Of all the office walls in all the world, Gov. Charlie's fifteen chummy photos have to show up on Scott Rothstein's.

Even our notoriously Teflon-coated governor may have a hard time slithering out of this one, although one of my editorial board colleagues insists that there is virtually nothing that will keep him out of the U.S. Senate seat currently being warmed for him.

Still, the double-talking will be fun to watch. While Charlie is probably too dim to be that crooked--and just got burned like everybody else who allegedly fell under Rothstein's spell--photos like these (and this cartoon is based on a real one--Charlie's birthday party) are a potent reinforcement of the kind of simplistic connections that resonate with the average voter.

Let's sit back with our popcorn and watch what Marco Rubio makes of all this.

> Discuss this entry

Politicians’ never-ending grovel for campaign funds can be a treacherous business.

You never know when those bucks might suddenly turn radioactive, and give you a nasty burn on the butt. One of the more interesting--yet unsurprising--aspects of the Scott Rothstein affair is how liberally he salted all sides of the political spectrum.

Since pols sell themselves relatively cheaply, it’s money well spent to simply stuff some in every available pocket. It’s win-win for the donor, and any losses are but a miniscule cost of doing business.

Now the voters are treated to protestations from our all-too-accommodating public servants that he’s so unfamiliar they wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a one-man police lineup, and that they’d return every cent he ever gave them if they just knew who the legitimate recipient might be.

With friends like those, he would have been better off staying in Casablanca.

> Discuss this entry

To quote Sonny Corleone out of context, "It's time to go to the mattresses!"

As in: to stuff one's money in, since it doesn't seem like you can trust anybody to invest it for you without ripping you off. Evidently, there are financial investment scams going on all the time, but as long as the economy is strong, the scammers can keep attracting new investors to pay off the old ones.

One wag-- I think it was Warren Buffett--said, "It's when the tide is going out that you find out who isn't wearing a bathing suit."

As someone whose idea of a wise investment is buying a used car that is less than ten years old, I have to admit to some schadenfreude when I hear of wealthy players who are lured into a scheme with promises of impossible returns in a short period of time. "Invest four million today, and in a year, it'll be worth FIVE! Absolutely no risk! A sure bet!"

Maybe it's just that some of us don't have a lot of loose change to go risking it on a venture, no matter how ironclad the guarantees. We're too busy spending it on things like food and electricity. So when somebody takes a massive hit at the hands of a crook, we say that maybe it's some karmic force's way of leveling the playing field when it has gotten too far out of whack.

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Even for Florida, where shoddy workmanship is the hallmark of excellence, this is egregious.

You move into your beautiful new tract home and discover that the walls make you and your kids sick, tarnish your jewelry, and probably most important of all, screw up the air conditioner.

You go to the developer who sold you this elephant, and he's oh so sorry, but to gut the house would cost him $100,000 or more, and to fix all the homes he's built would put him out of business.

You hear that Obama will be talking to the Chinese next month about making good on their cheesy product, but you realize that he isn't going to get anywhere with them because for manufacturers to back up their goods, they have to actually care about their reputation for quality. They know as well as you do that you only buy their junk because it's cheap.

The feds say maybe they'll free up some HUD money to compensate, but you have to be poor to qualify. A nice Catch-22, because no poor person could have afforded your house.

The insurance people say it's a manufacturing defect, not an act of God, so not only isn't it covered, they're going to cancel your sorry a-- for even asking about it.

Your only recourse is my nifty little kit, shown here. Get your neighbors to buy one too, and make it a block party. Kids'll love it, and it's great for building neighborhood cohesion.

> Discuss this entry

Ah, yes...if you have friends, you are a wealthy person indeed.

Until the Federal Corruption Task Force comes a-knockin' at your door, and you find out they've all turned into witnesses for the prosecution.

> Discuss this entry

It's all over but the voting. For that matter, why don't we just install Ted Deutch as Robert Wexler's replacement by acclamation? It would save the taxpayers special election money when it could be better used elsewhere.

I have nothing against Ted Deutch. He's my state senator, and hasn't done anything embarrassing, so he'd probably represent me in Washington as well as Robert Wexler--maybe better, since he actually lives in the district.

The fact that Deutch has already been hand-picked by Wexler as his successor and endorsed by such local luminaries as Reps. Alcee Hastings, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Ron Klein--who all say they look forward to working with him in congress--leaves me feeling a little like an illegal alien in my own district. I live there, but I have no say in my representation.

If I bother to vote, and I always do because I still naively believe in the power of voting, I may just vote for KoKo the Klown or whatever straw man (or woman) the Republicans draft to be their sacrificial lamb in the special election.

If enough people share my philosophy, it will keep Deutch looking over his shoulder knowing that his mandate wasn't unanimous. This is a healthy activity for any member of congress.

> Discuss this entry

Corruption in South Florida is a lot like cosmetic surgery.

Look around here and there's no shortage of face-lifts. Many--to be charitable--are simply obvious. Some are horrendous, others are flat-out botched.

Ever visited New York City? There are probably as many face-lifts per capita up there as there are in South Florida, only you don't notice them as much because the quality of the work is so much better.

Up in the Big Apple, it's commonly understood that many of the plastic surgeons who aren't good enough to succeed there or in Southern California head to Florida, where there's plenty of demand but the standards are lower (this is not to impugn the good ones who have chosen to call our little Garden of Eden home).

Like cosmetic surgery, corruption is an art form. In New York, they practice corruption with subtlety and nuance. They create gossamer layers of obscurity that befuddle the most discerning law enforcement operatives. A public official who skillfully conceals his or her "understandings" can go years, even decades, without a whiff of suspicion.

Here in Florida, you scratch the surface and you find unsophisticated, easy-to-expose, ugly relationships, like spouses of public servants being retained by contractors doing business with the same public entities.

They're hanging out there in all their hideous glory, like the blonde whirling around in the supermarket aisle whose drumhead-taut countenance causes you to gasp in horror.

This kind of sloppy workmanship would never pass muster up north. But this is Florida, where--as they say--the standards are lower.

> Discuss this entry

It sounds like South Florida’s favorite mensch, Congressman Robert Wexler, is going for the bucks.

One can hardly blame him—seven terms in congress is an eternity if your job consists mostly of espousing liberal causes that have little chance of being enacted into law, and making sure Social Security checks arrive on time back in the home district.

Why not head up a Middle East-oriented think tank, especially if the salary’s good? You may actually accomplish something real, and you can look at yourself in the mirror in the morning knowing you didn’t sell out to become a lobbyist.

Speaking professionally as a cartoonist, I would have to say that Robert Wexler has been good to me. The snafu over his so-called residency was fodder for a lot of commentary.

I also admire him for supporting Barack Obama’s candidacy in the face of huge opposition from his own constituents. This was back when Obama was still a Muslim and “had it in” for Israel. Wexler apparently knew better, and went like Jonah into the belly of the whale for him.

Whether or not you voted for or even like Obama, you have to respect that kind of political courage.

As one of Wexler’s constituents, I’ll miss him and his effervescent personality. Of course, I missed him when he was my congressman, too…so no harm, no foul.

> Discuss this entry

Maybe FPL has already done opposition research on these two new appointees with the ruthless efficiency of a KGB counterintelligence squad.

Any proclivities that can be exploited? Skeletons in their past? Kids of college age that got admitted to pricey Ivy League schools that might make them susceptible to a sweet job offer down the line?

Ah, don't listen to me...I'm just being paranoid--ZZZZZOTTTTT!!!!!
AAUUGH that hurt!!! How did they manage to plant those electrodes in my office chair??

> Discuss this entry

In Latin America, corruption is practically an art form.

