BlogWood: Norwood's Fair and Balanced Nattering

LaBrake's larcenies lead to big house

It’s now official: Steve LaBrake is a slimeball. Ironically, having stolen funds meant for low income housing, Steve will now be forced to have his housing needs met by the state.

Former city housing chief Steven LaBrake and his wife, Lynne, were convicted by a federal jury of all charges of bribery, conspiracy and wire fraud Tuesday afternoon.

Also convicted of numerous corruption charges was Chet Luney, the former chief executive officer of the Tampa Hillsborough Action Plan. A fourth defendant, University of Florida Credit Union loan officer Lori Roberts Horne, was acquitted of the two charges she faced.

All told, Steven Labrake was convicted of 30 federal crimes, while his wife was found guilty of 28. Luney was convicted of 20 of the 21 charges he faced.

The prosecution maintained during the trial that LaBrake used his influence over millions of dollars in federal housing funds to personally benefit.

A fifth defendant, contractor Dean Ryan, pleaded guilty to bribery and conspiracy charges before the trial and testified for the prosecution. In exchange, the government agreed to recommend a prison term of about 18 months, or possibly less.

The wire fraud charge, the most serious of all the offenses the defendants were convicted of, carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison.

The LaBrakes are to be sentenced in February.

Kid careless

Last spring, the GOP led legislature dealt with the fact that tens of thousands of poor Florida children were on a waiting list for subsidized health care by eliminating the waiting list. No list, no problem.

They also increased the paperwork burden for those lucky enough to already be enrolled in the program, thus ensuring an annual turnover that will make room for new enrollees by disqualifying existing kids. Get ready for lots more stories like this one.

Children in nearly 50,000 financially struggling Florida families could lose state-subsidized health insurance on Wednesday because their parents have failed to submit the proper paperwork -- and today is the last day to send it in.

Administrators of the program known commonly as KidCare say they have no choice: Parents are required by a new law to file a handful of wage and tax documents annually, proving their children's eligibility.

Chairman Muhammad, a single mother from Miami, said she did all that but received a notice from the state last week asking for the paperwork anyway. The letter doesn't mention that she has until today to submit the information.

But, she said, she has mailed the information four times after receiving a notice this summer that she must reenroll her son, who suffers from asthma and attention deficit disorder. One of his medicines costs $100 for a month's supply. Right now, she pays $5 for it, plus a monthly $20 fee to KidCare.

Like other parents in the program, she said she couldn't afford the medications without state help. And like many others, she has had trouble calling the KidCare hot line or faxing the information.

''I left the paperwork in the fax overnight, and when I came back it was blinking: redial, redial,'' said Muhammad, a 42-year-old insurance risk management specialist with a Miami-Dade hospital.

''I know how these things work,'' she said. ``I'm starting to think somebody's throwing this away. I'm probably too expensive or something.''
......

The program serves 340,000 children statewide.

KidCare's expanded paperwork requirement was passed in the spring by the Legislature as waiting lists to get on the program -- and the newspaper stories about them -- piled up. To the dismay of some Democrats and South Florida lawmakers, Republican leaders in both legislative chambers dealt with the program by adding more money to temporarily wipe out the waiting list of 90,000 children, abolishing future waiting lists by capping enrollment, and making enrollment more restrictive.

SMALLER PROGRAM

Open enrollment is scheduled for next month for 50,000 children on a first-come, first-served basis.
......

(Rose) Naff (the administrator overseeing KidCare) said most other states have similar restrictions. She said parents can call her office, submit information by fax or even e-mail their paperwork if they can scan it into a computer.

Told she could scan the documents and send them by e-mail, Muhammad responded: ''Now I have to find a scanner? What's next?'' she asked. ``It's like they want to discourage me.''

Yeah, it’s almost as if the GOP has absolutely no compassion for the plight of the poor.

LaBrake not a felon yet

You know, what with the election and other distractions, I have completely neglected to point out that this alleged slimy, wealthy white piece of shit is finally on trial for having stolen and misappropriated funds meant for low income housing.

After a third day of deliberations, the jury deciding the fate of former city housing director Steve LaBrake went home Monday without rendering a verdict. So far, the 12 jurors have deliberated for about 15 hours. They return today to continue their work.

LaBrake and his wife, Lynne LaBrake, are accused of taking a series of bribes and gratuities to build a 4,200-square-foot home and, in turn, steering millions of dollars in U.S. Housing and Urban Development contracts to the nonprofit Tampa-Hillsborough Action Plan and Ryan Construction.

The best moment was probably when professional realtor LaBrake testified, with a straight face, that he is incapable of balancing a check book, and therefore cannot have been expected to keep track of the public’s money that just happened to end up in the pockets of he and his friends.

GOP backs paper trail?

Greedy, cynical bastards must have bought some stock in a printer company. Or perhaps it’s just a payoff to the GOP friendly manufacturers of voting machines, since there’s no way in hell for an outside company to come in and modify an existing and secretly proprietary voting machine.

The new chairman of the state House committee that deals with elections said he's open to considering paper audit trails for touch-screen voting machines.

Rep. Ron Reagan, R-Bradenton, said he did not think there was anything wrong with the computer touch-screen machines used in 15 Florida counties this year, but he is willing to allow debate on whether there's a need to back them up with printers if the technology is available.

``It's something I think we do have to revisit,'' said Reagan, the new chairman of the House Ethics and Elections Committee.

His willingness to consider touch-screen paper trails echoes that of Gov. Jeb Bush, who opposed the idea running up to November's election, saying it wasn't feasible, but said the day after the election that if the technology becomes available, it should be pursued.

We absolutely need a paper trail, but I fully expect this crew to provide absolutely nothing meaningful. The system needs to print out a paper ballot that can be verified by the voter and later be counted by machine. Otherwise, there’s still no way to know if the computer that you’re voting on is really tallying your ballot the same way it was printed out.

Iorio developing ways to evict residents

We need lofts! We need condos! We need to move those unsightly poor brown people outa the way.

Mayor Pam Iorio's renewed interest in redeveloping the Central Park Village public housing complex has prompted the Tampa Housing Authority to scrap the $56 million plan it announced last month.

The housing agency tried this year to join with private investors and then the public sector to replace the crumbling 28-acre complex. After both attempts failed, the authority came up with its own plan to build a mixture of 590 rent-subsidized apartments and retail space.

That ended at the housing board meeting Friday.

Iorio sent a letter Thursday asking the authority to join the city and the county to develop a mixed-use complex.

The authority's plan, which called for nearly all low-income housing, could hamper the city's efforts to bring condominiums and lofts to neighboring areas, city officials have said. Iorio suggested taking six months to get proposals from developers.

Nice. We’ll evict the poor, tear down their homes, and replace them with something we will euphemistically refer to as “mixed use.” Of course, “mixed use” means that rich white people will use the front doors and poor brown people will use the servant’s entrances at the rear.

The two groups will then mix and interact, as the wealthy whites generously provide under the table minimum wage employment to the gracious former residents who are thankful to have finally been given the opportunity to become house niggers, a position most of them have been dreaming about for lo these many years.

It’s the perfect recipe for a vibrant, ethnically diverse neighborhood, lily white enclave in an area that has become prized by developers in recent years.

Yet, for some reason, the naysayers, those negative obstructionists who would stand in the way of a private developer making millions by displacing the powerless uh, hurt the poor by fighting progress are not on board with this mixed use trend.

Traditional bricks-and-mortar public housing for people living at or below poverty levels is slowly disappearing in the Tampa Bay area. The St. Petersburg Housing Authority, for example, is trying to sell 568 units of low-income housing - including James Park - the vast majority of which is public housing.

The potential sales come a few years after the agency saw more than 200 public housing apartments vanish when it rebuilt Jordan Park, another housing community.

Across the bay, the Tampa Housing Authority will have about 1,000 fewer public housing apartments when several projects under way are completed by 2006.

The gradual but steady dwindling of federally owned public housing reflects an ongoing shift by agencies away from owning low-income properties and toward buying mixed-income sites and moving residents into the private rental market with subsidized rent vouchers under the Section 8 program.
......

"The Housing Authority is positioning itself for the future," Syl Farrell, an agency spokesman, said in a statement. Darrell Irions, the St. Petersburg Housing Authority's executive director, and Debbie Johnson, his deputy, declined to be interviewed for this story.
......

But some low-income housing advocates offer a different, less sunny take. Public housing, they say, is a "precious resource" during a "huge" affordable housing crunch.

Moreover, they say, moving residents from public housing to Section 8, a program already under enormous pressure, puts residents at further risk. Families armed with such vouchers face a new set of challenges: looming threats of cuts by Congress; scraping up additional money for security deposits and paying utilities; and finding an affordable, available home to rent with the voucher in the first place.

"The federal government can take away a voucher just as easily as they give it," said Charles Elsesser, an attorney with Florida Legal Services, based in Miami. "But they can't take away a brick and mortar building. In selling the property they've given up an asset dedicated and targeted to the lowest income.

"Vouchers do not necessarily provide long-term housing for these people," said Elsesser, who serves on the board of the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the advisory board of the Florida Housing Coalition. "Housing authorities are not fairly calculating the benefits of public housing and the difficulty of using Section 8 vouchers."

* * *

Public housing, largely built after World War II, started disappearing in earnest in the 1990s when the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development began awarding multimillion-dollar HOPE VI grants to local housing authorities. The goal was to "eradicate severely distressed public housing" and break up concentrated poverty, populations and, in some instances, crime.

The St. Petersburg housing agency received a grant to demolish and rebuild the 446-unit Jordan Park. By the time the new Jordan Park was completed, it had 209 fewer units. The Housing Authority gave most of the displaced families Section 8 vouchers.
......

St. Petersburg housing officials say they plan to buy "mixed-income housing" with the money from any sales. But Elsesser, the attorney with Florida Legal Services, said such housing serves a different population.

"Mixed-income property tends to be for a different group of people, not the people living in public housing," Elsesser said. "We're losing the few units we have that are affordable for very, very low-income, disabled and unemployed families."

HUD classifies families earning no more than 50 percent of the area median income as "very low income." That's $25,600 or less for a Tampa Bay area family of four. Public housing residents and Section 8 recipients generally pay 30 percent of their adjusted gross income for rent. In some cases, such as McGowan's, they pay zero.

While public housing has seen its share of problems over the decades, Section 8 isn't perfect, housing advocates say.

Last year, the nation's more than 3,000 housing authorities, which Elsesser said are caught between shrinking federal budgets and people who desperately need affordable housing, didn't receive enough government funds to subsidize their Section 8 vouchers.

"Right now there's a battle in Congress as to whether to fully fund the vouchers that exist for next year," Elsesser said. "Whether or not the housing authorities will continue to have these vouchers in the future is totally up for grabs.

"I sympathize with the housing authorities' position. The federal government and HUD have been waging a war on housing authorities and public housing."

At the residential level, there are other problems as well, he said. For senior citizens and others who need smaller apartments, the Section 8 program tends to work well, Elsesser and others said.

