Guilt By Association

It is incumbent upon me to point out this is an essay about the trial of Randy Acevedo, Superintendent Of Monroe County Schools, and if by some bizarre mischance a juror were to be browsing here it would be in accordance with Judge Jones' order to switch away and read something else, somewhere else.

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The bailiff came by to advise me it isn't okay to photograph jurors and I assured him that I was aware of that. As I was squinting into the camera I overheard the bailiff, a Sheriff's Deputy ask State Attorney Dennis ward if he knew who "he" was." No idea replied the county's chief prosecutor. Long my it stay that way sez I. I didn't enlighten him. After years of being a reporter I like the anonymity of just being a citizen in a public space. Let the buggers wonder who I am. The established reporters were setting up for Monroe County's Second Biggest Trial:

Jim DeFede is a Miami reporter who has a habit of pissing off his bosses and speaking truth to power in an old fashioned way. I stopped reading the Miami Herald when they fired him for illegally taping a phone call from a man who called to talk to him, and later killed himself in the newspaper's lobby as a way out of a scandal he was mired in. That got DeFede some attention which he could not survive and the Cuban hardliners in Miami were glad to see him forced out of the Herald because he never kow-towed to their rather anti-democratic, anti-Castro posturing. Apparently he's working for the CBS affiliate in Miami these days so I shan't get to see his take on this affair.

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The object of the trail is Randall Wade Acevedo Senior, known as Randy to most people in the community he grew up in. His wife, the former head of Adult Education in the Monroe County School District faces felony charges herself of embezzling some $300,000 from the District. Her forthcoming trial will be the Big Kahuna of trials in Monroe County I am sure, outshining her husband's appearance in court.

This trial in the new Freeman Justice Center's third floor court room is to decide three felony counts against Randy. He is accused of essentially covering up his wife's alleged theft and not putting the interest of the school district ahead of his own. There were probably a couple of dozen people in the court room all told, most, as far as I could tell supporters of the Superintendent on trial. I nodded to one woman I knew from outside the court but I didn't engage in conversation with anyone because to me this kind of atmosphere is far too pregnant for small talk, and careless talk in these places can affect trials. I sat silent in my corner and watched.

In Florida the chief prosecutor for the county is called the State Attorney (in California he would be the District Attorney, in Canada and Britain they are the Crown Prosecution Service, known as "the Crown" for short). I voted for Dennis Ward in the last election because I was fed up with Mark Kohl's inability to prosecute Sunshine Law violations. Florida has a rather draconian law that states anytime two or more officials from an elected body are together they must not discuss the public's business unless they are at a properly posted public meeting. Officials in Monroe County seem to violate this law all the time and Kohl did nothing about it. Dennis Ward is currently investigating two members of the school board for sunshine violations and I am interested to see if he is as good as his campaign promises. He's a Democrat so I know what you anti-Gummint nutters think of that already. I heard the indicted Steve Pribamsky and John Dick joke about their Sunshine Law prosecution at a recent School Board meeting so I hope Ward gives them a severe wake up call. Dennis Ward and a minion sat on "my"bench at the back of the court room. I was raised in the Catholic Church and we were trained to fill the pews from back. I don't know what his excuse was:Judge Jones presented himself well, all business and polite. I was friends with a California judge and I wondered out loud how she had the patience to sit through hours of talking. She laughed and said it was always interesting in one way or another. I guess for me, the pay would be the best thing about being a judge and that's no way to go to work. I'm glad somebody likes doing it.
I did not find the court room presence of the Assistant State Attorney Mark Wilson to be much to write home about. He has a baritone voice that should sound like Joshua's trumpet throughout the land but he mumbled and slurped in a most disconcerting way when he addressed the jury in his protracted and monotonous opening statement. His facts are going to have to be damning to secure a conviction because he won't do it on charm and personality alone.
The defense attorney is a fascinating case unto herself. Catherine Vogel claims almost three decades of experience in the court room and it showed as soon as she stood up to address the jury. She has command presence despite resembling a disheveled Julia Child, and she's the one I'd like to be able to afford to defend me when (or if) I get into trouble. She looked and sounded completely at home in her brief and informative opening statement. She is going to defend Randy, she said, based on the fact there was no intent to commit a felony. My wife the former public defender thought Vogel was going to go with reasonable doubt as a defense. "Interesting," she said when I told her what Vogel's strategy was going to be. Through it all sat Randy, the man I associate with being in charge when he came around my wife's classroom or appeared at any of numerous fund raisers around town. Here he is just a pawn as the lawyers do battle in front of him. Vogel did say she would call him as a witness, later. He put me in mind of the joke one hears around Key West, where dress codes are almost non existent.

