Beach Booze Bust

Party animal: * * * Despite his cultural deficiencies, the Party Animal often lives quite a luxurious lifestyle. They are known to rely on their parents for protection and sustenance until, on average, they reach the age of 25 and can no longer rely on their parents' stability of mind for food and money.

-- Urban Dictionary

At last! Someone is trying to sober up the Mardi Gras revelers on Pensacola Beach. This past weekend, county deputy sheriffs "enforced a 20-year-old ordinance banning alcohol consumption in county parking lots, and 50 deputies were on hand to issue $100 citations for offenders."

Fifty-seven citations were issued. That's only a smidgen over one per deputy, hardly a police raid. You can be sure many more violators weren't cited by the deputies.

Look, we're not prudish. And we sure don't claim teetotaler status. But it's undeniable: For many residents and beach lovers, the Mardi Gras parade on Pensacola Beach always has been high on the list of events to avoid. For us, it's right below street raves, kickboxing, and dog fights.

Our own experience, to judge by the stories of friends and neighbors, is typical. When we think of the parade, we recall little more than ugly pushing and shoving by rude drunks; watching fist fights break out in the streets; insane pickup drivers trying to squeeze their square pegs into tiny holes; and unbelievable litter, everywhere.

This week's Gulf Breeze News quotes a number of those who were cited complaining that they were "targeted" by law enforcement. That's a hoot. Of course they were targeted! They were violating a county ordinance! That they weren't the only ones violating it is hardly a defense.

A few years ago, a veteran beach deputy confided to us that on warm weather weekend evenings, they know that statistically fully 50 percent of the drivers leaving Pensacola Beach after 9 pm are legally intoxicated or high. After 11 pm, he said, it's closer to 90 percent.

Nowhere near that many are cited for DUI, of course. That would be bad for business -- never a good reason, but probably the one upper-most in the minds of certain civic leaders.

More to the point, law enforcement without discretion would require a police force ten or twenty times bigger than the county can afford or the public is willing to sustain. And, it assuredly would lead to a backlash no one wants.

But there's another thing the deputy said: most of those intoxicated drivers leaving the beach on weekend evenings are well behaved, under control, and to all appearances they're driving cautiously enough not to endanger themselves or others. Unfortunately, that couldn't be said of as many drunks at the typical Pensacola Beach Mardi Gras parade.

The exercise of reasonable discretion in law enforcement at the parade should play a large role. 'Selective enforcement' is a must. Otherwise, we'd all be up to our armpits in deputy sheriffs and bail bondsmen.

Southern Censoriousness

Northerners who move to the Deep South usually suffer abrupt culture shock. Things are different here. It takes some getting used to.

Most Yankee transplants try hard to be accepting of the differences, much as an experienced international traveler will try to respect the cultural differences he encounters when visiting, say, Morocco, or an aboriginal tribe deep in the rain forest of Brazil.

Sometimes, though, we can be too accommodating. This was brought home to us again the other day when we found ourselves in casual conversation with a pleasant, smart, highly educated woman who moved to the Pensacola area a few months ago with her husband and children. She's from a large city in the Middle West with big, brassy shoulders and, like many northerners, she isn't shy about saying directly and emphatically what's on her mind.

Somewhat weirdly, we found ourselves comparing notes over the frequency of dropped calls by Pensacola area phone service providers. She has cell service with Verizon. Her husband prefers an I-phone, which means he's stuck with AT&T.

"We also had a hard line installed at home by Bell South," she explained. "Right away, we noticed the voice quality was terrible. The line kept cutting in and out. Whole words and phrases -- completely blotted out."

She shrugged. "We didn't complain. We just figured it was some sort of a Southern thing. That they don't allow swear words, or something."

Dept. of Further Amplification
2-18 am

Hendrick Herzberg's reminiscence of a school incident that happened in 1959 while he was growing up "in a corner of Rockland County, New York" ["Free Holden Caufield!"] somehow seems pertinent. 1959 Rockland and 2010 Pensacola have a lot in common, it would appear.

Mardi Gras on the Beach - 2010 Edition

This year, the annual Mardi Gras parade was squeezed in between cold fronts, on the nicest day of this long, wet, cold winter. Barrier Island Girl has the parade photos. For mainlanders, she has a Downtown Edition.

Don't Let the Opportunity Go Bayh

Atlantic Magazine editor James Fallows has launched an interesting challenge to Evan Bayh: Over the next year, use your decision not to run for reelection to act more like your own dad, Birch Bayh. What could that mean? Read it here.