Within certain limits of taste, it is not only tolerated, but an essential ingredient in making sure the wheels of bureaucracy run smoothly. Who likes standing in line for hours to get a driver's license when you can "know somebody" and get the whole thing taken care of without even showing up for a test?

In Mexico, they even have a word for it: la mordida--the bite.

My older Oklahoma friends lamented the repeal of the Volstead Act (prohibition), which didn't happen there until 1957.

Back in the good old days, they told me, your bootlegger (who always made sure the local sheriff got his taste), delivered your hooch right to your back door wrapped in corn husks, just like a milkman. After the repeal, a body had to galumph all the way down to the likker store to collect his medicine.

Anyway, I think that our friends to the south would marvel not that our public officials are on the take, but that they have control over such vast resources and are prostituting the public trust for such a relatively paltry sum.

Frankly, it's an embarrassment. I expect my elected officials to sell out for at least six figures. This is the big time, not some dusty pueblo.

> Discuss this entry

Naturally, the idea for this cartoon appealed to the career newspaperman in me.

It's not the stretch that you would think, either. How would the Feds have even known to stage multiple sting operations of local government figures if newspapers hadn't been watchdogging and digging up dirt about corruption, year after year?

The alleged criminals certainly weren't going to advertise it themselves, and everybody in our business knows that TV "news" operations wouldn't know what to report about if they didn't have a paper to read every morning (That's unfair. They learn about those bloody car accidents, fires and crimes from police and emergency scanners).

Anyway, nothing's more entertaining than a good perp walk. In school board member Beverly Gallagher's case, it was a perp "sprint," an act beautifully captured on our front page by photographer Mike Stocker in an image that will be forever seared into Broward political history.

A great day for the Feds, for better government, for the media, and even for voters, if they would just get engaged and stop automatically voting for the person they'd heard of.

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So there you are, some paper-pushing dweebazoid sitting in your dank little office at the PSC in Tallahassee, playing tiddlywinks with your stapler.

All you can think about is that you've got just a couple of years left before you can retire on your miserable state pension and spend some quality time with your stamp collection before you shuffle off this mortal coil.

You notice on your agenda that there’s an appointment today with somebody from FPL.

In walks this tanned, slick Brioni-suit-wearing specimen who flops down in your spare chair as if he owned the place.

“I’ve been looking at these figures,” you say to him, shuffling spreadsheets and trying to look official. “Your numbers just don’t add up.”

Your visitor grins expansively. He could care less. “You know, Furbish,” he whispers. “I like your chutzpah. If you’d ever like to work someplace where they know how to show their appreciation for your kind of institutional knowledge, just lemme know.”

He slides a business card across the desk and leaves. You sit there for the rest of the day, staring at the card. And the next day, and the one after. You start tapping your fingers, thinking about that Mediterranean cruise you and the wife dreamed about when you were young, and the future was bursting with possibilities…

> Discuss this entry

We've had a few pretty good years lately, knock on wood.

It would be understandable were the insurance companies to stick us with higher rates if we'd been battered repeatedly by hurricanes like we were back in 2005, but they've already hiked them several times since then even though the weather has been favorable.

They come at us now with some kind of gobbledygook about how the cost of reinsurance is up, thanks to worldwide catastrophes. They always have a reason.

Didn't they create those independent Florida subsidiaries (e.g. Allstate Floridian) so that they could soak us for big premiums, yet insulate the national company from huge losses in case the worst happened?

Why doesn't that "insulation" work both ways? Why should our premiums be affected by earthquakes in Japan, or a tsunami in Malaysia, if they're trying to treat the entire Florida market like some kind of isolated hothouse rose?

As usual, they always have the last word: If you don't like it, don't live here.

> Discuss this entry

On occasion, my editors have seen fit to send me to Tallahassee to cover the sillier side of our legislature in graphic montage.

There is no end of inspiration up there. I remember a special session that then-Gov. Bob Martinez called twenty years ago to reform Florida's abortion laws.

Impassioned partisans arrived from all over the country to stage demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in the streets of our sleepy capital city. The pro-life crowd, in particular, came equipped with visual aids that I won't even go into.

Anyway, I discovered that one way to get a handle on the crazy-quilt character of our state is to sit in the gallery of the House of Representatives. It's a little like witnessing a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.

Over in one corner, the Miami-Dade delegation is deliberating in Spanish. In another, the Broward and Palm Beach reps are still rehashing some football game from long ago between their old high schools back in Brooklyn. One can hear the broad diphthongs of the Midwest from the Orlando/Tampa/Sarasota corridor, and cutting through it all is the twang of good ol' boys from the Panhandle across to Jacksonville, thick and tough as the crust on a chicken-fried steak.

Bearing all this in mind, it's no wonder that a statewide voice-activated highway information system would be stymied trying to understand instructions from an average Floridian. Mainly because there is no such thing as an average Floridian. We're really a loose collection of accents and idioms.

That is, when we're speaking to each other.

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Sure it was a cynical move on Charlie's part, appointing his own political crony to a U.S. Senate seat because he's the only person he can trust not to want to keep it.

George Lemieux is a nice guy, but it would have been easier for us to swallow if he had at least some experience in elective office, particularly when there's somebody with former U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw's institutional knowledge sitting around with nothing better to do.

I drew a cartoon about this when Mel Martinez first abdicated. Little did I know that the governor would actually take my advice. Charlie, you always said the people of Florida came first! Say it ain't so, buddy!

Once Charlie gets elected next year, this could be the first time in history that a sitting U.S. Senator has a former senator as his chief of staff.

I may be wrong, but I understand that Sen. LeMieux will be eligible, after his year in office, for the gold-plated health care and pension plan that U.S. Senators have voted for themselves, so maybe he'd rather just retire on our dime than take a demotion. Besides, it would be confusing whenever somebody came into the office and said, "Senator," and they both answered, "Yes?"

> Discuss this entry

When your state's economy is based on homebuilding at a time when people are defaulting on their mortgages, and tourism when nobody is going anywhere, then it's best to stick with your strengths.

And, as any marketer knows, product placement is everything.

> Discuss this entry

When one is almost at a loss to say something new about FPL, the company obligingly goes and hands us a new issue on an electric chafing dish.

This time, it's trying to keep the salaries of its top execs a secret, claiming that releasing such proprietary info could harm its competitiveness.

How is it that a "regulated" monopoly suddenly needs to worry about being competitive? FPL has such a sweet deal that a pack of chimpanzees could run the place and still turn a tidy profit.

Maybe FPL worries that we peons--upon learning what these guys get paid--might rebel, hook our home exercycles up to little generators, and start conditioning our own !@#$% air.

> Discuss this entry

It's hard to get friends and relatives Up North to understand what it means to wonder, year after year, if you're still going to have a roof left by Thanksgiving.

They just don't feel the immediacy of it. Have you ever called someone after a hurricane hit to tell them you made it through OK, and they go, "What, you had a hurricane? Ohhh, yeahhh...I remember hearing something about it on the news?" To them, it might as well have been a typhoon in Malaysia.

An embittered member of Florida's congressional delegation--it may even have been my own congressman, Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Maryland (see how smart he is to opt out of living in his home district?)--once said that the only way we're ever going to get a national catastrophe fund is if a Category 3 hurricane goes right up the Connecticut River Valley.

I think he was wrong. It would have to hit the Hudson and the Potomac as well.

Anyway, it makes you think twice and three times about remodeling the bathroom when you could be showering with a garden hose by next month. No, our northerly neighbors will never be able to truly appreciate the thrill of going mano a mano with Mother Nature.

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Parts of South Florida, particularly the Greater Boca Raton Metroplex, can be characterized as Beverly Hills Lite mixed with a generous dollop of Nassau County, Long Island.