But for larger families, such as McGowan and her four children, finding four- or five-bedroom units in the private market is impossible because developers no longer build them. Also, families can lose their vouchers if they don't find a place to rent within a period of time that varies by agency. And landlords aren't obligated to renew a Section 8 tenant's lease.

In Tampa, Leroy Moore, the Housing Authority's chief development officer, said the agency isn't serving fewer people.

In one redevelopment project alone, the agency estimates a loss of 900 public housing units once Ponce de Leon and College Hill complexes - originally a total of 1,300 units - are finished being rebuilt next year with a HOPE VI grant.

The new community, renamed Belmont Heights Estates, will contain 850 units, 399 of them public housing. The other apartments will be market rate, Section 8 and subsidized by state tax credits, Moore said.

"The exact same tenants who qualify for public housing qualify for Section 8," said Moore, adding that responsibility for creating affordable housing lies with private developers, local government as well as housing authorities. "We're serving the same population. We're not serving fewer people."

In Tampa, 8,400 families are on the housing agency's waiting list for Section 8 and public housing, mostly for the latter. More than 1,700 families fill the St. Petersburg Housing Authority's waiting list for Section 8 housing, and the list is closed.

So, if we sell or demolish the actual dwelling units that are now housing the poor, and evict those folks into the Section 8 program, well, when that mean old Congress takes away the vouchers, the poor will no longer be our problem. We’ll eliminate the voucher list, and with it the waiting list, and our affordable housing crisis will be solved.

Oh, and we can have some swell parties in those new Downtown/Ybor condos!

Felonious Junk: Politicians give lip service to reform

Politicians are positioning themselves for a run for Governor in 2006. Charlie Crist, who has actually been an okay AG, is suddenly paying attention to reforming the antiquated and demeaning Florida felon clemency procedure.

Attorney General Charlie Crist said Wednesday that the state may soon make it easier for some felons to get their civil rights restored without having to go through the full clemency process.

Crist is one of four members of the Clemency Board, and he said that although fully automatic restoration of every felon's rights isn't likely to be agreed upon any time soon, a faster, easier process, including possible automatic restoration for some who have committed minor crimes, may be considered by the board as early as next month.

Florida is one of seven states where felons are permanently prevented from voting, holding public office and getting a license for many occupations - civil rights that can be restored only through an arduous clemency process.

"It's got to be sort of a progressional thing, but I think we do need to progress," Crist said.
......

Talk of reforms follows a July court ruling that ordered Florida to make it easier for felons to get their rights back.

In a case brought by black lawmakers, a state appeals court ruled that the Department of Corrections wasn't following state law requiring prisons to provide departing inmates with an application for a Clemency Board hearing.
......

Randy Berg, the lawyer who represented the black caucus in the lawsuit, said the issue has gotten lots of attention in Florida because of the fight over whether felons are getting their voting rights restored adequately.

"It more importantly affects their ability to get decent-paying jobs," Berg said. Without civil rights, they can't get a license to be a barber, a contractor or one of about 50 other occupations.

"If we want to keep people on the straight and narrow as they get out of prison, it's kind of a no-brainer you need to restore their civil rights," Berg said.

Don’t hold your breath. Jeb! is largely responsible for this backlog, and he could make it go away with a wave of his hand, but unless he can cynically figure a way to personally benefit, he’s got no motivation to change this backward, racist system.

Before Gov. Bush took office in January 1999, the average felon regained voting rights with a hearing five years after being released, the Herald found. Now, the average is eight years. Recently released felons who don't qualify for administrative review won't vote for president until 2012 — if their three minutes goes well. If clemency is rejected, the applicant won't be told why. Under laws designed to protect witnesses, he can't review his own file to find out if it is accurate.

Viewing those files is critical because the system is so fraught with error. The Herald found that computer glitches and poor communication dropped 100,000 felons from the clemency process from 1992 to 2001. It found that another 50,000 felons who served time in county jails were never offered a chance to apply. Florida is one of just seven states that don't automatically restore felons rights. About a half-million Floridians have not had their rights restored.

The list of rights felons must petition the state to restore goes beyond voting, which has grabbed the most attention after state officials bungled efforts during the last two presidential elections to purge felons from voters roll. Without clemency, felons also can't serve on juries or be licensed as nurses, electrical contractors or firefighters, limiting options for people whose options already are limited.

As The Palm Beach Post reported three years ago, the governor toughened the clemency rules when he came into office, adding 200 crimes to the list of offenses that force felons to wait for their three-minute hearing. While the governor claims that he is processing clemency cases faster than his predecessors, the Herald showed that his new rules are causing the system to back up more. The governor has promised reform. While Attorney General Charlie Crist, who serves on the clemency board and wants to be governor, argues for automatically restoring rights to felons who commit lesser crimes, the governor won't say what specific reforms he envisions. Here's one: Gov. Bush could single-handedly end the charade and automatically restore felons rights, as was the case before 1991, when early prison releases forced Gov. Chiles to replace automatic restoration of rights with stricter clemency procedures.

Unfortunately, rather than actual reform, Jeb! prefers to let ex-felons fester while God sorts ‘em out.

Jeb Bush came to visit for the holidays and said, “I can’t think of a better place to reflect on the awesome love of our Lord Jesus than to be here at Lawtey Correctional. God bless you.”

......

In fact, the InnerChange Initiative required prisoners to study the Bible and to attend church regularly for three months after release. Failure to comply is reported to prison authorities and can impact release and parole restrictions. In Lawtey, Science & Theology News describes an evening service:

“My job is to guide you to a personal relationship with the god of your faith. Amen?” (the leader) asks, moving from one man to the next and resting his palms on their shoulders. “And the only way I know how to do that is prayer.”

The leader is asking for an "amen" back from each prisoner. Jews don't shout out individual "amens" like evangelical Christians do. Neither do Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, or Native Americans. Imagine the social pressure on a prisoner who does not, in fact, reply with a hearty "amen" in front of his peers - and under the eyes of the warden, who was sitting in a back row during the service.

The Prison Fellowship Initiative actively participates in the faith-based prison initiative. Its leader, Pat Nolan, is refreshingly honest about his motivations, in contrast to the Bush brothers: “We don’t do this because it works. We do it because it’s what Jesus calls us to,” Nolan says. “We do it because Jesus was explicit, and we think that Christianity is the way, the truth and the life. That’s what we have to share. If we try to get it down to a generic faith thing, it loses its meaning.”

Much more on Florida felon rights.

Here come the GOP strippers

Palm Beach Post

Rep. Hostettler, addressing a special legislative briefing of the Christian Coalition last month in Washington, reportedly talked at length about a bill he plans to introduce. It would deny federal courts the right to hear cases challenging the Defense of Marriage Act, which bans same-sex marriage.

"Congress controls the federal judiciary," Rep. Hostettler was quoted as saying. "If Congress wants to, it can refer all cases to the state courts. Congress can say the federal courts have limited power to enforce their decision."

Apparently, the Hoosier congressman has not heard of the balance of power among the three arms of our government. He was quoted as telling the Christian Coalition members:

"When the courts make unconstitutional decisions, we should not enforce them. Federal courts have no army or navy... The court can opine, decide, talk about, sing, whatever it wants to do. We're not saying they can't do that. At the end of the day, we're saying the court can't enforce its opinions."

Another congressman, Alabama Republican Robert Aderholdt, was quoted as advocating court stripping as a means to protect state-sponsored Ten Commandment displays, such as the one erected by former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore

Banned in Tampa WMNF Newscast

For those who missed it, here's a link to the WMNF news story about my suspension which aired on November 24. Scroll to the Nov. 24 link on the page.

The story starts around the 45th minute, I think.

Banned in Tampa: The Times weighs in

Sp Times:

A DJ with a pre-dawn show on community radio station WMNF has been pulled off the air for playing profanity during his broadcast.

Norwood Orrick said he thought the songs had indecent words in their titles, but not in their lyrics. A "slip up" caused the playing of one song that contained the "f" word.

Orrick, like a majority of WMNF-FM programmers, is a volunteer. He called his suspension, which is open-ended, "overly harsh."

He said he was merely mocking the Federal Communications Commission during his weekly 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. program. But station managers assert he was willfully testing the FCC.

"I find it ironic, to say the least, that WMNF, which presents itself as something of a bastion of free speech, would be so quick to suspend a programmer - hours after the show in question - based on a single alleged incident which, obviously, no one has even bothered to confirm," Orrick said.

Banned in Tampa

Here's the letter of grievance which was delivered to the station today.

More on my suspension from WMNF

Felonious Junk: audit shows glimpse of problems

A new audit just released by the state gently criticizes the methods used to create the hugely flawed 2004 felon purge list, but, according to news reports, does not go so far as to suggest that any of the mistakes were intentional.

Since the state has been extremely savvy and blatantly partisan by including mostly Democratic voters on utterly inept in its attempts to create and manage a list of felons who are ineligible to vote, Secretary of State Glenda Hood has concluded that the best way for the GOP to retain power remedy is to design an even bigger list, ‘cause, um, the other list was someone else’s job well done fault.

Hood did not promise to produce a more accurate list, but did say that she hopes to eliminate controversies. Translated, that means that she and Jeb! have figured out a way to keep the new list super secret, thus avoiding those pesky controversies.

Oh, and there’s no reason to think that this audit may be flawed in any way whatsoever just because the auditor works for Glenda Hood.

Responding to a critical audit, Secretary of State Glenda Hood said Monday she will create a bureau to develop a statewide voter registration list in hopes of eliminating controversies that have plagued recent elections.

The new list will be designed to prevent anyone from voting in more than one place, and to remove names of dead people or felons who have not had their rights restored.

Hood said the development of that list will become the priority of the Bureau of Registration Services, which will handle all measures relating to the new Help America Vote Act approved by Congress after the 2000 election.

The changes were announced after a 50-page audit criticizing the way the Division of Elections managed a $2.2-million contract with Accenture, hired in 2001 to create a statewide voter registration list.

That list contained the names of felons who would be prevented from voting unless their civil rights had been restored. County election officials were to consult the list to prevent that from happening.

But the list was scrapped before the 2004 elections after revelations that it mistakenly excluded Hispanic felons.

The felons list has been a hot-button issue since the 2000 presidential election, when some voters discovered at polling sites that they had been erroneously stricken from the rolls. The loudest complaints came from Democrats, who claimed it was mostly their supporters who were prevented from voting.

The state then turned to Accenture, a huge consulting and technology firm, to create a list that election supervisors were to use this year to screen felons whose voting rights had not been restored.

But the list proved inaccurate.

"No person was denied their right to vote in the 2004 election," Hood noted. "That's very important."

Well, to be a little more accurate, after the state was forced to drop the felon purge list, no one was wrongly disenfranchised based on the list. Probably. See, Ms. Hood simply dropped the mandatory requirement that individual county elections chiefs use the list to purge their rolls. Some may have quietly kept using the list. But I digress.