Political Ethics in an Era Gone Bayh

Evan Bayh is retiring from the U.S. Senate. Good riddance, some say. That's probably premature. It's our guess you'll be seeing his name increasingly linked to that of future presidential and vice-presidential hopefuls.

Possibly as early as 2012. Two scenarios are likely. One, Bayh may be positioning himself to run against Obama, assuming the president even tries for a second term. The second is he's angling to replace Vice-President Joe Biden, who hungers after the cabinet post held by Hillary Clinton.

Sad to say, but running for president or vice-president has become a full-time job that requires years, not months. As Half-Term Governor Sarah Palin could tell you, political pollsters and advisers these days counsel ambitious politicians that it's better to be running for office than holding one.

Especially if Bayh wants to make up to the more liberal wing of his party, he needs to unshackle himself from the more conservative elements of the Indiana electorate and start edging to the left. Without that, even Obama couldn't convince a convention to substitute Bayh as his vice-president.

All of this provides us with a thin excuse to share a true-life anecdote with, perhaps, minimal relevancy. Or maybe not so irrelevant.

Many, many years ago when we were very young and frisky we happened to be visiting relatives in northern Indiana, including an uncle. We'll call him "Jim." In those years, Uncle Jim was a very big power in both the national and state Republican Party. It was no small source of embarrassment to him that his own congressional district happened to be held by a liberal Democrat, Birch Bayh, the father of Evan Bayh.

Uncle Jim had just returned from one of his frequent trips to Washington. There, so he said, he and party operatchiks were plotting how to beat Congressman Bayh in the coming election.

"I heard two rumors while I was in D.C.," he boomed in that distinctive baritone voice of his. "One of 'em is that Birch Bayh is sleeping with every congressman's wife in Washington. The other is that he's sleeping with every congressman."

Uncle Jim's deep chuckle shook the windows.

"I like 'em both," he added. "But I gotta pick which rumor to spread. It just wouldn't be ethical to spread inconsistent falsehoods at the same time."

My, how times have changed.

Crazy Like a Dead Fox

Casual readers of the Pensacola News Journal may be puzzled by today's editorial. ["It's Time to Stop Issuing Permits for Fox Penning"]

'What the heck is fox penning?' many will be muttering. That's a clue they didn't read Jennifer Hobgood's op-ed earlier last week ["Fox Penning Must Be Banned"]. Hobgood provided a spare description which one supposes the editorial writer assumed you knew.

Fox pens are --

fenced enclosures in which packs of dogs chase foxes and coyotes. The penned wildlife are often torn apart, or chased until they drop in their tracks.

An even more graphic description can be found on the web site of the Human Society of the United States:

First, the coyotes and foxes are caught by the heavy steel jaws of a leghold trap and suffer excruciating pain and terror. The trap can tear the flesh, cut tendons and ligaments, and break bones. When the animals struggle to free themselves, they aggravate their injuries. A trapped animal may chew or twist the limb caught in the trap in an effort to escape.

Later, the animal is removed from the trap and packed into a cramped cage with other injured animals. The animals are routinely sold and transported across state lines to operators of pens. Untreated for their injuries, the coyotes and foxes are released into an enclosure.

In the pens, packs of hound dogs are released to pursue the animals. Exposure to repeated, prolonged and unavoidable pursuit result in stress for the coyotes and foxes. Death is another possibility, even with the presence of escape shelters. The penned coyotes and foxes often meet a cruel end when torn apart by packs of dogs.

Who knew? But here's the thing that shocked us: it isn't just a 'southern' thing. Among a dozen states that still permit this wanton cruelty, the Humane Society lists Wisconsin, Indiana, and Iowa.

The heartland! With, apparently, no heart. We grew up there and, to our shame, we had no idea this sort of thing goes on.

This sorry business calls to mind Mark Twain's amusing travelogue about the long stage coach trip West he took in 1861. Abraham Lincoln had appointed Twain's brother, Orion Clemens, as Secretary of Nevada Territory. Twain decided to ride along, principally to avoid the Civil War. Along the way, he encountered desert coyotes for the first time.

Twain's description was more sympathetic to this "living, breathing allegory of Want" than to most of the humans he encountered. With good reason. The coyote, Twain wrote in a passage that could just as well apply to the modern-day (but slower) fox --

is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely! -- so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.
* * *

But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much -- especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed.

