Super crowd for DJ le Spam

And familiar faces from VoteFest a cool year ago. Nice to see Dave and
Dara!

Red Bull going down by the pickup load, people taking on fuel for the
whole night.

These guys are great!

But I'm heading five blocks up Collins Ave to see DJ le Spam and the
All Stars. Midnight now and the crowds and traffic are heavy and happy.

Sleepless Night gets started on Lincoln Rd

Next for me is a concert by New World Symphony.

Haiti in Miami Beach -- party time at Tap Tap

The Haitian restaurant Tap Tap is a gem in South Beach, and a resource for Democratic campaigners -- not only during the Obama campaign but continuing. A good place to have a little meeting or bigger ones. And Friday night it was party time for the restaurant's 15th birthday, coinciding roughly with the big Haitian holidays of Brav Gede -- corresponding to All Souls Day and All Saints Day, if I got it right. If not, try me again anytime. Wow, was the music loud and good! For that we thank Manno Charlemagne and the band, and for the party thanks to Gary the boss.

Take the stairs!

My next car. Just decided.

Don't be a Lieberman. Do the right thing on health care

For those whose juices are stirring because of the health-care legislation now emerging, could I suggest a pause to consider what the other side is planning? Take a few minutes and click on this piece with the title “Republican Guide to Undermining Health-care Reform.”

Don’t neglect to click on the link therein to Frank Luntz’ memo on the words to use. Who’s Frank Luntz? Think of Karl Rove and you’re in the same league.

My email inbox overflows with my progressive friends mad as hell at the “lying” Democrats in Congress who aren’t ordering from the progressive menu. Yes, you’re right. But what if at the end of the day your opposition to the bill helps to cause its defeat?

Yes, writing legislation is like making sausage. We’re going to have to live with it until we elect a better Congress. If this drive will increase coverage and stop the rise in health costs, it will be pretty darn good. If progressive opposition to the bill combines with clever conservative opposition and defeats it, will we be better off? Not in my best guess.

I’m with Paul Krugman’s message in today’s NY Times column. If you’re not with us, you’re being a Lieberman. 

Yesterday I saw MSNBC where Big Ed Schultz tried to get Rep. Dennis Kucinich to say he would vote against a health-care bill that didn’t have a state option for single-payer. Even Kucinich was – yesterday, anyway – not willing to go that far.

This is a signal to me to moderate opposition. Get ready to suck it up.

And PS: Thanks to Krugman for the tip on the existence of the blog at the White House Budget Office. Very sharp exchange therein between Peter Orszag, the budget director, and Fred Hiatt, editor of the Washington Post editorial page.  It seems pretty plain that Hiatt didn’t know what he was writing about. We have to be wary against being led astray.

Free public WiFi on Miami Beach?

This has been talked about for quite a while. First it was, then it wasn't. Now it is. At least, that's what it says on the banner of the Miami Beach city governnment Web site. Here's the skinny:

It's LIVE and FREE! Miami Beach WiFi Internet service is finally warming up. Last week, the city began a soft launch by neighborhood. There will still be a 90-day reliability period. Join us for the official "wire-cutting" on Friday, October 30 at 3:00 p.m. in front of Miami Beach City Hall, on the 17 Street side. There will be free giveaways.

My cell phone seemed to be showing a public WiFi net recently as I drove around Miami Beach. Not everywhere. Some places. This bears more investigation. I see the WiFi Web site is still under construction, at least in parts.

UPDATE: Behind the times again. The Herald had a story on this on Oct. 20.  It asserts that Miami Beach is the first city in the country to have this amenity.

House health bill provisions that take effect in 2010

A couple posts back I put up a link to the full text of the House health bill -- 1,990 pages. Here's something more digestible: Speaker Pelosi's summary of the provisions that take effect in the first year.

Pool report on Vice President Biden in Miami Beach

 Vice President Joe Biden was at a fundraiser in Miami Beach Thursday evening, and here’s a pool press report from Tolu Olorunnipa of the Miami Herald

VPOTUS made his second stop on a South Florida fundraising tour at the house of longtime friend Michael Adler in Miami Beach Thursday night. 

Speaking from about 6:18 to 6:36 to a crowd of about 150, VPOTUS touted his decades of experience on the political scene in an attempt to assure his supporters that, despite the wide array of challenges facing the Obama administration, he and Obama were prepared and ready to take action. 

He spoke generally about most major issues, the economy, healthcare, foreign affairs focusing more on the economy than other topics (jobs, housing market, bailouts). He did not directly address the Afghanistan or Iraq wars. 

