Innovative Governor?

Charlie Crist is Florida’s self-labeled “innovative” and “open-minded” governor.

That description has generally resonated because he’s an ideological hybrid. And a genuinely nice guy.

Yet the governor, enabled by a Republican-dominated Legislature, remains as taboo-challenged as any traditional politician when it comes to revenue raising. Witness the approach to Florida’s looming $1.1 billion deficit, one caused and exacerbated by the end of the rapid-growth era and the onset of mortgage meltdowns and property tax-cut fever.

The main solution? Budget cuts. Sorry, higher education, juvenile justice, highway repair and Johnnie B. Byrd Sr. Alzheimer’s Center and Research Institute. And head’s up, rainy-day reserves, and watch out, trust funds.To be sure, budget cuts should always be on the table in a deficit scenario. But these are short-term band aids, especially when projections show budget gaps of $2.3 billion, $2.8 billion and $3 billion over the next three years. Clearly a sales-tax skewed revenue system is woefully insufficient. And accelerating public spending is no long-term stimulus.

And yet, meaningful revenue raising is not on the table — not even university tuition — unless, of course, you count the governor’s equivocating approach to baccarat and pie-in-the-sky notions about selling off some highways or the state lottery.

A truly “innovative” leader, peering down the path of foreseeable deficits might want to resurrect the gubernatorial bully pulpit that was last used to push school vouchers and the FCAT. A minimum state income tax and sales tax exemptions, including services, for example, can’t continue to be treated like a political third rail – or a contrary position on the Cuban embargo.

If baccarat, blackjack and highway sales are on the table, so should a more equitable, less regressive, more productive tax system.

To dismiss such options out of hand is not to be “open-minded.” It is to unnecessarily gamble on Florida’s future.

Callahan And Armwood Make A Statement

Some victories are bigger than others.

Armwood High School head football coach Sean Callahan has won two 4-A state championships — and could win a third this season. But even if he does, he likely will never have a more satisfying win than the 26-7 one his Hawks pinned on Plant High two Fridays ago. In effect, Callahan won a double-header.

He won big on the scoreboard and even bigger on principle, a rare parlay.

Faced with having to punish eight players, including five starters, for skipping class, he opted — amid much speculation — for their suspension for the much anticipated season-opener against Plant, the cross-county rival and defending state champion. It was a game that had been hyped all summer because the perennially powerful Hawks were looking to avenge last season’s playoff loss to Plant. Now they would get the South Tampa Panthers at home in Seffner in front of a packed house and regional television audience.

A lot of coaches, especially at highly successful, high-expectation programs such as Armwood, would have found a rationale for not having to play such a mega game minus five starters, including the quarterback. There would have been extra wind sprints; a come-to-Jesus session with parents, teachers, coaches, administrators, a guidance counselor, a preacher and the school psychologist; a humbling apology to teammates for “letting them down”; and more wind sprints. Then they would have played — even if they didn’t actually start.

Not only did the Armwood 8 not play, they were not allowed on the premises. If they wanted to follow the action, they could see it on TV like other non-participants.

What Callahan did was win one for standards.

Even at the high school level, the better players are often catered to, especially in the high-profile programs. A lot of the double standards, dubious behaviors and marginalized academics you see at the collegiate level, began in high school. And all that trash-talking, strutting, boorish “look at me” conduct you see on Sundays and Monday nights didn’t start with the NFL.

Callahan sent a signal to those too arrogant to follow rules that apply to everybody else. He sent a signal to those who don’t understand the words respect and accountability. He sent a signal while there was still time.

USF’s Indicted Muslims

The indictment of those two Muslim USF students might yet turn out to be the perfect storm of unfortunate coincidence: the wrong foreigners in the wrong place with the wrong itinerary and the wrong car-trunk contents. In short, the wrong post-9/11 time to be clueless, Egyptian knuckleheads crossing state lines with “fireworks.” Nobody, to be sure, wants a Sami Al-Arian, “Jihad U” redux – or worse. More angst for the memories.

But make no mistake. That Berkeley County (SC) sheriff’s deputy did the right thing by doing more than write a speeding ticket for Ahmed Abda Mohamed, the USF engineering graduate student. He and his companion, USF undergrad Yousef Samir Megahed, were without a precise destination, ostensibly looking for cheap gas in the vicinity of the Goose Creek Naval Weapons Station and downright furtive about a laptop. And in the car trunk was apparently something more than sparklers and cherry bombs.

