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When it comes to deed-restricted communities and homeowners’ associations, no one rides a fence. In all likelihood, the great majority of those who criticize HOAs choose to live outside the walled confines of these exquisitely planned communities, while those who are robust fans dwell inside them.

This arrangement suggests that both sides have freely made choices that suit their lifestyles and so, really, what’s to complain about? But never mind.

Two supporters of HOAs in general and the much-maligned Bridgewater Community Association in particular wrote to express their displeasure with my Wednesday column, linked here.

There was this from a longtime Bridgewater homeowner:

I feel very certain that if you had bought into the Bridgewater Community in 2004 as I did and watched it blossom and then rot, and then see someone like Mark Spector trying his utmost, even if he is not right every time, to make it a place that you are not embarrassed to call home, you would not be so quick to write your article on Bridgewater. If you did, you certainly would have stated it differently.

If you lived in Bridgewater, you would thank God for the Mark Spectors of the world.

And from a Seven Oaks resident came this harrowing retort (changed from its original shouting all-caps format in deference to the gentle reader’s tender ears and eyes):

Just wanted to let you know that I think you are in error re: your opinions as expressed in your column of Sept. 8 and you are trying to simplify a situation faced by the Bridgewater [association]. 

The buyer who brought his situation to your paper’s attention was smart enough to get through the process of buying a foreclosure. In doing so he had to check on possible liens on the home. He also knew there was an [association] involved with deed restrictions. Why didn’t he check as to [association] violations on the home? Surely he knew that banks don’t properly maintain homes they take over.  He just figured that the easiest way to resolve was to complain to the paper in the hope the paper would take up his “cause” and put pressure on the [association] to give in. Sure enough the paper did just what he wanted. The “poor” little guy against the big bad [association]. No wonder no one is buying papers anymore.  Tell it like it is.

I also do not agree with your general comments re: [associations] and deed restrictions. Let me preface my remarks by letting you know that I am no “right wing extremist” as regards deed restrictions. However they are necessary in a state where there are not enough proper zoning laws and building codes. Did you ever notice some of the communities that don’t have deed restrictions? In addition, conceding on deed restrictions in and of itself is not going to increase home sales.  If you don’t like the [deed restrictions], don’t move into the community.

This is not a subtle point, and it references both the column and the introduction above.

Two of the reasons I moved into Seven Oaks were the fine property [association] and the deed restrictions. No one forced me to move here and I had seen a copy of the “covenants” before buying.  Do I agree with all of the restrictions? Of course not. Some seem crazy – like the color of mulch – certain-type backyard fences – garage doors open [no] longer than necessary – restrictions on screen doors – and getting approval to make all home alterations. However, on balance the restrictions do make for a nicer community. Like I said – if you don’t like them then buy somewhere else. …

Why should my life be affected because someone refuses to adhere to a deed restriction?  If everyone was reasonable in maintaining their communities most deed restrictions would not be necessary. However human nature being what it is. …

I readily concede that the would-be homeowner at the heart of Tribune business reporter Shannon Behnken’s story, rocked by the prospect of paying off a five-figure backlog of homeowners’ association fees, played an interesting card.  But it’s not like your correspondent demanded a change in Bridgewater Community Association policy—or else.  Otherwise, I’m not certain what this correspondent’s gripe was – I thought I made similar points – but, no matter.  The healthy and freewheeling exchange of ideas is what makes the blogosphere the modernday Roman forum that it is, and we endorse it.

 

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Here is a rare, if belated, peek into the lengths to which your humble correspondent—*blush*—is willing to go to haul down that elusive tell-all interview for Sunday’s column on egg farm safety precautions.

That’s me in the haz-mat lite get up, Simpson Farms chief Wilton Simpson in civvies.  “The chickens don’t know you,” Simpson explained.  Seriously?  Well, and also that Simpson hadn’t been off the property that day; anyone who came from beyond the security gate had to suit up before entering the chicken barns, lest they transfer some foreign contamination to nearly 1 million Hy-Line hens, sentencing most of Central Florida to weeks of breakfast cereals and uneventful baked goods.

And nobody wanted that.

 

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A leftover or two from the Taste of Marco Tour that sailed through Pasco County Monday.

The time for attaching particular expectations to the candidate, of course, is now, before he has established a legislative record in the office he seeks. Which may be why, after Rubio advocated repealing “ObamaCare” and replacing it with a plan relying on market forces and “lawsuit abuse” reform, a trio of his supporters took his position to mean perhaps what it did not: a restoration of their monthly resupplies of erectile dysfunction medications, cut off, they say, by their provider shortly after passage of the health reform package.

