Here's what I'm tired of: America patting itself on the back for dumping the Republican Congress. Democracy works, they say. People were smart enough to see through the lies. America isn't really a dumb brute of a country. Ask Marilyn Ginsburg of Boynton Beach, who wrote a letter to the Sun-Sentinel about how voters didn't buy the Republican deceptions:
As Thomas Friedman wrote in a recent column, "I, for one, don't think we're that stupid. Next Tuesday we'll see."The majority of voters sustained Friedman's faith in the ability of the American public to evaluate lies, deceit and propaganda. The American people on Election Day restored our faith that an excess of money does not necessarily buy an election.
Here's the problem, Marilyn: We're already screwed. Going on 3,000 soldiers are dead from the Iraq War, 150,000 civilians have been slaughtered, and we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to fix the country. If this country was really smart, it would risen up in mass and not allowed the idiot in the White House to start the thing in the first place. Instead the majority lined up in favor of starting a war. That's right: We've started a war. We've drenched peaceful streets with buckets of blood. We've caused pain and suffering and horrors the likes of which most of us don't ever want to imagine (if you have the stomach, see some of our handiwork here). Some of that blood is ours, most of it is theirs, but all of it is on our hands -- and it's not anywhere close to over.
So we might want to refrain from too much self-congratulation.
After the jump: Slamming Fla College Kids, Phony Jenny, and Uncle Arnie's Dirty Tricks
-- So the University of Florida has relatively cheap in-state tuition rates. That sounds like good news to me, but to bureaucrats running the show, it's cause for raising tuition rates another $1,000 through a surcharge. That's a 31 percent increase. And if the Board of Governors approves it this week, every public college student in the state will soon be paying it, not just those at UF. The Palm Beach Post's Kimberly Miller quotes UF's board of trustees chairman, Manny Fernandez: "UF is by far the best university in the state and charges the lowest tuition. It is time for us to move forward and change the tuition paradigm."
-- The stories this morning in the Sentinel and the Miami Herald regarding the rare Inverted Jenny stamp ruined my vision of an old codger in a condo absent-mindedly putting his half-million-dollar stamp on an absentee ballot. It looks now like it was just a hoax. The Herald's Diana Moskovitz found two stamp experts who said photos of the stamp -- which county commissioner John Rodstrom found on a ballot -- looked like a fake. Moskovitz also quoted Michael DuBasso, director of the American Philatelic Foundation, as saying that it looked phony, the same guy who told the same thing to the Sentinel's Robert Nolin.
-- The Miami Herald's Todd Wright and Amy Sherman report that another computer in the Hollywood sludge scandal -- this one owned by Keith Wasserstrom's "uncle" Arnie Goldman -- had major malfunctions right around the time prosecutors wanted key e-mails from them to use as evidence in their corruption case. They quoted Goldman telling prosecutor Catherine Maus, "It crapped out. It stopped functioning, and I couldn't get it to work.''
Okay, that's at least three computers "crapping out" at roughly the same time -- those at Wasserstrom's law firm, Mayor Mara Giulianti's, and now Goldman's. It's ludicrous. And it's time for Michael Satz to charge these jokers with obstruction of justice.
