I suppose he just assumed I had come there to inspect things.

"Which, of course, was true. But I couldn't have said that to the deputy sheriff."

Some Dirty Pigeon Stooled on Lou Dobbs...

... and it's about time!

DropDobbs.com: "When advertisers sponsor Lou Dobbs, this is what they are paying for:"

* Dobbs advanced racially charged conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate.
* Dobbs has close ties to “hate group” FAIR.
* Dobbs said Sotomayor nomination was “absolute pandering to the Hispanics.”
* Dobbs declared “Mexico has become our enemy.”
* Dobbs smeared U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce as “interested in the export of American capital and production to Mexico, and Mexico’s export of drugs and illegal aliens.”
* Dobbs fearmongered about Mexican “reconquista” plot.
* Dobbs aired hate group graphic to illustrate “the Vicente Fox Aztlan tour.”
* Dobbs spread leprosy falsehood in claiming “invasion of illegal aliens” threatening Americans’ “health.”
* Dobbs asked if Obama is “pandering to ethnocentric special interests again” by accepting Richardson’s endorsement.
* Dobbs praised Philadelphia English-only sign ruling as “a defeat for ethnocentric special interests.”

This is why we have joined together to launch the DropDobbs campaign — to let companies know that their continued financial support of his show makes them complicit in the hate speech that he promotes.

For more, read Dobbs vs. the Facts.

Health Insurance Self-Exam

Courtesy of the House Committee on Education & Labor, the same committee that approved H.R. 3200, the only health reform bill so far to make it out of committee:

Explosive Beach Tax Story

They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way,
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work;
For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard: and 't shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon: O, 'tis most sweet,
When in one line two crafts directly meet.

-- Hamlet, Act III, Sc. 4

Pensacola Beach resident Bill Post, author of the explosive Deceit Beach, has a new article in the Independent News. This time, he's exposing the sweetheart deal reached between Santa Rosa County commissioners and the leaseholders of Summerwinds condominium on Navarre Beach:

The County is giving lease fee refunds or credits to leaseholders at Summerwinds Condos on Navarre Beach for the purpose of offsetting the newly imposed ad valorem tax.

Post's article is a must-read for everyone who owns, or contemplates buying, anything on Navarre Beach or Pensacola Beach. For everyone, the question you should ask is, "Can I trust local government?"

Essentially, Santa Rosa County commissioners are relying on a legal opinion by county attorney Tom Dannheisser that sounds exactly like the arguments beach residents and businesses made in trying to resist earlier efforts by the two counties to impose ad valorem taxes. Call it the Joe Wilson response: "You lie!"

Hey! You promised not to tax us back when you couldn't get anyone to live or work on this mosquito-infested sand pile. We took you at your word. And, now that we're here and, as agreed, we're paying lease fees in lieu of taxes, you want to tax us, too?

The only difference is the commissioners overseeing Navarre Beach have decided to exempt only one condominium (so far) -- one of the latest to be built, in fact -- from the county's newly imposed taxes. But, in Hamlet's words, the move could hoist them by their own petard.

County government simply cannot, constitutionally, pick and choose which citizens it will excuse from suffering from the government's broken promises and which it will not. If Summerwinds can claim the government cannot break its promise of lease-fees- in-lieu of taxes, why not the Portofino complex on Pensacola Beach? The Hilton? Flounders?

And, if those commercial darlings of Escambia County's political establishment are protected from county deceit, why not individual residents? There i$ only one an$wer to that, of cour$e.

Read Bill Post's entire article. It's a humdinger.

Yesterday's Most Important Health-Reform News

All the newspaper ink and TeeVee bloviating today is focusing on President Obama's speech and South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson's desperate need for anger management counseling -- not to mention brains.

But the most important health reform news of yesterday is the elevation of U.S. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) to the chairmanship of the Senate's Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP). That's the same committee once headed by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Differences between any health reform bill that passes both the Senate and the House of Representatives will have to be reconciled by negotiators. And under Senate rules, the chairman of the Senate's HELP Committee will have "a key role" in that reconciliation process.

