Still Waiting On The Death of the Florida Gerrymander

When last we left this drama, the state Supreme Court gave the Florida Legislature specific marching orders on redrawing the Congressional district maps that were clearly in violation of the state amendments a supermajority of state voters passed.

The deadline is fast approaching - September - because the districts need to be in place for the 2016 election cycle.

So what has the state legislature been doing about this?

Whining.

Pretty much how John Romano is describing it for the Tampa Bay Times:

The interesting part of this saga is the utter lack of remorse, responsibility, shame or character exhibited by so many in the Florida Legislature. It is that apparent indifference to the normal rules of society that should really be turning heads.

So for those incurably truculent in Tallahassee, here is the reality of what happened:

You cheated.

You got caught.

And now you're pouting...

Rep. Richard Corcoran, R-Trinity, had the temerity to argue it was the Court that was ignoring the Constitution. And, seemingly oblivious to the Legislature's demonstrated lack of trustworthiness, Sen. Tom Lee, R-Brandon, is outraged that justices want all future map discussions held in public.

Here's what I wonder:

Why is it so inconceivable for anyone in Tallahassee to actually apologize to voters? To express regret that political consultants were quite obviously involved in drawing maps that, by law, are supposed to be apolitical? To acknowledge that their own power-hungry missteps are costing taxpayers money for yet another special session?...

The problem is that most lawmakers neither fear, nor respect, their constituents. Not so coincidentally, that attitude is at the heart of redistricting. Maps are drawn in such partisan ways that practically 90 percent of the Legislature is guaranteed re-election...

It doesn't look like the Florida Legislature is going to make the September deadline.  I'm willing to bet - just not a lot of money - that the legislators are going to force the courts to more drastic actions, trying to call their bluff (the old comment once quoted to Andrew Jackson: "Let's see them enforce it.")

Personally, I want the legislators to ignore the deadline.  I'm hoping that they will arrogantly ignore the will of the voters about the voters' desire to see the gerrymanders dead and gone.  I'm praying the courts issue contempt orders that put the legislators in jail in such a way that they can no longer serve in office, breaking their incumbency holds on "safe" seats that they do not honestly deserve.

Let's do this.  I'm game.  We'll see who rusts first.

We Should Be Doing Better for Our Kids

When I first saw the links about failing schools in Florida popping up on Twitter, I wondered what was going on.

Then I realized they were talking about schools in Pinellas County, and then I saw the article itself in the Tampa Bay Times.

You need to read it: How the Pinellas County School Board Neglected Five Schools Until They Became the Worst In Florida.

In just eight years, Pinellas County School Board members turned five schools in the county’s black neighborhoods into some of the worst in Florida.
First they abandoned integration, leaving the schools overwhelmingly poor and black.
Then they broke promises of more money and resources.
Then — as black children started failing at outrageous rates, as overstressed teachers walked off the job, as middle class families fled en masse — the board stood by and did nothing.

This matters to me because that county is where I grew up.  I survived Tarpon Springs Middle School, for God's sake.  Go Spongers, represent Class of '88.  My family, my friends.  Their kids went to Pinellas schools.  This matters to me as a resident of the Tampa Bay metro, this matters to me as a resident of Florida.  This matters.

This matters to everyone because we as a community, as a state, as a nation, need to be taking better care of ALL our schools.  Education is supposed to be one the great equalizers between classes and ethnics: it's supposed to be the method we break out of poverty and get ahead in life.

How the hell are we - our kids - going to improve and achieve anything when the guardians and administrators of the system rig the game, break the rules, and fail to do their jobs?

Just look at what the School Board did.

All of this is a recent phenomenon. By December 2007, when the board ended integration, black students at the schools had posted gains on standardized tests in three of the four previous years. None of the schools was ranked lower than a C. Today, all the schools have F ratings.

What the hell?  Why did they end integration policies in the first place?

...But the effects of giving up on integration were immediate.
In less than a year, schools on St. Petersburg’s north side became whiter, and the neighborhood schools to the south began drawing primarily from the city’s blighted avenues and subsidized housing complexes.
Before, the area’s most disadvantaged children, including the relatively few with serious behavior problems, were spread among a large area, mixed in with more affluent classmates and given access to several schools’ worth of teachers and counselors. Now they were all concentrated in a handful of schools.
The new system left Fairmount Park, along with the other neighborhood elementary schools, utterly transformed... The one-time A school is now the second-worst in Florida.
...Inside the school, students roam the campus at will, said Scott Ryan, a special-needs teacher who resigned in 2013 rather than work another full year at the school. “I would go in and teachers would be talking,” Ryan said, “and the kids are telling the teachers to shut up.”
It isn’t a matter of a few parents and teachers complaining. In a first-of-its-kind analysis, the Times reviewed district discipline data and found that the five schools are awash in disruptive behavior and violence.
Fairmount Park recorded at least 661 referrals for violence and disruption in 2013-14 compared to 198 in 2009-10 — a 230 percent increase.
Even after behavior problems spiked, district officials ignored calls from the teachers union for smaller class sizes and later start times.
They failed to deliver on promises to assign students extra social workers and counselors.
“Teachers were saying, 'I don’t have the resources and training that I need,’” recalled Kim Black, former president of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association. "It was a terrible snowball..."

It's as though the School Board basically quarantined an entire zone of schools and left them to rot.

Elyse Mermelstein started as a first-grade teacher at Lakewood Elementary nine weeks into the fall of 2013, but she already was the third teacher to run the class, her principal told her.
The other teachers had quit.
“The kids were horribly behind,” Mermelstein, 43, said in an interview with the Times.
A certified teacher of elementary school children and non-native English speakers, she said her Lakewood students could barely read. “They should have been reading books with paragraphs. They should have been comprehending... They had so many teachers, it added to the problem.”
Eight weeks after taking the job, she resigned, too.

There is no consistency in the teaching.  There is no focus when nobody knows who is in charge, or who doing what, or how well or poor the students really are.  There are no connections between teacher and student, one of the things that helps those students comprehend what they need to learn.  There is nothing there for the incoming teacher(s) to seize on, creating a self-sustaining cascade of failure and quitting that will not stop until a stabilizing force interjects itself.