This is why it came as no surprise when one of Boca's own institutions of higher learning, Florida Atlantic University, announced it was offering valet parking to students so they wouldn't have to traipse across the college parking lots in our punishing humidity and arrive in class with the frizzies. If you can look better by paying more, it's money well spent. That is the Boca Way, as well as the Hippocratic Oath for the plastic surgery industry.

It's also the South Florida way to do as much as you possibly can without leaving your car. If you must leave it, then make sure you minimize the number of steps you take to the greatest degree possible. This may even involve waiting for several minutes, burning fuel and blocking cars behind you, for that perfect spot to open up near the entrance to the fitness center--a place you are ostensibly going to in order to burn calories.

I say ostensibly, because we all know you're really going there to meet people, and you want to look your best when you arrive.

Any entrepreneur who can come up with a way to deliver a needed service to people as they wait in their car with the engine running is bound to succeed in South Florida.

Hence the business model I hereby offer up in my cartoon. I would love to see it become a reality.

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The presence in our local environment of creatures like the Formosan termite, the Bahamian curly-tailed lizard, the Africanized bee and the dreaded Cuban death's head roach is understandable, and probably unavoidable in today's free-trade world.

These uninvited guests arrived by way of shipping containers from far-off lands, or in the case of the bee, by an accidental release.

The problem of the lionfish and the Burmese python, however, can be traced to irresponsible idiots who keep these predators as interesting pets until they get too big or annoying to keep in the house.

What do you do if you're a typical Floridian who's gotten all the use out of something that he wants to, and is ready to move on? Dump it and forget it. That's what that big swamp back there, and that ocean out front, are for. You don't even think twice about letting it become somebody else's problem, because this is Florida. Other people don't worry about trashing the environment, so why should you? After all, it's pretty much trashed already.

When the place becomes so polluted and overrun with exotic, predatory wildlife that human existence becomes untenable, you can always just move to another state, the same way you moved in. Run a few red lights on your way out while you're at it. Weave in and out of traffic. Toss the packaging from your fast-food lunch on the highway.

Somebody else'll clean up the mess.

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As I’ve said before, it sometimes helps to understand human behavior from a tribal perspective.

When the human animal finds himself in uncertain or stressful situations, his default behavior is to seek refuge with his own kind. The tribe can be an ethnic group, a college fraternity, one’s religious denomination, or even a profession (like law enforcement).

It’s “us” vs. “them,” a mindset reinforced by initiation rituals as well as mandatory loyalty to the group.

Our constitution is a framework of codes designed to protect society from this all-too-natural tendency, especially when it exhibits itself in the institutions of government.

We are a nation of laws, not of men, and the idea of fairness and equality under those laws is the animating ideal that binds us together. It’s why the president swears his fealty to the constitution, and not to the people of the United States.

It is an ideal—not a reality—because men are not perfect. But it is why we feel such a deep sense of wrong when abuses like the recent Hollywood police fabrication occur. The deliberate flouting of our common code is not just an offense to the motorist who was hit by the policeman, but to everyone.

The authority those law enforcement officers wield is conferred by the rest of us. They threw it in our faces in the name of protecting one of their own.

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Our relationship with the utility we all love to hate is like a dysfunctional marriage, wherein we want to separate from an abusive spouse, yet find ourselves enabling their bad behavior because life without them is unimaginable.

It doesn't matter how many times FPL is exposed in print, or how many cartoons people draw,
because the utility just doesn't care. We need them more than they need us.

In fact, they've stopped even making excuses. It used to be that they'd come up with some kind of gobbledygook about soaring fuel costs (even while fuel prices were dropping) that was so transparent it insulted our intelligence. But they at least took the trouble to put on the charade.

Now they release the news about a whopping seventy-seven per cent increase in profits, and we don't even get the benefit of the soft-shoe anymore.

We deserve some respect as patsies. We've sat in the dark too many times.

> Discuss this entry

Who do the Palm Beach County Commissioners think they're kidding? An inspector general?

I have to admit, the title sounds impressive, which is about as far as it goes. The first thing the special interests are going to do is huddle and ask, "What's his/her price?"

That's assuming the commission doesn't appoint some crony to the post.

Even if, say, the governor appointed someone independently, how long would it take before this person's operating budget got held hostage by the very people he was supposed to be investigating?

It's window dressing, pure and simple. If voters are fooled by it, they deserve what they get. Actually, they've gotten plenty of it already, and they deserve that, too.

It's time people got involved and stopped voting automatically, over and over, for someone they happen to have heard of.

> Discuss this entry

We're going about this all wrong.

We all know that Florida is always at the top on the lists of the bad stuff, and at the bottom of the lists of desirable stuff. For once, we should celebrate--rather than bemoan--our strengths.

Tourism is one of the legs of our economic stool, isn't it? (The others are development and agriculture, I think, although you'd never know it from our tomatoes, which often taste like they were shipped from a Siberian sawmill). Here we have the one attraction that people will travel all the way down here for, even in a recession, and Gov. Crist goes and signs a law making it harder to get.

Is this the kind of thinking you want out of your governor, much less your next U.S. Senator? After all, if they can't get their prescriptions filled here, they'll just go and get them someplace else, like Mexico. So, no harm done in the end. Plus, it helps keep our international trade balance in line.

We should be offering packages to our honored visitors. "Stay two nights in a Florida hotel, and we'll throw in a bus tour of the top pill mills in Broward and Palm Beach Counties. Reserve within the next 30 minutes and we'll send you home with a pet Burmese python."

We can even have a slogan: "Florida. You'll love us from your first dose."

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I was talking with a tile guy one day (Word of advice: Don't ever hire a Brazilian
tile guy right before the World Cup Finals), and we were lamenting the fact that my typical South Florida tract home, thanks to shoddy construction, had no square corners. Nor were any of the walls plumb or the ceilings level--something I learned when I installed my own crown molding.

In fact, I was in the attic once and happened to look down into the interior of a wall below me. Buried down there was a time capsule of discarded cigarette packs, disposable lighters, sardine cans and other detritus left behind by the construction workers decades before.

Anyway, the tile guy told me he kept running into the same tradespeople at construction sites all the time, whether the house was relatively humble, like mine, or a waterfront McMansion. "The quality's all the same, " he said. "You may pay more for a bigger house on the water, but it'll fall down just as fast as yours."

That was heartwarming. And it helped explain why Parkland, which is adjacent to the land being transferred from Palm Beach to Broward County, and which is a relatively well-to-do community, should find itself one of the more high-profile victims of the Chinese drywall debacle. Let the buyer beware: no one is immune. One gets the impression that Florida developers would buy drywall from Borneo made of compressed bat guano if it came in cheaper than the Chinese stuff.

> Discuss this entry

An armed robber goes into a convenience store to steal money out of the cash register. He pulls out a pistol and points it at the store clerk.

He has no intention of using it. He just wants to show the man he means business. The store clerk, upon seeing the weapon, involuntarily recoils. He slips on a puddle of Mountain Dew and his head hits the tile floor. He dies of a cerebral hemorrhage.

The robber is apprehended, and charged with something called "felony murder," which is to say that even though he never intended to take a life, he embarked on a series of activities that directly resulted in the death of the clerk.

How is Bernard Madoff any different than this guy, when his theft resulted in several suicides by people whose entire life savings had been wiped out?

He's lucky all he got was 150 years, and not the magic mojito I.V. As it is, I heard that he's not going to a country club prison. Thanks to the enormity of his crimes, he's rumored to be headed for medium security, with rapists, armed robbers, and other unsavory types who are also serving life sentences with no possibility of parole.

In other words, the system has no way of disciplining them if they should happen to visualize their own grandmother in the place of some little old lady who is now forced to survive on cat food, and decide to take appropriate action.

