Category: Uncategorized

Iran and the Strait of Hormuz choke point is another reminder of that other reason why the U.S. and the world need to be weaned off of fossil fuels.

St. Pete Police Chief Tony Holloway has warned that we’ve haven’t seen the last of these teen-fueled car thefts, the most recent of which resulted in a pedestrian death. That’s beyond disturbing. These are not “joyriders.” These are young criminals who can take lives as well as property. And what the hell are teenagers doing out in the wee hours, regardless of what they’re up to? Is there anyone at home who’s remotely responsible?  

• “We are not seeking war with Iran. We need to get back on the diplomatic channel.”—Secretary of Defense Mark Esper at his Senate confirmation hearing.
• “Basically, we’re policemen right now. We’re not supposed to be policemen.”—President Donald Trump, in emphasizing that he wants an American exit from Afghanistan.
• “Trump is bringing the force of the American presidency to the rescue of white supremacy. And, self-identified Republicans absolutely love him for it.”—Charles Blow, New York Times.
• “(Trump) is more George Wallace than George Washington.”—Joe Biden.
• “(Trump) has never made a serious effort to expand his base. Instead, he seeks to inflame it. … The Republican Party goes along meekly as Trump struts around like a dime-store Mussolini.”—Eugene Robinson, Washington Post.
• “‘The Squad’ is a very racist group of troublemakers who are young, inexperienced and not very smart.”—Donald Trump.
• “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”—James Baldwin.
• “Years ago, we put our faith in the federal government to act. We won’t make that mistake again.”—New York Mayor—and presidential candidate–Bill de Blasio, in reacting to the fact that none of the New York police officers involved in the Eric Garner choke-hold death in 2014 will face federal criminal charges.
• “By raising the federal minimum wage, 23 million women across the nation, including 71,1000 local mothers and daughters in Tampa and Hillsborough, will see their wages increase. When women get a raise, we all benefit.”—U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Tampa, on landmark legislation to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025.
• “If lightning can vaporize rock, imagine what it can do to a person.”—Matthew Pasek, USF associate professor of geoscience.
• “So, the citizens of this county had the wherewithal and the cojones to put (All For Transportation) on the ballot and it passed by 57 percent of the vote. That’s what happened. We should be adhering to what they said.”—Les Miller, chairman of the Hillsborough County Commission, after it reinstated (4-3) spending restrictions on the new, 1-cent transportation sales tax. An appeal to the Florida Supreme Court still awaits.
• “At the appropriate time, I will give it thought.”—Pinellas County School Superintendent Mike Grego on whether he will apply for the superintendent’s position in Hillsborough County after Jeff Eakins retires.
• “It’s really exciting to see everything happening in Tampa. It has great energy to it now, and we think it’s a great time to be here.”—Anthony Soloman, owner of the Naples-based Ronto Group, which has unveiled plans for the 22-story Alltura Bayshore condo tower at Bayshore and Bay to Bay boulevards.

“We know that we can legislate the laws, but we can’t legislate attitudes. It’s the attitudes and viewpoints that we have to change as individuals and communities.”—Mayor JaneCastor, speaking at the LGBTA Democratic Caucus Summer Conference in Tampa.