In this civilizational-war era, we’re all asked to pay more attention to anything suspicious.

Law enforcement is on the front lines of homeland security. And, yes, common sense profiling is a legitimate tool, Muslim and ACLU protestations notwithstanding. It can be utilized without being ugly or abusively arbitrary — or turning our police into ethnocentric storm troopers. But we are at war, and it’s with young, male jihadi Islamists with death wishes – ours and theirs.

St. Pete’s Hip-Hop Hopes

In St. Petersburg there is concern in diversity circles that the growing downtown entertainment scene is top heavy with alternative, jazz and rock music. And that hip-hop is nigh on to negligible.

For the record, a smattering of hip-hop clubs have opened – and ultimately closed – in recent years in downtown St. Pete. Something about violence, drug-use rumors and a dearth of responsible owners. A 2003 rap concert in Vinoy Park drew lots of complaints. Something about loud music and obscene language.

There’s a pattern to hip-hop, one that’s utterly incompatible with St. Petersburg’s on-going nightlife renaissance. Put it this way: Alternative, jazz and rock are not, by definition, misogynistic anthems to a dysfunctional culture.

If St. Petersburg is serious about continuing its impressive downtown revitalization, it will continue to marginalize hip-hop. And it will continue to treat syllogistic piffle about “voices of the underrepresented” and urban youth “empowerment” with the politically incorrect discredit it deserves.

But if further evidence is still needed, St. Pete officials are advised to take a short road trip across the bay. See what the hip-hop scene has done for Ybor City.

Niche Degree

It was one of those details buried in an Associated Press story. It was about Ralph Gonzalez, a Florida political consultant, who recently died in Orlando. The AP account noted that Gonzalez had earned his master’s degree in campaign management at the University of Florida.

An MA in campaign management? Who knew such graduate degrees were even available? Is there a Ph.D. program in fundraising?

Still DesVICKable

This won’t be the final word, of course, but Whoopie Goldberg did bring this up again last week in her debut on “The View.” She defended Michael Vick, who recently pled guilty to dog-fighting charges, as being a product of his (Southern) environment, not unlike “cock-fighting in Puerto Rico.”

Can we put this sort of clueless, shameless rationale to rest once and for all?

At some point in Anthropology 101, we all learned not to judge cultures, lest we join the ranks of ethnocentric lowbrows.

But if we pay attention, we ultimately learn that there’s black and white amid all the non-judgmental gray. Genital mutilation, for example, should never pass muster even as a cultural norm. Or incorporating rattlesnakes into religious ceremonies that include children. Or signing on to death as an appropriate enough punishment for apostasy.

Or taking pleasure, repeat pleasure — and often financial gain — from the infliction of pain on another creature. We’re talking adrenaline rushes from animal suffering. This is about humanity’s dark side in all its morbid, myriad manifestations: dog-fighting, cock-fighting, bull-fighting. Cultural context – from the inner city to Appalachia to west Tampa – notwithstanding.

And in Vick’s case, of course, one of the reasons he took the plea deal is to avoid a wider public airing of what he literally did – personally helping to execute poorly-performing dogs.

Such acts of base cruelty are not a product of Vick’s “immaturity,” as he disingenuously phrased it at his news conference. Would that they were. They’re a product of demented values and what’s cool in certain, cold-blooded circles.

And just when we thought Vick couldn’t top himself in lying and plea-copping, he did just that.

“I’m upset with myself, and, you know, through this ‘situation’ I found Jesus and asked him for forgiveness and turned my life over to God,” he said at that news conference. “And I think that’s the right thing to do as of right now.”

Nice touch, Michael: Adding insult to injury, torture and killing.

As If I Didn’t Do It

So, Barnes & Noble will, indeed, yield to the marketplace – if not a sense of decency – and stock copies of O.J. Simpson’s ghostwritten, “hypothetical” story of how he would have murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. It’s to be published this week (Sept. 13) by Beaufort Books on behalf of the Goldman family.

No word yet on a sequel: “How To Profit From Victimization” by the Goldmans.