The 50-page audit, done by Hood's own inspector general, Kirby J. Mole, said inadequate project management within the state elections division created most of the problems.

"There was no evidence detected to substantiate that the division intended for such disparities to occur," Mole said.

In addition to poor management, elections officials failed to properly notify the NAACP when they made changes in the way the 2004 list was being developed, a violation of a court settlement reached after the NAACP filed suit in 2001.

The elections division also failed to notify the U.S. Department of Justice, which must approve any change in election procedures.

Asked who was responsible for the failure, Hood said the division was directed by Clay Roberts, who ran the office for Hood's predecessor, Katherine Harris.

They failed to comply with court orders and federal law. No biggie - it’s someone else fault...

It was Roberts who ordered that arrest data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement not be used if the race and gender of a felon did not match exactly the race and gender listed on voting records. The FDLE does not list Hispanic as a race, so the names of Hispanic felons weren't included in the list.

Both Hood and Roberts, who now works for Attorney General Charlie Crist, insist that the 2002 decision was made to ensure the list was drawn as narrowly as possible to avoid including someone on the list who didn't belong on it.

Yeah, like someone who might be likely to vote for Jeb!’s brother. I think they let a bit of truth slip through there. Smelly truth.

Ralph G. Neas, president of People For the American Way Foundation, who was co-counsel in a lawsuit challenging an earlier 2000 purge list, said: ``This smells to high heaven. It strains credulity to think that Hispanics were somehow left off the list, while African Americans remained on the list.''

Hispanics in Florida register Republican more often than Democratic. By contrast, more than 90 percent of the nearly one million black voters in Florida are Democrats.

Finally, I touched on this briefly already, but what’s with the constant disregard for the rule of law, and why aren’t any of these points in the headlines? Lies, lost documents, ignoring federal civil rights regulations...

OTHER CONCLUSIONS

Other key audit findings:

The department relied on flawed data from the Office of Executive Clemency when drawing up the felons list. For example, the office did not initially turn over the names of more than 5,000 felons whose civil rights were restored before 1977 because the office did not have birth dates for those people. In June, when asked about this possible flaw, state officials denied that it was a problem.

The department did not ensure that some changes to the central voter database were approved by the U.S. Department of Justice, which must sign off on any new procedures that affect voting rights of minorities.

The department did not always comply with a legal agreement it reached in 2002 with the NAACP over how to use the central voter database and the felons list.

The department failed to keep a close watch over the project and Accenture. The audit notes that the inspector general could not find all the required documentation for the project.

Banned in Tampa: The Final Chapter?

Probably not the last word on my suspension from WMNF.

Thanks again to everyone (the vast majority of you) who sent positive wishes and or constructive and well meaning criticism my way. I only got one response like the following:

As far as your show goes, it is like all of the other 4-6 am shows, filler with hardly any listerners (sic) and no significant fundraising for the station. I don't care about it one way or the other, and I wouldn't know you from a thousand other 4-6 dj's who have come & gone over the years.

That was from some dried up old hag who has been pissed off for two years because I called my show MorningWood and used “You’re getting up with MorningWood!” as my tag line. The fact that she’s been obsessing about this for 2 years pretty much negates her claim not to care, but engaging this one in logical argument is like having a debate with a fundamentalist. Mere facts are powerless against the fortress of her sophistic dogma.

Listen, I tried to unequivocally explain that MorningWood was a double-entendre, that it could literally mean Morning with (Nor)Wood, and therefore was a very clever play on words, but she just started emailing in tongues, and (figuratively) spat in my face. Some people are just too far gone to reach.

Anyway, to review, this whole thing started with a phone call in which WMNF Program Director Randy Wynne informed me that a listener complaint about a profanity in a song right before 6:00AM was gonna result in a what I understood to be a permanent suspension.

Randy’s response to a subsequent email revealed that he was actually concerned about my programming choices for the entire MorningWood broadcast that day, and that the “open ended” suspension was due to the his belief that he could no longer trust me as a programmer.

Randy maintains that I broke WMNF’s programming policy. and I’ve come to believe that I may have, although I don’t think I broke any of the less strict FCC rules, nor have I been accused of doing so.

So, I deserve some punishment, but an indefinite suspension? That’s way too harsh, not to mention arbitrary and unprecedented, and being notified via a confusing and rushed phone call rather than in person or in writing is a blatant breach of my rights as a volunteer, according to WMNF’s own disciplinary policy.

Even the ancient addled prude quoted above agrees with me on that point:

As far as due process, yes, I would agree that there should be something in writing and an impartial policy to be applied evenly across the board, with an appeal process.

I was gonna meet with Randy and Station Manager Vicki Santa and plead guilty, emphasizing the fact that I never intentionally set out to break any rules, no matter what Randy might think, and beg to have my indefinite suspension defined as 2 weeks or 4 weeks or whatever so that I could get back to doing MorningWood.

Then this email from Randy hit my inbox on Friday:

The basic schedule has been set, but programmers have not been named. In the following two weeks (by 12/3/04), I will need statements of interest from programmers and potential programmers.

All programs are OPEN TO APPLICATIONS from current programmers, subs, and
those not doing shows. You can apply for any show for which you feel
qualified, whether it is currently your show or not. Current programmers
should not consider their position is automatically renewed. Nor should you
assume you will not get the show again; we are simply asking you to reapply
with a statement of continued interest.

Program changes are upon us at WMNF. Here’s how this works: First, Randy decides what changes he’s gonna make and which programmers he’s gonna move around etc. Then he sends out an email like this one and invites everyone to apply for whatever shows they think they are qualified for.

After he receives everyone’s applications, he promptly ignores them and announces his predetermined selections. Randy’s programming decisions are final. Since Randy just wrote that he has lost trust in me as a programmer, I doubt that he is inclined to allow me to keep my 4:00AM gig, much less move me up to a more humane time slot.

So, I’m gonna break another “rule.” I am going to assume that I will not get the show again. There’s no point banging my head against this wall. Even if I get a reprieve, MorningWood would end in January. I’d only get to do a couple more shows, if that.

I still feel that I was treated unfairly, that judgment was rushed and arbitrary, and that I was never offered a day in court, but Randy holds the keys to the microphone, so if he doesn’t like me, I’m history.

I know it’s hard to believe, so I’ll say it again: at WMNF, with all of it’s committees, and all of its talk of being volunteer driven, and all of its feel-good schmaltz, one man has complete control over filling music related time slots. One man, who does not have to justify his decisions, and rarely if ever does. The application process is fatally flawed, because it is not open to review. Randy makes his decision by himself and answers to no one.

So why fight it? It’s a volunteer position. I honestly don’t have the time or energy or financial resources to take on this losing battle right now.

However, since I will no longer be doing MorningWood every week, I should have some free time on my hands. I’ll probably just start blogging way too much, but I am also thinking hard about starting a movement to provide more support and representation to WMNF volunteers. Sort of a Volunteer’s Union. I’ll post more about that later.

Banned in Tampa: Update

Here’s the latest update on my suspension from WMNF.

Again, thanks to all who have contacted myself and or WMNF to support my cause.

At this moment, I am trying to set up a meeting with Station Manager Vicki Santa and Program Director Randy Wynne to see if we can hash things out.

I have until Tuesday (or maybe Wednesday, depending on how the rules are interpreted) to file a grievance over the handling of this situation, and I will do so if I feel it is necessary.

The oddsmakers say there’s a chance that my punishment may be lightened, but I’m not holding my breath, and at this point, Randy has said that I have lost my show, so even if my “indefinite” suspension is lifted, I may be a programmer without a show.

I maintain that Randy overreacted and I think that he is now trying to justify his actions after the fact by crying “intent to shock,” but regardless of the merits of the charges against me, I should have been given the courtesy of a face to face meeting and an opportunity to explain or defend myself before a verdict and punishment were meted out.

Had Randy arranged a face to face meeting, it’s quite possible that we could have dealt with the problem immediately to everyone’s satisfaction.

Many station volunteers are irate at the way things were handled, and feel that station management is abusing its power in this case.

There is now an easy link right there on the left in the sidebar which will take you to all of the posts relating to this developing situation.

Oh, and if you haven’t already, or if you have more to say, contact Vicki (vicki@wmnf.org) and or Randy (randy@wmnf.org) and tell them just how you feel about this whole mess. Both can be reached at 813-238-8001.

Que sera sera

What’s a missing ballot or two among friends? 268 misplaced in a box here, 10 in a pouch there, 2 in another box, you know: "Things happen,"

Pinellas election officials said Thursday they had found 12 more uncounted ballots as they dug through boxes in their office this week.

Two uncounted absentee ballots were sitting unopened in a box that was headed to the warehouse for storage. And 10 provisional ballots were sitting in a blue pouch in a loading dock area. No one had noticed they had not been counted.

The discovery of those 12 on Wednesday came two days after an employee found a box with 268 uncounted absentee ballots. The unmarked brown banker's box was sitting in plain sight on an office floor, with papers and other boxes stacked on top of it.

Both discoveries came the week after Pinellas County sent final election results to the state.

Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark said she was unaware of the problem because she didn't know that her staff had not performed a standard check to make sure all ballots were accounted for.
......

Inside the counting room, the canvassing board chairman, County Judge Patrick Caddell, said people outside would never understand how complex the election process is.

"Things happen," Caddell said.

Banned in Tampa: WMNF responds

First, to those of you who emailed or phoned or commented or whatever with words of support: Thanks!

As many of you already know, I was suspended yesterday from my volunteer programmer (DJ) position at WMNF.

Since the original decision was handed down by phone, I was a little confused about several points. I emailed Program Director Randy Wynne, and this is his response (My original questions, followed by Randy’s response in italics)

There is much surprise over the permanent nature of my suspension. Did I misunderstand you? Please clarify: How long is this suspension?

I told you on the phone the suspension is "until further notice", That means it is open-ended but might be reviewed.

Who complained? Was it a “normal” listener? A station volunteer? A programmer? Staff?

A normal listener complained.

Why the punishment? Before 6am, this is not a great transgression. Where are our guidelines? What rule did I break? Is there a playlist rule? What about before 6am?

Based on the stated theme of your show, it sounded like you want to test the FCC. Your blog bragged that listeners will hear all seven dirty words. The playlist shows that the intent is "what can I get away with?" The Programmer Agreement says that "Between 10am and 6pm there is a more lenient standard". But it also says "Even during the lenient hours programmers should avoid material which appeals to prurient interest or whose appeal lies in shock value." It seems to me that the theme of the show was indeed intended to provoke shock value. Our policy quotes the FCC that even during the lenient hours there should not be programming that contains"the explicitness or graphic nature of the description or depiction of sexual or excretory organs or activities" (this wording precedes the toughening policy that has followed Janet Jackson and Bono) . Playing a song about masturbation right before 6am violates these rules. The FCC does not care if the song is funny.

Why no warning first? Have I ever been warned before about this kind of stuff? Have you been worried about my show? Why no communication to me to that effect?