• Of all seemingly unlikely places to be inundated by flood waters: Washington, D.C. But how ironic—or maybe karmic—that the combination of an aging stormwater system and climate change would overlap in the hub of Republican climate-change denial.
• In case you missed it on Fox or Breitbart, this just in: (A fossil-fueled EPA and a denier-in-chief notwithstanding,) we’re apparently making serious progress on the climate front. Really. “The president’s policies of competition and innovation have already produced significant carbon emission declines here in the United States, while also kicking off an energy revolution.” That revolting spin was courtesy of Sarah Matthews, deputy press secretary for the Trump campaign, reminding vulnerable voters not to be dissuaded by a deregulation mantra, relaxed vehicle-mileage standards or the Paris Climate Agreement withdrawal.
• Frankly, the best way to get Republicans to buy in on climate change—given that an existential threat to the planet and this country is just not nearly enough—is to keep characterizing it as a threat to national security. That buzzword resonates, especially the specter of immigrants fleeting what were once habitable parts of the planet.
• “God’s trust for this nation.”—That was actor Jon Voight’s take on what a 2020 Trump re-election would mean. I miss the “Midnight Cowboy” version of Voight.
• “I’ve known Jeff (Epstein) for 15 years. Terrific guy. … It’s been said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Donald Trump, 2002.
• So, retired Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan has called out Trump because “he didn’t know anything about government” and Ryan found himself wanting to “scold him all the time.” Speaking of “scolding,” that’s also what Ryan deserves for not having enough guts to have taken advantage of his Speaker forum to speak out more for his country—rather than becoming a sniveling enabler for his party and Trump.
• “Paul Ryan was a terrible Speaker.”—Donald Trump.
• We have another, altogether unsurprising, leaked quote from Kim Darroch, Britain’s ex-ambassador to the Trump Administration. He has labeled America’s, OK Trump’s, withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal as “diplomatic vandalism.” In short, asserted Darroch, Trump pulled out because “it was Obama’s deal.” Would that it didn’t ring so narcissistically true.
• Have you ever said—or heard others you respect say: “I hate that man”? We know whom we’re talking about. It’s typically followed by a self-rebuke, uttered or not, because we hate that we would “hate.” It diminishes us. The new normal is brutal. I hate it.

• While so much of the Jeff Epstein focus was on Alexander Acosta and a flawed judicial system that goes easier on billionaire sex traffickers than on marijuana miscreants, they were just the high-profile, legal enablers. More attention needs to be on all the other societal enablers, without which there would not have been such a preying monster. The coterie of amoral VIPs and jet setters, including a past and a future president, had more than an inkling of what his lifestyle included. There were colleagues and clients who found a way to look the other way. There were secretarial “recruiters,” who didn’t question the predatory dictates of their boss. And there were the parents of girls not old enough to drive who negligently failed Parenting 101.
• How ironic that the Labor Department has a lead role in detecting and deterring sex trafficking crimes. Surely that had something to do with the resignation of Labor Secretary Acosta. Surely.
• We saw the Trump-orchestrated, Acosta press conference, which was a revisionist long shot. It didn’t work. Trump can live with incompetence or even some scandal, but Acosta would have been a constant reminder of the Epstein-Trump connection, let alone all the other variations on a Trump “Access Hollywood” theme. 
• More irony: Acosta is the former dean of the Florida International University law school. FIU brought him in in 2009 to help heighten the profile of its relatively new law school. Well done. Yeah.
• If karma kicks in, Epstein and R. Kelly will share the same cell for the duration.

• One of the candidate-favorite rules of thumb for Joe Biden is to keep more of the focus on his role during the Obama Administration years—not his back-in-the-day Congressional tenure. However, Barack Obama isn’t likely to endorse him right now. It’s too early for him to be putting his thumb on the primary scale. But that’s awkward for Biden, a guy who needs that public affirmation from the one who vetted him. Especially for a former vice president who typically refers to the former president by his first name.
• And now there’s Tom Steyer, 62, getting into the mix. The billionaire investor-activist with an impeachment message can outspend everyone. Steyer has been frustrated with the slow, Dem-controlled House approach to impeachment. He also targets climate change with his advocacy group, NextGen America—and time is on nobody’s side. We get his sense of immediacy and urgency. He’s also against the inordinate influence of big corporations in politics. 

But the biggest political concern is what happens when Steyer inevitably doesn’t get the nomination—and resorts to an independent run. Ross Perot and the election of 1992 should still ironically resonate.