Keeping teachers at these five elementary schools in south St. Petersburg has been a difficult task, records show.
In 2014, 52 percent of the schools’ instructors requested transfers out.
Fourteen quit in the middle of the year. At least three of them simply walked off the job without giving notice, opting to risk action against their state teaching certificate rather than stay a moment longer.
That year, Fairmount Park alone lost three fifth-grade teachers, two first-grade teachers, two language teachers and a dropout prevention specialist. That amounted to more than 10 percent of the teachers typically on staff.
The teachers who remain at the schools are among the least experienced in the county, according to a Times analysis of state Department of Education records.
Last year, they had about 7 years of teaching experience on average. Teachers at other elementary schools in the district had about 13 years.

And the School Board is refusing to stabilize anything.

At Maximo, an instructor wrote: “How long can a teacher survive in such a broken system and how much can a human endure? Until the resources match the need, the district will continue to chew up our teachers and spit them out. We will burn out, leave the school and leave the profession.”

Any attempt to get the Pinellas School Board to enact reforms, or provide additional resources that are truly needed to these schools, has ended in stalling tactics and stonewalling.

But a Times analysis of school operating expenses shows the vote didn’t trigger a flood of new resources to the south St. Petersburg schools.
Instead, the district gave some of them less state and local tax money than other Pinellas elementary schools. Then it took federal money that was supposed to pay for extra staff and teaching time and used it to make up the difference.
That’s what happened at Maximo in 2011, according to district budget documents.
The school got about $5,600 per pupil in state and local tax dollars. On average, other elementary schools in the county got about $6,300.
The district supplemented Maximo’s budget with nearly $700,000 in Title I money and other federal funds, bringing the school’s per pupil funding to about $6,600 — $300 more than the district average.
But that still left Maximo behind more than a dozen schools in the district. And it left the school with less than half of the extra money it would have gotten if the district had given it the same local funding as most other schools.
Help would have come sooner if district leaders had followed through on promises. Instead, they announced one program after another, only to abandon each one in short order.
Turnover made things worse. Pinellas County went through four superintendents in five years.
Four months after the vote, Clayton Wilcox — the superintendent who designed the district’s plan to end integration — announced he was quitting to take a job with Scholastic Corp.
He was replaced by Julie Janssen, who launched her own programs to stop the test-score freefall at schools in south St. Petersburg.
Starting in 2008, Janssen championed a plan designed to prevent experienced teachers from leaving the schools. It would offer teachers a free master’s degree if they completed rigorous on-the-job training and stayed at their school for at least five years.
She later commissioned a study to find out why Pinellas County’s black children were trailing their peers in other counties across Florida.
Then the School Board fired her in 2011.
One of the first actions taken by John Stewart, the interim superintendent who replaced her, was to cancel the study. He also discontinued the teacher master’s program.

It's not the fault of the communities themselves, either.

When people have complained about black students’ poor grades over the years, district leaders and teachers have blamed parents, and the students themselves...
In reality, there’s nothing measurable about the county’s black population that explains why students are doing so poorly.
A Times analysis of statewide kindergarten readiness data shows that new students in Pinellas County’s most segregated schools show up no less prepared than students in scores of other struggling, high-poverty schools.
It’s only after a few years in Pinellas classrooms that they’re falling behind their peers statewide.
Ranked by social indicators that researchers use to predict how children will fare in school, Pinellas is a typical Florida county.
The median household income for black families falls squarely in the middle of all Florida counties. So do the rates of poverty, reliance on food stamps and unemployment. Children here are no more likely to live with an unmarried mother or father...

The problem becomes one of bullying: many of the anecdotes in the article are from families talking about how their children are harassed by other children with no intervention by the school's administrators to take steps to address the attacks and establish control of the classrooms.  The loss of stability with teacher turnover contributes to the bullying environment.  That bullying gets to harm the kids by distracting them, creating a negative psyche.

And the School Board isn't doing a damn thing about it.

Any argument about school choice goes out the window.  The system of magnet schools - designed to allow select students with good grades to attend focused programs - as a means of getting good students out of bad schools falls apart because of limited space.

Lawanda Bodden has watched her son fail with a mounting sense of desperation.
Though the family lives about a block from Douglas L. Jamerson Jr. Elementary, one of the best magnet schools in the area, Cayton can’t get into the program. At least 60 children are ahead of him on the wait list.
“I felt like I’m setting up my child for failure. I have no control over what education I can give my child,” said Bodden, a 43-year-old single mother who works for a Tampa engineering firm. “Unless I made enough money to send him to a private school or stay at home and teach him, this is the only option I have.”

Families are forced to homeschool - which takes away time and money from the entire family - or spend money they don't have on private or charter schools in order to avoid the failing schools in their own neighborhoods.

Good students are falling through the cracks of a broken system that the School Board refuses to fix.

Rather than re-balance the schools' budgeting to improve wages for teachers to stay on, to hire school security to help crack down on bullying, to spend on resources to make the schools more attractive as places of study and work, the School Board has done nothing.

The whole state of Florida has been letting teachers' wages drop, but somehow in Pinellas County the situation has gotten worse.  Without decent pay, teachers have less incentive to stay and fight when they don't have their own system backing them up.  And the School Board has allowed this ongoing cycle of resignation and despair to pile up.

This has been eight years in the making.  That's almost an entire generation's worth of kids getting pushed through broken schools into middle school and high school - if they even try to stay in that long - almost five or six grades behind in key developmental skills.  We're coming up to a graduation cycle where almost none of these kids are going to graduate.  Entire years lost.  Entire communities lost.

What the hell, Pinellas County School Board?  What.  The.  Hell.  When you swore in to office to do your duty, you swore to the whole county to no exclusion of any community.  And yet you've excluded an entire city's worth of children, condemned them, and for what?  Why?

None of you deserve to sit in your comfortable offices in that fancy building in Largo.  None of you.  Every kid should matter more than your job, and you failed those kids as surely as they are failing their standardized tests.  All because you broke your promises and rigged the rules.  And for what?

Damn you.

Anniversary: Woodstock 2015 Brief Remembrance

Not writing much here today, focusing poorly on the damn story writing I keep trying to finish mutter grumble.  So instead, you get some solid music from the Woodstock festival of 1969:

Santana.

Ten Years After

Joe Cocker

Janis Joplin. At least she was nice enough to ask how the audience was doing.

Have at it.  I'll try for some weekend commentary tomorrow.  ROCK OUT AND PEACE IN!

Trump Is Not The Problem for Republicans. Republican Loathing For Women Is.

So this popped up on my Twitter feed yesterday, and I hunted it back down today to talk about it.

For more detail, to the Politifact article:

Heather McGhee, president of the liberal economic think tank Demos, said on Meet the Press that the Republican Party has both institutional and structural biases against women.