The cayote will go swinging gently off on that deceitful trot of his, and every little while he will smile a fraudful smile over his shoulder that will fill that dog entirely full of encouragement and worldly ambition, and make him lay his head still lower to the ground, and stretch his neck further to the front, and pant more fiercely, and stick his tail out straighter behind, and move his furious legs with a yet wilder frenzy, and leave a broader and broader, and higher and denser cloud of desert sand smoking behind, and marking his long wake across the level plain! And all this time the dog is only a short twenty feet behind the cayote, and to save the soul of him he cannot understand why it is that he cannot get perceptibly closer; and he begins to get aggravated, and it makes him madder and madder to see how gently the cayote glides along and never pants or sweats or ceases to smile; and he grows still more and more incensed to see how shamefully he has been taken in by an entire stranger, and what an ignoble swindle that long, calm, soft-footed trot is; and next he notices that he is getting fagged, and that the cayote actually has to slacken speed a little to keep from running away from him -- and then that town-dog is mad in earnest, and he begins to strain and weep and swear, and paw the sand higher than ever, and reach for the cayote with concentrated and desperate energy.

This "spurt" finds him six feet behind the gliding enemy, and two miles from his friends. And then, in the instant that a wild new hope is lighting up his face, the cayote turns and smiles blandly upon him once more, and with a something about it which seems to say: "Well, I shall have to tear myself away from you, bub -- business is business, and it will not do for me to be fooling along this way all day" -- and forthwith there is a rushing sound, and the sudden splitting of a long crack through the atmosphere, and behold that dog is solitary and alone in the midst of a vast solitude!

It makes his head swim. He stops, and looks all around; climbs the nearest sand-mound, and gazes into the distance; shakes his head reflectively, and then, without a word, he turns and jogs along back to his train, and takes up a humble position under the hindmost wagon, and feels unspeakably mean, and looks ashamed, and hangs his tail at half-mast for a week.

And for as much as a year after that, whenever there is a great hue and cry after a cayote, that dog will merely glance in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, "I believe I do not wish any of the pie."

That was in a time when these pathetic animals, coyotes and foxes, were roaming free. Imagine today, sticking them in a fenced-in pen and siccing dogs after them.

It's a slaughter, plain and simple. Florida should outlaw it, period.

Snow Day Update

No snow on the beach or south of I-10. Just cold rain. But the highly reliable North Escambia.com reports "Snow in Atmore, Walnut Hill, Century, Flomaton, Jay, McDavid and North." And, they have the photographic evidence.

Snow Day Guide for Pensacola Beach

Virtually every travel guide for Pensacola Beach describes our beach sand with the metaphor, "as white as sugar." Instead, now they can say "as white as snow."

It looks like a Snow Day on Pensacola Beach. With the threat of maybe an inch, maybe less, already schools are closing, grocery stores are packed, social meetings are being canceled, business meetings are being moved to Miami, workers (those who aren't enslaved, anyway) are being sent home early, and Blockbuster's shelves are running bare.

At long last, we can have a Snow Day in Northwest Florida! So what if it all turns out to be a false alarm, like last summer's Hurricane Ida?

A Snow Day is a lot like a Tropical Storm Watch, only without the rising sense of terror. Since many Panhandle residents may not be familiar with what to do or how to act during a Snow Day, we provide this guide as a public service:

Evacuation Route

The proper evacuation route is from where you are right now directly into your bedroom.

Emergency Supplies

• Chocolate
  
• Popcorn
  
• A hot toddy (that's a drink)
• Mac and cheese, optional.
  
• Fluffy comforter
  
• Extra pillows

Personal Safety

• If you have kids around the house, send them out to have fun by making a snowman in the street. They'll probably be safe enough.
• Turn off all phones. You also should change your answering message to something like, "We're stuck in a snow drift right now and can't come to the phone. Leave your name and number and we'll get back to you just as soon as Spring arrives."
  
• Dress yourself warmly. Woolen PJs and warm slippers are recommended for singles. If you have a spouse or lover, your birthday suit will do.
  
• Be sure to be armed with a good book, a working television screen, or a video recorder loaded with a good movie. (Triple-X films are only for those wearing birthday suits.)
  
• Spread the comforter across the bed and plump up those extra pillows at the head of the bed.
  
• Grab the book or the remote in one hand. With the other, lift a corner of the comforter and slide joyfully under it. (For those wearing a birthday suit, just grab the first person you see who's also wearing a birthday suit.)
  