Q: "what do you call a guy in a suit?"

A: "The defendant."

Trials in real life proceed slowly, not with the rapid fire delivery as presented on television. The fastest thing about this trial was the defense's refusal to seek to prolong the start date. My wife was sure there would be postponement but Vogel decided her best strategy was to force the prosecution to get on with it with no extra time to prepare. No continuation means this case could be in the hands of the jury by tomorrow.

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Wilson told the jury in his opening statement that Randy is not accused of stealing anything or embezzling. He pointed out the alleged theft will be the subject of what I am sure will be viewed as the trial of the decade in Key West, that of Randy's wife Monique who has been arrested and handcuffed and taken to jail twice in the investigation. The State Attorney isn't sparing that white collar, alleged criminal, any humiliation. Randy too has been cuffed in front of the newspaper's photographer but only once. Dennis Ward enjoyed the publicity hunkering down with the reporters and blabbing his office's strategy to anyone who would listen. Until a judge ordered him and his lawyer to shut about the case. My wife wondered why she had never had the opportunity to go up against an un-professional prosecutor like Ward, to which query there is no answer. Ward looks the part, all tall and gentlemanly with his few remaining strands swept back and pomaded to his skull:

Like any good scandal and the trial it engenders, this affair has lots of subtleties most observers don't care to observe. Vogel used to be the top Assistant State Attorney in the ancien regime of Mark Kohl. She either resigned in disgust, in the middle of the parking lot or was simply pushed out depending on who's story you prefer. So she's back in court with a vengeance here to whup Wilson's, and by extension his boss's ass. They don't look whupped- yet.

The prosecution's "star witness" according to Vogel is Kathy Reitzel the District's Finance Director who was the first person to note and report discrepancies in purchase card accounts from Superintendent Acevedo's wife Monique. Unaccountably the School Board is looking to get rid of her despite her whistle blowing, and some say it's because she only reported the fraud after last year's election, as though she delayed it as a deliberate political ploy to support Randy's re-election. A weird notion but as I know Kathy personally it's easy for me to support her as the upright and honest person I know her to be. None of this has been very easy for her.Her testimony yesterday morning was technical in nature, explaining to the prosecution how she noted some discrepancies amid myriad pieces of paper that came through her office. I had been working Tuesday night, the prosecutor was barely audible at the back of the court room and I eventually had to go home and take a nap. I left Kathy on the stand, sitting like a child surrounded by ogres in lawyerly garb:From time to time the lawyers turned from the witness to the judge to argue a point of law and when they went into a huddle it was a good time to sneak out and breathe the fresh air of freedom: Judge Jones has come under fire in the anonymous comments section of the newspaper. He expressed a hope publicly that both sides might reach agreement and settle out of court, which in the ears of some of the more rabid/cynical member of the public sounded like a judge throwing in the towel. As though he didn't have the stomach to see Randy go down, and was somehow secretly favoring the defendant. Such is the paranoia engendered by this trial. I can't imagine sitting up there, listening to endless hours of talk and then getting an earful in the paper on top of all that, and not being in a position to answer back.

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And yet people line up to become judges. I overheard a conversation in the corridor outside the men's room during a break, about one such person from the distant past. At the end of a line of photos of distinguished jurists from Monroe County history books I saw two older white men peering at a photo.

"The original Obama," one man said to the other, pointing to one particular photo. I checked after they left and it was Judge James Dean (no, really!) the first African American elected to the bench in a state of the former Confederacy during the period benignly known as "Reconstruction." He served from 1888 to 1890 in Key West.
Comparing him to the first African American President could have been some sort of a compliment, but it didn't sound like it. It's certainly not the tag that comes into my mind when looking at a picture of a 19th century black judge. From then till now Monroe County seems to have managed not to repeat the experiment and I saw only one African American clerk in the court, two or three jurors ( I couldn't see the jury very clearly) and there was not one black face among the public. Make of that what you will.