"I think it’s important to remember the Republican presidential nominee hasn’t won women since 1988, so this is a very deep problem for the party," McGhee said Aug. 9, 2015. "It’s not going to be enough for anyone, a commentator or one of the candidates, to just disavow Trump’s sort of interpersonal sexist comments."

The researchers note there's no direct statistical evidence except this: actual women's vote tallies for each Presidential cycle from 1992 to 2012.  There's a chart for it:

To be fair about 1992 and 1996, the chart does not show the impact of a Third Party candidate - Ross Perot - taking away some of the percentages for the Republicans.  However, notice the Democratic line goes back over 50 percent for 1996, showing they'd rebounded nicely with the women's vote that election cycle where the Republicans didn't.  So Perot isn't the only reason for that drop.

Thing to note: our gender split between men and women in this nation is roughly even - about 51 percent female to 49 percent male, give or take a year - so we're talking about a sizable voting bloc.  And according to the US Census for 2014 the numbers of registered voters was 115 million for men and 124 million for women.

There are more registered women voters than men voters.  Let that sink in.

For all the talk about the Republicans trying to woo Hispanic voters as a bloc to compete for the Presidential election, the real objective for winning over enough support to win national elections ought to focus on getting the biggest voting bloc of all.  Hispanic voters - both men and women - merely total up to 36 million: Black voters total up to 29 million.  Asian voters total around 13 million.  If you create any voting bloc over identity politics - White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, then Man/Women - if you can't live with just the White Male voting bloc (92 million) you'd want the White Female voting bloc (96 million).

And yet here's the Republican Party pretty much failing to secure women overall as a voting bloc for the last 20-24 years.  The closest they got to getting a majority of women to back their candidate was 2004, and even then they didn't break 50 percent while the Democrats did.  Given the post-9/11 mood, supporting Dubya and the Republican Party overall was the general mindset for American voters... and they STILL couldn't win over women voters.  Look what happened by 2008: clear voting advantages to the Democrats...

So what's going on here?  Why are Republicans failing to secure enough votes from women voters?

Take a look back at the 1992 downturn.  Both parties drop in women voters, but Republicans practically take a nosedive.  Perot may have happened to split votes away, but something worse hit the Republicans that year.

It was the Culture War.

That year was when Pat Buchanan infamously presented his call to arms at the 1992 Republican convention, railing against "Clinton and Clinton" in a "struggle for the soul of America."  In particular, abortion became a major campaign topic with a stark division between Republican and Democrat taking sides.

Democrats won: Republicans lost.  As I recall, 1992 was also a year a lot of women candidates were running for offices up and down the ballot: not many won, but it was supposed to be a turning point in electoral cycles.

What happened then was that Republicans retooled their message.  As Bill Scher wrote over at Politico, they took a "pragmatic approach":

They hammered on abortion scenarios that Democrats would have to uncomfortably explain at length to defend. They crafted legislation to both restrict abortion access and divide Democrats...

During the subsequent Bush presidency, conservatives stayed on this path, albeit more aggressively. The federal “Partial Birth Abortion Act” was signed into law and upheld by Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices. The number of states with onerous regulations stifling abortion providers more than doubled... By 2004, Mississippi managed to shut down every abortion clinic within its borders save for one...

It still didn't win back women voters but it eased the poor polling numbers.  With 2008 however, with the Great Recession causing distress among families, those gains disappeared regardless of the Culture War.  What happened next according to Scher was pretty stupid on the Republicans' part: they stopped being pragmatic.

Yet when the ideological pendulum swung back to the left with the 2008 election of Barack Obama, Republicans failed to stick with the incremental, sometimes stealthy, approach that allowed social conservatives to make advancements despite a Democratic White House in the 1990s. Conservative state legislators turned “informed consent” into “mandated transvaginal ultrasounds.” Primary voters eagerly elevated candidates opposed to all abortions without exception, including two 2012 Senate nominees who explicitly defended forcing rape victims to carry out their pregnancies. Both proceeded to lose in states that Mitt Romney won.

The Republicans got even worse on birth control.  The Culture War - with its basis in hard Right Christian ideology of "Sexxx=Bad except if you're married and even then you better not enjoy it you lust-driven heathens" - cannot abide any concept of consensual relationships outside of abstinence.  It's a position that fully disregards how birth control from the Pill to IUDs can reduce unwanted pregnancies down to near-zero - which would reduce demand for abortion - and fully accepts the insane agenda of invading people's privacy and attacking women who use birth control (even married women do by the by) as shameful sluts.

Blame it on the GOP's overall gameplan to ruin Obama at all hazards.  The obstructionist agenda meant pushing against anything Obama was for and putting up issues Obama would be against.  The Republican campaign managers seem to think voters have short-term attention spans and won't remember the last 6-8 years of the Far Right throwing conniptions over issues that would actually matter to said voters.

How much trouble are Republicans in this cycle, heading into 2016?

Without exact data, it's hard to say.  The best evidence is recent history: the last time the Republicans went full-in on an anti-abortion anti-birth control anti-women platform - 1992 - they got clobbered.  When the Republicans even hinted at banning abortion for every reason including rape - when Todd Akin had his moment and the voters recoiled in 2012 - it pretty much killed two of their Senatorial campaigns, indirectly affected other campaigns, and prevented them from regaining the Senate during an election cycle they were predicted to win.

It does not help the Republicans that the Democratic Party has quietly - without the Beltway media even making note of it - become pro-woman on issues up and down the agenda under the Obama administration, even with the Republicans blocking his efforts every step of the way.

For all the talk about Obama's work on issues of race for better or worse, nobody seems to have picked up on Obama doing a lot for women and doing what he can to stand for them.  Under his administration he sign the Lilly Ledbetter Act trying to enforce equal pay.  He nominated and hired women for key executive positions throughout his Cabinet (including political rival Hillary Clinton).  Obama's Supreme Court nominations - a key part of any President's legacy - were both (so far) women: rather than have just a token female on the Bench, Obama moved to make the lineup of nine Justices better reflect the gender balance of the nation itself.  Now it wouldn't even be surprising if more women do reach the Supreme Court to share in judicial duties.

Even actions that aren't directly women's issues play towards that side of the voting population.  Obamacare's health care reforms bring with it improved access to health care for women.

And yet, the Republicans are convinced they need to fight Obamacare policies that support women's health.

And yet, the Republicans cheered a Hobby Lobby court ruling that gave companies the right to deny women any birth-control coverage.  Republicans are eagerly blocking access to birth control wherever they can.