As recently as last week, Senator Harkin was telling his home state newspaper that he thinks a "new public insurance plan" is essential to effective health reform. That's the public option.

We've followed Harkin's career for many years. It's a certainty that on the public option, he won't go down without a fight. At a minimum, it's as sure as anything can be right now that Tom Harkin will insist on a roll call vote for the public option.

Good speeches are nice, of course. Bad speech can have good, even if unintended, consequences, too, or so it appears. But in a matter as vitally important to the welfare of the nation as health care reform, when crunch time comes it's good to know at least one honest, intelligent, Senator who hasn't been bought off will be in the thick of things.

Unhealthy Speech

About President Obama's health reform speech last night, CNN is reporting both the good and the bad news.

The good news:

Sixty-seven percent of people questioned in the survey say the support Obama's health care reform proposals that the president outlined in his address, with 29 percent opposed.

The bad news:

Those figures are almost identical to a poll conducted immediately after Bill Clinton's health care speech before Congress in September, 1993.

Natch, Democrats are saying the speech was a "game changer." That's very doubtful. Even a great speech by a president on a single night -- and this was at the least a very good one -- can't compete with the boatloads of lobbyist cash being shoveled day and night into the pockets of greedy (and well-insured) congressmen and senators. The real game remains where it always has been: in the Hall of Mirrors that is our dysfunctional Congress, so widely corrupted, as it is, by corporate money.

Natch, too, Republicans are trashing Obama's speech. It's what they do these days. Trash. Just ask North Carolina congressman Joe Wilson.

"You lie!" he shouted at the president from the floor when Obama pointed out illegal immigrants would not be covered by any health reform bill pending in Congress. Anyone who has been paying attention knows Wilson is flat wrong. So wrong that even Time Magazine was roused to point out that Wilson was not only rude, he's the liar:

The President's seemingly simple statement, that "the reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally," is not hard to check. In the Senate Finance Committee working framework for a health plan, which Obama's speech seemed most to mimic, there is the line: "No illegal immigrants will benefit from the health care tax credits." Similarly, the major health care reform bill to pass out of committee in the House, H.R. 3200, contains a Section 246, which is called, "NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS."

But Republicans aren't the only ones who weren't impressed by the speech. Popular blogger and attorney "fflambeau" has a detailed, line-by-line critique of Obama's speech from a rigidly liberal perspective. His central disagreement is that what Obama has described isn't "health reform," it's "insurance reform."

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) goes further. Love him or loathe him, what Kucinich has to say is always well-informed, thought-provoking, and never... never... calibrated to please corporate campaign contributors and lobbyists.

With the compromises being forced by conservative Blue Dog Democrats as well as Republicans, Kucinich says:

This system is a bailout for insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies. * * * There might be some short term benefit when it starts, but inevitably you're looking at a decline here. And, we'll be here again. Mark my words. Y'know, a year or two after this program starts we'll be back at the problem where people are having trouble paying through their health insurance; they're having trouble with their co-pays and deductibles.

The system that we have now is wrong. There's an underlying fault with this for-profit system. And as long as we have this system that is now getting fed more money and profits will be further fueled, we're looking at an inevitable demise of the public interest.

Nevertheless, when asked if he could envision voting against a bill of the sort Obama outlined, the normally candid and forthright congressman finessed:

As we learned from a few months ago, there's no telling what [kind of bill] is going to come to us. I'm not very optimistic at this point, based on what I heard tonight. I'm, y'know... and I'm not saying 'It's my way or the highway.' Yes, I'm the co-author of the bill for single-payer. And it would be good if we made progress in the direction of trying, trying to help people survive in this economy. I think a bill that gives broad subsidies to insurance and pharmaceutical interests is a problem.

Some pundits are suggesting that Wilson's outburst, more than anything Obama said, may be the glue that will hold the disparate Democratic coalition of liberals and Blue Dogs together long enough to pass meaningful reform with a public option. We're skeptical about that. But, how delicious it would be if, in the end, the nation has an insolent, misinformed, right-wing congressman from South Carolina to thank for achieving, at long last, "Medicare for all."