I hope the six person jury finds Randy not guilty, and I know many people in the community have already decided he is guilty of something, including and up to theft. I have no faith in the school board that is using this scandal to settle old political scores and not giving the district the leadership it needs. I say that not because I support the notion of theft obviously, but because I prefer crimes and misdemeanors not to be tainted by politics in their prosecution.

Not ready to wait for the judgment of his peers the School Board has already petitioned the Governor and the State Senate to impeach Randy and remove him from office. So far all he's guilty of is of being married to Monique. Strange justice to be guilty by association.

Night Chore

Leaving the Police Department around midnight I noticed for some reason the fountain at the entrance to the building which is decorated with a permanent police badge, and stepping out a little further I found myself in the parking lot.

I don't pay much attention to the trappings of the police station, it's just where I work. I was reminded last week that some people find the environment odd, when a colleague of my wife's remarked that she didn't much like being around armed investigators. The school district has been investigated for some fraud lately and the State Attorney's officers have been in the school's administrative building. "Guns?" I said. " I guess they are just tools, like screwdrivers for a carpenter." My analogy got me an odd look but I tend to forget that for some people being around armed officers is unusual. It would be hard to do this without the other sometimes:But at one in the morning Poinciana Elementary School on Kennedy Drive is as quiet as an empty police station:

I made my way to Flagler Avenue, enjoying the rush of the warm night air through my hair. I stopped off at the old state police building to take a picture of Habana Plaza illuminated at night, a long white arcade, refurbished after Hurricane Wilma flooded the bottom and blew out the roof. The new plaza looks good but the Office of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has moved elsewhere and there is a for rent sign in the window. Which makes a passable mirror:And this was what I stopped for. One pleasure I get from commuting by Bonneville is that if I need to amuse myself in the middle of the night a ride around town is a satisfying break from the radio dispatch routine at work. And as I needed to go to the bank I incorporated the chore with the pleasure of the ride.The sign of the Automated Teller Machine is cracked and wrinkled by the sun and the fragile state of the blue letters put me in mind of the fragile state of Bank of America, apparently carrying a vast load of uncertain debt.The ATM worked this time, but my wife puts her faith more in the credit union than the convenience of the BofA. I don't handle the checks so I go where I am told, and going to the bank at 12:30 in the morning is a good way to get out of the office and onto the motorcycle.

Unreality on the Right

A perspective from a British columnist, Johann Hari who published this commentary in The Independent on August 24th. I read it on Alternet and thought it was an articulate reflection of my views in this crazy "debate" we are having in the US these days.

The election of Obama - a black man with an anti-conservative message - as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.

When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view - to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation - has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

This editorial cartoon from the Dayton Daily News was published in The Citizen August 24th.

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and - at the same time - that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence - here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper - can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed - with a straight face - that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves - and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" - and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.

A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue - but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.

It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly - while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.

These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed - as one Republican congressman put it - that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy - reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution - could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.

For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured - and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" - which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.

This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be - shrill, baby, shrill.

Submit An Essay

Jack the Trotskyite Toad riepe sent me a message saying he had crafted a 1750 word response to my request for healthy debate on health care reform proposals in the US. He wondered if I would post it on my blog (like his blog isn't good enough) so the idea was born.

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Send your essays of any length and any content to mikigboat@hotmail.com and I will publish it here. Write anything you want of any length, include pictures if that helps and let me remind you that attention spans are short. I often think my essays are too long but I am a don't-give-a-damn kind of curmudgeon. Do not expect me to publish anything claiming to be written by me or by Anonymous. I'd like it if you included a contact e-mail address as I think some people may wish to agree or disagree in private and a way to contact the author might give strength to the point of view expressed. If you choose not to include an e-mail address that will have to do.

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My interest in insurance reform is a need for fairness and decency. If we can afford to spend trillions to blow up Iraq and Afghanistan I see no argument that holds against the notion that we can afford to cover Americans' health care needs. On a personal level I want portability, accountability and no permitted refusal of coverage. I'd like to get out of private insurance and into Medicare (single payer for the elderly) if that were possible.