• Set your alarm clock for March 21.
• When the storm is over, do not file an insurance claim with Florida Property Insurance. If you've done it right, you had too much fun to qualify for coverage over a few shingles or those missing kids.
  

The Snowman Cometh

A beach friend knows that we've been holed up lately in a research library. Warm and cozy there? No. More like chilly, drafty, and echoing with the rasping coughs and sneezes of other patrons, which now have successfully infected us, too.

The friend wanted to call to our attention Tuesday afternoon's "Special Weather Statement" from the National Weather Service:

CLOSER TO THE COAST...RAIN WILL BEGIN FALLING THURSDAY NIGHT AND A CHANGEOVER TO SLEET AND SNOW MIX COULD OCCUR AS EARLY AS MID MORNING FRIDAY BEFORE CHANGING TO ALL SNOW BEFORE ENDING.

Our friend added: "Do you believe this??? I will, but only when I see the first flake of snow on this island in the decade we've been here."

Today's daily -- which, astoundingly, we found in one piece this morning, rather than scattered all over the neighboring yards by howling winds -- follows up with this cutesy front-page headline:

The shivering fellow you see there, by the way, lives on the streets in Philadelphia, not Pensacola. However, if you were to air-brush the snow and beard away, he easily could be the guy sitting across from us in the library yesterday.

This morning's NWS forecast is a little more modest:

As the newspaper observes, snow in the northwestern panhandle of Florida is not unknown. "The last time the flurries flew in the area was Jan. 1-3, 2002."

Snow isn't foreign to Gulf Coast beach communities. We remember waking up on Pensacola beach to something that sure looked like snow two successive mornings during the bitter winter of 1995-96, after Hurricane Opal. A close relative who lived in a condo on Ft. Walton Beach in the '70s saw an inch of snow there at least once. She was told by old-timers that at least a dusting of the white stuff happened about once every six or eight years.

Predictably, a lot of ignorant right-wingers -- something we are never without here in the Redneck Riviera, whatever the temperature -- are politicizing this winter's weather to argue it refutes the science of global warming. That's on the same intellectual plane as the Pope who was so sure that the Bible and his own eyes disproved any suggestion by Galileo that the earth revolved around the sun. It wasn't until 1992 that the Church admitted, sort of, that he might have been right.

As Dr. Jeff Masters pointed out recently, if anything "extra moisture in the air" is one of the necessary consequences of a globe that has warmed "0.74°C (1.3°F) over the past 100 years." Masters adds:

It's not hard at all to get temperatures cold enough for snow in a world experiencing global warming. * * * There will still be colder than average winters in a world that is experiencing warming, with plenty of opportunities for snow. The more difficult ingredient for producing a record snowstorm is the requirement of near-record levels of moisture. Global warming theory predicts that global precipitation will increase, and that heavy precipitation events--the ones most likely to cause flash flooding--will also increase. This occurs because as the climate warms, evaporation of moisture from the oceans increases, resulting in more water vapor in the air.

According to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased by about 5% over the 20th century, and 4% since 1970. This extra moisture in the air will tend to produce heavier snowstorms, assuming it is cold enough to snow. Groisman et al. (2004) found a 14% increase in heavy (top 5%) and 20% increase in very heavy (top 1%) precipitation events in the U.S. over the past 100 years, though mainly in spring and summer. However, the authors did find a significant increase in winter heavy precipitation events have occurred in the Northeast U.S. This was echoed by Changnon et al. (2006), who found, "The temporal distribution of snowstorms exhibited wide fluctuations during 1901-2000, with downward 100-yr trends in the lower Midwest, South, and West Coast. Upward trends occurred in the upper Midwest, East, and Northeast, and the national trend for 1901-2000 was upward, corresponding to trends in strong cyclonic activity."

Snow in the Florida Panhandle? Now that obstructionist Republicans, gutless Democrats, and the White House have abandoned the cap-and-trade legislation, you'd better get used to it. Unregulated carbon emissions almost certainly will melt the Arctic ice cap within a generation and bring more... and more... snow to Pensacola.

The Presidency of Barack Quincy Adams Obama

When one focuses on just how obstructionist the modern Republican Party has become in Congress, it's difficult to find any parallels in our history. Certainly, one that comes immediately to mind is the decade preceding the Civil War.

