Readers Poll … Don't Forget To Vote … for the 1st Annual EOM "Sand In Your Eyes" Award … by gimleteye

Readers, please don't skip past our online poll … in the right hand column on the webpage. So far, Lynda "Don't Fence Me In" Bell is winning by a landslide the dubious distinction to be our first annual winner … but we do need to hear from more readers! The poll is completely anonymous so you can vote without fear of retribution … :)

The Great Hispanic Hope. By Geniusofdespair

Alberto Carvalho

I stand corrected he is the 'Great Portuguese Hope' (It was a take-off of the play "The Great White Hope"). Everyone is a bit testy this morning. So he has lied, do you think the rest of them haven't. Gimenez will get a challenger, this is just one contender. If Charlie Crist can run, so can this guy...if he wants to.

The great hope is: He will run against Carlos Gimenez unless Carlos cleans up his act. Carvalho is photogenic, has done budgets, seems nice, wouldn't support Lynda Bell I assume and has no baggage except the affair with the newswoman covering him from the Miami Herald.

Carvalho has been featured on CNN, NBC, and ABC, and in publications such as The New York Times, District Administration Magazine, and The Christian Science Monitor. Watch him on video, he even speaks Creole!!! Well at least enough to say hello. Don't know that he is fluent.

Look at how good he looks in a suit in his glamor shot:

Mayor material? A lot of people think so.

Black Friday 2013 Aventura Mall. by Geniusofdespair

I took this at 4pm on Black Friday at Aventura Mall.

I also did one in 2012...compare. This one I took at 2pm and it is so superior to this year's video. I am getting lazy.

Virtual shopping...

Medical Marijuana: amazing poll result in Florida … by gimleteye

If the recent Quinnipiac poll is any indication, medical marijuana could sink Gov. Rick Scott. 82 percent of the population that would support a ballot referendum for medical marijuana is a big barrier for Gov. Rick Scott to overcome.

The states that support legalized marijuana haven't gone to pot. Lots of people have been watching. When the hypocrisies embedded in marijuana prohibition are eliminated from our legislative, political and legal system, no citizen will be poorer for their loss.

Turnberry's Soffers: Heartfelt...Almost... Promise to Protect our Wellfield. By Geniusofdespair

Jeff Soffer

The Soffers, of Aventura Mall, wrote a heartfelt letter to the Miami Herald coincidentally on Black Friday. At least they are trying to rebuild their image. Better than most. I wrote about them Nov. 7th. 
Here is their letter to the editor:

On Oct. 20, Turnberry Associates and its partners decided to withdraw its application to move Miami-Dade County’s western Urban Development Boundary (UDB). In consultation with the commissioner who represents the subject-area district, Turnberry took action to address Miami-Dade residents’ concerns about the Northwest Wellfield Protection Area and the preservation of the county’s primary reservoir of drinking water.

Founded in Miami-Dade County more than 50 years ago by our father, Don Soffer, Turnberry is deeply committed to the sustainable development of our community. Over the years, Turnberry projects have improved our community’s standard of living by revolutionizing the living, working and leisure habits of its residents and visitors. In addition to these important social benefits, Turnberry projects have made a significant impact on the county and its residents through job creation and recurring economic contributions, including taxes, fees, permits and licenses. At the same time, Miami-Dade County has become a vibrant, prestigious, world-renowned destination with unlimited potential.

Turnberry’s success is directly intertwined with the well-being of this community. Miami-Dade County has long been home to our company’s headquarters, to three generations of the Soffer family and to thousands of our employees. The success of our projects also depends on being able to provide the most basic and valuable services, such as drinkable water. Therefore, the preservation of our most vital natural resources is one of Turnberry’s top priorities for every project.

Our initial plan contemplated the development of a family entertainment, recreation and retail center to satisfy the needs of Northwest Miami-Dade County’s rapidly growing population and tourists. Before submitting a plan to the county commissioners, we hired environmental engineers and planners (OKAY THIS IS ME: WHO WOULD THAT BE EXACTLY? Your lobbyists were Alexander Heckler, Jeffrey Bercow, Michael Marrero, Michael Radell, Edward Swakon, Cathy Sweetapple, Oscar Braynon II. Swakon is a paid for hire environmentalists the rest are not even close to being environmentalists, they are the usual suspects when you want to move the UDB line.  How about you hire real environmentalists.) to ensure that the project would not endanger the aquifer in the Northwest Wellfield Protection Area.

While Turnberry placed a considerable focus on environmentally sensitive development, we understand that, in this case, the community clearly desired a new design for the project that addresses the concerns of county residents and their leaders. Therefore, we will go back to the drawing board to work on a plan that caters to the growing surrounding population of Northwest Miami-Dade County while also addressing our community’s concerns. (ME AGAIN: LOOKS LIKE TROUBLE BREWING IN THIS PARAGRAPH - big trouble.)