This show was not an accidental slip of a song with a bad word. It was a serious lapse in judgment which has led me to lose trust in you as a programmer. There was a clear intent to shock - to challenge with satire the FCC guidelines on obscenity. This was not your decision to make. The station (as well as you individually) are liable for violations - possibly tens of thousands of dollars.

The bottom line of our policy is this: "If you are considering any material that you feel might violate the policy, check with the Program Director before airing it. This is a station decision - not for the individual programmer."

So he’s changed his story a little. At first, he mentioned only the one song. Now, he is alleging that I broke the (more restrictive than the FCC) WMNF programmers agreement with the theme of my show.

The suspension still seems to be permanent - I mean, he’s said that I’ve lost my show, but that I may be allowed (solely at his discretion) to return at some unspecified point in time, though presumably not as the host of MorningWood.

He says that “It seems to me that the theme of the show was indeed intended to provoke shock value.” Well, that’s his interpretation. I would counter that in this day and age fuck shit and piss are hardly shocking.

The original theme of my show was the 7 dirty words - the words famously banned by the FCC. Many cuts that I played had titles or band names that contained these words, even though, in many cases. none of the words were in the song. In general, although some profanity aired prior to 5:00 AM, the song titles were much more graphic than the actual songs. Again, profanity aired prior to 6:00 AM is okay with the FCC.

I’m not sure what song Randy thinks was about masturbation. I fear that he has yet to listen to a tape of my show. Funny thing, though: I heard a song on WMNF this afternoon at about 4:30 that deals with masturbation and blue balls and all kinds of prurient stuff: “Whatever,” by Asylum Street Spankers. Good tune. I would play it. I hope this afternoon’s DJ doesn’t get in trouble for it. For what it’s worth, I’ve also heard the word “shit” broadcast twice today during the afternoon.

Next, Randy makes a leap from “It seems to me that the theme of the show was indeed intended to provoke shock value” to “There was a clear intent to shock - to challenge with satire the FCC guidelines on obscenity.”

So, now there’s a clear intent to shock. I don’t know: maybe there’s an intent to mock, or to rock, but not to shock. Again, shocking people takes a little more than playing a dirty word or two. My goal was to enlighten and entertain, with humor and opinion and good music.

And I wasn’t challenging the FCC - I was well within the boundaries of the law. These words are only banned between the hours of 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM. My show ran from 4:00 AM to 6:00 AM. How could I be challenging guidelines if I wasn’t breaking the rules?

And the little threat about a fine - bullshit: the FCC is not going to fine, because my show was well within the FCC guidelines.

The bottom line of the station policy is that it is a vaguely worded piece of shit: : "If you are considering any material that you feel might violate the policy, check with the Program Director before airing it. “ Well, obviously if I had felt that my programming was violating station policy, I would not have aired what I did.

WMNF is a great community asset, but like any organization, it has its problems. One big problem at WMNF is the fact that policies seem to be written with an intentional vagueness that leaves said policies open to widely differing interpretations. Randy thinks my show violated policy. I strongly disagree.

Unfortunately, Randy’s interpretation carries a lot more weight than mine. He is essentially a one man programming Czar. He and he alone decides who gets to be on-air and when. So, if he doesn’t like you, well, you’re out, and it looks like that covers me pretty well right now.

(Another big problem is that the policies are enforced spottily at best, probably to the point that an argument could be made that some policies have been nullified through lack of enforcement, but I digress.)

My only option at this point is to file a grievance (pdf file) with the station manager. During our brief phone call yesterday, Randy said he would “check with (Station Manager) Vicki (Santa)” when I asked him if his decision was final. Obviously, Vicki influenced his original decision, so I doubt that I will get anywhere with her.

I have to start with her, though, and then I can take my appeal to the WMNF Board of Directors. Considering the fact that Vicki works with the Board on a daily basis and that, while I know several of the members personally, I am, essentially, “just” a volunteer, I don’t like my chances very much.

The decision of the Board is final.

So, in all likelihood, MorningWood is history. It’s been a nice run. Thanks for getting up with me.

Banned in Tampa

Damn - first the election, and now this - Novemver has really sucked so far.

WMNF Program Director Randy Wynne (813-238-8001, randy@wmnf.org) just informed me, via phone, that he will have to suspend me, apparently forever. (I will be filing a grievance, as soon as I can figure out what the procedure is - does anyone know?)

For what?

Randy said it was a Belle and Sebastian song that I played titled “Fuck That Shit,” but when I informed him that that particular cut is an instrumental, he became very vague.

It seems that a listener heard the word FUCK this morning - probably from an Eric Schwartz song played just before 6:00 AM. From what I can gather, as soon as the complaint was heard, I was a goner - no one asked me my side of the story, no one reviewed a tape or otherwise confirmed the complaint - I am presumed guilty.

Randy said it didn’t matter if it was the Belle and Sebastian song or not, because the listener “probably would have heard the word earlier if he had been listening...” Uh, Randy, no one complained about anything I played earlier.

So, on the word of one listener who can’t even pinpoint the song, on the basis of one song, played before 6:00 AM, in which the use of the word FUCK is quick and fleeting, and in which the use of the word surprised me too - I must have previewed a “clean” version - Randy has fired a longtime and loyal station volunteer.

I got tons of calls and written comments this morning from people who loved the show. Not one complaint came in to the studio.

I find it ironic, to say the least, that WMNF, which presents itself as something of a bastion of free speech, would be so quick to suspend a programmer - hours after the show in question - based on single alleged incident which, obviously, no one has even bothered to confirm.

I do have “tapes”, and I am carefully reviewing this morning’s show right now. I defy you to listen to the last hour of my show and find something that is objectionable.

From this morning’s playlist:

Badly Drawn Boy’s “Pissing in the Wind” - yes, it does mention pissing in the wind. Shocking.

“Pissed of 2 AM” - classic Alejandro tune, from the Alejandro tribute CD.

The Wannadies “Piss on You” is a fun and innocuous little piece.

Kid 606's “Robitussin Motherfucker” is an instrumental.

Wu Tang’s “Bells of War” is an instrumental.

An Ol’ Dirty Bastard press conference was heavily “bleeped.”

No language problems in the next 2, from ODB and The RZA.

The Crucifucks is a band name, and the cut I played does not contain questionable language.

“Fuck World Trade” is a CD name, and the cut I played does not contain questionable language.

Lambchop’s “Your Fucking Sunny Day” was bed music, and the lyrics, as broadcast, were unintelligible.

Eric Schwartz’s “Keep Your Jesus off My Penis” does have one instance of “fuck,” and I missed that when I previewed.

Belle and Sebastian’s “Fuck That Shit” is an instrumental and only a snippet of it was played just before the NPR news came on.

So, apparently, the only incidence of questionable language came during the Schwartz song. One “fuck” slipped through. And this happened before 6:00 AM, when the FCC rules are relaxed.

If anyone had bothered to ask me, or if anyone had bothered to listen to today’s show, this would have been abundantly clear, but, instead of actually listening, Randy seems to have simply glanced at my playlist and seen lots of bad words, so he has assumed that all of those words were broadcast, when, in fact, they were not.

What is the precedent for this permanent suspension? Has any programmer ever been permanently suspended before based on single alleged incident? How about an overnight programmer? Again, the FCC rules are relaxed before 6:00, and no one is alleging that any objectionable language aired after 6:00.

Nothing even remotely obscene was aired. A single profanity was uttered. Profanity, before 6:00 AM is simply considered an expression of free speech.

From the FCC website:

It’s Against the Law

It is a violation of federal law to broadcast obscene programming at any time. It is also a violation of federal law to broadcast indecent or profane programming during certain hours. Congress has given the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the responsibility for administratively enforcing the law that governs these types of broadcasts. The Commission may revoke a station license, impose a monetary forfeiture, or issue a warning, for the broadcast of obscene or indecent material.

Obscene Broadcasts Are Prohibited at All Times

Obscene speech is not protected by the First Amendment and cannot be broadcast at any time. To be obscene, material must meet a three-prong test:

* An average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;

* The material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law; and

* The material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Indecent Broadcast Restrictions

The FCC has defined broadcast indecency as “language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community broadcast standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities.” Indecent programming contains patently offensive sexual or excretory references that do not rise to the level of obscenity. As such, the courts have held that indecent material is protected by the First Amendment and cannot be banned entirely.

It may, however, be restricted in order to avoid broadcast during times of the day when there a reasonable risk that children may be in the audience.

Consistent with a federal statute and federal court decisions interpreting the indecency statute, the Commission adopted a rule pursuant to which broadcasts -- both on television and radio -- that fit within the indecency definition and that are aired between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. are subject to indecency enforcement action.

Profane Broadcast Restrictions

The FCC has defined profanity as including language that “denote[s] certain of those personally reviling epithets naturally tending to provoke violent resentment or denoting language so grossly offensive to members of the public who actually hear it as to amount to a nuisance.”

Like indecency, profane speech is prohibited on broadcast radio and television between the hours of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.

I encourage everyone to listen to this morning’s show and decide for yourself if there is anything that warrants a permanent, or even a temporary suspension. Download it from the web. And, for those who are bandwidth challenged, or if you just don’t want the whole hour, here is the last 7 minutes of today’s show.

Download Eric Schwartz’s "Keep Your Jesus Off My Penis"

Every week I write a blog entry (http://www.blogwood.com) to accompany the MorningWood broadcast. Here’s what I wrote this morning.

...at this time of night, the FCC actually relaxes its ever tightening rules, the theory being that at 4 AM, children are less likely to be up and being shocked at the language that is emanating from the radio. Right now, I can get away with broadcasting shit like this, but daddy the FCC is threatening to expand the ban on “obscene” language to the overnight hours.

I’m sure that many of you, especially those who listened to my show this morning, will be happy about that, but the fact is that a very few prudes are dictating to the rest of us exactly what it is that we are allowed to see and hear, and that sucks.

Get Up with MorningWood

Get Up with MorningWood, on 70,000 Watt Community Radio WMNF 88.5 fm, Tampa, and streaming at wmnf.org. 4 to 6 am (eastern) every Tuesday!

Studio line: 813-239- WMNF WOOD

Blogging on the radio

Disclaimer: The FCC would not pre-approve today’s edition of MorningWood.

What the fuck?!? Ol’ Dirty Bastard is now a dead old bitch. I’ll be playing plenty of Wu-Tang and ODB. RIP.

They were chanting for him Friday night at the Continental Airlines Arena, during the Wu-Tang Clan's first area show as a unit in five years. The other eight had showed - something of an accomplishment in itself - but it probably surprised few that he wasn't there. This final gesture turned out to be fittingly enigmatic: Ol' Dirty Bastard, long hip-hop's resident jester and, moreover, its most tragic figure, died of still-unknown causes the following afternoon in a New York recording studio, two days shy of his 36th birthday.