It’s hard to imagine Rubio, or any candidate running under the conservative banner, making the argument that government dollars should ever have been spent on, well, non-essential pharmacological agents.

On the other hand, the argument could be made that in a more perfect repeal-and-replace America, our threesome would have the option (through Paul Ryan’s federally subsidized free-market voucher plan) to seek coverage that included the prescription plan of their choosing … and you can well believe more than a few medical insurance companies would be competing for their business.

But I’m not sure that’s the position they were staking out. 

The same trio didn’t say so outright, but they plainly were disappointed with Rubio’s nuanced take on America’s illegal immigration troubles, including his failure to embrace Arizona’s attempt to address its own particular difficulties.

While sympathizing with the people, legislature and governor of Arizona – it wasn’t an immigration law they enacted; it was “the Arizona public safety law” – Rubio nonetheless lamented the fact that Arizona felt compelled to act.  Instead, he blamed Washington’s refusal to enforce federal laws.

But our trio was in a round-‘em-up-and-ship-‘em-back mood. After all, they said, an e-mail making the rounds that claims three presidents – Hoover, Truman and Eisenhower – deported 13 million illegals proves we’re capable of mass roundups when elected officials have spines not made of linguini.

Well.  Various fact-checking outfits have established that while Hoover and Eisenhower had repatriation schemes – Eisenhower’s bore the lamentable title “Operation Wetback” – the assertions in the e-mail are, at best, wildly, enormously and ludicrously exaggerated.  See for yourself here: Hoover, Truman & Ike: Mass Deporters?

Still, refusing to shake a fist of solidarity with the Tea Party movement on behalf of beleaguered Arizona, even while laying out a perfectly reasonable alternative, is the sort of positioning that allows the New York Times to claim that Rubio has begun to trim his conservative sails—an assertion that is obviously nonsense.  Conservatives across the land agree that where the federal powers are enumerated, Washington should be unshirking.  Seeing to the sanctity of our borders and to looking after the foreign nationals on our soil is, unmistakably, among the federal government’s assignments.  It wasn’t hedging to come out in favor of Washington performing its duty so that the individual states wouldn’t have to.

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Context and timing being pretty much everything in sports and politics, we are rescinding our assessment about the election night behavior of the freshly minted Republican nominee in Florida’s 5th Congressional District.  Comments attributed to Richard Nugent in Wednesday’s edition of Hernando Today denigrating upstart challenger Jason Sager, while accurately quoted, were not uttered during Tuesday evening’s celebration.

Given that, we repeal our characterization of Nugent as having been, at his moment of landslide triumph, anything besides magnanimous and utterly gracious. As Nugent told us Friday, “I had no reason to be negative against Jason” after the election.  Everyone involved in the scenario, including the reporter who included Nugent’s scalding criticism, agrees: The remark was part of a document detailing the candidate’s positions submitted to the newspaper at least six weeks ago.

Nugent went on: “I tried to be very magnanimous.  I’ve been through this [campaigning] three times before.  Going negative [after the votes are in] is not how I am. ... It takes guts to get out there and run for office, and I admire that in anybody.”  This, for anyone less than completely clear on the matter, looks remarkably like the extending of an olive branch.  Sager and his camp could do far worse than to embrace its significance.

We stand by certain parts of our post. To refresh (and here we quote ourselves):

Rep. Ginny Brown-waite approached Nugent a month or so before April’s qualifying date deadline, confiding a closely held secret: She was ailing, likely too sick to continue through another term, and hoped he would consider running for the District 5 seat.  To minimize the headwinds, she said, she would keep her secret until the close of qualifying, eliminating the likelihood of a challenge from an established and ambitious Nature Coast Republican.  At least six days before qualifying ended, GBW contacted Nugent to reaffirm her intentions, and to ascertain his.

Nugent’s role in this heinous, cynical chicanery would be to arrive, literally, just minutes before the close of qualifying to file entry papers and a check.  The allegedly reluctant candidate explained the arrangement a variety of ways over the course of the primary campaign, and all of them stunk.  Not enough, obviously, to disqualify him in the eyes of District 5 GOP voters.  Not when the opponent was an upstart with heavy personal baggage, shocking ideas and insufficient resources to defend himself against an establishment machine candidate.

Otherwise, there is little more to be said about the GBW-Nugent skulduggery, except that as the campaign steers toward its November resolution, Florida’s 5th District Republican voters (who slightly outnumber Democrats) have weighed, measured and baked it in the cake.  Only if Land O’ Lakes business consultant Jim Piccillo, Nugent’s Democratic rival, is lavishly funded, is he likely to be able to make Nugent’s sneaking in an even remotely interesting issue.

In the meantime, we are happy to amend the record.

