Author: opinionstogo

Swiftie Attack: More Personal Than Political

Whatever your take on the swiftie attack on John Kerry’s war record, this much seems evident: It’s personal. Notably for Vietnam veterans who resent the “war criminal” label fashioned by Kerry. More so for any POW for whom aiding and abetting the enemy in wartime is sufficient cause to disqualify a commander-in-chief aspirant.

“Moderate” Position On Cuba

President Bush has provided an opening for Democratic politicians in Florida with this summer’s restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba. Congressman Jim Davis, for example, has filed a family-friendly amendment to spending legislation that lets Cuban-Americans visit island families annually without a specific license. Democratic Senate candidate Betty Castor is emphatically on the record as being “totally opposed” to the restrictions and has labeled them “not humanitarian.”

What would be the ultimate stand on principle, however — even for “moderates” — would be the denouncement of the 40-something U.S. economic embargo. It has had an inarguably adverse humanitarian impact on the Cuban people — not Fidel Castro — for two generations. But that’s too politically dicey.

Cuban-Americans still represent nearly 60 percent of this state’s 850,000 Hispanic votes. That’s the principal reason the embargo remains untouchable for Florida pols — even moderates.

“Meshawn” Still At It

Just when we think we’ve heard it all from Keyshawn Johnson, we ain’t heard nothing yet.

It wasn’t enough that he was paid handsomely to go away last year. That would have embarrassed better men.

It wasn’t enough that he continued to badmouth the only organization that could win him a Super Bowl ring.

It wasn’t enough that he could run off at the mouth even as his value plummeted with every dropped pass and each public pouting session.

Now he’s lashed out at one of the classiest players to ever suit up for the Bucs — Ronde Barber.

But it was no garden variety insult. Between blacks, it’s a veritable epithet: “Meshawn” called Barber an “Uncle Tom.” In Meshawn-speak, that’s a black athlete who sublimates himself to the identity of the team. Comporting himself with dignity in wins or losses and not using the media as a personal-vent vehicle only compounded it. Hence the insulting plantation idiom.

Ronde Barber an “Uncle Tom?”

Such an outrageous, racist cheap shot only makes sense from the perspective of one who’s a slave to his own malignant ego.

The Follies Frances: Dumb To Dangerous

You’ve seen the TV footage and the newspaper photos. Maybe you were an eyewitness. Perhaps a participant; hopefully not. Call it the “Follies Frances.” Bayshore turned into a photo-op flood plain of gamboling and frolicking from an early morning storm surge and high tide.

Call it something else too. Dumb. And dangerous.

Now a note of context. This is a first-hand account. Specifically, the perspective is that of someone who had three uprooted trees, a backlog of storm refuse, a sandbagged front door, skittish power — and nothing that resembled a party temperament. But still, dumb is dumb. Dangerous is dangerous.

Let’s start with the most obvious. The numbskull exhibitionist on the Jet Ski and the simp in the Bayshore-traversing Land Rover represented a new level of idiocy. We’re reminded that money can’t buy brains. Maybe it’s the parvenu gene.

Now for the most serious — and most confounding.

Concede the surreal scene that is a flooded Bayshore; it is quite the sirenic attraction. Any kid would be tempted to play in it. Indeed, there were splashing tykes in bathing suits and older kids on skim boards.

What makes no sense, however, are the parents who permit it. What is it about brackish sewer water — in all its contaminant variety and menace — that they don’t understand? Doesn’t coliform count?

“Sure, it looks like fun, but I can’t stress enough how inadvisable it is for parents to allow their children to play in it,” says Cindy Morris, the director of environment services for the Hillsborough County Health Department. “With normal flooding, you should avoid standing water — let alone a major storm with major pumping stations out. Sewage overflows. The natural runoff includes animal and bird feces, for example. It was in that water.

“We can’t stress enough to the public that it’s risky to be submerged in that water,” Morris adds. “You get intestinal illnesses from contaminated water if you ingest it. If it gets into your eyes or nose. Or if you have sores or lesions. Then there are the hazards of not knowing what’s there. It could be electrical; it could be glass.”

