“Hey, America… All Of You, C’mon Down”: Hurry On Down To Florida Before South Beach Is Underwater
“I have a message today to the people of New York, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and others: Move to Florida!”
Such was the sunny welcome put forth by Gov. Rick Scott at his second inaugural last week in Tallahassee, FL.
Quit your jobs, pack up your families and get down here as fast as you can. Twenty million people aren’t enough — Florida needs more!
I was thinking the same thing the other day on I-95, when I glanced in the rearview mirror and actually saw about eight feet of air between my bumper and the tanker truck behind me.
The first thing that sprang to mind was: Hey, another car could fit in there!
Not a regular-sized car, true, but maybe one of those adorable little Smart cars that you sometimes see on the streets of Manhattan or Chicago. It was a revelation.
Probably 99 out of 100 drivers in Florida would say our traffic already sucks, with a little imagination and no concern for the quality of life, there’s always room for more.
So you go, Gov. Scott! Keep on spreading the word.
The thought again popped into my head as I passed a middle school where every classroom has about 30 students, which most teachers will tell you are too many.
Know what? That school didn’t seem so crowded, at least from the outside.
The county had trucked in rows of windowless portable classrooms and painted them the same earthtone color as the main school building, so they looked hardly anything like warehouse storage.
Also, there was plenty of space for more portables at the east end of the soccer field.
So, everybody, listen to Gov. Scott! Bring your kids down to Florida and, by God, we’ll find a way to shoehorn the little imps into one of our schools.
And don’t be spooked by the fact that we spend less per pupil on education than 47 other states, because we make up for it in so many other ways.
Low taxes, for example. The governor loves to brag about Florida’s low taxes.
You might think it’s a sore subject among Floridians, this being the time of year when many of us are staring at our property-tax bills and wondering why they keep going up, up, up.
It’s because irresponsibly jamming so many humans together requires somebody (and it’s never the developers!) to pay for the roads, bridges, sewers, fire stations, extra police officers and so on. That somebody who pays is us.
So what’s Gov. Scott really talking about when he says our state has low taxes?
Get ready, future Floridans! Here’s the big celebrated tax break that the governor and the Legislature gave to all residents last year:
They cut the cost of our vehicle license tags by an average of $25. That’s not a typo, folks. Twenty-five whole buckeroos.
I still haven’t figured out what to do with all of it. Treasury bonds? High-cap stocks?
If a double-digit cut in auto-tag fees isn’t enough to bring caravans of U-Hauls streaming into the Sunshine State, then I don’t know what will.
The other morning I was driving through the Everglades thinking: Isn’t this swamp water finally clean enough? Really, how much urban runoff could a few million more people possibly dump?
We’ve probably got enough fish, wildlife and wading birds to last one more generation. What we really need are more subdivisions full of humans flushing toilets.
Aside from water shortages, saltwater intrusion, sink holes, red tides and the ludicrous cost of windstorm insurance, one thing that might keep newcomers away is fear.
Please don’t judge by what you read in the papers or see on TV, or by the latest FBI stats, which show Florida has more violent crimes per capita than New York, Illinois, California or Pennsylvania — all the places Gov. Scott is urging people to flee.
True, all types of criminals love it down here because of the climate. But while our prisons have been wretchedly overcrowded, additional cell space has become available under Scott’s administration due to a surge of untimely (and unexplained) inmate deaths.
So don’t be scared of Florida. Hurry on down before South Beach is underwater. We’re desperate for more people. We love sitting in traffic. We love standing in line.
Promised the governor: “Over the next four years, I will be traveling to your states personally, to recruit you here.”
Go get ‘em, you crazy Martian goofball!
Lie all you want about low taxes, and don’t say a word about the pythons.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, January 13, 2015
“License Plates Are Not Bumper Stickers”: When License Plates Take On An Obvious Political Tinge, Sparks Fly
A group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans has asked Texas to issue a license plate featuring the Confederate battle flag, which many consider an emblem of slavery. Texas said no, and the Sons are suing because the state accepts other messages for specialty plates.
The Sons have a point.
North Carolina issues a license reading, “Choose Life.” When lawmakers there refused to allow a competing abortion-rights message, the American Civil Liberties Union sued.
The ACLU has a point, as well.
States have jumped on the slippery slope of letting various business and social interests promote themselves on the specialty license plates. Now they have slid into the U.S. Supreme Court, which has taken the Sons of Confederate Veterans case.
The justices have examined license plates before. In the 1977 Wooley v. Maynard case, Jehovah’s Witnesses held that the New Hampshire state motto stamped on all license plates, “Live Free or Die,” offended their religious convictions. The court ruled that New Hampshire residents had a right to cover up those words on their plates.
How about no messages on state-issued license plates? Or perhaps limiting them to such neutral bragging as Wild, Wonderful (West Virginia), Evergreen State (Washington), Sweet Home (Alabama) or Garden State (New Jersey)?