This was, like now, a time when political passions ran high and political compromise between contending factions was difficult. It is signaled most dramatically, perhaps, by the odious 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. This disreputable federal statute enabled anyone who claimed another person was a runaway slave to enlist the U.S. Marshals for help in seizing by force the unfortunate victim. Nothing more than the slave owners' oral word was required. No evidence was required. No bail was allowed. Anyone resisting 'return' of the purported slave was subject to criminal prosecution, imprisonment, and a ruinous fine.

Even then, however, Southern pro-slavery congressmen -- who ceaselessly worked to ensure that slavery would spread as fast as the growing nation admitted new states to the Union -- refrained from holding hostage every single presidential domestic and foreign policy initiative. They did, that is, until we approached the very edge of Civil War.

Perhaps the closest parallel to our times is the presidency of John Quincy Adams. By then the first political parties -- Federalists and Republican-Democrats -- were on the edge of extinction. Nevertheless, it was a time of intense, and then-unparalleled-- political partisanship.

The time immediately before and during the Adams' presidency was regarded as one of “horribly embroiled conditions” and “unexampled bitterness” and “strife.” Religious pastors became politicians-in-the-pulpit. The public press was highly partisan and sharply divided. Virtually every newspaper sided with one partisan faction or another, and each attacked their opposite numbers with zeal.

At the local level, thinly-veiled vituperation and name-calling in the guise of “toasts” on Independence Day and other celebratory occasions became political ammunition for each side. As one historian of the times immediately before the Adams' presidency wrote, "This rage of party continued several years, and was sometimes so violent as to be in danger of degenerating into animosity and personal hatred."

Partisans, to a degree, did disagree over some major issues. Chief among these was the War of 1812; tariffs on imported foreign goods to protect nascent industries from aggressive foreign competition; creation of the National Bank; federal financing of "internal improvements" such as roads, canals, and a postal service creation of a national bank; and (of course) slavery. To a large degree, the fault lines over these differences paralleled the dominant regional split that plagues us even today between North and South. The overwhelming sense one gets is that in the North society was liberalizing rapidly and in the South the ownership class was intent on resisting those changes at all costs.

In the midst of this political maelstorm came the presidency of John Quincy Adams. Adams, like another president we can think of, strived to bridge the partisan divide. He retained several of his predecessor's key cabinet secretaries. He took on as his vice-president John C. Calhoun, a bitter political opponent and pro-slavery conservative who quickly betrayed Adams himself. Undaunted, Adams continued to the end of his term to appeal for bipartisanship (or, more accurately, non-partisanship in the interests of the new nation).

All to no avail. Southern reactionary opposition to tariffs, federal financing of "internal improvements," the National Bank, and even the postal service managed to stop most of Adams' legislative proposals. But not all. He did enjoy some modest success in persuading Congress to enact the Tariff of 1828 and finance some, but hardly all, of the internal improvements that were essential to the nation's expansion westward.

For all of his struggles to rise above the intense partisanship of the times, Adams was personally vilified and turned out of office after one term. Most of the nation's needs were to remain unmet for another generation. And, the silent ghost left in the attic by our founding fathers -- slavery -- eventually was to emerge as the real and unbridgeable difference that led to internal civil war.

So now, today, we are seeing obstruction of government at a level unprecedented since those times. Somewhat like then, it seems that the issues of today are in themselves less important than partisanship for the sake of partisanship. Whether, as before, this means all will end badly remains to be seen.

Rachel Maddow has the scorecard:

minor edit 2-10 pm

Life Without a Newspaper

We've been locked up in a library of late, pawing through nineteenth century newspapers for what is called around the home "The Endless Project." Every now and then, we accidentally run across an item that in some way or another seems to have a contemporary echo. For instance:

Illinois State Sentinel, October 11, 1850

Life Without a Newspaper

The second night after I left your city, I put up at the brick tavern, known as the ____ Hilgreen. The proprietor, in response to some interrogatories, informed me that he owned over 400 acres of land, had raised the present season 900 bushels of wheat, 650 bushels of oats, and expected to harvest 1500 bushels of corn; that he owed no man a dollar; and never took a newspaper in his life.

I had a curiosity to learn how a family kept up with the current events of the day, when deprived of the only means of obtaining it. Soon after I entered the family circle, which consisted of the parents, and six children, the eldest, a daughter, on the shady side of twenty five; -- the Mother commenced with --

"Mister, do you know whether that great Mr. Webster is hanged?"

"Yes, Madam."