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Now have at it, the gauntlet is tossed and it's up to you to say something.

Jack Riepe's Perspective

A guest essay submitted by Jack Riepe to stimulate sensible and thorough debate on health care reforms proposed for the United States. Please comment at length and sharpen your pencils to add your thoughts. All points of view are welcome, and will be printed by me unedited and uncensored, as will all comments in reply. My only time limit on this experiment is the day some sort of reform is finally passed, be it ever so inadequate, and signed into law by the President.

I am Conchscooter, aka Michael Beattie, 743 Indies Road, Ramrod Key, Florida 33042. Send essays to me at mikigboat@hotmail.com and post as many comments as you like below the essays. Unless you are the pornographic asian spammer, in which case send your pictures directly to Jack riepe at Twisted Roads (http://jackriepe.blogspot.com/)

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My Perspective: The Healthcare Debate-- Let's Start Over, the Right Way...

I want President Obama to put the brakes on the current healthcare public relations disaster and come up with three substantive, but different programs, that address all public concerns, to serve as the basis of a nation referendum on healthcare.

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Proposed legislation should come from the Democrats, the Republicans, and the insurance industry, (who should be advised that they can take the lead in offering an honest reform program, or be reformed by popular consensus and legislative action).

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The process should also be open to proposed programs set forth by labor unions or other social groups, like the Salvation Army. There has to be more than one answer to this problem. The proposed bills should be limited to 25 pages, plus an executive summary. A matrix for each plan (the size of a tabloid newspaper page) would also be prepared.

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Then I want President Obama to conduct a national referendum, that will be based on a factual analysis and presentation of the pros and cons of each program, conducted by an independent auditor and the US Government Accounting Office (GAO). Prior to the referendum, there will be be three one-hour television specials, with experts explaining how each plan would work. On three consecutive days (or as many days as it would take to present each program to the general public via various media outlets), newspapers across the country would run full-page ads, detailing each program using the executive summary and the appropriate matrix. The same data would be made available online. Proposed changes to these bills would be collected via e-mail and hard copy and tabulated prior to a final draft of each. (These could run into the millions.)

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It is to be hoped that each submitted program would include the input:

• Of respected medical authorities, who would be named in each bill.

• Of an accounting firm who would certify that all data, percentages,and cited costs were correct. (This means that all three proposalswould have to use the same base numbers regarding the nation's uninsured... And that means making an effort to accurately to define"uninsured" and count them.)

• Labor unions, professional associations, social networks, clubs, andlocal political groups would be encouraged to support or endorse one program, but not to criticize the other two. For example, rather than declaring one plan to be the national socialization of America, or the Nazification of the US lifestyle, it would be in the best interests of groups supporting another plan to point out the its benefits (i.e. keeping the US Congress out of the insurance business, while promoting a single payer concept).

• The bill would then be voted on in a special national referendum. Legislation may be necessary to accommodate such a vote. If so, Congress can make that happen.

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Now I realize this rational approach to resolving this problem will take at least six months to a year of dedicated legislation drafting, hearings and public coordination; and take all the fun out of name-calling and screaming, but it has some real benefits.

1) It will get the US public actively involved in solving a national problem -- in a constructive manner. (For presentation on television, I suggest canceling "Dancing With The Bullshit Stars," or "American Idol." unless the idols are school teachers, firemen, or single moms who hold two jobs and still find a way to pay for their kid's music lessons.)

2) No one will able to say a better alternative wasn't discussed or made available.

3) Every qualified social, political or professional entity (in addition to every US citizen) will have an opportunity to contribute to the finished legislation.

4) The final decision will be left to the voting public.

5) Politicians will be forced to work together, and adhere to public outcry, or face the consequences on election day.

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Republicans (and I am a Republican) will be forced to pull their heads out of their asses, and regard the common man and woman, with an income of $45,000 or less as their actual constituency. They are going to have to become known as "progressive Republicans" or "SRRs, Socially Responsible Republicans," committed to the man (and woman) on the street first. It may be easier to train tigers to ignore bloody gazelles.