I’ll admit to a soft spot for environmental messages — such as calls on Florida plates to protect whales, dolphins, sea turtles, manatees and largemouth bass — but not for blatant advertising. Sports teams are big businesses, and they have specialty plates.
Rhode Island offers a plate featuring Mr. Potato Head, marketed by the local toymaker, Hasbro. The fees car owners pay for such plates may go to a good cause (in Mr. Potato Head’s case, a food bank), and states take their cut. Still, it’s an ad.
But when license plates take on an obvious political tinge, sparks fly. And that’s why a blanket “no” to specialty plates is the right way to go.
Corey Brettschneider, professor of political science at Brown University, doesn’t agree. He sees license plate messages as “mixed speech.” Because the United States allows a freedom of expression unmatched by any other country, the state has an obligation to defend its values, he writes in his book When the State Speaks, What Should It Say?: How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality.
Brettschneider believes that Texas was correct in turning down the plates displaying the Confederate Stars and Bars but that North Carolina was wrong in rejecting the abortion rights plates.
I asked him, What about the argument that many see the Confederate flag more as a historical artifact than as an endorsement of slavery? Brettschneider responded that the flag’s history, including its use in opposing civil rights legislation, suggests otherwise. And even if the intent of some of its backers is pure, the considerations are bigger than the views of a private person.
Texas would be tied to the symbol, he said. “Texas has a deep duty to avoid an association between the state’s message and a racist message.”
But who speaks for the state? What happens when one set of officials is replaced by another with entirely different interpretations?
“The Constitution requires deference to the democratic process,” Brettschneider answered, “but it also sometimes requires limits on that process.”
We do agree that bumper stickers are a great invention. They are a frugal way to advertise one’s religion, preferred candidate, dog’s breed, football team or sense of humor. State approval not required.
As for specialized messages on license plates, I persist in opposing them all. Professor Brettschneider’s approach is well constructed and certainly more nuanced, but managing its tensions would be a hard job.
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, January 13, 2015
“There Are Things In It That Scare Me”: For Republicans, Dishonesty Works And Deceit Instills Fear And Uncertainty
There isn’t a democracy on the planet in which even conservative candidates take aim at citizens’ access to health care. At a certain level, the very idea seems a little silly – a national candidate would presumably fail if he or she told their electorate, “Vote for me and I promise to leave some of you behind without access to basic medical care.”
But the United States is the exception. The Republican Party is the only major party in any major democracy that believes citizens are not entitled to medical care as a benefit of citizenship. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), as we discussed yesterday, want the GOP to abandon universal coverage as a worthwhile goal.
The Affordable Care Act may have extended new health security to tens of millions of families, but Jindal and Republicans believe voters should elect them to deliberately take that security away.
In theory, this should be a very tough sell. Why in the world would any Americans consider voting, on purpose, for a platform that could deliberately punish their own family?
The answer, I suspect, has a lot to do with the power of fear.
The New York Times recently published a fascinating piece on Kentucky’s triumphs in implementing the Affordable Care Act, and the article highlighted a woman named Amanda Mayhew. On paper, the piece presents Mayhew as a classic example of an “Obamacare” success story: thanks to the ACA, she been able to receive free, overdue dental care; she was able to see a dermatologist for free; and she received medication to treat depression for free. This one law has made a big, positive difference in her life.
And then came the twist.
“I don’t love Obamacare,” she said. “There are things in it that scare me and that I don’t agree with.”
For example, she said, she heard from news programs that the Affordable Care Act prohibited lifesaving care for elderly people with cancer.
Mayhew went on to tell the NYT that she’s “thankful” for her coverage, she would “gladly give up my insurance today if it meant that some of the things that are in the law were not in place.”
The problem, of course, is that Mayhew has been misled. Despite what she “heard from news programs,” the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit lifesaving care for elderly people with cancer. It actually does the opposite – which is why the law has received the enthusiastic support of the American Cancer Society and AARP.
The Times article featured a well-intentioned woman, whose heart clearly seems to be in the right place, who would sacrifice her own access to medical care in order to scrap provisions in the law that do not actually exist.
And that’s where Republican rhetoric comes into play. For years, the naive among us – a group that I include myself in – have marveled at the extraordinary lies that have been told about the Affordable Care Act. Why, we ask, would the right lie so brazenly to families who urgently need access to doctors and medicine?
Because dishonesty works. Deceit instills fear and uncertainty.
When Republican candidates vow to gut the American health care system and take Americans’ coverage away, there are plenty of voters who are willing to go along because they’re eager to undo those horrible provisions in the law they “heard about” on “news programs.”
The power of deceptive propaganda, backed by billionaires and their powerful elected allies, shouldn’t be underestimated.
The Kaiser Family Foundation recently found that 41% of the country still, even now, believes “a government panel” exists to “make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare.” That’s two out of every five Americans who believe a ridiculous falsehood.
It’s not that these people are bad or dumb. It’s not that they want their neighbors or community to suffer. The issue here is that some wealthy and sophisticated folks launched a con job on the public, and the scam roped in a lot of victims.