That's what it feels like not to know if you're going to make it through the next day, Mr. Madoff.

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I speak here as a disgruntled FPL customer ( Is there any other kind?). What ticks me, and probably others, off as much as the rate hike is the way they insult my intelligence with their lame corporate rationalizations.

FPL says that lower fuel charges and increases in efficiency will more than offset the new kilowatt-hour base rate increase, in fact lowering our total bills. If they're doing so well with all these economies, what do they need to raise our base rate for?

They say we pay less per kilowatt-hour than customers of other Florida utilities. Could this be because FPL is the biggest, and benefits from economies of scale? And, just because other utilities rip their customers off more than ours does, is that a valid reason to increase our rates?

It wouldn't be quite as bad if our service weren't so spotty. A storm doesn't have to be a hurricane to douse the power at my house. Probably true for yours, too.

On top of all that, they're picking a lousy time to do this. By further strangling homes and businesses in an already stumbling economy, they make it that much harder for their customers to claw their way back to prosperity someday. Less money for them, in the long run.

To put it kindly (and there's no reason that I should), this business tactic lacks foresight.

> Discuss this entry

When a crime is committed, the people's interest in an ordered society is represented by the prosecution, which pursues its task (without passion or prejudice) within an accepted and respected framework of law.

Our reverence for the law and the assumption of its equal application (at least in theory) are part of the social contract that holds us together as a society. When that contract is violated, it's an affront to us all. That is, I think, what lies at the root of the anger at Donte Stallworth's punishment, or lack thereof.

We call the punishment of a crime the perpetrator's "debt to society" for a reason. It is not his or her "debt to the victim," because in theory, it is society and its code that have been wronged. This is what keeps our system from descending into "eye for an eye" justice. The legal system is there to protect us from ourselves, from each other, and from our natural revenge instinct. Without it, we'd all be killing each other off in vendettas.

The redress of personal grievances is settled lawfully in civil court. The fact that Donte Stallworth made a financial settlement with the family of his victim should have no bearing on his criminal sentence. We know this, if not because we are familiar with the law, then because we feel it in our guts as members of a collective group with a stake in preserving our code.

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You get what you pay for, and we Floridians have always undertaxed ourselves compared to other states.

It's part of our ethos here in God's Waiting Room, and some would argue that low taxes are what have fueled an economy that has, until now, been based on immigration from other states and countries.

A lot of our retired residents escaped from such high-tax states as New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. They've put kids through the education system Up North, and they're through with that. I would be, too, if I'd had to pay that much.

They have some pretty fine public schools up there. I just visited an elementary school in New Jersey whose multi-media computer room was filled with the latest Apple computers, and the courtyard contained a $90,000 Zen garden for the children to relax in while they contemplated the meaning of life. One classroom door label said, "Mandarin Chinese."

Admittedly, this was a high-end residential community, but clearly the residents were willing to tax themselves to the hilt to give their kids the very best. Here in Florida, they'd just complain and try to hang on to what was theirs.

We could have a top-notch education system, regardless of whether we were in a boom or bust economy, if we had the will.

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You'll notice this entry is cross-filed under "Local South Florida Issues," because that's where it belongs.

The multi-decade dance between Castro's Cuba and successive U.S. administrations has transcended mere foreign policy; long ago, it became an emotionally-charged co-dependency fueled over the years by a volatile exile community capable of tilting national elections.

That we are now making a form of progress in relations with Cuba is due to a couple of developments: the hard-line old guard of the Miami exile community is gradually dying off, leaving more moderate, American-born heirs who think of themselves more as Americans of Cuban descent than Cuban-Americans, and the fact that Obama won Florida in 2008 without the Cuban-American vote, so he owes them nothing.

Both countries have benefited from this warped relationship. Fidel--and now Raul-- Castro needed the U.S. and its embargo to blame for inherent systemic failures in the Marxist Paradise, and U.S. conservatives liked having a Communist enemy just off our shores, not only to keep the base whipped up, but to ensure that mostly Republican Cuban-Americans showed up to vote in high proportion.

Well, it's time to move on, at least for the United States. The Organization of American States has, with qualifications, invited Cuba, finally, to join. The U.S., deciding it doesn't really matter that much anymore, dropped its objections.

Raul, not surprisingly, has spurned the invitation, proving that he needs us as an enemy more than we need him. The intractable problems of his country aren't going away soon, so he might as well keep shifting the blame.

Good luck with that, Amigo.

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It really isn't the fault of the Broward Sheriff's Office employees.

Putting the possibility of almost unlimited overtime without regulation in front of a bunch of public workers is like dropping off a load of cake and ice cream in a room full of unsupervised kindergartners. After the feeding frenzy is over, the only thing left besides the sticky mess is the grousing about who got to belly up first and grab more than their fair share.

Which is what I understand is going on now at the Sheriff's Office. But that's their problem.

Let's face it- when it's everybody's money, it's nobody's money. That's why we now have spectacles like out-of-control contractor expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan...multi-million-dollar mess halls nobody's ever going to use, for example.

There really is no way to get public officials in senior, supervisory positions to safeguard public funds as if they were their own. There's too much cronyism, too many mutually-beneficial relationships. The money's just...there, as if the Tooth Fairy dropped it off.

It's a twenty-dollar bill you find on the sidewalk. You can either pocket it, or run around town asking if anybody lost a twenty. What's the point? It's a victimless crime, after all...they've already lost the money.

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It's comforting to know that my home sprawl, Palm Beach County, is famous for more than Rush Limbaugh, Bernie Madoff and the Butterfly Ballot. We are also one of the capitals of government sleaze.

With three out of seven commissioners behind bars for corruption, we need only one more for a quorum.

Right before the latest, Mary McCarty, was sentenced yesterday to three-and-a-half years in the hoosegow, her lawyer argued that her stint should be reduced to a year and a day, on the grounds that the scope of her crimes did not approach that of her already-incarcerated colleagues, Warren Newell and Tony Masilotti.

This is like saying that while you indeed did the crime, you should get points for incompetence because you couldn't manage to self-deal as much as the next guy.

We all wish Mary well during her sojourn at Club Fed. She seems the type who will benefit from the period of introspection. Considering how things are going here on the "outside," her position is, in many ways, enviable. She gets three guaranteed squares a day, doesn't have to worry about losing the roof over her head, and enjoys steady employment making Federal license plates or whatever it is they produce in the big house.

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The fact that many coastal residents are not prepared for a hurricane is no surprise.

Nobody is going to prepare for anything as long as the threat remains an abstraction. It's human nature. They will begin to prepare, however, when the news that a storm is approaching percolates its way through the ordinary stress and distractions of their daily lives.

This usually happens about forty-eight hours before the storm hits. All of a sudden, there are lines at Home Depot for (now scarce) plywood, and at the supermarkets for water, batteries and other staples that should have been bought months in advance. Incredibly, home improvement stores report that much of the plywood is returned after a storm fails to materialize, as if by surviving a near-miss, we have been inoculated against future catastrophes.

That kind of attitude can only be ascribed to blind superstition. This is what a lot of people must be taking solace in when they fail to perform simple preparatory tasks despite incessant government and media reminders.

It's too late now, but realize that I left ground bat wing and eye of newt out of the cartoon. Shoulda been better prepared.

> Discuss this entry

If you have a problem and you can't resolve it, then the next best thing is to make it somebody else's problem.

This wisdom holds as true for Holy Mother Church as for anybody else. The bizarre case of the Roman Catholic priest who was caught on the beach acting, um, human, with a lady was a huge black eye.