Jeffrey and Jackie Soffer,

I don't think the Soffers really get it. If I were an environmentalist I would go there and educate brother and sister. They seem like nice people who do not want ruin Black Friday for their Aventura Mall, so they are not stupid. And Jeffrey has VERY good Karma...so far...blessed with movie star good looks, surviving a deadly helicopter crash last year, weaseling out of a bankruptcy without a lot of damage in Vegas and marrying super model Elle McPherson. Let's help Jeffrey keep his karma that way!

And no we don't want a Soccer Field out there.

Happy Thanksgiving … by gimleteye

It is hard to give thanks every day of the year because of busy schedules and individual preoccupations. At least for a moment every day we should set aside self-involvement and the hardship, pain and suffering that season our lives. The meaning of Thanksgiving deepens as one grows older. It is a good day to affirm our blessings and to appreciate we are in this world together, and that fact -- simple as it is -- ought to add the same measure of humility in all our lives.

Tradition!!! By Geniusofdespair

 

As an Italian family, we always started off Thanksgiving with lasagna. Not anymore. Tradition gone. Sure it leaves more room for turkey but doesn't tradition count for anything? Everyone in my family is too lazy to cook it. And so it goes. Read Gimeteye's post, not as sad as missing lasagna...and missing grandma who made it.

We Don't Care How Handsome You Are: We Ain't Payin' for Your Soccer Stadium Dave. By Geniusofdespair

I don't care how good you look in your underwear, we aren't paying!!! We already paid for that crappy baseball stadium. We are done

Proposed site of stadium.

This is a bad idea on several fronts:

The port needs revenue clearly the group proposing the stadium will want a lower than market rate land lease -- or worse -- FREE LAND. It is not the highest and best use of this land which would have and should have a more commercial utilization to maximize potential revenue to the port.

The recent downgrading of the port bonds underscores the fact that they need to look at maximizing revenue not utilizing land in this manner.

Public-sector just spent over $1 billion building the port tunnel for the most part to lessen impact of traffic this will only exacerbate the traffic going in and out of the port. I assume most of the games will be played on weekends the very time when thousands of people will also be trying to access the port to get on cruise ships. Parking also will become problematic as people try to access both the soccer games and parking for cruises. If parking and traffic congestion becomes too much of a problem along with accessing the port for cruises -- it's very easy for the cruise lines to redeployed their ships to other ports north of the port of Miami ..therefore losing revenue as opposed to maximizing revenue.

Now add to the stadium and the cruise traffic two new museums ..a potential Genting casino ..alongside potential events at the performing arts Center,the American Airlines Arena and Bayfront Park and you have a traffic/parking cataclysm -- maybe the first in the world.

Did I mention we weren't paying for it David? Beckham, my advice to you, take it to Broward...although an autographed shirt would go a long way with my nephew Michael (another soccer superstar) and might convince me to not write about it -- are you listening lobbyists.

Gimleteye loves soccer, I see a fight on my hands.

Robert Bryce: Industrial wind turbines are climate change scarecrows … he is right … by Alan Farago

Writer Robert Bryce does excellent work detailing the folly of industrial wind power. The "all of the above" policies of the Obama administration for sustainable energy are a massive distraction for environmentalists who need, quickly, to organize a science and fact-based response to meeting the on-demand requirements of modern society.

Electric utilities and their business models are the problem. They embrace wind power because these fig leafs have worked admirably well to protect the status quo. It is tragic that the hopelessness of the electric utilities is matched by the embrace of wind power by the nation's environmental community. Put another way, if conditions emerge through which wind power turns into a necessity and not a fig leaf-- climate change will already have smashed civilization.

Bryce calls wind power a climate-change scarecrow. I'd call wind turbines -- poised to built at the edge of Lake Okeechobeee -- , Easter Island totems.

National Review Online
NOVEMBER 26, 2013 5:00 AM
Wind Turbines Are Climate-Change Scarecrows
By Robert Bryce
http://www.nationalreview.com/nro-energy/364885/wind-turbines-are-climate-change-scarecrows-robert-bryce

For years, the wind-energy sector and renewable-energy advocates have repeatedly claimed that wind turbines are essential to the fight against carbon dioxide emissions and catastrophic climate change. Here’s the reality: Wind turbines are nothing more than climate-change scarecrows.

The proliferation of wind turbines over the past few years has not, and will not, result in statistically significant reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions. That point can easily be proven with a bit of simple math, which I’ll do in a moment.