The numbers - his two solo albums, 1995's Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version and 1999's Nigga Please, both went gold - offer a hint of his reach, but they only capture part of the ODB phenomenon. Born Russell Jones, he was one of the great pop culture eccentrics, a reliably difficult character the likes of whom rarely last long enough in the public eye to arouse anything other than passing indignation and revulsion. Instead, over the course of a decade of incredible resilience - fathering over a dozen kids, storming the Grammy stage in 1998 to proclaim "Wu-Tang is for the children!", getting arrested for making "terrorist threats," and, in 1994, taking MTV cameras to pick up food stamps in a limousine - he inspired fascination, exuberant embraces, and rabid, often irrational fandom.

Last year, ODB finished a two-year prison stint pockmarked with concerns over his mental health. VH1 was so certain his life on parole would be a hoot that they signed up to film his escapades for a reality series. Thing was, by most accounts, the ODB who made it out of prison was a sober one. Predictable became the last unpredictable thing he could become.

Most people wouldn't have it, though, and he sadly remained an object of public spectacle. His continued existence as a shambolic cipher, it seemed, was a comfort to others who'd prefer to keep the dark side at a comfortable distance, for whom danger is a concept best kept abstract. And so Rusty, as his mother called him, has said good night to these foul-weather friends: You won't have Ol' Dirty Bastard to kick around anymore.

Today’s show was originally gonna feature songs with the famed seven dirty words. Then ODB kicked it, which really fucked my show up. So I left lots of fuck songs in the playlist, along with an occasional piss and shit. Still, I’m pretty sure that any listener who pays close attention to the lyrics, and not just the song titles, may just hear all seven dirty words before the night is through.

Oh, and for the record, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. And Fuck the FCC. And since we’re throwing fucks around like candy, we may as well Fuck the South too.

Now piss off and listen to the show.

Oh, and if you happen to be one of these three listeners, first, go fuck yourself, then download and listen to this nice song by Eric Schwartz that I picked out for you.

Note: at this time of night, the FCC actually relaxes its ever tightening rules, the theory being that at 4 AM, children are less likely to be up and being shocked at the language that is emanating from the radio. Right now, I can get away with broadcasting shit like this, but daddy the FCC is threatening to expand the ban on “obscene” language to the overnight hours.

I’m sure that many of you, especially those who listened to my show this morning, will be happy about that, but the fact is that a very few prudes are dictating to the rest of us exactly what it is that we are allowed to see and hear, and that sucks.

Playlists

Each week, I bring my planned songs in on CD. I usually end up playing most or all of them in the planned order. But sometimes things go askew. Sorry - no guarantees or refunds.

Hour 1 planned playlist

Hour 2 planned playlist

Live playlist

WMNF Community Radio

WMNF is a non-commercial community radio station that celebrates local cultural diversity and is committed to equality, peace and social and economic justice. WMNF provides broadcasts and creates other forums to serve the community by the exposure and sharing of these values.

Jeb!’s whimsy is felons’ last chance

Florida leads the nation in tasered children and disenfranchised citizens. 500,000 people in Florida are disenfranchised. 200,000 of those have been disenfranchised since Jeb! took office, and they will stay disenfranchised until Jeb! sees fit to lavish them with their most basic right of citizenship.

Used to be, a felon would be released from prison, and the restoration of rights process would begin and most ex-felons, having served out their sentences, having paid their debts to society, would end up regaining their right to vote.

Jeb! changed the rules. In fact, according to a recently retired Parole Board employee,

They're making rules that are stopping almost everybody from voting.

Now, 85 percent of released prisoners must go through a lengthy and extremely demoralizing process that involves waiting for years and traveling hundreds of miles only to have the Governor look them in the skin eye and render a decision that need not have any basis in reality whatsoever.

Florida’s Parole Board operates in secret, compiling dossiers on supplicants who come begging for the right to vote. Errors are common, but supplicants are not allowed to question the wisdom of the secret file, or even to have a peek inside it.

Because clemency records are inaccessible to anyone outside the system -- including other state agencies -- there is little accountability or oversight. Computer glitches, for example, went undetected for nearly a decade and dropped more than 100,000 felons from the process before they even had a chance to be considered.

The Herald asked Bush to use his executive powers and make the records available for review. Bush declined, citing a statute that exempts clemency records from the state's public records laws.

Do Jeb!’s Storm State Troopers, er investigators, include such information as political affiliations or leanings? There’s no telling, but Jeb! may well simply rely on visual clues, since he alone can simply give the thumbs down, no explanation needed, and an appeal will take another 3 years or more.

In the meantime, the frustrated supplicant is left to survive as something less than a full citizen, being taxed without representation, and being denied the opportunity to enter any field that requires a state license. Jobs such as hair dresser and exterminator, as well as hundreds of others, are all out of reach for those who cannot be legally licensed due to a loss of their civil rights.

But the real story lies with the vast majority of ex-felons who either look at the process and give up in confusion, or who don’t even know where to begin to go to get help. 200,000 just since Jeb! was elected, and only a handful of those have applied for a hearing before the Governor.

Jeb! changed the rules to make sure that most of the prisoners released on his watch would never be allowed to vote while he was in office (or while his brother was running for president.)

As Bush once told a crowded hearing room: ``I'm here trying to look into people's hearts and make a decision.''

These are not the famed purge list felons - those were names that the state claimed were on the voting roles when they shouldn’t be - these ex-prisoners have never been allowed to register since serving out their time. Their names have never made it onto the rolls to be purged, and if Jeb! has his way, the vast majority never will make to back to full citizenship.

Florida's removal of civil rights and broken system for restoring rights make it the state with the greatest number of disfranchised people -- 500,000 -- and they are disproportionately black. This has led to numerous lawsuits, including one pending in federal court that could end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

It charges that Florida's voting ban on ex-felons discriminates racially and calls on the state to automatically restore ex-felons' civil rights, a remedy that we advocate. Florida's clemency system does little to rehabilitate people while keeping ex-felons from being whole members of our society.

Castrating Private Ryan

An update to yesterday’s post.

Tampa’s ABC affiliate caved to an outright threat by David Caton, the man who was miraculously cured of a 300 dollar per day porn habit when he found Jesus.

I’m not making that last part up, either. Here’s a tiny little snippet of the theories of a sick man who seeks to blame anything other than his own love of serial masturbation for his sticky past:

A third way in which pornography enslaves is through chemical addiction. When the pornography addict indulges in his habit, the adrenal gland secretes the chemical epinephrine into the blood stream. According to David Caton, author of Pornogrpahy: The Addiction, epinephrine goes to the brain and assists in locking in the pornographic images. These locked-in images can result in severely changed behavior, including an obsession with pornography that has much in common with chemical addiction.

So, we’ve reached a point where a man who believes that “no civilized nation” should allow nudity anywhere, a man who fought to have Hillsborough County enact an anti-nude ordinance earlier this year, will be deciding what we watch and listen to on our public airwaves.

He’s such a weak and hypocritical little prick, trying to legislate morality because he can’t possibly be expected to simply ignore behavior which he might not want to partake in. Hey David: if you don’t like what’s on, change the channel. If you don’t want your kids to hear Christian soldiers saying curse words, then supervise your kids. Don’t make the rest of us suffer for your irrational fears.

If WFTS had aired it, a complaint would have been filed, said David Caton, head of the Tampa chapter of the Florida Family Association Inc.

Caton said the artistic merits of the film don't outweigh the use of coarse language on television when children might be watching. It was scheduled for 8 p.m.

``I don't think the film needed those words to have value,'' he said. ``And the FCC has made its position clear regarding the broadcast of such expletives.''

Caton said an edited version of the film would be acceptable.

ABC officials said the network could not run an edited version of the film because of contractual agreements with Spielberg. The network also refused requests by some stations to air it after 10 p.m., which under FCC rules might allow stronger language.

The FCC refused to grant a waiver to stations. FCC spokeswoman Janice Wise said the commission doesn't make ``pre-broadcast decisions because that would be censorship.''

Fuck the FCC.

Fuck the FCC

I was never a huge fan of "Saving Private Ryan" - in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever watched it all the way through. Mainstream Hollywood just doesn’t do much for me. Regardless of the film’s merits, however, this is just stupid.

More than 20 ABC affiliates around the country have announced that they won't take part in the network's Veterans Day airing of "Saving Private Ryan," saying the acclaimed film's violence and language could draw sanctions from the Federal Communications Commission.

The decisions mark a twist in the conflict over the aggressive stand the FCC has taken against obscenity and profanity since Janet Jackson flashed the world during the last Super Bowl halftime show.

Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning movie aired on ABC with relatively little controversy in 2001 and 2002, but station owners -- including several in large markets -- are unnerved that airing it Thursday could bring federal punishment. The film includes a violent depiction of the D-Day invasion and profanity.

Uh, yeah, it’s the immoral violence of war that the FCC wants stricken from the airwaves.

Other stations choosing to replace the movie with other programming are located in Atlanta, Dallas, Honolulu, New Orleans, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Orlando, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C. They are owned by a variety of companies, including Cox Television, Tribune Broadcasting Corp., Hearst-Argyle Television Inc., Belo Corp. and Sinclair Broadcast Group.

"We regret that the FCC, given its current timidity in dealing in this area, would not grant an advance waiver, which would have allowed stations like ours to run it without any question or any concern," Cole said.

In a statement on WSB-TV's Web site, the Atlanta station's vice president and general manager, Greg Stone, cited a March ruling in which the FCC said an expletive uttered by rock star Bono during NBC's live airing of the 2003 Golden Globe Awards was both indecent and profane.

The agency made it clear then that virtually any use of the F-word -- which is used repeatedly in "Saving Private Ryan" -- was inappropriate for over-the-air radio and television.

Fuck the FCC and the religious hypocrites who equate censorship with morality. Oh, and for those of you who parrot the dead argument that this kind of censorship protects children form hearing that awful language, maybe you should start practicing a little parental guidance and change the damn channel if you don’t like what’s on.

He sure has some purdy lips...

The Trib’s William March has a short overview of some of the questions about the vote totals that are floating around. Along the way, he makes the same point that I and many others have made, namely that a vote for Bush in Florida’s “Democratic” northern counties is not an unexpected result.

There are many historical reasons for this anomaly, including the fact that most Democrats in this part of Florida retain their party affiliation simply so that their voices can be heard in local races. One should also take into consideration the fact that, demographically, this area is much more “South” than the Southern, urban counties of Florida, which means that many residents lack the mental resources to form an independent thought.

Arthur Pinner, Dixie County Democratic chairman, took the argument further. He voted personally for Bush, he said, ``on account of his morals.''

Kerry ``was a liberal way down the road; he believed in same-sex marriage and abortion,'' Pinner said. ``It came out in all the magazines.''

Pinner couldn't name which magazines reported that - in fact, Kerry opposes gay marriage - before clarifying that his source wasn't a magazine.

``Pamphlets that was passed out in church,'' he said. He wasn't sure whom the pamphlets came from, but said, ``I believed them enough so I didn't vote for him.''

Planting seeds

The Village Voice

Against the odds, the trauma of this devastating defeat appears to be convincing young people anew of the importance of working politically within their own communities, on their own terms. Unlike the Democratic Party, which is now clutching at straws labeled "morality" and "pander more to the South," and unlike the old liberals, who are putting out yet another call to take to the streets, these young progressives are strong on values and strong on tactics, both.

