look, Ma, I'm a published author!

I've become a big fan of CNN's Jack Cafferty. Among other things, he poses questions about national affairs and invites viewers to email answers, and he reads a select few at the end of the program.

Tonight the question was, "Why do Americans trust the government less today than during the Watergate era?"

If you were paying close attention you heard him read a reply from Al, from Florida, who said, "Except for times when greatness was demanded as a matter of survival (the Civil War, World War II), the federal government has always been venal, corrupt and untrustworthy. The difference now is that the news media have developed the roasting of politicians into an art form. They aren't worse, merely over-exposed. Keep up the good work."

I think I could have said over-cooked instead of over-exposed, but it was good enough to get selected. I'm sure that the "keep up the good work" line was the part that grabbed their attention and made it a winner.

the countdown continues

490 days. Or, think of it as only 70 weeks. Nice round numbers, both of them, and getting smaller with every sunrise.

That's how much longer until the last day of George W. Bush's term in office.

Tonight I had dinner with three fellow "book club exiles." One is an old-time Boston Democrat and two describe themselves as "PORs," or "pissed-off Republicans." They've been in that frame of mind since Bush's election to the White House. His first election, that is.

I still don't know which primary election I'm going to vote in. That is to say, I don't know if the Democratic National Committee will make good on its threat not to seat the Florida delegates. If they do, I'm jumping ship to the Republican Party. That's a secret between you and me. I'll make a terrible Republican but at least they'll count my vote.

election capers

Yesterday I got to view our elections superviser's office from behind the scenes as they process the ballots in our city's primary election.

I don't think the voters in "Flori-duh" are stupider than a general cross-section of the nation but some of them demonstrated yesterday that if there is a way to spoil their ballot, a sophisticated $14 million voting system will not stand in their way.

Some voters went to the trouble of getting absentee ballots, then paid 94 cents each to mail them in. Despite numerous warnings to sign the exterior envelope, several did not do so and their ballots won't even be opened.

Several ballots were disqualified because they undervoted (didn't vote for anybody) or overvoted (voted for more than one candidate). You need to know that there was only one race in each of two city council districts, and each race had either three or four candidates, so the voter's job was to vote for one, just one, only one, no more than one candidate.

One wise guy, apparently offended that he had only one race to vote in, wrote "what a waster of taxpayer's money" on the ballot. We saw that message only because the machine kicked his ballot out as an "undervote." Yep, he didn't even vote in the one race he could vote in.

Some ballots were mutiliated. They were printed on long sheets of paper, which in a normal election would be filled up with several lists of candidates and ballot questions. Some people cut off the bottom two thirds and mailed in the top third. This was a problem because the computer needed to "see" some codes at the bottom of the sheet. To make the ballots machine readable, elections officials duplicated them on full-sized sheets and ran the full-sized sheets through the machine.

To vote, you had to fill in the space between two short bars, connecting them to form a long bar next to your candidate of choice. This was too confusing for some people. Somebody drew an arrow next to his or her candidate. Another made one of the short bars even darker. The canvassing board gave them credit for their efforts and their votes were counted but the ballots had to be duplicated to be machine readable.

I mentioned that the voting system cost $14 million. We've used the system for less than two years. Somebody convinced somebody in Tallahassee that the system could be fooled, so the system will be discarded in favor of another multi-million-dollar system. The system now being used cannot even be sold for scrap. The counties are picking up half the cost of the new system even though the state forced the change on them. The new system will, trust me, be fooled by some fool.

Flori-duh, indeed.

celebrating September 11

My city (that is, the one I work for) is having an election today, with two seats on the city council up for grabs. We will have a new councilmember in at least one of those seats. The incumbent has a pretty fair chance of getting re-elected to the other one.

I think this is a wonderful thing to do on September 11.

Our voters don't go home with purple ink on their thumbs but they don't worry about being shot or bombed on their way to the polling places, either.

There are millions of people on this Earth who have no idea what an open democratic election is.

I have a few stories I'll share later about the stupidity of a few of the voters. In our society, even stupid people get to vote. Stupid people need representation too, which explains why we sometimes get so many stupid Congressmen. But, don't get me started.

bad news comes in threes

Last week I posted a couple of notes about acquaintances of mine chucking their lives and their fortunes down the toilet due to greed. The week ended on the same miserable note when an elected official in my city, a man with an excellent reputation among those who saw only his public persona, was revealed to have a dark side. How dark? We are talking about allegations of child molestation against his own adopted children. We are talking about court orders to stay away from the children. We are talking about divorce.

He resigned from office, then went home and committed suicide.