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I cannot quantify how much hang-wringing was expended over insidious liberal judicial activism as a result of last week’s decision by a federal judge who tossed most of the Army Corps of Engineers development permit for Cypress Creek Town Center.  But I am certain there was at least some.  But before my friends on the right climb too far out on a limb in condemnation of federal judges ruling regally and leftestly from the perches of their lifetime appointments, consider what came down from the same D.C. circuit Monday.

From Tuesday’s Washington Post:

A federal judge on Monday blocked the Obama administration from funding human embryonic stem cell research, ruling that the support violates a federal law barring the use of taxpayer money for experiments that destroy human embryos. ...

[A] preliminary injunction ... prohibits the National Institutes of Health from funding the research under the administration’s new guidelines, citing an appeals court’s ruling that the researchers who had challenged the less-restrictive policy have the legal standing to pursue their lawsuit.

The decision, a setback for one of the administration’s most high-profile scientific policies, was praised by opponents of the research.

“We are encouraged that the court has recognized the seriousness of the ethics and the funding of embryonic stem cell research,” said David Prentice, senior fellow for life sciences at the Family Research Council.

The ruling stunned scientists and other advocates of the research, which has been hailed as one of the most important advances in medicine in decades because of its potential to cure many diseases but has been embroiled in controversy because the cells are obtained by destroying days-old embryos.

The conservative hack activist judge blocking NIH’s destruction of embryos on behalf of wacky pro-life extremists? Royce C. Lamberth, the same liberal hack activist judge who, doing the bidding of wacky environmentalist extremists, sent the Richard E. Jacobs Group back to the drawing board last week.

So there you go.

[Updated Aug. 24, 10:48 a.m.]
 

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Political hackery, cultivated by a Spring Hill businessman and blogger, is in full bloom in the final hours before Republican voters in Florida’s 5th Congressional District render their verdict in the race to succeed Ginny Brown-Waite, the ailing 4-term congresswoman.

In his Hernando Insider post “A Hypocrite and a Patriotic Religious Scoundrel,” Jaz Zydenbos, a jack of assorted trades and a favorite of the developer class (not that there’s anything wrong with that), stretches certain truths and simply invents others in a final-weekend dissection of Jason Sager’s insurgent candidacy against Hernando County Sheriff Richard Nugent, GBW’s personally anointed successor and the GOP establishment’s paid favorite.

What Zydenbos scrupulously avoids is what may be Sager’s best claim on voters’ sympathies: That Nugent conspired with Brown-Waite to perform a nefarious switcheroo at the qualifying deadline, paving the way for potential personal gain for the sheriff while locking out other viable GOP rivals.  Tuesday night, we shall discover how the GBW-Nugent two-step played in a year in which voters say they’ve had it with politics as usual.

Meanwhile, in attacking Sager – whose flaws are manifest, but are not exactly what the writer suggests – Zydenbos indulges silliness wrapped in hyperbole. For instance, he nonsensically suggests opportunism prompted Sager’s entry into the race: “The Tea Party was starting to bubble and Ginny Brown-Waite was becoming stale.” [Emphasis added.]

This is absurd on its face. When Sager declared his intentions last fall, it was a quintessentially quixotic act – a message candidacy for turbulent times that would, at its most effective, force GBW to tack to the right.

The only alternative is to concede that Sager, an utter political neophyte, possessed better instincts than every established and ambitious Republican on Florida’s Nature Coast. If Sager’s candidacy was prompted by an awareness that GBW was fast approaching her sell-by date, it was a condition apparent only to him.  In that case, his shrewdness and insight are to be admired.

Zybendos also beats him up for making claims that exceed his resume, that he is an “audiovisual engineer” and a “constitutional scholar.”  In fact, Sager has been a technician and seems to be an ardent student of the constitution, but the misapplications of these ambiguities have been amplified by sloppiness in the local media (present company included).

But Zybendos’ other characterizations are ludicrous. He describes two loosely organized, freelance conservative political groups – Protest Warriors and Communists for Kerry – from the Aughts Decade as “racist right wing extremist[s]” as well as “anti-establishment and hateful.”

If anything, both outfits demonstrated the absurdity of the anti-war, pro-Kerry left by indulging in absurdity themselves.  Who was indicted by the eagerness of young members of the Democratic National Committee to pose for photos with Sager-as-Guervara?

As for their willingness to be anti-establishment, given the debt-deepening, liberty-curtailing and future-threatening events wrought by the establishment in the last 18 months, the thoughtfulness of their positions speaks for itself.