Why else would politicians run on a platform of pushing millions of Americans into a position where they’re one ailment away from bankruptcy? It’s because they think they can get away with it – nice, generous folks will sacrifice their own security to prevent imaginary threats from hurting someone else.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 13, 2015
“The NYPD Slowdown’s Dirty Little Secret”: Not All Of Them Want The Slowdown To End
The police slowdown in New York, where cops have virtually stopped making certain types of low-level arrests, might be coming to an end soon. For a lot of police officers, it’ll be an unhappy moment, because they never liked making the penny ante collars in the first place.
“We’re coming out of what was a pretty widespread stoppage of certain types of activity, the discretionary type of activity by and large,” police commissioner Bill Bratton told NPR’s Robert Siegel in an interview Friday.
In the rank and file of the police department, there are mixed feelings about the slowdown and a possible return to the status quo.
“I’d break it down like this,” an officer in East Harlem told The Daily Beast. “20 percent of the department is very active, they’d arrest their mothers if they could, and they want to get back to work. Another 20 percent doesn’t want any activity period; they’d be happy to hide and nap all day.”
The officer added, “And then there’s the great middle that thinks things are fine now as far as their concerned and all they want is good arrests.”
The not good arrests, by implication, were all the low level infractions policed as part of the so-called “Broken Windows” approach to law enforcement, defended by both Bratton and Mayor de Blasio. It holds that one of the ways to bust high-level crooks is to crack down on seemingly minor crimes.
Between December 29 2014—January 4 2015, arrests across New York city dropped by 56 percent and summonses were down 92 percent compared to the same time last year.
It’s not novel to point out that the police slowdown, which pitted the police and their unions against city hall, granted one of the central demands of the #blacklivesmatter protestors—an end to Broken Windows policing.
Less noted though, is how many police officers are themselves ambivalent about actively enforcing low level offenses, and how that bodes for the post-slowdown future of policing in New York.
Retired NYPD lieutenant Steve Osborne made the point in an op-ed for the New York Times that was sharply critical of both de Blasio and the protestors.
“More police productivity has meant far less crime, but at a certain point New York began to feel like, yes, a police state, and the police don’t like it any more than you,” Osborne wrote.
“The time has probably come for the Police Department to ease up on the low-level ‘broken-windows’ stuff while re-evaluating the impact it may or may not have on real, serious crime,” he added. “No one will welcome this more than the average cop on the beat, who has been pressed to find crime where so much less of it exists.”
Day to day, no one has been telling police officers in New York how not to do their jobs.
“It sounds very unusual,” the officer in East Harlem said, “but I haven’t seen any coordinated activity besides the union putting the message out and then saying jump.”
It hasn’t taken much effort to coordinate the slowdown because, as Osborne notes, average beat cops were never that excited in the first place with going after public urination and loitering arrests. To them, it was a distraction from stopping more serious crimes.
Broken Windows advocates argue that some cops always resisted more active policing. When Broken Windows was first introduced, they say, police officers had to be pushed, by Bratton among others, to adopt the active policing approach that brought crime down to its current historic lows in new York.
But as New York got safer, the methods rather than the results became the measures of success. More arrests meant better policing as the tail started to wag the dog.
Bratton himself has said nearly as much in criticizing his predecessor Ray Kelly’s overuse of the controversial stop and frisk tactic that overwhelmingly targeted minorities.
“The commissioner and the former mayor did a great job in the sense of keeping the community safe, keeping crime down, but one of the tools used to do that, I believe, was used too extensively,” Bratton said in March 2014.
Stop and Frisks have fallen considerably since their high in 2011 when 685,724 New Yorkers were stopped by police, but some numbers driven approaches remain embedded in the department.
As a detective in the Bronx tells The Daily Beast, “there technically are no quotas” in the police department “but you can call them what you want, “productivity goals,” they are back door quotas.”
And those back door quotas can put pressure on officers.
“I have to suspend my disbelief,” the officer in East Harlem said, “to see how sentencing a guy with an open container is going to really bring crime down.”
“Violent crimes haven’t gotten worse in my little slice of heaven despite the slowdown on summonses and misdemeanors,” the officer added. “We’re still responding to robbery patterns. We haven’t gone down in presence for the more serious offenses.”
He acknowledged that it was too soon to say how such a policing strategy would play out over an extended period. “Whether it works will reveal itself over time. That remains to be seen.”
Once New York is out of the slowdown, it’s not clear what kind of policing the city will see on the other side. Will Bratton push the police to bring arrests back up to levels before they dropped off or will the department test its ability to back off?
Maybe there will be some new middle ground possible despite the bluster and rhetoric. According to The Daily News, the combative president of the police union is pushing for just a slowdown that’s a little bit faster. As one police source told the paper, “He said they should go back to at least 50% of what they used to do.”
By: Jacob Siegel, The Daily Beast, January 10, 2015
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