There are times when a word like "shock" is inadequate. The man should be remembered for the good that he did as a city councilman and in other public capacities. I've worked with a great many elected officials and I'd rank him up there with the best. The sad reality was captured by Shakespeare about 400 years ago: The evil men do lives after them but the good is oft interred with their bones.

500 days

As of today, there are 500 days left until the end of George W. Bush's presidency.

That's 71 weeks and two days plus what's left of today.

I'm tempted to say that the last couple of days won't count, but Bill Clinton made a lot of money selling pardons before leaving office. On his last day, he issued 141 pardons and 36 commutations, thereby undoing (in my humble opinion) whatever claim to greatness he might otherwise be able to make.

I only wish that Dubya had a claim to greatness . . . any claim, any sort of claim at all. He does not.

another one bites the dust

Lately the newspapers are full of stories about lawyers and politicians being taken away to jail, not to mention movie "stars" and other folks who ought to know better. After posting my note earlier this week about a lawyer I know who is going to jail, I learned of another one, this one a guy I knew as a fellow student in law school.

He was the quiet type in law school. Like me, he didn't raise his hand much and didn't seem particularly outspoken about anything. After law school, he surprised me and I suspect a lot of our classmates by his success, first as a lawyer in private practice and then as a state senator, a county commissioner, a state prosecutor, and finally as Sheriff of Broward County.

This week he resigned and then entered a guilty plea in federal court to charges arising from some petty transactions involving a land developer. Failure to report, failure to pay taxes . . . you've seen this story before. His story reminds me of the old "joke" about stealing money. If you are going to steal, don't steal the petty cash fund. Steal a huge amount and then flee to a country that won't allow your extradition back to the U.S.

In his case, as in so many others, I just don't get it. He had no doubt where his next meal or the next payment on his Mercedes was coming from. Now he is at risk of losing a state pension worth more per year than what I'm getting paid and I'm still working for a living. He is also en route to federal prison.

Working for a living. That pretty much sums it up. Some of us do, and some of us are looking for the easy way out.

be it ever so humble. . .

A man's home is his castle (and his lady's, if he is so lucky), no matter how rude it may be.

My home is nothing to brag about. The roof doesn't leak, although it's been replaced since I bought it and then a huge oak tree tried to cave it in. The windows keep the rain out and the air conditioner works. New landscaping makes the front of the house look better and the new citrus trees in the back yard should bear fruit in a year or two. Life could be worse, although we are overdue to gut the kitchen and bathrooms and replace them from the floor tiles up.

These thoughts occurred to me today when I picked up the latest copy of the Florida Bar News and read, to my amazement, that a well-known and wealthy lawyer in Palm Beach County has been suspended from practice. He has pleaded guilty to a federal felony, agreed to cough up $400,000 to the Internal Revenue Service, and agreed to cooperate with the IRS in determining and paying any tax liabilities, penalties and interest. The story does not say what became of his home. I've never seen his home but, trust me, it does (or did?) not look like mine.

He was an assistant county attorney early in his career. He helped rewrite the county's land use regulations, then jumped ship and made a ton of money representing developers in a county where there's never really been a recession. For years, he's been one of the people I thought I should have emulated. I could have done that, I thought. I thought of him in June, when I was in Palm Beach County for a scuba diving trip and saw his name on the back of a serious bicycler's racing jersey. Not just his name, but "B__ B___'s Racing Team." For a moment I tried to visualize a similar jersey with my name on the back, but it didn't come into focus. Now it sounds like the good life as he knew it is over.

When I go home tonight I will look around my hovel and think, at least it's all mine. I earned what it took to be in it the old-fashioned way, and I will not have the IRS or federal prosecutors breathing down my neck.

Democrats: Hell-bent on self-destruction?

"I'm not a member of any organized polical party. I'm a Democrat." That's an old joke by Will Rogers.

He was right then, and he'd be right today.

The Democratic National Party has gone beyond disorganization. They lost their focus, and national and local elections, for too many years by pandering to every single-issue consistuency we have. Now, on the verge of winning the White House because the Republican Party is crumbling before our eyes, the DNC has threatened that Florida's delegates will not be seated at the national convention. Why? Because our Republican-controlled state legislature changed the schedule for all party primaries to January 29, and our early primary will upstage Iowa, Nevada and New Hampshire.

I've been a registered Democrat all my life. At the time I registered, Leon County had no Republican Party to speak of and, if you registered Republican, you couldn't vote in a primary election. If my vote in the 2008 primary election doesn't count because the delegates from my state, the fourth-largest state, have been blocked from the party convention by the party itself, I will change my registration to Republican.

Will Rogers also said, "You have to be an optimist to be a Democrat, and a humorist to stay one." He was right about that, too. I'm an optimist, but I've lost my sense of humor somewhere along the way.