We inherited a pretty deep hole, we found ourselves dug in pretty deep beyond what I think we even thought or what most people even thought, VPOTUS said. By the time we raised our hands on Jan. 20 to be sworn in, already that month we had lost 700,000 jobs. And before we literally got our computers hooked up, almost before the White House's West Wing was functioning, we lost another 640,000 jobs in February.

 On housing, he noted that Florida, along with other states, has been hit particularly hard.

 VPOTUS said: For 36 months in a row, housing prices plummeted, losing 30 percent of their value. You’re still reeling down here. You and Nevada and Arizona and California -- the places that were at the top of the bubble. 

VPOTUS called the bailout of the banks the most unpopular decision he’s had to make. He said the bailouts were necessary to keep the economy from slipping into a depression. 

VPOTUS noted that there was a lot of good news, but also a lot of bad news to consider after the Obama administration’s first 10 months in office. One piece of good news, he said, is that we are beginning to forget how bad things once were.

The truth is, the good news is, we're forgetting, he said. We’re a long way from out of the hole, but the GDP did grow 3.5 percent this quarter. 

He added: We’ve got a hell of a long way to go, a hell of a long way to go, but we think the trajectory we set the country on is the right trajectory. 

More on good news and bad news:

The good news is the bad news, he said. The good news is it’s beginning to work. The ten largest banks in the country are all but one very healthy. They’ve already paid back 70 billion, We’ve already made 11 billion on that and we’re going to get another 15 billion paid back. The bad news is they’ve got $900 billion in capital and they’re not lending anything. And so, it’s a long way to go. 

He recognized Miami Mayor Manny Diaz by name repeatedly, calling him at one point, one of the best mayors in the country.  

VPOTUS said he speaks on a weekly basis with mayors and governors, who ask Where’s the next stimulus. VPOTUS said he’s not sure there will be another stimulus.

 I am absolutely confident that were going to come out of this. And when we come out of this we’re going to come out stronger than before, particularly, the middle class.

 He spoke about his father losing his job, when he was a 4^th grader in Scranton, Pa. VPOTUS said that GDP growth would not be satisfactory unless the middle class was faring well.

The way we look at this is We’re not going to be satisfied even if the GDP is growing at 6.6 percent, he said. if middle class folks, the same folks who got clobbered, through no fault of their own, aren’t able to look their kids in the eye by the time we leave office and say Honey, it’s going to be okay.

 VPOTUS said we were at a defining moment in American history, calling it one of the most dangerous, but also one of the greatest opportunities to effect significant change for the future.

 We’re at one of those inflection points in history, he said. A non-decision today is a fundamental decision. A non-decision on energy policy is a fundamental decision. A non-decision on dealing with American education is a decision.

About 150 attended the event. Ticket prices ranged from $1,000 to $10,000. It was Biden’s second stop in South Florida on Thursday. He spoke at a lunch event in Boca Raton as well.

 In the crowd: Miami mayor Manny Diaz, Basketball star Isaiah Thomas, Miami-Dade Police Chief John Timoney.

Attendees dined on hors d’oeuvres and drank wine, water and soft drinks. Biden spoke outside in front of Michael Adler’s pool. Adler introduced Biden.

 VPOTUS left the state after the event.

Cool bike rack

Seen in Coconut Grove. Instantly voting Yes for this rack.

Company called Creative Metalworks LLC is the maker.

While on this topic: The Miami Beach magazine reports there will be a bike-renting service up and running by early 2010. Supposed to be "the largest in the country, with 900 bicycles total in the whole city."

Take that, you advocates of limited government.

Kudos for AT&T support staff

 Some drops in service on my DSL occurred in the past few days. Considerable time was spent talking with/waiting for AT&T support techs, and I feel inspired to give some technical advice – a rare event, as technical is not the first adjective most people would apply to me.

Yesterday’s half-hour didn’t yield perfect progress, though the AT&T lady talked me into paying $5 more a month for a higher-speed DSL with home wireless network thrown in. The wireless part was what had been bothering me, as it simply wasn’t there sometimes to keep my laptop going. And, with hindsight, I also was sensing that the DSL service direct-wired to my desktop computer wasn’t always as hot as it was supposed to be.

So today, upon powerup, when the wireless was down again and the laptop therefore ineffective, I got on the phone again to the support crew, and 45 minutes later had been through the wringer of speed tests and rewiring two computers.

My technical advice is this: If you have AT&T DSL service, don’t accept sluggish speed or wireless networking that clicks on and off. This can be fixed. Call support. (888-321-2375) They will check with the line techs and test connections and speed. They said my circuit was showing some drops, and to fix it they gave my circuit a higher priority at the “Dee-slam.” What’s that? Well, part of the circuit where the signal is sent to me.