Forget John Kerry and his everlasting straddles, the $87 billion that he did and did not vote for, the "marriage is between a man and a woman." The new folks coming up have no fear of conviction, of true faith. We are anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-war, pro-living wage, pro-reproductive rights, pro-gay rights, pro-environment, anti-Rockefeller drug laws, anti-arms proliferation, anti-imperialist, anti-censorship, pro-sex education, pro-Constitution, pro-affordable housing, pro-HIV awareness.

And, in case the inserted link above was too subtle for you, Fuck the South.

Sorry: my God doesn't like your meds

Early this year, the Florida Legislature briefly granted pharmacists in this state the right to refuse to dispense life saving medication to anyone whom the pharmacist decided could afford to make a co-payment. Essentially, the state was granting people like the owners of David’s Pharmacy the power to completely fuck up ordinary people’s lives.

Here’s a scenario for you: a poor person needs daily medication to stay alive. She travels by bus to a doctor’s office and drops off her prescription at her neighborhood pharmacy. But wait! She’s on the state insurance plan, and she’s not dressed in tattered rags - she must be a sinful scammer - make her pay!

Fortunately, this policy was nixed soon after people became aware of it. Unfortunately, there is a trend developing nationally that allows pharmacists to decide what drugs to allow you to have. That’s right: after your doctor writes you a prescription, you may be faced with a pharmacist who decides to override your doctor’s advice and withhold your medication.

Yahoo! News (Link via Daily Kos)

For a year, Julee Lacey stopped in a CVS pharmacy near her home in a Fort Worth suburb to get refills of her birth-control pills. Then one day last March, the pharmacist refused to fill Lacey's prescription because she did not believe in birth control.

"I was shocked," says Lacey, 33, who was not able to get her prescription until the next day and missed taking one of her pills. "Their job is not to regulate what people take or do. It's just to fill the prescription that was ordered by my physician."

Some pharmacists, however, disagree and refuse on moral grounds to fill prescriptions for contraceptives. And states from Rhode Island to Washington have proposed laws that would protect such decisions.

Mississippi enacted a sweeping statute that went into effect in July that allows health care providers, including pharmacists, to not participate in procedures that go against their conscience. South Dakota and Arkansas already had laws that protect a pharmacist's right to refuse to dispense medicines. Ten other states considered similar bills this year.

The American Pharmacists Association, with 50,000 members, has a policy that says druggists can refuse to fill prescriptions if they object on moral grounds, but they must make arrangements so a patient can still get the pills. Yet some pharmacists have refused to hand the prescription to another druggist to fill.
......

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a provision in September that would block federal funds from local, state and federal authorities if they make health care workers perform, pay for or make referrals for abortions.

"We have always understood that the battles about abortion were just the tip of a larger ideological iceberg, and that it's really birth control that they're after also," says Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood (news - web sites) Federation of America.

"The explosion in the number of legislative initiatives and the number of individuals who are just saying, 'We're not going to fill that prescription for you because we don't believe in it' is astonishing," she said.

Pharmacists have moved to the front of the debate because of such drugs as the "morning-after" pill, which is emergency contraception that can prevent fertilization if taken within 120 hours of unprotected intercourse.

While some pharmacists cite religious reasons for opposing birth control, others believe life begins with fertilization and see hormonal contraceptives, and the morning-after pill in particular, as capable of causing an abortion.

"I refuse to dispense a drug with a significant mechanism to stop human life," says Karen Brauer, president of the 1,500-member Pharmacists for Life International. Brauer was fired in 1996 after she refused to refill a prescription for birth-control pills at a Kmart in the Cincinnati suburb of Delhi Township.

Lacey, of North Richland Hills, Texas, filed a complaint with the Texas Board of Pharmacy after her prescription was refused in March. In February, another Texas pharmacist at an Eckerd drug store in Denton wouldn't give contraceptives to a woman who was said to be a rape victim.
......

In the 1970s, because of abortion and sterilization, some states adopted refusal clauses to allow certain health care professionals to opt out of providing those services. The issue re-emerged in the 1990s, says Adam Sonfield of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which researches reproductive issues.

Sonfield says medical workers, insurers and employers increasingly want the right to refuse certain services because of medical developments, such as the "morning-after" pill, embryonic stem-cell research and assisted suicide.

"The more health care items you have that people feel are controversial, some people are going to object and want to opt out of being a part of that," he says.

In Wisconsin, a petition drive is underway to revive a proposed law that would protect pharmacists who refuse to prescribe drugs they believe could cause an abortion or be used for assisted suicide.

"It just recognizes that pharmacists should not be forced to choose between their consciences and their livelihoods," says Matt Sande of Pro-Life Wisconsin. "They should not be compelled to become parties to abortion."

Related and of interest.

Learn and regroup

Look, the theft in 2000 was blatant and well documented and swept completely under the rug. This time, they were much more professional and organized, and trying to track down the many ways in which they disenfranchised folks or manipulated vote totals will take some time.

Do I think they stole the election? Yeah, probably. I think they managed to swing enough votes through intimidation and fraud and other tactics, and I think they covered their tracks sufficiently to get away with it.

I’m not happy about it, but as I mentioned on the air yesterday, and as Atrios says,

... irregularities and questionable results are not necessarily "proof" of "fraud" and "proof" that the "election was stolen. " If people want this issue to be taken seriously they need to stop thinking that any of the information floating around right now - and yes, I've seen it all multiple times - provides proof of any such thing. Yes, legitimate questions have been raised, but I fear people on "our side" have started to confuse the legitimate questions with the answers to those questions they've imagined. I'm fully ready to believe that everything was corrupt in Florida, Ohio, and elsewhere, but thinking and knowing are different things entirely.

It is entirely true that there are a sufficient number of either weird or clearly unacceptable things which happened during this election. It's entirely true that the media should be following up more of these stories; the integrity of our democracy is seriously at stake. But, the cause is not helped by touting inconclusive statistical studies as "proof" or screaming "kerry won! kerry won!" every five seconds.

A "smoking gun" may yet appear, but until that time we need to differentiate between legitimate questions and manufactured answers. And, the cause of improving things by '06 is not helped by turning legitimate questions into conspiracy theories.

Devote more energy to the future, while keeping a wary eye on the past. We need to prevent another theft in ‘06.

“I’m gonna cut you a break this time and just confiscate your drugs...”

Arrested officer on drug unit

James Vincent Dausch, an off-duty Tampa police officer who was charged with possessing cocaine at a Channelside nightclub Saturday, worked on the department's antidrug squad, authorities said Monday.

According to Tampa police spokesman Joe Durkin, Dausch has been with the department for nine years, most recently with the Quick Uniformed Attack on Drugs Squad.

The unit's goal is to "aggressively work toward the reduction of open street drug dealing within the city," according to the department's Web site.

Dausch has been suspended with pay pending the outcome of an investigation.

According to a Sheriff's Office arrest affidavit, bouncers at the nightclub Banana Joe's reportedly escorted Dausch outside after observing him with a bag of white powder in a club restroom before 2 a.m. Saturday. Witnesses saw him drop the bag, reports state.

Sheriff's deputies arrested Dausch, 35, on a felony charge of cocaine possession.

In other news, Church officials have pledged their support for the local priest who was recently found with his penis inserted into the mouth of a young boy. Officials stress that an investigation has yet to be concluded, and have hinted that the boy may be an agent of the homosexual agenda.

St. Pete Hacks

Stenography from this morning’s SP Times:

Thirteen years ago, Dr. Manuel Alvarado chose Leesburg as the place he would deliver babies. He liked its quiet streets and small-town charm.

He was one of 10 obstetricians in the area. Now there are just five.

The departed include Alvarado's recent partner, who left because he couldn't afford malpractice insurance. Alvarado can't either. He's practicing without, sending high-risk patients to other cities and wondering whether he should leave, too.

So the study published in a national journal Monday was no surprise to him. A survey of 781 doctors in rural Florida found that more than half have cut back on procedures vital to every town, from delivering babies to staffing emergency rooms. Most of them cited rising malpractice premiums as a key reason for the cutbacks.

The 2003 survey appears to be the first scientific data backing a hotly contested claim made by state doctors during the last two years of malpractice wars. State medical lobbyists have said doctors were being forced to make cutbacks, but had few hard numbers to support their claims.

"Their (malpractice insurance) rates go up doing that, so they decide it's not worth it, so they quit," said Dr. Dennis Agliano, a Tampa surgeon who is president of the Florida Medical Association. "The things that have higher risk, they're going to eliminate."

Officials with a state advocacy group for Florida trial lawyers, who often are on the other side of the malpractice debate, declined to comment Monday.

In the survey, childbirth was the procedure most likely to be reduced or stopped entirely. More than 61 percent of the doctors who responded said they had cut back on normal deliveries, and almost 53 percent reported cutbacks on Caesarean sections.

More than 51 percent reported limiting their hospital surgeries, and almost 47 percent cut back on emergency room duties.

"We're disconcerted at the level of cutbacks in services to these vulnerable populations in rural areas," said Dr. Bob Brooks, associate dean for health affairs at Florida State University's College of Medicine and lead author of the study, which was published in Archives of Internal Medicine.

Uh, the Archives of Internal Medicine, is run by the JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is fighting hard for tort reform. So, the SP Times is simply parroting the claims of a professional group that has a vested interest in pushing the idea that we are in some kind of malpractice crisis that can only be fixed by severely limiting the rights of a patient to demand accountability from a doctor.

Casually calling this group a “national journal” without qualifying the fact that they are run by the AMA is outrageous. Oh, wait - the SP Times probably just reprinted a press release verbatim without bothering to read it, so maybe they weren’t aware of what they were printing in their paper.

Get Up with MorningWood

Get Up with MorningWood, on 70,000 Watt Community Radio WMNF 88.5 fm, Tampa, and streaming at wmnf.org. 4 to 6 am (eastern) every Tuesday!

Studio line: 813-239- WMNF WOOD

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My computer is sulking, and I am running very late this morning because of it.

Today on MorningWood: Democracy, America, Christians, and more. Sorry - no time to go into any detail right now - tune in and listen up! Freeform radio with a political edge.

Playlists

Each week, I bring my planned songs in on CD. I usually end up playing most or all of them in the planned order. But sometimes things go askew. Sorry - no guarantees or refunds.

Hour 1 planned playlist

Hour 2 planned playlist

Live playlist

WMNF Community Radio

WMNF is a non-commercial community radio station that celebrates local cultural diversity and is committed to equality, peace and social and economic justice. WMNF provides broadcasts and creates other forums to serve the community by the exposure and sharing of these values.

It's the stupid, stupid

Herbert

I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election's outcome as values. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with "clear evidence" that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.

This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.

The survey, and an accompanying report, showed that there's a fair amount of cluelessness in the ranks of the values crowd. The report said, "It is clear that supporters of the president are more likely to have misperceptions than those who oppose him."