And yet, the Republicans are happily starting up a war to defund Planned Parenthood over dubiously edited video clips over abortion procedures: even though Planned Parenthood covers general women's health coverage especially for cancer treatments.  Not just taking away funding to stop Parenthood's abortion services: the Republicans are looking to take away ALL funding, just to shut that whole thing down.

It's part of the overall voter revolt among the GOP base that has been strung along by a party leadership that pandered to them on the issues and then never delivered once in office.  All that talk about Obama destroying the nation?  Obama's still in office and most of his accomplishments are still on the books.  All that talk about shutting down the government to get what THEY want?  Never really panned out, and the Republican leadership mostly enjoyed more success despite those failures.  Bringing GOD back to government and smiting all heathens?  Chirping noises as gay marriage wins out in the courts and the mood of the nation turns away from the Thou Shalt Not mindset of the evangelical.

The GOP voting base is finally pissed.  Look at what happened to Eric Cantor.  One of the most powerful Republicans in Congress.  Grooming himself for the Speakership or even greater heights.  And he took his gerrymandered district for granted, and got booted out during a primary in 2014 where the election cycle - the midterms when voter turnout dies - favored Republicans in general.  The warning was clear: do not piss off the base.  And this election cycle, we're seeing the results as the Presidential candidates - and the Republicans in general - are pandering to that Far Right base on every conceivable issue, including abortion.

For all the weekend's news about Trump attacking Megyn Kelly with sexist diatribes, the real scandal out of the GOP August debate was how every candidate at the podium agreed to a Republican platform that would ban abortion without exception.  As WaPo puts it, the Republicans have backed themselves behind a deeply unpopular position.

That drop in 1992 among women voters?  That went down to 38 percent.  In 2012, Romney and the Republicans got 44 percent of the women's vote, with total actual turnout of 57 million voters for the GOP that would be 25 million women voted for Romney.

In 2016, if there were 57 million women showing up to vote again, and what if that was at 38 percent like in 1992?  That's 21 million women voting for whoever runs as a Republican on a full anti-abortion platform.  They are going DOWN in the numbers they need to win a general election backing a platform like that.  A platform that would go against 80 percent of voters who back exceptions for rape/incest and the health risk to the mother.  Part of me wonders if the number of women voters would drop from 38 percent to 20 percent in that situation... it's not likely, but there is NO WAY a Republican candidate could win with just 20 percent of the largest voting bloc among American voters...

The Republicans have been campaigning since 2000 on a short-term agenda of pandering to White voters in general, and they're still going full-storm following that track despite calls from within that they really need to start attracting more diverse groups.  But how far are the Republicans going to get if their platform becomes so anti-woman that the treasured White Vote base gets splintered by gender and White women flee in droves to a more open-minded Democratic candidate?  Are there going to be enough Men voters willing to shift to the Republicans on such a harsh anti-abortion platform?  It's unlikely, because not enough men really think that way...

What Trump is saying about women in general is sexist and tends towards abuse and sheer cluelessness.  But he's not doing this in a vacuum: given the Republican Party's recent history of dismissing women's issues - and given the current attacks against birth control, women's health, and access to abortion - the GOP seems convinced they can win without women as much as they can win without Hispanics or Blacks or college students or lower-income families or pretty much anybody who are not Angry White Males over 50.

I'd call it a suicide mission, but given the nature of the two-party system in the United States, the Republicans can easily take the rest of us over that cliff when they drive over it.

This isn't pretty.

And again, a reminder: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN.

Hypocrite of the Hour: Red State Erickson

Just to note, after the misogynistic things The Trumpster said about Megyn Kelly's hostile questioning of him during Thursday's debate, prominent Republican person Eric(k) Erickson decided to "disinvite" Trump from today's Red State Galloping Gertie Dance.

Conservative commentator Erick Erickson on Friday night disinvited GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump from speaking at an activist conference he is hosting here this weekend, citing disparaging remarks Trump made hours earlier on CNN about Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Erickson said Trump had been scheduled to speak at his RedState gathering on Saturday at the College Football Hall of Fame, but he told Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, about an hour before midnight that Trump was no longer welcome.

Trump’s campaign said in a statement that Erickson’s decision was “another example of weakness through being politically correct. For all the people who were looking forward to Mr. Trump coming, we will miss you. Blame Erick Erickson, your weak and pathetic leader. We’ll now be doing another campaign stop at another location.”

That is the same Erick Erickson responsible for saying such humane and compassionate things about women for years, right?  Via The Guardian:

Things Erickson has suggested include the notion that "Obama’s marxist harpy wife would go Lorena Bobbitt on him" – Bobbitt was a Virginia woman who in 1993 cut off her husband’s penis – "should he even think about it".  It, in this instance, was "shagging hookers behind the media’s back..."

Erickson has also suggested that there was nothing wrong with calling (state senator) Wendy Davis, who in 2013 mounted a 13-hour filibuster against a Texas abortion law, "Abortion Barbie..."

Also a reminder, how Erickson openly crowed on Twitter about the Hobby Lobby decision against workers' access to birth control:

It was a tough choice today.  Celebrate Hobby Lobby by going to Chick-Fil-A or making my wife make me a sandwich. #CFAFTW - 2:41 PM - 30 Jun 2014

Erickson does not have the strongest track record when standing up for women's dignity.  He only seems to do it when 1) it's a conservative woman doing a hit-job on a shared enemy, 2) there's no opportunity for him to insult liberals in the process.  When it's a woman on the opposite political spectrum, Erickson gleefully pulls out the Patriarchal Hat of Snideness and lets fly with the insults.

There is only this difference between Trump and Erickson: when Trump insults a woman it's because he's cluelessly offended by the woman's very existence.  When Erickson insults a woman it's for political gain and self-smug satisfaction.

Either way, both of them are perfect representatives of a Republican party that just finished their Thursday night national debate by pledging to push a ban on abortion with no exceptions, even if the woman's life is at risk.  The entire Republican party has a problem respecting women, period.

Shameless Self-Promotion: New Anthology Stories for All Seasons

Just cross-posting from my writing/librarianship blog:  my local writers' group Writers 4 All Seasons decided to work on a group project, getting our own anthology based on a specific theme published.

Stories for All Seasons is themed around seasons, and story order placed by chronological order.  As such my Christmas-timed story "Where the Snow Is Grey" is towards the end.

It's currently Kindle-only as an ebook (print is well, expensive to produce) but I will ask about EPUB format, hopefully we will have that format soon as well.