And until someone can put one of the (poorly conceived) pro-vouchers or anti-reparations signs into Sager’s hands, he is no more responsible for their allegedly racist (upon further review: not so much) messages than all Christians are for abortion-mill bombers, or even – as famously and persistently preached to us by no less than President George W. Bush – all Muslims are for the extremists who perpetrated the attacks of 9/11.

Then, donning his psychologist’s cap – we are uncertain about his degrees in the field – Zybendos hauls out his broad brush to dismiss Sager’s supporters as other than “thinking and fair-minded,” while condemning the candidate’s eagerness to quote the founders and scripture.

Both fountains of wisdom and faith are also the two most important refuges for a scoundrel such as Sager. Who dares to criticize? After all, that would be heresy.

Thus does Zybendos appoint himself (on flimsy authority) who is fit to wield such quotations. A few paragraphs later, he once again goes after Sager and his supporters, dismissing the former as self-interested and the latter as – well, you figure it out.

A hypocrite grandiose, Sager has born enormous time and money pressure to enrich himself politically and financially while using the name of God and the genius of the words from our founding fathers. Two years of unemployment have helped Sager to develop a well-honed act, but it rings thin to thinkers.

Zybendos urges Sager to rip off his mask; his own slips in the process:

Let’s get Rich Nugent to the general election, and let’s help change the direction of this country and rid ourselves of political and religious cons. Your vote means everything. Get off the couch, take time away from your job and life and vote your future.  Don’t let this jerk steal the primary with his group of glassy eyed zealots.

How can anyone call out political cons without at least mentioning the odious maneuvering that got Nugent in the race – one he’d not otherwise have considered in a lifetime of back porch musing – in the first place?

Never mind that, if elected, Sager would be one of 435, his worst impulses reined in by leadership among House veterans. But whatever else voters might think of him, he would be a voice, and a vote, for government modesty and constitutional restraint.  Meanwhile, Nugent panders, vowing to restore cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients, but offering no suggestions about how to achieve, simultaneously, raises all around and fiscal sustainability of an entitlement barreling toward bankruptcy.

Zybendos engages exactly none of this.  Instead, he has published a ginned up character assassination that has nothing to do with the merits of Sager’s positions on the issues in an effort to boost the candidacy of the establishment pick.

There’s a term for this, and that term would be: Politics as usual.

 

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Far be it from me to quibble with the superior wisdom of the folks on the News Center’s editorial board, but there’s one portion of their otherwise fine evaluation of America’s Social Security fix (”Escaping fiscal fantasy”) that is open to reconsideration.  The editorial says, in part:

There is no dispute that the Social Security money has been borrowed and spent. One way of looking at it is that spending excess payroll taxes helped keep income taxes low.

Yes.  That is one way of looking at it.  The other way, not mentioned in the piece, is that the persistent raid on Social Security taxes that has left nothing but trillions in IOUs in the federal treasury enabled reckless, irresponsible spending conducted by virtually every president and every Congress since Social Security and its (former) surplusses were rolled into a combined budget during Lyndon Johnson’s guns-n-butter Great Society era.

Folding payroll taxes into Washington’s operating budget simply fueled the flames of excess in ways otherwise unimaginable.  There never was a time during the last 50 years when a governing majority of Americans would have approved the income tax increases necessary to support our history of runaway spendthriftery.  To say, then, that blowing excess payroll taxes kept income taxes low is to take the narrowest possible viewpoint.  It is far more accurate to site nearly a half-century of outright thievery for enabling absurd, and otherwise insupportable—politically and fiscally—spending.

And spending—not finding ways to hike taxes—is what we have to get a handle on.

 

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Oleg Atbashian’s piece, “Communist for Kerry Now GOP Congressional Candidate,” gives us a welcome opportunity to amend and correct the record.

Writing for Pajamas Media, Atbashian notes that Jason Sager was even busier than previously presumed during the run-up to the 2004 presidential election.

We already knew Sager, the unemployed audio-visual technician and tea party activist running an energized and passionate insurgent’s campaign for the Republican nomination to succeed Ginny Brown-Waite in Florida’s Congressional District 5, was part of the New York chapter of Protest Warriors demonstrators who attempted to reveal the absurdity of the left by being absurd.  Atbashian writes that the picture—see it here —that has accompanied at least two stories in Hernando Today, our sister publication, originated with a second street-theater group, “Communists for Kerry.”

It’s funny how life turns out. That “Communists For Kerry” sign was designed by me, on this very computer.

Meet Jason Sager from Florida’s 5th Congressional District, formerly Comrade J.F. Che from the crazy summer of 2004 in New York. Kerry ran against Bush, and we ran an anti-Kerry, anti-left political street theater in a city where liberals outnumbered conservatives ninety to one and where being pro-Bush was equated with mental and moral idiocy.