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Democrats (and I supported a lot of these assholes) are going to have to acknowledge that the Continental United States is more than Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. There are millions of people who live in between these places who do not trust government for good reason. Alienating these people further is not good politics. Acting like they don't count is the first step in declaring a single term Presidency.

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If the President were to adopt the policy I have outlined above, it will do the following:

a) Give him more time to get this right.

b) Enable him to act upon new data regarding the acceptance of a program of this nature by the American public. Let's face it, the self-congratulatory Democrats were under the impression there would be no or limited opposition to this "40 acres and a mule" legislation. It blew up in their smarter-than-thou faces. (And their first reaction was to call the opposition organized stupidity bereft of social awareness, and nothing more than a neanderthal diversion tactic -- in an effort to discount resistance to a poorly communicated, over-complex document that is being rushed through Congress.

c) Tell the Democratic party not to mix issues with this program, and to assure (not just tell) the voters, "We're going to fix it." Of course, this means Obama will have to become the real leader of the Democratic Party. Democratic leaders have been waiting for their turn to screw the American public for so long that it may be easier to train tigers to ignore bleeding gazelles.

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So Conch, this would be my approach. I didn't mean to clutter up a great blog with this, but I rather got the impression you thought that I didn't think healthcare was important, or that I wasn't thinking about this, or that I was an idiot. It's just that I have no patience with government bullshit and no confidence in their bullshit promises. Among the things that President Obama promised were two elements of real change... They wouldn't cost any real money... They wouldn't raise taxes... They wouldn't even make a real splash at first, considering the average American is as dumb as dog shit and incapable of reading anything longer than a Twitter message. And yet, Obama couldn't drop these promises fast enough.

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The first was the promise that all legislation would be presented to the general public in plain language, 5 days before a vote would be taken. A nicer touch by a powerful leader eager to promote change would also have been to eliminate the rider system of passing legislation in the dark. But it was stupid of me to get my hopes up even for the initial offering. Can you imagine the value of the above legislative action in the promotion of a well-written bill, the acceptance of which by the American pubic was crucial to a major enhancement of the US lifestyle? You could use the healthcare bill as an example. But Co-President Pelosi and company is not really interested in smartening up the US voter.

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The second promise made by Obama was to eliminate all lobbyists and special interest representatives from his administration; and to require that all dialogues between elected officials and lobbyists be recorded and reported. This took my breath away. Only leaders like Attila, Pope Gregory, Napoleon, Washington, and Ghengis Khan make promises like that. As you can imagine, Co-President Pelosi and banking industry sexual aid Chris Dodd -- in addition to the rest of the occupants in the "Little Whorehouse on the D.C. Prairie" -- got real quiet on that one.

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It was for these two campaign promises, and because the Republican Party performed so poorly over eight years (treating rank and file Republicans, let alone the American public like they were idiots and cannon fodder), that I supported President Obama. He has performed like a true ward-heeler since getting into office.

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I routinely write to my elected officials, and my name is on hundreds of press releases that urge the feds to act responsibly (albeit on transportation issues), and with forethought, as opposed to highlyemotional responses that get headlines, but no results.

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So these are the kind of blog comments I write when I am not thinking about motorcycles, or women, or rum, or nude beaches in Key West.

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Fondest regards, Jack Riepe Twisted Roads

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"I have a good mind to join a club and beat you to death with it."--- Groucho Marx

One Hot Bonneville

It was Hot as Hades Friday afternoon. My wife and I had planned a take out meal at home to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary and I had spent my day off doing the laundry, vacuuming the house (all 700 square feet of it, which made that a quick chore) and generally spiffing the place up so she could come home from work and put her feet up. As a reward for my industriousness I took a ride to see what I might see out in the world of the Lower Keys.