I'm feeling a bit buzzed, getting published again with a short in a nice anthology that I hope all 7 readers of this blog can enjoy... ;)  Makes me wanna finish those damn novels I keep blocking over /headdesk /mutter /grumble

Hope you're having a better weekend than the Republican Media Elites. ;)  And to the 3200-plus people who used my drinking game for last Thursday's debate, I hope your livers and hangovers forgive me.


Update 8/12/2015: it's selling rather well, I saw it ranked as high as #91st on the Amazon sales list for Short Stories.  By comparison, my individual stories like "Welcome to Christmas in Florida" is around 1,378th in the Short Reads > Teen & Young Adult, and Last of the Grapefruit Wars highest ranking is 37,949th in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories > Single Authors.

The GOP Debate Hangover Blues August 2015 Edition

Did you all survive?  Are you all okay?  Are you all going to cope with the mournful awareness that Jon Stewart is no longer here to save us from ourselves?

...oh, you're here for the other thing.  Hold on, switching gears...

To the 3200-plus survivors of this blog's drinking game, I hope you are all okay and that the night wasn't as bad for your livers and nervous systems as I feared it would be.  I hope you drank responsibly and sobered up by replaying the Canadian election debates on YouTube (yeah, weird timing eh?)

In hindsight, I missed a few possible zingers worthy of a drink shot.  I completely failed to realize the Fox Not-News moderators would bring GOD - "Did you receive word from God on what to do?" - into the debate.  Considering the emphasis on abortion last night, pandering to the religious base should have been a given.

Anyway, I digress.  Let's get to the facts: who won the Republican Suck-Up To Fox August Debate of Sound and Fury?

Well, for starters the Aspirin / Hangover Cure industry won... /rimshot

Okay, okay. I'll settle down... sheesh...

First thing to note: the Republicans do not debate over matters in a rational or oratorical fashion, at least not anymore.  The modern GOP debate - much like modern campaigning since the late 1960s - relies more on emotion than on logic.  If a pundit / columnist / media observer thinks a candidate responded well by using facts, that is no guarantee that candidate won the argument or the night.  The winner(s) is/are going to be the candidate(s) who made compelling emotional arguments or at least pandered well to the base on stirring up resentment and contempt.

Second thing to note: if you want notes, the Washington Post wrote up a transcript of the night, a handy reference tool to help highlight what was said and notice what wasn't.

Personally, I avoided directly watching the debate.  Cowardly, perhaps.  But as someone who DOES NOT drink, I would not have endured long the voices of certain candidates I now furiously despise.  I would have honestly smashed the flatscreen TV in rage if I had spent more than ten seconds listening to either Jeb or Huck.

It was easier for me to track along with live-blogs and on Twitter, as the night progressed I was able to read responses and see by what was joked about or what created a "Oh GOD No" blast how the candidates were faring.

Just by my twitter feed alone, I determined that Trump had an even night.  Yes, he answered some pretty direct and harsh questions about his own brash persona.  Yes, he did not have rational or reasonable answers for half the questions he took.  But the twitter responses implied he bulldogged through the night, remained relatively unflappable.  For Trump, that's a win (then again, when it's him it's always a win, and it's HUGE). And given how the general view of the audience was how Fox Not-News was going after Trump with a prison shiv for most of the night, Trump and his people are likely coming out aggrieved and angry at the cable network as part of the Establishment punting Trump to the curb.

As the twitter feed progressed, I could see which candidates were getting the most upticks - the more liked responses, or the most despised - in terms of announcing their presence with authority.  The ones who were making any kind of impression period, which is what most of the low-tier candidates are in dire need of doing to gain traction in this crowded race.

The ones getting the positive reviews from the punditocracy I follow on Twitter were Rubio and Kasich.  Kasich was getting described as the only serious adult in the room, someone acting and reacting with answers that made sense (if even he was sticking to the GOP agenda).  Rubio was getting points on Twitter for poise and reasonableness (when immigration came up he shared in the groupthink against illegals but found room to argue for the legal immigrants, a tone clearly lacking in the otherwise hateful discussion).  Just to note, the ones I follow on Twitter lean center-left, so that means these two may not have won over the Far Right base that much...

On the other side, Walker and Jeb Bush were getting hammered by the Tweetists.  Walker came across the feed as underperforming, a little too quiet (meek would be too harsh a word).  Jeb stumbled on a couple of questions and didn't deliver as many barbs: he was trying to act like the adult in the room (where Kasich was) but acted more milquetoast than concerned dad.  In terms of emotional performance, Jeb failed: he showed little of the charisma and geniality his older brother excels at (remember, Dubya is a Passive-Positive and a guy who can work a room), nor any of the authoritarian reasonableness of his father (Bush the Elder as political enthusiast).

The overall impression from Twitter was that Jeb was uncomfortable on-stage: not a good sign.

For the other candidates, the Twitterrati I follow were less kind but that was to be expected because this group - Rand Paul, Huckabee, Cruz, Christie, Carson - tend towards the extremist positions that the people I follow can easily mock.  Among them, the important thing was to feed the party base and in that count Huckabee and Cruz delivered the most blows.  Huckabee pandered hard to the religious base - arguing for personhood rights to fetuses - and Cruz went in hard on war-mongering in the Middle East.  Rand Paul made a few attempts to pummel Trump - where Trump punched back - and otherwise stuck to his libertarian script.  From what I was following, Christie got beat up a few times and didn't impress.  Carson did not make much of an impression across the Twitter feed, although the debate reviewers documented he got decent air-time.

That was just the twitter feed though.  How did the actual Beltway media respond to who won and lost the night?

The New York has a round-up of select reviews per candidate:

Of the positive round-ups, Rubio and Kasich got consistent high votes.  Among the Far Right pundits, the winners were Cruz, Huckabee and Christie, with Carson getting the Mister Congeniality award.  Paul got pummeled, and Walker and Jeb were criticized for their underwhelming stage presences.

CNN's list has a mixed bag among winners, but the consistent loser among the judges was Jeb Bush.

The overall impression of winners and losers, in my humble opinion?

Given how the debate focused on pretty divisive issues - abortion, immigration, slashing Social Security and social safety nets, the drumbeat for more war - the overall loser was the Republican Party.  There was nothing in last night's debate that would help appeal the GOP towards the moderate voters needed for the general election.