It could be avoided. But obviously common sense was in as short a supply as generators were.

Runner-up: Those who made the Frances Follies a well-photographed, early Labor Day family event. Very early — as when the storm still surged, the rain remained heavy, the wind stayed stiff and the occasional tree branch whistled by. Some brought their very youngest — still in strollers — pulled from behind to avoid facing into the wind. The photo album will surely bear witness: “Baby’s First Hurricane.” Cute. Derelict and stupid, but cute.

Honorable mention: The early morning mom who accompanied her two young boys, both of whom were outfitted in skates and umbrellas. Bonding in a breezy obstacle course.

Honorable mention: The lad who brought his three-wheel, all-terrain vehicle beyond the water’s edge before turning around and performing a wheelie on the soggy lawn of St. John’s Episcopal Church. Maybe an agnostic — as well as a garden variety, inconsiderate punk.

Honorable mention: The man-on-a-mission guy in the pick-up who drove so close to Bayshore that his wheel wells were covered — as he parked it in a half U-turn. He jumped out, took a photo of his monster truck in a tropical flood and climbed back into his now stalled vehicle. Touché.

Frances Afterthoughts

*The lamest excuse proffered for parents’ indulging their kids’ hurricane fantasies amid the obvious flood risks: “cabin fever.” Come on, it was less than a day. No one was emerging from a nuclear winter. Break out the board games. Remember those?

*This, I know, is first-rate rationalizing, but there is actually an up side to losing power. It means a dependence on radio news . The nature of the medium, “War of the Worlds” aside, is to traffick much less in melodrama and hype. Plus you don’t have to stare at the cone of anxiety, the approaching apocalypse or a suspendered, histrionic meteorologist.

*To the Univision/Channel 62 reporter who tripped and momentarily disappeared amid the wave action at the high-water intersection of Bayshore and Orleans and Watrous avenues. Nice recovery. Her hand-held microphone never hit the water.

*I’ll take Topical Storms Ronda any day.

Decidedly indecisive

Who are these people? These electoral vacillators — that all-important, targeted demographic of undecided presidential voters.

At this point, what’s to be undecided about? This isn’t Jan Platt vs. Pat Frank; this is George Bush vs. John Kerry. What’s not to find different?

Would these people have seen McGovern and Nixon as a tough call? Would FDR vs. Hoover have required Solomonic intercession?

Or are they trying to wait out the media in hopes of starring in a made-for-TV focus group?

No “Castor-gate” From Al-Arian Controversy

Betty Castor’s field-trouncing primary win may have finally put the Sami Al-Arian issue to rest — or at least into a politically comatose state.

The Peter Deutsch campaign — via the American Democracy Project — had hoped to fan the flames of controversy and outrage over the indicted, alleged terrorist conspirator. It sought to portray Castor, the former USF president who put the tenured computer science professor on paid administrative leave, as disingenuous and indecisive on Al-Arian — and by extension craven on terrorism, weak on national security and vulnerable to GOP exploitation.

Not only did the ploy not work, but it came across as a counter-productive cheap shot. U.S. Rep. Deutsch lost to Castor by some 30 percentage points — a nearly unheard of margin for a well-financed, battleground senatorial race. As it turned out, it was also bad pandering — Deutsch even lost the endorsement of a key Jewish newspaper in his own South Florida back yard.

As to the Nov. 2 general election showdown with Mel Martinez, the Castor campaign knows that, while virtually anything might seem fair game to the Bush Administration-backed candidate, the GOP brings up Al-Arian at its own peril. And not just out of fear of a cheap-shot back draft.

There’s that George W. Bush presidential campaign photo with Sami and friends at the Florida State Fairgrounds. And then there’s that 2001 Al-Arian visit to the White House. Playing the 9/11 terrorist-revisionist card against Castor on Al-Arian would be a strategic rapier.

At the Castor victory party at Ybor City’s Italian Club, retiring Senator Bob Graham acknowledged the Al-Arian factor has likely played out and stressed that it never should have played in — in the first place.