Fuzzy math

It seems that, according to the Florida Department of State, there were 150,000 more votes cast for president than actual voters. (To simplify, let’s say you have 10 people who voted and the final totals showed 5 votes for Candidate K and 9 votes for Candidate B - that’s 4 votes more than could have possibly been cast - there is a problem somewhere.)

Now, I know this seems astonishing, but keep in mind that a similar phenomena in Ohio gave Bush an extra 4,000 votes in a precinct in which only 638 votes were cast. Stay tuned.

House Dems seek voting inquiry

Wired

Three congressmen sent a letter to the General Accounting Office on Friday requesting an investigation into irregularities with voting machines used in Tuesday's elections.

The congressmen, Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Florida, New York and Michigan, cited a number of incidents that came to light in the days after the election. One was a glitch in Ohio that caused a memory card reader made by Danaher Controls to give George W. Bush 3,893 more votes than he should have received. Another was a problem with memory cards in North Carolina that caused machines made by UniLect to lose 4,500 votes cast on e-voting machines. The votes were lost when the number of votes cast on the machines exceeded the capacity of the memory cards.

There were also problems with machines that counted absentee ballots in Florida. Software made by Election Systems & Software began subtracting votes when totals surpassed 32,000. Officials said the problem affected only certain countywide races on one of the last pages of the ballot. Elections officials knew about the problem two years ago, but the company failed to fix the software before the election this year.

Reports from voters in Florida and Ohio also indicated that some of them had problems voting for the candidate of their choice. When they tried to vote for John Kerry, they said, the machine either wouldn't register the vote at all or would indicate on the review page that the vote was cast for Bush instead.

Lost votes in Ohio and Florida

As outlined in this Daily Kos diary, there is something fishy in Ohio and Florida. The bottom line, though, is that, barring irrefutable evidence of widespread machine errors, there is almost certainly no way in hell for Kerry to gain enough votes in either state to make a difference in the outcome.

If everything breaks Kerry’s way, Ohio could conceivably come within 40 - 50,000 votes, perhaps enough to trigger a recount, but, in reality, not enough to win. The bigger problem is the very real possibility that, just like in 2000, thousands of minority voters were disenfranchised, so their votes will never count no matter what.

Reports of long lines at minority and other heavily Democratic precincts in both Florida (scroll to the bit about the USF campus with nowhere near enough machines to handle the turnout) and Ohio have raised eyebrows.

In a poor neighborhood, a long line is essentially a poll tax, as the voter loses precious work time, and may even endanger her employment status if she’s too long away from work. Some lines in Ohio were 10 hours or more. 10 hours. In line. Most of the people I know would have given up in utter frustration.

So, long lines equal disenfranchisement, and it looks like this was part of the Republican strategy. Where the GOP controlled the voting, machines were under-allocated to minority precincts. They employed lots of pre-election disenfranchisement tricks, too, and all their talk of challenges at the precinct level may well have discouraged countless voters.

Again, the disenfranchised votes will never ever be counted, no matter how many recounts, no matter if fraud is proven, these votes are lost forever.

So, the election is lost - no real chance to gain enough votes in Ohio, and Florida is way out of reach. But I feel that the Kerry team is still working, behind the scenes, to expose some of these criminal activities. Remember: Kerry is a former prosecutor, and Edwards is a feared trial lawyer. They have plenty of cash in the bank previously earmarked for a post-election legal battle, and they made repeated promises to guard against exactly this kind of cheating.

If they can prove widespread fraud, if they can show unequivocally that minorities were disenfranchised in highly disproportionate numbers, then we may see some Bush campaign officials spending some time in jail, and we may even be able to fix the system before 2006.

Reports of computer tabulation and other e-voting problems are rather widespread. The latest buzz has it that the centralized database computers may be having problems (intentionally programmed or not) counting the votes properly. Again, it is extremely unlikely that enough proof will be found to overturn the results, but that doesn’t mean we can’t strive to improve the system for next time.

Musical lining

The Other Side of Country :

On a lighter note, trying to find the bright side in today's news for some of my more despondent friends, remember this: there's a lot of Nixon in this President, and not just because about half his cabinet were low-level hatchet men for Tricky Dick back in the day. Sixty-eight to '74 were some of the best music years in world history, so maybe if you're really mad and you know 3 chords, you'll make something new and exciting for us all. In the meantime, keep your local liquor store on speed-dial and try not to jaywalk.

What she said

Arianna says what I was trying to say earlier, only she says it better.

The fixation on undecided voters turned a campaign that should have been about big ideas, big decisions, and the very, very big differences between the worldviews of John Kerry and George Bush - both on national security and domestic priorities - into a narrow trench war fought over ludicrous non-issues like whether Kerry had bled enough to warrant a Purple Heart.

This timid, spineless, walking-on-eggshells strategy - with no central theme or moral vision - played right into the hands of the Bush-Cheney team's portrayal of Kerry as an unprincipled, equivocating flip-flopper who, in a time of war and national unease, stood for nothing other than his desire to become president.
......

Unless the Democratic Party wants to become a permanent minority party, there is no alternative but to return to the idealism, boldness and generosity of spirit that marked the presidencies of FDR and JFK and the short-lived presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy.

Otherwise, the Republicans will continue their winning ways, convincing tens of millions of hard working Americans to vote for them even as they cut their services and send their children off to die in an unjust war.

Savages

The Rude Pundit

We are a nation of savages. That is what we decided last night. We belong to the "most advanced" society in the history of the world, and we decided that we would rather be barbarians, hunched over fire pits, ripping meat off the bones of our enemies, raping our women, howling out at the gods for peace in the afterlife.

Oh, how when this glorious nation began, we believed we knew who the savages were, the Indians, worshipping their mad array of deities, slaughtering each other in wars over hunting grounds, enslaving each other, living in caves and teepees, creating communal existences where each member of a tribe had his or her place and his or her job to contribute to the life of the group. God, how we hated them. How we entered their villages and tried to convert them to the single God. How we massacred them regularly when they would not give up their centuries-old existence in favor of the obvious good and rightness of the European way. Sure, sure, they tried to strike back, but that made our bloodlust even stronger. We white people showed them what savagery was, and it made their bows, arrows, axes, and (later) rifles seem like so many sticks tossed against a brick edifice. King George III loved his gifts of scalps, cut off the Indians skulls by loyal white subjects of Britain.

More

Watch out

NYT

Exulting in their electoral victories, President Bush's conservative supporters immediately turned to staking out mandates for an ambitious agenda of long-cherished goals, including privatizing Social Security, banning same-sex marriage, remaking the Supreme Court and overturning the court's decisions in support of abortion rights.

And that's just for starters.

A note to my Democrat friends:

Dems better move left the way Reps are right, else all is lost - this country needs a true opposition party, not some pansy ass pandering to the center, tilting right Joe Lieberman party - we need a party of Kucinichs and Deans.

Many people, like me, who gave up hope with the Dems long ago as they turned into the center/center-right party, supported Kerry because we thought he had a good chance of beating the incumbent and setting the country on a slightly better path.

Well, that’s it. This country had a clear choice between moderation and extremism, and the voters went for fear mongering and fag bashing, preferring the corrupt and hateful bible-thumping ineptitude of the incumbent to the moderate, thoughtful, hopefully a little progressive promises of the challenger.

Why? Well, the flip flop meme stuck, for one. Many folks saw John Kerry as a wish washy opportunist. Kerry might have won over these voters with a few strong stands on controversial issues. Where were the wedge issues for the Dems? They allowed the Repugs to frame the arguments that resonated with lots of voters.

Those who don’t really pay attention, the vast majority of the country who, if they pay any attention at all to the news, are likely to see it filtered through mainstream, or CNN, or Fox lenses, those people are the ones who voted Bush back into office.

I’m not attacking those folks for not paying attention. Working 50 or more hours each week, struggling with health care and school costs, stressed from dealing with all the wonders of modern society, most people don’t have time to pay proper attention.

When they take their 20 or 30 minute daily dose of news, only about 5 minutes of it is actual news. The rest is sports or weather or fashion or entertainment. And the little bit that really is news is oversimplified to the point of being useless.

So, they heard that Bush stands for God, guns and gay bashing, and that Kerry stands for, uh, not God, but he thinks it’s okay to be religious and all, and guns are fine, if you’re, you know, like a hunter, and, well, 2 men getting married is kinda icky, but that’s alright, unless it’s not alright.

Bush actively courted the right wing. The right wing noticed, and turned out in droves, while framing the Bush message in such a way that average moderate voters would not be scared away.

Kerry pretty much ignored the left wing, assuming that we would follow along, perhaps hoping for a few scraps (a start toward universal health care, a vague idea of fairness and inclusiveness). Kerry was so firmly entrenched in the center that he was seen as passionless by the moderate voter who preferred a candidate who could take a firm stand on the issues.

There were a few true progressives in the Democratic primary field. They didn’t lose based on the merits of their stated beliefs - they lost because the party leadership declared them to be unelectable. Unelectable because they stand for something. Unelectable because they are not afraid to fully embrace the ideals of a progressive movement for change.

I voted for Kerry because he was the anti-Bush, the only other choice. Voters who do not share my passionate feelings against Bush needed a candidate who offered something more than simply not being the incumbent. They looked at Kerry and saw nothing.

Election night bonding

Topical Vote Wave
All FREE
Election Night: Tuesday November 2nd 2004

The Irish Pub
1721 East 7th Avenue, Tampa, FL 33605 (click the "contiinue..." link for more info)

(813) 248-2099

Doors at 7:00
Show at 8:01pm to 3 am

· Live Performances, Rants and Raves by Ronny Elliott, Lori Karpay, Crash Mitchell and surprise guests.
· Political songs, live performances and large screen election tracking.
· Political Music by WMNF Morning Wood DJ, Nor Wood
· Emcee WMNF Music Director Flee

Admission: Absolutely FREE to all WMNF listeners and anyone else who cares about the election and doesn't want to have to face it alone.

(Note: there will be beer and drink specials)

Get Up with MorningWood

UPDATE - Some of today's best cuts came from the party party.

Get Up with MorningWood, on 70,000 Watt Community Radio WMNF 88.5 fm, Tampa, and streaming at wmnf.org. 4 to 6 am (eastern) every Tuesday!

Studio line: 813-239- WMNF WOOD

Blogging on the radio

VOTE

I’ll see you tonight at

Topical Vote Wave
All FREE
Election Night: Tuesday November 2nd 2004

The Irish Pub
1721 East 7th Avenue, Tampa, FL 33605 (click the "contiinue..." link for more info)

(813) 248-2099

Doors at 7:00
Show at 8:01pm to 3 am

Live Performances, Rants and Raves by Ronny Elliott, Lori Karpay, Crash Mitchell and surprise guests.
 Political songs, live performances and large screen election tracking.
 Political Music by WMNF Morning Wood DJ, Nor Wood DJailed Protester
 Emcee WMNF Music Director Flee

Admission: Absolutely FREE to all WMNF listeners and anyone else who cares about the election and doesn't want to have to face it alone.