When polling Americans on their political priorities - following this Gallup poll - the highest numbers are on the economy, on employment in general, with wages and income inequality somewhere in the mix.  But when you look at the debate's transcripts, when you look at the reviews and the twitter feed, you'll notice the candidates spent little time on those topics.

click to zoom, I hope

And what were the biggest topics last night?  Going after illegal immigrants big time, an issue bound to drive Latino voters straight into the arms of the Democrats in 2016.  The second big issue was abortion, an issue on the Gallup poll that DOES NOT EVEN EARN A PERCENTAGE POINT, it's not even a Top 10 issue for a majority of Americans and yet the Republicans are treating it (again) like a major issue: all because the Far Right religious base has gotten tired of getting shunted to the side on abortion and are finally pushing the party leaders to answer them.  

Problem is, just look at that poll: most Americans don't CARE for abortion as an issue because in a lot of ways they've already settled on it.  Most don't like abortion in practice, but recognize there is a need for it in specific cases.  That's why the safe spot on abortion is the "safe legal but rare" position: it acknowledges restrictions on the procedure but allows it to exist.  The Far Right - stuck on absolutes as necessity, and viewing abortion as a cardinal sin equal to genocide - can't accept it... so they're pushing hard on this issue in a way most Americans won't like.  This is going to bite the Republican Party on its collective ass if the Far Right succeeds in making this a Top Three issue: this is why I view the GOP as the biggest loser in last night's showing.

In terms of the candidates themselves, how I would rank them (as a moderate, yes Eric I am one shut up) and how the Republican voting base would rank them as winners down to losers of the night:

My Take	Likely GOP Voter Base’s Take
Kasich	Trump
Rubio	Cruz
Trump	Huckabee
Cruz	Walker
Walker	Christie
Paul	Carson
Carson	Rubio
Christie	Paul
Bush	Kasich
Huckabee	Bush

Jeb! just really didn't win over a lot of people, neither pundits nor pollsters.

What do you think, sirs?

Brief Things about Jon Stewart and the Daily Show

I haven't written much about Jon Stewart, save for the occasional observation that The Daily Show was a more accurate news source than most other cable shows - not just Fox Not-News but also CNN and MSNBC paled in comparison - so this is kinda out of the blue for me writing about him just as this is his LAST DAY hosting The Daily Show after 16 years.  (I'm not about to live-blog the GOP debate tonight because this site's just not built for it, check with Wonkette please).

So, just to say this much:

1) For a stand-up comedian hosting a satire show that parodied the flaws of television media, Stewart took his job seriously.

2) When he took over the show, the tenor of the Daily Show went from a sadistic streak under Craig Kilborn - insulting half of everyone - to a sarcastic one that relied more on the Talking Head media elites getting caught failing basic logic.  Stewart's focus could still rely on crude and direct put-downs of specific targets - Glenn Beck in particular - but that was applied more as a scalpel cutting out cancerous growths instead of the sledgehammer style Kilborn employed.

The Daily Show
Daily Show Full Episodes,  More Daily Show Videos,  Comedy Central Full Episodes

This embedded clip above - if it plays correct - is perhaps Stewart's crowning moment of political satire, shredding Beck's performance style and pointing out the twisted failures at logic Beck tried to shill.

3) I probably would have missed going to college with him as he's eight years older than me, but if the parental units had decided on staying in Virginia Beach instead of moving to Florida, I could well have gone to William And Mary.  Oh well, it wouldn't do.

4) While he's leaving at arguably the most dire time our nation needs him - in the middle of the craziest, wingnuttiest Republican campaign for the White House since Wendell Wilkee - in a lot of ways I don't blame him.  Stewart's made it clear that all these years fighting the BS shilled by Fox Not-News has burned him out.

For all of Stewart's efforts to point out the flaws and insanity of the Far Right, nothing much ever changed.  Some of the messengers got mocked off the stage - Beck is now so fringe that barely anyone quotes him on Twitter now - but Ailes and his network simply reloaded with fresher faces and worse talent.  The Far Right media of which Fox is the major hub keeps chugging along with the same message - FEAR LIBRULS, FEAR THE OTHER - in a way that belittled Stewart's efforts to slap reality into the dialogue.

5) It's DEBATE TIME.  God Help Us All.  When it ends, Jon Stewart is gone.

Today, The Reckoning: August 2015 Drunk GOP Edition

This is it.

This evening, we will know for certain how many Americans watched the Republican PanderFest 2016 episode by the number of people crying into emptied beer bottles.  I do worry my drinking game rules will contribute to that blighted landscape...

For those of you who 1) do not own cable or dish and thus can't watch Fox, 2) have brain cells and thus avoid Fox at all hazards, I recommend looking for any live-blogging site that will track Teh Crazy for you via these Intertubes.

Balloon-Juice usually does live-blogging, I'm pretty sure they'll have a page up for that.  Check around 4 PM EDT if they've got a pre-round live-blog up at least.

Drink Responsibly, America.  Choose a Progressive Designated Driver while you are at it.  I'm pretty sure once the ball starts rolling a lot of Republicans will be getting drunk as well, just not by the rules of the game...

Update: Someone on Facebook just reminded me tonight is Jon Stewart's FINAL SHOW as host of The Daily Show.  TONIGHT?!  COINCIDENCE?!?!  I THINK NOT!

DAMN YOU, FREEMASON ILLUMINATI SHADOW OVERLORDS!  (drinks his sorrows)

Also, Sarah Glenn reminded me Wonkette likes to live-blog this type of crazy stuff too.  I will post updated links if I can for either site.

Update Update: The Guardian hosted a live blog for the Happy Hour Brew Krewe / Puppy Bowl / Kids' Table Also-Rans Debate.  Link here for the summary.

Jon Stewart Update: He's still retiring from the Daily Show.  (breaks out the swear jars)

Crazy Eddie's Motie Drinking Recipes: this is a little late getting updated here but if you can mix your own drinks, Pinku Sensei has recipes for each debatee tonight.

Uber Update: The Guardian's Live Blog is up.  No sign yet if Wonkette's is running.  I think they're drunk already.

Wonkupdate: There we go, Wonkette's live.

What Should We Actually Expect at Thursday Night's PanderFest 2015?

It's one thing to joke about how much of a car-wreck the Fox Not-News Republican (now a Subsidiary of Koch Industries) Party Presidential Primary Debate is going to be.  It's fun to dream up a drinking game set of rules of some of the more obnoxious and petty things that are bound to crop up between one man pandering with all his con-artist skills and nine other con-artist wannabes trying to keep up.

But let's try to focus on the reality, where these televised debates tend to be 50 minutes of boring blah-blah-blah and 10 minutes of commercial breaks.  What is Thursday night's Republican debate going to be like?