I stopped here and there to take some pictures and by the time I got to the Seven Mile Bridge some thirteen miles from my home I was hot and sticky and ready for some shade. The sun was burning down and my thermometer was reading just about 102 degrees (39C) which is a tad bit hotter than one expects among these islands where a breeze almost always blows. Last year I lamented the passing of a summer in which the wind seemed to blow every single day and the flat waters one comes to expect between June and October never materialized. Every day was a ruffled day on the Straits of Florida. Well, this year I got my wish and every day is a furnace, off the water and on:I stopped at Bahia Honda State Park and used my annual pass to get inside and buy a cold soda at the concession stand, which had closed fifteen minutes before my arrival. There wasn't a Coke machine anywhere to be found and I had change in my wallet for a ...change. I took some pictures to justify the stop and pulled my open face helmet back on. For riders over 21 who enjoy the benefits of having a health insurance plan (seriously!) Florida is a helmet-optional state, but on a day as hot as Friday putting my lid on brought relief from the heat. Some people think a white helmet is going to radiate more heat away from the rider's head than a black helmet. However if that were the case the helmet would have to have no insulated lining at all. I like black clothing as it shows the dirt less, which is a consideration for a pig-pen like me. I attract dirt, grease, oil and debris like a magnet attracts iron filings and I marvel at people who have the nerve to buy white clothing of any kind.My plan, such as it was, had started out as a visit to Veteran's Park, a sliver of beach at the southern end of the Seven Mile Bridge. So after I left Bahia Honda, panting for something cold to drink, I stopped at the inconvenience store at the RV park on Ohio Key (August 9th, 2008). The lady in the store seemed grumpy and took my $1.44 with nothing approaching a cheerful demeanor, so I hope whatever was bothering her, gets better. I use Anti Monkey Butt powder for those annoying tropical irritations and I considered for a second mentioning it to her. A quick glance at her scowl and I took my well ripened banana and ice cold can of Coke Zero and fled back into the heat. She had the television on behind the counter and I am proud to be able to tell you she was ignoring a program called Everybody (except Conchscooter) Loves Raymond. I am totally hip to the culture, dude. Which comes from long hours standing in line with gossip magazines in the grocery store. Veterans Park was disappointing. Instead of being hard at work on a summer Friday afternoon hoi-polloi were swarming the place, the parking spaces filled with their vast spacious heffalump mini vans and extended cab gas guzzling Saudi Arabian economic support vehicles. What was even more irritating was that they seemed to be enjoying the shallow waters and the shady ramadas and clearly I was going to have to come back some other day to get my pictures. Humph. My coke was warming up nicely in my saddlebag.
Being a resourceful sort of elitist I knew how to implement Plan B. I crossed the Overseas Highway and rode down to the launch ramp parking lot on the north side of the main road. This strip of asphalt is shadeless and was burning hot so I rode the Bonneville illegally, past the barrier onto the grass and parked in the shade of what appeared to be some sort of buttonwood tree, though it probably wasn't. I drank my Coke and ate my banana, feeling all that potassium flooding my corn syrup filled veins, and started to feel right with a very overheated world. I had forgotten to bring reading material for once in my life so my camera was my friend and my entertainment.Fishing was over for the day for this crew and I watched as they retrieved their boat at the ramp. My phone rang and my wife announced she was done for the day, her classroom was organized for the little tykes' return on Monday. She was stopping at Square Grouper on Cudjoe Key to pick up dinner.
I struggled to get vertical and realized my legs had sweat their way through my riding pants and large ovals of damp were riding above the knees. My wristwatch was bathed in moisture that ran rather disconcertingly down my arm, and my shirt collar was plastered to my neck. It was time to get home. Had I brought my mesh jacket I would not have worn it as any extra clothing would have given me heat stroke. My lightweight leather gloves felt like damp neoprene mush on my hands. It was way too hot at six o'clock in the evening.
Fish was on the menu for me too. We had Crab Rangoon made as only Square Grouper knows how to fry this excessively familiar, and slightly bizarre dish, followed by sliced deep fried eggplant (aubergine) rounds. Eggplant is my wife's favorite plant and these crisply coated vegetable slices came with discs of goat cheese squished between them, combining her favorite flavors. The main dish was a fish stew also done Square Grouper style so it was a creamy chowder tomato bisque type of thing with bits of octopus and calamari and fish chunks floating beneath the surface . Leftovers went into the fridge to chill.Rather to my surprise we sank an entire bottle of Vincent Arroyo Melange between us and before I knew it my wife had slipped into a deep and dreamless sleep on the couch. All I had left to do was download the pictures and reflect on how good a day can be with almost no conscious effort.