From Gimleteye: Please donate to Wikipedia … by gimleteye

This is a giving time of year, and I'd like to make a pitch for your charitable donation to a website that has become an indispensable part of my reading and learning: Wikipedia. If you are curious and use the internet to search for subject material and history of interest, it is likely that you are also a visitor to the Wikipedia website … the following is the email encouragement that I recently followed:

Thank you for helping keep Wikipedia online and ad-free. It's been a year since you donated and a year since we've asked. This is your annual reminder.

If all our past donors simply gave again today, we wouldn't have to worry about fundraising for the rest of the year. Please help us get back to improving Wikipedia.

We are the small non-profit that runs the #5 website in the world. We have only 175 staff but serve 500 million users, and have costs like any other top site: servers, power, programs, and people.

Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind, a place we can all go to think and learn.

To protect our independence, we'll never run ads. We take no government funds. We survive on donations from our readers. Now is the time we ask.

If Wikipedia is useful to you, please take one minute to keep it online and ad-free another year.

https://donate.wikimedia.org

Thanks,
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia Founder

P.S. The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit charity. Please make a tax-deductible donation today.

Sick of the Holidays Already. By Geniusofdespair

I hate this time of year but Sunday and Monday were ridiculous. I was in bed sick, only able to watch TV, more like listen, I couldn't even read the book I got at the book fair. What are the rug rats passing around this time of year? All I saw/listened to on TV were commercials for stores hawking Christmas. Black Friday officially starts at 8pm at most stores. Do you know that? If you work at Penny's, Sears or Target you should. Unless you are buying a car, then the ads are forever till Christmas. I cannot wait until January 2nd when things return to normal. Strangely, the Thanksgiving ads were pretty sparse. Maybe I am a big ticket TV watcher, Publix doesn't advertise on my station list.

Look at Gimleteye's post. He is also hawking Holiday gift giving. Where can I go media-wise to escape from holiday hype?

Fixing what's wrong with Florida's environmental movement … by Larry Fink

(The following is republished from the Sierra Club Everglades Listserve. Larry Fink is a former lead scientist of the South Florida Water Management District.)

There is no margin of safety left in our natural systems for another four decades of environmental incrementalism. In terms of our social contract, commerce is always trying to socialize more risk to privatize more profit, while our inalienable right to life becomes increasingly conditional on a game of toxic substances Russian Roulette, with more and more bullets in the chamber of the revolver held to our heads. In the vernacular, they have already come for our fleece, and now they are coming back for the mutton. In Darwinian terms, its not personal, its just business, but our saving the Everglades, the state, the nation, and the planet is a more serious business and has more evolutionary value than commerce saving its profits, so there will be a reckoning for the unregulated free market's gross mismanagement of the natural economy and its reckless disregard for the public health, safety, and welfare and the natural systems held in public trust, both in this world and the next. If taking God's name in vain is blasphemy, how much greater is the sin when one takes God's great natural works in vain?

In the spirit of game-changing plays, start by agitating for a permanent breach of the Herbert Hoover Dike (HHD) with a spillway/flow-way and supporting infrastructure to distribute and stack the emergency releases on private property where they will do the least private harm and the most public good and routine overflows that will rehydrate the Everglades the old fashioned way. This will relieve the pressure on the rapidly failing HHD, stack water on the EAA instead of blowing out the estuaries, stop peat oxidation and claim carbon sequestration credits, and allow us to lease-back the land acquired via eminent domain for routine uses that are more compatible with stacked-water conditions, e.g., rice, aquaculture, algae biofuels production, and that produce wastewater, leachate, and runoff that can be captured and treated by the STAs down to all applicable Everglades Water Quality Standards at the end-of-pipe and is, therefore, a water supply appropriate for rehydrating the Everglades, which wastewater,runoff, and leachate from oxidizing EAA peat soil is not.

The Problem is Civil Obedience. By Geniusofdespair

Matt Damon reads from Howard Zinn's speech "The Problem is Civil Obedience" (November 1970)

Howard Zinn was a Historian
Died: January 27, 2010, Santa Monica, CA
Education: Columbia University, New York University, Thomas Jefferson High School. He was a political science professor at Boston University for 24 years.

The Miami International Book Fair 2013. By Geniusofdespair

Mitch Albom - is an American best-selling author, Tuesdays with Morrie.

Local Author Alex Flinn From Young Literature Panel

Amy Tan -  is an American writer whose works explore mother-daughter relationships. Her best-known work is The Joy Luck Club, which has been translated into 35 languages.

Edna Buchanan - is an American journalist and writer best known for crime mystery novels.

Scott Anderson - Scott Anderson is an American novelist, journalist, and a veteran war correspondent.

The Literary Band -- Not Playing

Literary Band playing -- Scott Turrow is lead singer on this number. Below is video of Mitch Albom singing lead.

Video on YouTube

More photos....