Expect lots of aggrieved politics.  The Republicans' platform is pretty much one aggressive campaign of White Privilege/Rich Man Resentment.  It's a platform focused to keep lower-income and middle-income White males angry at or terrified of THE OTHER, be it Black thugs or Radical Feminists or Illegals Crossing The Border or Mooslim Terrorists.  There's one big reason why Trump rocketed to the top of the primary polling among Republicans (unless Democrats have been sneaking into the interviewing areas at the shopping malls and skewing the answers): Trump's opening salvo was a broadside shot at Mexicans being violent drug smugglers and rapists.  Even with the immediate outrage among Hispanic communities and a clear loss of Latino support for the Republicans overall, it helped Trump get to the top debate spot... and the other candidates have to recognize that and adjust their presentations to fit the party base mood.

The reason Republicans are even tolerating overt racial attacks - something that has to be scaring away moderate voters they'll need in the general election - is because they made this decision ages ago.  Not just the Southern Strategy of the 1960s onward, but a clear refusal since the turn of this century to recognize the long-term demographic change the United States is facing.  The GOP decided on a short-term agenda of immediate wins today while the older White male population is at its peak, rather than allow for a long-term agenda of appealing to a growing Hispanic population and rather than accept the inevitable loss of older more resentful voters to age and death.

The modern Republican Party is not hip to the younger generations like the Millennials who grew up pro-gay rights and who grew up in a more diverse racial environment, nor with the Generation X/Y crowd who grew up more libertarian on social-religious issues and are still open-minded compared to Baby Boomers and older surviving Americans.  I doubt there will be any serious attempts on Thursday night to make appeals to younger voters other than "Oh hey check out my Tumblr."  /headdesk

We should expect a lot of attacks at the Democrats, obviously.  It would be rude to attack your fellow Republicans in-person (leave THAT to the SuperPAC ads running in 13 early primary states).  Better to draw all ire at the Enemy, aka "Evil Overlord" Obama and "Wicked Witch of the East Coast Librul Elites" Hillary.  There's a reason people asked me to add "Benghazi" as a trigger word for the drinking rules.

Otherwise, the debate is likely a placid affair: while some of the low-percentage candidates may try to float radical ideas out there to draw interest, most of the debaters are not going to want to pull any gaffes on national television.  Jeb Bush, for example, is already reeling from a pre-debate screwup where he openly questioned federal funding for women's health, which drew howls even from fellow conservatives.  Nearly everything we're going to see on-stage is going to be heavily scripted, rigorously controlled.

Even Trump, notorious for being an off-the-cuff speaker whose words have already blown up any civil discourse between the Republicans and the rest of the nation/world, is going to keep it cool.  Despite his crude ways, he IS a con-artist who knows how to work a room (he's been giving motivational speeches since the 1980s: he knows what works).  He'll stick to certain talking points, will never admit to a flaw or mis-statement, but he's not going to blow his lead with anything more outrageous than making more attacks on immigrants and foreign global competitors like China and Iran.  He'll end up toeing the Republican platform about 99 percent of the way.

I am leaving open the distinct possibility of one of the wild cards - Cruz is likeliest, although Christie is another gambler who may try to muscle and bully his way into the spotlight - will bring up a crazy answer that appeases the Far Right but is something the GOP leadership would rather keep under wraps.

While attacking Planned Parenthood - the Target of the Year for the Far Right this season - is a given, there's a possibility Cruz (most likely, although any of the pro-fetus candidates could go there) will go full "Repeal Roe" or even argue for violent destruction of women's health care clinics to "end abortion once and for all".  Previous anti-abortion crusades proved moderate general voters don't want to ban abortion outright - there's a sweet spot of "legal but rare" that always wins elections - which is why the Republicans have never given the pro-fetus movement in their Far Right fringe everything they've asked for.

But that's also one of the things angering the Far Right base against the Republican Establishment.  Trump's rise to the top spot has more to do with the Republican base voters resenting their own party: they've gotten tired of being told one thing - ZOMG FEAR OBAMA AND THE LIBRULS THEY ARE TAKING AMERICA FROM YOU - and yet seeing little action from the Party to answer those fears.  These are the voters in the primary season the candidates are hoping to win over.  And while Trump currently has those voters in his thrall, the conventional wisdom is that Trump won't last - either he'll implode (not happened yet) or the Establishment will nuke him (likely by January 2016) - and that all those resented voters will need a new champion among the candidates whom the party bosses can't banish.

Hence the high possibility that the likes of Cruz - who speaks the same messages Trump has - or Christie - someone desperate enough to play that game and play it loud - will go there: try to Out-Pander Trump.

THAT'S where the possibility resides of the Thursday Night debate going off the rails.

So: Keep the beer handy, and choose a designated driver.  Good luck, America, we're all counting on you.

And for those of you in France who visited my drinking game rules,
Blessent mon coeur / 
d'une langueur / 
monotone...

(waits to see who gets the reference)

How the People Suffer When the Politicians Pander

As we're heading into the final lap towards Debatageddon 2015: The August Angst, we are able to see in real-time and in real-world implications how damaging all this political campaign to the extremist agendas is going to get.

In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal - desperate to make the cut for the prized chance to make the prime-time Fox Not-News prime-time debate - made the political gesture to cut Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood offices in his state.

It's a political gesture because he's made it one:

The move comes despite the fact that the two Planned Parenthood clinics in Louisiana do not provide abortion, which Planned Parenthood confirmed to the state's Department of Health and Hospitals as part of the state's ongoing investigation into claims that the organization is profiting off of aborted fetal tissue donations. A third clinic being built in New Orleans plans to offer abortion, but will not participate in the tissue donation programs, a Planned Parenthood executive told the state.

The "tissue donation program" at issue, by the by, is part of an over-hyped fabricated assault by anti-abortion organizations to discredit and destroy Planned Parenthood (as well as stoke the pro-fetus voting base eager to have their issue treated as top priority).  Per the Bob Cesca article in Salon.com:

If you’ve been keeping score at home, you’ll have noticed that not one but two states, including a red state with a paleoconservative governor, have in the past several days exonerated Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing in the so-called secret-video sting that has conservatives calling on Congress to defund the non-profit organization. The appropriate response to this news is, “Of course! Because Planned Parenthood is absolutely not selling fetus parts via some sort of grisly underground marketplace.” For many, especially on the right, no amount of fact-checking will ever be enough...