Check on Wikipedia for DSLAM and it’s revealed as Digital Subscriber Line Multiplexer.

Here endeth the technical advice for the day.

I’m glad to say that the accents of the AT&T support staff both days indicated that African-American women of the Deep South were fielding my requests, and they were good at their jobs.

Link to the House bill on health care

The House bill on health care: you can read it. It's a pdf file.

Only 1,990 pages. Did I read that right?

Newt G is taken down yet another level

This rolls in from Michael Precker, my friend and former AP colleague, who has a certain fame as a refugee from journalism now working to promote a topless club in Dallas. What a pro! He's been on the Rachel Maddow show twice with rips into Newt Gingrich, once the Speaker of the US House of Representatives and now just a Republican scammer. Still, I just heard Newt's name on NPR. Not passe' yet.

Take this poll on the public option

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois is asking for input on what sort of a public option should go into the health bill. You can take the poll.

This came to me by email, making me wonder how the Friends of Dick Durbin got me on their email roster.

Shakeup in District 5?

A quick intramural FYI:

While most of South Florida is focused on the upcoming Miami mayor's race, something interesting is happening in District 5 -- the district covering some of Miami's poorest neighborhoods (Overtown, Liberty City, Little Haiti...) Just a few weeks ago, most people you talked to would tell you that no one would be able to beat the incumbent: Manny Diaz protege Michelle Spence Jones. The commissioner has raised nearly $180,000 -- mostly from an assortment of developers and other business interests (no obvious Marlins money, but you've got to figure...) while her opponents, David Chiverton of the MLK Economic Development Center, and Jeff Torain, the former deputy police chief in Opa-Locka, have barely raised $20,000 between them.

But that was a few weeks ago.

And while I'd be the first to admit that there exists a frustrating, ongoing sense of incumbency fatalism in the Black electorate in South Florida, which keeps ineffective leaders in office literally until they retire, run for a different office, or get indicted -- suddenly I'm getting calls from unexpected people suggesting that Torain might have a shot to at least force a run-off. So what's up? I hosted an on-air debate between the candidates a couple of weeks ago on Hot 105, and the phones were so slammed, it took up the whole show. Last week, Bishop Curry took his turn, and same deal. Spence-Jones didn't turn up at the first scheduled debate last month (moderated by Jim Defede at a local church,) but there, too, a surprisingly robust crowd attended. Clearly, there is interest in this race within the black community (though it's impossible to know how much of it is coming from people actually registered to vote in District 5).

Meanwhile, Torain got the Miami Herald endorsement last Saturday (not surprising since the Herald has been chopping away at Spence Jones' ethical issues, and since Chiverton figured, not prominently, but palpably, in the paper's "House of Lies" expose.) But today, he also got the Miami Times endorsement. And for those of you who don't know, that's pretty huge. The Times is the African-American "paper of record" in Miami, and for them to ditch a well-known incumbent who has widely been considered unbeatable is no small thing. For Torain, the endorsement is in some ways more important than the Herald nod, since more people in the target demographic actually read the Miami Times cover to cover -- and pass it around -- than the tiny number who flip through the Herald on a daily basis all the way through to the editorial page. [Full disclosure: I contribute the occasional column to the rival paper in Broward, the South Florida Times...]

We'll see if the change vibe in the air is real, or if this is just the deep breath before the plunge back into the status quo on November 3rd. In a low, low turnout election (which sadly this will be,) a small but energetic base -- for or against the incumbent -- could swing the race.

Cross-posted at ReidReport.com.

A quick updater on the debates swirling over US foreign policy

The NY Times weekend book review section has an endpiece that's more about an issue than about a book. Last weekend it was about foreign policy, under the headline "Which Way Do We Go?"

It was meat and potatoes to this student of foreign policy, covering nine recent books (if I counted right) and pingponging between neoliberalism and neoconservatism (both now out of fashion) and landing on neo-isolationism.

Is that the way we're going? To a "return to the inwardness of the post-World War I years?" Public opinion may be forcing the United States in that direction, though its history is not exactly replete with success.

Here's the final word from the esssay:

It may not be a bad thing that almost no one in foreign policy circles is proposing anything new. Foreign policy is not modern dance; tried and true may be better than avant-garde and visionary. Still, in today’s world, marked by unparalleled threats and characterized by a striking division between elite ideas and broad public opinion, it’s hard to believe that America’s way forward is a return to the past.