To add insult to injury, Father Alberto Cutie began publicly questioning one of the most sacred tenets of the Church, the doctrine of priestly celibacy. While this entertaining little affair doesn't rise to the level of the child abuse scandal, he had to go. But how to disappear him without generating further embarrassment?

Enter the Episcopal Church, which, as a member of the Anglican Communion, traces its very roots to a dispute between King Henry VIII of England and Pope Clement VII. The latter refused to grant Henry an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon when his head was turned by the comely Anne Boleyn, so Henry cut Rome out of the the English salvation business and became Protector of His Own Faith. Where better for Padre Alberto to hang his clerical collar?

In the end, everyone comes out ahead. It's a modern-day miracle.

> Discuss this entry

My editor knows something about economics. At least, he says he does.

He knows more than I do, which to me makes him an authority.

He likes to terrify us during editorial board meetings with little hypotheticals, like: "Suppose a massive hurricane hits, and you lose your roof. Sure, you have a windstorm policy, but because it's now so expensive, you opted for the highest possible deductible...say, $12,000. So you go to the bank for the twelve grand, and they say, 'We're not lending, especially to you, since the value of your home has dropped below the amount of your mortgage.' Now, multiply that by several hundred thousand cases, and you've got a real catastrophe."

Then he says that the only solution will be for the state to step in and start handing out money to people so that they can pay their deductibles. Since the state is required to balance its budget every year, that means all of us taxpayers will have to step in, including those who bought before the bubble and whose mortgages are not upside-down. A political nightmare.

Which is when we turn our eyes to our rich uncle in Washington for Federal relief. You know that old expression, "There are no atheists in foxholes?"

Try this one: "There are no Libertarians in roofless homes."

> Discuss this entry

We tried to give it a permanent source of funding with a $2 tax on rental cars.

Yes, Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, the three serviced by Tri-Rail, were willing to tax themselves. Well, they were willing to tax tourists who came and rented cars, but it's a small point.

The Republican-dominated legislature, which had to approve the self-taxation, felt we needed to be rescued from our own folly, and refused to sign off on the plan. Why? The old anti-tax philosophy. What happened to government staying out of the people's business? I thought that was Republican philosophy, too.

Then Tri-Rail got caught up in some petty tit-for-tat ego battle between pols over a similar system in Central Florida. We don't get ours, then you won't get yours.

It's all very childish. Remember that as you creep down I-95 past those lovely abandoned stations.

> Discuss this entry

This blog is often Florida-centric, since as editorial cartoonist for a regional daily, I need to remain mindful of the interests of my print readership.

It is a happy moment when local news morphs into national. This happens not infrequently here in the Sixth Borough of Paradise--the Butterfly Ballot and Anna Nicole Smith are two subjects that immediately come to mind.

If Casey Anthony's lawyer's request for a change of venue is granted, the whole dog and pony show may move from Orlando into our backyard--along with the paparazzi, TV crews, international media, and the usual carnival train of hangers-on and scam artists that accompanies spectacles of this magnitude.

Paging Judge Seidlin.

The Anthony case holds no interest for me. Mrs. Lowe-Down, on the other hand, is addicted to the criminal porn shows, like Issues With Jane Velez Mitchell and the eponymous Nancy Grace, driving The Lowe-Down into his garage workshop for refuge.

At the beginning of each program (I hear this in the background, mind you), Nancy marches through a set-piece litany recapping the major events in the Anthony psychodrama. I remember one line in particular, "little Caylee's body, duct-taped and stuffed into a garbage bag, LIKE TRASH!" She could open a side business selling rosary beads for viewers to finger while they recite the liturgy along with her.

Anyway, who am I to complain? Tourism is tourism, and we'll take it anywhere we can find it. O Judge, in thy boundless wisdom which passeth all understanding, please grant Casey's petition...

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It's the Holy Grail for cash-strapped localities: cameras, supplied by a private company, that snag red-light runners. The company takes a cut, the city gets the money, and it's win-win for everybody.

Red-light runners are one resource that South Florida possesses in an abundant, inexhaustible supply. Tapping into them is like harnessing the power of the sun.

Besides, everybody hates them, so it's like taxing child abuse or something. There's no constituency of red-light runners that will organize to push back against being targeted.

Another advantage I see is that, this being Florida, the rear-end collision side-effect of drivers slamming on their brakes at the last moment will be more pronounced than in other states where these cameras are being tried. Take into account all the usual text-messaging, phone-yakking, ingesting of dangerous drugs, and doing make-up while driving that happens in every state, and add to it the slower reaction time of a tailgating senior who is trying to get through the light because, like everybody else in Florida, it's important to get wherever you're going ahead of all the other drivers, and you've provided a stimulus for one of our major industries: personal injury lawsuits.

It's the gift that keeps on giving.

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It looks like Fidel Castro may have won simply by outlasting everybody else.

The Cuban American National Foundation, long the bulwark of the hard line against engagement with the Communist regime--a group so powerful that it hamstrung one administration after another and virtually dictated our Cuba policy for years--has now decided that maybe increasing our ties with the island is the best way to effect change.

It's true that the C.A.N.F.'s influence is on the wane (Obama took the swing state of Florida in spite of its support of McCain), and the younger Cuban-Americans, the next generation, neither share the fire in the belly nor the fear of being tarred as Castro sympathizers for following their own political path. Slowly and tentatively, U.S. official policy toward Cuba is becoming more flexible.

It has been said that Miami-Dade County is the only county in the U.S. to have its own foreign policy. That may still be so, but at least theirs is finally coming into line with the federal one.

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My Creationist friends aren't going to appreciate this, but Florida--South Florida in particular--is a Darwinian environment for people and dwellings.

It is a rare building indeed that does not fall victim to such local perils as windstorms, the Formosan termite, the Cuban Death's Head cockroach, tuberculosis-inducing mold, and a host of other natural nightmares.

As if that weren't enough, we have to face brimstone-laden panels of Chinese-made gypsum board, predatory lending institutions and additional man-made threats to home and hearth, like entire neighborhoods turning into ghost towns. Only the toughest humans and domiciles survive this brutal natural selection process.

Back to Creationism: Anyone who really believes in the doctrine of "Intelligent Design" should take a good look at how this region developed. It'll make a Big Bang theorist out of anybody.

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Congressman for Life... It has a nice, third-world ring to it, doesn't it?

Well, that's my Congressman, Robert Wexler. I say that loosely, because he calls Maryland home, but he nominally represents my interests as a resident of his district.

I've had some fun with Rep. Wexler in the past, which he accepts with good humor. He can afford to be magnanimous, because nothing I or anyone else says is going to dent his chances of getting reelected as often as he wants.

Robert may rarely show his face around here, but his constituent services are second to none, so nothing short of a secret photo showing him cavorting on a yacht with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would ever cause his adoring public to have second thoughts about him.

This Chinese drywall thing, though, is one of those simmering little stories that can blow up in a legislator's face if he allows himself to get caught napping. It's unlikely there's much of a Chinese drywall problem among Mr. Wexler's neighbors up in Maryland, but there is one down here where people vote. Hence, the inspection tour.

So nice to have you back in the area, Congressman. Stay a spell and enjoy the holidays with us!

> Discuss this entry

It's time, once again, to get our minds off depressing issues like politics and the economy to discuss an unrelated local topic, to wit: the Boca Raton teacher who has been accused of allowing her cats to starve to death in her apartment while she was off working and spending time with her boyfriend and family.

We knew the subject would stir passions, which is why we made it the Daily Buzz on the Sun Sentinel's website. So far, it has been a smashing success.

I am owned by two cats, myself. I use this locution advisedly, because in a relationship with a cat, he or she is the master, and you are the dog. A cat displays allegiance to the last person who fed it, and that's about the extent of the bonding. I think it's precisely because cat loyalty is so transitory that we prize the critters so. Dogs love you even if you're a dirtbag. With them, love is cheap (I also have a dog).