For Jindal, who couldn't even wait for Louisiana to finish its' investigation that he ordered last month into Planned Parenthood, fact-checking is not the point.  The fact that federal aid - of which Medicaid is part - is already blocked from funding abortions is not the point.  The point is, Jindal is trying to position himself as a major player in the Republican battlefield for voters' attentions, and if getting even five percent of the pro-fetus crowd into his corner is enough to make the crossing line to make it to Thursday night's panderfest, so be it.

In the process, of course, Jindal is leaving a lot of damage in his wake.  Planned Parenthood is one of the few clinics that assist poor women with health care needs across the board, not just birth control but also cancer treatments and more. Statistics point towards around 10 million different people helped at their offices across the U.S.  Zander at Balloon Juice is figuring about 700,000 women in Louisiana facing the loss of health care help because of Jindal's pandering move.

While Planned Parenthood only offers abortion as a service to a small degree - roughly 370,000 procedures compared to 4.4 million STD tests or 3.7 million contraception services (which by the by would do great good reducing abortion in the first place) or 1.1 million cancer tests and treatment - the Republican Party is eagerly looking to defund that organization in toto, recklessly ignoring all the other health care services those office provide.  Then again, we're talking about a GOP that rails against Obamacare to such a degree any health care positive for poor women and families turns into a red negative deserving of annihilation.

In that regard, Jindal is not even viewing his ban on Planned Parenthood as a risk.  He's viewing it already as a win, even if he misses the final cut for prime time.  Anything - like all the Republican leaders pandering for primary votes this election cycle - to placate the Far Right crowd across the nation.  And to hell with the residents of his own state.

I Have Come to Tampa Bay Comic-Con To Chew Bubblegum And Use The Force... And I Am All Out of Bubblegum

Actually, I got out of the habit of chewing gum back when I had braces in the eighth grade, but hey.

IN MEMORIAM OF ROWDY RODDY PIPER, LET US SPEAK THE IMMORTAL WORDS OF SCI-FI ASS-KICKERY:

In the meantime, here are some lovely pictures of the 2015 Tampa Bay Comic-Con.

Only this time I kidnapped invited along my nephews.  They had never gone to a comic-book/scifi-fantasy/gaming/geek convention before, so I wanted to show off.  I hope I didn't embarrass them too often.

To note this year, the convention didn't have many panel discussions I wanted to attend.  I asked the nephews but since it was their first visit and they really didn't have a focus on their geekdom - they are gamers and cartoon watchers, with some scifi love thrown in - there wasn't much on their list either.  I decided on sitting in on a celebrity Q&A with Carrie Fisher aka Rebel Princess Leia.  Thing is, previous experience with conventions taught me to show up EARLY for these big-name appearances, and so I got to the pre-line for the line to get in line for the line to join the waiting room area to enter the ballroom to see her.  Next set of photos are all about that:

Having been in the front of the pre-line, I was able to get good seats up front.  Here's me looking back at the entrance pre-pre-pre-line with people filing through.

This is how close I got to the stage.

Room is starting to get packed now...

Here's behind where me and the nephews got to sit.

OMG OMG OMG She's entering!
(you can tell because everyone else is standing up and clicking away)

Trying to zoom!  Damn, getting blurry on my old digital camera.  Sometimes it gets good detail, other times... part of it is me, I'm getting too damn old to hold a camera steady.

Yep, still getting blurry shots.  At least it's the background.  Look kids! Carrie Fisher! (Applause)

I switched over to my smartphone to see if the pictures would come out better, but unfortunately this is the closest I could zoom.  Sigh.

Carrie was a gracious guest speaker, snarky and knowingly prodding about the awe a lot of Star Wars fans have about the upcoming Episode VII: Force Awakens movie.  She didn't take any questions from the audience, she was booked for pretty much a whole afternoon of autographing and photo-taking elsewhere at the convention...

Pretty much everything else was walking the floor, checking out the vendors, and getting into lightsaber fights with Sith Lords.

Hey, you all might remember this couple from last year's Comic-Con photo gallery.  They were the ones whom I saw with the LED-bright sabers that ooooh man I really wanted one for meself.  So thank ye for the inspiration.

 Now this...

Got to be...

A really serious fight...

'Cause this guy knew how to wield a double-blade saber...

Only problem was I kept asking him to use Force Choke so my nephews could get a good action shot, and he apparently didn't hear me during the fight, so I had to end it with a Force Push move (THAT he understood, and played it well).

This is my former co-worker Briana at the Bartow Library, who had moved on to work in Tampa.  She came dressed as Missandei from Game of Thrones.  It was an excellent cosplay effort, and she really looked the part.  During the brief meet-up I had with her, she had three separate requests to get her photo taken.  THAT is a HUGE thing to happen to you at a comic-con: it means you've done a great job cosplaying.  (if you're wondering, no, I didn't get any requests for photos.  I had to request others.  Sigh...)

Speaking of cosplayers, I am always impressed by the ones who come up with a recent character design in what looked like weeks of prepping.  Such as this lady I saw during the morning line to get inside the convention center, dressed up as Joy from Inside Out:

I saw later that her globe glowed yellow, as it should.

Always good for a convention: LOOK KIDS, IT'S R2D2! (Applause)

As a side note, my brother would have liked coming to the con: there were three different Jay and Silent Bob teams.

Didn't see the Mandalorian cosplay group here today, just the 501st.  Ah well.  If Count Dooku had a working saber I would have faced him...

Oh, this guy had a working saber.  Be right back...

This time around, the convention was slightly easier to walkabout: the vendor and table areas were better spaced giving people excellent room to move back and forth.  There were a few narrow spots - noticeably between the Autograph area and the vendors area - but it wasn't as bad as last year, and not as bad as MegaCon's.  That said: There were a few decent spots for BENCHES to allow people some respite from all the walking, next time people, just plan it out, get a few benches going, all I'm saying...

Got to see JC De La Torre again, and author Glenda Finkelstein.  Missed running into Bill Hatfield.  Met a friend of my brother's - John Crowther - who got into the comics biz in Rochelle the Teen Cockroach.  Got to see some of the familiar artists and cosplayers.

And here we are at the end of the afternoon heading out.  It rained hard at the convention center: all of Florida looked like it was getting socked in by a massive storm system.  The parental units for the nephews had to drive in as I was parked in the open and with little opportunity to get to the car.

I hope the nephews enjoyed the trip out this day.  I think Tommy found a toy or two for purchase: unfortunately, I still owe Andrew a present for his birthday (couldn't find anything he liked during the walkabouts)...