Taliban Triumph

It wouldn’t be surprising if those groups that lean heavily on hostage-taking to advance their cause are still celebrating the upshot of the Taliban’s kidnapping of those South Koreans in Afghanistan. The six-week ordeal yielded an ironically disastrous outcome.

Imagine, the Taliban takes 21 Christian church workers hostage, kills two of them, gets concessions to release the remaining 19 and then gets less blame than the South Korean hostages themselves. Who does their PR?

South Korean public anger against the hostages has been pointed, palpable – and understandable. The hostages – and the church that sent them – had ignored repeated warnings from the South Korean government not to go.

But they went; they were taken hostage; and their government came under heavy, worldwide pressure to do whatever it took to secure their release. It was an untenable position for a government that knew such scenarios awaited, an act of arrogance by those who ignored common-sense warnings and a strategic victory for the pragmatically barbarous Taliban.

Local Publisher Looks At Obama’s Cuba Policy

When it comes to a position on Cuba, no presidential candidate is more open-minded than Sen. Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat. In a controversial debate remark earlier this summer he indicated his willingness to meet – without preconditions – with world leaders who are America’s adversaries, including Fidel Castro. Late last month in Miami, Obama made headlines when he called for the U.S. to ease travel and remittance restrictions to the island for Cuban-Americans. No other presidential candidate has taken these positions.

It was enough to prompt this comment from Patrick Manteiga, the politically plugged-in editor and publisher of the Ybor City-based weekly La Gaceta. “It’s nice to see one candidate who is not pandering to the far right Miami Cuban exile community,” stated Manteiga in his front page “As We Heard It” column.

Which begs this question: Isn’t the bar set pretty low when it comes to Cuba?

What about the embargo that hurts Cuban citizens, U.S. business and American credibility around the world? The Cold War relic that geo-politically positions the U.S. as a hypocritical hegemon at the worst possible time? Or the sense that Cuba’s actually a sovereign country that doesn’t require America’s democratic stamp of approval?

No candidate will touch the embargo, including Obama. In fact, no candidate would dare agree with the April 12, 1963 press conference words of President John F. Kennedy. “The basic issue in Cuba,” said JFK, who had weathered his share of Castro crucibles and CIA intrigues, “is not one between the U.S. and Cuba; it is between the Cubans themselves. And I intend to see that we adhere to that principle.”

“Sure, the bar is low,” acknowledges Manteiga. “No one is talking about anything, even (the lone Hispanic, Bill) Richardson.

“I honestly thought the tipping point was two or three years ago,” he says. “But it’s still so easy to rattle sabers at Fidel – and even Raul. It’s still the political thing to do. And the new (generation) Cubans won’t rally.

“Obama’s as good as it will get,” underscores Manteiga. “Hillary will follow her husband’s play book: say nice — but don’t change anything. This actually could show Obama having some leadership. Reaching out, uniting families. He’s got to nip at her heels – without getting his nose bloody. And who knows, maybe Hillary or Edwards might move over a bit.”

Tampa Should Market Signature Crew Art

Here’s a discussion we’ll be having increasingly as Tampa’s riverfront continues its revitalization. What of all that uncommissioned “urban art” that has been left in the wake of college rowing crews over the years?

Will it remain cool – in that Tampa signature kind of way – or will it seem an incongruous mismatch with the new Riverwalk, museums and upscale, outdoor dining?

Here’s a vote for continued coolness.

We’re obviously not talking about urban graffiti that is the unsightly tag line of vandals or ad hoc advertisers. We’re talking about a literal, historical signature: a graphic reminder of where Ivy League and Big Ten student-scullers have long wanted to be in the winter. And not only were the collegiate Kilroys here, but they’re still coming back.

If a simple Yale logo or a colorful reminder that the Princeton Women Crew was here in 2000 are not considered compatible with a protean waterfront, then we need to do a better job of educating those that think that way. Philadelphia and Boston, for example, don’t have a problem with student signatures along their boathouse rows. Tampa needs to market it — not question it.

To that end, visitor-related brochures and websites need to highlight the unique Tampa totems. And the private sector can emulate the Sheraton Tampa Riverwalk Hotel, which will place a plaque in the hotel’s lobby explaining the crew art history.

In Tampa, you can row home again.