Playlists

Each week, I bring my planned songs in on CD. I usually end up playing most or all of them in the planned order. But sometimes things go askew. Sorry - no guarantees or refunds.

Hour 1 planned playlist

Hour 2 planned playlist

Live playlist

WMNF Community Radio

WMNF is a non-commercial community radio station that celebrates local cultural diversity and is committed to equality, peace and social and economic justice. WMNF provides broadcasts and creates other forums to serve the community by the exposure and sharing of these values.

Challenge compromise in Hillsborough might speed voting

According to information received tonight as part of the Election Protection training, polls might not come to a grinding halt every time a voter is challenged in Hillsborough County.

In a late compromise agreement, Buddy Johnson has issued new rules which specify that after a voter is challenged, the voter’s immediate fate will be decided by a Democratic poll watcher, a Republican poll watcher, and the local precinct chief in conference.

Previous rules required all poll workers to stop assisting other voters and confer over the challenge. Voters who lose a challenge will be able to cast a provisional ballot, for whatever that’s worth.

This is very good news for those who fear that excessive challenges could end up causing delays and long lines, but the GOP is still expected to push the challenge envelope to the max.

This time, the Dems are ready for them.

A network of Democratic trial attorneys and law professors is threatening to sue poll watchers and poll challengers who intimidate or disenfranchise voters in Florida, Ohio and other battleground states.

U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, a Pennsylvania Democrat, announced the Voter Protection Network on Monday in response to high-profile Republican strategies to challenge the legitimacy of thousands of newly registered voters, including many black and Latino voters.

"Quietly and lawfully monitoring voting is one thing, but aggressively suppressing and intimidating voters is quite another," said Fattah, who represents parts of Philadelphia and its suburbs. "Aggressive poll challengers need to ask themselves a simple question — is one day of trampling on voters' rights worth risking my financial security? Because that's what it could ultimately cost."

In Florida, more than 5,000 Republican poll watchers will be on the lookout for fraudulent voters, people who are trying to cast ballots in the wrong precinct, and new citizens or young people who failed to register properly. The GOP has created a list of 1,800 voters in Duval County — most of them African-American — whose voting rights may be questioned. Gov. Jeb Bush has encouraged watchers to frequently challenge voters.

"The Republicans may think they're clever, but what this is really is a new Jim Crow mentality," said Mikel Jones, a trial attorney with offices in Philadelphia and Boca Raton, Fla., who plans to be at polls in West Palm Beach on Tuesday as part of the Voter Protection Network.

Jones said the network would lean on the Democratic activists, get-out-the-vote groups, and voter advocacy coalitions to collect the names and contact information of people who were disenfranchised or intimidated through poll watchers.

At least a dozen law firms in three states have agreed to handle cases that arise on Tuesday, and law professors at several universities will act as advisers. Attorneys will likely sue individual watchers under the Voting Rights Act or Civil Rights Act, Jones said, and damages could exceed $100,000 per watcher.

NOTE - Election Protection is a non-partisan voter rights protection organization. The organization mentioned in the article looks to be a different group.

LePore arrests journalist

Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore is just making shit up and having journalists arrested for no reason.

A widely published investigative journalist was tackled, punched and arrested Sunday afternoon by a Palm Beach County sheriff's deputy who tried to confiscate his camera outside the elections supervisor's headquarters.

About 600 people were standing in line waiting to vote early when James S. Henry was charged with disorderly conduct for taking photos of waiting voters about 3:30 p.m. outside the main elections office on Military Trail near West Palm Beach.

A sheriff's spokesman and a county attorney later said the deputy was enforcing a newly enacted rule from Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore prohibiting reporters from interviewing or photographing voters lined up outside the polls.

But the arrest drew expressions of outrage from a leading Florida civil liberties expert — and even from one of LePore's fellow county election supervisors.

When Deputy Al Cinque tried to grab Henry's camera, Henry ran about 100 feet across the pavement on the side of the elections office before he was tackled by the deputy.

Cinque yelled at Henry, "Hold still, stop moving," after he pinned Henry on the pavement, punched him in the back and grabbed Henry's left arm to put a handcuff on his wrist.

Cinque then jerked Henry, 54, to his feet by his left arm and slammed his body against a parked car, where the deputy punched him again as Henry tried to hand him identification cards that were later found on the pavement.

A widely published free-lance journalist, as well as a Harvard-educated lawyer and economist, Henry has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report and The New Republic.

According to his Web site, www.submergingmarkets.com, he is working on "an election-year book, due out this fall, that explores how the U.S. is falling behind the rest of the democratic world, including countries like Brazil and South Africa, with respect to the practice of electoral democracy."

Asked why Henry was being arrested, Cinque said, "You're not allowed to take pictures of voters."

Henry repeatedly told the deputy: "I'm a journalist. I'm a journalist doing my job."

A Palm Beach Post reporter and British journalist Marcus Warren, of the London Daily Telegraph, witnessed Henry's arrest. So did dozens of waiting voters.

Sheriff's spokesman Paul Miller said that before being transported to the Palm Beach County Jail, Henry was examined by paramedics when he complained of shoulder pain. Henry has been charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest without violence, Miller said.

"We're not going to let anyone interfere with the orderly conduct of the elections process here," Miller said.

LePore refused to come to the main desk of elections headquarters to comment on the arrest. She did not return later calls for comment.

One of LePore's peers, Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho, called restricting reporters and photographers on public sidewalks outside polling places "an outrage. I'm shocked. The First Amendment right to be there is absolute.

"Outside our early voting place we had Japanese journalists, the BBC, all kinds of reporters and photographers," added Sancho, who is based in Tallahassee. "It's a public place, a public sidewalk. There is no statute, no law that can take away your right to talk to someone who is willing on a public sidewalk as long as no one is obstructing or interfering."

Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, also called Henry's arrest an outrage. "Where did Theresa LePore get the authority to criminalize activities protected by the First Amendment?"

Henry was one of the original "Nader's raiders" who worked decades ago with consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and was vice president for strategy for IBM/Lotus before he founded the Long Island-based Sag Harbor Group, a consulting firm that focuses on technology strategy. He has continued his investigative reporting career at the same time, in 2004 publishing The Blood Bankers, a book reporting on "dirty banking" in developing countries. The book includes an introduction from former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley.

Anyone can take pictures and anyone can speak with voters who are willing to be engaged in conversation outside the polling places. This event took place on a public sidewalk. Whether Henry was a credentialed journalist or not, he had every right to be where he was taking pictures.

EZ GOTV

Staying home today? GOTV from your couch, in your underwear!

VoterCall - GOTV

See Michael Moore, and HELP MoveOn

MoveOn Pac still needs help in Tampa. Call 813-258-1371. Oh, and Michael Moore will be speaking today. Volunteers get the best seats.

Hillsborough: Filmmaker Moore to speak in Tampa

Filmmaker Michael Moore is scheduled to speak at 5:30 p.m. today at the Tampa headquarters for Moveon PAC, 2307 W Azeele St.

The event is to encourage volunteers for the election. It is free and open to the public.

To register, e-mail moveontampa@yahoo.com or call 813 258-1371

Voting Q&A

Here’s a good list of FAQs from SP Times:

Q. Who can vote?

Floridians who registered to vote by Oct. 4. If they registered after Oct. 4, they will not be able to vote. If they didn't fill out a registration form correctly, they may not be able to vote. The Supervisor of Elections should have mailed all voters a precinct card. To verify status, call the election office.

Q. What do I need to bring with me to the polls?

Voters should bring identification showing photo and signature, if they have it. Acceptable photo IDs include driver's license, company badges, credit cards, a student ID, or a passport. Elections officials also accept utility bills, bank statements or paychecks to help verify identity. Voters without identification can sign an affidavit.

Q. Where do I go?

The location of a voter's polling site should be listed on voting cards that came in the mail. Those who don't have the card, should call their county elections office or go to its Web site. Voters can also look up polling sites at MyPollingPlace.com. It's vital that voters go to the right polling site. Otherwise, their votes will not count.

Q. What time can I vote?

Polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 7 p.m. Tuesday. Those standing in line at 7 p.m. will be allowed to vote.

Q. How long will it take?

Voting itself should take about five minutes. Lines could be long getting into the polls, though. To avoid crowds, don't go at peak hours in the morning, at lunch and after work.

Q. Who will be at the polls?

Outside, there will be election monitors, lawyers for the Bush and Kerry campaigns, campaign volunteers, international observers, reporters and possibly law enforcement officers. Inside, there will be election workers and poll watchers from both parties.

Q. Do I have to answer personal questions to get to the polls?

No. Election officials should not ask about debts, parking tickets or for a Social Security number. Campaign workers, monitors, lawyers and reporters may ask to speak to voters, who can talk if they want.

Q. What is a provisional ballot?

The Legislature created provisional ballots after the 2000 recount to provide a remedy for voters who might be mistakenly turned away from the polls by workers who thought they were ineligible. If a voter's eligibility cannot be determined at the precinct, he or she may fill out a provisional ballot, and the county canvassing board will determine if the ballot should count.

Q. What if I'm not on the voting rolls at my precinct?

If a voter isn't on the rolls, elections officials will find out if the voter is actually registered. They may direct the voter to a different precinct. If so, the voter must go to the right precinct. A provisional ballot cast in the wrong precinct will not count.

Q. What if I get challenged?

This year, poll watchers could challenge people's right to vote. If that happens, voters should remain calm. Voters will be asked to sign an oath attesting to their name, address, age, political party and eligibility to vote. Voters can present other evidence that they're entitled to vote, too. If poll workers still have doubt about a voter's eligibility, at the least, all voters will be allowed to cast a provisional ballot.

Q. How will I know if my provisional ballot was counted?

Voters can attend a meeting of the county canvassing boards Wednesday where provisional ballots will be reviewed. Voters also can bring additional evidence to argue that their vote should count. A decision must be made by noon Thursday. All voters will get a letter in the mail later saying whether their provisional ballot was accepted or rejected and why.

Q. What if I don't trust the touch screen voting machines?

If voters are casting their ballots Tuesday in a touch screen county (Pasco, Hillsborough or Pinellas), they need to use the machines. Don't ask for a provisional ballot. The canvassing board will throw out the ballot if a voter demands one simply because he or she doesn't trust the machines.

Q. What if I need assistance using the machines?

A voter can fill out a form at the polling site requesting help. They can get a family member or friend to assist. If a voter has no one to help, two poll workers will assist. There's also a demonstration machine available at each polling place.

Q. What's on the ballot?

Look for the sample ballot that came in the mail. Voters can also find a sample ballot on Web sites for the Supervisor of Elections, or in the Know Your Candidates special section of the St. Petersburg Times published Oct. 26. People also may hand out sample ballots at lines at the polls. It helps to read the ballot ahead of time.

Q. Do I have to vote in every race and for every amendment?

No. A voter can skip any race or amendment.