Our group started with six non-conformists to the liberal code: Jason and Charles were born in America; Bryan arrived some years ago from Ireland; Ivan, Gene, and I were immigrants from different parts of the former USSR. On Bryan’s suggestion, we called ourselves Communists For Kerry. Our plan was to improvise a surrealistic sequel to the Red Dawn movie with a modern twist.

Every weekend we showed up on Union Square — the hotbed of New York’s left-wing street agitation — dressed up as communist icons: Lenin, Castro, Che Guevara, and assorted commissars in pointed Red Army hats, under a vintage USSR banner and the sign “We cure weak liberalism with strong communism.” Our other signs and flyers spoofed the Kerry-Edwards campaign: “Ask France First,” “Stop the vicious creation of wealth and prosperity,” and “Give each homeless person a rich Republican widow!”

Atbashian goes on to describe how, even as their group pushed what they believed to be the limits, Real Believers often outdid their best efforts.

We picked a spot between the Union Square subway entrance and a group of youngish communist agitators who preached Marxist dogmas about the evils of capitalism and the benefits of a complete redistribution of wealth by the dictatorship of the proletariat. American citizens all, they held strangely idealized beliefs about the USSR, and when I tried to dissuade them, they dismissed it as “propaganda.” A little further away, a large yellow banner saying “9-11 was an inside job” was being held by rotating volunteers, who often wore hammer-and-sickle shirts. The rest of the square’s open space facing 14th Street was filled with an assortment of ephemeral subversive groups, all with the same address on their flyers — a building a couple of blocks away that happened to be the official address of Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center. There was also an occasional showing by union activists with glossy, expensive-looking signs denouncing Coca-Cola and the Colombian government.

Thus was the group forced to dial it up.  My personal favorite, a Rubik’s Cube red on all sides: “The People’s Cube: nobody is too smart, nobody is too slow, everybody is equal!”

Atbashian puts Sager, then in his late 20s, firmly in a leadership role.

Working the crowd in Che costume was not all Jason did. There probably would be no Communists For Kerry if it weren’t for Jason’s planning and organizing. I mostly did the web-related work: graphics, writing, photographs, and web formatting. Others had their duties too, yet Jason was the leader. He was the kind of leader anyone would want to have as a boss: open, funny, generous, determined, and easy to work with.

In a recent column reflecting on Sager’s activist work refudiating anti-war moonbats on behalf of the Bush re-election effort, I blended the Protest Warriors and Communists for Kerry into a single operation.  They were separate, as Atbashian makes abundantly clear.  And we are only too happy to correct the record.

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... about voting, elections and the sanctity of the ballot box will be revealed Saturday when Pasco elections supervisor Brian Corley joins us in the studio on the next episode of “The Jax Files Weekend.”

Early voting for the Aug. 24 primary—the first leg of what many regard as the most important midterm election in 70 years—is under way across the state, and Florida’s elections supervisors are feeling the heat to make sure they get everything right.

Topics we’re sure to cover include optical ballot readers vs. touch-screen voting machines; what’s on the 2010 primary ballot and who can vote on what; proof-of-identification requirements at the precincts; how to report voter intimidation; electioneering near voting places; the use of absentee ballots; election myths vs. election fact; and the chances of ever experiencing another Bush-Gore meltdown.

“The Jax Files Weekend” airs Saturday mornings at 11 on WGUL, 860 AM.  We’re also live-streaming on the Web at http://www.860wgul.com.  We encourage your questions, challenges, doubts, complaints and even the rare compliment by calling us at (877) 969-8600.

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Over at MSNBC.com, Contributor Megan L. Thomas describes this season as something other than a sunny “Summer of Recovery” for teens hungry for work.

It’s been a long, frustrating summer for employment-starved teens. And most unemployed adolescents will struggle to find work at least until the holiday season, the latest data suggests.
The employment picture has been bleak across the board, but it’s been particularly tough on teens. The U.S. unemployment rate was 9.5 percent last month, but for teens it hit 26.1 percent — and July is typically the peak of the summer employment season for teens. It marked the worst summer hiring season for teens since 1949, according to an analysis by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm.

Part of the problem: Teens are facing unusually heavy competition from millions of older workers, many of whom have been unemployed for months or longer.
“The teens are facing heavy competition, from people in their early 20s particularly, who are taking some of those better teen jobs that usually they leave alone,” said John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray. …

And it does not look like the odds will be improving any time soon for teens. U.S. job openings fell for the second straight month in June and and are expected to continue dropping, according to the government’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey released Wednesday.

OK, so part of the problem is “unusually heavy competition.” And another part of the problem … ?  Contributor Thomas begs the question, then leaves us dangling, prattling on for another 14 paragraphs without so much as a hint of what learned economists regard as fundamental to high teen unemployment.