This is why pet food manufacturers can extort cat lovers, pound for pound, for the most carefully prepared feline treats, while dog food can be bought in bulk at a price that more accurately reflects what it's worth. No kitty toy or gimmick designed to make their lives more comfortable is too expensive.

For the record, I think that what this woman is accused of doing is worthy of a felony charge. The least she could have done was leave the sliding door ajar so that they could get out and fend for themselves. She didn't.

On a personal note, this cartoon marks my 25th anniversary here on the Opinion Page of the Sun-Sentinel. Where did the time go? I think I'll celebrate the auspicious occasion with another Lowe-Down Cartoon Caption Contest, probably next week. Cool prizes and the thanks of a grateful nation lie in store for those with the guts to enter.

Stay tuned.

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Law enforcement types are really scratching their heads over this one. Normally, when the economy sags, there's an uptick in violent crimes and murders. In this recession, however, the year-over-year numbers are down, at least in Broward County, FL.

My theory is that we are confronted with the worst economy that those of us who still have the strength to lift an assault weapon have ever seen in our lifetimes. It's scary, and everyone's too busy out looking for work or trying to hang onto his job to indulge in flighty diversions like killing other people.

An alternative postulate: you know what they say about most murders being committed by someone the victim knew personally. Maybe that someone, at the moment of pulling the trigger, remembers that the bullet's recipient is the one who brings home a significant portion of the bacon. These days, a person with a steady job is somebody to be valued. Maybe it's in everyone's best interests to kiss and make up.

Just an idea. I'm willing to hear others.

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Sometimes the role of the editorial cartoonist involves more than finding fault or poking fun. Sometimes his role is to channel what the community feels.

Political views aside, it would be hard not to have anything but respect for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who not only battled and beat breast cancer, but did so without missing a day of work. As befits her character, she is now using her experience to aid in passing legislation that will increase breast cancer awareness among young women.

Ms. Wasserman Schultz is an unabashed progressive. I remember decades ago, when she first made her mark in the legislature by pushing for dry cleaning parity for women's blouses, which for some reason incurred a higher charge because they buttoned left-to-right. It sounded silly at the time, and was ridiculed both by her colleagues and the media, but she stuck to it and gained a lot of credibility in the process as a crusader. She knew that small things mattered to her constituents.

Well, this is a big thing, and it looks like she has attacked it with the same determination that has become her hallmark, and that has helped catapult her to a leadership position in the U.S. House.

We all wish her good fortune in her life and endeavors.

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It's too bad they can't figure out a way to generate electricity from chutzpah, because if they could, we FPL customers would be paying the lowest rates in the nation.

After a rainstorm--that's right, a rainstorm---causes tens of thousands to lose their power, FPL wants to squeeze an additional $1 billion out of us, claiming that they haven't raised base rates in kilowatt decades. If that's so, what's been causing our bills to go up over the years? Could it be those fuel charges they wanted to raise, even though prices have dropped precipitously since last summer?

Maybe they just took a cue from AIG. Since massive incompetence appears to be richly rewarded these days, why not belly up to the trough with the rest of the hogs? After all, FPL can stack its ineptitude up with the best of them.

Strike while the socket is hot, as they say at FPL headquarters.

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Now that the Jim Naugle era is over, we can afford to be a little magnanimous about a civic leader who remained so resolutely out of step with the community he served.

Mayor Naugle's views and outspokenness on the subject of gays made him a national poster boy for the Forces of Righteousness, and reflected an attitude more in line with the mayor of a medium-sized city in Utah than of a cosmopolitan, easy-going metropolis like Ft. Lauderdale.

He belongs in the pantheon of one-of-kind politicians who refused to back down from their words--no matter how many people they might have hurt--like Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, and Dick Cheney.

Speaking as an editorial cartoonist, Mayor Naugle was the gift that kept on giving, providing me endless material with his anachronistic spoutings about gays and the poor.

Godspeed, Mr. Mayor...and may you continue to generate waves of discord wherever your journeys take you. I know it will make your day.

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Whatever you think of Rush Limbaugh, he's worthy of your respect...as an entertainer. He knows well his listeners' carnivorous palates, and he throws them the bloody scraps they crave.

What he and his fellow traveler Ann Coulter are doing to the gossamer fabric that binds our nation together, just to make a buck, is another story. For that, there's a special hot love seat waiting for them where they're going.

But this is about Rush the Entertainer, who cannot help but be chortling over the way the Democrats are helping to boost his ratings. Their condemnation is his gravy.

As for the Democrats, their behavior with this idiotic billboard just reinforces my belief that the number-one mission of any organization is self-preservation. If they had just kept their mouths shut, the Republican Party would probably have marginalized Rush on their own, since his cause is not theirs.

But, Rush is also a powerful fundraising magnet. He must not be allowed to sink into obscurity, lest the fires dim in the bellies of checkbook-bearing lefties everywhere.

Sure it's cynical. That's why so many of us are registered as Independents.

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This cartoon should be pretty self-explanatory whether or not you read the Sun Sentinel story over the weekend. When asked to explain why customer rates continue to rise in spite of dramatically lower fuel costs, some FPL flack said that they could not release fuel price information for competitive reasons.

They're a monopoly, for crying out loud. Where are we going to go if we don't like their brand of electricity? Florida Flower and Blight? They have a non-answer for everything.

Anyway, I thought it would be instructive, and give you a behind-the-curtains view of the editing process, to show you how this cartoon evolved from the moment it sprang to life inside my twisted brain.

The color cartoon you see above is the final version, which will appear in black and white on the February 17 Sun Sentinel Opinion Page. Below is a sketch of the original idea, which I discarded out of hand without even drawing (I drew it afterward for the purposes of this discussion).

I tossed it because, while the Abu Ghraib image is powerful, it introduces an element that is not germane to the central idea.

"What's Abu Ghraib got to do with my FPL bill?" I can hear somebody saying. Also, by using such a shocking image, which could be thought of as overkill, I run the risk of actually turning my target, FPL, into a sympathetic figure. This is no mean feat, I assure you, but I didn't want to run the risk of my cartoon backfiring.

Which brings us to the sketch below. I showed this one, which I felt captured the atmosphere I wanted to create without all the extra baggage, to my editor, the estimable
Antonio Fins. Tony looked at it and said, "Ooh! That's harsh!"

This cartoon, ironically, reminded Tony of Abu Ghraib. He once toured our "facility" at Guantanamo Bay, and is particularly sensitive to the whole issue in a way one cannot be unless one has actually seen one of our prison camps firsthand. In his opinion, the sketch trivialized the suffering of the Abu Ghraib prisoners.

Tony asked if I could put clothes on the victim, and make the interrogator look less like an executioner and more like a mad scientist. I acquiesced, because in my mind, the essential idea had not been sacrificed, although I ultimately decided to use the image of an interrogation cop rather than a mad scientist in the final version.

Now that we've been through all that, I would be interested in knowing from readers which version they would have preferred to see as the final, finished product: the color one that ran, the Abu Ghraib image, or the regular, garden variety "harsh interrogation" scene? We'll call them "A," "B," and "C."

Feel free to tell us why you think so.

> Discuss this entry

Whenever there's any kind of bad news, from a high incidence of HIV/AIDS to soaring school dropout rates, Florida is well represented. Our state regularly rates the poorest in the desirable statistics and the highest in the negative ones.

It is no different with the Madoff scandal. Floridians constitute a huge proportion of the con artist's victims. I suppose we can be happy we're not in the majority, but it's bad enough.