"Well," said the daughter, "I allow as how he'd not make any more of them thar spelling books."

"I suppose not."

"I've lived so long in the world," said the mother, with a deep sigh, "and I never seed any body hanged yet. I always thought I'd like to see one hanged but it never happened to come right, and I'm getting so old now, I don't expect I ever will. I've seed the sarcus and the caravan, and such kind of shows, but I'd rather seed one fellow hanged than fifty of them shows."

"Stranger," said the daughter, "there's going to be an animal show tomorrow down here 'bout six miles, maybe you'd like to lay over and go down. Brother Jaemes says, they've got two snakes there, the same kind as what can swaller an elephant, but I don't believe there ever was such snakes, do you?"

"No Miss."

"Wall, then, the jography lies," replied Jaemes, a youth of some twenty two years.

"I allow it does," said the mother. "Why shouldn't the jography folks lie just like other folks?"

"Mother," said Jaemes, "You don't know nothing what you're talking about. Don't the United States make all the jographies? What's the use of their putting lies into 'em? They make 'em every ten years; they're going to make another in a few days -- They send out men all over the country to find out every thing; -- that's what that chap was here for 'tother day, asking so many farnal questions about. -- Stranger, supper's ready."

If you don't quite get the Webster reference, read this (Noah Webster, 1758-1843)... then this (John White Webster (1793–1850) ... and then this. There's a also a PBS documentary and several books, including this one.

But if you're a teabagger clinging to your own misconceptions as if they were facts, we can't really help you. We're heading back to the library.

minor edit 2-08 pm

Sarah Palin Mystery Solved!

Sarah Palin doesn't 'talk to the hand.' She talks from it! Just like that idiot in eighth grade who sat behind you in the next row: she cheats. Here's the proof:


Below is the YouTube video, which appeared before the close-up of Palin's right hand became available. Steve Benen has more.

Dept. of Amplification
2-07 pm

It should be added that Palin wasn't cribbing notes on her hand because she wanted to be precise about complex numbers, or chemical formulae, or a specific House bill number or stuff like that. Not even, for that matter, the spelling of a multi-syllable word or two. No, the words she had to cheat on were "Energy," "Tax," "Lift American Spirits," and "Cuts."

That said, it remains to be decided just who is the bigger idiot. Sarah Palin? Or the hapless teabaggers who paid her a cool hundred G's to read such empty generalities from her hand?

Shakedown Shelby

Alabama's opponent of good government puts the arm on the American taxpayer while also weakening our national security. Meet "Shakedown Shelby" (R-Extortion):

Editorial by Committee

Shorter PNJ editorial:

• Republicans have become nothing but "the party of 'no'."
  
• Republican legislation over the past decade is responsible for 97 percent of the "projected $2 trillion swing into the red" since 2000, when Bill Clinton left a $230 billion dollar budget surplus.
  
• Republican claims that their budget proposals would cut $75 billion from the budget are fantasy. Even the Cato Institute found they "only $5 billion in actual program cuts" at best.
• Republicans in Congress are pretending George W. Bush "never existed — but Ronald Reagan is alive and well."
• So, the all the fiscal trouble we're in is the fault of Obama and Democrats who need to "actually join [the] debate."

What? Run that by us again, please.

Dept. of Amplification

Shorter and more coherent, from Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman:

The moral here is that right now the GOP literally has no ideas about how the nation should actually be governed.

And the scary thing is that lack of ideas seems to be a winning platform.

Rebuilding Haiti: The Odds

Today's Times editorializes at a rather abstract level about a "ten-year recovery" plan for Haiti. ["Thinking About a New Haiti"] Stuff like "promote self-sufficiency".... "open up the countryside".... "rebuild... infrastructure" ... "tap the diaspora."

All admirable generalities. When it comes to specifics, we think there's a better than even chance the "self-sufficiency" will be provided by shady off-shore corporations, international drug cartels, and Wall Street banks who can always claim later they didn't realize who their partners in crime were. The "countryside" will be emptied, not opened up, to fill temporary construction jobs. New "infrastructure" will be built mostly to support the gambling industry. And the "diaspora" will consist of emigrant Haitians returning home to be schooled as dealers, croupiers, and slot machine mechanics.

Unless the international community gets its act together fast, Port-au-Prince is our bet to become the new 'Caribbean Las Vegas' -- taking the place of the mob-ruled Havana of the '40s and '50s. We give you odds of 3 to 1.