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Our Gov is hiding in the Mansion trying to figure out how to talk to people of color who appear to be upset
The American Empire is disintegrating before our very eyes, but what the hell? This is Florida: The beaches are open, baby! Still, a little guidance, some stirring words from the white folks in charge, wouldn’t go amiss. The state’s racking up between 600 and 1,400 new COVID-19 cases every day, totally messing up football practice […]
Republicans can try to run from science, but they can’t hide
Donald Trump and his government minions don’t know nothing about no damn science and boy, are they proud of it. Rudy Giuliani went on Fox last month to sneer at contact tracing to track the virus, wondering why, since obesity, cancer, and heart disease also kill you dead, we don’t contact trace for those bad […]
Hellooooo: FL needs visionary leadership, not boneheadedness
The writer (and biochemist) Isaac Asimov famously decried the “false notion,” all too common in America, “that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” This is practically the national creed, epitomized by the person who won’t wear a face mask because it infringes on his “freedoms;” or the anti-vaccination movement […]
Rick Scott, a man of no sympathy for “whiners who lost their little jobs” and try to access FL’s glitch-prone, crash-happy unemployment system
Florida’s junior US senator is quite a guy–as he’d be the first to tell you. He’s worth over $250 million, and you’re not. Rick Scott has no sympathy for these grasping whiners who lost their little jobs in the coronavirus pandemic and now have the gall to expect a government hand-out. Who do they think […]
Talking to a screen is not the same as talking to human beings in a room; Going to class is a ritual, an event
PLAGUE-RAVAGED TALLAHASSEE—I’m in the middle of talking to my senior literature students about Ralph Ellison’s great novel Invisible Man when the cat sticks his two-tone muzzle up to the tiny camera and scrubs his cheeks on the laptop lid. My students get a screen-full of feline face. The cat isn’t known for his scholarly dignity, […]
DeSantis will never do anything to offend Demented Daddy in DC
One month after Florida got its first COVID-19 cases, two weeks after the governors of California and New York issued shelter-in-place orders, the governor of Florida finally shut the state down and told people to park their backsides at home and stay there. But don’t blame DeSantis: he had to wait till Demented Daddy in […]
Sheltering in place: ‘Anxiety Baking,’ the Complete Works of Henry James and a whole day with a can of Pledge
Well, it’s been a quiet week in Tallahassee, Florida, my hometown, out here on the edge of the swamp. Except, of course, for a few ugly scenes in the toilet paper aisle of the Lake Ella Publix and that unseemly tussle over the last package of spinach and chive linguini left in Trader Joe’s. (Hey, […]
For real? U.S. Sen. Rick Scott got lousy reviews as FL governor — and now he wants to be president?
Rick Scott really misses being governor of Florida. He misses the mansion; he misses tootling about in his private jet; he misses having the power to do cool stuff like deny voting rights to ex-felons, decree the phrase “climate change” verboten, and standing before the cameras, pretending to care about whatever lurid disaster has befallen […]
Florida Republicans remain doggedly clueless about higher education
OCCUPIED TALLAHASSEE – Florida Republicans’ disdain for education is matched only by their ignorance of how education works. That doesn’t stop them from screwing around with curricula, micro-managing teachers, and undermining knowledge in their attempts to produce generation upon generation of pliant church-going consumer-cogs in the profit engine, unencumbered by critical thinking. The core education […]
No dang wetland should ever interfere with the pursuit of profit!
OCCUPIED TALLAHASSEE — Stop worrying your pretty little head. The state of Florida knows what’s best for that ecosystem thingamajig, so sit back, relax, maybe have one of those craft beers the kids are so crazy about, and let the governor and the Legislature take care of the water. Our water. Your water. You will […]
Florida Republicans embrace the heavy-handed Big Government they once derided
OCCUPIED TALLAHASSEE — While our reality show government lurches from atrocity to atrocity, here in the state capital, your imperial Legislature asserts more and more power over your life. I’m talking about preemption, the Legislature’s favorite laws, the ones overriding local governments when they differ, forbidding cities and counties to do things local people actually […]
Somebody’s lying here. Whoever could it be?
The prime-time impeachment of Donald John Trump is the best television since that BBC interview when Prince Andrew went so far as to call his pal Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile sex-trafficking “conduct unbecoming.” Maybe even better than the episode of Dancing with the Stars when Sean Spicer, dressed in a ruffled shirt the color of the […]