• It hardly helps that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has strongly suggested that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was disrespectfully singling out “newly elected women of color.” Arguably, Pelosi’s ire has everything to do with rookies needing to read the minutes of previous meetings, doing freshman homework and channeling feisty activism into something other than a counterproductive media spotlight. That’s likely what Pelosi had in mind when she told the Democratic caucus’ progressives: “Some of you are here to make pâté, but we’re making sausage.” Yes, it’s time to break up the circular firing squad before 2020 gets any closer. It’s time to remember that the real heavy is Trump, who wants to exploit a Democratic-controlled House split while tossing in racist tropes that further cement common cause with white nationalists.
• Speaking of, Donald Trump has weighed in as only the occupant of the Oval Orifice can against the AOC “squad” by exhorting them to go back to the “broken and crime-infested places from which they came.” And, BTW, they “hate our country.” Among the pushback to such despicably dangerous, presidential trash talk is that of New York Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries: “Racial arsonist strikes again. Shut. Your. Reckless. Mouth.” And, yes, the congressman, who also chairs the House Democratic caucus, pulled some rhetorical punches in his response to the racist-in-chief.

• Were it not for investigative reporting, in this case the Miami Herald, we would not be having this societal reaction and conversation about sex-trafficking predators. No, Jeffrey Epstein and his privileged treatment was not fake news. But allowing a predator to, in effect, continue preying was morally reprehensible. 
• Another day at the orifice. A federal appeals court ruled that Trump had violated the Constitution by blocking Twitter users who criticized or mocked him. Because he uses Twitter to actually conduct government business, said the court, he could not exclude Americans from reading or engaging with his posts because he didn’t like them. The reinforced bottom line: The new, noxious normal of Trump and political expression increasingly taking place online still doesn’t place anyone above the law.
• “Unlike immigrants, natural-born citizens such as Tucker Carlson are neither screened nor forced to pass a citizenship test nor made to swear an oath. And when they stray from the American way, no one thinks to tell them that they’re failing to assimilate.” That was a lot more than a satiric broadside from the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf.

• It’s about time; it’s progress; we’ll take it. Gov. Ron DeSantis has officially requested that a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune, the iconic civil rights leader and educator, replace that of a Confederate general (Edward Kirby Smith) as Florida’s representative in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Symbolism matters—more than ever right now.
• Undervote Update: Recent research now indicates that in Broward County voters who skipped the 2018 Senate race likely did, indeed, do so by accident. A poorly-designed ballot isolated it from other marquee contests. Sorry about that, Bill Nelson. But how the hell does an informed voter leave a voting booth without having cast a vote for one of the highest-profile races—Rick Scott vs. Bill Nelson—in the country? This is not just about bad ballot design.

• Imagine building a spec office tower these days? For Tampa it’s no longer an edifice hex. For this is what’s happening with the onset of construction of the 20-story 1001 Water Street office tower that Strategic Property Partners is building next to the nearly completed USF Morsani College of Medicine. But it’s a reminder of what can happen when a developer such as SPP has faith in this market and, even more importantly, can tap into the capital of its deep-pocketed founders: Jeff Vinik and Cascade Investment, the personal wealth fund of Bill Gates, one of the richest people in the world.
• The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office is now awaiting proposals for body cams. We all know the urban-policing reality. It will cost: as in digital video storage, maintenance and retrieval. Plus, privacy issues. But we also know the inevitable costs of deadly force and no transparency.
• Whatever the uncertainty over the high-profile Riverwalk Place tower, where developers have stopped taking condo reservations, this much we definitely know: There will not be a Trump Tower Tampa going up there.

• The H word: “Holocaust.” It’s as singularly horrific a word as there is. It embodies evil. It should never be repurposed for political advantage. So, imagine this from Israel’s new Education Minister Rafi Peretz, who’s opposed to inter-faith Jewish marriages. He went rhetorically renegade by asserting that “assimilation is like the Holocaust.” Being the leader of a religious nationalist party hardly excuses unconscionably heinous hyperbole.
• Last weekend police in Copenhagen arrested more than two dozen people who were riding scooters while drunk. You knew it was coming, but an “SUI” arrest still sounds weird.