For the answer, we turn to the Wall Street Journal and its July 24 editorial, “The Young and the Jobless” (subscription required).

Today marks the first anniversary of Congress’s decision to raise the federal minimum wage by 41% to $7.25 an hour. But hold the confetti. According to a new study, more than 100,000 fewer teens are employed today due to the wage hikes.

Economic slowdowns are tough on many job-seekers, but they’re especially hard on the young and inexperienced, whose job prospects have suffered tremendously from Washington’s ill-advised attempts to put a floor under wages. In a new paper published by the Employment Policies Institute, labor economists William Even of Miami University in Ohio and David Macpherson of Trinity University in Texas find a significant drop in teen employment as a direct result of the minimum wage hikes.

Contributor Thomas dances furiously, whipping up a pageant of unrelenting woe for idled teens, many of whom are suffering pangs of guilt because they are unable to help out their unemployed parents.

Dennis Amon, a 16-year-old from Indiana, wants work to help his family. His mother was recently laid off as a bank teller and his father’s pay is stretched just covering expenses. His family will sometimes eat only popcorn as they struggle to pay the bills, he said. Amon has searched for work for roughly a year without success but is still hoping for a job so he can pay for his basic necessities and save for college.

We’re not just talking about an economic crisis, either.  There are social ramifications …

For teens, work can be more than just a paycheck, according to a July report from the Center for Labor Market Studies. Teens who work in high school are less likely to drop out before graduation. The cumulative work people do in their teens can also result in a positive impact on the employment, wages and earnings they have in their 20s, the report found.

… not to mention a cascade effect:

In addition, teens unable to get work today are more likely to have trouble finding employment in the future. Low-income teens living in areas with fewer job opportunities have a greater likelihood of engaging in delinquent behavior. Areas with fewer jobs also tend to have higher rates of teen pregnancy as well.

“We subscribe to the notion that idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and I think that’s particularly true for a lot of economically disadvantaged teens, which is a group of teens that has some of the lowest employment rates,” McLaughlin said.

And yet, on the topic of how best to reverse this dismal, but eminently curable, circumstance (sound of crickets chirping).  Again, the Journal:

After isolating for other economic factors and broadening their analysis to include all 32 states affected by any stage of the federal wage increase, the authors conclude that “the federal minimum-wage hikes reduced teen employment by 2.5% translating to approximately 114,400 fewer employed teens.”

Minimum wage proponents often claim that a higher wage floor will reduce poverty, ignoring that most minimum wage earners aren’t poor. “A small fraction of minimum-wage workers are the sole breadwinner for their family,” said Mr. Macpherson in an interview. “Historically, the number is one-in-six. So five-in-six are either secondary earners, or kids living with mom and dad, or kids living alone, such as college students.”

Research by economists David Neumark and William Wascher has shown that minimum wage hikes also fail as an antipoverty measure because workers who receive the higher wage are counterbalanced by others who get laid off. Minimum wage laws are especially detrimental to black workers, who tend to be less experienced or have been trapped in failing public schools. The overall teen unemployment rate in June was 25.7%, versus 39.9% for black teens.

The NAACP and Congressional Black Caucus have been busy of late calling for various groups and government officials to apologize for perceived racial slights. Their energies would be put to better use urging the White House and Congress to lower the federal minimum wage, or at least to install a sub-minimum for teenagers. Our guess is that blacks of all ages would prefer a job to an apology.

And we’re guessing here they’d rather not have to wait.

 

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What to do about the school district budget gap?  Raise property taxes in a stubborn recession?  Is an amendment to the class-size amendment good policy?  Think the current board too often plays rubber stamp in the fist of an agenda-driven administration?  With almost all district employees once targeted for layoffs successfully reassigned, should the board seek dollars for permanent raises from the no-name, one-off federal “jobs” bill Congressional Democrats expect to send to President Obama today?

Come Thursday, these and other pot-stirring questions will help provide what a pair of ink-stained moderators from the local dailies hope will be a livey and informative inspection of the small army of candidates seeking three wide-open school board seats in the Aug. 24 primary election.

Beginning at 6 p.m. at the conference center on the west campus of Pasco-Hernando Community College, Bill Stevens, boss of the St. Petersburg Times Pasco edition, joins your humble Pasco Tribune opinion-leader for a three-hour brain bowl on topics education-centric.

District 3 candidates (Cynthia Armstrong, Mike Ryan, Sallie Skipper, Anthony Terranova) kick things off.  District 4 candidates (Alison Crumbley, Steve Kanakis, Karen King, Billie Stamatis-Kaleel, John Tracy) mix it up beginning at 7 p.m.  District 5 candidates (Steve Kuikart, George Brazier, Mark Swartsel) follow at 8 p.m.  Better bring your A games, office-seekers.

