People can’t be blamed for having raw emotional responses to insanities such as the Newtown school massacre on Dec. 14. But some responses stagger from the emotional to the ridiculous and back to the insane.
Immediately after the Christmas break, the parent of a sixth-grade girl at an elementary school in my neck of the woods -- Palm Coast, a suburb to nowhere on the state’s north Atlantic coast --...
It’s not been a good couple of weeks for unions. Actually, it’s not been a good couple of decades. But let’s take it one shock at a time.
Earlier this month the Florida Supreme Court ratified the Florida Legislature’s 3 percent garnishing of state workers’ wages, ostensibly to make workers contribute to their Florida Retirement System pension, but in fact to plug state budget holes at workers’ expense....
While the national obsession with guns takes a turn for the hysterical, an interesting duel is taking shape in Washington between Barack Obama and Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio. It involves an issue almost as incendiary as guns. Immigration.
Luckily for us, neither Obama nor Rubio is being hysterical about it. They both recognize that 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States can’t be wished...
I’ve been listening to Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association CEO and executive vice president, talk about how to protect our children from the next school massacre. I have to say he makes some sense. The only thing that can keep guns out of schools is more guns in school.
We have about 70,000 public schools in America, only 23,000 of which have armed security of one type or another. That’s...
I never thought I’d be welcoming the new year with a middle finger, or what former President George W. Bush, in a rare eloquent moment, called “the one-fingered victory salute.” But I am, and gladly so, at least in grateful recognition of John Swartz.
Swartz is a Vietnam veteran who, on Memorial Day weekend a few years ago, was riding along with his girlfriend to visit relatives when he saw a cop parked with...
There are almost 1,000 red-light cameras snooping and snapping at intersections across Florida. They are the robotic spies of cities too cheap to hire cops to police their traffic and too deceitful to admit that the cameras have one overriding purpose: to make money by ringing up as many citations as possible.
Sometime in 2013, the Florida Supreme Court will decide whether the installation of spy cameras...
A few days after Thanksgiving two years ago, my step-father died in an assisted living facility in Palm Coast. It was not unexpected. He’d been in bad health for years. Assisted living facilities, those hothouses of wilted lives, accelerate death as efficiently as any lethal disease.
What stands out about that day for me isn’t his death. It’s the moving response of paramedics we had to call in for my...
For some reason Adam Putnam, Florida’s agriculture commissioner and governor wannabe, felt compelled to hold a press conference last week to boast about the number of concealed-carry weapons license holders in the state. That number will top 1 million this week, doubling in just five years.
The millionth permit will be handed out the same week that we will witness the memorial service for the 27 victims...
I’m having severe morning sickness. I’ve been waking up to “breaking news” flashes at the New York Times, on ABC News and a couple of other ostensibly reputable news sources about… Kate Middleton’s pregnancy? And that was before the putrid prank that led to the suicide of the nurse at the monarchy’s hospital.
Thursday’s email alert came right after the email from the Florida Highway Patrol informing me of a fatality on I-95, a woman, killed the previous eveningnear the Flagler-St. Johns county line. The victim was either standing on the road or crossing it when southbound...
One looks at the recent past and wonders if there is an acceleration, like the universe’s expanding rush to extinction, of occasions when the United States places itself abjectly on the wrong side of history. The invasion of Iraq, the concentration camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, torture during the Bush years and assassinations by drone during the Obama years are examples, counting only those overseas.
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