Moving beyond the Florida connection, it's fascinating that a number of really famous people--like Kevin Bacon and Steven Spielberg, to name just two--were stung. We peons have this feeling that famous people must be "in the know," and that there's some secret code among them that prevents them from falling victim to the usual scams the rest of us face. Also, they must be smarter than we are or they wouldn't be famous.

The fact that these people were not insulated tells us something important about the nature of fame: in some cases, it's a byproduct of hard work and excellence in a particular field--like Madoff victim Sandy Koufax.

In other cases, people get famous for things that have nothing to do with intelligence, like non-victims Paris Hilton and the Octuplet Lady.

Fame, in other words, says more about us than it does about them. It's about whom we're willing to confer it upon, and for what reasons. They're just folks, with the same problems and susceptibilities we have, only they can't go out to the driveway and grab the paper without some jerk sticking a camera in their faces.

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Hurricanes are one of those facts of life we simply have to deal with. We can't "hate," or "despise" hurricanes, or "hold them in contempt." They have no free will. They're just products of the laws of thermodynamics.

Homeowners' insurance companies, however, are another matter. All that public relations pablum about being in good hands, about being good neighbors--it's just selling a feeling, because their product doesn't exist as a tangible item you can get your hands around.

We forget that they're not really here to be a public service. They're profit-driven, and they take our money, betting that we'll never have to make a claim. So for years, they took it gladly. Then, we had a few bad seasons. Now State Farm is pulling out, because the house is no longer guaranteed its traditional winnings at blackjack.

The company is more than happy, however, to stay behind to insure our automobiles, which continues to be a lucrative enterprise.

There's a word for that: boycott.

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It looks like the Federales are going to be with us for a long time, because the local watchdogs either dropped the ball or never picked it up in the first place.

I have a theory about why government corruption is so rampant and enduring down here. A lot of people, the ones with enough time on their hands to vote, move down and leave the grown kids up north. This means they have no stake in the future of the area.

All they want is to be left alone to enjoy their twilight years and be allowed to die in peace. As for government, as long as it maintains a relatively low tax rate and keeps the hooligans from kicking in the condo door or snatching one's purse in the parking lot, then it's done its job. If somebody wants to use his office to make a side living, that's his business. When election time comes, you vote for whom you've heard of.

Which is where campaign fund contributions come in.

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Rep. Robert Wexler, few would disagree, occupies one of the safest Congressional seats in America.

How safe? Back when it was not cool to do so, he was one of the few to defend former President Clinton during the impeachment hearings. No, he didn’t just defend him, he got out there, plastered his face all over the networks and VOCIFEROUSLY, UNAPOLOGETICALLY and INDEFATIGABLY defended him.

How safe? He called for the impeachment of President Bush just a few months before the Clown Prince was heading out the door anyway.

How safe? He was one of the very first major Florida pols to support Barack Obama in the primaries, a position that required a lot of fast-talking in the temples and synagogues of District 19. Yet his career did not suffer for it, because to his constituents, he’s a mensch.

Except for that quirky little thing about his being a full-time resident of Maryland (to which I have alluded in this cartoon and earlier ones), he’s far from being the worst of that batch of jokers in Washington.

Wexler could have walked in and written his own ticket with the Obama administration, but for some reason he has decided to hold onto his seat. I guess he cares about us—not enough that he would actually want to live among us, but enough not to deprive us of his representation.

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Former (as of yesterday) Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty is the latest of the rogues' gallery to do the perp walk in what is becoming the Federal Prosecutors' Full Employment Act.

That makes three snagged, so far, by the Theft of Honest Services statute that can be summed up thusly: "The way public business has always been conducted in South Florida."

Three out of seven. One more, and they'll have a quorum of the Palm Beach County Government in Exile.

You know that row of Commission mug shots that greets you at the airport in West Palm as you arrive from the concourse? Here's an idea: replace them with digital picture frames. It may cost a little extra up front, but in the long run we'll save money.

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It would be easy for us working stiffs to indulge in a little schadenfreude over this Madoff investment Ponzi scheme uproar. The rich, trying to get even richer, ended up hoist on their own petard of greed.

Unfortunately, there were quite a few charities that placed their money and trust in the hands of this criminal as well, so a lot of innocent "little" people are being hurt.

Since Madoff's fifty-billion-dollar crime was white collar, he'll probably end up doing a few years at the Allenwood Federal Country Club, if he does any time at all. Meanwhile, a small-time crook who rolls a Seven-Eleven with a pistol will probably do twenty years or more, even though his crime affects far fewer people far less drastically. But that's the way the system works.

Meanwhile, where were the Feds while all this was happening? According to recent stories, they were probably sitting around with their thumbs up their derivatives, giving each other inside stock tips instead of doing due diligence.

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Why do our esteemed commissioners, caretakers of the public trust and all that, get so exercised over childish matters, like who got a commemorative plaque and who gets to sit where?

It could be that the problems we elected them to deal with are so intractable. You can't just snap your fingers and watch contributions from developers come streaming in when there aren't any houses being built. When the economy's lousy, you feel ineffective.

Instead, you tussle over the small stuff, like making sure your mug is closest to the camera so that all eight people who watch commission meetings on county public service TV get treated to your good side.

And a plaque! As my old editor used to say, "Sounds like just the thing to hang on a wall."

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You can hardly blame Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, one of Miami's three anti-Castro amigos (along with the rabid Diaz-Balart brothers), for imagining herself to be yet another victim of a telephone prank.

After all, local Miami stations are past masters of the art form, having famously fooled Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez into thinking his pal Fidel Castro was on the horn, and then reversing the prank on Fidel, himself.

We all know about the French Canadian "President Sarkozy" who called Sarah Palin a couple of months ago.

It is no wonder, therefore, that Ileana hung up on President-elect Barack Obama when he called to congratulate her on her election victory and tell her how much he was looking forward to working together on common goals. Just to make sure she had dug her hole deep enough, she then slammed the receiver down on his future chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who had called to tell her that the Barack outreach was una llamada verdadera.

When the whole mess was finally ironed out, everybody had a good laugh, sort of. But Ileana is no fool, and in her embarrassment, she knows full well that Obama managed to carry Florida without the help of what is left of the anti-Castro Miami Cuban exile community. Which means that he's free to pursue any policy on Cuba that he chooses to, without fear of backlash from her or her constituents.

Not exactly the best way to play your hand with the new administration, particularly when you come to the table without so much as a pair of deuces.

As for the Miami radio pranksters, this must be the sweetest victory of all. They didn't even have to pick up the phone.

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What happens when Floridians' notorious independent streak (just check out our gun laws) bumps up against localities' bright idea to raise revenue in tough times by paying commercial outfits to install traffic cameras and collect fines automatically?

Toss in a dollop of our legendary road rage, and Big Brother comes down with a case of lead poisoning.

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A conventional wisdom seems to be developing that the same huge minority voter turnout that helped tip Florida into the Obama column also helped to put the "Gay Marriage Amendment" over the top, thereby enshrining discrimination in our state constitution.

If that is true, I find it puzzling that a segment of our society that so recently suffered under anti-miscegenation laws, and knows what it means to have the state step in and dictate whom one should and should not be allowed to marry, could be complicit in restricting the rights of another minority.

But, maybe it isn't true. Also, maybe I'm just dumb and am missing some key piece of logic here.

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One of my colleagues voted early yesterday, and she spoke afterward of how moved she was that so many people were willing to stand in line out in the sun for so long to make sure that their vote was counted.

This election, especially the circumstances surrounding it, may have finally gotten people to understand how much government--and who is leading it-- can affect their everyday lives. The economic crisis hits home in a way nothing else can. It isn't abstract, it isn't something that only the chattering classes yak about on Sunday morning talk shows. Never have the choices been so stark, or the outcome of greater consequence.