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First-time political candidate Sallie Skipper (she’s seeking the Pasco school board post held by Cathi Martin, whose problematic tenure we will not belabor here) writes lamenting the extraordinary vanishing of her campaign signs. Writes Skipper:

This is the first time that I have run for public office, and I am shocked by how many—and just how quickly—my signs have disappeared. Not only are signs expensive, but they are purchased with some donated money that is not my own. Some of my contributors are retirees on fixed incomes and people who don’t have much disposable income. Who does anymore?

So, having laid the foundation for this communication…

My friend had just returned from vacation, and he asked how campaign things are going.

I described for him what happened yesterday: I was driving home from a School Board meeting in Land O Lakes. I noticed that all my signs were gone. Signs of other candidates were still there—in clusters—but mine were gone. I put out a few more (keep a stash in the back of my Tahoe), but had this eerie feeling like a character in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Eraser. It was like I had been erased. I was no longer a candidate.

The Jax Files has no independent means to verify that what Skipper is telling us is accurate—except to note that we have not seen that Pasco County is awash in Skipper-for-school-board placard. However, given local history, we have no reason to doubt her.

Skipper would not be the first office-seeker to suffer the apparent theft and/or vandalism of signs, nor will she be the last. Nonetheless, that the practice is common does not change the fact that it is among the lowest and most vile of campaign treacheries. To that end, every candidate in every race should make it part of his/her stump speech that the candidate deplores such practices. Moreover, his/her campaign will aggressively enforce its condemnation by identifying to local authorities anyone suspected of participating in swiping or mutilating opponents’ signs.

Not that Skipper’s story comes to an utterly irredeemable end.

Today, being on the campaign home stretch, and down to a few thousand dollars in the fund, my treasurer and I considered how best to spend what remains.

We quickly decided not to order more signs because it would be more efficient to just throw money out the car window. We’d save all that time of ordering signs, putting them together, loading them up in the Tahoe, pulling off the road, stopping the car and jumping out to put them in the ground for someone else to just take away. We concluded that what money is left in the account will be better spent on advertising in the newspaper. [Emphasis added.]

Humorously: Wondering if your paper had a hand in the sign removal?

Seriously, the treasurer and I decided to do just that—newspaper advertising—with the remaining campaign funds.

A sad commentary for our system. A good one, I suppose, for the Fourth Estate.

For the record, if getting campaign signs off roadsides would drive candidates to advertise more abundantly in my newspaper and on this Web site—and I thought it reasonable that such a law could withstand constitutional scrutiny—I would launch a series of columns advocating a countywide moratorium on the practice. For a more beautiful Pasco County, don’t you know. But I don’t, it wouldn’t, and I shan’t.

Let’s just play fair out there, OK? And, now that it has been brought to our attention, if in our tours of Pasco in the next couple of weeks we notice plenty of campaign signs for certain candidates and next to none for others, we are going to note the imbalance here. We won’t be accusing. We’ll just be wondering aloud.

 

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The bright, cutting-edge fellows at Power Line address an issue closely associated with my column in Sunday’s Pasco Tribune (”Big money reason for immigration fix”).  John Hinderaker has an assortment of disturbing statistics, including this one:

One hospital in Dallas, Parkland Memorial, delivers around 11,000 babies a year to mothers who are non-citizens, a large majority of them illegals. That represents nearly three-quarters of all babies born at Parkland. Around 60,000 babies a year are born in Texas alone to non-citizens. All of them, under current law, enjoy full rights of American citizenship.

This alone is why it was perfectly appropriate for the study by Federation for American Immigration Reform to include the 3.6 million legal residents of illegal immigrants in its finding that America’s porous border policies cost taxpayers at least $100 billion annually (and that state and local governments shoulder 85 percent of that load).

Hinderaker continues:

A substantial majority of Americans favor a revision to birthright citizenship, so naturally the Democrats—as with all issues on which they are being clobbered politically—want to take the issue off the table:

 

State Rep. Rafael Anchía, D-Dallas, accused Republicans of using the births to generate an explosive election issue.

  “They’re pulling the pin on the immigration grenade,” he said. “It’s all about the November elections and continuing to use the immigration issue as a wedge to win votes this fall.”

“Wedge issues,” too, are those on which Democrats lose. The fact is that, contrary to the assumption of most liberals, American citizenship is important. This country needs a rational citizenship system, operating in tandem with a rational immigration system. Today we have neither.

Read the whole thing (and see Michael Ramirez’s insightful cartoon) here.