“It was a silly issue to begin with,” opined Graham, while noting that the FBI never provided Castor with “fire-able” evidence. As for the primary win “inoculating” Castor from the issue in the general election, Graham wouldn’t concede that much substance to the matter.

“Betty isn’t ‘inoculated,’ if you will,” Graham said, “because it was a disease that never had any kick to it.”

With the Republican primary as prologue, however, the Martinez campaign is hardly issue-challenged sans Sami. He and Castor differ on a lot — from foreign policy to abortion.

Martinez, the former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, did more than wrap himself in the mantle of all things presidential. He took no ideological prisoners and earned enough ire from the Bill McCollum campaign to be labeled a practitioner of “the politics of bigotry and hatred.” That angry retort was in response to Martinez having defined McCollum as “anti-family” and “the new darling of the homosexual extremists.”

And McCollum is a fellow Republican conservative.

And Castor is a moderate Democrat.

And Florida is one of a handful of states with an open Senate seat. Control of the Senate — now 51-48 (with one Democrat-aligned, nominal independent) in favor of the Republicans — is very much at stake.

This won’t be pretty — even though Martinez will try to tack back toward the center from the religious-right fringe.Perhaps Deutsch did Castor a favor in preparing her in his own inimitable way.

Back to the future?

Sam Horton, the president of the Hillsborough NAACP, is on to something. He has been pointing out that the school district ought to be able to find a better way to spend the $4.6 million allocated to launch the voluntary desegregation effort called “controlled choice.” That’s the plan that has replaced 33 years of busing for integration purposes.

To Horton, as well as anyone else who can differentiate a boondoggle from a pedagogical priority, that’s money that could have been spent on something else. Improving instruction comes readily to mind.

Horton, however, should have stopped right there.

Instead, he segued into his main agenda: That the choice plan concern is more than a matter of misspent money. More to the point, it’s a very ineffective way of protecting integration. You see, in this first year of “controlled choice,” not enough students are choosing to inconvenience themselves by opting for a school that’s not nearby. Imagine that.

To the NAACP, that’s “resegregation.” And, sure enough, statistics show that 33 county schools are now “racially identifiable (black enrollment of more than 40 percent) in a county where the black population is 15 percent.

To the kids and parents who no longer want to be part of a social experiment, there’s another word for it: neighborhood schools. Remember them?

To Horton, this is “back to the future” stuff. As in the bad, old “separate but equal” days that predated the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954.

A little perspective, please.

Two points:

First, there’s a chasmic difference between de jure segregation whose underpinning was the racial-inequality affirming Plessy vs. Ferguson and parents who simply choose to send their kids to the nearest school.

Second, how insultingly racist is it to make the case, in effect, that too many blacks in a given school cannot constitute a sound educational environment? Surely, the NAACP wouldn’t want to be party to that twisted tenet.

Hillsborough County and any other school district have the legal — and moral –responsibility to provide equal education opportunities in terms of school facilities, equipment, curriculum, textbooks and instructional personnel. That well-monitored mandate can co-exist with true neighborhood schools, regardless of the racial composition.

As with any other school district, however, Hillsborough has no control over certain key educational variables, such as parental involvement and an education-encouraging culture. And no “controlled choice” scenario or busing blueprint will change that.

There are better ways to spend educational dollars than on marketing “controlled choice” or gassing up a lot of school buses. You’d think we would have learned at least that these last 33 years.

Olympic finale

*Behind the scenes a number of Greek officials are bummed that their less-than-affluent country is stuck with a $1.5 billion security bill, because the IOC mandated extraordinary measures. By comparison, that’s 15 times what was spent on the 1996 Games in Atlanta. It was Athens’ lot to be saddled with the first post-9/11 Summer Games. Athenians also are chagrined that some clown was still able to jump out of the crowd to assault a Brazilian marathoner. Apparently NATO hadn’t thought of that one.

*For those nostalgic for the old USA-CCCP Olympic battles — that ostensibly said so much about our competing socio-economic systems — this note of interest: The U.S. topped all competition and finished with 103 medals at the Athens Games. Russia was second with 92.

But the total of all countries that were once part of the Soviet Union came to 162.

But we still won the Cold War, the ultimate mettle victory.