Hence, the connection I made in the cartoon between voting and the economy. Go stand in line to vote. It's a lot better for your health than standing in line for fast food.

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It's true that I drew a cartoon about Representative Tim Mahoney of the scandal-plagued Florida 16th Congressional District just last week, but this gift of a local/national story keeps on giving. Since the story first broke, Mahoney has admitted to multiple affairs, and blubbered his way through a press conference wherein the morality candidate of two years ago begged for forgiveness from his constituents.

The amazing thing is, he hasn't quit his campaign for reelection, thereby assuring that a lot of angry voters, who may not be in a such a forgiving mood after their second representative in a row showed himself to be morally challenged, will turn out to vote against him. This is certain to hurt his own party's (Democratic) presidential ticket in a very important swing state next month.

Considering his reckless behavior to date, why should we be surprised?

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In the midst of a national presidential campaign, let us pause briefly to turn to more parochial issues. This being Florida, they tend to morph into national ones, anyway.

There must be something in the water up there in Florida's Sixteenth Congressional District. The man who replaced serial online congressional page groomer Mark Foley, and who managed to turn a Republican district Democratic, now appears to be caught in his own web of deceit.

Tim Mahoney gave a news conference today in which he hewed to the strict guidelines of what has now become an American political ritual, the fallen public figure accompanied by his stricken spouse (Why is it that they always have to humiliate their wives a second time by forcing them to endure the probing lenses of the media while they deliver their mea culpas? It seems so barbaric).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Europeans don't care about this stuff. Why bother to go to all the trouble to become a politician, they reason, if you don't partake of the goodies? If you don't like a cheating spouse, then don't marry a pol.

Politics aren't nearly as interesting over there.

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It reminds one of the life cycle of the cicada. Every four years, the gay marriage issue rears up and threatens the very existence of our republic. A furious burst of political activity ensues, characterized by a flurry of would-be laws being placed on state ballots nationwide for consideration by a vote of the people.

Some succeed, others don't. The real purpose is to turn out "The Base," which will, while they are angrily wearing a hole with their pencil into the optical scan ballot at the place that would ratify the anti-gay question, vote for the Republican candidate before they go back to sleep, politically speaking.

We should take one moment to think about not just how cynical, but how patronizing of "The Base" this strategy is. It assumes that there is a large portion of the electorate that will not even bother to turn out to vote in a presidential election unless there is a sweetener involved.

For the rest of us, the question would seem almost quaint and irrelevant, under current circumstances, if it didn't have such a potentially disastrous effect on people.

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Chances are the Founding Fathers, back in olden days, had no idea to what absurd lengths their Bill of Rights would be stretched. On the other hand, if you don’t go to those lengths, somebody might arbitrarily draw the line at a place that is unacceptable to the rest of us.

In other words, if you have to invoke the First Amendment to protect some youth’s right to wear his clothes in such a way that will make him feel like an idiot when somebody shows him a picture of himself twenty years later, so be it.

In the two-cents department, just because you have a right to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it. Take heavy-metal music, for example, of which I am not a fan. I do not try to stop it from being played, even when an aficionado of the genre is generous enough to share it with me at high volume while stopped at an intersection.

When treated to this largesse, I refrain from manually expressing my own Constitutionally-guaranteed First Amendment right, especially if I think said aficionado is likely to exercise his Second Amendment right to discharge his musket in my general direction.

Eventually, the light changes, and we all move on with our lives, our civil rights intact.

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It would be nice if the words, "Palm Beach County," evoked images of swaying palms, pristine beaches, and the good life when uttered abroad.

If only. Last week, I opened a lecture in Austria with an explanation of how George W. Bush got elected back in 2000. "I happen to be from Palm Beach County," I said, and immediately heads in the crowd started nodding up and down. "Ach, ja, ja," they said knowingly. "Der Falterfischwahlzettel! (the butterfly ballot!)" It sounds so much worse in German, doesn't it?

Here it is, eight years later, and we're still appealing to anybody who will listen to help us out of our electoral morass. Maybe the Jimmy Carter Center will come to our rescue.

Say what you will about Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Maryland) and his weaselly residency irregularities; that's small potatoes compared to his greatest sin, foisting Elections Supervisor Without Peer Dr. Arthur Anderson upon us. Safely ensconced in Civil Service Pension Valhalla, Theresa LePore is having a good laugh.

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When I began sketching this cartoon, I realized that I had never drawn Nancy Pelosi before, which seems surprising considering how much she has been in the news. Or, maybe I was just having a senior moment.

Cartoonists are always hypersensitive to facial quirks and details--after all, it's our job. I think anyone would admit, though, that our fair Speaker wasn't born with eyebrows that far up on her forehead (I'm not talking about the cartoon).

Getting to more serious stuff, my editor and I agree that the way out of our dependency on oil is not to drill for more, but to add a consumption tax on the petroleum products we use (while providing means to offset the tax's effect on the needy). It would force us to conserve and to find alternatives in our personal lives, while funding research into other forms of energy.

Makes a lot of sense, even though it'll never happen...especially with people around like Nancy Pelosi who can't think past the next election.

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Rising taxes, insurance premiums and the higher cost of just about everything down here are causing more and more of us to question that big move from Up North.

Every once in a while, when we hunker down in our cracker boxes and try to push that storm tracking line on the TV away from us through sheer force of will, those Jersey winters don't seem so tough in retrospect. A little shoveling, big deal. The house was all paid for, for crying out loud. Why DID we move, Herbert?

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It's such a rare event when the good guys (meaning we consumers, as represented by state regulators) win a round, that it's worth a cartoon. In this case, Allstate has been caught using the hurricane threat to gouge customers, and had to pay a hefty fine (along with rebates), the cost of which cannot be passed along to the consumer. I'm sure they'll figure out a way to offload the penalty, regardless. After all, their marketing tells us they're good with their hands.

Speaking of the Good Hands, it's always fun to draw cartoons about insurance companies, because they employ feel-good images like hands, umbrellas, and good neighbors in an attempt to inject a little humanity into what is, at its heart, a rapacious industry selling us an abstract, intangible product. These images create perfect avenues for satire; I've used the hands before in many configurations. Annoyingly, there have been plenty of opportunities to do so.

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This has been fun. Robert Wexler, God bless him, is just such a fat target. As one of my colleagues said, "All people wanted was to hear him say, ' Sorry, I screwed up.'" But, an ego like Wexler's doesn't suffer fools. It has been far more fun watching him squirm around, trying out all manner of hollow rationalizations, before finally bending to the inevitable.

I would be surprised if it cost him his seat; people forget this kind of thing pretty quickly. Meanwhile, some poor would-be speculator who bought a condo in U.S. House District 19 right before the housing bubble burst just managed to find a "tenant." Good for them.

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It could be that we actually hate insurance companies more than utilities. At least FPL delivers a useful product. The problem with insurance is that it isn't tangible. They're supposed to be peddling "peace of mind," but the trauma hits with a double whammy: first, the hurricane itself, second, trying to force these people to part with the loot they've been taking from us for years.

Like a good neighbor, they're there to present their annual statement, or your cancellation notice. I wonder what an insurance executive's concept of hell might be? This gives me an idea for a new Design Your Own Cartoon contest.

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As you can probably tell, I had some fun with this one.

The Broward gay community owes Jim Naugle a great debt, in my opinion, because without him they would not be the coherent political force they are today. At least, it would have taken them a little longer. They could not have invented a more effective foil.

Mayor Naugle, over the years, has been a rich source of material for me, and I am grateful to him also. I will be sorry to see him leave office. Godspeed, Your Honor.

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