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Over at Power Line, Scott Johnson calls out the junior senator from his home state of Minnesota.  Evidently, Al Franken mistook the chamber of the world’s greatest deliberative body for the desk of “Weekend Update,” bringing dishonor to himself and his Democratic Party colleagues.  Notes Johnson:

Al Franken is the United States Senator from Minnesota and an utter embarrassment to the decent people of the state. Today he showed why once again:

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) scolded Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) on the Senate floor Thursday for allegedly mocking him while he delivered a solemn speech on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.

The dust-up came seconds after McConnell delivered a speech on Kagan’s nomination shortly before the Senate voted to confirm her to the high court.

Franken, who was presiding over the chamber from the dais, gesticulated and made faces while McConnell explained his opposition to Kagan, according to witnesses.

The television cameras broadcasting the speech on C-SPAN remained fixed on McConnell, missing Franken’s antics from the Senate president’s chair.

McConnell grew increasingly angry as Franken made fun of him before a crowded public gallery and Senate aides lining the chamber walls. Senate aides said they were shocked that Franken would flout the decorum of the chamber during such a solemn occasion.

After McConnell finished his remarks, he walked up to the dais and rebuked him.

“This is not ‘Saturday Night Live,’ Al,” McConnell said, making reference to Franken’s career as a writer and actor on NBC’s long-running comedy show, according to a witness who overheard the exchange.

After the vote, Franken walked to McConnell’s office to apologize but couldn’t find him.

He has sent a personal note, instead.

“The Leader thought I was disrespectful while he was giving his speech on General Kagan,” Franken said in a statement to The Hill. “He is entitled to give his speech with the presiding officer just listening respectfully. I went directly to his office after I was done presiding to apologize in person. He wasn’t there, so I’ve sent him a handwritten note.”

“Sorry” really doesn’t cut it, but Al Franken is one sorry excuse for a United States Senator.

The sooner this knucklehead is in the minority, the better.  If that sounds like an endorsement of the only Sunshine State candidate for the U.S. Senate guaranteed to caucus with the Republicans, well, one could draw worse conclusions.

 

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Dismembering the silliness within Sunday’s New York Times column by notorious former “green jobs” czar Van Jones, syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg waxes eloquent on the welcome rise of “New Journalism” and its eclipse of of the House of Cronkite.

A Facebook friend, the incredibly bright salutatorian from the King High School Class of 1971, sniffs that Goldberg couldn’t “carry Walter Cronkite’s shoes.”  To which the fellow who graduated 17th says: Could too—nyaah—although I’m not sure if Goldberg could smoke Cronkite’s pipe.

Here’s some of the good stuff:

You’ve just got to love a former member of STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), a Mao-influenced organization with a professed “commitment to the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism,” giving Walter Cronkite — the dashboard saint of American bourgeois conformity — his due as the bulwark of decency. Yes, yes, Jones says he’s grown and is no longer the Red he was even a few years ago. But come on.

For generations, conservatives lamented the decline in standards. When Hollywood portrayed glandular instincts as the new moral compass of the secular age, conservatives waxed nostalgic over the lost decency of the “studio system.” When the education industry shelved the great books in favor of hugs, conservatives lamented the demise of the three R’s and the “closing of the American mind.” When the Left became enamored with a “riot ideology” that mistook lawlessness for political protest, conservatives invoked “law and order.” Name a front in the political and culture wars, and conservatives defended the authority of authority and the tradition of tradition, while liberals and leftists defended sticking it to the man.

But now that the legacy media is one of the last resources the Left still has at its disposal, even Comrade Jones isn’t immune to mossy nostalgia for Walter Cronkite (who, by the way, is easily one of the most overrated American icons).

And now, the money graf:

The house Cronkite built did many fine and noble things. It also locked out competing points of view, buried inconvenient bodies, spun the news with centrifugal force, and racked up a formidable list of Shirley Sherrods all its own. The New York Times whitewashed Stalin’s genocide. Cronkite misreported the significance of the Tet Offensive to say the Vietnam War was unwinnable. Dan Rather, Cronkite’s replacement, began his career falsely reporting that Dallas schoolchildren cheered JFK’s murder and ended it falsely reporting on forged National Guard memos. The Rodney King video was misleadingly edited; the Tailwind story was not true. And that’s only a snippet of the list.

Happily, the worst excesses of the paleo-media (including your humble, ink-stained correspondent) no longer reign unchecked or unchallenged (even as the paleo-media practitioners attempt to ignore the revolution).  It’s messy sometimes, but the relentless and rowdy pursuit of accuracy and accountability emboldened and facilitated by the Internet and assorted cable news upstarts, is all to the good.

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