2014 Governor's Race: What Will Big Sugar Do? … by gimleteye

These have been great years for Big Sugar. Having co-opted the Democrats in the 1990's, massaged Jeb! Bush for eight years, wrecked Charlie Crist and promoted Marco Rubio, and gushed over the most compliant governor in modern history -- Rick Scott -- it is hard to know how Big Sugar does better, politically, from here.

The nearly 800,000 acres it owns south of and around Lake Okeechobee -- through its own companies, affiliates or best boy friends -- look increasingly like staging areas for inland ports, train depots, suburban sprawl: you name it, whatever Big Sugar wants politically, it has gotten. For example, in the last election cycle it tested the power of Dark Money -- through political fund raising committees like Florida First -- and pushed deep into county politics where it has no business.

Until the Lee County race, where it unseated a long-time Republican county commissioner -- Ray Judah -- who opposed the massive releases of pollution that benefited Big Sugar and devastated Florida's estuaries and waterways on both coasts (!), Big Sugar had only tampered at the edges. (Big Sugar has also strenuously fought against Fair Districts, the movement and litigation seeking to end the gerrymandering of political districts at the state and congressional level that has accrued all to the favor of the GOP.)

But 2014 could turn into a strange year for Big Sugar.

Gov. Rick Scott, who invested more than $60 million of his own money to take the Governor's Mansion, is the most unpopular governor in the United States: that is saying, a lot. So who does Big Sugar bet on?

Big Sugar holds no cards with Charlie Crist, at least none we know about. On the other hand, a Crist governorship -- as a Democrat -- might not be worse, say, than with a Lawton Chiles or Bob Graham. In other words, Crist could defeat Scott and Big Sugar would still be in the driver's seat, controlling the state legislature majority and committees responsible for agriculture, land use and environment.

The one wild card is -- interestingly -- climate change.

Florida's economy and jobs have the most to lose in the nation from sea level rise, and yet the issue has been mostly buried in the state's political consciousness.

Climate change could be the electoral issue that acts like an ice-breaker on the political hegemony that has been enforced these long decades by Big Sugar. Why? Because Big Sugar depends on complacency at all levels: from the grass-roots, where it has succeeded in promoting Tea Party activists who agitate against their own interest, to county and state legislatures where perception is power.

With Florida's environmental community largely penned in by Big Sugar's political maneuvering, there is no chance to energize the public on the environment. Climate change, though, is -- in the word's of my fourth grade teacher Mrs. Bachman -- a horse of a different color. But are there any political candidates in Florida, to make climate change the winning issue with voters in 2014 and breaks, finally, Big Sugar's stranglehold on Florida?

Speaking of which, the billionaire Fanjuls are throwing a big fundraiser for Newark mayor Corey Booker, continuing its grand tradition of enlisting African American power centers to the cause of Big Sugar.

The Traffic … by gimleteye

Miami ranks on the lists of the worst traffic in the nation. And with condos filling up downtown, traffic congestion is turning freakish.

Last Thursday night at 6:30PM, it took me an hour from Coral Gables into downtown Miami. Brickell / South Miami Avenue is a disaster zone. This week's rain didn't help. New construction will add thousands of cars and trucks to roadways that can't possibly meet existing demand.

In two weeks, visitors will arrive after a year's absence to Art Basel -- the kind LVMH and Craig Robins are counting on to boost the average visitor daily contribution to the local economy. Many won't even be able to get out of their cars to spend foreign dollars in the way that keeps the Miami economy afloat.

The traffic irritation factor is so high that last year I went to the venues as early in the morning as possible. And now, with closures on Alton Road and Collins, world travelers to Art Basel will return to their homes telling how traffic in Miami is like Bangkok.

If traffic turns out to cook Art Basel's golden goose, no one can say that blogs like Eye On Miami didn't see it happening.

While I'm on the traffic complaint cycle (a place we've returned again and again in the past seven years), I went to Cocowalk the other night for the first time in six months.

Cocowalk -- the mall in the Grove -- has been more or less on my route since it was first constructed twenty years ago. Then, it spelled the end of the Grove character that made the place famous. The neighborhood hung onto the Taurus watering hole until that, too, disappeared in waves of euphoria during the last building boom.

Despite new owners, new marketing spiels, Cocowalk remains the well-lit emblem of what is wrong with land use planning in South Florida: take a gem (the old Coconut Grove) and mash it with development that is out of scale and out of character to place and to people.

The best thing for Cocowalk, for Coconut Grove and for Miami would be demolition. Why is it that every scheme to build over what was badly planned in Miami in the first place, just puts something worse in its place? Here is the answer to that question: citizens with a civic interest in sensible planning and growth -- and no personal profit motive -- get a seat at the table, but their seat only has three legs.